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10moonymhrivertam · 3 years ago

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Buffy/Witcher fic fragment

“Julian, duck!” The voice is a little shrill and definitely frantic. Jaskier’s still reeling from the portal, but something about the words has his hand shooting out to drag Geralt down with him. Something flies over their heads, and he looks up to see a headless body crumbling into dust. Which he hasn’t seen anything do in a very, very long time. He tenses at running footsteps, and he has a dagger in hand based sheerly on how frayed his nerves are. The girl standing over them is in jeans and a t-shirt, and he hasn’t seen the combination in decades.

“It is you! Everyone’s going to flip. It’s been years, I’m pretty sure they thought you were dead, especially since nobody really did magic yet when you went missing.” The girl has a hand out, and Jaskier stares at it, his brain buffering. Eventually, he realizes why. He’d gotten a spell to help him learn the most common language on the Continent when he’d arrived there, and now his brain is scrambling to parse English for the first time in twenty years.

“Who the hell are you?” He asks, the words wrapping strangely around his tongue. The girl frowns, her face scrunching into an expression that rings a bell deep in his memory. He’d had a friend that made a face like that...

“Right. The spell. You were gone.” Her hand still hangs in the air between them. “I’m Dawn Summers. I can take you to Giles, if you want.”

Jaskier eyes her for another moment before accepting the hand and then turning to help Geralt up. He doesn’t refuse the help, but there’s something tight in his face that says he doesn’t trust conversations he didn’t understand being had over his head.

“She knows someone that might know something,” he says to Geralt. Geralt grunts, his eyes darting from grave to grave. Jaskier suppresses a sigh and turns back to Dawn.

“Lead the way, Miss Summers.” Her face does something strange, but without a word, she turns on her heel and heads for the gate of the cemetery with unerring accuracy. Geralt’s stony silence felt significant, but every time Jaskier thought of something to say, all he could think was how Geralt was going to tear him apart for this pile of shit later when Jaskier wasn’t the only translator around. Another voice speaking English stopped his anxiety from ratcheting higher.

“Dawn, all I want to know is how I didn’t see you go.”

“I literally just waited until you stopped asking me questions while you were reading. But look, I survived!” Her voice is as bright as the sun. “Also, I found something!”

“You found something?” It wouldn’t have been easy to miss the skepticism in his voice even if Jaskier didn’t already know him. Dawn looks back, drawing Giles’s eye. Jaskier waves awkwardly, suddenly aware of just how much distance time has put between them.

“Julian?”

“Giles. It’s been...a while, for me.”

“It hardly looks like it.” Jaskier recognizes the look from seeing one like it on Geralt’s face more than he remembers it on Giles’s.

“I think that first portal did something to the way I age. Do you want to not-invite us back somewhere?” Which clears up a little bit of the look on Giles’s face, at least.

“I suppose there is an anniversary pizza party which can use a few more guests.”

“Oh, yeah!” Dawn grinned. “You haven’t met Tara yet! Oh, and, um - who are you? Sorry.” Jaskier looked back at Geralt - for a split second, he was waiting for Geralt to answer, then remembered.

“Geralt, this is Dawn and Giles. Giles, Dawn; Geralt. Language barrier.” Geralt had figured that much out already, so he didn’t feel the need to repeat himself.

“Sounded Polish.” Giles said a string of something which almost sounded like a greeting, but made Jaskier make a face. The easiest explanation was just that his accent was incomprehensible, but - then he remembered that they’d hopped from the thirteenth century to the twentieth.

“I’ll look into it,” Jaskier said in very firm English. Giles winced, and Jaskier felt bad for a moment. They quickly got on their way, and silence reigned. Jaskier hated the thick tension in the air, so with a mental fuck-it, he started speaking.

“Say something,” he pleaded with Geralt. “Anything. Three words or less?” The prompt usually worked when all else failed, but then - that had been before that awful dragon hunt half a year ago.

“Apologies are difficult.” The words came slowly, and Geralt looked pained. Jaskier didn’t bother hiding his surprise. Geralt eyed him for a moment before dropping his eyes to the sidewalk. “Harder now that I’m confused. And you’re the only one that knows what’s going on.”

Jaskier bit his lip, processing that. Geralt wanted to apologize, before they were portalled into Sunnydale. That was...a lot.

“This is...” Jaskier trailed off. “It’s where I’m from.” He looked away from Geralt. “A few years before we met, a portal took me from here and dropped me on the Continent. There was a mage that was so frustrated with my charades that she just slapped a translation spell on me. I’m just lucky the mechanics of it mean I can be a great bard. I can still tell the languages are separate, they still feel different, but I just - understand them.” He tapped his temple.

“This is where you’re from?” Geralt repeated. Jaskier looked over to see his eyes roaming from the sidewalk to the road to the power lines.

“It’s got monsters, too, but no witchers. Got something else, though. Oh, and it’s the twentieth century. Twenty-first, maybe, depending how long I was gone. It was the 90’s.”

“You know them?”

“The man. The girl said something about a spell, but...I don’t know what she means. Hold on. Miss Summers, what was that you said before about a spell?”

“Oh, yes, you were gone.” Hearing Giles say the same thing was a point in her favor. “It’s...rather complicated. There was memory alteration involved.”

“So I forgot you?” Jaskier couldn’t help but be a little upset by the idea.

“Wrong way around,” Dawn said, looking a bit uncomfortable. “We probably should wait until we get back, and then everyone else can tell you the way they remember things. It might be kind of neat to see how you tell things.”

“Alright, then.” Jaskier flashed them a disarming smile before turning his attention back to Geralt and shrugging. Geralt hummed and fell quiet again. Jaskier did the same despite himself, at least until the girl drifted back towards them.

[disappearance somewhere mid-s3; this is set in an ambiguous post-s5 everyone-is-happy-fuck-you]

“Is that a guitar?”

“A lute. Learning it was a little different. The tuning’s a bitch.” Giles shot him a look over his shoulder, and Jaskier rolled his eyes. “This is a special one. I got it from the king of the elves.”

Dawn’s eyebrows rose. “Okay, Bilbo.”

“Hey, no, they’re real on the Continent!” Jasker protested. He outlined what history he’d learned at Oxenfurt for her, and by the time he was coming to the end of his impromptu lecture, they were outside a house he recognized, just barely. Giles was first through the door, tossing out a greeting to get a chorus of voices in return. Dawn followed. Jaskier hesitated just one moment. His high school friends seemed to be in there. He hadn’t seen them in going on thirty years. Nonetheless, if he didn’t go, Giles wouldn’t trust him, and he didn’t have any chance of either settling in here or finding his way home. So he forged ahead, hanging onto Geralt’s sleeve. He crossed the threshold without a lick of trouble, and Geralt shadowed him silently.

“Who’s that?” That was Joyce’s voice, he thought.

“We found them in the cemetery!” Dawn said, far too cheerfully. “But we didn’t invite them in,” she added quickly. “You heard!”

“We heard.” That was another familiar one. A few moments later, one of his old friends was in the doorway. “...Julian?”

There was a chorus of ‘what’s, and suddenly it seemed like the entirety of whatever party they were having was in the doorway. Before he’d quite processed it all, Xander had drawn him into a hell of a hug.

“Lute!” He protested, squirming out of the hug. He took off his case and floundered for a place to set it. Geralt gently removed it from his hands and nodded back to the others. Jaskier flashed him a quick, warm smile, then turned his attention back to distributing hugs.

“It’s been a while,” he offered when they’d had their fill.

“How are you not dead?” Xander asked, earning an elbow in the side from Willow. He winced and pouted at her.

“There was a portal. Which did do something strange to my aging, I’ll admit.”

“You barely look older than me,” Dawn observed, which didn’t help Jaskier as much as it ought to.

“Well, that’s flattering.”

“Why, how old are you?” Buffy asked.

“Coming up on forty-three.” Geralt tensed at the various ‘bullshit’s that rose up. Jaskier flashed him a smile to reassure him. “I’d offer to prove it, but all I have is Geralt’s word, and he never even argued with Yennefer about those crow’s feet jokes, so I don’t know if he noticed.”

“Oh, what are we all standing around the hall for?” Joyce tittered. “Come on, come sit. There’s pizza; soda; some wine.”

“Ooh, they’ve got wine, Geralt!” Geralt hummed. Still holding Jaskier’s lute with something like reverence, he followed Jaskier. At least until Jaskier stopped dead in the door, his eyes narrowing at the man with bleach-blond hair in the middle of what sounded like a pop culture argument with a woman who hadn’t come to greet him.

“You have more to catch me up on, right now,” he said lowly. Spike looked over and his eyebrows shot up.

“Pretty boy. Thought you were dead. Nice going on the still being here.” Spike made a vague gesture of congratulations and then turned back to his partner, but she was squinting at Jaskier like she knew him.

“There was a thing,” Dawn answered, dropping onto the couch. “An organizationy thing. Now he basically has a taser in his brain so he can’t eat people. He doesn’t have a soul but he’s still okay.”

“Watch yourself, little bit.” Spike waved a threatening finger at her, and Jaskier nearly leapt forward with his dagger, clear invitation be damned. A hand landed on his shoulder. He tensed and nearly whipped around.

“Jaskier,” Geralt rumbled in his ear. “What’s going on?”

“When I left, that bastard was out to kill us.”

“And now?”

Jaskier huffed angrily through his nose. “He’s been invited to the party.”

“Treat him like he’s Valdo Marx, then.”

“Not fucking well helpful, Geralt, someday I’ll murder that little shit, I really will.”

“You’re Jaskier and Geralt of Rivia!” The accusation was sudden, giddy, and in the language Jaskier was used to hearing. He and Geralt turned as one to look at Spike’s conversation partner. Jaskier distantly noticed he was staring at her, too, though in a more ‘what the fuck’ way.

“And who would you be, madam?” The flirty, pleased smile touched easily on Jaskier’s face. Xander’s eyes narrowed.

“Oh, when I went there, I usually went as Anyanka.”

“Anyanka...that’s familiar.”

“It had better be. I had at least three separate summons that stopped me and Hallie having days out because of you.”

“Summons?” Most of Jaskier’s excitement had dropped away.

“I was a demon zemsty.”

“Shit.” Jaskier could feel himself go pale. He could feel Geralt at his back, but couldn’t tell if he was angry or smug or indifferent.

“But I’m not stupid. Witchers are almost as infamous as Slayers, and you’re the White Wolf’s bard.”

“Slayers?” Geralt asked.

“It’s what I told you we have instead of Witchers. Except there’s only one, and she’s always a girl.”

“Seems like a lot of responsibility for one person,” he remarked.

“Which is why Buffy has everyone.” Jaskier made a gesture encompassing the room. “And hasn’t died yet. No, wait, Kendra was Called. Well, she’s never died properly.”

#i'm sorry it ends so abruptly i tried to add to it just now but nothing was working out T_T #i just had a lot of fun reading this when i found it again in my google docs so i wanted to share #writing #fic #the witcher fanfic #ambiguous timeline #canon divergence #there was a struck through scene explaining that Anya just has the ability to hop Spheres as a vengaence demon #but the timing was kind of a gamble #except that Hallie had a knack for finding concerts where Her Sweet Kiss was played XD #Anya and Jaskier only barely missed going to high school together i think #and i feel like it's weird that he doesn't ask after oz but i remember looking at episode guides to decide on the timeline #so oz must've already been gone #buffy fanfic #anyway yeah i wrote this mostly for me but i hope you find it fun #i kinda want to continue it but not enough to figure out where i wrote myself into a corner #altho i do wanna do the comparison of jaskier having memories of canon 1-3 against everyone's dawn-edited 1-3 #also anya like. you must have a translation spell either you or tara can do just. do it so geralt doesn't have to keep suffering #;kljfakldjflka just realized there is a distinct possibility in this verse that Yenn could've summoned her after finding out about the wish #then again yenn probably wants to be self-suficient and claling a vengaence demon wouldnt' count

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pynkhues · 4 years ago

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Sweat face diamond ring thought bubble!

Thank you! <3

😅- a line that made you feel second hand embarrassment

Oh god, so many, but I feel like it’s first hand embarrassment when it’s my own work, hahaha.

This bit from Blue Moon is one I think about probably once every few weeks though, so that’s hilarious:

The speakers judder to life and the opening riff of Push It start, and it’s like muscle memory, the way the steps find her – more than the steps, the lyrics too, and they’re barely through the first verse when Sara starts laughing, her face split, her chest heaving, and then she’s coughing, and Ruby springs forwards, but she’s stopped - - Stan stops her - - reaching for her, pulling her back to him, and he just shakes his head, and it hurts as the nurses tumble into the room, then the doctors, watching from the sidelines as Sara coughs, blood spilling from the corners of her mouth, and then there are drugs and drips and one doctor pulls them out of the room and says the word transplant and Ruby goes home and she hates herself, but Stan - -

I like the segment overall, but I get really in my head about Sara coughing up blood. It was a bit I’d highlighted to consider changing in later drafts, which I never actually did, because while coughing up blood is something that happens with kidney-related diseases, it’s usually really serious before that happens, so it’s technically a bit early for Sara to be suffering in that way. I wish I’d changed it to an earlier symptom of kidney failure like irregular heartbeat or shortness of breath.

Mostly though I get more embarrassed by seeing phrases I overuse? Descriptions of light, the use of certain words, motions, and habits are things I’m trying to address at the moment, which is really tough! I’m excited for it though too as an area for growth! :-)

💍- your most underrated story

Oooo, I have the biggest softspot for On a Balcony with Champagne Lips which I think is a story a lot of people are pretty ‘meh’ on, haha. I wrote it purely based on s3 spoilers, and am always delighted at how canon-compliant it ended up being, and I don’t know. I like the push-pull of it, and it resonated with me writing it, even if it didn’t necessarily resonate with many people reading it, haha.

💬- describe one of your completed works in three words

Okay okay okay, let’s go Cross Your Fingers.

Trauma! Entrepreneurship! Catharsis!

I hope anyway, haha.

Writer Ask Game

#writer ask game #cross your fingers #welcome to my ama #fic asks #sothischickshe

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moonlit-imagines · 4 years ago

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Damoiseau in Distress

Steve Harrington x reader

warnings: the truth serum drug thingy from s3, puke mention, gun mention, makeout session(?)

a/n: Vou bem obrigado! Tive que traduzir, mas acredito que entendi! Também estou digitando esta parte no Google, desculpe se não faz muito sentido. Eu espero que você goste desta escrita!

prompt: anonymous: “oiii, tudo bemm? Vc poderia fazer um imagine em que o Steve Harrigton estava drogado e a Y/N proteje ele já que ela lutava melhor kkkkk,aí no final ele se declarava pra ela e rolava uns amassos bem calientes. PLEASEE! Me desculpe,espero que dê para entender, pode estar um pouco confuso, porque eu não falo inglês kkk THANK YOUUU!” -> “hi, how are you? You could make a picture that Steve Harrigton was drugged and Y / N protect him since she fought better kkkkk, then in the end he would declare himself to her and he would make some very hot snogging. PLEASEE! I'm sorry, I hope you can understand, you may be a little confused, because I don't speak English kkk THANK YOUUU!”

