#(whom i am still developing)

[brazen-art]

Gang's on the move

(a pipe burst in the hoard storage room)

[gazemaizeisdead]

13 Pitches For Ratatouille 2 (Rata-TWO-ouille)

With the success of Inside Out 2 (now only the second-highest grossing animated film of all time after being freshly dethroned by Ne Zha 2) Pixar has announced today that Coco 2 is in development, which will follow Toy Story 5, Incredibles 3, and “Hoppers”, a promising if controversial Bugs Life spinoff (time will tell if the decision to keep Kevin Spacey on comes back to bite them).

It seems we are firmly in the second major era of Pixar sequels; at this point it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to see a future devoid of Ratatouille 2 (Rata-2-ouille). To that end I have taken the liberty of inventing several fresh directions for the series to take. Brad, if you’re reading this, my schedule is extremely busy but I am willing to talk if you would like to meet with me about expanding on any of these.

Six months after La Ratatouille opens, a new restaurant across the street takes Paris by storm, run by a mysterious unknown named Bessières many are lauding as the next Gusteau. Remy doesn’t view cooking as a competitive process, and his business hasn’t been hurt at all despite a perceived rivalry in the media, but an especially positive endorsement from Ego gets him curious enough to ask that Linguini sneak him in to see what the fuss is about. Remy discovers that Bessières (Kumail Nanjiani) is actually a fellow rat chef, and strikes up a friendship with him as the first friend he’s actually been able to discuss his passion with. The situation takes a dark turn when Bessières reveals himself as a rat supremacist à la a young Malcolm X, who rejects the Gusteauian ideal that anyone can cook — in his worldview, only a rat can truly be an artist, and humans have treated their kind too poorly to be allowed to continue controlling the world. Bessières tries to raticalize Remy and enlist him in his plan to shock human society with a series of rat terrorist attacks across Paris and elevate the social position of rodentkind, but Remy resists him and narrowly manages, with the help of both his human and rat friends, to prevent Bessières from blowing up the Eiffel Tower. Remy makes a stew that’s so good that it snaps Bessières out of a hyper-realistic rat panic attack and instantly fixes his anti-human bigotry and they open a new restaurant together. No real structural changes are made to fix rat-human relations but Remy gets a cute new rat-sized oven at the end of the movie and makes Bessières a rat-sized creme brûlée and that makes them both smile

Chef Skinner returns from disgrace with a restaurant entirely staffed by robots — anything can cook, declares Skinner to mocking crowds, who change their tune when they discover that the food is just as good at anything Gusteau made in his heyday for the same price as a big mac. Critics still think it’s a joke, but the public can’t get enough of Skinner’s new concept, and he begins buying out one Parisian restaurant after another and replacing the workers with his automatons. Remy and the “rat-pack”,  a team of five diverse marketable rat-children he is training to follow his pawsteps (Awkwafina, Kenan Thompson, Jenny Ortega, Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, his last name cleverly stylized as Chris P. Ratt in promotional materials) team up to infiltrate the robo-kitchens and see if they can find a way to stop Skinner. They discover that the robots are fake and are all actually controlled by enslaved rats, whom they free. Following a rat gundam fight where a living swarm of rats battles Skinner’s ultimate machine in the Seine, Remy sacrifices himself to save the rat-pack and actually dies. Skinner goes to prison (where it is heavily implied that he will be killed and eaten by prison rats) and the rat-pack makes crepes in Remy’s honor

Emile movie. Remy and Linguini travel the world to compete in a global culinary competition while Emile accidentally joins a rat spy agency to stop an evil conglomerate from smuggling fake truffle oil into France. Remy is in this movie for six minutes and has nine lines of dialogue, Colette is unvoiced

Another rat-pack vehicle, this time with Jenny Ortega swapped out for Olivia Rodrigo, who stars as a young rat looking to make a name for herself and become Remy’s apprentice years after the events of the first film. An aged Remy has become disillusioned with cooking and lost his passion for creating after the sudden death of his rat-husband, but the rat-pack works together to help him find inspiration and learn to love food again. This is actually a sequel to the Emile movie, although Emile himself only appears partway through the movie to enjoy a short zoom call with Remy and then later to call the Chris Pratt child an extremely offensive rat-slur (which he is reclaiming, the usage is considered appropriate by the film; Linguini tries to repeat the joke later himself and is immediately cancelled by everyone)

Film based on the in-universe Gusteau documentary that inspired Remy to be a chef. A young Gusteau (digitally-recreated Anthony Bourdain) works his way through the unforgiving 1960s hellscape of French cuisine to fight for his third and final Michelin star. At first this seems like a small plot hole because in Ratatouille restaurants are able to get up to five stars but at the end of the movie Gusteau’s food is so good that the Michelin company has to change their system to add extra. First M-rated Pixar film, ties the record for second most F-bombs in any movie ever

Everything that happened in Ratatouille 1 happens again exactly as it did the first time but it takes place in Italy instead. No new characters and it’s not a reboot, it’s just the same plot in Italy, everybody remembers the first movie happened but they weren’t able to internalize the lessons they learned after they all decided to move to Italy because the train ride was very long. Remy has to once again balance his rat and human lives and Linguini finds out his Mom was secretly an Italian chef so he inherits another famous restaurant and Ego is sad again. Skinner wants it to be illegal for rats to work in restaurants, but it already is illegal at the start of the movie, so he lobbies the EU to make it legal so he can then get it made double illegal. This is also a sequel to the Emile movie, Emile farts on the pope

Three disconnected episodic interludes about Remy (Dan Castellaneta), Linguini (Phil LaMarr), Colette (Tara Strong) and the entire rat-clan learning the true meaning of Christmas. Olaf cameos in the second short as a monster chasing Remy during a hallucinogenic nightmare he has after staying up for a week straight trying to create the perfect fruitcake (only later does he realize that the only truly perfect fruitcake is the one you share with family). Disney+ exclusive

Fifteen years after the first movie, Colette’s crazy sister (Sarah Silverman) returns from her exile in Elba to try and steal the soul of Linguini and Collette’s firstborn son Bouillabaisse (Jack Black) to use in an ancient culinary ritual that will allow her to take over Paris. Remy is dead and a ghost in this movie, it’s revealed that the Gusteau he kept talking to in the first movie was NOT a figment of his imagination, that was the real Gusteau; cooks of significant skill are able to continually defer their true deaths by making tasty enough food for the grim reaper (for reasons that are only alluded to, this form of necromancy only works for the french, in a comforting throwback to the nationally-segregated afterlife system implied by Coco). This movie also touches on the themes of rat discrimination more seriously; Remy is directly compared to Rosa Parks. Remy’s great granddaughter Madeline (Zendaya) and Bouillabaisse, guided by spirit Remy, defeat Colette’s crazy sister and use the power of the culinary ritual to reveal the truth of rat society to the human public. The movie ends on a bittersweet note when it turns out that only french rats are sapient, all the other rats are just rats

Remy and Linguini reunite to battle the Underminer and his robot army and stop them from destroying the surface world and polluting the atmosphere to turn the whole planet into an artificial underground. At the end they leave the underground for the first time in the movie during the final battle and the Underminer turns good because he sees Paris and realizes that he doesn’t need to terraform the surface world because the hellish aboveground wasteland he wants already exists. 62 on metacritic

Live-action remake of Ratatouille, but instead of going the Lion King CGI abomination route this uses actual trained rats who are voiced over Milo and Otis style (in that their mouths don't move and no effort is made to sell even the illusion of this, not that 40,000 real rats are ritualistically killed during production). In order to truly echo reality all dialogue is spoken in untranslated french regardless of the version of the film you are watching, except for Emile, who only farts (though is insinuated to be farting in the same language as the viewer). The rats constantly pee on everything just like real rats though this is never acknowledged. The Grammy and Annie award-winning songs "Le Festin", "Colette Shows Him Le Ropes", "Dinner Rush", and "Ratatouille Main Theme" do not feature (save for the trailer and brief EDM remixes of their motifs during the end credit blooper segments where we get to see all the silly mistakes the rat actors made during filming!) and are replaced with silence and sad coughing sounds. No rats are harmed in the making of this film but many many french people are

Followup to the live-action remake, Remy's dad Django prequel movie. IntergeneRATional trauma movie through the frame of a friend of Remy's Dad, Git (that one super fucking buff rat running around in the kitchen during the scene where they're stealing, you know the one) recounting the story to Remy and Emile shortly post-Ratatouille after they have a fight and decide they can't be brothers anymore. It is pointed out that Remy is a prince; the subtle implication that Remy grew up in Anton Ego's childhood home and was able to cook a meal that so perfectly matched his nostalgic preferences because he learned to cook using the same books and techniques as his mother is made explicit here, making the original movie much better and more cohesive as a result. We learn that Django actually had dreams of being a chef himself as a young rat and was friends with little Ego (Seth Green). Remy and Emile interrupt the central narrative multiple times throughout the story with witty banter and wacky interjections. Halfway into it after the tragic misunderstanding scene where Django only overhears Ego says that he's sick of rats (he leaves the room before hearing the -atouille) Emile points out that Git's story doesn't make any sense because rats only live for 1/35th the human lifespan and Ego and Django couldn't have been childhood friends. Blood instantly starts running from Git's nose before he collapses and dies and Remy and Emile realize that Chef Skinner has manipulated their entire lives through his magic time machine. The brothers work together to fix the timeline and even manage to save Gusteau, who we learn was murdered by Chef Skinner; but Skinner was only a puppet (literally!) of an evil future version of Remy who Remy himself defeats in "Rat Combat". For as well as this works as a thematic climax, the weaknesses of the trained rat conceit do begin to reveal themselves during the final fight scenes when so many crusted dribblings of rat piss and shit accumulate in the Skinner's actor's hair and eyebrows that he's unable to stop crying for the entire segment

Romcom Toy Story crossover in the style of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" where Remy falls in love with a stuffed toy rat. Django and the toy's adoptive parents (a Pet Rock and a 2nd generation Tamagotchi, who had faced parallel discrimination themselves in their youth but don't see it as equivalent to what their son is doing) eventually do give up their bigoted ways but the relationship falls apart anyway during the same night due to Remy's obsession with his career. Heavily marketed as featuring Pixar's last LGBT character

Low stakes fanservice vibe sequel where the rats and humans work together to put on dinner theater at La Ratatouille (they do Madame Bovary, Colette reluctantly stars but kills it, Emile is forced to control Linguini for all his scenes after he has a panic attack and faints and does just as good of a job). This one is also an Emile movie but it's stealthy about it. Also a jukebox musical

[mortalityplays]

You need more free art.

I quit my job yesterday. Well, actually I quit my job eight weeks ago, but they finally released me yesterday for good behaviour. Don't get me wrong, I love what I do - but I do it for the wrong reasons. Working for major charities, you learn very fast that 'I want to make the world a better place' is a phrase you use to ask people for money, not to give them things. I was an ass-backwards fit for that world.

You need more free art. I need more free art. Everyone has felt the shift in our media landscape over the last ten years, away from access and towards nickel-and-diming the human experience. That lack of access is making life and culture worse for all of us, across the board. Paywalled news sites leave us less informed, attacks on the Internet Archive leave us less capable of research. Algorithmic social feeds and streaming walled gardens trap us inside smaller and smaller demographic bubbles, where we are increasingly only likely to encounter ideas that have been curated for us by marketing departments. Hasty efforts to resist AI commodification have only led to more artists locking their work away and calling for even more onerous systems of copyright law. This is not good for us.

