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I mean, nearly thirty years as a mentally ill person on this fuckass planet and I have to endure writers of shows I watch repeatedly tell me my only option is to fucking die.

Fuck those people.

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Italians buying medals again

#artistic gymnastics #olympics #wtf #beam

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My problem with The Dragon Prince is that while it preaches about "breaking the cycle" and "choosing love", it repeatedly does so in a way that echoes the age-old idea of telling victims to passively accept their lot in life and the injustices inflicted upon them while their perpetrators never have to acknowledge their wrongs or face consequences for their actions. This is the kind of narrative they follow on both a personal and systematic axis, and it's exactly why the show will always frustrate me.

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So much this. I am all for defending the validity of age gap relationships, but when a rich influential older man continues to pick barely adult women in their early twenties with neither the privilege nor the life experience to truly protect themselves, this man is a predator, no ifs or buts.

I used to love GO, as well as some of his books, and knowing he was best friends with my favourite writer of all time stings a bit. However the guy is pathetic, disgusting, and woefully misogynist. I knew of his Zionist views and of course had formed an opinion on his work ethic after he massacred Good Omens for the sake of internet popularity and easy representation points, but holy shit this is rock bottom.

One last thing but it's also baffling to see people go like "i hope it's not true, I support the victims but we need to believe in innocent until proven guilty" about the man that admitted having a relationship with women aged 20-23 when he was 40+. Surely a man in that kind of power imbalance relationship could only be up to good things and there is nothing weird about a pattern of seeking relationship with employees/fans

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About Prodigy and J/C

So, first off, the new season of Star Trek Prodigy is one of the most phenomenal seasons of television I've ever watched, so please proceed and watch the hell out of it so that we can perhaps get a continuation.

With that said, proceed with caution, for there are minor spoilers ahead.

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Regarding what we got (or rather, didn't get) in terms of j/c shipping, I have read several opinions by several people who, apparently, feel betrayed by the promises made by the showrunners, and I hear those complaints.

However, hear me out.

First of all with regards to the actual content of the ship present in the season, I have to say that it's rendered pretty clear that, no matter the type of the relationship, these two people are one another's most important human. This is evident not only in the way others perceive Janeway's emotional attachment as detrimental to her duty as Admiral, but also in the way the characters themselves talk about one another.

For example, Janeway refers to Chakotay as her "number one", and given that she never used that term with other first officers, the phrase seems to convey something different. The hologram Janeway is all that stands between Chakotay and a possible descent to madness during his isolation. In a flashback, he even hands her the rock with the spiral pattern drawn on it, refering to her in no uncertain terms as "home". The list goes on.

But it's not just that, and the fact remains that most fans of the j/c dynamic were looking for a more outspoken romantic tension, a kiss, or a confession. And I understand the frustration that it didn't happen, however keep in mind that the second season had been written in its entirety when news of the show's cancellation hit the press, and the writers were evidently planning ahead with no intention to wrap things up this early (there's also a point to be made about writers not having to abide by the dystopian laws of modern streaming, where there is always the fear of cancellation looming over your head and interfering with the organic development of the plot, but that's another can of worms.)

One final point to be made is about the Hagemans and the nature of the work they usually do. Anyone who has ever watched their work on Tales of Arcadia will tell you they love their romantic sub plots, touching on the love lives of teens and older adults alike. Tales of arcadia is perhaps unique in how much, how delightfully, and how unpredictably it ships main and secondary characters alike, and I cannot believe the people responsible for such a colorful selection of romantic subplots would shy away from dealing with the most notable semi-canon ship to come out of nineties Trek.

The bottom line is, the show is beautiful as is. And hope is not lost on the j/c front. Romantic or not, they are canonical soulmates. And the nature of the showrunners ' previous works makes me believe that there were plans to make the ship canon further down the road.

All the more reason for the rest of us to try and secure a continuation.

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FURTHER SPOILERS FOR J/C S2 PRODIGY

I wrote quite a bit regarding some J/C things, but please don't take this as anything other than that. Go watch Season 2 of Star Trek: Prodigy.

It is an incredible show with lovable new characters and well-thought-out plot lines. I will keep saying it is some of the best Trek out there.

This is just for the J/C aspect of the show.

Again, DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU WATCHED THE SHOW OR IF YOU WANT TO BE SPOILED!