“You have got to be kidding me.” You groaned when you found your two former classmates on the floor of a secret Russian base, each as high as a kite. You threw your head back and sighed as the two kids you were “babysitting” waited for you to say something. “Alright, you two get Robin, I’ll get Steve.” You instructed while untying the two from the chair.

“Y/NNN!!!” Steve giggled. “My hero!” You rolled your eyes and pulled him to his feet, which took some getting used to for him. “Woah! The floor is jelly. My legs are jelly.” He mumbled, you just ignored him and kept on with the kids an Robin behind you.

“Do you remember where you’re going, y/n?” Dustin whispered from behind you.

“Yeah, I got it.” You assured him.

“Yeah, y/n’s got it.” Steve repeated while taking your hand. You yanked on his arm at the turn and managed to get this into a little cart for a speedy getaway. “This is the best day ever. I feel amazing.” Steve grinned all stupid-like while you tried not to lose your mind.

“I’m sure you do, Harrington. Enjoy that feeling.” You patted his shoulder and watched as he lied down on the cool metal floor and felt the elevator activate, shooting you back up to ground level. The screams of these two very intoxicated children gave you a headache, but you were really just focused on making it out of this alive.

“We should probably get somewhere the Commies can’t find us, right?” Erica suggested, shrugging her shoulders as she waited for a response.

“The movies.” Dustin gasped and helped you get Steve and Robin to some sort of safety while you all contacted backup. Your plans never go so smoothly, though, because you lost Robin and Steve, got trapped in the mall, and then separated from Steve and the gang. You saw the Russians nearing the helpless kid who was still feeling a little weak after puking up all the contents of his stomach.

It may not have been a perfect idea, but it was split-second. You went charging for the Russian (with an actual gun in hand) and tackled him down to the ground. No one else could shoot at first without hitting their comrade, but they could still grab you. Steve turned the corner to see you attack this man with nothing but pure adrenaline and your bare hands. You saved him, he couldn’t have been more grateful.

Next think you know, the Russians were attacked by a flying car and you ducked beneath the action while they got what they deserved. You fell the the ground with a heavy stomach, realizing that you could have just died. Steve rushed to your side and pulled you right to his lips for a passionate kiss. It was a bit of a shock, yes, but Steve was just full of surprises.

“You are my hero, y/n.” He told you before kissing you again. There were tons of eyes on you as he did this, but you have to admit, you gave in for a moment.

“So I’ve been told...We can do this again in a while, Steve. You know, after we’re done fighting or running from bad guys.” You smiled and patted his chest, tilting your head towards the spectators. “Also, you need to brush your teeth.”

“Anything for my savior.” Steve helped you off of the floor and the rest of the group gathered up in a circle to discuss their discoveries over the past few days. There was a lot more to go over than you thought, that kiss may need to wait a bit longer...

—————

The long night finally camebto an end, you actually saved Steve three more times before it was over. He couldn’t keep himself off of you, that was for sure.

“I’m glad neither of us died.” Steve told you while driving down the quiet roads of Hawkins.

“Yeah, we did pretty good out there.” You nodded and looked up at him.

“You know,” he slowed the car down to a stop and stared at you, “I’ve been fighting the urge to make out with you all night.” Steve admitted as he looked down at your lips.

“I know.” You answered smugly and leaned in slowly, seeing if Steve would make a move.

“Don’t tease me.” He lowly spoke, making you smirk.

“Oh, I’m not.” That was all he needed to hear before his lips crashed into yours and moved in sync with your own. After such a stressful night, this was exactly what you needed. Steve reached his hand across the car and placed his hand on your thigh as the two of you continued, you truly wondered how long he’d keep the car stopped in the middle of the road, if you didn’t stop him, nothing would.

“Well, truth-be-told, I’m still a little freaked out to be on my own...you mind staying the night with me? Maybe we could, um, do that again?” Steve awkwardly rubbed the back of his neck as he awaited your response.

“Yeah, I’d be okay with that. Let’s get moving.”

taglist: @locke-writes // @queenofthehairharrington // @bonniesbabybunnie // @lotsoffandomrecs // @wolfish-willow // @captainshazamerica //

#steve harrington x reader #steve harrington imagine #steve harrington #stranger things 3 x reader #stranger things 2 #stranger things imagine #stranger things x reader #stranger things 3 #stranger things

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lightsandlostbells · 4 years ago

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wtFOCK season 3, episode 5 reaction

This whole episode I kept doing that Marge Simpson groan. You know, the one that’s like tight-lipped and this low, exasperated mmm from deep in the throat? That was me constantly.

Episode 5

Clip 1 - Jens gives Robbe sex advice

Robbe texts his mom and says to her he can’t visit, lying that it’s because he’s sick. One repeated element that does exist in this season is Robbe listening to music on his headphones, which is him retreating into himself, or using music to cope. The song lyrics reflect that: “I used to feel so alone, now I’m feeling better on my own.”

Since I’ve been trying to think of ways to rewrite this season, they could expand Robbe using music as a coping strategy even further. Music should have been something that Robbe bonds with Sander over. And not just Sander’s recommendation of Bowie, either, which is all they’ve done so far - it seems like Robbe should give recs or insight as well. Talk about how important music is to him with Sander. Make it a serious point in their developing relationship.

Jens skates up and talks to Robbe. Robbe wants to get high, but Jens doesn’t have weed with him at the moment. He asks Robbe if he’s thought about the Brrrothers, because they’re not the same without Robbe. Robbe snaps and turns away from him, then lies and says his bad mood is about Noor. Jens has already heard that they’re fighting.

Jens’ talk to Robbe, knowing that Noor wants to have sex and Robbe doesn’t, is actually pretty sweet. Even though he doesn’t understand the real reason why Robbe doesn’t want to, his talk is thoughtful and not shaming Robbe for being a nervous virgin, it’s considerate of him. Considering the Brrrothers have been obnoxious about sex and girls all season, this was a refreshing change. One question I do have is how Jens knew that Noor wanted sex and Robbe didn’t, but I guess it was implied that this explanation was part of the rumor mill.

Of course, the downside is that Jens’ advice prompts Robbe to text Noor about how he misses her and wants to meet up. Bad, Robbe! I don’t know if Jens’ talk encouraged Robbe to text her because Robbe was like “Yeah, I’m supposed to like Noor, better get back on that,” or because maybe he genuinely told himself, “I just don’t want to have sex with her because I’m nervous, yeah, that must be it,” and decided to just move forward with it.

I do like drama that comes from characters trying to be helpful but unintentionally saying or doing the wrong thing - that’s what happens in the locker room scene with Isak and Even. When Isak says he’s better off without mentally ill people in his life, he’s telling Even this as a way of saying that his mother won’t cause problems for them, he doesn’t care what she’ll think of them dating. So taken on its own, I think this scene is fine.

HOWEVER. The pacing of this season is again, SO SO weird, because this scene would have fit right in around episodes 2-3? Right after Robbe tried and failed to have sex with Noor, you know ... the first time? Or the second, or the third? Like … have it be in line with Isak’s episode 3 sexuality crisis, all the “why does he have to be so gay” stuff. It would’ve worked well to have this talk at like, the beginning of episode 3, and then have Robbe making the “that guy is so gay” comment as an unintentional result of this - by trying to convince himself he is just straight and nervous and distancing himself from being gay. We had three entire scenes of Robbe failing to fuck Noor, so narratively, why did we need to wait this long for Jens to talk to him about it?

Clip 2 - AGAIN?

Robbe invites Noor over to bone. He’s lit about a million candles and is trying to make this a big romantic deal, except lmao, he has on David Bowie’s Life on Mars … Robbe … what u doing…

Actually, I’m not sure if this is diegetic music or not, if Robbe is blasting Bowie from his phone as mood music or if he’s only hearing this song inside his head. I think we’re definitely meant to take away that Robbe is hearing the song since it gets distorted as he slinks down Noor’s body, and that it’s not just there for the audience. In either case, Sander is supposedly the shadow hanging over this sad hetero affair.

Tbh listening to Life on Mars is the best part of this season and I wish I could just like … listen to this song play against a black screen instead of watching poorly written, repetitive clips.

They start to get it on and he takes off her shirt, unhooks her bra, yadda yadda, he doesn’t look happy but he soldiers on and it’s implied they went All The Way. On the one hand, I will rage if they actually had sex. On the other hand, if they don’t, it’s yet another clip where the same shit happens, Robbe tries to bang Noor and fails..

Clip 3 - Robbe’s not turned on by Noor and this is BRAND NEW INFORMATION

… okay, so he didn’t have sex with her AGAIN? He couldn’t get it up?

For fuck’s sake. I mean, on the one hand I’m glad it was actually Robbe’s choice (apparently) to put a stop to the sex instead of like, someone else walking in and interrupting yet again, but on the other hand, I feel like we have done this scene SO MUCH. We KNOW. About the only thing that’s changed I guess is that Robbe kissed a boy and now he’s trying to be straight? If this was only like the second time this scene had happened, it would have been fine.

I just don’t have a coherent idea of Robbe’s arc. This season is going in circles.

Anyway, Robbe couldn’t get it up, Noor is sympathetic, she asks if it’s her, Robbe says she’s amazing, he looks sad and haunted blah blah we’ve already seen this play out.

Why were these separate clips? In the first clip, we have Robbe seemingly determined to have sex with Noor, and then in the second, he can’t get it up. So why not SHOW THE MOMENT OF CHANGE? Are these filmmakers on drugs? This is storytelling 101. Like there’s no reason to split up these clips except to cause a bit of anxiety if you happen to be able to watch the clips at the exact time they’re posted, and from a real-time perspective I get it, but that’s ineffective for the vast majority of people who will have to watch later and then will watch these two clips together at the same time. I mean, the fact that it’s not even 10 minutes in between clips … just SHOW THE WHOLE SCENE. Holy fuck. How are they this incompetent?

The pacing of the scenes themselves is so weird. So many of the clips are oddly short, we don’t NEED them to be split into parts. It makes me really appreciate Julie’s pacing: Skam S3 episodes had 4-6 clips each, and in those clips, we got rich scenes packed with details, often multi-tasking within different story threads. wtFOCK’s pacing is simplistic and choppy and unnecessary.

Clip 4 - Milan gives Robbe a pep talk

Robbe is Googling erectile dysfunction which is honestly kind of funny (but again, probably would have been a better fit for earlier in this season, before Robbe had already kissed a dude ...) Milan comes in wanting advice on two shirts, Robbe is annoyed.

Milan tries to get Robbe to talk to him. It takes some prodding (and I do like how Robbe is swiveling in his chair and not looking at Milan) but Robbe admits there’s a guy who likes him and, after Milan asks, admits that it’s mutual.

Tbh … I don’t find it so hard to believe that Robbe opened up to Milan even though they’re not anywhere as close as Eskild and Isak, because I do think another gay guy is a “safe” person to talk to about this situation and I can see Robbe doing it. What I do NOT get is why, here and now, Robbe is now openly admitting it. Why did we go from Robbe trying to fuck a girl and, before that, calling the boy he kissed a pervert and a homophobic slur, to admitting his attraction for a boy? Why the sudden turnaround? Based on the clips themselves, all we have to go off as a turning point is that he couldn’t fuck Noor, BUT this is nothing new for either Robbe and the audience, AND not being able to fuck a girl does not actually mean that Robbe would be able to fuck a guy, or that he’s into guys, and it especially doesn’t mean that Robbe would accept that he likes a guy. I mean, he’s Googling “erectile dysfunction” not “am I gay?” which tbh seems still more like denial than anything. He’s blaming his lack of arousal on a medical issue, not his sexuality.

This scene would feel more true to me if Robbe was like, downplaying his side of it, or playing it off as only Sander had feelings and it wasn’t requited. That’s more in line with the characterization we have just been given, that Robbe is denying his attraction to Sander.

Another way would be to not split up the sex clip and to show like, Robbe flashing back to his kiss with Sander while he’s making out with Noor, so we get that it’s not just that he’s not into Noor, it’s that he’s very into Sander, and we see him grudgingly admit to himself that yes, he’s attracted to Sander (at the very least.) which would make it believable that he admits it to Milan. Cause and effect, etc.

MIlan is like, are you so nervous to tell me you have a crush on another guy (...????? um, yes, Milan, you have to know it’s hard to come out???) but is pretty supportive and says Robbe’s lucky to have him, Milan would have wanted himself when he was going through this. Robbe is just like, I don’t know what I feel and I want everything to be normal, there’s too much shit going on right now. Milan says Robbe IS normal and he doesn’t want to bottle up who he is, the pressure will get too real and he’ll explode, he’ll hurt people. Robbe seems to take this advice seriously, so hopefully this scene will actually lead to cause + effect.

Again, this scene is fine on its own? There’s just something about the pacing of the season as a whole that feels strange.

I don’t know if this is supposed to be the equivalent of the Pride clip, because Robbe doesn’t say anything offensive and Milan didn’t get upset. Milan’s advice is good about not pushing away who you really are, but there’s nothing specifically confronting internalized homophobia, which Robbe desperately needs seeing as he’s had some extremely homophobic outbursts. I think it’s a shame to lose that part of the scene, because it’s got a very pointed and urgent message. (EDIT from the future: We got the Pride clip later in the episode, so that’s good.)

Clip 5 - Robbe tells Jens he likes someone else

Robbe is sitting on the sidelines listening to music again. Jens comes over and asks how things are, Robbe says he took his advice with Noor and Jens is happy that he’s a matchmaker. Robbe is like no, there’s someone else. He says he thought it would go away, but it didn’t.

For a moment it seems like this might be a sudden coming out scene, but Jens finally asks who it is and Robbe clams up and finds it hard to get out. Jens asks if she goes to their school. Robbe is saved by Moyo wanting to play a game against some guys.

This is some plausible conflict, at the very least, Robbe not being able to tell his friends that he’s into a guy. It would have been way better to focus on this instead of Robbe flinging a slur at Sander. Robbe’s friends seem like the clearest explanation for his internalized homophobia.

Now Jens needs to follow up on this development, or else turn in his Jonas card. Because there’s dropping the subject if he senses Robbe doesn’t want to tell him yet, and then there’s forgetting about the subject because Jens isn’t that engaged with what’s happening with Robbe, and unfortunately the latter vibe has come across far more than the first. Like why does it seem like Jens is always walking away?