We all need more free art.

So what am I going to do about it?

This is a question I have been asking myself for years. It's easy to sit here feeilng frustrated and thinking 'boy I hope SOMEONE does SOMETHING'. It's harder to take action in a world where I still have rent to pay. But hard doesn't mean impossible. Sometimes hard just means time-consuming, frustrating and slow. And sometimes it's worth doing something time-consuming, frustrating and slow because...I want to make the world a better place.

I'm going to do this:

1. From April 1st, I am relaunching as a freelance writer and editor.

This is the one that will (hopefully) help to pay the bills. I am a very good and experienced editor. I've worked on hollywood movies, I'm a member of the Chartered Institute of Editors and Proofreaders, I have clients who have been coming to me exclusively for more than 10 years.

Alongside bigger contract jobs, I am going to refocus on offering my services to small-press creators at a reduced rate. That means you, graphic novelists. That means you, itch and amazon writers. I want to help you develop your work, the same way I help large organisations. You can learn more about what an editor even does and what kind of pricing you can expect here.

2. I'm also going to start giving shit away. Like, constantly.

Next week I'm going to launch a new free shop. If you're unfamiliar, a free shop, giveaway shop, swap shop, etc. is an anarchist tradition of setting up a storefront where anyone can take what they like for no cost. Offline, this often means second-hand clothes, tools, furniture, food etc. Online, I am going to be giving away digital art. Copyright-free, no strings attached. It will (eventually) feature everything from print-res posters to zines, poems, tattoo flash, t-shirt designs and anything else we come up with.

Yes, I said 'we' - while this is a curated collection, it will feature work from a variety of credited and anonymous artists and activists, all of whom have agreed to give their work away to the public domain. Some of it will be practical, some of it will be political, but a lot of it will be decorative or personal. This is, in part, a response to recent difficulty I had finding somewhere that would print a one-off joke poster for a friend that featured the word 'faggot'. Enough. No middlemen - no explaining ourselves. Just print our shit and enjoy it.

I'm very, very excited about this project. I'll have more to say about it closer to the launch, but you can expect it to go live on March 27th.

2.2 I forgot to mention the ACTUAL LAUNCH GIVEAWAY

To celebrate my launch, I am going to be giving away a ton of physical prints. When I went looking for my old stock to see if it was worth setting a new (paid) storefront up, I realised I had way more old work in storage than I thought. This will be announced in its own right on Monday, but this is why I've been hinting you should go follow my Patreon.

On April 1st, I will pick 8 random patrons (from across all tiers including non-paying followers!) and mail them a bundle of assorted prints and postcards. The prize pool includes A3 and A4 posters, packs of A6 postcards, and printed minicomics that I've previously sold for up to £12 each.

You don't have to be a paying subscriber to enter - this is strictly no-purchase necessary. It is purely and entirely a celebration of the concept of GIVING ART AWAY FOR FREE.

3. PORN, YOU PERVERTS

Because I still have to pay to stay alive, I am going to be subsidising all this free art with the introduction of Fuck You Fridays. Starting from March 29th, I will drop a new 18+ short story on the last Friday of every month, over on itch.io (yes I know my page is desolate right now, don't worry I'll get there).

The first edition, Go Fuck Yourself, is about, well - telling your boss where to stick it. Julia has had it with her millionaire man-child manager, and is just about ready to let him know what she really thinks. It's a short and steamy 5k words, with a gorgeous cover illustration by @taylor-titmouse, and you can pick it up for $3 starting from March 29th.

4. ANOTHER BIG SURPRISE

I'm keeping this one under wraps for now, but April 1st will also play host to one more (FREE) launch. If you've been following me for a long time, you might remember the other significance of this date (no not April Fool's day, though that is certainly thematically relevant to this entire effort). That's all I'll say right now. Watch this space.

tl;dr: I'm sick of paywalls and career ladders. I'm literally putting my money where my mouth is. More free art for everyone and I'm not kidding around!!!

[treasureyourfire]

~ Where is my Soulmate? ~

Welcome Souls~

I am sending my new pick a pile reading for you.~

We often have to travel a long way to find our eternal, romantic soulmate/divine partner. The road leads through struggles, wounds, lessons and healing. We think about where they are, what they do, what their life is like, when we finally find eachother...

I think, "when" is malleable. The decisions we make, how we shape our lives and ourselves can influence it, and perhaps that's more important where we go with our own growth until we meet them. That's why I didn't get into that in the readings.

Choose the image(s) that attracts you the most. Accept from the messages what you can identify with, and let go of the rest~

Illustrations belongs to Jumo.Art (Facebook, Instagram, Etsy)

Reminder:

* These are not gender-specific readings, I use They/Them pronouns. * These are collective, timeless readings for entertaintment. * I am not a professional reader and readings that I do are a part of my learning process. * The tarot can provide guidance, but you manage your own life according to your free will. Feel free to keep what resonates, and let go of what doesn’t.~ * (English is not my mother language, sorry for the mistakes.)

To what extent are You ready to receive your soulmate? Four of Pentacles, Page of Wands, Sun, Four of Cups, Hierophant

Dear Soul! In this period of your life, you are/have been striving for security, balance, and stability. You plan for the long term, for durability. You focus on building your foundations: it can be your home, your financial situation or your physical body, your health. You are an honest, straightforward person, but cautious. In the past period, you may have closed yourself off a bit to protect everything that is important to you and that you fought for. Maybe you just settled somewhere. You cling to a secure foundation both on the earthly and spiritual planes. At first, under the surface, which may seem stoic and serious, lives a dreamy, enthusiastic, artistic soul with a rich world of emotions. You are ready to use your creativity to develop and enrich yourself with new experiences. Recently, you are starting to open up to the world and come out of your shell. You want to shine like the Sun, enjoy life obliviously, fulfill yourself in it, get the most out of yourself. I feel that your circumstances give you the opportunity to do so. Despite this, you still have moments of skepticism when you feel uncertain. Sometimes you still think about things that didn't go according to your plans. Your experiences and relationships so far have not satisfied your desires and needs, and you cannot really believe that something better than what you experienced in the past can awaits you. However, something that is pure, a sincere gift may appear to you, you just have to break down the barriers built around you and learn to trust again, to believe that the universe -or what you believe in- supports you and encourages you to look at the bigger picture. You are dedicated, you strive to create lasting values in your relationships as well. You would like to share your long-term goals and desires with the right partner to whom you would commit yourself for life. You are looking for a spiritual unity/bond that is solid, where you receive emotional security, mutual trust, intimacy, in which you support and inspire each other, and you can develop together, solving difficulties together.

To what extent are They ready to receive you? Ten of Cups, Eight of Pentacles

Fully! I smile and it fills me with joy when I look at your soulmate’s cards. They are full of love and enthusiasm, they long for a family, a happy home full of laughter and abundance, with you. They think of you as a team, in which they would support you in everything as an equal partner. Maybe lately they have been a little more immersed in their work or other personal projects, but if you find each other, they'll be just as dedicated to your relationship. Maybe they will feel that they have to work for your trust, but they don't mind. They have persistent, hardworking personality. Thoughtful, patient, humble, attentive to details, not intrusive. They will pay attention to you, your signals and what you need. Maybe they will shower you with gifts (if this is what you want), if they see that you like this way of expressing their emotions to you. Maybe they also have an artistic vein, like to create with their hands, and will surprise you with they self-made works. I sense that your soulmate is eager to welcome you into their life, but at the same time they are trying to wait patiently until you are ready to come to them of your own free will.

What symbols and signs will indicate to you that your soulmate is nearby? Knight of Cups

Helmet - It may sounds funny, but I mean a kind of Gallic helmet what the characters wearing in the Asterix stories. Wings (can even be a car emblem) Horse - winged pegasus or earth horse, may be in color white Silver and Blue colors could also dominate. Fish (including goldfish, koi), scales, scaly pattern, wave pattern, Japanese-style waves, which can often be seen in tattoos

When I saw the card, I felt as if my lungs were filled with fresh air. A clean, soothing feeling. I was relieved. Or as if a sip of cool, fresh, clean water had washed my throat. Maybe you will experience similar feelings when you meet them.

Where and under what circumstances will you meet? King of Swords, Tower, Three of Pentacles, Page of Swords

A situation where you need knowledge, wisdom, good judgment, clarity, rationality, good communication skills, clear communication, maybe leadership or organizational skills (you two don't necessarily have to be in a leadership role, but a person of this role can be present). Perhaps in circumstance where there is a sudden change, an unexpected task arises. It maybe include a light tower, but this is a bit special, of course this cannot apply to everyone, the image just flashed in front of me. Planning, re-planning/building (because of the Tower card), learning, discussion, consultation, teamwork, team building. Maybe, possible misunderstandings and doubts should be clarified, the fog should be dispelled with an objective view. Honest, open communication will be required.

Advice: What to focus your energy on in other areas of your life until you meet: Moon, Ace of Cups

Let yourself sink into the depths. The Moon gently asks you to examine your fears in the darkness surrounding you. It invites you to turn inward, do introspection and self-research. All feelings, traumas, ideas, picked-up or learned patterns that intimidate, unsettle and hold you back are hidden in this subconscious depth. Examine what is preventing you from welcoming love (back) into your life, be it romantic or of any kind. By uncovering these barriers in yourself, renewal and healing can begin, and you can open up again to the love that awaits you from both yourself, from the outside world, from your future soulmate. In the quiet retreat, you can prepare yourself for development, for moving on, rebuild your faith in a better future and fill your own cup before coming to the surface again.

To what extent are You ready to receive your soulmate? Reversed Six of Swords, Seven of Cups, Two of Swords, Temperance, The Fool

Dear Soul! You had to get yourself out of a difficult situation. You had a strong resistance to moving on. You may have been haunted by excessive caution, overburden, mistrust (even paranoia) in the past period. You lived in fear, and this internal struggle hindered your progress and development. There was confusion in you and around you. You were unsure of your possibilities, you couldn't determine what your true calling was, what would take you forward, what you could trust, and what was false or (self-)delusional. Maybe it only applies to a small percentage of you who chose the second picture, but maybe someone clouded your clarity with illusions and took away your confidence, maybe gaslighted you. You were confused and waiting for someone or something to rescue you from your hopelessness. You had to make a difficult decision. You needed to exclude all kinds of illusions and external influences, to silence the chaos and your fears in your thoughts in order to find your inner voice. You wanted to finally see clearly and continue your life more consciously. Over time, you overcame your difficulties, the hoped-for enlightenment arrived, you managed to make the decision and move on. The Sun is rising on the horizon for you, an ascension is coming in your life. You are relieved, you are on the road to recovery. Your outer and inner worlds are beginning to harmonize. After a thorough self-examination, you now see yourself more objectively and manage your emotions more consciously. In your bundle you carry your experiences and lessons with you, but you have left the past behind you, you do not let it continue to chain you down. The most important thing is that you are finally free. I wish that the new beginning fills your heart with hope and confidence, and that the knowledge of that you were able to overcome the difficulties gives you the strength to embark on the next, much happier phase of your life that awaits you.

To what extent are They ready to receive you? Four of Swords, Queen of Wands

It seems that your divine partner is resting after a difficult period too, consider things while they are healing (or just recently the healing phase is coming to an end for them). For them, the primary goal during this period is to regenerate and recharge their batteries. They must regain their strength and their love of life. First, they must warm up their own soul, so later, when your paths cross they can invigorate you with their pleasurable personality, and after that, as your relationship deepens, they can embrace you with their caring, devoted warmth. They need to gather courage and fix their self-confidence so that they can see the future more optimistically. It is necessary for them to turn inward now, they must process and understand their own emotions and what happened to them, so that later they can trust their intuition again, which will lead them to you.

