#[ the trainwreck: deviations ]

[aquaburst3]

By popular request...or an anon commenting me last night about enjoying me creating posts about the flaws in TWST and wanting me to talk about the worldbuilding aspect specifically along with me having some free time between jobs, here it is!

Disclaimer: Keep in mind this is all personal opinion. If you enjoy the worldbuilding in the game and find zero problems with it, great! I don't care. You are entitled to your opinion and I am entitled to mine.

Where do I even begin? The shorter question would be, "What isn't wrong with it?" xD But seriously, oh, boy—there's a lot. Hell, this is pretty much my go-to example how NOT to write an urban fantasy world.

The closest thing I can compare the world of TWST to is the movie Bright—and that's NOT a good thing. For those of you who never had the misfortune of watching that late 2010s trainwreck, it's about a cop played by Will Smith teaming up with an orc to retrieve a magic wand. Sounds cool, right? However, like with TWST, the worldbuilding is something to be desired. It's an alternate universe where two thousand years ago there was a big war between The Nine Races where the orcs supported the Dark Lord, but an orc defected and lead an army that defeated him. Despite everything, it's pretty much exactly like real life with a few added fantasy elements. It even brings up real world pop culture references, containing such cringey and problematic lines like, "Fairy lives don't matter" after the Will Smith cop squishes a pixie that's on par with a raccoon in that world.

The worldbuilding in TWST feels like that. It's exactly like real life but with a few Disney and fantasy elements slapped on top, like magnets on a fridge. There is hardly any deviation from real life. Things like planes, cell phones, methods of measuring, days of the week, etc all exist just as they do irl. When you stop and think about it, half of these things shouldn't exist and the other should be a little different.

Yana also never thinks of the implications all of this alternate history. Magic always existing and the Greek gods being real should have a huge ripple effect, creating a completely different history compared to real life, but yet it doesn't. Hell, the whole idea of knowing that the Greek gods are real alone would massively change world history, since they would be a proven concept, snuffing out every other religion in existence! The world should be more massively different than ours with Disney sprinkled on top. There's no imagination about how a world like this would work. To quote Lindsey Ellis, "You cannot import elements from our real world without including all of the history that comes with them. You can, but it's lazy, and it sucks." xD Sure, you can write a fantasy world with cars and stuff, but the histories and the ways those exist in those worlds cannot be the exact same. There must be some divergence for it to make sense.

None of the new worldbuilding elements sense or feels woven in. It feels like Yana tossing out whatever idea she comes up up with at the wall and seeing what sticks. A lot of it starts to fall a part or even contradicts itself.

Take the whole Stitch or Tsums events. The existence both of these imply that aliens exist. That brings up a lot of questions like...

What is this world's policy for alien life?

Are aliens well known entities for this world?

What are other's reaction to this?

How did his story play out in this world if that's the case?

Everyone in this world has a Disney counterpart, right? If that's the case, wouldn't that mean there's some TWST version of Stitch running around Night Raven?

Is any of this ever addressed? Nope. That's stupid. World shattering shit like that should be addressed. While I know these are probably more than likely corporate mandates, especially since Tmus are a Japanese Disney product while Stitch is super popular in Japan, she could've added a disclaimer saying that it's a crack au that has nothing to do with the canon. The fact that these are both canon is mind boggling.

Plus, both of these events create a giant plot hole. If aliens are known to exist in this world, then why the fuck can't Yuu go home? If aliens exist, wouldn't there be portals and other ways for them to go home? It just makes Yuu and the rest of the cast look like total dumbasses for never thinking of this!

It goes beyond stupid events, but happens in general. The game routinely brings up similar elements without thinking of their implications on the game as a whole. Take the whole existence of STYKs. It was never once brought up or foreshadowed in the game, but brings about a lot of questions that are hardly explored. Like if this has existed for hundreds of years, how the fuck hasn't anyone heard of it? If STYKS is attached has a branch which is like our world's, someone should've blew the whistle eons ago. Surely, someone as smart as Idia or another mage should've been able to hack them and expose that to the public. Right? Wouldn't there be more of a public outcry for stealing people away, including royalty? Wouldn't there be government oversight about this? None of these questions are never addressed. Yet that element is slapped in without a second thought. Same also goes for all of the new lore in regards to Lilia's past, those pointless prophet dreams or how Playful Land works.