Clip 6 - Robbe breaks up with Noor

Old Town Road is playing as Noor meets Robbe in a cafe. One thing I do notice is that there are a fair amount of gay musicians on the soundtrack this season, so that’s cool.

Robbe is stressed because we can tell he’s gonna try to break up with Noor. He doesn’t order anything to eat. Noor is sympathetic about him not getting it up with her, but Robbe says he needs some time for himself, he has so much shit on his mind. Noor says she can help with that, he’s like nah, Noor is crying and reaching for him desperately. He gets up and walks out.

L O L I heard all about how Robbe supposedly handled this better than Isak, and I mean … on the one hand, I certainly agree that he did Noor a solid by officially breaking up with her and not just running away from her in the hallway. But er ... first of all, Robbe went wayyyyyyyyy farther with Noor than Isak EVER did with Emma. Robbe and Noor had an actual relationship for what, a month? Isak and Emma made out twice and flirted a bit. They were not exclusively, seriously dating. So yeah, Noor is owed this breakup.

Second, Robbe still cheated on her with Sander before he broke up with her. The fact that they were naked while they made out in the pool frankly adds an on-screen sexual element to the cheating. And technically Isak making out with Even in the pool was not cheating … for sure it was a dick move to lead on Emma and then ditch her like that, I’m not going to say it was NBD, but like I said, they weren’t exclusively dating. I mean, in all my years of Skam fandom, it’s pretty rare that I’ve heard anyone refer to what Isak did as cheating - it’s usually talked about differently than Even cheating on Sonja. Robbe and Sander BOTH cheated on their girlfriends here.

Third, it’s nice he did this with Noor but lmao, kinda small potatoes considering what Robbe said to Sander.

Fourth, Robbe just gets up and leaves while she’s crying, lol. He let her order soup and then he ditched her! That’s cold as ice! Bro, you need to stick around until she tells you to leave, or you needed to pick a breakup location where both of you can leave ASAP without someone coming by with the meal you ordered.

And to be clear, I don’t think Robbe not handling this perfectly makes him a terrible person or anything. It’s more the comparison to Isak with how Isak is supposedly worse and Robbe is much nicer. Nah.

Sucks for Noor and all, but whyyyy are they making the Emma character so tragic and emphasizing this het relationship so much? We don’t even end the clip on Robbe’s POV. Because how he feels about this breakup doesn’t matter, I guess. Does he feel guilty? Free? Unsure? Conflicted? IDK because we close on her, not him! I’m sorry, but it’s not her season!

I mentioned this in an earlier reaction but I’m just super tired of gay storylines that have this intense focus on how much someone being gay hurts a straight person. I believe I mentioned Love, Victor as a prominent example, because Victor’s relationship with his girlfriend seemingly gets more screen time than the relationship with his actual male love interest. And I get why this storyline is relevant to a coming out arc, of course I do, but it really bugs me when the het relationship seems to overshadow the gay relationship, as it does here. At this point I feel like Robbe/Noor has been given equal plot relevance as Robbe/Sander, if not more, and that should not be the case. It’s not about shipping, it’s about wanting a story about a gay kid’s journey of self-acceptance to focus more on the life-changing love story that is the catalyst for embracing his sexuality, than the fake passion-less relationship that is doomed to failure that is just a momentary stumble in said journey of self-acceptance. There is no need to demonize Noor, but there is actually a middle ground between treating her with respect and empathy and making her the real victim of this story.

This narrative choice also does not exist in a vacuum. It is completely fair to be skeptical of the prioritization of a het relationship over a gay one. It’s fair to wonder why we’ve gotten multiple scenes of Robbe getting hot and heavy with a girl, why Robbe spends a pivotal clip being so sad about Noor that he doesn’t seem to really notice or care that he’s alone with the guy he supposedly likes.

I mean, fuck, Robbe seems more upset about hurting Noor’s feelings by breaking up with her for legitimate reasons than he does about hurting Sander’s feelings by calling him a f*g and accusing him of sexual assault.

Clip 7 - Robbe tries to speak with Sander

Robbe goes to school (not his school, Sander’s) and asks where the art room is. He’s in a way better mood, a spring in his step, but LMAO you better pray that Sander actually wants to talk to you rather than kick your ass or avoid you for all eternity because of what you said to him.

Sander is sketching a nude male model. Robbe seems happy just to see him. He walks away and goes to the bathroom, fixes his hair, stares in the mirror, takes a deep breath. Then he goes up to Sander after the bell rings. Robbe wants to talk, Sander is not having it and walks away. Robbe is sad, angsty music plays.

Uhhhhh, serves you right? No offense but I can’t even feel sad for Robbe in this scenario, because what he did crossed a line. Internalized homophobia is a hell of a drug, but there’s such a difference between Robbe just denying that the kiss meant anything or blaming it on being drunk or whatever, and essentially accusing Sander of sexual assault and calling him a slur. It’s not an ignorant mistake, it’s a malicious one. I feel bad that Robbe ever had such self-hatred that he made those comments in the first place and I certainly don’t hate him or think he should be forever alone, but it is 100% understandable why Sander would not want to speak to him after that.

Also, going up to Sander at his school was not the best move, because he’s basically ambushing him. Sander doesn’t have a choice whether to deal with Robbe in that moment. It would’ve been better if Robbe sent him some kind of apology text or voicemail first and left it up to Sander whether he wanted to meet. I get that’s not as good for televised dramaaaa, but it’s kinder to Sander. (And if Sander doesn’t respond, or if he’s blocked Robbe, well, those are just consequences of Robbe’s actions that he’ll have to live with.) EDIT: Robbe actually did contact Sander first via text, wanting to meet up so he could explain. That does make it somewhat better, although I still think he shouldn’t have approached him at school. If Sander doesn’t want to talk to you? Then give him space. Maybe he’ll be willing to hear you out in time, or maybe he’ll decide he’s better off without you, but Robbe’s the one who did something wrong and it’s not up to Robbe whether Sander forgives him.

Clip 8 - Robbe and Sander make up and kiss

Angsty music keeps playing as Robbe walks home. He sees a mom and her kids playing, more sadness presumably due to his own family troubles.

Sander has followed him and says he has five minutes. Robbe’s like “Why don’t you want to talk?” LMAO IDK ROBBE, WHAT COULD IT BE.

Robbe says he’s sorry and that he loves Sander. LMAO WHAT. Is this a nuance of translation where “I love you” isn’t as strong as it is in English? Are you kidding me?

First of all … he LOVES Sander when they’ve barely interacted? They’ve spoken only a handful of times. Hell, they only met in episode 3, and this is episode 5. It’s been like two weeks since they’ve met, and while I could buy that some ships fell in love in that short of time, this is sure as fuck not one of them.

Second … Robbe goes from shoving Sander and calling him horrible things and trying to fuck Noor, to professing his love for Sander, WITHIN DAYS? And this is the character who’s supposed to have a big coming out arc? What is nuance, what is good writing, what is a coherent idea of this character’s struggles with his sexuality and himself... The talk with Milan might convince Robbe to accept his feelings, but it would make way more sense if Robbe was more tentative about them. He doesn’t need to come out swinging the big epic declarations in order to accept his romantic interest in Sander.

Like this isn’t even based on what I personally think is believable for a romance, this is based on what wtFOCK has told me about this character! They made the choice to make him say more viciously homophobic things. They made the choice to have him go back to Noor and try to have sex with her for the millionth time.

I’m glad that Sander doesn’t buy the confession at first, at least.

Robbe says that he was really fucked up and hat Sander is the first dude. There is a cute moment where he’s like “that kiss (mimes fireworks)” but then things went Chernobyl. Would have been great if we saw exactly what made him go Chernobyl and make him regret the kiss. He says he’s sorry but asks for one more chance.

Sander steps in, leans in for a kiss. “What about Chernobyl?” “Fuck Chernobyl.” They kiss, it’s really sweet, but lol they’re kissing in public??? Robbe is ok with this?? I just have abso-fucking-lutely no idea where this kid’s head is. Like ... how is he so cool with this considering where he was just days ago? Apparently Robbe’s internalized homophobia was so extreme that he was all “get away from me f*g” toward Sander with no clear catalyst, but also not so extreme that it couldn’t be fixed with a pep talk from Milan? Okay!

This scene would have been totally fine if Robbe’s mistake was less cruel and amounted to blocking Sander or telling him to stay away or w/e. It doesn’t feel satisfying for what Robbe actually did say.

Also, sigh, because Sander did forgive Robbe just like that, and I don’t buy it. I mean, if anything, it makes me sad for Sander. I want to tell him that he deserves better. I suppose I can buy this as part of his fear that no one will ever love him, that he’s desperate to be accepted and loved and so is quick to forgive.

It would have made more sense for Robbe to have a longer period of self-reflection, have him come out to his friends, etc. and then reunite with Sander an episode or so later, similar to how Isak and Even reunited at the end of episode 7. Or to have Sander take some time before letting Robbe talk to him, during which Robbe works on his own issues.

Sander gets a call from Britt, which he ignores, saying Britt’s the past, he and Robbe are the future (as the song lyrics talk about the future and the past … they’re going pretty on the nose this season. Fine by me, OG was also on the nose.) Lmao but Robbe has no right to be upset about Britt after he explicitly told Sander to stay away. I mean, it’s dubious of Sander to keep dating her after cheating, but he also thought Robbe was no longer an option sooo don’t be surprised Sander is still with her, dude.

Sander goes to meet Britt, but not before some make outs, some handholding. I think their chemistry is good! It’s just that I don’t really buy the depth of this relationship. It legit makes me sad that these actors are getting served this half-assed material.

Clip 9 - Zoë gets a letter

Robbe goes home and gets a text from Sander, with a sketch of them, saying their kiss was Chernobyl. Well, that’s cute.

Milan is telling Zoë about seeing some straight-looking dude on the bus who melted when Milan looked at him. Robbe is in a good mood and is gonna do the cooking. Milan observes that he’s happy and asks if things went well with his (Robbe looks toward Zoë) “lovely girlfriend”. At least Milan covered for him! (EDIT from the future: Ahahaha, funny considering how casually people out Robbe this season...)

Robbe hands Zoë some mail that turns out to do with Viktor, the apparent Nikolai in this version, about the case going to court. She has to testify. She is upset and walks out of the kitchen.

I complained a bit about Zoë/Senne drama taking up time in Robbe’s season, but to be clear, I have no problem with them following up on this plot point from S2. It’s a hugely important story. But I also think it works best if you integrate it into Robbe’s story, by drawing a parallel to their situations, finding a common theme, etc. And it depends on whether Robbe’s story is otherwise satisfactory, because if the writing is pretty tight, I’m not really bothered by digressions in other characters’ subplots.

Clip 10 - Robbe and Sander get cozy

Oh hey, it’s the big cuddling clip! Robbe and Sander goof off, pillow fight, smoke a joint, make out. Mostly make out. Sander shows Robbe a sketch of him (Robbe) and implies how good it would look on a wall (big).

Robbe’s fave actor is Leonardo DiCaprio, because hasn’t Sander seen Romeo + Juliet? It’s fucking beautiful.

Man, on the one hand, sick Skam reference, and it’s just a simple, cute little nod to OG, not something complicated. I can dig that. But on the other hand, now I’m annoyed at how Isak got all of this beautiful development and watching R+J actually meant something for his character, and Robbe has absolutely nothing like that. Stuff like the fact it’s Robbe who likes R+J instead of Sander, WHICH IS FINE, but like … doesn’t say anything about Robbe’s view on masculinity or w/e, doesn’t do much for his characterization.

Sander takes pics of Robbe. Their chemistry is cute. Once again I despair at gifted actors being given subpar material leading up to this clip.

LMAO at them copying the dialogue from OG, Sander being all life is like a movie. Again, irrationally annoyed because this dialogue MEANT something to Even. Even was a huge film buff and an aspiring director. Sander hasn’t mentioned movies at all, he’s into art and David Bowie and photography. So why not have Sander quote some Bowie lyrics that explain his thoughts on life? Mention what art means to him? Personalize this dialogue so that it’s specific to Sander. Or, if you’re going to borrow this chunk of dialogue, at least establish Sander as a film enthusiast prior to this clip.

Also that Isak brought up the multiverse theory because he was smart and inquisitive, but I have no idea who the fuck Robbe is. Does this make sense with Robbe’s prior characterization? Shrug.

I do like the multiverse reference to Spider-Man because HELL YEAH Into the Spider-Verse!!! Fucking masterpiece! I could be watching that for the 20th time instead of the upcoming gay-bashing hate crime.

I do like Sander’s acting in this scene and his reaction, how the music (“Ocean Eyes”) stops when Sander starts talking about multiverse theory. His dialogue is a little different here than OG, about thinking about what he’s done and wondering why he thinks something, his thoughts never stop, which fits in with bipolar disorder.

Robbe notices he’s a little agitated, Sander says the only way to stop your thoughts is from dying. So I guess we’re putting in the suicidal thoughts in this version?

“Sometimes I forget how young you are.” Are they the same age in this version? Lmao. It’s a joke so it’s not a big deal.

Robbe starts kissing him and asks when Sander fell for him. Sander is like, before you! When Robbe was spraying the graffiti he knew Robbe was the one. Robbe is like … you were there??

I mean. this is cute and all, but doesn’t it kinda take away from later events, if Sander goes back to Britt, then like … knowing Sander has been Pining All Along should create way less doubt in Robbe’s mind? When Even went back to Sonja, there was room for actual doubt in Isak’s mind (and the audience’s) about the sincerity of Even’s feelings. I think people forgot that the “I saw you the first day of school” moment at the end of the season was a surprise. I was in the fandom and I don’t think a lot of people thought Even had fallen for Isak that early. So Robbe now knows that Sander fell for him well before they even talked, doesn’t that remove some of the tension about Sander’s motives? I suppose it depends on how the story goes from here, but if it’s similar to OG, then I think it slightly lessens the ambiguity and tension.

Also, another reason why it would have been good to actually see the graffiti scene play out in episode 1… and to see what Robbe tagged on the wall … come on. COME ONNNN. Let’s see what got Sander’s attention! Did Robbe create something funny or clever or insightful? Wouldn’t that have been a great detail to show their connection? This is basic storytelling, hello?

I guess if I’m being fair, we don’t know exactly what Even saw in Isak that first day of school, either. But then again, we didn’t see the first day of school in a clip, while we definitely saw the graffiti scene. Just a missed opportunity, IMO.

They kiss and Sander gets a text from Britt. According to Sander, he told Britt about him and Robbe, but she doesn’t believe him, which is what I assumed of Sonja too, btw. At least, that’s what I thought at Emma’s party where she initiated the kiss with Even. Sander says Britt is so controlling. Robbe seems uncertain.

Sander says there’s probably another universe where Sander is still with Britt, but he’s glad to be in this universe. I do like this part.