What symbols and signs will indicate to you that your soulmate is nearby? King of Swords, Seven of Pentacles, Three of Pentacles

Sword, dagger Butterfly Crown Frog Flying bird(s) Pentagram, star a Ring (jewelry) what you maybe find in an unusual place or one that has one of the listed symbols on it Crescent moon Reaping hook Bunch of grapes Flowers for decoration/ornament/sticker, bouquet the color Blue can play a role

Where and under what circumstances will you meet? Ace of Cups

It seems like a place close to nature, near water, maybe next to a lake, where water lilies float on the water, or in a park, maybe by a fountain (perhaps with coins in it), in company of birds, where you can feed them. A sound of a small bell. I don't know where the jingle came from, but it has a nice, cheerful sound. Maybe you'll hear a similar sound when you meet eachother. You will meet at a time when you are both ready to accept new emotions, a new relationship, when you have reached the appropriate phase of self-care, practicing self-love, when you can give because you have taken care of filling your own cups.

Advice: What to focus your energy on in other areas of your life until you meet: Nine of Cups, Ace of Swords, Reversed Six of Cups, Strength

Take care of yourself, celebrate! Enjoy what you have achieved, reward yourself! Take advantage of the clearing of your thoughts. Let the new ideas and inspirations take you away. You can start to opening up to new communications, new acquaintances and opportunities. Sometimes you may even be filled with nostalgic feelings, which make you play with the idea: "Everything was good in the beginning." "Everything could be like that again." Please don't turn back! Avoid people with energy/vibe that reminds you of the old ones. Stay aware, leave the past in the past, don't nurture old things, ideas, relationships that you have already outgrown for your own benefit, that no longer serve you, they only drain your energy from your present and your future. Try to transform your experience into your strength. Nurture the inner strength to move forward, turn to yourself and your shadows with patience and understanding. Maybe you need to heal your inner child/teen, give yourself the care and love you need and desire. You have endless opportunities to grow and develop, you have the resources you need for further healing, and to tame and silence those shadow creatures that would encourage you to repeat old patterns. Hang in there for yourself, for your recovery.

To what extent are you ready to receive your soulmate? Queen of Wands, Reversed Hierophant, Ten of Cups, Reversed Eight of Wands, Reversed Moon

Dear Soul!

You are full of fire and passion. Confident, creative, intense, emotional, warm-hearted, devoted. You are aware of your values ​​and you are looking for the king/queen in whom you can find an equal partner, who is strong enough to walk beside you, with whom you can create your own empire, like proud lions.

You long to experience all forms and heights of happiness, as well as the feeling of completeness and fulfillment, with a true, supportive partner.

You want this in such a form that you can keep your personal freedom and independence. You don't necessarily desire the bond of marriage in order to meet expected traditions and/or social expectations on paper. Perhaps you have already had a bad experience in the past, disappointment, breakup, divorce, a relationship that did not satisfy you spiritually and emotionally, where your soul could not soar.

Yet you would give your whole heart if you could find your soulmate, the ally with whom you could finally establish a home and live your life in abundance and overflowing love.

Yet there is something that holds you back, paralyzes you. There is an inner tension in you because you want to move forward, but you can't. Things around you are not going the way you want them to. Something always gets in the way, breaks your momentum, your sense of purpose. Whether there are obstacles in the physical world or internal obstacles that do not allow you to continue on the path to your soulmate, they also prevent you from fully opening up and becoming receptive to this attachment.

The voices of anxiety, fear, and uncertainty suppress your own inner voice, which would show you the way to your truer life. To unlock and release this inner barrier, you must turn inward, dive into the darkness, find the source of your fears, and examine it to see clearly. Just observe them in silence, if you let go of the struggle against them, accept their presence, the light of enlightenment may even reach you sooner. Maybe you need a quiet, meditative retreat to find your inner compass, the light of the Moon that illuminates the path you can follow.

To what extent are They ready to receive you? Eight of Cups, Reversed King of Wands, Reversed Three of Wands, Reversed Nine of Pentacles

Meanwhile, your soulmate also tries to move on with difficult feelings and to leave their past, everything that no longer serves them. A period ended for them, and they set out on a new path towards the unknown. There are several challenges ahead of them that they must overcome to reach the top of the mountain, but despite their doubts, a small inner flame drives them on.

For me, the Reversed King of Wands usually does not reveal excessive aggression, but rather a lack of self-confidence, battered confidence. I sense a restless energy from them, like from you.

They obsessively wants to accomplish, or stubbornly sticks to an idea, maybe that’s why they don't listen to their intuition. Maybe that's why it's hard for them to adapt to their changed circumstances.

A new world opened up to them, but they not very optimistic about it. They doubt and hesitate, even though they have all the potential to take control of their life, they just need to rediscover that ability and determination within themself. They really need commitment now to start over. They need to examine their options with foresight, carefully plan their journey and prepare for it before making further decisions. They should not make decisions out of haste or thoughtlessness, and they maybe unwilling, but have to accept the intentions of others to help.

They strives for financial independence and longs for abundance so that they can give the best to their loved ones. They want a stable life where they don't depend on anyone and can enjoy the fruits of their hard work.

What symbols and signs will indicate to you that your soulmate is nearby? Page of Pentacles, Reversed Four of Cups

Pentagram, star

A specific Coin or Jewelry (maybe with one of the listed symbols on it)

Object of longing/admiration - what you get for yourself, or you find something you've been looking for, something you wanted to deal with, something you wanted to know more about, something you admire

Palm tree – (Eggsecutor jumped in my mind, maybe you or them are in the Pokemon fandom but not necessarily)

Unexpected gift/opportunity - You will find a new opportunity/offer that will shake you out of your dullness

Where and under what circumstances will you meet? Reversed Eight of Pentacles

I feel like there is a forced break in this situation. Restrictive circumstances or financial difficulties may play a role in work or study.

Like:

Job interview, job searching, go to employment office, work break, any kind of break in education, forced leave, slow administration/work, long line, long waiting, enrolling in a course, suspended/cancelled/missed/postponed event/course/workshop, unfinished business.

Advice: What to focus your energy on in other areas of your life until you meet: Knight of Wands, Reversed Five of Wands, Reversed Queen of Pentacles

You probably would not like to hear this, but; Patience, dear Soul. You really want this person who can make a difference in your life. You are bubbling with action, you are thirsty for new, exciting experiences, but in order to move away from the dead end, you need to channel your energies into a healthy channel. "Great excitement can also result in a stressful situation that prevents a well-considered decision and correct action." If you get carried away by the intensity, you can get involved in conflicts that don't move you forward, they just eat up your vitality. You need patience, persistence and sanity. It's worth avoiding or not taking stressful situations too seriously, rather use the power of your inner fire to overcome your own internal battles to get closer to what you really want to create. During this period, it is important to sort out restless energies to avoid burnout. Ground yourself, let the flames subside, rest for a while, seek stability. It’s important to take care of your health. Take care of yourself, you need the right physical and mental nourishment to find your center. Think about what foods and nutrients you take in, pay attention to your body's signals. Try meditative activities/techniques that you like, seek contact with nature, be it a walk in the park or time spent with animals, do creative activities, anything what you feel that helps you to relax.

The reading is permeated by the energy of the number 888. A phase of both of your lives is coming to an end so that something much better can begin for you. Abundance and harmony is headed your way, just keep going. You have to prepare and go through some trials, but if you are committed and open to transformation, you will definitely get closer and closer to your desired goals and to each other.

[manganiti]

Amane's/Hanako's memory loss

We know that Amane/Hanako doesn't remember some parts of his past, the most notable being the reason he was fixing the clock.

However, there are some other things that he doesn't remember. And those things are... his encounters with Nene when she traveled to the past.

Yet, at the same time, he subconsciously recalls them.

1. "Body remembers but mind doesn't" instance #1: The Tanabata Star Festival 

I don't think that Nene changed the timeline when she traveled to the past, but rather it was destined to happen in the previous timeline, because note that before she traveled to the past to meet little Amane, Hanako was already confused as his heart started to beat faster after Nene whacked his forehead.

Like, the whack triggered the sensations he had when Nene kissed his forehead in the past. That's why the "?" like, "Why am I feeling so nervous out of nothing because she whacked my forehead?" It's like, his body remembers what happened even if his mind doesn't.

Something interesting is that Amane doesn't remember Nene 4 years later.

Many people think that it's because he met her when he was little and then he forgot about her because he grew up, but I don't think that's the case. For example, even though Tsukasa was 4 when he first met Nene, he still remembered her when he was 12.

I think Nene had such a strong impact on Amane when he was 8.

He liked her because of her fat ankles, then blushed because she cleaned his mouth with a handkerchief, had a crush on her after this and was willing to give her his one wishing slip. Then, he told her she was his type and he even changed his wish of becoming an astronaut, to meeting her once again, writing her name in the process. Finally, he hung the wishing slips she gave him from the big wish tree and smiled as he looked at them. She was his first love!

That's why it doesn't make sense that he doesn't remember her.

It’s as if his memories were altered while he was still alive. But by whom? Could it be The Clock Keepers? Did Amane became a Clock Keeper in the ages of 8-12? Could an accident that happened during that time, make him lose his memories? (Before the one that happened at the school festival).

Or could it be Tsukasa who manipulated their "accidental encounters" through time so that they would develop their bond, but it was very important that Amane wouldn't remember Nene at the same time, hence, he altered Amane's memories so that his big plan to grant Amane's wish could work?

2. "Body remembers but mind doesn't" instance #2: Picture Perfect

At first, we weren’t sure whether what Hanako did to Nene when he locked her up was a kiss on the forehead or showing him getting closer to hug her. However, with the recent official art and the anime, it’s clear that it was a kiss on the forehead.

It doesn't seem that Hanako remembers something about her from when he was alive, though. He just subconsciously remembers the kiss she gave him on the forehead. I think it became something really special to him, a sweet gesture of affection.

3."Body remembers but mind doesn't" instance #3: The magic spell

So, this is another example of how Hanako subconsciously recalls the kiss Nene gave him when he was 8, but as I previously said, it's very clear that he doesn't remember meeting her when he was still alive.

Still, his emotions and actions scream and show how much that interaction meant to him when he could remember. It's as if those memories are trying to emerge from the depths of his mind.

It's also an example that shows that what happened in the past with Nene, is already part of the previous timeline.

I know that it started with Hanako giving a kiss to Nene as a magic spell, so she replicated it with Amane, but also Hanako seemed confused when his body reacted to Nene's whack on his forehead at the festival.

I think he replicated the kiss Nene gave him on the forehead when he kissed her cheek, but if he hadn't done it, Nene wouldn't have replicated it with Amane.

It's like a causal circle of kisses interactions. Like there's no beginning or ending. It was everything at the same time, in some way and no kiss interaction could have existed without the other (When I started to write this theory I didn't know I could be analysing these kisses interactions this deeply lol but it's very interesting).

4. "Body remembers but mind doesn't" instance #4: Love at first sight

Another example of he has memory loss but his body remembers is the day Hanako met Nene for the first time because she wanted him to grant her wish.

What if Tsukasa planned everything from the beginning? How did he know that Nene would have such a strong impact on Hanako? Hanako liked Nene at first sight!

