#(presumably they want a devastating ending but if they kill the protagonist they have to explain how they uploaded the story)

[jackkin-memories]

slasher reveal ended up being a secret third option 31 dead 17 missing

[justforbooks]

Yahya Sinwar

Hamas leader who plotted the 7 October attack on Israel that triggered war in the Middle East

Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who has been killed by an Israeli patrol in the Gaza Strip at the age of 61, was the principal architect of the attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 that killed 1,200 Israelis, kidnapped 251 hostages, and propelled the Middle East into its greatest peril since the 1973 Yom Kippur war.

The overall leader of Hamas after the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in July 2024, he was its key strategist before and after 7 October, Israel’s most wanted man and the ultimately pivotal Hamas figure during ceasefire negotiations. Though presumed to have been hiding for most of the year within Gaza’s vast tunnel network, he was killed alone in a ruined apartment in Rafah, according to the Israeli military.

Despite repeated vows by Israeli leaders to assassinate him during their devastating retaliation for the 7 October attack, and after what Israel announced was the killing of his close collaborator Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas’s military wing, in July 2024, Sinwar was the last survivor of the three Hamas leaders against whom the international criminal court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, sought arrest warrants for suspected war crimes.

Sinwar first came to prominence in 1985 when Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder of the organisation that would become Hamas in 1987, put him in joint charge of an armed internal enforcement agency known as al-Majd.

He missed direct participation in the momentous Palestinian events of this century’s first decade, including Hamas’s election victory in 2006, the subsequent imposition of an international boycott, and its armed seizure of full control in Gaza in 2007, because he was in jail. In 1989 he received four life sentences for orchestrating the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and the execution of four Palestinians suspected of cooperating with Israel. According to his interrogators, Sinwar admitted without remorse to personally strangling one victim with his bare hands.

By a historical irony, he was among the 1,027 prisoners released in 2011 by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to free a kidnapped Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. The exchange reinforced Sinwar’s belief that such abductions were needed to release Palestinian prisoners. During his 22-year incarceration he assumed a commanding role among Palestinian inmates and tried at least twice to escape. Jail, he later said, had been turned by militants into “sanctuaries of worship” and “academies”. He learned fluent Hebrew, studied Israeli politics and society, and by his own account became “a specialist in the Jewish people’s history”.

Sinwar was born in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza. His father, Ibrahim, and his mother had been forced to flee Majdal, now Ashkelon, as refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. He would tell fellow inmates in prison, said one, Esmat Mansour, that he had been heavily influenced by conditions in the impoverished refugee camp, with its daily humiliation of queueing for food. He was four when Israel overcame Egypt in the six-day war of 1967 and took control of the Strip. He attended Khan Yunis senior school for boys and then the Islamic University, graduating in Arabic language. Sinwar was active in student organisations fusing Islamism with Palestinian nationalism after the perceived failures of the secular PLO. He was briefly detained in 1982 and again in 1988 after Israel’s discovery of al-Majd weapons.

An autobiographical novel he completed in prison in 2004, called Thorns and Carnations, describes the protagonist Ahmed sheltering with his family during the 1967 war, only to find their dreams of Palestinian liberation shattered by Israel’s victory; Ahmed becomes an Islamist after a cousin convinces him of the religious concept of the waqf – the God-given Muslim land from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean. Infatuated with a young woman, Ahmed ends the relationship – chaste in accordance with strict Muslim custom – because in “this bitter story” there was “only room for one love”: for Palestine.

Also in 2004, Sinwar had a brain tumour removed by Israeli surgeons, detected by a quick-thinking Israeli prison dentist (and later intelligence officer), Yuval Bitton, who had Sinwar rushed to hospital. Over multiple conversations in jail before and after this life-saving episode, for which Bitton was warmly thanked by Sinwar, he recalled the prisoner telling him: “Now you’re strong, you have 200 atomic warheads. But we’ll see, maybe in another 10 to 20 years you’ll weaken, and I’ll attack.”

After his release, Sinwar was elected to Hamas’ political bureau in 2012 and, in what was seen as a shift towards its militarist tendency, to the faction’s Gaza leadership in 2017, replacing Haniyeh, who subsequently succeeded Khaled Mashal as political bureau chief. Hamas was losing popularity after two wars with Israel, in 2008-09 and 2014, and Gaza’s deep impoverishment by the blockade imposed by Israel (and Egypt) since 2007.

Sinwar seemed at times to adopt a relatively pragmatic approach. No ally of Mashal, he worked to restore relations with Iran that Mashal had ruptured by opposing Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, in his repression of a popular revolt. But he did not demur when Mashal published a (for Hamas) innovative 2017 document which, without recognising Israel, or abandoning its aspiration for the whole land, indicated it would meanwhile accept a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders – comprising the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

In 2018 Sinwar conspicuously appeared at the Great March of Return, a series of unarmed mass protests at the border barrier. Increasingly organised by Hamas, to the chagrin of some civil activists who had devised them, the protests seemed briefly to offer some alternative to armed insurgency, despite the lethal gunfire against them by Israeli troops. Sinwar even wrote (in Hebrew) to Netanyahu, proposing a long-term truce.

But a turning point came in 2021, when Sinwar and Deif are thought to have begun planning for what became the 7 October attack. By then, the 2020-21 Abraham accords between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain had reversed the Gulf countries’ refusal to recognise Israel unless the Palestinians secured a state. How far this – and the fear in 2023 that Saudi Arabia might imminently follow suit – dominated Sinwar’s thinking is unclear. But in his 7 October speech praising Sinwar and Deif for the attack, Haniyeh excoriated the Arab states for seeking “normalisation” with Israel.

Sinwar reacted defiantly during Ramadan in May 2021 when police raided the al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem, after clashes in the city between Palestinians and rightwing Israelis. When police did not leave the compound by a Hamas-set deadline, Gaza militants fired 150 rockets, Israel responded with airstrikes, and there was a short but intense 11-day war. Sinwar warned that Hamas, whose rockets had reached deeper into Israel than before, had enacted a “general rehearsal” for what would happen “if Israel tries to harm al-Aqsa again”.

Less conditionally, in December 2022 Sinwar addressed Israel at a Gaza rally: “We will come to you, God willing, in a roaring flood. We will come to you with endless rockets, we will come to you in a limitless flood of soldiers.” Hamas would name the 7 October attack the “al-Aqsa flood”.

So secretive was its planning that Sinwar kept its timing and scale – though apparently not that something was being prepared – from most of the Hamas external leadership. Western intelligence agencies also believe he did not confide his intentions in advance to Iran or its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah.

According to a June 2024 Wall Street Journal report, Sinwar described the huge Palestinian losses in a wartime message to Hamas leaders in Qatar as “necessary sacrifices”. In another, on the seizure of women and children as hostages, but without clarifying whether he was referring to Hamas fighters or others who joined the attack and its accompanying atrocities, he said: “Things went out of control … People got caught up in this, and that should not have happened.”

Though he told hostages he met in the tunnels that they would be protected and exchanged in a prisoner release, one 85-year-old peace activist, Yocheved Lifshitz, freed in the week-long ceasefire in November, said she had challenged Sinwar on whether he was “not ashamed to do such a thing to people who have supported peace all these years. He didn’t answer. He was silent.”

In 2011 he married Samar Abu Zamar, and they had three children, the fate of all of whom is unknown. Sinwar’s brother (and close ally), Mohammed, is still being hunted by Israeli forces.

🔔 Yahya Ibrahim Hassan Sinwar, politician, born 29 October 1962; died 16 October 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[piracytheorist]

Since the first thing that strikes me about re8, story-wise, is that it seems to be all over the place? Again, I’ve no idea how it ties to previous games but it feels like this parental/mother-child theme is just hanging there with no resolution at all? I mean yes, Ethan saved his daughter, presumably breaking some sort of abuse cycle, yay, congrats, but what about his wife/gf? Isn’t she supposed to be like the main protagonist of the story of a mother bereaved to the point of tyrannical madness

Or rather, this specific story is not the right choice for his character since there’s SO many ethical and philosophical issues and questions implied but never properly explored because of Ethan’s ‘fuck you, idc’ attitude (which is completely understandable in those circumstances but adds virtually nothing to the plot and arguably even ruins it a bit). Heisenberg could’ve been an excellent ally with fascinating grey morality (provided the writers wouldn’t push him to the point of absolute insanity and let freedom, not power-hunger be his main goal and motivation for rebellion).And again, aren’t the lords supposed to represent child development stages? In which case Ethan what? Kills the possibility of some evil version of Rose? Or his own chance to experience fatherhood throughout all of those stages? Either way, it seems a bit… weird to have a Parent destroy multiple people whose main relevance to the plot is that they’re children of an abusive antagonist in a storyline so extremely focused on parent/kid relationships.

I feel like the main theme of re8 is not just parenthood/motherhood, but the relationship itself of the parent to the child. There's a lot of mentions to "children being used". Miranda kidnapping people, experimenting on them and mutating them and then treating them like they're her kids; Miranda kidnapping and practically killing Rose; Dimitrescu making daughters out of reanimated corpses she experimented on; Heisenberg wanting to use Rose's powers, etc etc.

And it's important that Miranda is at the center of this. There's something very interesting she says to Ethan in her boss fight:

"Why do you interfere? Surely you have no need of Rose now, so close to death?"

And that's where her mistake was. Ethan wasn't doing all that because he needed Rose herself. He was doing it to save her, fully aware that he wasn't going to be a part of her life cause he knew he was dying. Miranda was way too dependent on her love for Eva - and like, I honestly get it that losing your child can devastate you (if anything my fear of that is one of the reasons I don't want to have kids) - so much that her life literally revolved around her child. Once Eva died, Miranda wanted to die. Once she found the Megamycete and discovered she maybe had a chance to bring Eva back, she dedicated her entire life and ruined multiple others to do just that. Her one and biggest need was to get Eva back. It wasn't a simple want or wish. It was a need. She'd get her child back, damn everyone else - including other people's children.

Miranda had no-one to blame directly; Eva had died from the influenza, it wasn't like she had any chance to change things. Ethan's case was different; he had people to blame, particularly, the one who kidnapped Rose and dismembered her, and her lackeys who kept said parts and fought him for trying to take them back.

So on one end, you have a parent who lost her child due to a tragedy, and ended up destroying other - innocent - lives in order to get her back. On the other, you have a parent who lost his child due to a crime, and ended up going after the criminals responsible in order to get the child back. Like, it wasn't even revenge, and it wasn't that he "needed" Rose in his life. He simply wanted to save her and ensure she'll be alright.

I fully agree it could have been Mia as the protagonist in re8, and that it was a wasted opportunity to simply fridge her and have her in the sidelines angsting over her husband. But whether it was Mia or Ethan as the protagonist, I feel like the theme that I explained above does offer a resolution, showing the opposites of Miranda and Ethan, and ending Miranda's tyrrany of her "need" to have her child back through Ethan's determination to ensure his child's safety and happiness - even if he doesn't get to be a part of any of that later on. Miranda showed obsession; Ethan showed dedication.

And this is how I see the abuse cycle breaking and the resolution is reached; an obsessed parent hurt a good parent's child to bring their own child back - the good parent's dedication stopped the former, allowing the former's tyrrany to end and their child to grow up safe.

Seeing as this is a horror game, I don't tend to focus on the morality issues (if I'm interpreting your second message correctly). Like, the developers are making a grant effort to put us in Ethan's shoes, first-person POV, plain character protagonist and all; our child got kidnapped and practically murdered, and we have the chance to bring her back. We'll absolutely raise hell to the people who are responsible for it and we will get our child back, fuck any moral dilemmas we might have. When someone is threatening your life, you have the ability to kill them to defend yourself. In the case of a caring parent, that ability may multiply by a lot when the threat is towards their child. And I feel that this is what the game explored in the end. Though the whole survival issue is taxing on Ethan, he doesn't give a damn about who he has to kill if it means saving his daughter - but again, it's only the responsible parties. We see how watching all the people at Luisa's house die affected him, and even before Elena died, he wanted to ensure her safety before he went searching for Rose; he is sympathetic and morally rational, but also capable of cold-blooded murder if someone is threatening his child. To a lesser extent, we saw that in re7 too. With his life on the line, he killed Jack (multiple times) and Marguerite, and at the end he recognized how they were actually victims of Eveline. But they were still actively trying to murder him so he wasn't given the chance to help them. With Zoe, he promised to send help, and he did, even wanting to talk to her once she'd been rescued by her uncle and Chris. The same applies to re8, but as I said, it's multiplied since it's his daughter who's in danger, and the end of re8 proves he cares for her safety more than his own.

Now, all that said, I think it's important to note how it's stil a Resident Evil game. I haven't actually played or watched any playthroughs of other games, but the basic concept in these games, from what I understand, is that the player shoots zombies; ex-human beings who have lost any human mentality and will just come for your throat if you don't kill them first. They're not humans anymore, they can't be reasoned or sympathized with. It's not really an issue of morality, ethics or philosophy. Your life, and the life of your child in the case of re8, are in danger. You don't give a shit. You just start shooting and hope for the best. Again, I don't know if the morality issue is explored in other RE games, but to be honest... Resident Evil doesn't sound like the kind of franchise that's thematically into going super deep into the morality of shooting zombies to save your life.

I have to admit I haven't thought of the Lords being representative of child development stages. I think they could be put as Moreau being a toddler, fully dependent on their parent - funnily enough, the Greek word for baby is "moro", pronounced almost exactly the way "Moreau" is pronounced in the game - Donna as a child, Heisenberg as a (rebellious?) teenager, and Dimitrescu as a late teen/young adult (if anything, Dimitrescu seems to behave like the eldest child of the bunch). But I'm not sure the connection that has to Ethan as a father, if anything because the bosses are fought in complete random order of age, if my analysis is correct. Like, I understand the symbolism behind the Lords' behaviours, maybe as you said they represent the obstacles Ethan had to overcome. In one single day and with his life on the line, instead of in the course of Rose's entire childhood and adolescence, but that's exactly why he hated being a protagonist of a horror game, lol.

Anyway, yeah. All in all, I don't think Resident Evil is a franchise where we should expect to sit down afterwards and ponder whether we were right to shoot the zombies that were trying to kill us. Again, I'm not the right person to ask this, since I don't know anything about other RE games, but that's the conclusion I'm making in a meta-thinking way.

[feathersandblue]

Dean Winchester, Character Death, and Frodo’s Return to the Shire

This will be a LOOONG post that has been stuck in my head for a while in bits and pieces - about Dean’s death, what it was and what it wasn’t, and incidentally, the Lord of the Rings has found its way in here too.

It’s pretty clear that Dabb always meant for Dean to die.

And while I strongly disagree with that, on so many levels, I think it might have been more palatable if framed in a different way, and so I’ve been trying to figure out what the ending might have looked like in a world that wasn’t quite as shitty as ours. Still shitty, but marginally less so.

Dean is notoriously bad at letting bad things happen if he can prevent them. I find it difficult to believe that Dean would ever quit hunting entirely, and for as long as he kept hunting, the danger of dying would always be present. It’s not unrealistic at all for him to die on a routine hunt. Life is unpredictable; life as a hunter, even more so. I understand that the writers might want to make that point. And it might have been valid if – and that’s the real problem – Dean’s death hadn’t otherwise been devoid of meaning.