The magic system and how overblot works also fall apart the more you think about it. According to the light novel, only one out of ten humans is a mage. The percentage goes up in other races, but it remains about the same. But that makes no sense. TWST isn't like the HP universe where mages are isolated from the outside world, they are a part of society. Wouldn't it be the DOMINANT gene after over centuries of mages fucking mortals? I think it being more like the ATLA or BNHA universe where mages are the majority would make a lot more sense. That's what I did in my fic. Hell, it would make the world more unique, because usually fantasy stories have it where mages are a minority.

How overblotting works is never fully explained. All that we know, despite being on the seventh fucking story arc, is that whenever a mage uses Okay, sure. But there are times where that isn't the case. Characters who hard use up any magic like Leona and Vil overblot. Even if you argue that they were emotional during those bits or something, wouldn't the other part play a bigger role, since they used up so little magic in those cases? How in the fuck is that unknown concept to the general public? Wouldn't that be common knowledge? Diseases like Alzheimer's aren't something that everyone experiences, but this existence of those things are still common knowledge. Hell, why is it extremely rare in the first place? Wouldn't it be more commonplace? I feel like having it be a biological consequence of a mage using up too much magic and it being a well known down side to the world like how it is in my writing makes a lot more sense and is much simpler.

The lore around the fae also make zero sense. Common elements in fae lore like never thanking them or accepting gifts from them for you owe them a favour to cream and honey making them drunk are never brought up or mentioned. These are not random tropes brought up in shit like Baldur's Gate 3, but ingrained shit to the fantasy genre. You can't strip them out, because it is what makes the fae, fae. Hardly any types of fae from folklore are ever brought up outside of dragons and Tinkerbell style pixies. Characters like Vil who act very fae like are completely human. To be honest, I genuinely get the sense that Yana has done no research into this topic at all, because that's how out of touch they seem compared to how they are in folklore and other fantasy series. But if that is actually the case, then she should've looked into it more or consulted another writer who knows a lot about it.

Plus, the whole idea behind Briar Valley also makes no sense. They are completely isolated from the rest of the world...because…well, nothing, besides possibly vague hatred of tech. That's dumb. Countries don’t isolate themselves for no reason. There is always some sort of explanation for them to do that, whether it's manufactured for political gain like Panem or out of protection like Wakanda. Seriously, am I the only one that thinks that Brier Valley is just the fantasy Amish? As for the Spinning Wheel Wars, that will be explored in more depth as the fics go on.

If you want to see a world similar to TWST done right, watch The Owl House. That series, too, has a modern fantasy world. Unlike TWST, it seems like a fantasy world with modern elements instead of the other way around. Despite having phone-like devices and manga, it feels like stepping into another world.

Either way, if you wondered why I came up with completely different worldbuilding for my fics—this is exactly why. The worldbuilding in this game is pure dogshit. I wanted to create something leaps and bounds better than the bullshit we got. The fact that me, an amuetur writer, gets complimented and praised for the worldbuilding in my fics and it being better then the game is truly sad. Yana is a seasoned professional with a published manga with dozens of volumes under her belt, she should be better at this than me, not the other way around! Same goes for @stormkitty97, because she helps me brainstorm ideas for my shit and uses it in her writing, too.

The biggest sin of all is that there are some genuinely really cool ideas in TWST. The idea of turning into a monster whenever you use up too much magic is terrifying. The story could've done so much more with that if it made more sense!

As much as I might get hate for saying this, Yana reminds me a lot of Stephanie Meyers in the sense that she can come up with cool concepts and ideas, but has no idea how to execute them properly. I would love to see a better professional writer tackle a concept similar to overblot, because it would be cool and scary in the right hands.