It's as if Tsukasa knew he could take advantage of the feelings Hanako had for Nene and he made them a crucial part of his plans. It's also strange the way Hanako got attached to Nene so quickly and it's like Tsukasa was expecting Hanako to get attached to her that quickly.

I think that aside from the time travel events that are shown in the story so far, something really important happened between Nene and the Yugi twins when they were alive.

Those interactions made Tsukasa realize that Amane/Hanako's and Nene's feelings were mutual, or maybe he manipulated everything so that they could fall in love with each other (That would make him HanaNene biggest shipper lol).

(This is a "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" kind of situation. My head is gonna explode hahaha)

Either way, Hanako doesn't seem to remember Nene because his memories related to her are altered along with his reason for fixing the clock. Could his memories about Nene and the clock be related?

Tsukasa knows the full story.

[jojo-schmo]

✿ Forgotten Land Roleswap AU ✿

✦ 3rd Anniversary ✦

I was hoping to get this Light Novel cover redraw finished by today, but I haven't been feeling well and ran out of time- but I still wanted to at least share this WIP and muse on how much things have grown during these three years, and how much this project has meant to me so far.

April 12, 2022 was the day I created posted the first doodles that would, unbeknownst to me at the time, germinate the idea that would transform into a passion project spanning multiple years. I had just finished Kirby and the Forgotten Land's story and slowly getting back into the Kirby fandom space for the first time in years. It had been a long time since a game made me feel as wonderful as Forgotten Land did. I've loved Bandana Waddle Dee since I first played Return to Dreamland on the Wii when I was a kid, and wished he had more opportunities to shine outside of directly supporting Kirby in the game. I also love "What If" and "Roleswap" AUs, so I considered what would happen if I swapped Bandana Dee and King Dedede's role in the game.

The posts didn't really get much traction at first, which was fine. But I kept going back to the idea after a few days and thinking about how to push it further. Instead of just swapping Bandee and Dedede, what if Dedede was Player 1 to increase the stakes of rescuing the kidnapped Waddle Dees? Dedede wouldn't have access to Mouthful Mode, so how would the gameplay work then? Instead of Kirby taking care of everything with his own Mouthful Mode, it could be more fun to have Meta Knight be Player 2 instead, and explore their teamwork dynamics and problem-solving methods together!

So I explored an alternative- Combo Mode! And developing and researching ideas for that lit a spark within me! I had to keep going after that!

Now I had to consider, if I'm already swapping around all the main characters, I'm starting to have an entirely new universe here! What's next to change up? For the heroes' companion, I felt like Elfilin wouldn't behave very differently in this AU than in canon, he would probably continue to be friendly and helpful and sweet. Which would be okay- but to make things more interesting for myself, what if I played around with the origin story of the missing pieces of Fecto Forgo and switched "Elfilis" and "Elfilin" around? That way there's new obstacles and possibilities there and maybe I can even surprise some people with the lore down the line!

Now I'd had my Dream Team shuffled around, a very different mysterious companion for them... And why stop there? Why not play with the Beast Council's roles too while I'm at it to make things even more interesting for myself to write?!

From the early days of this AU Project...

To my more recent work...

...Now here we are.

It'd been a long, long time since I enjoyed the creation process of anything for myself like this! I was coming out of some pretty hard times in the early 2020s, and in a lot of ways, this AU has been there alongside me during a years-long journey to get help for my mental health, to become more confident in who I am and what I can bring to the world around me, and to love myself. Now I'm the best version of myself I've ever been, and I can pour so much more into my art and writing, especially with this AU!! <3

AND MAN, does it feel good to see physical evidence of my art style's evolution side-by-side! Like comparing my first Light Novel cover redraw from 2022 with my current WIP!

Creating this AU has taught me so much about storytelling, the medium of comics, organization, and most of all, to enjoy the process and really push my personal limits in a positive way. I've met so many amazing people since starting this story, some of whom have inspired me in ways I never could've imagined. Some very key people have even helped me ponder different mediums to tell this story.... Some animatics... or maybe even more interactive storytelling...? I am slow cooking some fun ideas, dear reader....

This AU gave me the confidence to become more involved in the fandom space and find community among people who have taught me so much. I am so, so grateful for this project.

I know it's taken some time to get here. I still work full-time and now I'm pursuing a second bachelor's in hopes of a career change that will allow me more time to focus on creating someday. But for now, free time can be frustratingly limited for me. It's also taken this long because I've put a lot of thought into how to set up the metaphorical "dominos" in the forms of foreshadowing and world-building I want, to do my best to make the wait worth it for the future plot pay-offs and reveals I have planned!! I'm hoping to continue to pick up speed with updates as I increase my skill and solidify my master plan for this story... MUAHAHA....

I plan on seeing this project to the very very end, and I can't wait to continue this journey with you all. Especially with the announcement of Star-Crossed Worlds!!! I'm not too worried about it turning my AU lore upside-down quite yet since it's post-game content and my bigger lore drops are still a little bit away, so I have time to navigate that when it does drop :3

Thank you to everyone who has read, enjoyed, and supported this project in any way, whether it's a like, comment, reblog tag, dm, carrier pigeon, paper airplane- whatever!! <3 I love, appreciate, and am beyond grateful for every reader, supporter, and friend I've gained in the past three years!!

Cheers to a successful three years under my belt, and I look forward to the future!! By the end of this journey, I hope you will enjoy reading this story as much as I've enjoyed writing it.

🫧 Love, Jojo T. Schmo 🫧

★○★○★○★○★○★○★○★

♫ Laughing loud! Even if you're far apart, they're right by your side. Hearts full of love! Everyone is welcome to live in this new world. ♫

｡⋆｡˚ ʚïɞ ˚｡⋆｡

[thewertsearch]

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain cloth. Or anything taking place out here in the emerald shitty paintjob, for that matter.

So, wait - in this extended Wizard of Oz analogy, Hussie is the wizard? It does seem fitting, except that the Wizard of Oz was only pretending to be an all-powerful god, whereas Hussie, as the author of the story, actually is omnipotent.

...not that there's any actual proof of that, come to think of it.

Perhaps the in-universe Hussie avatar is merely narrating the story, rather than creating it, and any claims to the contrary are really just smoke, mirrors and braggadocio. If that's true, then they're really just an observer of these events, albeit a particularly well-informed one.

JOHN: this place is weird. when are we gonna bust through the other window, anyway? JOHN: i'm kind of antsy to get on with our adventure and meet up with everybody! JADE: yes me too JADE: hmmmmmm

It's going to be hours, at the very least.

If our two parties were mere minutes from reuniting, there'd be no reason to drag it out for this long. Besides, if the kids' arrival in the B2 session was imminent, then they'd immediately steal the spotlight back from our four new protagonists, some of whom we haven't even officially met yet.

The B2 kids need room to breathe. They deserve some time to develop as characters, without being completely overshadowed by their predecessors. Therefore, said predecessors will have to slow their fucking roll for a second, and let the Alpha Kids shine.

JADE: we should arrive in about three years

Jegus, what?

I haven't been this blindsided by a timeskip since Scarab 25.6 - but the more I think about it, the more confident I am that it's the right decision. Not just because it gives the Alphas time to develop, but because of the possibilities it opens up.

When the B2 kids re-enter the story, they'll be around the same age as Jane's team - and since we've just met Jane's team, I think it's highly unlikely that they'll be included in the timeskip. The Alpha Kids aren't going to be nineteen when John's team arrive - they'll be in the same timeframe they're in now, on the same day they entered their session.

In other words, we're going to get to know the Alpha Kids as a group of hormonal teenagers - and then, when the time is right, we're going to drop a cluster bomb of additional teenagers right on top of their session, stand well back, and watch the shitshow begin. If you think the Jake/Jane/Dirk/Roxy love quadrangle is bad, wait until you see Jake/Gamzee/Karkat/Terezi/Dave.

Plus, a 3-year-timeskip means our protagonists can finally rest for a while. The Sburb crisis isn't over, of course, but it is on pause - and for much longer than I expected it to be, too. The kids can finally unpack what the fuck happened today, and the trolls can enjoy a non-hostile living environment for literally the first time in their entire lives. This is good for them, and I think it'll really help them grow.

It's a shame that we'll probably be splitting the party, but these two groups are still full of interesting dynamics, that we now have time to explore. John/Jade and Rose/Dave can finally get to know each other as siblings, Rosemary can develop as a couple, and the whole Karkat/Terezi situation can finally resolve, one way or the other.

We've been stuck on one single day for almost four thousand pages - but now, we're finally leaving this long, long Monday afternoon behind us. It's time to accelerate.

[fantasydreamland]

Sorceress

legolas greenleaf x fem reader

Summary: You join the three men on the journey to fight against Saruman, and one does not trust you. Legolas is suspicious of you and your perfection, until he admits to himself those feelings were just masking his true feelings that he had quickly developed for you.

Notes: 18+ ONLY!!! Smuttt, enemies to lovers, angst, violence/minor gore in battle scene, alcohol consumption, p in v, fingering, oral (m&f), masturbation (m), fluff, possible spoilers.

Word count: 6k

(I got a little carried away with this one)

masterlist

“She is going to help us.” Aragorn says as he, Legolas and Gimli sit at a table inside the inn while they wait for your arrival. “She is supposed to be a great sorceress. We need her.”

“We cannot trust some old woman we do not even know. Why can we not simply go without her?” Legolas questions with furrowed brows.

The idea of a stranger joining them on their journey left him feeling extremely uneasy.

“Who told you I was an old woman?” They hear a voice behind them.

You lower your hood as the inn door closes behind you. You walk towards the men and they stand to greet you. You give a friendly smile to Aragorn whom you had just recently met and agreed to assist. Legolas’s eyes go wide in surprise as he takes you in. You appeared young and basically flawless, nearly elvish beauty but something even more rare. You had piercing purple eyes and beautiful porcelain skin. Below your cloak your long purple dress clung to your figure, Legolas had to clear his throat to force himself to stop staring.

As Aragorn goes to speak Legolas says- “Forgive me, my lady.” He bows his head. “I simply cannot trust someone I do not know. And I find it rather odd that the other sorcerers I have known appeared quite old in age yet you look remarkably young.”

“Well, I do not trust you either yet. We have only just met after all… And I doubt you have ever met a female sorceress.” You give him a catty smile. “The concept of eternal youth should not seem that odd to you, elf.”

“Hey now.” Gimli cuts in.

“I did not mean any offence, sir.” You turn to the dwarf before turning your gaze back to Legolas. “I have a great admiration for the elves. They can be quite impressive.”

Legolas fought his lips curling into a smile as your eyes remained deeply connected for a moment.

You all sat down at the table and started quietly discussing the plans. Legolas’s eyes kept drifting towards you anytime important information was mentioned, still untrusting of this (beautiful) stranger before him.

**********

Legolas continued to keep a close eye on you, still unsure if he could trust you. He is always skeptical of strangers but there was something too enchanting about you. He felt bewitched every time your eyes would meet. You were too perfect, no one is that perfect.

“We should take the passage through the cave here.” You say pointing to a spot on the map that you and your three companions were hovered over.

“It would be safer to go around. We have no idea what lurks in that cave.” Legolas responds.

“Perhaps, but it will take us three times as long.” You gently argue as Legolas gives you a scowl in response. “Besides, I have passed through it once before. We should be fine but we will remain on our guard for any surprises.”

“Surprises?” Legolas retorts. “How do we know this is not some trap you have set for us?”

“Legolas.” Aragorn says firmly.