The thing about character death – any sort of character death – is that it needs to have purpose.

And there are different ways that it can have purpose, but it depends on what sort of character we’re talking about.

Minor, often unnamed characters – the redshirts in every narrative – die to illustrate injustice or to highlight evil. Their death is a catalyst or a consequence of the events as they unfold, part of the conflict the heros have to solve. An army led into battle by a tyrant. Refugees in a camp dying of malnutrition. Murder victims of a serial killer. In all these cases, death fuels the plot but has little meaning beyond that.

There are minor characters whose death both fuels the plot and gives the hero a more personal motive to act. Supernatural is full of these. Mary and Jessica burning at the ceiling; Charlie dumped in a bathtub. Minor characters can have their own arcs, but ultimately their deaths are only important for the impact they have on the main characters.

The death of a protagonist is markedly different. Protagonists need to have agency even in death to maintain their status.

Their death has to be the reflection of their character development up to that point but it also has to tell us something about them that we did not already know – show us how they make a final decision or draw a final conclusion that marks the end of an inner conflict – which is what all storytelling is about. Character death has to serve a purpose to have meaning, and for a protagonist, the purpose must be personal.

And If it fails to do that, then that’s either a sign that we’re no longer dealing with a protagonist, or that something weng very, very wrong in the writers’ room. There is no inherent value in tragedy. In storytelling, tragedy is justified when it achieves something, otherwise, it’s just capriciousness.

Buffy’s death at the end of season 5 of BTVS is a classic example for the death of a protagonist. Harry’s decision to go and face Voldemort in the forbidden forest, even though it doesn’t ultimately kill him, is another. When Sam jumps into the abyss in Swan Song, that is his heroic sacrifice, but if he’d permanently died in season 2, that would have been bizarre and nonsensical because it was entirely beyond his control – it did not reflect his decisions, gave him no agency, and reduced him from a protagonist to a side character. In that moment, his death was something that happened to Dean. It worked because his death didn’t stick – he regained his agency after resurrection. But as an ending to his hero’s journey, it would have been singularly unsatisfying.

Dean is our protagonist, and he has been for 15 seasons. What does his death tell us about him that we didn’t know – what decisions did he make, what inner struggle got resolved, what meaning did his death have for him, personally, and then, in extension, for us?

The problem is that the finale, as is so often the case in Supernatural, tells two stories at once.

Whe the episode starts, it appears that Dean moves on with his life just fine, a well-adjusted model citizen. He’s ready to get a job, seems to be moderately happy. He even has dog. The decision to keep hunting is his, and death just accidentally happens, which of course is not unrealistic in his line of work. On the forefront, his death is brought about by the fact that he exercises free will. It tells us that he is a hunter and will always be one, that he keeps protecting people because that’s just who he is.

None of that, however, is new. It is just more of the same. All of Dean’s decisions in the finale tell us nothing about him that we did not already know. He’s trying to move on from the death of the people closest to him, as he’s always done. He chooses the hamster wheel, as he has always done. He follows in his father’s footsteps, as he has always done.

As he gets impaled, he has no choices left to make. There is no agency in his death, no inner struggle. His death furthers neither his character development nor the plot. That Dean simply accepts his death is as unsurprising as the fact that his final moments are spent reassuring Sam and telling him that he has to keep fighting.

The conclusion? Dean ceases to be a protagonist.

He dies not as the hero of his story. His death just happens to him.

After Sam and Dean had presumably freed themselves from the constraints of Chuck’s narrative, the final episode should have emphasized their agency, their freedom of choice, through change. But in the end, it only led them both to making the same choices as always, the unsurprising ones. And even the choices that did indicate a change (like Dean’s job application) were not shown to bear fruits.

What meaning does free will have when it doesn’t change the outcome? All the finale does is tell a bleak story about humanity and how we are incapable of making meaningful, consequential changes in our lives.

It’s almost like Lucifer is talking to us all the way from the Endverse of 5.04: “Whatever you do, you will always end up here. Whatever choices you make, whatever details you alter, we will always end up – here.”

Devastating as that is, there is another interpretation of the finale that is arguably worse, a different reading strongly suggested by both text and subtext.

Dean, as mentioned before, is trying to move on with his life but ultimately fails. The situation is different from the way he behaved when he lost Cas and Mary in season 13 where he was outright suicidal – his desperation is more quiet but also more profound. He seems determined to honor Cas’ and Jack’s sacrifice. But determination is not enough. Dean only goes through the motions, and it shows. He clings to the dog in the morning; the dog sticks to him closely throughout the day as dogs tend to do when they feel that their owner is in distress, almost like a therapy dog. His room looks messy, he makes an attempt to fix it but then abandons it as it requires too muh effort. Ultimately, he can’t be bothered. There are alcohol bottles standing around, a sign that he’s drinking, though not as heavily as in the past. All the while, he sems very laid-back, presumably relaxed and at peace and coping well with the loss but also weirdly detached.

When Sam mentions Cas and Jack at the pie festival, he says, “Yeah, I’m thinking about them too. You know that pain’s not going to go away. Right? But if we don’t keep living, then all that … sacrifice is gonna be for nothing.”

He feels an obligation. And he’s trying. It’s just not working very well.

He barely reacts when Sams pies him in the face.

When impaled on the rebar, Dean actively prevents Sam from calling for help. He tells Sam not to bring him back. And in the end, he asks Sam to tell him it’s okay to go. Which isn’t something he would do if he was simply dying – it strongly indicates that he wants to be allowed to die.

Prompting the conclusion that Dean is giving up on life the first opportunity he gets, not even knowing whether he’ll end up in heaven.

In this reading, Dean does have a little bit of agency. He makes a decision, sort of. His death marks the resolution of an inner struggle: He gives up.

He dies as a protagonist.

In the worst way possible.

In all honesty, I can’t decide which interpretation I hate more.

But what could the writers have done differently, if Dean was meant to die all along?

Back when the SPN finale had freshly aired, I was describing it like this:

Imagine that the One Ring is destroyed. But Merry died in the battle and Pippin went missing and was never found again. Frodo and Sam return to the Shire; Pippin and Merry are mentioned once in passing. Upon their arrival, Frodo is attacked by Wormtongue and slowly bleeds out over the span of thirty pages. Sam marries someone else than Rosie; Rosie is never mentioned again. Somehow, both Frodo and Sam are teleported to Valinor, where we are told that the real fun begins.

At the time, I only used this as an example to illustrate what a mess the finale had been. But in the weeks that have passed since, then, I’ve started thinking about the LOTR comparison some more, and it got me thinking about Dean’s death in a different way.

And it has everything to do with the difference between running from and walking toward.

As mentioned before, it’s not unrealistic that Dean would die on a random hunt. Would the Dean Winchester we know ever stop hunting? Maybe. We might want him to. Then again, would be still be Dean Winchester if he did? We know that Dean can’t help but feel responsible. He is someone who is incapable of staying hands-off.

Dean, as we see him in the finale, is trying to honor Cas’s and Jack’s memory by living, although he’s not very good at it – not outright suicidal but worn-out. Exhausted. And still he makes the decisions to keep hunting because he can do nothing else.

When Frodo and Sam returned to the Shire in LOTR, they had earned their happy ending. But Frodo, who had carried such a heavy burden that he was permanently altered by it, could no longer find happiness in Middleearth, and ultimately decided to depart for Valinor along with Gandalf and Bilbo with the promise of later being reunited with Sam. The journey had changed both of them, but it had changed Frodo to a greater degree, his responsibility had been greater, the weight on his shoulders heavier.

And I started to wonder whether the intention had initially been to show Dean in much the same state – and to frame his death as a decision to move on, the same way that LOTR has Frodo move on to the West.

Imagine the following: Cas is pulled into the Empty. His happiness and love change the Empty; he merges with it or otherwise changes it so that it’s now a more demon-friendly environment. Everyone there is at peace. Cas, in whatever form, moves on to Heaven – or maybe his soul does as it’s now mostly human.

Dean goes on a hunt and dies. Jack, or some other entity, shows up where you would expect the curiously absent reaper in order to give him a choice. Learning that Cas is in Heaven, and knowing that he will never be able to stop hunting if he remains on earth, Dean makes the conscious decision to move on. For the first time, Dean prioritizes his own happiness over his perceived duty. His death is no longer suicide by proxy, and neither is its sole purpose to illustrate the inherent meaningless of free will by turning him into a hamster-by-choice. Instead, it becomes a decision because he’s given back agency. He resolves an inner conflict and there’s even a final bit of character development as he breaks the chain of mutual co-dependency that ties him to Sam and allows himself to be with Cas. He remains a protagonist throughout the end.

And because he acknowledges his love for Cas and decides to be with him, he no longer just runs from, he walks toward.

The parallels to The Lord of the Rings get even more obvious when you take Sam into the equation because much like Samwise, Sam remains on earth in order to have a life that, for him, still holds meaning and the chance of happiness – whereas Dean can no longer be happy on earth as long as Cas isn’t there.

To be completely clear: I’d still think that such an ending would suck because it puts too much emphasis on an afterlife, and it would still send the message that characters like Dean could only find peace in death, and unless some adjustments were made to Sam’s arc as well, the ending would still suck for him.

But seeing as SPN plays in a universe where an afterlife exists, I could probably learn to live with Dean’s death if it had any sort of meaning, for him, besides dying and waiting for Sam to arrive, if it allowed for that final bit of character development. If he got to choose.

While I’ll never be able to see the finale that we actually got as anything but a complete atrocity.

[kitkatopinions]

Team RWBY doesn’t have the moral high ground in their spat with Ironwood. RWBY crit under the keep reading. If you don’t want to see any Ironwood defense or people talking about RWBY being questionable, don’t read this.

First off, I want to start by saying that I’m against Ironwood murdering, attempting to kill a fifteen year old, and hacking into Penny. I think that was a bad choice from the writers, but I can explain that in another post if people are interested. However, since the only member of RWBY and co that knows about that (if I recall correctly) is Oscar, I’m going to frame all of this from only their main argument; Ruby wants to keep Atlas, the Relics, and the Maiden in Salem’s direct line of fire until they can evacuate the people of Mantle who are getting attacked by Grimm. And Ironwood wants to save the Relics, the Maiden, Atlas, and arguably the world, despite the fact that he would be leaving Mantle without proper defenses. The show frames Ironwood’s choice as absolutely wrong, cruel, proof that he’s untrustworthy, and proof that he’s a danger to everyone.

RWBY would rather stand and fight, making a stand against an immortal witch, because they can’t save everyone in Mantle yet (thus leaving both cities in danger.)

In season eight, didn’t all of Team RWBY, JNOR, and the Huntresses essentially give up on Atlas though? Essentially saying ‘it’s too late for Atlas’ and choosing between A. Helping Mantle or B. Launching Amity? One could argue that knowing Ironwood would be launching defenses himself, they didn’t think they needed to help, but we see tons of soldiers launching themselves into battle, we see Grimm in the city, possibly killing children, and Ironwood told them that he and his soldiers were all completely exhausted. It’s possible RWBY and co didn’t realize this would happen, but they still abandoned an entire very large city, knowing that Salem was attacking, and knowing that the Vale authorities and the Atlas authorities weren’t enough to stop the attack on Vale that Salem wasn’t even a part of. Either they were blind and foolish, or they knew the attack would be devastating and didn’t do much of anything to stop it. Let me correct that. They actively stopped people from stopping it.

The fact that Team RWBY and co disagreed with Ironwood’s choice to abandon Mantle wasn’t my main problem, I actually like that. But they pretty much immediately abandoned Atlas themselves, which is just as bad and destroys their message of ‘you have to work to save everyone.’ They split into two groups, and the group specifically sent to help Mantle... Oh yeah, abandons it. I understand that they were trying to save Oscar and they were teenagers who were emotional, but JRY officially no longer have any moral high ground. They were fine with completely abandoning one city to save another, and then they were fine with abandoning an entire city of people to save one person. Team RWBY took the stance of ‘it’s better to send out a confusing message to everyone to warn them of danger and ask people who mostly couldn’t make it to Atlas in time to come and help us.’ This shouldn’t have ever even been on the table because at the tail end of season seven, they established Amity wasn’t nearly finished, and then pretended it was in the next season. However, they did retcon that to give RWBY and co a win. But when they manage to launch Amity, instead of doing anything to help Mantle or Atlas, three of our main characters sit and wonder if they should bother. They officially have no moral high ground. You could say they were trying to help save the world by getting the message out, but of course, you could say Ironwood was trying to save the world by getting the Relics and Maiden away from Salem’s reach, only while Ironwood was sacrificing Mantle, RWBN + Penny was abandoning Atlas and Mantle, and then when they finished their task, they did nothing more to help either city.

This isn’t a story about unity, this isn’t a story about trust, because Ironwood trusted our main heroes and they betrayed him only for the story to then frame them as Right and him as Wrong despite the fact that they don’t actually have a moral high ground in that fight, and Ruby was proven ‘right’ for their own mistrust by having the show make Ironwood a full blown child murderer. They warn the whole world that he can’t be trusted because he was doing the same thing they were doing in a way that arguably would save more lives. It’s very possible that if they were working together with Ironwood, they would be able to save everyone like Ruby wanted. But again, their group doesn’t have the high ground, because the reasons he doesn’t trust them and the reasons he tried to have them arrested are directly based on actions they did. Ruby led everyone into lying to him, and Blake and Yang went behind his back and divulged secret plans to Robyn (and she apparently wouldn’t stop talking about it.) They didn’t realize what it would lead to, but it was their actions that made James distrust them. Yes, Ironwood is also partly responsible because he wasn’t listening to them, but he’d given them the benefit of the doubt before. He’d trusted them, brought them into his plans, gave them their licenses, considered himself lucky to have them, and then they lied to him and went behind his back. This is why I actually like Yang arguing with Ruby, and I actually would’ve liked more of that. If the story was, Yang was accusing Ruby and Ren was accusing Yang and Blake, and some of them were saying they should try to reason with Ironwood and others were saying he clearly won’t listen, and Ruby was struggling to hold her own team together, it could’ve been a great consequence to the actions they took. Maybe Yang wouldn’t be being fair (since she’s lied too and let Ruby lie to Ironwood,) and maybe Ren wouldn’t be being fair (Blake and Yang were only trying to help,) and maybe it’s clear to the audience that James isn’t being receptive. But I just think that would’ve actually been more interesting than just Yang saying Ruby wasn’t that good of a leader and then dropping it and defending their track record to Ren.