Clip 11 - Milan schools Robbe on Pride

Robbe’s alarm goes off in the morning. He smiles a bit, though, presumably because he’s got Sander in his life. He gets a good morning text from Sander, which is cute and makes him smile more. Goes into the bathroom and Milan is there. Sander texts Robbe that he’s been thinking about him in all universes, Robbe is happy.

Milan is like, when can I meet your boyfriend??? Robbe says soon. Awww, this interaction is pretty sweet. Milan is like, welcome to the club! You know, “our” club meaning dudes who like dudes.

Robbe is like, just because I’m with Sander doesn’t mean I belong to some club, I’m not like you. Milan is like … and how am I? Robbe gives the usual Isak-ish response of dressing up and talking about BJs, Milan gets upset. Robbe says there’s nothing wrong with being gay but when people think of being gay, they think of that and it’s not fair to those who aren’t like that. Robbe’s not going to put on leather pants and dance at pride just because he likes Sander!

Milan gets very upset and goes into the Pride speech. I always appreciate this scene and I’m grateful that it’s one thing the remakes don’t really fuck with, since it’s so important (I think the remakes all recognize that it’s amazing, heh).

Senne wanting to use the bathroom is kind of a jarring thing, they should’ve just let the moment sink in.

Robbe takes a Good Hard Look at himself in the mirror which is on the nose but like, better than nothing. I think there was a mirror earlier in the season? I confess that I’m so hung up on the basic writing fumbles that I might be missing stuff that’s actually supposed to be symbolic.

Anyway, all things considered, I think they did fine with this clip. Robbe coming out to Milan earlier in the episode did help pave the way for this talk since they didn’t have the close relationship as Isak and Eskild. Like, any issues I might have with it are related to the bigger issues in the season, but on its own, I felt like it was decent, and the “welcome to the club” comment is something I can believe Milan would say and something that would make Robbe reply with a boneheaded comment.

Clip 12 - This fucking scene

Robbe and Sander flirt in a bar and get touchy-feely with each other. For some baffling choice, we start with some rap/hip-hop song and then it cuts to “Two Men In Love” by The Irrepressibles … like … you could just start the clip with that song instead of this weird non-transition?

They kiss and then move outside the bar and then kiss and cuddle some more (again … I ask, where did Robbe’s boldness with gay PDA come from ...) Robbe jumps on Sander for a piggyback ride. They kiss passionately in the street.

Ahahahahahahahahah HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAA FUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

Some homophobes spot them and call them slurs. Robbe and Sander try to grab their bikes and quickly leave. The bigots manage to grab them and beat the shit out of them. It’s really brutal, like we get POV shots from the ground as the guys kick them. The guys call them f****ts once more before leaving Robbe and Sander crumpled on the ground in the fetal position. The wheels on the bike go round and round.

I mean … where do you even start.

OK, I’ll start here: worst decision made in a Skam S3 remake yet.

“Yeah, Skam season 3 was a masterpiece and all, but you know what I could have used more of? Violent gay-bashing,” said no one ever.

I don’t get triggered by media, not really, but boy am I glad I was spoiled for this. Because I do get fucking angry at media. And I’m angry now, but if I was watching this unspoiled? Man, I would’ve popped a couple of blood vessels. And I feel so, so sorry for people who watched this unprepared and were triggered. Because yeah, it is a remake and not 100% like the original, you can’t predict everything that will happen. But this isn’t something that you expect in S3, because you expect the writers to know enough to leave this shit out. This isn’t made with kind intentions for the audience, it’s made for shock value.

Consider that the WHOLE POINT of this very, very short clip is the hate crime, btw. It’s like two minutes long! They dropped a clip just for a cute kissing montage and then to interrupt it with a brutal beating! Something about that makes it even more repugnant than if it were like … a long involved scene about something else, and this happened. IDK, something about it feels even more tasteless, like this beating is their cinematic setpiece.

The first-person POV of the beating = not necessary. Like of ALL the fucking times in your season to actually give a shit about the importance of POV, lmao. This isn’t a video game. I’m not shooting zombies or getting jumped by bandits.

Remember when Skam faded to black on Noora’s blackout? And cut away from Even walking naked out of the hotel? Yeah, there are plot and POV reasons for those, but they were also ways to respect the audience and not include pointlessly triggering, exploitative material.

There’s just so much to say about this bad choice that I’m at a loss. Why did we need to go here? In particular, why did we need to go here knowing how the rest of the season plays out? Because for me, that’s what clinches this as a terrible decision. This isn’t a shitty scene with a satisfying follow-up. The resolution - or non-resolution, as it turns out - of this plot development is what exposes wtFOCK’s true character.

There is an AMAZING Evak vid set to Two Men In Love and I recommend you watch it to get the bad taste out of your mouth from this scene.

HOW I WOULD REWRITE THIS EPISODE:

Sigh.

This is just textbook bad writing for coming out stories, not to mention packed full of tired cliches.

Closeted gay guy is violently homophobic (Robbe calls his love interest homophobic slurs and accuses him of being a pervert) - I’m sorry but I am so tired of the “dating your bully” trope and this is what it fell into for me. Why should Sander take back Robbe after that? After Sander told Robbe he was afraid no one would ever love him?

Gay-bashing For The Drama, to make sure you know homophobia is bad, really bad.

Overemphasis on the heterosexual love interest (“love interest”) and how it’s hurtful to her, like I get that it’s a delicate topic with not demonizing her, but I always feel like there is SO much interest on straight characters in these stories! It’s not about them!

The hate crime has to go. Really. What is even the POINT of it in this particular story? As if there wasn’t enough angst in S3? Especially if you consider: they wasted a few episodes on repetitive nonsense. Their pacing is fucked up. And now you have to insert this monumentally offensive storyline and its fallout into a season already full of problems? Next.

Okay, I will offer ONE way to incorporate the hate crime, and that is simple: Make the rest of the season about the fallout. Similar to Noora’s season with her assault, dive deep into the trauma, spend a few episodes with Robbe and Sander recovering, telling their friends about it, going to the police about it. Cut back on other drama from S3. Don’t fuck around with Sander going back to Britt, unless you tie it in directly to him being afraid to date a guy after the hate crime. Don’t fuck around with Noor outing Robbe considering he has enough shit on his plate. If you want to bring her back, make her support him through the trauma. Honestly? Don’t fuck around with the hotel incident. Like I truly hate to lose Sander’s mental illness as a vital part of the season, but adding a full-blown manic episode on top of gay-bashing is way too much misery porn. I think you could probably show how the hate crime and resulting trauma affect Sander’s mental state without pushing it into full-blown wandering the streets naked while manic.

Do I particularly like this plot? I mean, no, not compared to the original, and I feel like this is better off as its own thing rather than a S3 adaptation. But at the very least, I can see the attempt to take the hate crime seriously. You cannot just throw in this type of scenario to shake things up and leave it at that. This show is specifically made for teenagers, to take their struggles seriously and to give them positive examples of how to handle problems. If you prioritize the violent act itself because it’s dramatic and shocking, rather than the recovery (because that’s like, boring and uninteresting, amirite), then you’ve shown your ass. You don’t understand the purpose or the appeal of Skam in the first place.

Jumping ahead, I think this is exactly where wtFOCK exposes its true intentions. wtFOCK does not care about helping vulnerable teenagers find solutions to tough problems. wtFOCK does not care about healing or educating. wtFOCK is about shaking the audience so hard that viewers get whiplash. If wtFOCK gave a shit about helping the audience, the rest of the season would focus on Robbe and Sander dealing with the assault, giving them options to report it, showing them ways to cope with the trauma. Things that might help audience members who unfortunately also found themselves victims of hate crimes or homophobic violence. Those are not present in the rest of the season. It’s just a fucking soap opera.

If you MUST have a homophobic incident to go with your dark ‘n’ edgy season, you can still limit it to some assholes yelling homophobic slurs without resorting to violence. That’s bad enough, and it did happen to Isak and Even later in the series. Even if you decide you MUST have a violent angle to this incident for whatever reason, I don’t fucking know why but OK, you don’t need to film it in this super exploitative manner where our heroes are getting viciously beaten on the ground. But there are so many ways to incorporate external homophobia without this shit.

Wouldn’t this dreadful scene make more sense at least if it had happened after the pool kiss? Like they go out a few days later, the hate crime happens, and then THAT’s why Robbe pushes away Sander and calls him names? Because now he’s afraid and he’s internalized what the bigots said? It’s tragic and gross, but at least there’s some character-driven logic in that sequence of events.

Another thing that really doesn’t work is that they’re straying so far from the original script, but at the same time they keep jamming in scenes from the original, except there isn’t the same buildup. Or any buildup, sometimes. This results in an incoherent mess of a season and of a POV character, where Robbe is part-Robbe, part-Isak.

I think all the remakes do this to a degree: there are certain beats they feel they must hit, and they hit them even though they’re off course. You need to commit either to doing a mostly faithful adaptation of the original, or to doing a remake with your own spin on the characters, but you need to be very, very careful not to just haplessly mix ‘n’ match the two. Does a scene from OG make sense within this remake universe? No? Then drop it, rewrite it, do what you need to do, just don’t carelessly recreate it if it doesn’t fit.

The way they’re writing Jens is bizarre because he seems to care enough about Robbe to ask him how he’s doing, but also not care enough to stick around and listen once the next shiny thing comes along. From the beginning they’ve set up the friendship tension with the boy squad as not just Robbe’s fault, but as a failure of his friends to pay attention as well. Like in the first episode Robbe is trying to talk to them and they just ditch him! They really need to make Jens more aware of how he himself has messed up with his friend, and not act like this is all Robbe’s doing.

We don’t need another Noor blue balls scene, thank you, bye. But if we keep this one, then we absolutely needed to see what exactly made Robbe stop in the act of sex with her, such as him flashing back to his kiss with Sander. Or even just letting us see him make the decision, because goddamn, what’s with wtFOCK not letting this young actor actually act out some of the meatiest material?

Overall, give Robbe more baby steps in his personal development, and not unbelievable leaps and changes in his behavior because the plot demands them.

I did try to think of a way to incorporate much of the same material from this week, including a hate crime, in a way that made more sense and was not ridiculously OTT or offensive. It’s hard because I really think you need to go back to the beginning of the season, but here’s what I came up with, borrowing some elements from the last episode as well.

Robbe wakes up the night after kissing Sander. He’s happy and glowing, he sees a cute text from Sander and smiles. Then he goes to the kitchen and Milan is there with a black eye or something, he’s talking to Zoë and Senne, maybe they’re tending to his injuries. Robbe asks what happened. Milan had a date last night and some homophobes started giving them a hard time, Milan wasn’t having it, punches were thrown. Milan is very shaken and upset. So is Robbe, who panics. Is this what he has to look forward to if he’s dating a gay? Will people harass him just for being out with his boyfriend? The implications of what it means to be a gay person in this world hit him really hard. He looks at Sander’s text again and ignores him and possibly blocks him. At some point we will establish that Robbe is also ignoring texts/calls from everyone else, too: Noor, Jens, his mom...

Sander shows up the next day outside Robbe’s place after Robbe has been ignoring him. He tries to talk to Robbe, but Robbe is freaked out and visibly nervous, his eyes darting around - he’s paranoid now about being seen with Sander, due to Milan’s incident. He’s worried about being a target for homophobic violence, understandably so. Sander doesn’t realize that Robbe’s frightened, however, and keeps talking and being nice. Robbe tries to play off the other night as just him being drunk, it was a mistake. When Sander physically gets too close to Robbe, Robbe yells that he’s not gay and runs inside, leaving Sander alone.

Robbe encounters Milan at home alone. Milan is still bruised from the homophobic incident. Milan is unusually subdued. Robbe says he’s sorry for what happened to Milan, it’s terrible. Robbe then sticks his foot in his mouth by saying something well-intentioned but hurtful and ignorant about how maybe Milan shouldn’t be so gay in public or w/e, since that will just attract homophobes, and that not all gay people act like Milan (meaning flamboyant, etc.) Milan gets really, really upset and snaps at Robbe about how gay people have been beaten and killed for just being who they are - basically a version of the Pride speech with a somewhat different context - and that it takes bravery and strength, Robbe doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. So that ends on a bad note for them.

Now trying to get out of the house since he’s fought with Milan, Robbe meets up with Jens, or maybe Jens finds him at the park or whatever. Jens comments on how it’s been a while since they’ve talked. Robbe says he was just worried about what the guys would say since he blew up at them previously. Jens is like, dude, we’re your friends. You have to talk to the people who care about you, you can’t just ghost them and avoid facing your problems. Robbe takes this advice to heart. Jens tells Robbe that he’s ready to listen when Robbe wants to talk. Maybe Robbe sees something that reminds him of Sander, like graffiti on a building, and despite his fears, we can see that he really misses Sander, and that his feelings for Sander are stronger than his fears.

Next he meets up with Noor. She’s really upset that he’s been ignoring her. He apologizes and a version of the breakup scene goes down. When Robbe leaves, we see him walk away with a conflicted expression. Sorry that he’s hurt Noor, but understanding that this was the right call, and relief that he doesn’t have to pretend any more.

Robbe sees Milan again and apologizes for what he said last time. Milan accepts his apology. Robbe admits that he’s been confused lately because he likes a guy and he doesn’t know what that makes him. Milan says something like that’s great Robbe likes a guy and that Robbe doesn’t need to label himself right now, he should just follow his heart. Maybe that liking boys is scary (Milan points to his black eye) and sometimes you need to be careful, but at the end of the day, Milan has to be himself and live his life honestly, and so does Robbe. After Milan leaves, Robbe takes out his phone and texts Sander saying he wants to talk.

Sander meets Robbe somewhere and Robbe apologizes for ignoring him, says he freaked out because that was the first time he kissed a guy, but now he’s made up his mind that he wants to be with Sander. They kiss and make up, yayyyyy.

This is by no means a perfect solution (like the thought of then going into the shit with Britt next episode on top of this makes my head hurt), this is just an attempt to include stuff like homophobic violence, Robbe’s ghosting Sander, scenes with Jens and Noor, etc. in a way that makes a little more linear sense to me and doesn’t feel as haphazard, and isn’t super triggering or exploitative. I think if you have a hate crime happening to Robbe himself, that really needs to be the main focus from here on out, for at least a few episodes; if you have something off-screen happening to another character, you can address the topic of violent homophobia without having it dominate the season or featuring triggering scenes. And hopefully it would still have some emotional impact, because we see how it affects Milan, and some clear consequences for character development, because we see how it affects Robbe, as the situation he may find himself in one day.

If I missed anything, cultural notes, translation nuances, let me know!