“What? I am sorry but this all seems far too suspicious for my taste. How do we know she is not working for Saruman?” Legolas continues with frustration as his eyes go back and forth between you and Aragorn. You just stare at him blankly. “Why is she helping us so willingly if she is not a spy meant to trick us? I do not trust her!”

“I am helping you to fight against Saruman because like all of you I do not wish to see this world destroyed by evil.” You state sternly, tears beginning to fill your eyes that were firmly focused on Legolas. “If you cannot find a way to trust me we are doomed… But if that is not enough, and you remain convinced I am just some horrible evil witch, I will figure out some other way on my own and leave you all alone…”

Legolas simply stares at you in surprise, not quite sure how to respond.

“You may let me know your thoughts in the morning.” You say before he can respond, with a slight shake in your voice as you fight back tears. “I’m turning in for the night.”

And just like that, you walk off without another word or ‘goodnight’ to anyone. Legolas feels a sinking ache his stomach. He could tell you were genuinely hurt by what he said and he felt quite guilty about it now. You had not truly given him a real reason to mistrust you so deeply. He just believed you were too good to be true. Too perfect. Maybe deep down he was simply trying to mask the unwanted feelings he was quickly developing.

“I am going to turn in as well.” Legolas says lowly to Aragorn and Gimli. “Goodnight.”

He walks off to his room which was directly across from yours. His heart and feet stop at the sad sound of you crying in your room. His advanced hearing could hear your soft sobs through your door, though you were clearly trying to remain unheard. Another wave of guilt washed over him.

He felt a magnetic pull towards your door and was nearly about to knock before deciding against it. He retires to his own room instead, unable to find any rest as you overtook all of his thoughts.

**********

The next morning Legolas was quick to rise. He was eager to see you and apologize profusely. He waited anxiously at the table you had been at last night. After some time, his head perked up at the sound of feet approaching from the hallway. His expression quickly sunk when he saw Aragorn and Gimli come around the corner.

“Do you know if (y/n) is awake?” Legolas asks.

“Ay, she is awake.” Gimli responds, giving a knowing side eye to Aragorn, making Legolas raise his brow at them.

“Her room is empty…” Aragorn says hesitantly, avoiding direct eye contact with Legolas. “She must have left in the night.”

“All because you could not keep your mouth shut!” Gimli points out.

“Gimli.” Aragorn says sternly.

The dwarf grumbles an apology. Legolas hardly pays any attention to the insult or the apology as his mind races from the news of you being suddenly gone. He feels sick to his stomach, not completely sure why your absence affected him so deeply. As he goes to say something the inn door opens and you walk inside, your hood up and your bag at your side.

“Forgive me, I was restless this morning and went for an early walk.” You say blankly to the men at the table as you walk over to them.

Legolas lets out a quiet breath of relief. The feelings he had thinking you had left just proved how badly he wanted you to stay with them, with him.

“I trust you have made your decision?” You ask Legolas directly.

“I have.” He stands from his chair. “I have decided to trust you.” He states.

“Oh!” You say in slight surprise. “Well, I suppose that is good then...”

Legolas raises a brow at your dry tone, you notice.

“I was expecting a much different response.” You explain.

“Please forgive me, my lady.” Legolas gently takes your hand in his, you let him. “My behaviour last night was unbecoming of me and you did not deserve that. You have given no reason to earn such disrespect. I am truly sorry.”

Your slightly pursed lips curl into a pleased smile. This was not what you were anticipating at all. You truly thought he despised you. You assumed it had already been decided last night that he would certainly choose to be rid of you. You did not know that he actually had made his decision last night, it was just not the choice you expected. You were oddly relieved as you realized you not only didn’t want to part from the crew, but you did not want to part from Legolas.

“You do not understand how glad I am to hear that.” You smile to him.

He smiles back and places a kiss to the back of your hand before letting go.

“Well then, the adventure continues!” You say to the group of men before you all continue your journey.

**********

Legolas was quite impressed seeing you in battle. Your powers were incredible but what blew him away was how skilled you were with a blade. You stuck closed together during the fight, like magnets. There were multiple times you pulled a brave move that saved his life and he, yours.

One attack had you knocked on your back. You fought hard, pushing against your enemies dagger that was getting closer and closer to your throat. You were too exhausted to use any more magic to save you, your life flashed before your eyes when the tip of the dagger touched your skin. Suddenly, the enemy lets out a pained scream and you see the tip of a sword sticking out of its eye, it’s blood splattered on your already blood coated face. You see Legolas standing over you as he kicks the enemy to the side so he fell to the ground and not on top of you. He reaches his hand out and pulls you up.

“Thank you.” You pant.

“No problem.” He pants back, both of you exhausted from battle.

After the battle you all began to flee back to your meeting spot. You climb on your horse and go to Legolas’s side.

“Climb up!” You call down to him.

“I need to find Arod!” He calls back.

“He is safe! Gimli already took him!”

“That little…” He snarls. “Alright, let me steer!”

“Just get on!” You shake your head at him.

He climbs on behind you, the saddle forcing your bodies to press closely together. You ride off and the friction between you in the saddle begins causing a panic to rise in Legolas as his member quickly hardens behind you. He tries hard to concentrate on absolutely anything else but with your butt bouncing and pushing up against him as you rode, it made it impossible. He prayed to the gods that you would not notice but you were secretly smirking to yourself as you clearly felt something hard pressed against your backside. You casually push into him even more as you continue your journey, your cheeks quickly heating at his desire for you.

**********

You rest and celebrate from battle at a nearby inn. Gimli boldly challenges Legolas to a drinking contest. Several mugs of ale later the dwarf was piss drunk laughing loudly.

“I feel something…” Legolas suddenly says, lifting his hand and rubbing his fingers together. “A slight tingle in my fingers… I think it’s affecting me.”

Gimli cheers loudly, raising another cup as they both continue to drink. After some time Gimli lays passed out on the table and Legolas is stumbling towards where you stood against the wall with your now empty cup.

“You seem to be having fun?” You smirk at him.

“Quite.” He smirks back, a drunk smile stuck on his face. “Do you think you could point me to the direction of my rooom?” He slightly slurs.

You chuckle at him. “Come now, I am heading back to mine as well.”

He follows you down the dimly lit hallways of endless doors and couldn’t help but continuously glance in your direction. He was too busy drinking with Gimli that he hadn’t noticed earlier just how revealing your dress was. The purple fabric wrapped around your body in a way that left your back and arms fully exposed. The sight of the few freckles scattered across your back made his cheeks heat, though that could also be from all the ale. The dress was long and flowed openly as you walked, briefly exposing your bare legs underneath. Then his eyes slowly wandered up to the low cut V of your dress, revealing a sinful amount (he thought) of your large breasts. He felt a jolt go down his spine and shoot directly to his member.

You stopped suddenly and his eyes met yours.

“We are here.” You say a little awkwardly, gesturing to your rooms that sat across from each other at the very end of the halls.

His cheeks darken, unsure how much of his gaze you had caught.

“Goodnight, Legolas.” You smile before leaning in and placing a soft kiss to his cheek.

You turn towards your door when his hand grabs yours.

“(y/n)…” He says in a whisper, leaning in closer to you as your hands remain connected.

“Yes?” You whisper back, eyes searching his.

“I am not sure when I will have the courage again to say this…” He says as his other hand cups your cheek, causing your heart to race. “I think you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. And the most interesting, kind, wild, and courageous woman I have ever met.”

You can’t help the wide grin that spreads across your face at his words. Before you have time to respond he closes the space between you and captures your lips in a searing kiss. It was deeply passionate, hungry. Your hands cling to his shirt as you kiss him back desperately, happily letting his tongue slip into your mouth. His hand moves into your hair as he pushes you back up against the wall. His lips fall to your neck, kissing and sucking gently.

“Legolas…” You breathe.

The sound of his name softly falling from your lips like that just spurred him on. His lips continue to ravish your neck and move down your chest as his hand grabs at your breast. A soft moan escapes you and the need for him fills your veins like fire. You wanted him so badly… but not like this.

“Legolas…” You whisper again, this time gently pulling him off you. “I think we should slow down…”

“Yes. Sorry. Yes, you’re right. I am sorry. I should not have-“ He stutters a bit anxiously.

“No! No. You have no reason to apologize.” You say reassuringly.

“I should not have assumed-“

“Legolas.” You say firmly, cupping his cheek in your hand. “I want you. I want you much more than I would care to admit… But when, or if, that moment happens… I want us both to be fully in the right state of mind.”

“Yes… you are right.” His hand covers the one on his cheek. “I would also like to be able to ravish you… fully.” He gives you a devilish smirk as his eyes drift from your lips back to your eyes.

His words make you blush and he watches as you bite your lower lip. It took both of you all of your will power to finally pull away.

“Goodnight, (y/n).” He says, taking your hand to place a kiss upon it.

“Goodnight, Legolas.” You give a blushing smirk before you turn to walk into your room.

Your eyes meet his a final time as you both go to close your doors. No words are said but the look between you was an unspoken promise for later.

Sleep was difficult to find as your mind races thinking of the steamy kiss you had just shared with Legolas. The thought of your tongues intertwined, his sinful mouth all over your neck and chest. You had a taste of each other and now the desire for him was driving you absolutely mad.

Legolas was in no better shape. The alcohol began to fade from his system but he still felt drunk on the memory of your lips on his. His hard member pressed angerly against his trousers. He couldn’t help himself. He would blame the blinding lust on the alcohol later, when he was completely sober and trying to reason his actions. For now, he shoved shame aside and pulled his aching cock out and began slowly stroking himself. His hand speeds up as intoxicating visions of you flash in his mind. Your revealed skin, the freckles on your back and your long pale legs. His lips on your sinfully exposed chest. The soft gasps and moans that slipped from your perfect lips. What finally pushed him over the edge was your voice ringing in his ears ‘Legolas… Legolas…’ Your soft whispers of his name had his release shooting across his stomach as a choked out moan escapes him.

He cleans up for bed and rest finds him surprisingly fast after that. His dreams were filled with nothing but images of you.

**********

A loud rumble of thunder wakes Legolas in the night. His mind instantly begins to race at the memory of the steamy kiss you had shared just outside the door. He could not resist the strong magnetic force pushing him to go and see you. After several minutes of debate he throws off the blankets, revealing his shirtless upper half and heads towards the door.

He quietly closes his door behind him before stepping towards yours. He was desperate to see you but also did not want to wake you if you happened to be sleeping through the loud thunder continuing outside. He knocks lightly on the door, not to wake you if you were asleep but loud enough you would hear if you were awake.

His heart stops as he hears your footsteps getting closer and watches as the door slowly opens.

“Legolas?” You ask in a sleepy whisper, peaking out the door.

“Apologies my lady, I hope I did not wake you.” He responds quietly, careful not to wake anyone else in the nearby rooms.

“No, the thunder woke me… Though I have hardly been able to sleep.”

You try to ignore the heat pooling between your legs at the sight of his bare toned upper body and his rarely loose hair tucked messily behind his pointed ears. You also notice his eyes scan over your form. He nearly lost all restraint right then and there, at the sight of your nipples poking through your thin night dress.

Before you could ask what he was doing at your door in the middle of the night he says in a whisper- “I could not stop thinking about you...”

You can’t help but smile as your eyes connect, electricity sparking silently between you.

“I have not been able to stop thinking about you either…” You say lowly. “Do you… do you want to come in?”

Legolas smirks and nods before boldly capturing your lips and walking you both into the room as he closes and locks the door behind him.