Personally, I would really prefer it if this arc was centered around Team RWBY and co being confronted with consequences, but still coming out on top because (presuming that the show didn’t have James go way too far) they actually manage to break through to Ironwood eventually, helping him through his clear mental breakdown and convincing him to let them in again and join together to fight Salem back. Ruby learning that she shouldn’t have lied promotes the show’s pushed message of trust and honesty and sets Ruby apart from Ozpin (who had great reason for being wary, but still insisted that he was right to keep things from them and didn’t seem open to changing that.) Ruby and her team not trying to divide the people against a leader who’s only trying to do what’s right (again, this James wouldn’t murder people when he could’ve just arrested them,) would promote the show’s supposed narrative of unity against evil, with Team RWBY not willing to have an ‘us versus them’ perspective. And Ruby managing to talk Ironwood around and help him, thus managing the unity, furthers the ‘victory is in a simple soul’ message that the show has always tried to have. Making Ruby actually win through her emotions like they want by having her act in compassion to James would help their message, instead of retconning things to make her have a win. Having her be a leader who steps up and takes responsibility, who does unify people against Salem, and who maybe even leads the attack would make her a much more active and good protagonist. Honestly, idk if those are even good ideas. I’m just disappointed.

Just to clarify in case it wasn’t clear, 1. I’m not trying to hate on the mains. Every good character has flaws and makes mistakes, I just don’t like how the show frames them as morally superior, in the right, and totally ready to lead while ignoring the flaws. 2. I’m not saying that James is perfect. He’s a deeply flawed character and I like his gray ‘ends justify the means’ character. But his obvious PTSD and paranoia are mental problems that should be treated with more sympathy. 3. I also am not saying his actions of senseless murder and hacking Penny are alright. I think they’re horrific and actually move him out of a position where he can be redeemed (unless they really go hard to make the actions a product of a semblance or subtle mind control or something.)

[hamliet]

Who are your top 10 female villains? And your top ten male villains? Thank you!

Oooooh. Well, in this list I am including antagonists (people I see as conflicted/not committed to like, the bad side, if there even is a bad side, but basically oppose the protagonist at some point). Also, they are in no particular order:

Female Villains:

Cersei Lannister (A Song of Ice and Fire)

She's sympathetic enough so that we understand how she came to be the way she is, yet terrifying and depraved enough that we fear for the characters around her. I don't think that's an easy balance to strike for a character: if you make them likable it's hard to keep audiences from rooting for them, but the balance is struck perfectly with Cersei.

Azula (Avatar: The Last Airbender)

As @aspoonofsugar wrote recently on Azula, I think she is a fantastic female villain. I think she is sympathetic despite her actions, and I wish the story had explored her redemption, which was clearly hinted.

Claudia (The Dragon Prince)

The first three seasons have kind of been Claudia's fall. While as a whole I don't think TDP is very well-written, I do think that Claudia, Viren, and Soren's family dynamic is a polished gem of writing that literally carries the story. I fully expect to see redemption for Claudia down the line, but not until she spirals further and further. At the end of season 3, Claudia resorts to killing someone to save her father's life when she has nothing and no one else left, and she makes this choice after her brother Soren (now redeemed himself) chooses to kill their father in front of Claudia, devastating her. Their choices are clear parallels and both are somewhat negative, somewhat sympathetic. Soren can't kill his past: he has to live with it, and Claudia can't cling to the past: she has to let it go.

Delores Umbridge (Harry Potter)

She is awful and I hate her, but you're also supposed to hate her. Her comeuppance is hilarious ad perfect, and just--I think she's a fantastic villain because she reminds every single one of us of an albeit exaggerated version of a teacher we all know.

Karren von Rosewald (Tokyo Ghoul:re)

Karren is TG:re's best written character in my opinion. Her tragic arc takes place throughout the first three arcs, which imo is also the highest point in the series. Karren just wanted to be loved, and if she had to die, at least she got to die as herself. 

Nora (Noragami)

Nora! The reason I read Noragami is pretty much for Nora and her redemption arc. The fandom hates her for... reasons, but she's always been primed for redemption. Her name is in the title (which yes also refers to Yato, etc.) She's important. I wrote a few metas on Nora, notably here.

Enoshima Junko (Danganronpa)

Despair. It's fun to find a character who is, well, just plain fun, but who is also bored, despairing, cruel, and terrifying. She's unique and a brillaint character.

Toga Himiko (Boku no Hero Academia)

I'm not the first one to say that Toga is BNHA's best written female character, but I do agree that she is. She, like Junko, is fun and interesting, and she has an arc that is compelling. Her actions directly move the plot; she’s bloodthirsty and yet uniquely empathetic and compassionate. 

Yoshimura Eto (Tokyo Ghoul)

Eto's backstory and her motivations were fascinating. She was one of the most complex characters in the entire story, and despite the fact that you understood why her father gave her up, you also understood her pain and justified anger at his doing so. She perfectly illustrated the divide between human and ghoul.

Male Villains:

Shigaraki Tomura (Boku no Hero Academia)

BNHA's best-written male character, imo. His backstory and the current chapters that focus on him are extremely well-done, thematic and full of character development, and detailed artistically. He gets so much focus that I can tell he's important to Horikoshi, and I'm excited to see where he goes.

Dabi (Boku no Hero Academia)

I'll admit there's a lot missing here. Namely, we don't know his identity for certain, but it seems basically certain that he's Todoroki Touya; however, we still don't have his backstory. Still, his fury at the presumed father who destroyed his family and yet has the audacity to be a "symbol of hope" is fascinating to me, and I'm excited to see how he develops as well. (Both Shigaraki and Dabi seem primed for some kind of redemption).

Adult Trio: Illumi Zoldyck, Hisoka Morow, Chrollo Lucilfer (Hunter x Hunter)

Am I counting these three as one so that I can get extra characters? Of course I am. In all honesty I really think all three of these antagonists are really well done, sympathetic and/or likable. They're the shadows of the three MCs they foil: for Illumi, Killua, for Hisoka, Gon, and for Chrollo, Kurapika. They represent the traits the three protagonists (sorry Leorio) don't want to acknowledge in themselves, and therefore their encounters with their shadows are particularly thematic and powerful. Also, one doesn't usually kill their shadow, but instead integrates with it, so I highly doubt the three of them will be killed by their respective protagonist.

Meruem (Hunter x Hunter)

Yes, again, HxH. It has great antagonists. But Meruem's development is literally one of the most powerful I've ever read about. I don't know anyone who starts his story not loathing him, hoping he dies, and then by the end of it, ebfore you've even realized it's happening, you're crying for him and Komugi. His arc explores human nature at its finest, most horrific, and ultimately most beautiful.

Furuta Nimura (Tokyo Ghoul:re)

Furuta's a fantastic villain whom I wish got a better ending (not even redeemed really, but just... something more). He was so damaged by the system of an unfair world that he made it his life goal to become the villain and burn the system down, destroy it no matter what it took--and also hoped to destroy himself in the process, as he was born knowing he would die young and longed for it. I wish he had been forced to live.

Mori Ougai (Bungo Stray Dogs)

Mori's utilitarianism is chilling. He's not exactly unlikable, despite being absolutely morally repugnant, and the Beast AU from Asagiri himself shows us that Mori is certainly capable of a positive life and positive change; however, within the canonical story, I don't see that for him. He's been set up IMO as the final boss of the series, and his habit of targeting the most vulnerable (especially children) to control people is almost certainly going to bite Dazai in the ass eventually.

Eren Jaeger (Shingeki no Kyojin)

I can't believe I'm writing this. I don't know what to call Eren: he's the protagonist, and he's sunk to becoming the final boss. While it's possible he, like Furuta and like Lelouch of Code Geass, is playing the villain, I really hope not, as I think the themes are much more powerful if Eren sincerely believes what he proclaims to believe. He's a kid who has always wanted to fight for freedom and for the people around him, and now we're seeing the dark side of those traits, wherein he's destroying the world via genocide to save the people close to him. He's driven by fear and by anger at the cruelty and unfairness of the world, and he's forgotten the beauty of it. I hope Mikasa can  remind him before the end.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Bungo Stray Dogs)

MY BOY. Look if a character is named after my very favorite real-life author, I must stan. But actually I do think Fyodor is well written and a master manipulator. He's modeled after my favorite character in all of fiction, Dostoyesvky's Demons' Alexei Kirillov. He really seems to want human connection, to live, and has forgotten that empathy is an important and necessary part of both of those. I hope--and think it is likely given BSD's prolific redemption arcs--that he will remember eventually.

Lee Yut-Lung (Banana Fish)

Again,, he's less a villain than an antagonist. Like Ash, the main character, he is a teenage boy betrayed by the people who were supposed to protect him and abused his whole entire life. He's driven by a desperate need to be loved and jealousy that Ash is loved while he is not. His ending, when Sing finally tells him he will in fact be staying by Yut-Lung's side and will help Yut-Lung redeem himself, "because you're in pain... your soul's bleeding, even now" is literally the perfect ending for him.

Jin Guangyao (Mo Dao Zu Shi)

I've written a lot on Jin Guangyao, but he's a walking tragedy. He ties with Wei Wuxian, the protagonist, as my favorite, and the reason is because they are two sides of the same coin--in fact, they're the same side of the same coin. They're not very different, and the fact that he finally at least got empathy in the end and was able to push the person he loved most to safety because of that--well. Brb time to cry.

[wombathos]

I think I’ve figured out why Endgame frustrates me (beyond what it does to my favourite characters). It’s related to the discussion about stakes being too high. And it really boils to this: you can’t show darkness on that level if you’re not prepared to deal with the consequences.

As far as I understand it (and... I don’t, really), the film ends with the dusted characters being brought back five years after they were dusted. Which means that half of the population remembers those five years, had to live them. The other half didn’t and now has to live in a world with the consequences of that snap.

Now... look... I realised going into this film that we weren’t going to have a proper exploration of what exactly it would mean for half the population to disappear. There just isn’t the time to capture the scope of it, so all the film did was hint at it. Steve’s support group. The kid who wouldn’t answer Scott’s question. (Weirdly undercut by the reaction to Bruce - enthusiastic fans of an Avenger who failed to stop the devastation they were living with? Considering how Thanos’ name was common knowledge surely their failure would be too?) But we didn’t get much beyond that. Which is pretty frustrating, because it makes the MCU feel kind of small, with masses of civilians we are never given reason to care about unless they are directly connected to one of the protagonists. Sometimes it almost feels like the protagonists wouldn’t even care without those connections.

It’s not ideal. But I get it. I get that it’s too much, and the film was already pretty dark as it is. But then they... they didn’t completely reverse it for some vague and illogical time stream reasons. Which means that the MCU-present should be 2023, right? With all that - all that - as part of that universe’s history.

What does this mean for FFH? Half of Peter’s classmates should have graduated by now, right? Is that film going to deal with this? Unless the trailer was widely misleading, I doubt it! Even the idea that after all that they’d have a field trip to Europe and that parents who had lost their children for five years would actually let them go is a bit *head scratch*.

But beyond that... imagine how devastating those consequences would be. Imagine how many people would be utterly traumatised! Governments collapsed, much of the world presumably descended into anarchy. Food shortages (especially since half of plants/livestock were snapped, thanks Thanos), power plant failures, riots... you name a catastrophe and it probably happened somewhere. On the personal level, some people will have moved on! Imagine coming back to your partner and seeing that they’re with someone else, that your children call someone else mother/father. Imagine coming back to find out someone you love has been killed in the aftermath. Will anyone who has been gone for five years still have a job? What about that person who searches for years to reunite with their loved one only to find out they were killed when the plane they were both in crashed when the pilots got dusted? All those people were brought back to were they were - are we to assume that people started dropping from the sky (putting aside for a moment that Earth does kind of move: it wouldn’t really be the same place)?

And you can hand-wave some of those points away! Maybe Bruce used that big brain of his to make sure everyone was in a safe location, whatever. But not all of them. Maybe I massively misunderstood the ending of Endgame, and I kind of hope I did, because to be honest this ending leaves me at an utter loss. How do you go on from that with happy superhero films? Now this wouldn’t be as big a problem if Endgame had indeed been the end of the MCU. But it’s not. Setting aside prequels (like presumably the Black Widow film) and space-based adventures (like GotG3), I assume some films (like SM:FFH) will have to deal with this. And I just don’t think they can.

The thing is, you can’t have it both ways. I don’t want the next phase of MCU films to be an angsty exploration of how a temporary genocide on a universal level would affect society! That’s not what I see superhero films for! But you can’t have that there and then pretend like everything’s ~mostly~ gone back to the status quo. Don’t give us the stakes if you’re too scared to show us the fallout. IW and EG are films that demand to be taken seriously - they’re dark! they’re grown-up! the stakes are high! - but aren’t willing to go all the way with their ideas which the Russos have done before. Thanos as a character is almost begging us to be taken seriously: a comic book villain with a ludicrous motive that is nevertheless played as a tragic or at least earnest figure (there’s a whole other essay to be written about how weirdly this film understands power and its wielding). But what does any of that mean if you cannot deal with the fallout? How can we care about the lives of the people within the MCU beyond that select few? Post-Endgame Earth would essentially be a post-apocalyptic society. The MCU can’t deal with that, not really. So presumably it won’t. And that just isn’t particularly satisfying to me.

The obvious solution to this would have been to revert everything to the moment of the snap, then lie to everyone about what had happened because even knowing that half the universe had disintegrated would be ridiculously traumatising. I don’t know whether they felt that would have been too cheap, or whether they felt like they couldn’t do that with Morgan. But man... forget the protagonists, I just want to give the civilians of the MCU a break.

I will say this, though: the idea of trees just popping out of the ground at random places is kinda funny.

[pplydm]

ePUB#39

Title: The Outsider Author: Stephen King

Commenced May 24 2020 Completed May 27 2020

Slowly pushing myself to immerse in the realm of Stephen King compositions. I’ve already done “Everything’s Eventual”; it was a collection of outrageous shortish narratives of horror. MAJOR SPOILERS ahead!

“The Outsider” didn’t disappoint. It gets a substantial satisfying solid 4/5 star rating, also my very first (except Everything’s Eventual) Stephen King lengthy novel. In this read, Stephen King captures the realistic rawness of an individual’s emotion. I even categorize this as a Drama, other than genre Supernatural Horror. There were scattered risible roasting dialogues in here, from beginning to the end. An example were some slightly harassing approaches of the stereotypical police characters whether during the arrest or the witness interviews. I however took delight in the chapters embodying their POVs, specifically of the private investigator. The baseball, football and basketball features gave this a spirit of locality like as if the Flint County residents were just typical neighbors you’d spot in one’s own community. Although I myself am not into novels showcasing any sport element. The present 20th century was boldly represented by the following modern references: Huffington Post, Harlan Coben, Slenderman, etc. There was also a sighting of my personal favorite, a Hercule Poirot trademark: vital information being considered unimportant.