I think one big lesson that amuetur writers like myself can learn from the worldbuilding in TWST is that if you are a "Pantser", aka someone who writes on the fly, like Yana, great, all the more power to you. Hell, I confess that I'm more like Brandon Sanderson in the sense that I'm a mixture of both a "Pantser" and an "Architect" Writer, and I came up with some elements of my worldbuilding on my TWST fics as I was writing like the characters being able to teleport. But for fuck's sake, have a solid plan for your worldbuilding and stick with it. Because constantly throwing ideas at the wall beyond the outlining stage will eventually make these contradictions arise and make your world fall apart. Also, if you are building a modern fantasy world like TWST, always think through the implications each element bring. Adding in elements from our real world will always drag along all of the history tied with it. Having your modern fantasy world seem like TWST or Bright is the last thing you want.

[jimquisition]

The taste of Skull Island still lingers bitterly on one’s tongue, yet those fine monsters at GameMill Entertainment have already offered another scrape from the barrel’s bottom. The Walking Dead: Destinies takes the AMC television series and runs it through a thresher to create a hurried and barely coherent cliff notes version.

There is, however, a twist. Dotted throughout this trainwreck of a game are binary choices allowing you to decide the fate of characters in ways that may either follow or deviate from the original story. With this conceit, Destinies manages to make perhaps the most valuable contribution to The Walking Dead as a franchise.

You can kill off Carl Grimes.

You can do it pretty early, too.

[nanjokei]

the deen higurashi animes are not that bad people just watched them when they were 11, heard people say they were bad, then read the vns much later and went "well its not exactly 1:1 so it really is bad"

you really have to appreciate the work chiaki kon did to make the original higurashi anime coherent in 26 episodes. sure its not perfect, but compared to most vn adaptations, are you kidding? deen higurashi is perfectly watchable. it's no clannad but i consider it a successful vn anime adaptation that stands in a field of failed vn anime adaptations. it is great as long as you stop after finishing kai and do not touch anything that came after it

also this is only tangentially related but since i see people sometimes lying that ryukishi may not approve of this, or especially of the umineko anime. not true! the umineko anime is a different matter because the production of that anime was a mess, the story was releasing AS THE ANIME WAS AIRING, and ep4 was horribly adapted by virtue of it literally COMING OUT LITERALLY AS THE ANIME WAS AIRING. ngl though, as much of a mess it was, it was one of the first anime i genuinely followed from the first episode to the last as it was airing. and what an anime it was. absolute trainwreck, everyone was happy that EP3 was actually adapted pretty well after how goofy EP1 was and okay but derpy EP2 got sometimes, then came EP4 and uh. haha.

but i digress... my point with this^ is that a lot of people have delusions of grandeur of original authors hating an anime adaptation just to justify their own hatred of it. i see it all the time, especially with old adaptations of shounen manga superseded by either remakes or sequels (rare, but i'm thinking of bleach here). people have this long standing urban myth that togashi HATES hunter x hunter 99, but the only recorded opinion we've ever gotten of it is that his assistants would watch it while he worked away on the manga itself, so he didn't have an opinion on it. a lack of an opinion does not signify an opinion. if anything, there are more clues pointing to togashi being involved in the anime in at least some capacity— namely the bonus stage arc, which has foreshadowing for things that hadn't even happened in the manga yet at the time, and was allegedly based on scrapped drafts that togashi had.

really, lately "mangaka is involved with every step of the adaptation" has become synonymous with quality, but manga artists are manga artists. not all of them know what decision is right for the animated medium. i have yet to see an anime turn out especially good because the studio kept the mangaka in the room making whatever level of decision they can claim happened. (to be honest, i kind of doubt it anyway, but i don't care.) it's dumb, but i miss the era when adaptations were actually about adapting to a new medium and having *shudders* oh noooo spooooky filler to help the story flow better, or hell just diving deeper into certain scenes and expanding on them, rather than having a big jack off contest about who can draw the closest to the manga without any deviation so a bunch of salivating geeks on twitter would tweet at any public figure involved in the anime with either praise or insults both 100% lacking in any critical merit

at least.... can we stop animating at 300 gigasharts per second to appeal to twitter shounen meatheads so we can get anime longer than 13 episodes again. im fucking sick

[rphunter]

(Sorry! I think I accidentally hit the anon button when I submitted this a moment ago)

The Misadventures of Gabriel Andrews: 