“Are you certain?” You ask him in a pant, breaking the kiss. He knew exactly what you were referring to.

He knew he was certainly not in his right mind with the way you haunted his thoughts. But he knew he was now completely sober and knew for certain this is what he wanted. You were what he desperately wanted.

“I am certain.” He responds, looking deep into your eyes. “Are you…?”

You nod a little too eagerly, making him chuckle. He kisses you again and you both make your way over to the bed. You boldly pull your night dress over your head, leaving you completely exposed before him. You watch his breath catch and fire flicker behind his eyes as he takes you in.

“Lay down…” He says in a seductive whisper.

You don’t hesitate for even a second before getting into bed. He quickly climbs over top of you and leans in. A nearly silent moan escapes you at the feeling of your breasts pressed against his bare skin. His lips hover just above yours as your noses brush.

“You are… exquisite.” He whispers before capturing your lips again.

This kiss is much more slow, tender. Like he’s savouring every second and every reaction from you. Each gentle flick of his tongue against yours calculated and deliberate. His lips move to your neck, leaving a trail of kisses and then sucking harshly.

“Legolas! You are going to leave a mark…” You yell in a whisper.

“Good. Then everyone will know who you belong to.” He says in a husky voice against your neck.

His words send a shiver through your entire being. He continues his light torture on your skin, sucking and gently nipping his way down your collarbone. Once he reaches your chest he does not hesitate to take your breast into his mouth. You moan as his warm tongue circles around your nipple, he moves to the other breast to do the same before kissing down your stomach, your breathing now rising and falling frantically.

“Tell me if you wish for me to stop…” He says in a rough, deep voice that you had never heard from him before.

You shook your head at him. Having him stop was the very last thought on your mind. He gives you a devilish smirk before his mouth moves down onto your core. You gasp loudly as his tongue instantly begins working against your clit. Your fingers bury into his silky white hair as soft whimpers escape you.

He slowly slides in his long slender finger, testing you before he adds a second. The way he begins to curl his fingers inside you as his tongue relentlessly works at your pearl has you crying out his name. You were grateful for the loud rain and rumbling thunder masking your moans while Aragorn was sleeping in just the next room.

Legolas subconsciously begins grinding against the bed as he continues ravishing you, his achingly hard member screaming to be released. His fingers work faster as he feels your beautiful thighs tighten around his head, warning him how close you are. With a final cry out you come undone, pulsing against his fingers and soaking his face.

He pulls away and you look down at him, his glistening face between your legs, messy hair, cocky smirk and heavy lustful eyes staring into yours. You felt like you could come again just from the sight of him.

You pull him to you and kiss him hungrily, tasting yourself on his tongue.

“I need you inside me, please.” You pant, you could not wait a moment longer to have him.

He growls at your words as you reach for the hem of his trousers. His pants are quickly thrown to the floor and he lets out a shaky breath as your delicate fingers wrap around his length. He glides his tip against your core making you gasp. He smirks to himself before pushing into you. You let out a relieved moan in tandem, both of your mouths dropping open. Legolas stills inside you for a moment, the feeling of your warmth wrapped tightly around him had his head completely spinning.

“Legolas…” You pant.

He looks deeply into your purple eyes and the connection of it makes your heart skip a beat. He presses his lips to yours before sliding out and thrusting back into you. You moan into his mouth as he does it again while continuing to chase your tongue with his. His lips move to your neck as he gradually increases his speed. He can’t help the moans and grunts that escape him.

“Gods (y/n)… you feel fucking incredible.” He groans against your ear, causing goosebumps all over your skin.

You could not remember if you had ever even heard him curse before. You moan loudly in response. Suddenly he sits up, falling out of you causing you to whine from the sudden loss. He lifts your legs onto his shoulders before leaning down and plunging back into you. You cry out and he begins pounding into you relentlessly. The new angle and merciless speed quickly makes you see stars. Your mind goes completely blank other than his name and the amazing feelings he was sending throughout your body. Your nails dig hard into his biceps as your orgasm hits you like a tidal wave. You let out a long final moan that rings in loudly his ears. Loud enough that you were certain the thunder did not mask it.

You are completely breathless as he continues slamming into you, now chasing his own release. He lets your legs fall back down to his waist, wrapping around him. Another orgasm creeps up and threatens to overtake you.

“Fu-ck!” Legolas moans loudly as he spills into you, the intensity of it making him dizzy.

You moan loudly with him as he triggers your release once again. You wrap your legs tighter around his waist and pull him deeper into you as he fills you with his seed.

He rolls over, crashing onto the bed beside you. You both lay there facing the ceiling panting, trying to catch your breath and bring your minds back down to earth.

“Wow… that was… wow.” Legolas says between heavy breaths.

You let out a breathless chuckle in response. He pulls you in close and you cuddle up to him. He places a kiss on your head and softly plays with your hair as you peacefully fall asleep.

**********

The next morning you wake and look to Legolas with a mischievous idea in your mind. You could not stop replaying last nights events in your head. But there was one thing you realized you had not done. With that in mind, you slowly pull the blanket down his body, revealing his morning wood. You begin to place soft kisses all the way down his stomach, making him slightly squirm under your lips.

“What are you doing?…” Legolas mumbles sleepily.

“What does it look like I am doing?” You smirk at him before sucking on his tip, causing him to let out a sound between a gasp and a moan.

His heavy lidded eyes meet yours and his mouth parted, already breathing heavily.

“Do you want me to stop?” You pull away teasingly.

“Gods no.” He breathes before placing his hand on your head, gently urging you back down.

You smirk to yourself before you take him fully into your mouth, forcing a loud groan to escape him. You continue to bob your head, taking him fully down your throat. Legolas’s mind was completely blurred, all he could think of right now was beautiful, magnificent, you… and the feeling of his cock slamming against the back of your beautiful throat. Your actions quickly bringing him to his release.

“Gods (y/n), I’m going to-“ He chokes out.

Just then there’s a loud knock at the door. You pull your mouth off him with a ‘pop’ and look to the door then at Legolas, concern on your face.

“(Y/n)? Are you awake?” Aragorn calls from behind the door and you hear Gimli mutter something else to him.

“Ignore them.” Legolas urges in a desperate whisper, cupping your cheek with his hand. “They’ll go away if they think you are still sleeping. Just… ugh, please do not stop.”

You smirk and give him a small nod before taking him into your mouth once more. Legolas tries to hide his soft moans as his fingers tightened in your hair. He was so, so, close.

Another loud knock. You ignore it and continue bringing him towards the edge.

“(Y/n)?” Aragorn calls again. “Sorry to disturb you, but we cannot find Legolas. His things are still in his room but we cannot find him anywhere. We are worried something may have happened.”

“Oh for fucks sake...” Legolas huffs and storms out of bed, grabbing the sheet to wrap around his naked waist.

You watch from bed as he stomps over to the door, pulling the other blanket up to your chest to hide your exposed body. He swings open the door and you see Aragorn flinch in surprise as he takes in Legolas’s half naked form wrapped in a crumpled white sheet and an annoyed look plastered on his face.

“Legolas? I- I-“ Aragorn stutters and then spots over Legolas’s shoulder you lying in the bed, peaking at them both from under the blanket. “I- I am sorry… Just, um, come meet us at the bar when you are, done- I mean, ready…”

Legolas simply nods, trying to bite back a smile and keep a stern face until they were out of sight.

“Well, that solves that mystery!” Gimli laughs loudly once the door is shut.

Legolas makes his way back to you with a smirk.

“Well, that was incredibly awkward.” You chuckle and get up from the bed, leaving the blanket behind. “I suppose we should get ready.”

Legolas’s eyes flicker with fire as he takes in your naked body now standing right in front of him.

“As they said, we will meet them when we are done…” He says lowly.

He lets the sheet around his waist drop to the floor and your eyes glance down to his hard member before meeting his eyes again. The raw desire in his eyes causes fire to spread throughout your body.

He grabs both of your cheeks and pulls you into a passionate hungry kiss. You whimper at the intensity. He quickly flips you around and leads you back over to the bed.

“On your knees, love.” He whispers sensually in your ear, causing you to shiver with goosebumps, his hardness pressing against your back.

You follow his instructions and get onto the bed on your knees. You bend forward, giving him perfect access to you. He growls at the sight before him. You feel his hands grab your butt and hips. He shoves himself into you and you yelp out a moan. He wastes no time and starts a fast and relentless pace.

“My love…” He pants. “I- I cannot last long.”

You had brought him so close to sweet release with your mouth only moments ago, before you were interrupted, and it was making it impossible for him to last any longer. He was fighting hard to hold back at the very edge waiting for your response.

“It’s alright, my love. Come for me...” You breathe.

Hearing those words in your enchanting voice pushes him right over the edge and he finally lets go of the last thread of restraint. He grunts loudly as he comes deep inside you, his head thrown back and his fingers digging hard into your hips.

He rests against your back for a moment as he catches his breath. He pulls out and you both quickly get cleaned up and dressed. You made sure to choose a high cut dress to hide the many love marks that were spread across your neck and collarbones.

“Ready?” You smile at him.

“No.” He smirks and pulls you close against him.

He kisses you, gentle and slow. His tongue lightly glides over yours only once, before he places a final kiss to your lips and pulls away.

“I wish to stay in this room with you all day and night...” He gently pulls the neckline of your dress down to reveal your skin, before softly kissing your neck, following the trail of marks he had left last night.

“Mmm.” You hum. “I wish for that too…”

It takes all your strength to pull away from him as he nips at the sensitive spot on your neck. Your hooded eyes meet his and he watches as you bite your lip, which causes even more desire to fill him.

“But we cannot…” You sigh, eyes still connected intensely.

“You are right…” He sighs back, reluctantly pulling away from you.

He grabs his things from his room as you gather your own things and head out together.

**********

Aragorn and Gimli were waiting at a table in the bar area of the inn, just where they said they’d be.

“It’s about time!” Gimli calls loudly, Aragorn nudges him to be quiet.

“Apologies gentleman.” You say shyly as you sit down at the table.

Legolas sits in the empty chair across from you and you felt your stomach tighten when your eyes meet. You could hardly focus on what Aragorn and Gimli were discussing. Your mind swirled with the pleasure you had just shared only minutes ago and all the wild memories of last night. The feel of him, the look of his body, the taste of it, his pleasured facial expressions, his moans and sighs… it all flooded your mind. You tried to snap back to reality and focus but your eyes met his again and you could tell by the fire in them and the slight smirk creeping in the corner of his mouth, he was thinking about all of the same things you were.

You bite your lip trying to fight back your own knowing smirk. The action catches his attention and you watch his eyes look from your lips back to your eyes, somehow with even more fire behind them. There were unspoken words behind his gaze that you understood. All he was thinking about right now was being inside of you again and taking you right here on this table. And your lustful stare back at him told him that is exactly what you wanted too.

“Could you please stop eye-fucking eachother? We have important things to discuss!” Gimli yells with a laugh, startling you back to reality.

“We weren’t-“ You clear your throat, choking back the embarrassment. “Sorry. Please continue.”

Legolas simply smirks and shrugs. You both turn in your seats to fully face Aragorn and Gimli as they repeat the plans you missed. For a quick moment you dared to glance at Legolas again and when his eyes met yours, they were full of heated promises for later when you could finally be alone again.

**********

Later that night you find yourself tangled in the sheets with one another. He enters you for the second time that night.

“I have to ask you something.” He mumbles against your ear as he spoons you from behind.

“What is it?” You breathe out as he continues to slowly move in and out of you.