There is a great quantity of characters one must keep informed of in this book. Frankie and Ollie Peterson were respectively the murder victim and his brother. I presumed Ollie has emotionally recovered and now clearheaded, turns out he was just suppressing his devastation. Ralph Anderson was primarily introduced as the assigned detective and interviewer. He was the protagonist out of all the abundant personas. He has this recurring and telling memory of a bra strap which terribly confused me about its relevance. The number of times Ralph mentions how brutal Frank’s gruesome death is irritating, as if he’s actually not bothered at all. Props to Jeannie, Ralph’s wife, for supportive gestures, providing wisdom and advises; not nagging or annoying. Initially assumed the accused Terry Maitland was contending with his doppelgänger. Terry’s wife, Marcy, is one heck of an emotionally strong woman; I admire how she handled every awful news that came. They have I infer a family lawyer, Howie Gold whom is too sympathetic for a defense attorney. Here included a prosecutor named Bill Samuels. I swear I could’ve smashed his face if I meet him in real life. He has this hostile boastful remarks which definitely got me rolling my eyes. At other times, I don’t even want to read his lines. A late addition, Holly, a peculiar, colorful almost-detective personality. Exceedingly pleaded for Holly, who founded the whole concept of an outsider, to maintain appearance until the finale. Come to think of it, the heinous manner Frankie was killed couldn’t really have accomplished by any sane human. The chapter transitions are fast-paced. In Sorry (July 14th-15th) Chapter 12, I imagined these scenes visually then thought of a sitcom type from the Peterson family entering the hospital building to the part of the physician’s declaration. It was amusing, particularly the aftermath reactions of other people in the emergency room. Arriving on the Footsteps and Cantaloupe (July 18th-20th) Chapter 5, I bumped with an undoubtedly brilliant and intense description of a felo-de-se.

Questions as I read on..and the answers that I discovered in the latter

1. Why didn’t Terry immediately supplied his alibi when he was arrested and first put in the police car?

Answer: My personal opinion was probably that his trust and confidence on his fellow townmates diminished because of the public shaming.

2. Wondering why Terry seems to be the focus of this book to the point which the victim’s immediate family all died?

Answer: his side could actually be the more emotionally and spiritually damaged, especially with his ruined immaculate reputation and injustice

3. Has Peter Maitland got anything to do with murder?

Answer: Nope, didn’t even get any exposure

I watched the movie “It” both the part one and part two. Was planning on reading the book but put off because it was just too long. I found similarities between “The Outsider” and the movie ”It”.

1. The protagonist had a team with him, about 5 to 6

2. The gang is diminished by 1 to 2 character involvements apparently they were skeptic; the remaining pursues the mission

3. The mission would be to stop the perpetrator from killing again

4. Villain (mostly supernatural) uses someone (a human) to help

5. The hiding place of the baddie was underground, for this read, a previous tourist attraction cave and for “It”, the sewers

6. Both featured culture, one were Mexican frightening folktales and the other was Native American tribes

7. Two words: Child disapperances

“Just promise me you’ll stop every once in a while and acknowledge the day, honey. It’s the only one you’ll have until tomorrow.”

——^ I find this quote, encouraging and substantive

Time had passed, and time probably did heal all wounds, but some of them healed so slowly.

——^ this was just too accurate to ignore

[firstpuffin]

A look at the leading ladies in the Devil May Cry series:

I do love the Devil May Cry (DMC) series. The action is fun and over the top, the music is super engaging and the designs great. But there are absolutely some big flaws in the series and I personally feel that while the male leads are generally good to fantastic, the ladies are typically…dull.

  I was chatting with friends about the series and tried to bring this up only for them to…miss the point. Completely. And then to tease me about it. It was infuriating. Instead, I’m going to discuss it here, where I can flesh out my thoughts to my heart’s content.

  Of course as I haven’t played DMC 5 yet and I haven’t even looked at DMC: Devil May Cry (the reboot) in years I won’t be bringing them up, but I’m currently on the fourth game of my series playthrough so I can at least talk about those four.

 So let’s start by pointing out that there was a real problem with the writing of the series which they tried (and freakin’ succeeded at) to do better in the third entry, and eventually with DMC (the reboot; god that’s confusing) they tried to redo everything from scratch. DMC(.5?) was… well, it was a bad Devil May Cry game although not a bad game by itself, but the writing was worse. Really, any writing that relies on that level of sex and shock value and swearing is pretty poor. Sure, all of those have their place in writing, but it’s easy to rely too much on it, but this and DMC.5 is really a subject for another article.

  Anyway, not only did the writing improve drastically for DMC 3, but that also included the lead lady…Lady. But again, that’s for later; I wanna start with DMC 1’s Trish.

 Devil May Cry wasn’t all that close to what it would become, especially given that it was originally a part of the Resident Evil franchise that was rejected but ended becoming a standalone game. And you can tell. It’s noticeable through the sound design and the aesthetic of the game, as well as the fact that Dante is pretty much a dull Leon Kennedy.

  Basically the game starts like this: Dante is at his store, the titular Devil May Cry, when Trish who looks “exactly” (not very much) like Dante’s dead mother, drives her bike into the front door, stabs him and hucks the bike at him.

  Then she dumps exposition on us and away they go to this mysterious island, yadda yadda ya. It’s not very interesting and neither is she. She is literally the inciting incident and love interest. She betrays him, saves him, appears to die… but this isn’t character. These are all token events to add drama to the story and that at most say that she is a troubled character who overcomes life-long conditioning, but that’s about it.

 Let’s move on because there really isn’t much to say about her. Next is Lucia who… could easily be no more than a paragraph. DMC 2 was outsourced, presumably because Capcom didn’t realise how much the fans loved the first game, and it was a travesty.

Dante, who was already short on personality, had his cockiness mostly removed and zero agency, repeatedly relying on a coin flip. The story was a series of loosely connected events, connected by poor dialogue and made confusing by out of the blue statements that make no sense. The only good points were Dante’s outfit, and Lucia’s Devil Trigger. Oh, and the music was pretty good.

  Lucia herself was a very typical example of an early 2000’s love interest: watch almost any action movie from the time period and honestly, you have a prime example of Lucia, the story points and how they attempt to make things dramatic. Seriously, watch Mission Impossible 2.

-Lucia and her Devil Trigger-

Yes, yes, YEAH!! Onto my favourite lady-lead.

-Lady-

  Yes, I should calm down. I’ve just finished DMC 3 again and my adult brain got so much more out of it than my teenage brain. There is emotional depth and complexity, characters with character and- damn. It’s just so good.

  Yes, Lady dresses a bit like a stripper, but it’s also pretty practical (I frequently struggle with trousers that limit movement so I understand). More importantly, she doesn’t act as sexual as Trish and where Lucia is boring Lady just isn’t. But she isn’t a perfect person either.

  She’s determined to kill all demons but she clearly won’t stop there; she shoots Dante before she even knows that he’s a demon. Lady is angry and she lashes out, but it’s also easy to see how vulnerable she is and how hard she works.

  Lady was betrayed by her father (Arkham) who killed her mother and he is currently her primary target, but when she finds him already dead she is devastated. Then he wakes up, confesses to her that he was being used and she actually believes him. She shouldn’t have.

  Arkham was using her again, but that’s not the point. The point is that she so desperately doesn’t want to hate her father, thus falling for his lies. It’s touching and tragic, and when she finally kills him her laughter turns to crying and then laughter again. Her emotions are a mess.

  Which especially makes the fact that while she eventually gives in and lets Dante help, she doesn’t turn into his girl. She rejects his kiss assuredly but without vehemence. Lady is an emotional mess and yet doesn’t leap into our charismatic hero’s arms. More stories need this because it’s kinda boring at this point.

-this, this is straight up sexualised-

 And Kyrie. Wow. Kyrie is just… wow.

  She could literally be replaced with a photograph in a wallet. Kyrie is there as motivation for our protagonist, Nero. She gets kidnapped some way through the game but that barely matters.

-at least she dresses modestly; I can appreciate that in a video game lady-

 Devil May Cry is not a deep, complex series, apparently reaching its peak in these areas in the third entry, but the characters are usually pretty good, as long as they have a penis hanging between their legs.

[gailynovelry]

Writeblr Life Week — Characters

So, I am of the firm belief that a character that doesn’t serve the needs of the story needs to be axed immediately. So while my Shadow Herald series has a lot of named characters, most of them appear more than once, and their relationships string out as a complicated spider-web mesh of trust and mistrust, protection and vengeance.

It’s easiest for me to sort the characters of Shadow Herald into factions with their opposing wants and needs.

Firstly, you have the gods. They tend to dictate the factions farther down the line.

Gardhe: The sun god, and an arrogant bastard who killed 99% of the other gods so that he could be the sole god of Rhimn. He rules Gadhi. As the fei were an accidental consequence of him killing the other gods, he’s annoyed that they exist in the first place.

The Romne: are the twin gods of the seasons, and are aligned with the fei. Fraihz is the god of winter. Thah is the god of summer. They’re not really fighters, but they are the most patient gods, and use their gifts of prophecy to calculate their next moves.

Alluari: Goddess of the moon and the rain. She rules over Ullua, the desert. She survived Gardhe’s genocidal whims by being his equal in combat, and despite resenting him, has brokered a peace treaty with him so that Ullua and Gadhi can trade with each other.

Silamir: The long-presumed-dead goddess of death, rebirth, and wine. She spent an awful lot of time trapped within the confines of her two remaining temples, and she spent most of it

The Irongardhe are the ruling order of Gadhi. They’re more or less the main antagonists.

Regent Elaina: Gardhe’s Herald. A Herald is more or less a god’s sole high priest. They’re like a queen on a chessboard — powerful to weild, and devastating to lose. She lives in Gadhi’s capital, Talimour, but if she didn’t have so many political obligations, she would be hunting down Vaerin and weeding out the fei herself.

Atevia and Jeidhe: Two of the many knighted nobles that serve the Regent.

There are some Gadhian citizens that aren’t directly Irongardhe or revolutionaries in the Shadow War (Or not at first, anyway).

Ma & Evain Crimsworth: Crislie’s family.

Inkantik: The closest thing Vaerin has to a grandparent. Has a long and rich history as a denounced nobleman, but for the moment, he works as a florist. He also runs a safe house for fei to stay at, either because they’re hiding from the Irongardhe or because they desperately need to be smuggled out of Talimour.

Courtfather Snow: Runs the Frostbiters, one of the feirie Courts that do their best to survive Talimour’s slums. He and Mepari are… at odds, to put it mildly.

Gilde: Mepari’s sibling and Snow’s favorite kid. Kind of a jerk, kind of charming, runs on constant improv mode.

Charlan: A shopkeeper in the Reaches. Tries to get along with every Court at once, and somehow succeeds. Taught Mepari how to read.

There are also the revolutionaries and neutral parties. I can list them, but most don’t pop up in the first book, and I can’t give much detail without spoiling the books after Shadow Herald.

Revolutionaries: Ainzel, Morekai, The Crone (Thah’s Herald), the Wolfmaster, Russet.

Neutral Parties: The Matrius (Alluari’s Herald and ruler of Ullua), Prince Alaezel, Photesie (?).

Good Creatures: Daughi (a direwolf), Lankie (also a direwolf), Lethos (weird little albino crow)

Lastly, that leaves us our protagonists — Vaerin, Crislie, and Mepari.

Vaerin, The Shadow Herald: Vaerin wants a sense of personal agency, and freedom from the mysterious voice in her head. She desperately needs some rest and respite after all she’s been dragged through. At the same time, she is resigned to the fact that this rest is not coming anytime soon. It makes her a bit bitter and complacent at times. Due to Silamir’s invasive influence, she has her fair share of intimacy issues, and worries faintly about being too weak to deserve survival. There’s no end to her dry-witted jabs. Caution is her game, but despite that, she possesses a keen sense of empathy.

Crislie Crimsworth: Crislie is an in-the-moment person who wants a bit of adventure and to see the world. She loathes the idea of being tied to one place or path in life, and while she lives with the vague notion that most people are pleasant folk until proven otherwise, she suspects there is some exciting evil out there for her to vanquish. If there’s anything out there that she hasn’t seen, she wants to see it. She is generally upbeat and often oblivious to the consequences of thrusting herself into danger up until they smack her in the face — a fact that worries Vaerin to no end. She would fight a god if she could.

Mepari of the Frostbiters: Mepari has an independent nature spurred on by a history of taking care of himself in the absence of anyone to personally parent him. Despite his protests otherwise, he really does desire platonic intimacy and emotional warmth. Unfortunately, the ‘intimacy-wanting’ thing doesn’t jive well with the guarded atmosphere of the Reaches, where anyone could suffer a bad encounter with the Irongardhe any day. This Mep is snarky, world-weary, and yet still childish in certain ways — his sense of justice is keen and absolute.

Because of my “minimal character” philosophy all my side-stories have very few characters, especially since they are all stand-alones and not very far along in their process.

Mind Hive has Avery, the main character, Bruce and Natalia, the secondary mains, Vertigo the AI, Avery and Bruce’s unnamed families, and by technicality, the various groups which are hunting Avery down for their own agendas.

She Sells Seashells really only has the main characters, Zuri and Melusine.

Coliseum has only Vev, Fern, and the Sorcerer King that stands against them.

[argentdandelion]

Cross-Fandom Analysis: “I’m Bad, and That’s Good”

Or, “How to Not Die by Falling into Not-Lava”.

Thesis: Ralph’s speech of “I’m bad, and that’s good. I will never be good, and that’s not bad. There’s no one I’d rather be...than me.” also applies to W.D. Gaster of Handplates, but in an opposite moral direction.

(For simplicity’s sake, this article will not be considering the sequel Ralph Wrecks the Internet)

Ralph Context

Ralph: “Sure must be nice, being the good guy.” Ralph: “Here’s the thing. I don’t want to be the bad guy anymore.” Clyde (the orange ghost in Pac-Man): “Ralph, Ralph. We get it. But we can’t change who we are. The sooner you accept that, the better off your game and your life will be.”

History

In the film Wreck-it Ralph, Ralph, who's been the "bad guy" of a Donkey Kong-esque arcade game for decades, doesn't want to be the "bad guy" any more. He's tired of getting defeated by his game's protagonist, Fix-it Felix, over and over and being excluded and not appreciated by everyone in his game. He doesn’t seem to have any friends; when he shows up to Bad Anon at the film’s beginning, it’s his first time.

In his game, Felix gets a medal for his heroism after defeating Ralph; to prove he can be a good guy, Ralph ventures to another game to get himself a medal. In the process, he accidentally brings a mindless killer robot to the helpless game Sugar Rush. Though thought destroyed, the robot actually survived and multiplied underground. He also loses his newfound medal, and in his quest to get it back, he befriends one of Sugar Rush's characters: Vanellope.

Motives

Ralph’s bad-guy status was externally-imposed: he was created for the role of being the bad guy in an arcade game, and the game literally puts words in his mouth to accomplish this. Refusing to play out his role or even just leaving his game for too long comes with the risk of making the arcade game seem broken, and if people think it's broken, it will be unplugged and its characters will become homeless; therefore it is selfish.

Ralph’s initial motives are selfish. The other characters in the game Wreck-it Ralph don’t believe he can ever get a medal because he’ll never be any more than a bad guy. When he gets a medal (by basically cheating rather than earning it), he figures he’ll come back to the admiration of the other game characters.

Execution of Motives

While Ralph’s initial motives for helping Vanellope are selfish, (he wants his hero’s medal back and helping Vanellope win a race will do it) he nonetheless does some kind, altruistic (arguably heroic) things to help Vanellope even before he gets his medal back.