Let me start with my by far favorite episode of Season 2, and maybe Prodigy in general, which is episode 11 - Last Flight of the Protostar, Part I. This is where I felt they weren’t afraid to venture into uncharted territory with the writing, not just for Chakotay’s character, but also by tackling serious, adult themes of death and not being afraid to show it.

Why do I mention this in relation to J/C? Because I thought this episode marked the beginning of not having to walk on eggshells just because it’s intended for a younger audience. It’s why I felt they were going to deliver on their promises, but I realize now the "goods" meant finishing the plotlines of S1, not the J/C content.

My unpopular opinion is that J/C ended up being the same as what we got in Voyager, not expanded upon. It’s still undefined, with two people acting like they are more than friends, only to fall back into the classic Voyager trope of having a really emotional episode, then forgetting it happened the next. As a member of the J/C shipping community, we are pros at examining every single nuance and detail in search of hints and clues, but after 30 years, we are tired. I still love doing that and have done so, but the biggest confirmation that it didn’t go anywhere came from my partner. When I asked him about the J/C stuff in S2, he said he sees them as friends who deeply care about each other, but that’s about it. He got bigger romantic vibes from Doctor/HJ and HJ/Chakotay.

I spoiled myself back when the French dub was released, so I had time to digest and prepare for what was about to happen, or rather, not happen. Even though I couldn’t fully understand French and tried to translate it, I slowly began to realize that I actually had no idea which episode Kate was referencing when she said there was an episode about Chakotay that showed every possible emotion Janeway could have towards him. Additionally, I couldn’t, and still can’t, for the life of me, figure out what that big moment was where Chakotay’s stand-in voice actor, who was giving Kate lines, started crying. I keep re-examining both those statements and the episodes, thinking I must have misunderstood them. The only scene I can place it is in my favorite episode and my favorite scene when Chakotay finds Adreek, but the interview statement makes it sound like it was said in a scene with Janeway. If that's the case, it was very misleading.

Either way, I know I became greedy because when Prodigy started, I thought Chakotay was going to be a legacy character who would pop in for an episode or two, not that he would be a central plot point and the reason for Janeway to venture back into the DQ. I could never have imagined that we would get even this after so many years, and I am so very grateful to everyone involved in this show because you did something I never thought I would see again. I just wish that the J/C talk for S2 was toned down and not overpromised because we were/are starved, so it stings more than it normally would.

To circle back to my starting point, from what was said in the interviews, to how Janeway (and her constantly rewatching any footage of him she had) was written, I honestly believed we were going to get one scene between two adults who finally have an open conversation about how they feel. That’s where I thought those two interview statements I mentioned before fit.

I remember back when I first watched the French release, I thought the moment he landed on her farm in Indiana, that was going to be it. They are on neutral territory. She’s retired, he has Voyager-A, they don’t have to worry about timey-wimey stuff, and there’s no impending doom at that current moment. That’s it! That’s got to be the scene, right? … But the scene passed by in a blink of an eye and was just there to push the plot, not add any character development. That’s probably my most disappointing scene of the season.

I believe if that scene was prolonged by adding in a honest conversation or even one line – “The Federation needs you, Kathryn. I need you” ... bam, there. That’s an opening. Do not tell me he doesn’t look like he was about to say it anyway. Yes, he mentioned the Mars attack, but that could have served as motivation for “the world is going to hell again, it’s time we come clear because if not now, then when and we aren't getting any younger” which would also circle back to their conversation in the ready room about getting old.

I feel like all the J/C stuff in S2 lies in the stuff they didn’t show and had us trying to figure it out. But to me, it came across as ageism. Just like that horrible statement from back in the day about how no one wants to see two old people kissing, this felt very much the same. Because of episode 11, I thought we were done with the ageism tropes of old television. I didn’t need them to kiss in Prodigy, I just wanted an honest conversation between two adults.

My takeaway from J/C in Prodigy S2 is that they are in the same position as they were in Voyager – not together. Only now, I can’t figure out why? We knew the why in Voyager. Here, it’s just unclear for the sake of being unclear. It was too romantically coded in almost every scene that had anything to do with them, yet it goes nowhere.

It’s why I believe the community is disappointed in this aspect of the show and how it has been handled because we’ve been down this road before and we just took a stroll again thinking this time, it was going to lead somewhere new.

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About the yassification of GO2.