#wtfock reactions

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sam-roulette · 3 years ago

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rip to the alt Sasha survives s3 “the slaughter ritual is a battle of the bands wherein one of the 4 main mechanisms albums has the key to ending the world” crack au for being quite literally impossible to write

so here’s how it was meant to go down:

- Jon gets kidnapped by Alfred Grifter himself and when he’s returned to the archives he has all 4 Mechs albums and also punches Tim in the face in a slightly slaughter-induced haze

- Jon immediately snapping out of it and being so apologetic he tells Tim to punch him back so they’re even. Tim, tiredly, tells him that no. He is not going to punch him back. “You don’t have to worry about if it hurts,” that’s. Not The Point.

- there’s some slaughter juice on the albums so everyone starts getting a little bloodthirsty, a fact that becomes apparent as the Archives splits along party lines- Jon is convinced High Noon Over Camelot is the world-ender, while Sasha insists that it’s The Bifrost Incident. Tim’s on Sasha’s side; Martin says he’s impartial but implies Jon may have a point, and only chooses Once Upon A Time to keep up the veneer of not being biased.

- Sasha manages to convince Tim to grab Ulysses Dies At Dawn so that none of the other possible combatants have it Just In Case that’s the one that ends the world so that she can stop him. Tim questions who’s gonna stop Sasha if he can’t get close once Red Signal starts and she says not to worry, I’ve got a plan

- the plan is she gets Not!Sasha out the basement to be her bandmate, promises it that it can eat her after the competition and (it can’t because of ) threatens it with a suspiciously high voltage taser. She has no plans to let it eat her later. She is a liar

- Tim, predictably, does not take this well. Sasha tries joking that he doesn’t get her “artistic vision” and Tim says he doesn’t know what he’ll do if Sasha gets taken again. The argument gets more heated from there.

- Turns out, things between Sasha and Tim didn’t get magically better once Sasha was spat out the table at the start of s3

- and in fact Tim has been more distant and unsure of how to act around her, since even if she’s His Sasha, he has NO memories of her- just what Sasha says and vague half-recollections that he can’t tell if its something the Stranger put in him or if its the hazy remnants of this woman that he loved once.

- Sasha finds herself being treated like a stranger by Tim, and while it’s not really bad per se- Tim isn’t cruel to people- it still Hurts when she tries to reach out to him, when it looks like he’s obviously hurting, and he just. Doesn’t Open Up. It doesn’t help that he can’t be in the same room as Jon for long and that he can’t look Martin in the eye, and it doesn’t help that it’s only after Literally Threatening To Leave that Jon cracks and admits everything that happened in s2

- The day of the contest is getting nearer. Martin is suddenly very suspiciously good at the violin despite never having lessons growing up, which he jokes is a “natural affinity for strings”. He’s been on the phone a suspicious amount.

- The day before the contest and tensions are high in the Archives. Jon’s locked himself in his office to do “vocal exercises”. Martin hums everywhere. Tim and Sasha are coordinating on The Bifrost Incident, but Tim keeps it strictly professional and terse, and it’s slowly driving Sasha up the wall.

- Finally, Tim says, “During this... we won’t hurt each other, right? While we’re in there- we can keep our heads on straight.”

- “Of course not.” Sasha replies, immediate. “You’d never hurt me.”

- “... Right.”

- The day arrives and it’s revealed that Jon, Martin, Sasha, and Tim are the Only combatants. It was Grifter’s game to get them to fight each other the entire time, in a strictly organized battle-like way. Not!Sasha gets a pass as Sasha’s “pet” and Sasha very quickly steps on its foot to keep it from saying anything that might disqualify them.

- Listen the actual battle itself ? Is messy as fuck to figure out. like we never actually properly figured out the rules. we have a spreadsheet of like which number placement every song in all 4 albums were and everything and while some combinations would’ve made for some SICK turn based combat would’ve been an absolute Nightmare to actually carry out

- each song actually has an effect and transforms both the stage and audience as the show goes on- so there’s a bit where Jon has The Hanged Man Rusts and that garners complete silence as it accidentally prophesies the rest of the story, Thor causes Sasha to actually begin to spark with lightning, cool stuff

- the only truly comprehensible bit was round 4. Hellfire, Sirens, Cinders’ Song, and Sigyn.

- Hellfire sees Jon give into the Slaughter energy more than any other point as the entire audience starts fighting each other in religious ecstasy, the other stages where the assistants are isolated beginning the melt and warp. Sasha helps Tim back up just before he slips into the flame below and Martin tries to climb higher as the hands of congregation reach for him, or past him, or to grab Anything

- Sirens cuts through the last bit before it all goes truly to hell as Tim picks up a guitar and starts lulling everything down to a sense of normalcy. There’s a moment, at the intersection of when Jon stops trying to scream the last dying cry of Gallahad’s maddened ramblings and the audience returning to their seats and his voice acapella filling the hall- we can chase away your worries- where there is Perfect Clarity. Tim could stop after this moment. Before the end of the verse, he could stop, and maybe it’d put an end to this.

- His eyes land on Sasha. Before he can stop himself, the verse is finished. Sleep in peace and serenity. Then he can’t stop singing anymore, and Sasha watches the drowsy smile suddenly bloom across Tim’s cheeks

- It’s when Martin, never once looking in Jon’s direction, jumps from his platform to Tim’s that Sasha knows something’s wrong. Because she wants to do the same thing. So she takes a page out of the real Ulysses’ playbook- she has the Not!Them tie her to one of the beams on her stage and promise, no matter what she says next, to never untie her. Not until someone else starts singing

- Just as Sasha predicted, she starts getting odd herself. Tim is looking in her direction, so longingly as he sings that she Knows it could only really be for Her, that he wants her to just lay in his embrace and be well taken care of- and she stops wanting anything beyond it. So she struggles. She hisses and bites and kicks and screams to try and break free of the rope while Tim smiles, beckoning, so they can finally have that reunion they’ve both wanted. The one where they hold each other and say that it’s okay, that they have each other, that it’s Safe

- Someone unties Sasha. It feels like Tim’s arms around her and she melts, no longer recognizing the pretty man singing on stage. Not!Tim looks back at Tim from across the gap, holding Sasha tenderly, and grins. Tim stops singing, for just a moment, surrounded by legions except for the sole person he wants to see most in the world, in the arms of something that doesn’t even look remotely like him

- The moment’s enough and, as Martin sees Jon looking strangely adoringly at Tim, he realizes that wait a fucking minute. And immediately gets so jealous he hijacks Tim’s spotlight and restores actual equilibrium with Cinders’ Song. Tim is once again left alone on stage, strangely desolate against the large setting.

- Sasha regains her balance and tries to answer it all with Sigyn, but the Not!Them refuses to stop looking like a mockery of Tim. Jon is kind enough to take Lyf’s narration while Not!Tim is “kind” enough to take Loki’s lines. Sasha tries to appeal- why back away? This time I’ll stay; come stand at my side as we make them pay...

- When she sings “remember your wife!” Not!Tim says, “I don’t recall,” playfully, mocking. He mocks when he says “She’s still enthralled,” one part disgust for Sasha’s feelings and one part gleeful accusation to Tim- look what you did to her. She still feels the effect of your song, even now.

- anyway long story short everything gets more and more screwy as everyone is magically made to forget that they’re supposed to be stopping this thing and start only wanting to be the one to get to their finale quickest. Blood and Whiskey sees Sasha nearly lose an ear from a bullet. Underworld Blues has Tim nearly causing hell to freeze over with his chilling plea as Orpheus. No Happy Ending signals the first of the audience member deaths.

- It also signals when Grifter leaves weapons on the stage and has the team go at it. It’s not really so bad, at first- Jon and Martin forget about fighting somewhere along the way and kiss, Sasha is knocked out for a few seconds and is somewhat conscious, which is Not a good state to enter Red Signal in, and Tim is trying desperately to figure out where to go next

- Tim has Ties That Bind as a last attempt to gain control of the situation and very nearly manages to snap Sasha out of the absolute maddened hell state she’s about the enter. If only he could find it in himself to omit some lyrics- if only he could find it in himself to be less bitter when singing I was betrayed by the one I was to wed.

- There was no more love there - my heartstrings long since cut...

-There was no more love there.

- “Ah.” Is Sasha’s last coherent thought, “I see.”

- “So that’s how it is.”

- Martin’s mic cuts out. Jon’s mic cuts out. Tim’s mic cuts out on the last line.

- Sasha picks herself off the ground, slowly. Far more slowly than the words falling out of her mouth. Not words- an incantation. A Chant.

- y’ai ngah Yog-Sothoth...

- turns out Jon’s not the only one who can do a mean incantation. And unlike Jon, Sasha’s had some vocal training at some point in heavy metal. Make of that what you will

- The guitars kick in at the end to dive straight into Ragnarok I and Alfred Grifter announces that the winner is Sasha James amidst the screaming and destruction of the roof caving in reverse, showing a blood red sky. The Not!Them has disappeared, presumably already running into the faceless crowd to find a new body for the incoming new world Jon’s trying to get to safety and Martin’s begging Tim to hide, that there’s not gonna be getting through to Sasha now

- But Tim knows the album because he worked with her on this. For this scenario. Just in case. He knows it’s safe enough to move when Sasha-as-Sigyn questions I know this man, why is he here...? Knows to hold still, make himself as small as possible, when she begins Ragnarok II. The crowd isn’t so lucky and they melt into each other, a mosh pit of rock n roll violence that flashes and gleams with pocket knife and piercing and heels and nails. Just barely manages to make a run for it as Sasha takes on the final lines as the Void.

- Envy your dead for now unfurled / this madness follows to consume / your world.

- Tim is just close enough in ear shot to yell, not even attempting to sing at this point with a throat as dry as his is, “You- don’t I know you?” The world tries to skip Ragnarok III to get to IV. Tim tries to be louder even with the rubble giving way under his hands, “Weren’t we friends?”

- The gentle piano kicks in instead. Tim could nearly cry with relief when Sasha turns his way and, even if she doesn’t look like she fully gets it yet, answers, “Once- I remember. And now, when it ends...”

- In harmony. The first they’ve managed in a long while. Where are you going?

- “For vengeance...?” Sasha left uncertain. Answered in a songbird lilting voice, “For love.”

- There is no mention of death. Only an immediate harmony as they both sing Perhaps that’s enough!

- The guitar that comes on isn’t the end of Ragnarok III. It’s the lonely riff of Thor as Sasha hauls herself up with a drum mallet she steals from the broken down remains of backstage. Sung, almost like a tune a soldier marches to, fury like thunderbolts burns in my veins...

- She smashes Grifter over the head and feeds him into the mosh pit to be torn to shreds. As his shriek of laughter echoes off of the walls, she takes the mallet to the lonely speaker at the back of the hall, playing the final riffs, and destroys it.

- The world stops ending. Everyone is left in the wreckage, passed out and bloody. Jon pokes his head out from a trap door in the ground. Martin mutters from offstage somewhere. Sasha is heaving out breaths as she stares at the broken equipment, still clutching the hammer she threw in the works.

- Cue the moment where she finally turns to face Tim. They look at each other. Then, they’re grinning, and they’re starting to run. They end up toppling onto the ground together, laughing with wild relief, arms tight around each other the entire way through as Tim’s the first one to let loose the first catharsis tears.

- Tim tells her that was the coolest damn thing he ever did see. Sasha says she’s sorry for almost ending the world to have him see that, and Tim’s just going are you kidding ??? This was the best way this could have ended up!

- And Sasha says that it wouldn’t have happened if not for Tim stepping in like he did. And Tim says he’s sorry too, for everything. For the way he acted, and Sasha says that none of them were in their right minds, but Tim still insists that being in right mind or Not, he made some shitty choices there-

- and of course Sasha kisses him. Tells him he was simply brilliant. And Tim grins and kisses her and tells her that no no no SHE was absolutely brilliant, she had TRUE star power-

- and it’s not like before. Tim still can’t remember everything, and the memories Sasha has of the Archives before the Not!Them leave a sour taste in her mouth after she’s released. Tim is gonna need a long time before he can really go back to being his cheerful self, and Sasha needs time to come to terms with missing so much of her own life. But

- But at least they can lay together at night and find a little peace and serenity in the interim.

#tma #man we had so much planned it felt like a waste not to tell anyone #use this idea if youd like i guess but also hgvjb good luck doin it buddy #also ev erything's below the cut bc there is truly. So Much oh no

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romansrace · 4 years ago

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Season 13 Sassy Reviews: Episode 02 - Condragulations

Oh mama. This one didn’t do anything to address the strangely - and unnecessarily - tense atmosphere, and instead actively stirred the pot with bizarre remarks from Tina, Kandy and LaLa, and our first (but surely not last) instance of blatant producer favour.

Let’s get into it.

So episode 2 opens with the Porkchop girls being forced to *actually*, no gag, vote off one of their own people based just off of first impressions. Because...what we really needed in 2020/21 was for a group of marginalized people who had had their income and culture taken away for six months to, on first meeting nationwide-reaching colleagues who could become friends and found family, to be instead forced to create divisions between themselves. Really?

So the group votes out the kooky queen and the queen wearing the least feminine clothing, and then when it comes down to a re-vote on just those two...production makes all the queens vote again until a sacrifice is chosen. Seriously unpleasant stuff. Rosé, the queen who objects most virulently to this, is painted as haughty and self-important by the edit for...literally raising valid concerns and trying to stand up for the group. So I guess our hopes of the show moving on from having a vendetta against Jan and any of her friends are crushed just like that.

Then we cut over to the ‘winner’ group of queens. Production-influenced or not, they spend a LOT of the episode crowing and boasting about how brilliant they are, after all, they’ve all made the massive achievement of.... being voted by Ru to win a lipsync in the previous episode, including some VERY questionable performances.

The BIG TWIST that no-one could have seen coming is that... gasp, MAYBE the 7 eliminated queens weren’t actually eliminated on day one of a show that hasn’t had less than 9 competitors ever. And then the queen the losing girls voted out, Elliott with 2 Ts, is introduced to join the winning girls.

As I said in my previous review, it feels really bizarre in the same season that every second word out of Ru’s mouth is chicken soup for the soul about self-love and how actually they’re all winners, to actively go out of your way to split girls into two groups, one of Losers and one of Winners, in which the Winners get smoke blown up their ass about how they are better, and kind of reinforced by the show by focusing on them and only them in episode 2. Especially if they’re going to just proceed to do a split premiere group challenge LIKE THEY DID IN THE LAST SEASON without needing an arbitrary way to justify dividing the girls.

Anyway, the dolls have exactly the same mini and maxi as E1/2 of S12, which... I’m not sure how I feel about. Obviously everyone really enjoyed it in season 12, but a straight redo feels lazy.

Mini-challenge: present two runway looks with a loosely connected theme. Maxi: perform a RuMix with original verses to a new Ru song. Runway theme: a material.