When the other Sugar Rush characters harass Vanellope and tear apart her homemade cart, Ralph (who doesn’t even like her, at this point) charges down and scares the other racers off. He’ll get the medal back if Vanellope wins a race, but Vanellope doesn’t have a car or some place to practice. So he uses his super-strength to break into a car-making minigame facility and help Vanellope make a car, and also creates a racetrack for her to practice on.

Later, he unexpectedly gets his medal back before Vanellope races. the film’s antagonist also tricks him into believing that if Vanellope does win a race, Sugar Rush’s plug will be pulled, causing everyone to flee the game and become homeless game characters. Yet, Vanellope, as a glitch, cannot escape her game: she’ll die.

Ralph thus wrecks Vanellope’s cart so she can’t race, avoiding the outcome that will result in her death. (The scene is emotionally devastating; the author still always fast-forwards through that scene.) Later on, he breaks into prison to rescue Felix, the hero of the game Wreck-it Ralph, for Felix’s magic hammer can fix anything and thus can reassemble the remains of Vanellope’s car.

Speech Interpretation

At the film’s climax, Ralph learns a mindless killer robot (a Cy-Bug) he accidentally brought in from another game survived the crash of the escape pod that brought him to Sugar Rush. Not only that, but it multiplied into a massive army, in a game where there are no built-in controls to its spread. Vanellope, as a glitch character, cannot escape Sugar Rush. The film’s villain holds Ralph high in the air, trying to get him to watch Vanellope die. That’s when Ralph realizes he’s above a mountain of Mentos and lava-like diet cola. He escapes the villain’s clutches, intending to punch the entire layer of Mentos in the mountain into the boiling diet cola: the eruption would draw the Cy-Bugs in like moths to a flame and destroy them.

When Ralph is falling to his (presumed) death, it’s likely he believes he’s brought a lot of suffering onto Vanellope, such as bringing a Cy-Bug in (accidentally) and breaking her cart to start with. It’s likely he believes his sacrifice is the only way to save her.

Therefore, Ralph’s interpretation of the Bad Guy Affirmation would be: “I’ve messed up, and I’m doomed to be a villain. I accept that. At least Vanellope cares about me [he looks at his candy medal during this line], and this is the only thing I can do to save her.”

Handplates Context

Gaster: “It does not matter if they [the test subjects] can understand. It does not matter what they look like, or if they can think, or what they feel.” Gaster: “To even consider...[abandoning the experiment and raising the test subjects more-or-less normally]...such selfish sentimentality gets people killed. There is only one choice.”

History

In the Undertale fan comic Handplates (by Zarla-s), monsters were sealed underground with a magical barrier after losing a war millennia ago. When his son was killed by humans, Asgore, king of the monsters, declared war on humanity. He declared that any humans who fell into monsters’ underground realm would be killed, and their souls used to break the magical barrier keeping them all underground. However, Asgore is a kind pushover of a king, who once adopted human child himself. Going through with his declaration causes him a lot of emotional suffering. To ease his pain, the royal scientist W.D. Gaster tries to find some way to break or bypass the barrier without having the king kill any humans.

To this end, he cut out disks of bone from his hands to grow into “living tools” for his experiments. Yet, they unexpectedly became sentient monster children, causing some ethical problems.

W.D. Gaster, in some ways, is the opposite of Ralph. Though his whole family (and all other skeletons) were killed off in the war, he was de facto adopted by King Asgore and Queen Toriel, who loved him very much. He grew up to be a scientist, and helped the whole Underground with his inventions. Indeed, he gained the singularly esteemed position of royal scientist, with immense resources for whatever project he needed.

However, like Ralph, W.D. Gaster has very few friends. While he’s been alive for thousands of years (Ralph’s been alive for 30), he seems close to only three people: Alphys, Asgore, and Toriel. (and for most of the comic, he believes Toriel is dead)

Motives

W.D. Gaster’s bad-guy status was internally-imposed. Nobody is making him do cruel things. In fact, nobody other than himself and his test subjects even know he’s doing cruel things. He believes he is the only person who can do what he thinks must be done, for the greater good, so his motives are initially altruistic. While his devotion to Asgore and willingness to suffer for monsterkind’s sake is admirable, the way he goes about it is definitely a bad guy thing.

In contrast to Ralph, W.D. Gaster’s initial motives weren’t selfish. He wanted to free all monsters from their underground realm and soothe Asgore’s suffering however he could. Nobody considered him a “bad guy”: he was already admired and had people who cared about him.

Execution of Motives

After a brief period of a more-or-less happy childhood/toddler-hood (Gaster was emotionally unavailable, but not hostile), Gaster believed his “objectivity” was “at risk of being compromised”. He drilled in metal plates into the test subjects’ hands, starting a long chain of very painful experiments. Sometimes, he would perform these experiments not to serve his greater, ostensibly noble goal, but for no other reason than his own curiosity. (e.g., breaking one of Papyrus’s bones to see how long it would take to heal) Indeed, while he told himself he would do what he needed to do (including very painful experiments), sometimes his cruelty (e.g., not giving anesthesia) just isn’t pragmatic.

Speech Interpretation

Therefore, Gaster’s interpretation of the Bad Guy Affirmation would be: “I am, and am doomed to be, callous, unloving, and unworthy of love in turn, but that is good: it means I am able to do whatever is necessary to remove Asgore's need to kill again, and free monsterkind. My actions are unforgivable, but I have no choice to turn away from this course: in the end monsters will be freed, and I am willing to accept any punishment afterward for that goal. I do what I must, because I am the only one who can.”

Final Comparison and Results

(Ralph gets cake. Gaster not only does not get cake, but is erased from reality and forgotten by everyone.)

Both have an extended falling sequence into not-lava: lava-like boiling diet cola for Ralph, and magic “lava” (it’s unclear) in a power plant for Gaster. Both have someone who knows them well trying to save them during this sequence; for Ralph, it’s Vanellope, and for Gaster, it’s one of his test subjects, Papyrus (2-P).

Vanellope uses her glitch powers to glitch through the walls of the mountain on her cart, saving Ralph. (Incidentally, Ralph helped her with her glitch powers and cart driving.) Papyrus (called 2-P) tries to save Gaster from falling into the not-lava using gravity-altering blue magic. However, Gaster told him earlier that if he and his brother ever tried to use blue magic on him, they’d be severely punished, and Gaster proceeds to “demonstrate” by breaking quite a lot of Papyrus’s bones. This experience makes Papyrus hesitate, and so he’s too late to save Gaster.

Yet, despite sharing these similarities, their motives, character development, and actions are almost the opposite of each other. Ralph fell to begin with out of a heroic sacrifice to save Vanellope, while Gaster fell because one of his test subjects, Sans (1-S), who resented him for his cruelty, shoved him off a catwalk in the power plant. This, while the Bad Guy affirmation applies to both of them equally, one shows the descent of a “good guy” into villainy, and another shows the ascent of a “bad guy” into heroism.

[hippychick006]

14.18 - Absence Recap

I’m putting this recap under a cut. I’ve tried to cut it down, but nope, I have a lot to say about this episode.  It’s highly critical so if you are a fan of Dabbernatural, you most definitely want to keep moving down your dash.  Nothing to see here, the show is absolutely wonderful, carry on with your day...

Note, if I talk about Dabb’s writing, I mean him being in overall charge of the quality of writing as show runner, even though another writer might have written the episode I’m criticising.  I’m not fully blaming the writers because they have no clear direction with Dabb as showrunner.

Positives are the brother moments, though I definitely felt that Jared and Jensen were struggling a little to find the emotion in this episode – which contrasts with the emotion of episodes like Lebanon where it came more naturally.   Rowena is always a positive addition to an episode, and even though I talk about Jack being over utilised in my post, I still love my nougat eating Nephilim. Can we keep him and just send him off to Stanford and have him back for the holidays?

I’m struggling with the show right now.  My mind is “helpfully” supplying that we have 22 episodes and counting until there’s no more new Sam and Dean content, and episodes like this, that are so far beneath the - admittedly high - bar set by Kripke are just depressing to watch.  I’ve made no secret that Dabb is the worst showrunner to ever happen to Supernatural (I would have said any show, but I mistakenly started to watch Quantico a few weeks ago, so he’s been elevated recently).  Even by Dabb’s standards though, this episode is epically bad.   And it’s bad for so many reasons.

I had a quick look back at Dabb’s writing to see if he’s perhaps a better writer than a showrunner.  IMO, he’s had more misses than hits since joining the show in Season 4. Hits include: Yellow Fever, Dark side of the Moon, Red Meat and Lebanon (though I wouldn’t put Lebanon in the league of the other 3 personally, it was a great Season 14 episode, but stacked up against others, it falls down the list).  Misses include 2 failed pilots: Bloodlines and Wayward sisters, plus many others.   He’s capable of good writing obviously, I just believe he’s lazy and tries to please the online fandom too much, completely forgetting that fandom is an incredibly small part of the overall viewing audience.   He should write for the story first and foremost, only giving the odd nod to fandom, not allowing it to completely overtake – and in my opinion - completely ruin the story being told.

As showrunner, he’s started and dropped many plot lines (several of them running at the same time so you experience whip lash while viewing).  He kills characters for shock value and brought long dead characters back for the same reasons.  He’s then proceeded to butcher those characters (or ruin their earlier arc) until they are unrecognisable from the characters you loved.  He steals plot lines and ruins them, his dialogue includes ridiculous levels of pandering.  The show has too much drama, people constantly dying and there’s no fun anymore. When they try to do funny, it just falls flat, because they can’t write comedy in the same way as someone like Ben Edlund.

His biggest missteps though have been the forced pushing of “found family” onto a general audience that was watching the show for the unique bond between the siblings.  Making Supernatural about “family” is just making Supernatural the same as every other show out there.  The bond between the brothers is actually what made the show unique and special. Now it isn’t any more and the magic it had has been, not lost entirely, but heavily watered down under Dabb’s incompetence.  

His other misstep has been too much focus on other characters that are not Sam or Dean.  Seriously, I’m one of the people that likes Jack, but he’s had far too much focus this season (almost like they’re making a lame, last ditch attempt to try to get a character worth a spin off for this show).  No longer whispers into the void but screams until I’m hoarse: PEOPLE ARE WATCHING FOR SAM AND DEAN YOU DUMBASS HACK, FUCKING WRITE WITH THEM AS THE CENTRE OF YOUR FOCUS AND NOT REDUCE THEM TO PRETTY FURNITURE!

For those of you that might come back with “But J2 want time off…” I acknowledge this, but I’ll come right back and point out that J2 are in the episodes, it’s just not about them and that is the problem, not the time off.  As mentioned, I loved Jack in Season 13, now I don’t really care about him because he’s had too much of the story be about him, as if he’s the protagonist of the show and not Sam and Dean.  

Anyway, on to the episode.

We recap on Mary badgering Jack and watching it again annoyed me just as much as the episode last week.  Definitely slapped in the face with the stupid stick.  When someone is out of control, you humour them and give them space. You don’t constantly badger them, making things worse – particularly if you witnessed said being lose control and charbroil to death another human (a very bad, murdery human, but still a human).  And I don’t actually blame Mary, it’s simply bad writing, because if you want something to happen to get to the position you want to be in, write it better. Don’t make a character suddenly stupid in order to achieve it.  Unfortunately, as I mentioned on another post, Dabb is a very lazy writer.  He wants to get to point B and doesn’t care how stupid he makes his characters in order to get there.  

Sam and Dean arrive home, immediately calling for ‘mom’ and ‘Jack’.   Sam looks longer than Dean who is already sitting down with a beer when Sam returns from searching the bunker.  They share a toast to “another miraculous Sam Winchester survival.”  Dean: “Gotta say man, if Jack hadn’t have healed you…” Dean trails off and I try not to think of the consequences, particularly with how devastated Dean was during the few seconds he lost Sammy yet again. Dean reflects they’d be “up the creek without that kid.”

Jack’s all right as long as he’s saving Sammy and killing bad guys.  Got it.

Dean brings his phone out to try mom’s cell.  Sam brings his own phone out, presumably to try Jack. When Dean connects to Mary’s cell, they hear a buzzing and see Mary’s bag with her cell phone and keys on the other end of the map table.  Both start to get a little worried.

Sam says he’ll try Jack.  We switch to Jack and hear the phone ringing, but he doesn’t answer. He seems to be in shock.

Fast forward an indeterminate time and our boys have tried everyone; Jody, Donna, Charlie, Bobby, Rowena.  Nada from most of them, but Rowena is a little more helpful and might have a spell that can track Jack and Mary down.  Just as I’m wondering if Castiel was on their list, Dean’s phone rings, Sam looks hopefully at Dean (that it’s either Jack or Mary) but Dean shakes his head.  He answers the phone without putting it on speaker and it is indeed Castiel, who got Dean’s message that Nick was trying to raise Lucifer.  Dean updates Castiel that “the kid” says he took care of him, and they are just trying to find him and Mary at the moment.  Castiel: “Are they together?”  Dean: “Yeah.”  Castiel: “Alone?” Dean’s got no idea what Castiel is on about, he answers that yes, they are together, alone. Sam is only hearing one side of the conversation and wants to know what Cass is saying.   I have no idea why Dean doesn’t put the phone on speaker (I am however 100% certain it has nothing to do with non-existent Destiel), it just seems weird not to put it on speaker as they normally would, and there’s no obvious reason not to do so.  Dean knows Castiel is holding something back and says, “If you’ve got something to tell us, now is the time.”   Castiel explains about Jack using his powers to kill Felix the snake.  “I was gonna tell you but…”  

Urgh, how many times must we suffer through this?  This is Castiel’s role on the show: try to fix a problem without telling Sam and Dean, because he doesn’t want to worry them. It leads to something bad happening.  They find out, Dean is angry and wants no more to do with him, while Sam defends Castiel.  Rinse and repeat.   It’s manufactured drama and it’s bad writing, because if you are a decent writer, you can get drama within an episode without this.  And the thing is, Dabb wrote Red Meat, loads of drama in that episode, none of it manufactured, so he can do it.   Baby, Regarding Dean are other examples from recent years. Not a single one of these had manufactured drama, all absolutely fantastic episodes.

Castiel tells Dean he doesn’t think Jack is well.  Dean puts the phone down on him.  And thousands of anti Cass fans rejoice, and we will enjoy our few seconds of rejoicing even knowing that Sammy will at some point (probably this episode) vouch for Castiel as he has done many times in the past (undeservingly so imo – how many times is Sam going to say ‘it’s Cass’ before he stops getting a free pass and changes his behaviour?)  

Dean brings Sam up to speed about Jack, and Sam has an idea for finding him. He uses the “find phone” app to discover Jack is in Nepal. As they watch, Jack suddenly jumps to Lima, Peru.  Sam makes the genius (not really) observation that Jack must be flying.  They watch as Jack jumps again to Paris, France, and then Madagascar.  Dean: “What the hell is he doing?”

It’s night and we hear a flap of wings and Jack slumps onto the ground.  He stumbles to get up, then checks his phone, he has 10 missed calls, 7 voicemails, and several missed texts, all from Sam, Dean and Castiel. Interestingly, the most communication is from Dean, but I headcanon that a large part of that is Dean leaving messages: “Where the hell are you, Sammy’s worried sick!”