“Did you use some kind of spell… or magic on me?… Because the way I feel about you… the way you completely consume my mind… and my body…” He says between slow thrusts, placing a gentle nip to your neck. “I feel bewitched.”

You chuckle shyly, the confession of his feelings making your heart soar. You turn around, making him slip out of you. He whines at the loss of your warmth but then your lips find his in a fierce kiss as you move to straddle him.

“I did not use any magic on you, my love.” You mumble against his lips.

You grind against his length, causing his hands to grab onto your hips.

“Though, every time our eyes meet…” You say as your eyes meet intensely. “I feel bewitched by you.”

“I feel like I am in a trance whenever I am near you. Your eyes, your lips, your wicked mind, even your scent… You-“ His words are cut off with a groan as you sink down onto his cock. “-intoxicate me.” He chokes out the last words.

**********

You could not get enough of one another. You were all over each other every chance you got to be alone, whether it was time for bed or you had a moment to sneak off somewhere. Aragorn and Gimli could hardly stand to be around you both sometimes with the sexual tension constantly bubbling between you two. But it was not just the sexual desire and lust… the romance, gentleness and love that you shared between you was just as intoxicating as any of it. You fell deeply for your handsome male elf and he fell deeply in love with his beautiful sorceress.

masterlist

[mimble-sparklepudding]

Ship and OC Relationship Creative Process Ask List.

I am still pondering how best to approach some sort of "ship" for one of my OCs, but it's proving to be quite the challenge to wrap my head around. So what better way to learn more about how other people approach the topics of sex and relationships with their characters than to put together a little Ask List. Not just focussed on ships between OCs and canon characters, but also open to relationships between your OCs - or your OC and someone else's OC (or OCs, as we are all very polyamory inclusive around here).

Did you create your OC with a plan to ship them with a specific character or another OC? Or was their relationship something that evolved all by itself?

How important is your OCs relationship(s) to their story? Would it still make sense without it? Or is their connection to this other character integral to their development?

Were there any barriers to you establishing your OCs relationship? Perhaps social or cultural stigma? Or a concern that "ships" with that character were already overdone? Or simply a fear of being seen as "cringe"? If so then how did you overcome this?

How graphic or explicit are your explorations of sexual interactions involving your OC? Do you happily name body parts and actions? Or do you prefer to leave the mechanical details to the imagination?

If your OC's relationship involves a gender or orientation different to your own then how confident did you feel about exploring or writing this? If your OC and the character(s) with whom they are in a relationship are the same as you in terms of gender/orientation then was this a conscious decision?

How easy do you find it to write (or otherwise portray) non-sexual affection between characters? This might include terms of endearment, "pet-names", descriptions of cuddling or stroking the other's head in their lap etc.

How important is other people's investment in (or enthusiasm for) your character's relationship? Was this a consideration when you were planning it? Have you ever changed a character's relationship(s) due to other people's response to it?

To what degree do you use your OC as a means to explore your own romantic proclivities (or shortcomings)? Is your OC a self-insert and the relationship a form of wish-fulfilment and/or an means to explore certain fantasies? Or do you enjoy exploring something completely different to your own experiences and preferences?

How confident are you in writing about or otherwise portraying kissing between characters? Did this take practice? How much detail is enough? How much is too much?

Is it important to include tension or outright areas of conflict in a relationship? If so then how do you explore these? Or does this not appeal to you?

Does it matter to you how many other people also ship their OC with a particular character? Would this make it more likely that you will compare your material to theirs? Or does this not enter into your thinking?

How much does your OC's background and origin affect their approach to relationships? Are there specific insecurities or preferences that lead on from their past?

How easy do you find it to write romantic (or sexual) dialogue for your OC? If they are in a relationship with a canon character then how difficult is it to keep these interactions faithful to their established character and communication style?

How do you feel about answering questions about your characters sexual/romantic activities or preferences in character?

Did you build up to your OC being in their relationship? Or did you put them into it quite quickly and then filled in the background in retrospect.

Is there a relationship between characters in another setting that particularly inspired you? What is it about this portrayal that you enjoy?

Does it matter whether other people consider your OC sexually attractive? Did this inform your thinking when you were creating them? Also was it important that you put them in a relationship with a character who is generally considered "attractive"?

Do you have specific music that makes you think about your OCs relationship?

Do you have a sense of how your OCs relationship will evolve in the future? Or is it quite a fixed in terms of dynamics and story?

Is it easy to write or otherwise portray other characters (or OCs) reactions to your OCs relationship? Are these interactions important to your characters story? For example, is the relationship one that can be publically acknowledged?

How important is it that your OCs relationship is "realistic" for the setting in terms of the characters values and attitudes? Or are you happy to explore psychological or sexual issues that might more reflect contemporary concerns?

Do you consider your OC to be sexually attractive? Or pretty/handsome? Would you still be able to write about their relationship if you didn't?

What is something you feel you have improved at in terms of portraying sexual or romantic relationships?

How do you feel about people producing fanart of your character's relationship or ship? If this were NSFW would you want to be asked first?

Other than your own characters' relationships, can you give an example of someone who is particularly good at writing or otherwise portraying romantic and/or sexual relationships? What is it about their work that really stands out for you?

Have you given much consideration to specific "kinks" or sexual likes and dislikes for your character? If so then is this something you feel comfortable talking about or describing?

Is there a particular "trope" for relationships that you especially enjoy - e.g. enemies to lovers etc - and is this something that you set out intending to explore?

Is there something you historically felt (or still feel) awkard about describing in terms of your character's relationships? Whether sexual acts, bodyparts, pillow talk, romantic declarations or using the "L word". How did you overcome this (if you ever have)?

What makes a scene or situation "romantic" in your opinion? Is this something you find easy to portray?

What advice do you have for someone considering creating a ship for their character? Or for someone unsure about writing relationships and/or sexual scenarios?

When portraying romantic or sexual scenarios involving your OC, do you aim to inspire a particular response in the reader or viewer? Whether a warm fuzzy feeling, or getting really quite turned on (or possibly both)?

If you ship your OC with a particular canon character, then what was it about that character that drew you to them? Is it that you have a certain "type" when it comes to shipping? Or did you surprise yourself with who you felt drawn towards? If your OC is in a relationship with another OC then did you change any aspects of either of their backstories or personalities to make this work?

To what degree is your OC a self-insert, particularly in terms of their relationship? Do you sometimes use your character's relationship to explore your own feelings about a canon character or another OC?

How confident are you in writing angst or portraying conflict or tension within a relationship? Or is this something you avoid? If so is this because it doesn't much interest you? Or because you're unsure how to approach it?

Is there a way in which your portrayal of your character's relationship subverts the reader or viewer's expectations? Was this deliberate?

How do you ensure that the dialogue (or other portrayal) of a canon character is true to their personality and (more importantly) way of speaking? Do you spend time studying their "official" dialogue in order to get it sounding authentic? Or did it just come naturally?

What is something you try to avoid - or think everyone should try to avoid - when portraying sex and/or relationships with their characters?

What is your favourite depiction of romance (or sex if you prefer) that you have produced? Or if you haven't produced one yet, then what is your favourite example from another creator?

What, if any, is your biggest source of fear or anxiety when it comes to writing or otherwise portraying romantic or sexual scenarios?

What is something that your friends or mutuals could do to support and encourage you when it comes to your creativity around your OCs relationship(s)?

[animeyanderelover]

Among Uchiha (Sasuke, Itachi , Indra and Shisui) whom are most to least likely to do a massacre just to ensure their darling safety or just for her to be alive

Tw: Yandere themes, possessive behavior, obsession, delusional behavior, violence, death

Tags: @shumidehiro @swagenemyartisan @cachamata

Ranking

Uchiha Shisui

🍂Last place is actually sort of tricky for me but I am going to settle with Shisui on this one. Whilst I actually see him capable of the act of murder if we're talking about sheer mindset alone what holds him back greatly is his connection to Konohagakure. Sure, the Anbu is a very ruthless position but certain things are very much off the table and an entire massacre is hardly going to be excused if only for the sake of your safety. Shisui has to rely on smarter methods as a result of that, needs to be much more stealthy and careful whenever a situation arises where he knows that he is unable to act like his darker instincts tell him at times as there are restrictions placed on him as a part of the Leaf Village. If he had none of those expectations that shackle him down he would be much more dangerous but with what he is given he is only allowed that much lenience from the council and the Hokage until even he would get into troubles. Whilst a lot of people might be able to close an eye or two when he commits a questionable action there is a limit of how much he can explore this willful ignorance and Shisui learns to use this line to his full advantage. Ultimately a limit is still a limit though.

Uchiha Itachi

🍡Itachi and Shisui both have been essentially desensitised to violence and death from a very young age yet even as a member of the Akatsuki Itachi holds up some loose morals. Even those loose morals get tainted as his obsession for you gets involved and whilst Itachi is much more composed in comparison to other trigger-happy members of the organisation it would be wise to remember that he is at best merciful and merely tries to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. He isn't a good person and he himself had embraced this years ago when the blood of his parents stained his katana and he had to leave his younger brother behind all by himself. Nothing is worse than that which is why everything else could never evoke the same silent agony that he went through when he had to massacre his entire clan. What enables him more than Shisui is additionally that his circumstances place no watching eyes over him. Pain only cares for the members to capture the tailed beasts and the havoc that happens in between does not matter as long as results are delievered. Itachi doesn't have to pretend to be on the good side, the only reason why he does is because he doesn't want to scare you.

Uchiha Sasuke

💙As the second reincarnation of Indra it is very much understandable that Sasuke makes it fairly high on this list. He has no ties that properly bind him anymore to any village and even when with you he doesn't pretend to be a good guy as his past speaks louder and it is something he doesn't even want you to ignore. He may not be as trigger-happy as he once used to be when he was still a teenager filled with nothing but hatred and the burning determination for vengeance but Sasuke is far from changing his ways. When you stumble into his life you become the only person he truly has left as his family is dead and all his friends in a village far away who could have been otherwise able to at least weaken the intense obsession he develops as a rogue. With no voice of conscience even attempting to reason with him Sasuke simply gets consumed and whilst he may have acquired a colder and calmer exterior he is extremely possessive and protective. Death is a fate he easily hands out if someone does not head his only warning and an immediate consequence if someone even attempted to harm you in any shape, the lives taken not even evoking a twinge of guilt.

Otsutsuki Indra

💜Indra should not even come as a surprise as the first place as he has really nothing that could even remotely restrain him. In his eyes he has been wronged and betrayed by his own family, has suffered humiliation by the hands of his younger brother who used to be always inferior to him and has as a result quite literally just snapped. He acts on pure obsession and a secretive paranoia that he does not speak of, perhaps because he isn't even fully aware of it himself. After all his trust has been permanently broken as his own flesh and blood turned their backs on him, leaving him unable to ever put his full faith in anyone ever again. The consequences are severe for you as you are constantly monitored and unable to do as much as glance too long into someone's direction without Indra starting to believe that you too plan to abandon him by already planning for an escape. It's that overwhelming amount of paranoia and possessive impulses that result within the blink of an eye into blood being spilled. The angrier Indra is, the more extreme this will get as you have made plenty of experiences with his Susanoo crushing people like ants even though he could have easily done it without using those powers.

[thewadapan]

So why did Transformers One bomb?

Look, I'm just going to say it right off the bat: no, Transformers One is not the best Transformers movie of all time. I am (gritting my teeth) very happy for every single Transformers fan except me, who all seem to have liked it, and most of whom seem to have loved it. I agree that, as a production, it meets some baseline level of technical competence. It's a perfectly fine movie.