So onto the mini first. All of the queens do broadly as well as each other, with - to my eye - Gottmik being head and shoulders above the group nailing both runways, Olivia Lux’s day look being the second best look on the runway, Tina Burner doing the most impressive bodywork out of the group on her night look, managing to compress her substantial body into a tiny vinyl-latex-esque miniskirt and tube top, and Symone being wildly overpraised for simply having a slim and fit physique that she decorated with material, a la Courtney Act from S6 or Naomi Smalls from S8. Brace yourselves, because this won’t be the first time.

The maxi challenge is a hot mess. The song isn’t great, and the queens take wildly varying approaches in terms of style, genre, and tempo. If you thought Roxxxy Andrews’ random singing on Read U Wrote U was out-of-place... for Condragulations (providing an episode title drop) by my count, three queens give us a rap, two queens sing, one queen gives us spoken word and one queen (Gottmik) gives us literally two bars as an intro.

And onn that note, there’s a bizarre production moment during the rehearsals for the performance in which a moment in which Gottmik experiences gender dysphoria, for including his gender identity in his verse - “I was born a girl” (which, in itself... is that really how a trans person would self-describe rather than e.g. AFAB? I kind of feel like I don’t know how I feel about that line going out to a straight audience) - is represented as Gottmik not having any idea that the other queens would hear his verse. In a group challenge. Where the challenge is to each perform a verse of the same song, as a group, in front of each other. Ok Henny.

The choreography is not great in the challenge, with the best performance of the group going imo to the underrated Elliott, who is, of course, a dancer. Despite the fact that Tina Burner, having lipsynced against her in E1, was well aware of this, Elliott was shut out of the choreography discussion by the other girls - who throughout the episode gave Elliott the cold shoulder & even, bizarrely accused her of being a spy! - for who, QAnon?? Elliott, not wanting to rock the boat, kept quiet, only to go on to NAIL her own performance with a jump split and impressive, confident verse, with dance elements throughout.

So naturally she wasn’t put in the top 2 for the episode, despite everything in the storyline pointing to the ONLY REASON you would separate the queens into winners and losers and then bring back a loser would be for a redemption (RuDemption?) arc. Nope!

The top 2 queens are of course...Olivia Lux, who to be fair, performed her socks off in the challenge and wisely wore an outfit that accentuated her movement, and...Symone. Again. Who wore this.

Whose verse consisted of a walk to the center of the stage and pretty poor lyrics and vocal (”the ebony enchantress...is me” is giving Mariah in all the worst ways). Who looked a little manic during the performance. But who - like Ru - is tall, slim, and statuesque. Anyone else getting S2/S3 flashbacks?

Off the bat let’s make something clear. I don’t dislike Symone. I think she’s a fierce queen, I think she definitely won the top 2 lipsync, I think she’s an excellent lipsync performer, and she has a great body and a great swagger as a drag queen. And I know she can do flips and acrobatics if it calls for it - look for yourself on youtube.

But I think favoritism drags the show down, and ESPECIALLY - as we saw in S12, too - when applied to queens like Symone who are ALREADY among the strongest of the group. Let’s face it, on skill alone, Symone is likely to pick up at least 3 wins of the 11 weeks of this contest. So why stack the deck by giving her an early 4th?

Olivia Lux, the other top 2 queen, performed decently in the lipsync, but was perhaps a bit literal with the lyrics. Her runway gown was highly praised by the judges, but for me was on the simpler side, although she definitely sold it with her walk and attitude. All other queens were given an equal Safe this week which... may or may not have been used to shield the worst performers overall this week, Gottmik and Kandy, who were unsure of themselves during the performance and made a few slips.

I’m ending this week as I ended the last one - wary, but hopeful. After such a focus on how entitled and unpleasant the Winners were in this episode, perhaps the next episode will cast the Losers in a more sympathetic light. My favorite and second-favorite queen, Tamisha, and Denali, are in that group, and I’m hoping to get good confessionals and meme-worthy moments from them if nothing else. And also, I’d hope that this team have bonded and will give a better performance as a group as a result. Although the threat to eliminate one of them next week given by Ru at the end of this one seems like insult to injury in terms of creating division.

Was S12 a fluke? Will S13 be another S11? Will I start genuinely liking any of this? Be here next week to find out~ xoxo

#romansrace #rpdr13 #shady reviews #rupauls drag race season 13 #rupauls drag race #drag race reviews #gottmik #olivia lux #elliott puckett #elliott with 2 ts #sassy reviews #2021 #rpdr 13

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norgestan · 4 years ago

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Are you seriously comparing the toxic and manipulative relationship of Miquel and Nora to Amira and Dani?? I don’t like the ship either but making a parallel between those two goes a bit too far for me, especially as someone who’s been through a similar relationship as Nora’s

i am not. i wanna make it clear before the tag goes apeshit with “AND NOW THEY’RE SAYING THAT DAMIRA = NORA AND MIQUEL!! DUMB AND STUPID!!!!!!!!!”

i wholeheartedly believe whatever they’re doing with damira it’s obviously not comparable with what they did with noriquel. nora’s season was about an emotionally abusive relationship, amira’s season is about faith. i’m... inclined to say that i don’t think eskam will add “emotional abuse” to the already convoluted mix of storylines and themes of this season, just because i think that if they split them up it will be based on amira’s interpretation of her faith or maybe dani doesn’t live up to amira’s expectations of a life-long romance, whatever.

BUT, you can’t deny there are a lot of elements shared with these two!

childhood crush, few years older than her.

expresses to her in some way that she’s perfect, which in return makes both amira and nora feel pressured to be the best girlfriends that they can be (nora worrying about being honest to miquel vs amira being insecure that she’s not enough for dani bc she’s not the typical white non-muslim girl)

um, this rooftop clip? got MAJOR vibes from nora and miquel’s first (well, second) kiss.

the clip where dani tells amira that they will tell everyone they’re together, and whoever doesn’t like them can go fuck themselves, has such a huge vibe like that clip right after the concert in s3, where miquel says people will try and fuck them over. but let it be known that i think those are completely different circumstances. i obviously don’t think dani is purposefully taking her away from her friends, unlike miquel’s true intentions.

the dance scene from this clip... idk, it feels to me like dani is trying to break some boundaries that amira has already established. and of course it reminds me of the clip where miquel tries to get nora to undress while they’re making out and she pushes him away. again, i think the tone is compleeetely different!, but it all adds to the pressure of what they have to give in this relationship to make up for the grand gestures (in today’s clip, amira looks uncomfortable/sad and then asks dani if he gets bored with her).

just the fact that amira is so isolated from everyone and dani is the only person she can confide to. it’s so.... HHHHHHHHHHHHH and while the circumstances are completely different (it’s not like someone is forcing amira to isolate herself, it’s been a mix of islamophobia and miscommunication and betrayals) but it’s reminiscing of the moments where nora was alone and scared shitless of telling miquel the truth. i wouldn’t have a problem with this if i was sure the show will later address this, that your boyfriend (especially in amira’s case, where dani is white and non muslim) can’t be the only person you should be friends with. but the way they’re framing their relationship, with dani being so seemingly attentive of her needs, reminds me a lot of the grand gestures miquel did back then (like bringing her to that theater, all buildup so nora would have an extreme loyalty for him later on). and so if amira fails dani in some way, their relationship could turn out to be quite unbalanced.

my main concern is that i can already draw so many parallels between both relationships where previously miquel was only comparable to characters like rubén (pushy, finding clever ways to get the girls they’re interested in to be with them). and i don’t know if to think this is intentional (most likely scenario?) or worse, after an entire season meant to show teenagers what the signs of an abusive relationship are, they’re re-using the same elements that miquel did to show how dani is an exemplary boyfriend. like, up to this season, it’s been very important that the girls can talk about their love problems to the other girls! it’s been the heart of the show, literally! and by making amira so isolated from anyone that isn’t dani (which AGAIN it’s not dani’s intention at all, you don’t have to tell me that!), it makes me worried for what will happen if damira start having real problems. i can’t guess what their intentions are so i know i’ll have to wait a bit... i’m not even that sure that damira will be endgame anymore. but whatever happens, i wish that amira has at least one friend by her side, because dani being the only person amira can lean in is not it.

#skam españa #meta #anti damira #.....sort of

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theredhairedmonkey · 4 years ago

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Why is Rayla so surprised when Callum calls her a hero?

Rayla doesn’t have a great understanding of what it means to be “heroic.” My guess is that she equates being a hero with being someone like Runaan—strong, stoic, swift, able to get the job done with zero hesitation or remorse. But because Rayla is not like Runaan, she consistently feels like she’s falling short or failing to live up to that “hero elf” ideal in her mind.

But Callum recognizes what qualities make one heroic; it’s something that he clearly has given a lot of thought, perhaps basing it off the kind of person his mother was—compassionate, loving, fearless, caring, strong, determined.

It’s for this reason that Rayla considers herself weak (“I’m not good enough and I never will be”) while Callum considers her to be strong (“I’ve seen you get knocked down so many times and every single time, you get back up again. That’s real strength”).

That’s the major disconnect between them: Rayla has all the training and confidence of a hero but without realizing what makes one heroic. Callum knows exactly what a hero is, but (momentarily) lacks both the confidence and the training to become one. That disconnect has been a part of their dynamic since the beginning up until before the S3 finale.

Moments such as when Rayla thinks she’s not brave because she’s afraid of water, while Callum points out this makes her heroic).

I say until before the S3 finale, because then the dynamic changes and their roles somewhat reverse. Rayla now hangs back while Callum does the fighting. Rayla goes up against Viren, someone who’s far more powerful than her, yet makes a split second heroic decision to push the two of them off the pinnacle. Callum, meanwhile, finds both the confidence and the power to be the hero himself—diving down and saving Rayla from falling to her death.

And that’s how the disconnect is resolved: Rayla realizes why she’s heroic, and Callum realizes that he is brave and strong enough to be a hero as well.

#rayla #callum #rayllum #runaan #sarai #tdp #the dragon prince

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mittensmorgul · 5 years ago

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I'm confused - aren't there 20 eps in the final season? But I keep season people saying ep 8 is the midseason finale? Shouldn't that be ep 10?

The midseason finale is based on the network broadcast schedule, and not the “halfway point” of the season. Historically, that’s fallen anywhere from episode 8 to episode 11, based on the airing schedule, when the season began, how many episodes were pushed back a week for a holiday or other scheduling conflict, etc. This is something the writers would know when they arrived in the writing room to structure the season-long arcs, it’s just a fact of writing for episodic television that the Big Story Beats will necessarily hang around the airing schedule this way, and not always split into exact numerically equal bits.

For example, last season, with 20 episodes, the midseason finale was episode 9, and we returned in January with episode 10. It was the same in s13, which had 23 episodes– episode 9 The Bad Place was the midseason cliffhanger with episode 10 Wayward Sisters the first episode back in January. The fact the season had more episodes had no bearing on when this break happened. It doesn’t need to happen at the technical midpoint of the season.

For reference:

22 episode seasons:

s1 Midseason finale: 1.10 Asylums2 Midseason finale: 2.09 Croatoan

s3 was the outlier, writers-strike shortened to 16 episodes. When they went on strike in November, they already had 12 episodes filmed with no certainty of there ever being any more. The Midseason Finale was 3.08 A Very Supernatural Christmas, but the HOPE was that the strike would be over quickly and they’d still be back to work in time to write a full 22 episode season. That didn’t happen, obviously, but by that time they were lucky to have four more episodes to bring the season to a conclusion. A lot of shows didn’t survive the strike, but Supernatural did. Thank heck!

s4 midseason finale: 4.10 Heaven and Hells5 midseason finale: 5.10 Abandon All Hopes6 midseason finale: 6.11 Appointment in Samarra

Then the show moved to a 23 episode season:

s7 midseason finale: 7.10 Death’s Doors8 midseason finale: 8.09 Citizen Fangs9 midseason finale: 9.09 Holy Terrors10 midseason finale: 10.09 The Things We Left Behinds11 midseason finale: 11.09 O Brother Where Art Thous12 midseason finale: 12.08 LOTUSs13 midseason finale: 13.09 The Bad Place

The we moved to the 20 episode season:

s14 midseason finale: 14.09 The Spears15 midseason finale: 15.08

The writers structure their overarching narrative so that Big Plot Developments happen in these episodes (typically, some are more cliffhanger-y than others). Regardless, between the midseason finale and the second half premiere (typically mid-January), what we typically get is a turning point moment for the season. That’s just how narratives work.

Just looking at Dabb era (starting in s11, because Dabb wrote 11.10, the first episode of the second half of the season, and I believe he unofficially began steering the narrtive from that point forward, if not earlier), in 11.09 we ended with Sam trapped with Lucifer in the fake Cage in Hell, Dean having been zapped away before Heaven attempted to smite Amara, and Cas... suspiciously missing from the story >.>. 11.10 picked up right from that moment and sent us spiraling into the second half of the season (Casifer, Rowena apparently dead, Amara directly threatening everything) and laid out the Major Plot Situations that would need to resolve by the end of the season.

12.08 ended with Kelly on the run from Cas, and Sam and Dean being whisked away in secret by black ops types to who knows where. 12.09 showed us Sam and Dean escaping from the secret prison as well as setting up the Mary/BMoL arc for the second half of the season, as well as introducing the tension of the Cosmic Consequences Cas faced from breaking Dean’s deal with Billie, and established the Winchesters as Cas’s family who he’d do anything for.

13.09 ended with the rift opening, Sam and Dean tossed into The Bad Place world, Jack tossed into the Apocalypse AU at Mary’s feet, and Kaia unconscious by the roadside, and a bunch more angels dead... 13.10 picked up with the Wayward Sisters saving the day and setting up the Big Question for the rest of the season... how to rescue Mary and Jack from the Apocalypse AU.

14.09 ended with Michael!Dean and the rest of TFW and the whole planet in immediate danger, and 14.10 began with the mission to save Dean and demonstrated the precarious situation of Jack vs burning off his own soul, setting up the rest of the season’s Major Threats.

Like those seasons, I suspect 15.08 will end with a Major Confrontation with Chuck, or at least some other sort of Massive Peril for TFW, and 15.09 will return with them getting a partial win but also establishing the major problems they will still have to overcome by the end of the season.

When writers know they’re going to have a month or more between episodes, they try to leave the story on a big moment of tension like this. Just because it doesn’t fall at the mathematical midpoint of the season doesn’t change the fact that the major story beats happen in these episodes.