We see a flashback between Jack and Mary where Mary says what he did was amazing (in dealing with one of the AU angels – can’t remember which one – Zachariah I think, but he was wearing a different meat suit than normal).  The flashback ends and we see something appear in the dark behind Jack.  It’s Nick, though it’s not Nick.  His eyes flash red and I worry for a second that Lucifer is actually back, but no, he’s Jack’s sub-conscious.  Taps chin in puzzlement.  Where have we seen a similar storyline before, with this exact same character, hmmm?

Nick tells Jack that he can’t come back from killing Mary.  Jack: “It was an accident!”  Nick: “Okay, tell Sam and Dean that, I’m sure they’ll understand, it’s not like family isn’t everything to them.”   Jack zaps Nick, telling him to shut up.  

Oh, if only it were that easy, kiddo.

Sam and Dean are driving to somewhere – presumably still tracking Jack’s cell phone signal. Sam tells Dean that Cass is going to meet them there.  Dean doesn’t answer.   Sam tries to defend Jack, saying that maybe he wasn’t able to stop Nick from raising Lucifer and Lucifer took them both… “and Jack, he must have thought he was helping, you know, being kind.”  

Dean (and me, puzzled): What?

Sam: With Felix.

Dean (annoyed): “Really, with the snake?”  

Sam: I’m just saying, Dean, I’m trying to understand Jack without a soul

Dean (very annoyed now): We don’t know that he doesn’t have a soul!  Okay, I don’t wanna… let’s… let’s not talk about it, all right... let’s just find mom, find Jack and we’ll figure it all out.”

Sam’s tablet indicates they’ve lost Jack’s signal, but they still head to where Jack was last, which is the cabin where Nick was killed.  Very dramatic music as they head in there.  The music is another thing that has annoyed me this season, it overpowers scenes rather than compliments them, it’s very distracting.  Please stop it, because I’m not three years old and can understand perfectly well when I’m supposed to find something dramatic and when I’m not.

Sam looks inside the cabin, while Dean looks outside.  Sam therefore is the one to come across Nick’s body.  He shouts for Dean who doesn’t hear him (though last week heard him perfectly well from quite a distance).  Dean comes across a spot outdoors which is covered in ash.  He’s either just lucky he came across it, or he was tracking Jack and Mary’s path.  Dean’s an outstanding hunter, let’s go with tracking.  Sam soon joins him (also an outstanding hunter) and it’s clear they both seem to believe something bad happened at that spot.  

Cass is in the car and he’s arrived at the cabin.  He doesn’t go in.  We see a flashback to where he was hunting with Mary.  Jack having a flashback I understand, but Castiel has no reason to suspect that Mary is dead, only missing at this stage, so why is he having a flashback? Also, as other people have pointed out, this flashback of him hunting with her couldn’t have happened within the timeline. Lazy idiots that can’t keep track of the story!  Upshot of their completely fake scene is that Castiel says he’s glad she’s back and that Sam and Dean are happy, “Finally they don’t have to be so alone.”    Mary answers: “Castiel, they were never alone.” No, they weren’t Mary, because they always had each other and that’s all either of them needs.  Other people are nice to have, but not necessary to eithers continued existence.  Whispers: platonic soulmates.

Now, if Dabb meant that line to mean that they were never alone because they had Castiel, I look up the facts.  Dean was 30 before Castiel dropped into their lives, he was 37 before Dabb started forcing him into the narrative as “family/brother” when in actual fact between the years of 30-37, he was rarely around, and they only called him when they wanted something. Over the last three years, he hasn’t exactly been a constant in their lives, no matter how much Dabb has tried to shoehorn him in to please the 1%ers at the expense of the general viewing audience and a decent storyline.

Moving on, Castiel finally gets out the car to go inside the cabin.  

Sam covers Nick with a blanket.  He’s worried. Dean tries to reassure Sam that they don’t know what happened, they don’t know what Nick did, he probably deserved it.  Sam somewhat agrees Nick deserved it, but not in that way.

Sam updates Castiel on Nick and a “blast spot” behind the house that looks angelic, only bigger. Dean is turned away during this, giving Castiel the cold shoulder.   He does chip in at one point though;

Dean: It might have been Lucifer, Nick was trying to bring him back  

Sam: Yeah, but Jack said…

Dean: I don’t care what Jack said!  We don’t know what happened, but I swear, if he did something to her, if she is…

Sam sighs and Dean turns to Castiel, “then you’re dead to me.”

Hold on, I need a moment.  

“Then you’re dead to me.”

Sam: Dean…

Hold on another moment, while I speak to Sam in private about defending Castiel yet again. This is what I was afraid of, he always defends Castiel and Castiel is not learning anything. He makes the same mistakes over and over because he doesn’t deal with the consequences of his actions.  Slaps Sam in the face with a parenting book that helped me enormously during the teenage years.

Dean: “No, he knew, he knew something was wrong with the kid, he knew it and he didn’t tell us. He didn’t even tell us!”

Sam says nothing (good, our little chat worked then).

Castiel: I was scared, I believed in Jack for so long, I... believed that he was good, I knew that he would be good for the world, he was good for us, my faith in him, it never wavered, and then I saw what he did.  It wasn’t malice, it wasn’t evil, it was like Jack saw a problem and in his mind he just solved it with that snake…

Dean (angry):  the snake? [he’s seriously getting annoyed that everyone keeps bringing up the snake]

Castiel (talking to Dean’s back): What he did wasn’t bad, it was the absence of good and I saw that in him, but we were a family (family mention alert for those of you playing dabbernatural bingo!) and I didn’t want to lose that, so I thought I could... fix it on my own, felt like it was my responsibility, so I left, and I didn’t tell you.  If I could go back and just… just talk to him right then and there, I would, but I can’t Dean.  I failed you and I failed Jack.  And I failed…

Dean (turns around): No, no, Don’t even say it, don’t even say her name!  

Dean steps towards Castiel, but Sam steps forward and puts his hand out with a quiet “Dean.”

I’m not sure what I’m supposed to feel during this scene. Sad, I presume?  I just feel pissed that we are having to suffer through incredibly bad writing that has Castiel screwing up yet again, by going off on his own, yet again, and I’m going to have to suffer through some more puke inducing dialogue at some stage in the very near future that will have Dean apologising and all will be right with the world.  Totally fed up with Castiel being used as nothing more than a plot point, I don’t even like the character, but no one deserves that.  Bad, lazy writing that shows he has no purpose to the show and that he no longer fits and hasn’t for a long time.

Sam’s phone rings, it’s Rowena and at least Sam knows how his speakerphone works.  Sam’s really upset as he answers.   Rowena updates that she’s tried to find Jack, but his energy is too unstable. Sam: “And mom?”  We see Rowena close her eyes and not answer.  Dean orders: “Say it” and Rowena says, “I don’t know what happened, or where she is, but I can tell you with certainty, Mary Winchester is no longer on this earth”

Dean closes his eyes, we switch to Sam and then Castiel (rolls eyes because getting his reaction is pandering, because sure, let’s not waste footage by focusing on the two that are actually her sons).  We get a minute of watching Sam and Dean, and can I just say how brilliant these two are. I mean I have no feelings at all towards Mary, Dabb completely screwed over her character and did nothing to make me care about her in any way, so I don’t feel anything towards her.  But I do feel for Sam and Dean here, but only because of Jared and Jensen’s acting in this scene.

Dean’s quiet for a few seconds, then he breaks a chair.  Sam flinches as he does with loud noises and someone needs to get my poor baby some help for that PTSD he’s been carrying around for the last few years.  

Sam (to Dean): So, what do we do?

This isn’t Sam Winchester, the hunter, this is Sam Winchester, the little brother, looking to his big brother to have some answers, because he’s completely lost.

Dean: What we always do when we lose one of our own, we fight, we fight to bring them back.

Wait, what? Seriously?  Are we retconning that narrative now too?  I’m starting to suspect that Dabb hates the special bond and his personal mission has been to break it. Kripke we need you back, stat!!!! An untalented petty little man is ruining your legacy!

Sam asks “How… Billie? Dean says Rowena, she’s got the book of the damned and can resurrect Mary.  Cass says they don’t even know where your mother is.  

Dean (angry): Then go to heaven and find her!

In direct contrast to Mary last week, Sam knows how to deal with someone on edge.  He knows when to keep quiet and he does as Dean walks out, telling Sam to tell Rowena that they are on their way.

Rowena is working on something when the boys arrive.  But it’s not the boys, its Jack.  He admits he killed Mary, but it was an accident.  He asks for her help, but Rowena says the magic she uses on herself, only works if it’s prepared in advance (i.e. before death).  Jack asks about the book.  Rowena says there is a spell, and starts to talk about it, but when Sam and Dean arrive, Jack realises that Rowena has been stalling.  Jack disappears with Rowena, just as Sam kicks down the door – which was hot by the way.

Castiel is at the children’s sandpit that leads to heaven.  No one is guarding it, he calls for Naomi.

Jack and Rowena appear in the bunker, Jack passes an area on the wood floor which has marks on it. He has a flashback which shows a knife being thrown into the floor.  Mary is teaching him knife skills.  He keeps dropping the knife,  Mary tells him he’s doing well though.  Jack says when they get Dean back, Dean is going to kill him (for the holes in the bunker floor).  Mary pulls the table over to cover the marks and says, “For what?”

This is a cute moment, and this is another thing I hate about Dabb.  The writers are capable of writing characters, they just choose not to do it until they need to go for a cheap moment like Mary dying.  It’s just bad writing.  If they had done their job properly, all of these would have been real flash backs to real moments and we would all be genuinely sad (or kind of sad, given that Dabb has also ruined the meaning of death). 

We see Sam arrive and he hangs back until Jack leaves, which concerns me that he’s avoiding Jack. Also, Bearded!Sam alert – when was this filmed?!  He asks Mary how Jack’s training is going.  He tells her he feels bad as he doesn’t feel he’s been there for Jack since he’s been so busy looking for Dean.  Sam apologises for laying his problems on her.  Mary: “No, are you kidding, it’s nice knowing I’m not the only one.  [Sam frowns] with parental guilt.”  She tells him that parenting is always a struggle, you always feel like you are failing, then you look at them and somehow, they’re amazing, somehow they’re literally… [Mary grabs Sam’s chin because he looked away]… the bravest, kindest, most heroic men on the planet.

Right, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, if this had been a real flashback, and death hadn’t been cheapened by Dabb, I’d have been very upset right about now if this had been the version that Mary had been allowed to develop into. Where tf was this when we were getting the crap we’ve been getting?  As it is, I feel nothing – actually not true, I feel very angry at how crap Dabb is and what he’s done to my show.

Actually, the one bit I liked about this, which I mentioned in a separate post, was the flashback that Jack was having led into the flashback that Sam is having, and I like that transition between them.  

Anyway, back at Rowena’s and Dean’s still angry.  Jack’s got Rowena and the Book of the Damned and they’ve got no way of keeping up with Jack when he’s got wings.    Sam’s a good brother and stays quiet, just letting Dean get it off his chest.

Dean is still pissed at Cass and says he should have told them as soon as he saw Jack go all… (no idea what he says here) … on a stupid freaking snake.

Sam is a good brother and stays quiet, just letting Dean get it off his chest.  

Sadly no, that’s not what happened.  Sam once again defends Castiel, saying it wasn’t just him.  That they also knew that Jack was dangerous, they always knew. “You more than anyone, I mean from the very beginning you knew…”

Oh, so we’re going down that route now?  The route that has to end with Dean always being right and everyone else being wrong. I thought we’d moved on from that, but okay, no.  

Hammering my keyboard, we move on as Sam continues, “But you know we fell for him because he had a good heart, and a good soul… then he didn’t… And that’s on me too, by the way.  I mean I’m the one who made the call to bring him back.  He didn’t ask for that, I decided for him.  And you warned me.”

Dean: You didn’t know, okay… we didn’t know.

Sam: Exactly, we didn’t know, but… he’d become our family (I’m losing count, is this the second or third mention of family in a single episode?)

Sam: You know, after Maggie and the other hunters…died, I just left, just… dumped Jack on Cass and left.  I knew, I mean I knew something… was gonna… I just didn’t know it would be this.

I think Sam looks at Dean here, expecting him to explode at him, the same way he did Castiel earlier, but Dean doesn’t.  He admits that he did too and it’s a nice moment between them.

Back to Rowena and Jack.  Jack’s impatient for the spell.  Rowena says the ingredients are simple but need to be compounded precisely.  She tells Jack she could have fought him back at her flat.  Jack doesn’t ask the obvious question “flat?” which disappoints me.    I think she’s starting to get through to Jack, but Nick hallucination appears and he’s as annoying as Lucifer with the constant badgering.  He tells Jack that trying to bring Mary back isn’t going to work.   Rowena notices there’s something wrong with Jack (looking and talking to something imaginary), but she finishes the spell ingredients. Jack tells Nick to shut up, then asks Rowena if the spell is finished.  Rowena tells him it is, but they need the last thing, which is Mary’s body.

Back to Castiel – I’d forgotten about him – he’s still at the sandpit, calling for Naomi.  He refuses to go anywhere until he speaks to her. Duma appears and she’s one of my favourite angels after Zachariah, because like him, she tells it how it is, and I appreciate the honesty.  Duma tells him that Mary Winchester is happy, she’s in heaven, a “special” heaven. (me: oh fuck, here we go, Dabb will retcon Sam and Dean’s soulmate heaven as a final fuck you to the brother fans).  “Mary Winchester is complete.  You and the Winchesters may not be, but she is.” (hmmm, not sure about this line).  

Jack takes Rowena to Mary’s “body”, which is a pile of ash.  She tells him she can’t make it work.  Because Rowena can’t help him, Jack shoves her back to her “flat.”  I think that’s a little progress over the previous episode since he didn’t flame grill her.

Rowena is pissed, she calls Sam and Dean to tell them they need to stop Jack as she fears he’ll bring something terrible back instead of Mary.

Jack gathers some ash to perform the ritual.   He’s part way through when he sees the Impala approach.  He uses his powers to stall the car.  Unfortunately for him, Sam and Dean are within running distance of the cabin.   The spell finishes and Mary’s body is returned, just as Sam and Dean arrive.  

Jack looks devastated as he tells them it didn’t work.  We hear the flap of wings and he’s disappeared.  Dean runs to Mary as Sam approaches more slowly. Dramatic music as Sam kneels down beside Dean.  We see Dean’s flashback in the car with Mary and at first I thought it was a poxy flashback compared with everyone else, but then I remember this is Dean’s flashback, this is what made Dean happy, this is what Dean has always wanted, his family (Sam, Mary and John) around him. That’s what his one wish with the pearl was.  This is why it annoys me when I read meta that Dean’s arc is to realise he’s sacrificed his life and he’s going to stop doing that (i.e. let Sam die) and go live his happy life with the angel.  No, that isn’t who Dean is, Sam has never been an obligation or a job to Dean, Dean’s face shines when he’s taking care of his family, that’s what brings him enjoyment and we see that in this scene with Mary, just having her in his life brings him joy.  