  The setting is in current times of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Gabriel is on a regular job that seemed, in his definition, fine, but soon realizes that he’s now in over his head. After finishing a couple odd jobs for a nameless face and going through various people and channels, he finds that he’s been doing work for a well known, and very high up Death Eater(or equivalent) that has evaded imprisonment from Azkaban for decades. Your character could be literally anyone! Ranging from an old classmate that tries to help, or the villainous character that is making him do all these insane tasks. There's a dozen ways that this could go. I'd prefer OCxOC, but I dont mind OCxCC

My OC is Gabriel Andrews: he's my little social butterfly! He’s a bit of a firecracker, and is kind of a trainwreck waiting to happen. He’s quite a flirt and does less than savory jobs for questionable people. Despite the rough lifestyle that he chose, he gets very sentimental about things, animals especially, which has gotten him in trouble because he tries to sneak illegal magical creatures into the UK quite often when he’s coming home from other countries 

-Character details: he's a halfblood wizard in his early to mid twenties, dirty blonde hair, emerald green eyes, fair skin tone, with light freckles across his face. also loves dressing very posh, though he acts the complete opposite.

Sidenote: although I have the set in the Harry Potter universe, I don't mind kind of deviating from that fandom as long as we keep kind of the same vibes as far as the plot goes

Partners and characters must be 21+

OOC chatter would be fun! Though not necessary 

My writing style is 3rd person, average 1-2 paragraphs, once a day or can be every hour on days I'm not busy, and I mainly use discord.

.

[holydrakes]

I'm thankful to read Standard Deviation since it shows how miserable Soul ultimately is as the kid who kept feeling like he doesn't fit in anywhere. His own family practically disowned him for marring the Evans' name, and his girlfriend's family is a trainwreck left after a failed weapon-meister marriage, so not only is he constantly reminded that he might just be an okay weapon compared to other weapons, he might be plagued with feelings that not only is he ever gonna be good enough for his family, he might not ever be good enough for his girlfriend either.

[interroughbang]

Girl 1 music versus Girl 2 Music

“See You Again (feat. Kali Uchis)” by Tyler the Creator is a great song. Watching people sort gender presentation by the lyrics is less than great.

If those first two sentences seemed absurd, it’s because they are, all things considered, to the average person. The context will not make it much better, but instead dismantle this concept and piece together what happened to make such a thing reality. It’ll be a long walk; stay with me.

We’ll start at the beginning. For hundreds and hundreds and even thousands of years, there has been a concept of “those” people, a disparaged “other”. The evolution of a stratified society and predefined societal roles exacerbated the issue of classifying people as well as it did the issue of classifying those who fail to fulfill a role, or who fulfill a role we particularly dislike.

Unfortunately, a lot of the burden for classified ‘others’(so to speak) has fallen onto women. Certain definitions of proper, traditional femininity are utterly stifling in their restrictions and equally punishing for deviation from said restrictions. There are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to be feminine. Though this is less restrictive (perhaps just restrictive in a different way)—nowadays, the roots of policing and judging women for how they exist while being women persists. As far back as 1851, editorials warned of women with “an obvious tendency to encroach upon masculine manners, manifested even in trifles, which cannot be too severely rebuked or too speedily repressed”. They were certainly rebuked. Victorian women couldn’t even ride bicycles for a while without being mocked for ‘bicycle face’, or being told that their organs would get jumbled to death if their fragile uterus dare brave the ride of a velocipede. The emerging trend of wearing bloomers (billowy big pants) met harsh criticism as well—how dare women engage in such mannish behavior…like…. pants.  This policing of women’s’ existence has always had its ugly trivial side. On the more extreme side of things, suffragettes fighting for women’s’ right to vote were cast as angry, cruel women that would die alone and unloved for their inability to surrender their lives to men. For a modern equivalent, turn to the more recent ‘snowflake’ trope. It gets its name from the phrase ‘special snowflake’, a phrase borrowed from children’s books that used snow as an analogy for all people being unique, and therefore special, in their own way. The ‘special snowflake’ as a stereotype gained popularity in 2016 and 2017. Women and LGBTQ+ folks who people decided were a little too unique were slapped with this label. Easy bullying. Anything from using they/them pronouns to being visibly queer or even just protesting a misogynist joke would get you thrown in this bin. I myself was, confusingly, labeled a snowflake when I did a class presentation by myself since my groupmates had done nothing. Honestly it made no sense. The snowflake thing by itself didn’t either, though—it was just slapping a target onto the back of people that society could easily deem nonconforming. Such people using the ‘snowflake’ term thought the nonconformist existence of minoritized folks was only acceptable as a punchline. Why else would it be okay to be so strangely un-average? Women had possessed the right to vote for almost 100 years by 2016, but heaven forbid a woman wanted to exist in a way that was noticeable.  