#Anonymous #this is how stories work #the vagaries of television production

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themikewheelers · 5 years ago

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I hope they make next season with different pairings like idk Dustin with Will and Jonathan or Robin with Nancy something like that. And i would looove if they make Mike and Eleven alone to investigate something bc they always do everything with the group, so just them two could create interesting scenarios

DEF agree like for some extent I think the show has done a rlly good job shuffling characters around, but for some of them they’ve rlly just stayed with the same people every season. Obviously I want Jonathan and Nancy to spend time together and for their relationship to develop, but in terms of where they are in the plot, they’ve always been teamed up, and I would love to see them teamed up with new characters for s4. Same with Hop and Joyce, so I do think it’ll be interesting now with s4 if they’ll make Joyce a lone ranger, or if she’ll be teamed up with a different main character (El maybe). Everyone looooves Steve and Dustin so I doubt the show will be splitting them apart (*small sigh*) but I would love to see Steve teamed up with different characters, and now with Robin too, I love her friendship with Steve, but I wanna see what she’s like with everyone else. I don’t want the two of them kinda off in their own world, occasionally involved in the rest of the show via Dustin, I want to see them more directly involved and have more relationships with other characters. I’ve said this before, but I do feel like the show kinda wrote themselves into a corner with Steve because he wasn’t originally supposed to be a main character, he was just supposed to be Nancy’s temporary bf that’s eventually forgotten. But by making him a main character it’s weird now bc they gave him that relationship with Dustin to tie him in, but opposed to the rest of the main characters, who are all interconnected in a lot of different ways, Steve’s just kinda off in his own corner so they rely on Dustin to bring him into everything. And he’s kinda friendly with the rest of the kids but it doesn’t seem like he has any real relationships with them. So yeah that’s def smth I rlly want in s4 that honestly I doubt we’ll ever get, but I want to see Steve form more relationships with the other characters and just become more involved in everything, and I want to see the same for Robin. (Can we please get Robin and Nancy to team up? Based on the way Robin spoke about her in s3, we know they know each other, but they don’t seem to be friendly. Can we please get some development on that front??). Also yeah I agree about Mike and Eleven bc for them obviously they’ve spent a lot of time together each season, but unlike the other core couples on the show, they’ve never rlly been teamed up in the actual plot. In season one they were, but it was weird bc in some ways you could also argue El had her own plotline and as a result she was kinda distanced from the plotline with the rest of the kids since for most of the season they were just trying to figure out what was going on and she already knew. Then in s2 obviously they’re separated the whole time. Then in s3 yeah we got that whole Griswold family team, but imo that was just too many people for one teamup so it didn’t do a great job really showing how specific characters interacted. So yeah I agree it would be interesting in s4 to actually see the two of them working together to solve some mystery or smth. I’m not sure if they’re going to continue to have Erica as a main character (rn my prediction is she’s just going to be like Karen- she’s credited as a main character and she has some appearances throughout the season, but she’s not really involved at all and in reality is more like a supportive character) but if she does genuinely continue to have a role of importance, I would LOVE to see her teamed up with Lucas, bc tbh I’m a little disappointed just how little we saw of the two of them in s3 like right at the finale I wish there was just some small moment where we saw them working together.

That’s one big disappointment I had with the season - there were these 3 clearly defined groups, but next to no interaction between the groups. I think season 2 did a really good job of having all the characters separated, but once they started working together groups rearranged and in the finale it wasn’t the same as we’d seen all season which just made sense. Season 1 didn’t rlly do that, but then again, the season 1 groups were more sensible to begin with, and wasn’t so much a matter of coincidence where people ended up. It was the kids, teens, and adults, and it just made sense for them all to be grouped that way throughout. But in s3 the groups had more variation so I just thought it was odd how even after everybody came together, the groups didn’t change at all, even tho they were so ragtag to begin with. We didn’t see Dustin rejoin the kids, or any of the kids go with him to the antenna. We didn’t see Lucas and Erica interact at all even though Lucas is really the only person out of everyone there that Erica has any relationship with. With the teens I can kinda get it bc Steve and Robin aren’t on great terms with Nancy and Jonathan, but it felt weird that there wasn’t even any acknowledgment they knew each other bc they didn’t interact for even a second. For some of these it rlly doesn’t matter, but in some instances I thought it hurt too. Like Hop and El really only having one genuine scene together all season, and esp considering Hop “dying” at the end, there rlly should have been more focus on his relationships throughout. Not just his relationship with his daughter kinda put on the backburner all season until they have a heartfelt goodbye before he goes and sacrifices himself.

Idk. It’s a v v small thing and I don’t rlly care that much, but yeah that’s def smth I hope they DONT do in s4. Like for starters I def was a new mixup of groups, but even then, I don’t want the same characters to be paired up alllll season, like show the groups be a little fluid when its realistic considering they all have a lot of interconnectness and relationships with each other.

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butterflydm · 6 years ago

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The Magicians Revisited: 1x01 Unauthorized Magic

I’m doing the rewatch with @themagiciansrevisited and I’ll be watching along probably until 4x10, which is where I’ve decided my own personal canon for the show will tap out. And because my brain likes to keep track of things, I’ll be rewatching again on my own after each group rewatch and write out the things that stand out for me, that I might want to remember. This is v. long, so I will pop it under a read more.

Significant moments: The first character we meet is Dean Fogg, who comes onto a NYC street through a portal from a more wooded area (I think it’s the area outside Brakebills). The door closes behind him without him needing to physically shut it. He meets up with “Eliza” (making Jane Chatwin the second major character we meet) and says, “You’re late”, which is going to echo in the later first meeting of Eliot and Quentin (and which was itself mirrored in the first meeting between “Kim” and Todd in 4x01). Being that time loops and timelines are such an important part of the show, it’s interesting to me that the importance of timing is set up so soon. And… it’s also possibly a nod to The Lord of the Rings.

Jane’s brought Fogg evidence that the Beast is already active in this timeline (a huge-ass moth). The NYPost that he’s reading looks to be dated October 18, 2015, which tracks with when the first episodes came out. Part of the implication in this conversation is that Jane wants Fogg to rush our group into Brakebills even though they aren’t in place to have it handled yet.

Jane shows particular concern over ‘our boy’, which I think we can take as read is Quentin, given how Jane directs her attention to Quentin fairly pointedly and given that we’re going to cut to him after this scene. Looking back, it’s interesting to think about how this relationship may have evolved from Jane’s PoV. She must have recognized Julia and Quentin as the Witch and the Fool as soon as they were old enough and got involved in the very first timeline, plus it’s possible she figured out somewhere along the way that Quentin was also the old man who gave her the Time Key in the first place. There are four major characters who remember the time loops, after all - Jane, Fogg, Martin, and Ember - so I’ll be paying particular attention during their scenes to see what they may drop as a hint to what happened in previous timelines.

This scene also mirrors, to a certain extent, the introductory McGonagall & Dumbledore scene at the beginning of Harry Potter. I suspect that’s intentional, given the series’s future interest in deconstructing various fantasy storylines and tropes. So, we have two authority figures who understand what’s to come and they have been deliberately attempting to shape this younger generation into a weapon to wield against the enemy that threatens them (and that comes from their own generation).

Quentin is the next major character introduced to us - he is in the Midtown Mental Health Clinic, which has a nice view of the Statue of Liberty. He’s thoughtlessly doing magic tricks with a coin. The show then cuts between him checking himself out of the clinic with a scene of him at a party at his apartment. Julia is introduced by noticing Q looking out of place at the party, and then he bails to go hang out alone in a bedroom and read which… yeah, same, Q, same. We see his pills, a comic book, some other books: bunch of books on stage magic like card and coin tricks, and Plover’s books (at least two editions of the Fillory and Further series). As Q reads the first book (Fillory and Further: The World in the Walls), we get a visualization of them onscreen.

Julia and Quentin talk a little (and I’m going to note that she explicitly calls the Fillory books ‘obscure fantasy’, so not actually in the realm of Narnia or LotR) - she gives him a friendly kiss, and then Julia’s boyfriend James comes in and jokes about them having a threeway, which I did not expect to be foreshadowing and yet… Quentin will definitely have a threesome before the end of the season so, I guess it was. Unexpected foreshadowing!

The (dead) Yale interviewer had the clock from the Fillory books (or a replica? I don’t recall from further episodes if this is the real deal or not) in the place he was planning to interview Quentin. Huh, one of the dead interviewer’s eyes looks kinda like a fairy eye. We do find out later from Dean Fogg that the interviewer was a magician, so… hmm. This scene is very suspicious to me in many ways, in retrospect.

The manuscript that Jane gives Quentin is, officially, Fillory and Further; Book Six: the Magicians and it is dated Feb 1952. We learn that Julia is the one who got Quentin into the Fillory books in the first place and that’s why he learned magic tricks. They were both very into the books all through high school, but then Julia met James and she pulled away from them.

Next, it’s Julia and Quentin’s introduction to Brakebills! So, in most (though I suspect Jane tried cutting Q out of the equation at some point early on) of the previous loops, both Quentin and Julia would have gotten into Brakebills at this point, so after this is where we split from the general timeline to the differences in TL40 (for the students! Martin/the Beast is probably doing his own set of experiments each time he gets snapped back into a new timeline; especially different ways of approaching his ability to talk to Penny, I suspect).

When Q arrives, Eliot is, of course, posing in a gorgeous outfit. He was given a card with Quentin’s name and is waiting for him.

So, timeline thoughts: obviously, Fogg decides to set up Eliot and Quentin’s friendship early on, based on previous timeline experiences and whatnot. Given Jane’s worries about Quentin not being prepared enough, it does seem likely that Fogg decided to set up a mentorship-ish situation, since Eliot and Margo appear to get involved anyway in other timelines and since Margo’s a big Fillory fan, too. I’m going to see how Fogg reacts to them in later episodes to see if it confirms or counters my suspicions here.

When Eliot brings Quentin to the exam room, Penny is in the foreground of the shot and Quentin ends up sitting next to him. Julia is more in the middle of the room and (hilariously, from a P23-P40 perspective), I think I see Kady at a table in between Julia and Penny. Quentin sees Julia and they hug. I did not see Alice in the exam room, but there were several tables that had blonde girls at them, so maybe I just missed her.

Julia is told that she failed the test and will be sent home. “I can’t just go to Yale if this place exists” and she deliberately scratches herself before the memory spell is placed on her. Meanwhile, Q is given a deck of cards and told to do magic. He fumbles for a while, Dean Fogg puts some heavy pressure on him, and Q’s magic bursts out and then he collapses.

Q has a dream of talking to Jane in Fillory. Dream!Jane (real!Jane using a spell of some kind, I assume) name-drops the Beast and tells Q to “get off the garden path”. She wants him to try something new, because she knows that the previous tries have all failed spectacularly. He needs to do something different this time.

Q wakes up at Brakebills and Julia wakes up in her apartment in NYC, remembering everything and researching right away. Q talks to Dean Fogg. We learn that Brakebills is a three-year graduate-level program. So. Dean Fogg here is… hmm. He encourages Q to give up his meds. In the earlier scene, he deliberately preyed on Q’s fears (which he would know well from 39 previous timelines of experience) in order to provoke him into displaying a forceful burst of magic. We know that Jane is particularly worried about how much Q, specifically, needs to learn. Adding that together, and it does feel very deliberate that Fogg leads Q to believe that magic — that this school — will eliminate the need for his meds & etc., when we know from future episodes that this is very much not something that magic actually “fixes”. But he’s setting up Brakebills as the place that makes everything better because he wants Q to believe it. It’s also possible that he’s discouraging Q’s meds to create a certain level of emotional pain in Q to power his magic? Wow. That’s a dark thought.

Q and Penny are roommates. Q notices his F&F Book 6 is missing and is accusatory towards Penny, but before it can go further, Eliot comes to introduce Quentin to Margo. He’s told her that Q is cute and her opinion is “not that cute” but she’s friendly to him. We learn that first years stay in the dorms, and then once you know your ‘talent’, you get put into a house. The ones that Eliot lists out are: Physical Kids (where he and Margo are), Illusions, Healing, Nature, Knowledge (where Julia would have gone), Psychics. We also learn that there are only four students currently remaining of the third-year class, sixteen of them having disappeared along the way.

So, after all that, we go to Q’s first class and we see Alice for the first time (at least, that I could spot). She gets singled out to do a demonstration for the class and turns a glass ball into a glass horse. Also in this class, Kady meets Penny. They have an instant sexual connection and hook up right away. This is a definite deviation from timeline-23, at least, and if Kady only got into Brakebills because Julia was kept out, then that could potentially make Kady an overall wildcard. We know that the Great Cock in S3 knows about her, but I wonder if she was on anyone’s radar before timeline-40 happened. I’ll keep an eye out!

When Q finds out a little bit more about Alice from Margo and Eliot, he’s intrigued because he was very impressed by her spellwork. Margo and Eliot do not seem particularly interested in Alice one way or the other - when Alice leaves after Margo’s (debatably sincere) invite, they basically roll their eyes and shrug. Q tries to talk to Alice again later and she is definitely not interested in making friends.

Some time has passed, because James has sent Q several emails that he hasn’t answered. Julia hasn’t been eating or acting like herself, so James asks Q to come to her birthday party. Margo and Eliot overhear and immediately invite themselves along, because they have 100% adopted Q into their friendship already like damn. I’m kinda stunned over exactly how quickly Eliot and Margo decided that Quentin is One of Us. Eliot takes one look and is basically like ‘you’re cute, we’re keeping you’ and Margo goes with it in a way that she absolutely does not do with “Mike” later on. Eliot and Margo are the two people who are welcoming and encouraging to Q basically from day one and it just really stands out even more in a rewatch. Like Q has to go through some traumatizing shit with Alice, Penny, and Kady to start to develop any kind of bond, but with Eliot and Margo, he basically just has to show up and... be himself. And - this is jumping forward a bit but - they both mention later on that they genuinely like Q for his personality and his interests. Margo & El are stealth nerds and Eliot finds nerds charming in general, so they both just... like Q for who he is. It’s just so sweet and very adorable to see it already present in the first episode. They just like him. For the person that he is.

We meet future reoccurring hedge witch Pete at the party, briefly, as Julia goes ‘ugh no’ at first sight. Julia talks to Q in private and reveals that she remembers about Brakebills. The conversation goes badly, Q is not willing to help her with magic stuff, and he leaves with Ellot and Margo. Pete is a creep and scares Julia until she magics her way out of the trap and he invites her to join a non-Brakebills method of learning magic.

The next dream Q has about Jane Chatwin appears to take place at Rupert Chatwin’s grave (or just a monument to him? But I’m guessing grave). She warns him again not to just stick to the “garden path”. She shows him the symbol that he saw in Alice’s book and burns it into his hand, giving him a new reason to seek out Alice. Alice tells Q to meet her that night to do a summoning to contact the other side. Penny is drawn to go help Alice and Q, and Kady volunteers to join him. They do the spell and after they all leave the room, a smiley face is drawn on the mirror, ominously.