I like how Sam is comforting Dean in this scene.  This is what siblings do, in that moment Dean needed Sam more than Sam needed Dean and Sam steps up and provides it, even though he too is grieving.

Jack’s on his own, but not for long.  Hallucination Nick is by his side, telling him that there’s no going back.  Castiel, Sam and Dean will never trust him again. He tells Jack: “You can never trust them.” Which given the dramatic music, is an anvil for an upcoming episode.

Sam’s looking through family pictures when Castiel arrives.  He tells Sam that Mary is in heaven and that she’s at peace.  Dean arrived at the tail end of the conversation but stays off to the side.    Castiel tells them that he saw Mary’s heaven and she’s happy.  (I like the 2 dates on the door, someone has already made a joke about Dean and Sam’s doors.  Like what on earth was Dean’s door like during Mystery Spot?)

Question for Castiel, if Mary is with John, then why is his name not on the door or does he have his own door that interconnects with Mary’s room?  

He tells them Mary is with John, that there’s no sorrow or guilt, just joy.

Sam tells Castiel and Dean that Rowena thinks Jack just brought back a shell, a replica, incapable of holding life.  Sam asks once again, what are they supposed to do now.

Dean: What we always do.

Sam closes his eyes, he knows what Dean’s talking about.

Now, if I was a shipper, desperate for proving my ship, I’d point out the clear separation between Dean and that of Castiel and Sam in this scene.  Sastiel for the win, and once again, you guys totally deserve it.

What they always do turns out to be a lot more accurate this time.  They’ve built a funeral pyre to burn the fake body.  I don’t understand why Castiel is there, I personally think it was just a moment for Sam and Dean, but Dabb is intent on ruining the show entirely, pushing Castiel into everything, even though he can’t feel a fraction for Mary that Sam and Dean do.  He’s just awkwardly standing there.  

Sam steps up to put a picture on the pyre.  We get some more flashbacks of Mary again and I’m feeling… well I’m still feeling absolutely nothing but anger at Dabb to be honest.

Castiel looks at Dean and makes a move to go to him, but Sam puts his arm out, very clearly “You go near my brother and I’ll kill you.”  Not really, but he does stop Castiel and tries to smile in reassurance, kind of “give him time.”  

Dean is once again kind of standing on his own in this scene, with Castiel and Sam slightly off to the side.

That’s it. That’s the end of this episode!  

I wish!

Because we go back to the bunker and the camera glides over the table and MW initials have been added to that of Sam and Dean, and seriously fuck you Dabb.  Fuck you for taking everything that was amazing and special about the unique bond between the brothers and what those initials mean, and crapping all over it.  Others disagree, but that’s fine.

Onwards to the next episode where I think Sam will have to choose between Dean and Jack.  Kind of like Season 4, where he was forced to choose between Dean and Ruby, even though he wanted both.  Maybe he’ll get both this time around and Jack won’t be evil?

I’ll finish with this line from Dean to Sam in next weeks promo:  “We need to stop Jack... but here’s the deal, we’ve both got to sign off on it.”

[imaginedmelody]

I think I’m finally ready to try and write my “The Magicians” season finale reaction post.

I’ve been collecting my thoughts on this for the last almost-week, because I knew that this post would be a difficult one; it’s hard to sort through all the opinions and feelings and put them down in a way that makes sense. I’ll try to hit on my major takeaways under the readmore. Bear in mind that my reaction is mixed. Conflicted is the word I’ve been using. I really sympathize with the pain that much of the fandom is feeling, even if I don’t feel it on a level that’s the same (or perhaps comparable) to theirs. I’ll try to dig into that in this post a bit.

I’m a new viewer to this show, as I’ve said many times before. I tried to watch it two years ago, and found it confusing in that I felt like it failed to resonate with me even though I still felt strangely drawn to it. I would watch an episode, feel unsatisfied and only barely interested, but then the next day I would feel oddly compelled to watch the next one. After about 5 episodes of season 1, I gave up. I picked it back up again about 9 weeks ago; I guess I was one of the many viewers who came along because of 4x05, although I didn’t realize that was why I was pulled back in- I just started seeing more and more about the show on my social media again, and it was enough to make me want to give it another try.

This time, I was hooked. I marathon-watched the whole show in probably 4-5 weeks and loved almost every moment (except for a couple of the really distressingly disturbing ones). I was so moved by 3x05, “A Life in the Day,” that I wrote this post about how the show felt like a missing piece had slotted into place at the end of that episode; like a photo that you don’t realize is slightly out of focus until someone adjusts the resolution and it just resolves. I got caught up enough to livetweet somewhere around episode 7 or 8 of season 4, and have been enjoying my integration into the fandom, although I’m still very peripherally a part of it.

I say all this because, as a new viewer, the fallout of 4x13 has been...confusing. Not confusing as in “I don’t understand why this is happening,” but in the sense that the fandom’s collective grief can feel kind of alienating to new viewers. That’s not intentional on the part of seasoned fans, and it’s not something that anyone should feel responsible for or obligated to change. It’s just difficult because we have only just invested in the show. We may be devastated at the loss of Quentin, many of us for the same reasons longtime viewers are (the loss of queer representation, for instance, or the way it seemed to counteract the positive development of a mentally ill character). But at the same time, a lot of us are more positive overall, even if we think killing off that character was a bad choice. We’re still kind of wrapped up in our enthusiasm, so that our grief just feels like another strong emotion we’re feeling, rather than a betrayal. And it can be awkward because we don’t want to express that too boldly or strongly, because we don’t want to appear to be trivializing the grief of other fans. I think that’s an unfair position that the show, not the fans, puts us in. We’re already new to the community, and now we feel less engaged in what is very much a communal emotional response. Positivity feels like rubbing salt in other fans’ wounds. So we’re not sure where we stand.

I was in shock when the show killed off Quentin. Like most viewers, I couldn’t believe it. I waited for them to find a way to reverse it. It was like a hole forming in my heart when they didn’t. I mentioned on twitter later that night that I cry all the time when I watch TV and movies- literally, if something is in any way beautiful, or sad, or exciting, or happy, I’m getting teary-eyed. But once the credits roll and the story is done, my emotional response is usually finished too. If I’m gonna react to it in any other way, it’ll be intellectual (through meta or fanfic) rather than emotional.

But when this episode ended, I finished my cup of tea, went upstairs, and got in the shower. And all of a sudden, before I even knew it, I was crying. It had been 15 minutes since the episode ended and I was still emotional enough to cry. Since then, because I’m a glutton for emotion who likes to lean into anything that makes me feel strongly, I’ve rewatched the episode once and the “Take On Me” scene like eight times- and every single time I’ve cried, even if it’s just a little. It touches some raw emotional place in me that very few shows get to. And I think I’m in awe of that as much as I’m in pain because of it.

I never quite got to the outrage that other fans did, though. That could be for a number of reasons- less prolonged attachment as a new viewer (although I feel very attached to the show and characters); greater privilege to not feel personally attacked by the loss; just having more emotional energy to engage with the scene. But I felt simultaneously anguished and energized by the episode, including the death. It broke my heart, but it also pulled me in. It’s very confusing. I’m angry at how things increasingly seem to have been mishandled, and I’m disappointed at the fallout this has for the show and the fans, and I’m in disagreement with the validity of the choice. But I still feel engaged and almost excited by it. That’s a hard balance to reconcile.

It really does seem to me like the writers dropped the ball. The fact that they knew they were killing Quentin off bothers me, but actually, the thing that I find most galling is that the other actors weren’t in on the plan. We have it on good authority that they filmed a fake scene, where presumably Q comes back somehow, and all the actors were led to believe that was what was in the episode until two days before the finale, when they were told the truth for the first time. My question is: why? Did they not trust the actors to keep the secret? I can kind of understand faking out the audience, but why play that mind game with your actors, who are part of the creative team and should know what’s going on? Why deprive them of the chance to say goodbye to Jason Ralph as a fellow cast member? So far, in every interview, no one has really explained what the point of that fakeout was. If I was an actor on the show, I’d feel really upset about that.

The other thing that’s really been grinding my gears is something that I saw mentioned in comments before I ever saw it in context in the article (and thank you to everyone who helped me find the source). It’s a quote from John McNamara, one of the showrunners, from an article in the Hollywood Reporter, in which he says this about the decision to kill off Q:

“... in a way, I'm not sure what we would have done with the character had he lived.”

I took issue with that statement for two reasons. The first is from a writing craft perspective. I understand wanting to take risks and shake up expectations, and I understand that “kill someone off” is common writing advice when you get stuck in a project. But it’s my firm belief that the main character (and even on an ensemble show like this, yes, there is a clear lead character) should pretty much always be safe. Because the premise of the show is structured in some essential way around him; that’s why he’s the lead. And that’s why almost every show that gets rid of its main character, either by recasting or just removing and replacing with other characters, goes downhill in quality- because that original character was integral to the story.

I’ve said before that literally the only story I can think of that is better for having killed off its protagonist is friggin’ Julius Caesar. When I teach that play, we discuss at that moment in Act 3- and then again at the end of the play- what it means for the narrative if your title character dies halfway through his story. What it means that Marc Antony is the lead for the rest of the play. How Caesar is still so central to the plot even though he’s dead. Part of the reason this doesn’t work on TV- the reason the plot can’t still centralize the character they killed in the narrative- is because a play is a single self-contained entity that you consume all at once, and a TV series is, well, serialized. The show can’t keep centering a character who’s no longer present, because it wouldn’t resonate in a long-form narrative that you consume in small installments. That’s why shows that kill off characters don’t keep bringing them up. They throw in a couple of heartfelt moments that directly or indirectly reference the character, and then they move on and you’re supposed to let them go. A protagonist has to live to keep being important to the story.

So I am of the firm belief that if your main character has outlived his usefulness, the problem is with your narrative as a whole, not with that particular character. If you can’t think of anywhere meaningful for that character to go, you don’t need to kill him off- you need to restructure your whole story so that it’s responsive to him again. It doesn’t have to revolve around him all the time- the show has frequently centered around other characters prominently and effectively, and Q doesn’t have to be in the spotlight all the time- but if he’s no longer relevant? Your whole story has a problem.

But the second thing that aggravates me about that comment is this: not only do I think Q should not ever become decentralized and disconnected from his show’s narrative, I don’t think he has. The events of this season provided so much room to develop that character. He learned his discipline (minor mendings), which has tremendous practical usefulness as well as symbolic significance. “Escape From the Happy Place” reopened a potential relationship that contains a whole wellspring of emotional resonance as well as complication. His father died- you can do a lot with the grief related to that. His reconnection with Alice felt hollow to me, but even that could be useful narratively (especially if she goes on to lead the Library, which could create a layer of separation and potential for either teamwork or conflict of interest that could sustain several intriguing narratives). Even his tendency toward suicidal self-sacrifice could have been brought up; the conversation he had with Penny about whether he was trying to be a hero or just finally finding a way to kill himself could be had after a failed self-sacrifice attempt just as meaningfully as a successful one.

Quentin has been filled with potential this entire season in the storyline. All of this plus his emotional reckoning with Fillory in the scene where he brings the garden back to life... it seemed like the writers spent the whole season re-establishing all the potential Q had. It didn’t read like a season in which the writers didn’t know what to do with him any more. So the decision to kill him off does seem purely like an effort to challenge themselves as writers and wrong-foot the fans. Which I don’t think is enough of a reason to do it.

Because here’s the thing: I’m a writer too, and I understand that the dichotomy of pursuing your own writing vision and capitulating to the fans’ wants and needs is a delicate one. Writers hate being told what to write, and with social media and fan conventions and other very close forms of engagement, fans have more ways to make their desires known than perhaps ever before. They have every right to make the choice that supports their creative vision, and to do things that force them to stretch their limits as creators. But this feels like it went wildly off its mark. It feels less like an experiment and more like a careless move, and I think they could have approached it a lot better.

I wouldn’t rule out seeing Q again on the show one day. I think if they’re willing to fake us all out once, they’d do it again. I’m comforted by the fact that they appear to have consulted the author early in the process and gotten his blessing, although his comments since then seem to walk back his involvement or contradict what the showrunners have said. (Whether that’s because they’ve overstated his involvement or enthusiasm, or whether he was involved in the decision and is now trying to distance himself from the fallout, it’s impossible to say.)

What is less heartening for me is that some of these writers/creators come from Supernatural, a show that has gone on for far too long and has been retreading tired old ground for years. I only watched to about season 8, but it just feels like an endless cycle of similar plot arcs and killing off and resurrecting the same characters over and over again. The Magicians, admittedly, feels a lot more well-crafted, so I don’t think they’d get as lazy as SPN seems to be- but it’s still a worry, all the same.

(Side note: I am often adamant that unless it’s a legacy franchise like Doctor Who, most shows should intentionally be constructed to be a maximum of 5-7 seasons. I think a lot of broadcast shows are less high-quality because they are just vague pitches that get riffed into a show; the writers and creators don’t come into it with an endpoint in mind, so the show goes on as long as they can add any material at all to it or until they get cancelled, whichever comes first. That means that the plot feels aimless and unstructured. The difference between “prestige TV” and “regular TV” is not just better writing and acting overall- it’s that those shows tend to have a very defined arc, and they know where they’re going, so everything is in service of a common idea. Not just a vague and easily sellable premise that can have a ton of stuff derived from it with little effort. I think The Magicians sits above most broadcast shows in quality, but this is where it is starting to show its weak points. And that’s why I think the creators need to be very deliberate about making sure everything going forward contributes to a very defined arc.)

So that’s where I am right now. Emotionally a wreck; disappointed in the process of this choice and feeling the grief other fans feel; strangely invigorated at the same time? Unsure where to go from here, really. Still committed to watching the show as much as I ever have been, but wary at the same time. It’s complicated. But I’m ready to embrace the complexity of it.

[yakitori-queen]

Thoughts on We Happy Few

WARNING : SPOILERS EVERYWHERE. OF EVERYTHING.

So i finally finished watching a walkthrough of WHF (well, except for Ollie’s part but i was just so done. I’ll watch it eventually though), and i have some things to say about this game.