Luckily that trend is long gone. What took it’s place is markedly less of a bully tactic, but still a strange, ambiguous way of categorizing people, and yet another stereotype. Forget the preppy girl, the jock, or the nerd, and make way for the trainwreck that is ‘girls who say hi v.s. girls who say bruh’. I could not make this up. It’s essentially a trend from a couple years ago that made jokes about stereotyping feminine girls (often with the connotation of them being innocent and/or weak) and ‘cool’ girls who are apparently less feminine or something…. essentially a more convoluted ‘type a’ and ‘type b’ for women. As if there wasn’t already enough of that. This is where the music mention from the beginning comes back—the ‘hii’ versus ‘bruh’ girl meme would compare any characteristics from appearance, speech, favorite food, and taste in artistic media between these stereotypes, essentially filing any sort of thing someone could be or enjoy into a category. Hopefully you, reader, can see where this can get messy. Take some real examples:

Already weird and abstract. Back to where we started: “See You Again”. Again, a great song. What happened after the bruh/hi girl thing was that people started to repeat that by categorizing people based on which line of the song’s ending people would sing. “See You Again” ends with Tyler singing “okay okay okay okay” and Kali Uchis harmonizing with some ‘la’s. Literal sounds reappropriated into a ‘type’ of girl. Every action of a woman categorized. In googling examples the first suggestions for ‘okokok lalala girl’ were ‘quiz’ or ‘test’ or ‘difference’—as if one should want to know, to categorize themselves, to fit into being one type of girl or the other and match the media they enjoy and consume to that.

Different iterations of stereotypes persist, of course, it never really ends. Now I often see labels or memes of people’s taste in art as being some sort of nameable, Pinterest-searchable aesthetic—Lana Del Rey is ‘coquette’, Radiohead is ‘femcel’, and with these words go not only music but fashion, speech, body language…sound familiar?

Though definitely strange to process, it isn’t entirely unheard of that this happens. We humans are communal creatures, and undoubtedly finding identifiable communities of shared interest are helpful, but there are caveats to what sort of categorization is helpful and what is a symptom of needing that categorization. I bear no ill will to coquette or femcel or hii or any sort of girl. What I do bear a bit of distaste for is that we live in a world that will try to shove women into a box to make their differences acceptable—one must conform to something.

Let it be known, reader, that no woman—or anyone else for that matter—needs to conform to anything. The very idea of conformity has been fabricated from the start, since ‘woman’ and ‘man’ were conceptualized as separate genders rather than subsets of genetic phenotype. There is nothing to conform to, rules are made up, categories are for fun and magazine quizzes, not the great aggregate mass of human expression.

And “See You Again”, by Tyler the Creator and featuring Kali Uchis, is just a good song. Nothing more. Sing whatever part you want at the end. All it means for who you are is that you decided to sing it.

I send you off with a r/3amthoughts post that highlights the silliness of all this.

Additional citation:

[themattress]

I honestly feel like these results make perfect sense. SuperS is obviously the most underrated so of course it doesn't get many votes, and nor does Classic (which is Dark Kingdom arc, not Dark Moon!) since it's that good and the praise it gets is warranted.

S is absolutely the most overrated season. Yes, praise for Sailor Stars is baffling to me, but it doesn't come up half as often as praise for S does. S had a solid first 22 episodes, Haruka and Michiru were great at first, Hotaru was good when the series finally got to her, and Professor Tomoe was utter perfection the whole series through. But other than that, there were problems in the direction of the series even to start with, the main characters were showing clear signs of Flanderization, and the head writer swap not only wrecked the quality of this series but the whole anime going forward, making it even more formulaic and even more deviating from the source material than it was before. S was, tbh, a major trainwreck.