Warning: the following text is highly critical of the second season of Good Omens. If you enjoyed it, I am happy for you, and a non-negligible amount of jealous as well. Please scroll past before I inevitably rain on your fandom parade.

So, I did the thing. I binged the entire second season of what was, up to now, my favorite show ever, in one sitting. And I have a great deal of things to say, but hardly any of them is positive.

Let me start by saying that I don't mind the cliffhanger or the melancholy ending, like at all. In our era of Marvel apologists and the instant gratification culture, it is necessary for media to persevere and add nuance to romantic relationships. That said, what transpired during the six hours leading up to this sort of unearned climax hardly contains anything remotely close to nuance.

Who are these people? I don't mean the new characters, all of them written as cardboard-cut anthropomorphic personifications of stereotypes, yassified to the point of representation losing its purpose and getting in the way of, you know, actual writing. I mean the protagonists themselves, Aziraphale and Crowley, up to now my favorite characters in the entire world and -up to now- tangled in a love story so beautiful I had, for better or for worse, devoted a large part of my creative output on it, making art, songs, and metas on why what those two entities had was as close to perfect as anyone can hope to find for themselves.

These are not the characters I knew. The characters I knew spent hundreds of human lifetimes revolving around each other in a treacherous yet familiar dance- they both knew the love was there, it was comfortable like an armchair that has taken the shape of the body using it for years. They argued the way old couples do, and of course, like all fictional beings that are counterparts of one another, had differences to settle, but what stood in their way wasn't misunderstanding or miscommunication, in was their fear of Heaven and Hell, and their fundamentally different approaches on how to keep each other safe.

What is all this teen angst? This will-they-won't-they silliness that lacks any nuance, thematic coherence, or literally even trace amounts of understanding of the source material? Where is the dark humor, the quotability, the chaotic overarching plot, the self conscious camp? The season is so cynically written to cater specifically to a certain part of fandom, that I am losing respect for the original work- because if Neil Gaiman doesn't care for these fictional beings, and he evidently doesn't, why should I?

The thematic core of what made Good Omens what it was, had always been the "Love in unexpected places" trope Sir Terry Pratchett knew how to write so well. It had never been about the fantasy, because Sir Terry wrote satire wrapped up in a supernatural package, it had never been about the romance, because when the ship becomes the end instead of the means, the love rings hollow, like artificial light trying to pass as sunshine. The beating heart of GO lies in its philosophy, in the beautiful notion that the agents of two oppressive systems at war have more in common with one another than with their respective oppressors. That being a nobody, a mere cog in a larger machine, says more about said machine than it does about you, and that you can try to break free and build a life for yourself, where a happy ending looks like a dinner at the Ritz with the one you love most.

Shoehorning an underdeveloped "romance" between Beelzebub and Gabriel not only feels like bad fanfic (disclaimer: I like the ship and feel like it could have worked if developed in any capacity, and presented in a more humorous and character-appropriate way. I hate with passion how much they watered down Beelzebub in order to make them stereotypically romanceable, adding the Ineffable Bureaucracy to the ever-expanding list of characters I don't care about anymore.) but also, it muddles and grossly undermines the thematic raison d'être of Ineffable Husbands. If the ramifications for defecting and fucking off with the enemy were a slap on the wrist for the respective leaders of both sides, well surely the system can't be that oppressive after all. And if fear of the oppressive system wasn't, after all, what kept these beings apart, surely these two entities don't like each other as much as we thought. Or rather, one is reduced to a lovesick puppy and the other to a brainless husk of a character, a plot device, a means to go from place A to place B without spending much brainpower on the logistics.

And if these two new people got to kiss I care not, for they are not the same people I rooted for (props, though, to the actors, who gave, somehow, an almost Shakespearean gravitas to their love affair, underwritten and dumbed down as it was. They both love the characters, and it shows in the minuscule yet brilliant ways in which they added nuance where the script had none.)

What was that thing with the lesbians about? Though straight passing, I have always known myself to be attracted to women as well as men, and I am always highly suspicious when an "ally" writer (see: straight, no shade to straight people among which I live because they are, like, the majority) decides to make all characters queer, in the face of real-world statistics and despite NOT being queer themselves. When a person like Nate Stevenson does it they get a pass because writers self-insert and because, when done well, it can carry a message of equality. But when the ally writer does it, unless it is pitch-perfect, I am forced to examine the possibility of them being calculating about it and trying to score representation points, often because they need the rep as a fig leaf to cry homophobia behind when people start complaining about the atrocious plot.