The Beast freezes everyone’s actions except their eyes, enters through the mirror. He kills a professor, is attacked by the Dean, defeats him but doesn’t kill him, and then spots Quentin. He calls Quentin out by name and starts to reach towards him and we cut to credits. That’s the scene that really made me go “woah, shit, this show commits” in my first watch-through. Specifically, it was the smiley-face that the Beast makes during that scene. I was like “did I just watch that happen?”, which a thought I have now had many many times over the course of future episodes as well. Sometimes for good and sometimes for bad, I suppose.

Magic: 1. Location portal (Dean Fogg travels through) 2. Portal to Fillory (described in F&F: the World in the Walls) 3. Clock in tree (spotted by Jane; placed by “the watcherwoman”) 4. Julia and Quentin getting into Brakebills (bushes vs elevator) and traveling to upstate New York 5. Magic exam test 6. (attempted) memory spell on Julia 7. Quentin makes the cards fly around the room after his exam and then builds them into a card castle before collapsing 8. Jane talks to Q in his dreams 9. The globes in Dean Fogg’s office sense magic, though they aren’t always right 10. Illusion work is used to keep friends and families of magic students from finding out they attend Brakebills 11. Lots of random practice magic from the students as Eliot and Margo give Q a tour 12. Kady floats during sex and make other things float too (including Penny) 13. Julia makes sparks happen at her birthday party 14. Pete uses magic to tie Julia up and scare her into showing her magic Julia breaks out of Pete’s trap 15. Q has another dream of Fillory and Jane Chatwin 16. Summoning spell with Q, Alice, Penny, and Kady 17. time freeze by the Beast, travels via mirror, magically kills a professor, takes Dean Fogg’s eyes

Relationships: Dean Fogg & Jane Chatwin: firm allies Quentin & Julia: best friends -> becoming estranged friends Julia & James: established relationship Quentin & James: friends -> becoming estranged friends Quentin & Eliot: early friendship/crush Quentin & Penny: bad first impression on both sides Eliot & Margo: best friends Margo & Quentin: early friendship Quentin->Alice: admires her talent Alice->Quentin: hostile -> becoming temporary allies Penny & Kady: immediate sexual/romantic relationship Margo & Alice: mutually unimpressed Eliot & Alice: mutually unimpressed Quentin->Kady: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Kady->Alice & Quentin: “losers" Alice->Kady & Penny: temporary allies Penny->Alice: admires her talent Jane&Fogg->Quentin&co: manipulative mentorship Pete->Julia: impressed with her talent Julia->Pete: creeped out

Obviously a certain amount of subjectivity in this but I call ‘em like I see ‘em.

Physical contact: Jane places the magic watch in Dean Fogg’s coat pocket and then smooths his clothes out afterwards. Julia sits in her boyfriend’s lap at the party. Julia touches Q’s leg, takes his book out of his hands, snuggles up to him, and kisses him on the corner of his mouth. James jumps on top of Q and Julia in Q’s bed when he’s joking about the threeway. Other people join in. Julia and Q press up against each as they walk to Q’s Yale interview, and she touches him on the back and then brushes his hair out of his eyes. Julia and Q sit pressed up together after finding the dead body of the interviewer and she’s somewhat loosely hugging him from behind. Eliot escorts Q into the exam room with a touch on the shoulder and back. Julia and Q hug in the exam room after the test. Margo pulls out Q’s tie when they’re introduced. Margo touches Eliot’s arm when talking about the third-year class and they stayed mostly pressed up arm-to-arm for much of the later conversation. Kady and Penny have sex, and then touch casually and flirtatiously in the walking scene afterward. Margo and Eliot hold hands as they run up to talk to Q when he’s on the phone with James. Eliot leads her by the hand at Julia’s birthday party. When leaving, they hug and spin around together. James hugs Q, and then Q hugs Julia. Pete touches Julia’s face when she’s trapped by his spell. dream!Jane grabs Q’s wrist and presses his hand against the summoning symbol. Q touches Alice’s shoulder when he’s trying to tell her about the symbol burned into his hand. Alice holds his wrist to look at the symbol and then pulls him along by the wrist so they can talk more privately. Penny takes Kady by the hand when they leave. Penny and Kady are playing around/holding hands in class when the Beast arrives. The Beast pulls out Dean Fogg’s eyes and bites him? headbutts him? so that he falls. Bites him, I think. WTF, Martin?

Character Notes: Dean Fogg: mint green shoes Jane Chatwin: Martin was her twin; Rupert was her older brother. She was ‘the family skeptic’. Described by Fogg as a ‘scout; freelance, sort of’. Quentin Coldwater: Checked himself into Midtown Mental Health because he “couldn’t concentrate, eat, or get out of bed” and the “feeling of not belonging anywhere was overwhelming” and being “the most useless person who ever lived”. He was planning on selling his Fillory first editions on Ebay. His father lives in Jersey. Martin Chatwin: “gloomy nature” (as claimed by Plover) Rupert Chatwin: wounded in “the war” (WWII) Charlie Quinn: Died five years ago at Brakebills, so 2010 Julia Wicker: Was going to go to Yale for a business degree.

Students: “Missing 3rd year class” students: there are only four students in the current third year class, with sixteen having gone missing. I’m not certain exactly how many we end up accounting for over the course of the season (at least Victoria and Josh but there might be more), so I will keep track of that, too. But, for now, we have the nameless four remaining. Known 1st year students: Q, Alice, Penny, Kady. Dean Fogg mentions “I’ve got another twenty-four of you today”, which sets the class size at 25 minimum (if Q is the first new student he talked to) Known 2nd year students: Margo, Eliot

Timeline Notes: Oct. 2015: Dean Fogg meets with Jane Chatwin to discuss this current time loop. “Not Tuesday”: Quentin is checking himself out of Midtown Mental Health and mentions he has a Yale grad school interview on “Tuesday”. Tuesday: Julia goes with Quentin to his Yale interview, but the interviewer is dead. Jane is posing as an EMT and gives Quentin the unpublished Fillory and Further sixth book. Quentin starts some new meds. Tuesday Night: Quentin and Julia are pulled into Brakebills for their exam (and it is day in Brakebills) Wednesday: Q is at Brakebills; Julia is back in NYC. Q gives his new meds up to Dean Fogg. ~undisclosed amount of time passes~ Julia’s birthday: Q, Eliot, and Margo attend ~undisclosed amount of time passes~

Ways the Loop-aware Messed With Our Kids: 1. Julia was kept out of Brakebills 2. Eliot was sent out to bring Q in to take his test 3. Q and Penny are roommates in the dorms 4. Jane burns Q’s hand to encourage him to seek out Alice 5. Jane tells Q that Brakebills isn’t the point and he has a greater destiny

#TMRevisited #The Magicians #tmwk1 #long post #text post #keeping track of things

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murasaki-murasame · 5 years ago

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With the recent info about how the Fruits Basket reboot is apparently going to be exactly 63 episodes long in total, and the recent leak of what seems to be the outline for most of season 1′s story, I think now’s a good time for me to finally get around to laying out my detailed thoughts on what I’m expecting from the long-term pacing and plot structure of the reboot.

I’ll put it under a cut since this is gonna get long and very spoiler-y.

I initially didn’t know if I should put much stock into what I was hearing about the reboot being 63 episodes long, but it seems to come straight from one of the main voice actors for the dub, and he sounded pretty specific and certain about it. Usually dub VAs and whatnot are very out of the loop on stuff like this, but Funimation seems very connected to the production of the reboot, so they might know info like this.

I was hoping that the reboot would be 75 episodes across three sets of 25-ish episode seasons, but it sounds like it’ll probably be two 25-episode seasons, and then a final 13-episode season. Which could be fine. They’d have to speed things up a bit near the end, but it could work. At the very least, the way the scriptwriter for the anime has talked about it makes me think that they worked out a concrete outline for the entire series very early on, so I trust that they have a specific plan in mind for this. I’m still a bit worried that the slow and leisurely pace we’re getting thus far might lead to them having to rush it later on, but I think they’ve planned it out enough to avoid that.

Recently we got an unintentional leak of sorts, with how apparently in the video Funi posted about the reasoning for Momiji’s accent in the reboot, you can see some sticky notes on Caitlin Glass’ computer [the dub voice director] that seem to be notes on the episode by episode plot outline for most of season 1, up to around episode 21 or 22.

Combining the vague glimpses of that we saw with what’s already happened in the anime thus far, and a bit of my own speculation for how they’ll handle the last few episodes of season 1, I think it’ll end up like this:

Ep1: Chapter 1

Ep2: Chapters 2-3

Ep3: Chapters 4/8

Ep4: Chapter 5

Ep5: Chapter 6

Ep6: Chapters 7/9

Ep7: Chapters 10/12

Ep8: Chapter 11

Ep9: Chapters 13-14 [Haru’s intro]

Ep10: Chapters 15-16 [Valentine’s Day]

Ep11: Chapters 17-18 [Hot springs trip]

Ep12: Chapters 19-20 [New school term]

Ep13: Chapters 21-22 [Ayame’s intro]

Ep14: Chapters 23-24 [Grave visit and Momiji’s backstory]

Ep15: Chapters 25-26 [Lake house trip]

Ep16: Chapters 39~41 [Uo’s backstory Part 1]

Ep17: Chapters 39~41 [Uo’s backstory Part 2]

Ep18: Chapters 27-28 [Kisa’s intro]

Ep19: Chapters 44-45 [Ritsu’s intro]

Ep20: Chapters 37-38 [Hiro’s intro]

Ep21: Chapter 29 [Yuki fan club visiting Hana’s house]

Ep22: Chapter 51 [Hana’s backstory]

Ep23: Chapters 30-31 [Tohru getting sick and setting up the Kyo arc]

Ep24: Chapters 32 and part of 33 [Kyo arc Part 1]

Ep25: Rest of Chapter 33 and Chapter 34 [Kyo arc Part 2]

Everything up to Hana’s backstory was laid out in the notes we saw, so everything after that’s just my personal guess. It seems pretty likely that since they don’t seem to be planning on doing the Kyo arc earlier in the season, they’re probably planning to end season 1 with it. There’s a few different ways it could go, but I think that combining chapters 30 and 31 together would work really well, and it’d let them spend two whole episodes on the actual meat of the Kyo arc, which would let them pace it out nicely and have it feel less abrupt.

I’m not sure if the two Hana chapters are going to be adapted into two back to back episodes, or combined into one, though. I’m also not sure if season 1 will be 25 episodes long or 26, but I’m leaning toward 25. Either way, it’s possible that they might fit in chapters 42 and 43 before the Kyo arc starts, but they might push that to near the start of season 2.

And on that note, I don’t really have a specific outline in mind for all of season 2, but if it’s going to be another 25 episode season that leads into a final 13-episode season, I think it has to at least cover up to chapter 99, which is the whole climax of us finding out the truth about Akito once and for all. They’d have to at least get that far in order for season 3 to be able to adapt the rest of the manga in just 13 or so episodes. And I think it could work.

To start with, if season 1 goes the way I think it will, season 2 will probably immediately start out with chapter 35, since that’s the immediate aftermath of the Kyo arc, and how Yuki feels in response to it. They might fit chapter 36 in there too, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they incorporate the trip to Ayame’s boutique into his intro episode in season 1. After that, I think they’ll move into adapting the second half of volume 8, plus maybe chapters 42 and 43 if those aren’t in season 1. I think it might actually work pretty nicely to move those chapters into season 2 so that there’s not as huge of a gap between when Kakeru and Machi get teased at, and when they actually show up for the first time. [Fake edit: I’m also curious to see if they might bring up Rin during Haru’s intro episode, which might let them get away with skimming over or cutting out elements of chapter 43 later on, since that’s where we first properly hear about her in the manga]

And on the note of Kakeru and Machi, one structural change I want season 2 to make is that I want them to have those two only show up for the first time at the start of the new school year after the vacation arc, along with the other student council members. I’ve always thought it was a bit awkward how in the manga they just kinda vanish for like three volumes after the chapter they first properly appear in. So even if it means waiting longer to see them, I’d like them to show up a bit later so the pacing feels more natural.

Similarly, I think it’d work nicely if they move that one chapter near the end of volume 9 with Tohru and Kyo visiting Kazuma to later on so that it happens at the same time as the chapter where Tohru talks to Kazuma about the curse after the vacation.

I also want them to move the other chapter from volume 9 where we see Uo and Kureno first meeting into season 1, probably in the second episode focused on her, just so that we properly get to see him before season 2.

So basically I want the reboot to shift things about so that we go straight from the end of volume 8 into the summer vacation arc, which I think would work out for the best.

If season 2 is gonna get up to at least chapter 99, I think they’ll have to start speeding things up a bit, so in particular I think they might trim down the summer vacation arc to just 4~5 episodes rather than 6, and they might go through stuff like Kyoko’s backstory faster than the manga did. That whole part’s like four chapters long, but I think it could be trimmed down a fair bit, and the way it’s bookended with the present day scenes with Kyo would make it work nicely as a single episode. I think they could also go through some of the stuff in volume 15 with Yuki’s big talk with Kakeru and the culture festival fairly fast as well.

Season 3 would be a bit tricky if it’s 13 episodes long, since even if season 2 gets to chapter 99, that still leaves nearly 40 chapters for s3 to adapt. But I think there’s a lot of parts in the final volumes the anime could go through surprisingly fast, since there’s a lot of moments that are really heavy on the lengthy internal monologues and stuff. I could also see them trimming down the final volume to two episodes. And there’s always the possibility that they might have a double-length finale, which would give them a bit more room to fit stuff in.

Even though there’s a fair bit of stuff I want them to shuffle about in season 2, I can’t really think of anything I want them to change in season 3, based on the material it covers. It might be good for them to move the Machi-focused chapter from volume 16 so that it happens in the same episode as the other Machi-focused chapter a bit later in the manga. But other than that I dunno.

All in all I think that the reboot will probably be able to faithfully adapt the entire manga in 63 episodes. It’d just require them to focus more on trimming it down rather than fleshing it out later on. I think the pacing of the first eight episodes isn’t going to be very indicative of the rest of the reboot’s pacing, and it’ll probably get faster from here on out.

As the reboot gets further along I’ll probably post more detailed speculation about seasons 2 and 3, but they’re just too far away at the moment for me to want to think too hard about it.

Before I forget, though, I’m also still wondering if they might be planning to do a short 12-ish episode adaptation of Fruits Basket Another once the reboot’s done. It’s something I could give or take, but even though it’s a short series, I think they could probably work with Takaya to flesh it out into a full anime. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve heard that it’s split into 12 chapters across three volumes, so it might fit pretty neatly into a 12-episode anime.

#murasaki rambles #fruits basket #i've been debating if I should make a big speculative effort-post about this for a while but now seems like the best time lol

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