As for R getting a lot of votes, that tracks too. R is commonly praised, but fans who don't like it really don't like it. They don't like Chibiusa's bratty attitude, they don't like time travel as a plot device, they don't like the infamous Usagi-Mamoru break-up, and they don't like (why I'll never know) the Makai Tree arc that the series opens on. Of course they would vote for it.

Lets have some fun on the 31st Anniversary of the 90's anime( March 7th 1992) premier shall we?

Which arc do you feel like is the most Overrated?

Let's define Overrated

Overrated- rated or valued too highly.

So which Season you feel like the fandom hypes up so much??

I'm also going to do one for Underrated so I'm just running this poll for a day and not for a week.

[sbtekno]

I don’t understand...

I thought I wanted to be a girl. I fantasized about being one for years. If nothing else, I still feel like my immense enjoyment of girl dreams means that some part of me wants to be a girl. And yet, pretty much any deviation from how I've been living my life up to this point has just felt wrong. A different name doesn't feel right. Different pronouns don't feel right. Any time I see or hear them directed at me, I get this visceral feeling that just screams, "THIS ISN'T ME." The old name and pronouns do irk me, not because they feel wrong, but because they don't. And I really want them to. I WANT TO *WANT* TO BE A GIRL.

I'm beginning to think that the reason I felt so elated when I saw all the validation being given out in the comments of the first memes I related to on r/egg_irl is that I was just happy there was a possibility that there was a reason for my fantasies other than just, "I'm a perverted freak." I had thought something was wrong with me, and I don't want the things that are wrong with me to be my fault, probably because I'm unconsciously trying to absolve myself of all responsibility for the trainwreck of a life I currently live.

My pride will not let me admit to being wrong. Not about this. Not about the all-consuming (and I do mean all-consuming) fantasies ultimately meaning nothing.

I hate myself so much.

[syphoncontinuity]

This story is supposed to be a puff piece, eloquent prose to permanently elevate the people behind the Daejeon Magical Accords to the top shelf of the shrine of history. Transform unruly pines into heroic bonsai form, any deviation from the abstracted ideal carefully clipped away.

And the truth is it did happen more or less as you would have heard, with the Chiyoda Affair, the IAME white paper, and the Night of Ten Thousand Flowers. We changed the lives of billions, an impact so large I can’t comprehend.

But the truth is also that we didn’t know what we were doing. We were selfish, short-sighted, and focused on the wrong things for most of the time. We fell together. We fell apart. 

The truth is that it was a slow-motion tsunami of cascading trainwrecks from beginning to end. 

The first of those, the one that really made the news, was the overdose.

[galedekarios]

HANK: Step away from the ledge!

[deincs-main]

headcanon dump on luisa and carla:

carla was a real person.

luisa met carla shortly after her mother’s “death”.

luisa sometimes hallucinated carla throughout her childhood, when she most needed a friend, because carla was her best friend.

luisa and carla did have a relationship throughout luisa’s undergrad.

luisa proposed and carla said yes, but this was before same sex marriage was legal in most states (before 9/11, even), so they didn’t officially get married.

within a year of 9/11, carla died.

luisa planned to attempt suicide and started more consistently hallucinating carla, which saved her life.

now, i tend to headcanon that rafael probably met carla but that emilio likely did not. i tend to headcanon that carla is rose’s cousin (or somehow related to her because carla and clara are way too similar for me), and i also tend to headcanon that rose killed her. these last ones, of course, don’t necessarily apply to other rpers or writers of those characters, but it’s likely my default when it comes to writing luisa with anyone else.

[atlantethan]

Here’s a thought: Adaptations of long book series, like John Carter of Mars, Dinotopia, Percy Jackson, and Mortal Engines should be TV series and NOT movies. You need only look at Game of Thrones in order to see why this is the better solution.

[rarepears]

Liu QingQui wakes up in the caves with the 4th peak lord, who he's pretty sure he's only ever seen ONCE since they became peak lords, shaking him frantically.

It takes about two weeks of him being stuck with the 4th peak's disciples hanging all over him while the peak lord is doing peak lord things with Yue Qingyaun before anyone actually thinks to tell him he died.

(LQQ was too much of a himbo to work it out on his own.)