Nina and Maggie were boring. They had no personalities, no cohesive backstories, nothing to make us understand what they are to one another and to the overarching plot ("plot" is used loosely here, for there was no plot: the series ended where it should have started, with six hours of -progressively more offensive to my intelligence- fanfic tropes in a trenchcoat serving as the, well, "plot"). I didn't care whether or not they'd end up together, because I have no idea who they are. The blandness of the dialogue had the actresses, both very talented as evidenced in the first season, grasping at straws with what little characterization they were left to work with, and the "ball" was so unbelievably bad a plot device no amount of suspension of disbelief was ever going to make it right.

The minisodes, though at parts clever and philosophical, felt out of place. This was another narrative choice I had to raise my eyebrows at, because it felt like a bunch of executives sat around a table and watched Neil Gaiman's powerpoint presentation of what made Season 1 financially successful. They were shoehorned in, largely irrelevant to the, eh, "plot", and most of them lasted far more than I personally deemed welcome, or necessary.

What else is there to say? The wink-winks and nudge-nudges to the Tumblr nation? The in-your-face Doctor Who reference? The narratively myopic choice to make Crowley a former archangel? The cheese dialogue, not one bit of which was quotable?

I am distraught. I am grieving an old friend, and a part of my fandom life I cannot, in good faith, return back to after this gross betrayal. I am happy for those who don't see it, because I wish I could love this season past its flaws. However, the writing isn't simply mediocre, it is irrevocably, immeasurably, undescribably bad, so bad I am shocked to my very core, so bad I find it offensive to Sir Terry's memory and everything his own creative output was lovingly filled with.

I am passing all five stages of grief and very much doubt I will return to this fandom. I loved the original story and the characters with all my heart- now the aforementioned heart is broken, not by the breakup or anything as pedestrian as cheap romantic tropes. But because my old friends, my family of fictional beings, are no longer the ones I loved and could relate to.

Deppie out.

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So wait ppl are angry because the romance has... angst? Bc the show might get cancelled and gaiman just should have listened to the cooperate and tell a more simple story...? Honestly a lot of discourse like this makes me realize you just cannot satisfy people bc they will ultimately find any way to complain. Accusing gaiman for queerbaiting bc there was no kiss btwn the leads and then attacking him again after they put a kiss scene just bc they made it angsty is insane.

Honestly, I think I found the key of why English speaking television is going to hell. It's not only the corporates without soul. The audience is so utterly bland and wants nothing but instant gratification. So of course the corporates are gonna win. How can you not win when your audience is actively rejecting storytelling in favour of soulless consumption?

Yeah, basically they are saying that, that he should have just copied and pasted Season 1 and ended it with Crowley and Aziraphale moving together (in the second of act of the fucking story) because of the possibility of the show not being renewed.

With that fucking attitude, it won't be renewed for sure. And after that they would sure cry and act like victims and say it was Neil's fault because God forbid he wanted to keep telling his and his friend's story despite what the fandom wanted.

Good work, people, the CEOs must love you. Don't worry, they will surely create soulless shows with no clear conflict or structure for you soon. They'll love to know you get angry at actually competent writers trying to tell a story and not them for setting unrealistic expectations in shows and keep hiring dumb hacks that write garbage for little money in little time.

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First Cosplay Ever!

Hello, world.

I am back on this *hellsite* after like four years because me and my partner did a thing, and it's this thing.

We did our very first cosplay ever, from stolen time off our -crappy, depressing- jobs, we bought clothes, customised our wigs, painted new faces on our ordinary, everyday, boring ones, and ta-da.

Good Omens is my favorite book and his favorite show. Since he is, very decidedly, the better person, and despite the perennial baby face, I am a bit of a *bastard* there was no doubt as to who was going to be who.

The people at ComicDom Con athens were so warm and supportive! We were honestly terrified people wouldn't recognise us, or that we'd do something wrong, but turns out nerds in Greece are as much into Good Omens as as nerds everywhere else. Who knew?

(They were squealing and running towards us as if we were the literal actual award-winning actors David Tennant and Michael Sheen. Fandom is the best, I thought, and, are they supposed to do that?!?)