Okay, so, at first, i watched Jacksepticeye’s first video of it and got interested, and decided to watch a full no commentary walkthrough. I fell in love with Arthur Hastings, because of course my favorite is always the survival horror protagonist (my fave in outlast is miles upshur, my fave in re7 is ethan, etc... i’m predictable ok), only to have my heart crushed by the ending of his act. It’s revealed that “oh, actually he’s kind of a dick” and on top of that i read a theory that Arthur is actually really an asshole and lies to himself to make himself look good. So i was devastated, because i still wanted to like him and i get way to emotional over fictional characters. But then, there’s Sally’s ending, which is hopeful, and I think Ollie’s ending is too ? So I was like, what the fuck, Arthur gets the sad ending but everyone else gets hopeful stuff ? Well that blows. BUT as it turns out, Arthur’s real ending is in a cutscene at the end of the game, which goes as follows (from the wiki) : “ As Arthur and the Constable walk across the bridge, Arthur continues to hear Percy crying out, and upon questioning from the Constable, Arthur laments how heinous he truly is. The Constable notes that some people are better prepared to handle the truth and the guilt that comes with it, and offers Arthur some Joy that will make him forget everything. Should Arthur accept, he forgets presumably the events of the game and goes back to Wellington Wells, and can be seen playing on playground equipment in a dilapidated and overgrown area. If Arthur refuses, the Constable puts away the joy and allows Arthur to finish his journey on his own. Arthur can then be seen saying "Lovely day for it!" to various plants and rocks, and then encounters a boy with a ball, who Arthur tries the same greeting with. The boy swears at him and tells him that it's been raining all day, and that tonight will be bad too. Arthur, with a smile on his face, then states to the boy, "You're right. It has been rather a shit day." “ So actually, he gets hopeful stuff too (that is, if you choose to not take Joy at the end, but i think that’s supposed to be the true ending). So, my final thoughts (only about Arthur and Sally of course) (remember : these aren’t facts, just my humble opinion) :

Sally is a rather nice gal. She’s intelligent even though that isn’t what was expected of her. It seems like she unexpectedly shut off a lot of people in her life, which is part of why she has many enemies. She is also quite the charmer/heartbreaker, and this has caused her to make mistakes and enemies, but also get her way when she wanted. In her act, it’s revealed that part of why she wants to stay with her daughter is because she would be alone otherwise. She seems to think it’s a bad thing and tries to deny it. In her ending, she finally abandons her charmer/heartbreaker ways, revolting against them as they’re unhealthy for her and she isn’t an object. She also accepts that she wanted to stay with her baby because she didn’t want to be alone ; it’s not really a bad thing and besides, her daughter needs her too. They both have each other and escape. For Arthur, it stays unclear whether Sally’s or his perspective of the events was the right one. I personnally think Sally’s probably the true one, as Sally is way more sane and less troubled than Arthur. Whether Arthur’s way of seeing things was due to him lying to himself or the effects of Joy/Joy withdrawal, we may never know, but i think it could also be a mix of both. In the theory i had read about, there was something about Arthur not really being sorry about killing people, which i think isn’t necessarily true. Maybe it’s true that he lies to himself to make himself look better, but he doesn’t only do that ; he also does feel bad about things before the ending, and for one major thing at that : his brother. Even before he learns the terrible truth, he remembers lying about his age to not get on the train, and does already feel bad about that. Anyways, in the end, he finally sees how bad of a person he’s been and regrets a whole lot. I also really like the final scene, with the boy he meets beyond the border ; it gives off a really hopeful vibe (as i said before) : finally, Arthur doesn’t have to lie anymore. Not to himself, not to others, not to anyone. He finally gets to accept the truth even if that means he’ll have to learn to deal with it.

On a final/side note, which is mostly me being a fangirl : Even though it’s implied in Sally’s ending that she kind of lets go of Arthur, I like to imagine them meeting again after they’re out of Wellington Wells. Arthur apologizing to her, Sally forgiving him. And then, either them getting some closure in their relationship, or getting back together (because i kind of ship them to be honest), either as friends or lovers. With Gwen, they can finally be the Three Musketeers !

Anyways, i finally am at peace with this game, thank god because it was a treacherous fucking journey to be honest

[ernmark]

One of my favorite things about Second Citadel is that every major character is the protagonist of their own story and the antagonist of somebody else’s-- and that gives the series a unique angle for showcasing one of my favorite ideologies of characterization.

A person’s greatest strength will be their greatest weakness.

It also gives us a chance to really look at motivations from multiple angles. We get to see the reasoning behind their actions and know they aren’t ill-intentioned-- but then we also get the flip side and see when those actions hurt other people.

Angelo

Sir Angelo is incredibly strong-- but that means he tends to treat the people around him like they’re incapable.

He’s very loving and protective of the people around him-- but taken to extreme, that can become infuriatingly condescending.

We see him at his best when he’s with his Best Rival: he and Damien have a solid understanding of each other’s needs and boundaries and methods of communication, and that means he’s great at calming Damien from his panic attacks.

There’s also a sense that Damien and Angelo are on equal footing in regards to privilege, for the most part. Both are dudes, both are presumed to be straight-ish, both are apparently local to the Citadel, both are high-ranking and well-respected knights-- so Angelo doesn’t have to think too far outside of himself to be considerate and understanding.

Pulling from his character description in the script:

Has always lived with a lot of privilege, and so he sees the world as an inherently fair place where nothing bad ever happens to truly good people. Only just now starting to see that things might be a little grayer than that.

And like a lot of people who have a lot of privilege, he does a lot of stupid shit because it didn’t even occur to him that it might be hurtful.

Now that he knows to look, he’s trying harder. And sure, his efforts are still clumsy, but he’s putting in the effort to educate himself and do better (and to call it out when he sees it elsewhere!), and I appreciate that.

Damien

Sir Damien’s superpower and curse is his obsessive nature. Left to his own devices, that fixation turns in on itself and gets him worked up into a panic attack, but when it’s directed at a real goal, or directed by somebody who knows how to properly use him (like Rilla, Sir Angelo, or Queen Mira), he’s unstoppable.

Looking at Damien in the context of the stuff he’s gone through recently, his reactions make perfect sense-- after all, he genuinely believes that his infidelity is the reason the love of his life is in danger, and we’ve already had it spelled out how devastating guilt is to him:

He can barely handle the guilt he makes up. Real guilt would be worse than killing him.

And boy howdy, the guilt he’s feeling is real.

But Sir Caroline doesn’t know any of that. She doesn’t know how his mind operates, she doesn’t know why this affects him as dramatically as it does, and she doesn’t know what will trigger an intense reaction. And without any of that context, all she can see is a melodramatic buffoon.

Damien’s also got some major xenophobia to unpack. (Sexism, too, but the xenophobia is what really sticks out to me.) We see it a lot in his contempt for Sir Caroline (which apparently preceded her throwing him down a flight of stairs).

Saint Damien, your Tranquility… the world has lost its order, nothing is as it was… surely when knights are governed by foreign women ... the fate of our Second Citadel must soon mirror the first…

We see it a whole lot more overtly in the way he deals with monsters-- and honestly, his xenophobia (and/or racism?) is probably part of how he copes with killing so many monsters when it’s common knowledge that many of them can talk.

Caroline

Sir Caroline is a lone wolf with all the requisite resourcefulness and drive. The fact that she’s beholden to neither authority nor other people’s approval means she has no fucks to give when she’s pursuing what she wants, whether it’s a knighthood or a hot date with a beautiful lady, and it allows her to look at a situation objectively and show mercy rather than blindly following orders. She’s under an incredible amount of scrutiny-- as a female knight, as an immigrant, and as a wlw who hasn’t put her love for women behind her-- and probably in part because of this, she’s incredibly private, which means it’s difficult to see her side of the story when she’s put into a bad light. Consequently, she tends to come across as ruthless and cold-blooded.

In context we’re given at the time, her stealing the Janus Beast’s head just seems like she’s dicking over Sir Marc and Sir Talfryn just because; given what we’ve seen of the way she’s treated, it’s not implausible that having to have the assistance of a pair of civillians (even ass-kicking ones) would have undermined what little standing she’s been able to carve out for herself. 

Her tripping Damien down a flight of stairs seems just plain mean-spirited... but if he was treating her the same way then as he was during LotL, then I can’t exactly blame her.

Marc

Sir Marc may in fact be on par with Damien for sheer determination, considering how much he had to work and train in order to take the knight exam two hundred and ninety-one times. But that same single-mindedness means he’ll ignore little things like having enough food to eat or enough medicine to not die or getting enough sleep to be okay in the morning, which causes no end of woe for Tal (and sometimes Rilla).

He’s quick-witted and a fast talker, and he tends to use his words for self-defense as readily as his sword. It’s great for distracting enemies and bantering with foes, but it doesn’t just get directed at them. Since one of his worst fears is being abandoned by his brother, Talfryn winds up being the subject of a whole lot of verbal abuse.

Rilla

Rilla hasn’t been an antagonist as of yet, but I had a hard time getting a read on her at first. The demanding life of a medical professional means that she’s probably exhausted all the time, and yeah, she’s sometimes short with people. At times she seemed oddly reserved when she talked to Damien-- which makes sense, considering that she’s trying to be supportive of his monster hunting (and his poetry about monster hunting) when she knows that it’ll probably get him killed one of these days.

That’s some heavy stuff to deal with.

[the-desolated-quill]

The Vulcan Hello - Star Trek: Discovery blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Well here I go. Boldly going where I’ve never gone before. My first ever Star Trek experience.

I can’t honestly say why Star Trek never really appealed to me before. I guess it’s because I’ve always associated it with being cheap and tacky. Some of its more hardcore fans might have put me off as well. There are some that love the show so much that they’ve actually learnt how to speak Klingon and stuff, which is what perpetuated the nerd stereotype and the perception that liking Star Trek is synonymous with being a loser. Or at least that was my understanding of it growing up. It wasn’t cool to like Star Trek in my neighbourhood.

Of course nowadays sci-fi and other areas of geekdom have become more mainstream, and when I heard about a new Star Trek TV series boasting both gender and ethnic diversity, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to give Star Trek: Discovery a go just to see what all the fuss is about.

One episode in… and I’m hooked! OMG! Bryan Fuller, Alex Kurtzman and Akiva Goldsman, I could bloody kiss you! I love it! I LOVE IT!

I must confess I didn’t think this was going to be very good during the first minute where we see these weird troll looking people with ridiculously large foreheads speaking OTT gibberish. I was getting ready to mock and snigger until the episode suddenly shifts to Sonequa Martin-Green and Michelle Yeoh walking across a desert planet, at which point my jaw hit the floor in amazement. It looks gorgeous. In fact the entire episode is visually breathtaking. The Federation spaceship, the binary star system, the Vulcan VR bubble thingies, the Klingon spaceship, they all look fucking incredible. I couldn’t believe this was a TV show. It looks like something out of a big budget movie.

It also helps that the writing is extremely good too. They waste no time in introducing newcomers like myself to this universe and absorbing us completely into the story, to the point where upon returning to the large foreheaded Klingons and their gibberish language, I was actually starting to take them seriously and becoming fascinated by their culture and history. But more on that later.

By far my favourite thing about The Vulcan Hello are the three main leads and their interactions with each other. First there’s Captain Philippa Georgiou, played by Michelle Yeoh. I really like her playfulness and witty behaviour, but at the same time she commands absolute authority. Yeoh is extremely impressive, being able to switch from light to dark effortlessly. The look on her face when she points that gun at Michael was incredibly intimidating. You have no trouble buying why she’s the leader.

Then there’s Saru, played by Doug Jones. The overly cautious and at times sarcastic Science Officer. At first glance he seems to be the no nonsense, voice of reason on the ship, but there’s a lot more to it than that. He’s at times prone to cowardice, but never to the point where he becomes annoying or counter-productive, and I love his little spats with Michael as they both subtly try to one up each other. He’s a very charming character that I can’t wait to learn more about.

And of course there’s Michael Burnham, played by Sonequa Martin-Green, who is by far the most intriguing and is clearly going to be the main focus of the show. What I find most refreshing about her as a protagonist is how demilitarised she is, if that makes sense. When we normally see quote/unquote ‘strong female characters,’ they’re normally these gun wielding badasses with no empathy whatsoever. Michael, however, is allowed to be compassionate. She’s clearly fascinated by the lives and cultures of other aliens and derives great pleasure and excitement from exploring space and visiting different worlds. Her empathy is established early on as her most defining character trait, made even stronger when we learn that her family were killed by the Klingons. She doesn’t let her history cloud her judgement when she interacts with other aliens or when she spots the UO, chastising Saru for making hasty assumptions about the potential threat. What makes this even more interesting is that she was adopted and raised by Vulcans (who as far as I can tell are these sort of emotionless space elves). Her adopted dad appears somewhat disappointed in her and her empathetic side due to him perceiving empathy as a weakness, but she’s very quick to rebuke this, saying that her emotions inform her logic. She’s a caring and compassionate individual, and is clearly proud of that fact, seeing her empathy as a strength that helps her to do her job. Clearly the dichotomy between Vulcan logic and human empathy is something that will continue to be explored over the course of this series, and I look forward to it immensely.

The relationships between the three are extremely well written and well performed. They feel like real people and I became invested in them almost instantly. I really wanted to spend time with them and get to know them, and its this emotional connection with the characters that helps to fuel the tension in The Vulcan Hello. Which brings us to the Klingons.

Once you get past the silly gibberish and foreheads, they’re really interesting too. The show really goes out of its way to make them as alien as possible. Whereas the Vulcans and Saru are relatable to varying degrees, the Klingons are utterly divorced from anything we could identify with, which is part of their intrigue. The language, the culture, the designs of their spaceships and their armour are all distinctly alien, effectively creating a ‘them and us’ scenario. Even the funeral for their torchbearer plays into this. A spaceship covered in coffins is an incredibly striking image that’s both morbidly dark and distinctly odd. (I presume if Vulcans are like space elves, then the Klingons are the space orcs). It’s not clear why the Klingons hate the Federation, but the writers do a really good job showing us the divide between the two sides and how the differences in their respective development and evolution have perhaps fuelled this underlying animosity between them.

There’s a lot to like about The Vulcan Hello, but what elevates it from a good episode to a great one for me is how it takes what could have been a simple good vs evil plot and turns it into a nail biting confrontation with potentially devastating consequences.

When Michael kills the torchbearer, she effectively creates a diplomatic incident, culminating in a cold war scenario where the Klingons are poised to invade Federation space. Philippa knows full well she doesn’t stand a chance against them in a fight because they would just overwhelm her, but at the same time the Klingons are so aggressive and hostile that diplomacy is not really an option. Neither is retreat because it would just give the Klingons a clear path. This is about as tense as it’s possible to get, but then it gets even more tense when Michael suggests firing the first shot, citing an incident where a Vulcan ship was destroyed by the Klingons and since then the Vulcans always fired first in order to command respect from their adversaries. There’s a certain logic to it if you squint hard enough, but naturally Michael’s colleagues aren’t too keen on this idea. The other options aren’t exactly ideal, but firing the first shot in the hopes that they’ll tiptoe respectfully away seems practically suicidal. It’s a great scenario because there’s no clear solution presenting itself, and while you want to side with Michael because she’s so damn likeable, it’s hard to shake off the barminess of her idea. And then things spiral further into chaos when Michael commits mutiny, knocking Philippa unconscious, in a desperate bid to save everyone. It’s hard to tell what’s driving Michael at this stage. Her determination and insistence that she’s in the right or her own emotional baggage regarding the Klingons. It’s so gripping you would have needed a crowbar to prise me away from the screen. When the episode ended on a cliffhanger, I swore very loudly in response because I was desperate to know what happened next. That’s how engaged I was.

The Vulcan Hello is the perfect way to start a series. The production values are staggering, the characters are all interesting and likeable, the actors bring them to life effortlessly, and the writing is absolutely impeccable. I loved every single second of this and now I’m going to abruptly end this review so I can watch Episode 2. Bye :D