Liu Qingqiu you say...

Shen Qingqiu and Liu Qingge both died in the caves that day, together, in the midst of a qi deviation in which Liu Qingge was trying to kill his martial brother and Shen Qingqiu, with his hand stretched out to touch Liu Qingge's chest, attempted to give Liu Qingge a qi infusion to calm Liu Qingge's rolling storm of qi.

Because they died together, qi intertwined, Shen Jiu wasn't expected it, but he should have known that his luck was so foul that this would happen.

This being that Shen Qingqiu and Liu Qingge's souls were still separate, but they shared the same ghostly bodies now.

They were now-

Liu Qingqiu.

-

(And then to their horrors, they both are no longer peak lords but are disciples of the 4th peak because they need to relearn how to use qi using the ghost cultivation methods as well as having two souls and two minds coordinate one ghostly form.

it's a trainwreck.

[jin-zixun]

I mean I can't disagree, and I wouldn't call JGS the worst (the worst like. person? yeah. but sect leader? eh he's fine.) but also I can't give QHJ credit for just happening to have a competent younger brother. On the other hand, NHS was deliberately incompetent on purpose, like QHJ was just an absolute trainwreck of a person for real, but NHS just decided to act like one.

NHS did also have JGY to pick up after him though, but then he killed JGY so who is going to pick up after him now? LXC? Not likely with how he's doing. I think the idea that NHS will just become competent post canon and get everything running again is very wishful thinking tbh. Nie Sect is on borrowed time fr. Lan Sect rose again after QHJ died but also that had nothing to do with QHJ.

But also also when LXC went off on his own to be a trainwreck of a person, it's not so bad *because* there are other competent Lans. So I guess QHJ leaving knowing there are other competent Lans isn't so bad? Even though he can't take any credit for it?

But you know what else? The Nie Sect is actually terrible! They cultivate with resentful energy that kills them, causes them to deviate and attack innocent people and loved ones, and has to be entombed away, in a place that also kills people and imprisons the spirits of the dead. The Nie Sect is a horror show. Maybe it's good for it to die. Maybe the worst Sect Leader is really Nie Mingjue for not running the Sect into the ground and embracing such evil methods, even forcing them on his own younger brother? No, no, that wouldn't be right either. It's still his sect!

Ugh this poll is harder than I thought.

Worst Sect Leader?

[fieldsofeternalfortune]

Rating every version of Cobra Commander from GI Joe media I have consumed thus far...

GI Joe: Retaliation

I don't care for the first movie enough to talk about it. The second movie didn't make any sense, they immediately killed their main protagonist, I think Zartan was the president, all the baddies were put in waterjail... It was a great batshit insane experience. CC had exactly zero substance as a character but damn he looked cool in that getup, walking in slow-mo towards the camera. No idea what he was trying to accomplish but he looked good doing it. 8/10

GI Joe: Resolute

Very evocative of classic comic/cartoon CC but if you gave him a cute outfit and a sword, and let him say 1 swear. I like this boy's feral energy. His voice is kinda hot. 9.5/10

GI Joe: Sierra Muerte

So in this comic CC is told that he's dying and Doctor Mindbender prescribes a full-body transplant. CC spends just about every second of this comic being extremely dramatic and/or having an existential crisis. It's absolutely hilarious. Thoroughly enjoyed every panel of this dramatic bitch. 10/10

GI Joe: Deviations

Again a CC more wacky than serious. This CC has successfully taken over the world and is miffed that he can't go around spreading mayhem like the good old days. His outfit is wild and I love it so much. He is a sassy baby who I adore. 11/10

GI Joe: A Real American Hero

Ok now this... This is beautiful. This absurd screechy boy has the best voice, the best janky animation, and THE GREATEST stupid world domination plans of all time. I could literally watch him all day. 100/10

GI Joe: A Real American Hero (but like, the comic by Larry Hama)

Listen... Listen. These comics are both good because they're ridiculous beyond imagination, but also good because they tell great stories with really fun cinematic art and action sequences? Like yeah CC calls people clams and it's great but I've also found myself feeling real human emotions over this filter-less trainwreck of a terrorist? I really have a soft spot for these comics and love this iteration of CC idk what else to say. 101/10