It's also the worst-performing Transformers movie Paramount has ever made.

Hopefully, now that its theatrical run has unceremoniously ended, people aren't going to try to rip me to shreds for theoretically threatening this multi-million-dollar film's box office revenue some miniscule amount by sharing a few teensy weensy complaints with my fifty followers.

Because I do just have a few little nitpicks, which I've tried my best to communicate, over the next 17,000 words of this post.

If you're not a Transformers fan, sorry, this essay is mostly written with the assumption that you've seen Transformers One. However, it might still be of some interest as a window into the current state of the franchise. I've written a basic plot summary of the movie to bring you up to speed, in that case. Because Transformers One purports to be the perfect introduction to the story, no homework needed, I've also done you the courtesy of elucidating background context as needed—think of this less as a review, and more as a history lesson, or maybe a "lore explained" YouTube video. After all, that's pretty much all that Transformers One is.

(And if farcically long posts aren't really your thing, you might prefer to listen to the special episode of Our Worlds are in Danger where my pals and I chatted about the film. Many of the hottest takes and silliest bits in this essay are shamelessly stolen from Jo and Umar.)

We've been waiting for Transformers One for a very long time. It's the first animated Transformers film to get a theatrical release since The Transformers: The Movie came out in 1986. It first entered development around a decade ago. Many fandom members I know online got to see it as far back as June. Its US premiere was in September; those of us in the UK had to wait a full extra month before seeing it, for no clear reason. This is a film which purports to show, in broad strokes, for the first time on the big screen, the origin of the Transformers: where they come from, who they are, and why they're fighting.

By the end of its runtime, Transformers One does not actually answer these questions. Don't get me wrong, it takes great pains trying to answer a lot of different, related questions—just ones which nobody was really asking in the first place: What does the word "Autobots" mean, if not "automobile robots"? What does the word "Decepticons" mean, if they're not actually deceitful? Why is he called "Optimus Prime"? Why is he called "Megatron"? If they were friends, why did they fall out? Why does Starscream sound Like That? Where does Energon come from? If "Prime" is a title, what were the other Primes like? How do Transformers transform?

Writer Eric Pearson, coming onto the project as an outsider to Transformers, describes having to go to Hasbro to ask these kinds of questions:

they had a script that outlined the story that they wanted to tell. I knew Optimus Prime and Megatron and I knew Bumblebee as well, or B. I had to ask about some of the other deeper ones, the mythology, “what exactly is the Matrix of Leadership?” Stuff like that.

See, Hasbro does in fact have the answers written down somewhere. The story as I understand it goes something like this. During the wild west of the '80s and '90s, Transformers "canon" was largely a by-the-seat-of-your-pants consensus-based affair between the freelance writers and copywriters the toy company would bring on to advertise their toys. That changed around the turn of the millennium, when late later-CEO Brian Goldner saw how Hasbro's licensed IP lines (such as Star Wars) were more financially successful and realised they could make more money by aggressively promoting their own in-house IP, which they didn't have to pay licensing fees for. (For the curious, a similar thought process at rival toy company Lego was what led to their creation of BIONICLE.)

The guy basically singlehandedly managing the Transformers brand at the time, Aaron Archer, eventually set to reconciling all the self-contradictory lore surrounding Transformers, an endeavour which dovetailed into the creation of the HasLab internal think-tank (best known for Battleship, the 2012 store-brand Michael Bay knockoff which was a failure critically and commercially but not in my heart) and ultimately the creation of the so-called "Binder of Revelation", an internal story bible which cost over $250,000 to produce and has strongly influenced nigh on every piece of Transformers media released since, but which we hadn't actually seen until it got leaked a week ago. As it turns out, the document itself (compiled mostly by marketers and toy designers) is patently useless to any writer: it's a typo-ridden internally-inconsistent wishy-washy mess that mostly describes the characters in terms of a made-up form of Transformers astrology that has otherwise never seen the light of day.

So although the Binder is the baseline story bible for most modern Transformers media, its influence isn't direct per se; it's more accurate to describe it as being an elaborate game of telephone between high-profile cartoons, comics, and other internal documents, with the Binder itself apparently just sitting in a drawer somewhere at Hasbro; Eric Pearson says that he never received a "binder", with the "script" he mentions either being the earlier draft from Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (the guys who originally pitched the story), or some other unseen internal document. Director Josh Cooley, however, definitely seems to have been physically handed the Binder or its mass-market adaptation:

I knew that there was a lot of origin to be told, and when I first started, [Hasbro] gave me the Transformers Bible. I could not believe how big it was. I was like, "This is way more than I ever anticipated."

When trailers first dropped for Transformers One, a lot of my friends who are savvy were immediately like: "Oh, this is a weirdly faithful adaptation of the Binder of Revelation, huh."

I. The One True Origin of the Transformers

Half of the people reading this are Transformers fans, and half of you literally could not give less of a shit about Transformers, so if you're in the 'former group (so to speak), you'll just have to bear with me while I bring the rest of us up to speed.

Before the Transformers' civil war begins, Cybertron is being oppressed by the Quintessons. The Quintessons are a race of five-faced aliens (as in, not Transformers), who execute everyone they come across, first introduced in The Transformers: The Movie, presiding over a kangaroo court on a castaway world. In the followup cartoon five-parter "Five Faces of Darkness", writer Flint Dille established that, gasp, they were actually the original creators of the Transformers! But basically nobody else at the time was particularly compelled by this idea, it seems, with most fans preferring the more mythological origin story conceived by Bri'ish writer Simon Furman for the Marvel comics. I think people kind of just didn't like to think of the Transformers as being robots—mass-produced, a fabrication, programmed—as opposed to an alien race of thinking, feeling beings like us. But because the cartoon was important to many kids, a lot of early-2000s media tried to reconcile the cartoon and comic origin stories by stating that the Quintessons didn't actually create the Transformers; rather, they simply colonised the planet early in its history and pretended to be the Transformers' creators, until the truth came out and they got kicked offworld. This is how the Binder of Revelation ultimately paid lip service to the Quintessons. In Transformers One, the Quintessons are just sort of here, they're these evil aliens secretly skimming Energon from its miners, they don't speak English (or whichever language the film was dubbed into in your market region), they're just these nasty societal parasites.

Energon is Transformers fuel. In the original cartoon, it was these glowing pink cubes the Decepticons were always trying to produce using harebrained Saturday-morning-cartoon energy-stealing devices. There was a Cold War going on, America had just been through an "energy crisis", maybe you're old enough to remember any of that. Transformers are these big, complicated machines, so I guess the idea is they need this hyper-compressed superfuel to run off, and their homeworld has run out. By the time of the Binder of Revelation, the concept had been telephoned to the point where Energon is like the lifeblood of Primus or some shit.

Primus is the Transformers God—but not the kind of God you have "faith" in, rather this actual guy whose existence is objectively known in various ways. He transforms into a planet, that's kind of cool, right? Where does Primus come from? Look, it doesn't matter, he's like, the God of Creation, he was there at the start of time. He created all of the Transformers. All the other species in the galaxy, though, they evolved naturally thanks to "science". Actually wait, didn't that Quintus Prime guy go around the universe seeding all the planets with different kinds of Cybertronian life? That's why they're called Quintessons. See, now you know. Who's Quintus Prime?

Okay, so the Thirteen Original Transformers, or the Primes, are the thirteen original Transformers created by Primus. Most of them correspond to different kinds of Transformer: Nexus Prime is the god of Transformers who can combine, Onyx Prime is the god of Transformers who turn into animals, Micronus Prime is the god of Transformers who are small, and Solus Prime is the god of Transformers who are women. You might remember the Primes from Revenge of the Fallen, although there were only seven of them there for whatever reason.

Honestly, The Fallen was the only one who mattered for a long time. The whole reason there's thirteen of them is because thirteen is kind of an unlucky number, right? Twelve would've been fine. But throw in a thirteenth guy, and he betrays everyone, he's this fucked up evil guy. In the Binder of Revelation, though, the Thirteenth Prime is his own special guy shrouded in mystery, because they kind of liked the idea that Optimus Prime would secretly turn out to have been the Thirteenth Prime all along, and he just forgot or something, because that means he has the divine right of Primes. In IDW's 2010s comic-book reboot, the Thirteenth Prime was called "The Arisen"—in reference to that one line in The Transformers: The Movie, "Arise, Rodimus Prime!" (this margin is too narrow to explain who Rodimus Prime is). Towards the end of his run, writer John Barber did some actually interesting stuff with the concept, playing with the ambiguity over whether-or-not Optimus Prime was actually the chosen one.

All of Optimus Prime's immediate predecessors as Autobot leaders, Sentinel Prime, Zeta Prime, the lineage seen in "Five Faces of Darkness"... they're all false Primes. They're Primes in name only. In fact, IDW had a whole procession of these cartoonishly evil dictators thanks to a few continuity errors leading to the addition of a couple of extra narratively-redundant fuckers. Transformers One tries to simplify it slightly by just saying that Zeta Prime was one of the Primes for real—occupying that thirteenth "free space"—and it was just Sentinel Prime who was only a normal Transformer pretending to be a Prime, then Optimus Prime who's a real boy.

But if he's not a Prime from the start, Optimus Prime needs another name in the meantime. In the '80s cartoon episode "War Dawn", before he was called Optimus Prime, he was called "Orion Pax". Have you noticed that Optimus Prime is kind of an odd-one-out amongst all the straightup-English-word names like "Bumblebee" and "Ratchet" and "Jazz"? That's because his name was one of a tiny handful from very early in the franchise's development, before writer Bob Budiansky came onboard and came up with identities for the vast majority of the toys. Practically everyone Bob Budiansky named is called like, "Bolts" or some shit, long before the characters even know of Earth, which has always just been a contrivance of the setting you're not supposed to think about.

Presumably to create a parallel with Orion Pax's transformation into Optimus Prime, someone at Hasbro in the 2010s came up with a new name for the bot who would become Megatron: "D-16". In real-world terms, this was nothing more than a dorky reference to the Megatron toy's original Japanese release being number 16 in the line ("D" stands for "Destron", which is what they call Decepticons in Japan). But in-universe, the name "D-16" was drawn from the sector of the mine where he worked. I don't get the impression it was originally intended to be part of a broader pattern.

Which is why I'm baffled as to what the hell the reasoning was behind Bumblebee's pre-Earth name, "B-127". There's this bizarre situation in the Bumblebee film, where the name "B-127" first cropped up, where literally every other bot gets a normal cool name with personality like "Cliffjumper" or "Dropkick" except for Bumblebee, who is stuck with this clunky sci-fi name until he makes friends with a human teenager on Earth and she gives him the name Bumblebee. I guess I don't find it confusing that the writers would (correctly) realise it's a bit weird for Bumblebee to be called Bumblebee on an alien planet where bumblebees don't exist. What I find confusing is that they didn't extend that logic to any other character.

So despite everything else in the franchise's direction pointing away from "robot" and towards "alien", Transformers One ends up with this ridiculous situation where two of the most important guys are, for practically the whole movie, simply referred to as "Dee" and "Bee", I guess because the writers correctly realised the numbers sound fucking stupid.

And if you squint, "Elita-1" sorta fits this naming scheme. But the great irony of it is that the very same cartoon episode which coined "Orion Pax" simultaneously established that Elita-1 also used to go by a different name: "Ariel"! Like the Little Mermaid. Y'know, because an "aerial" is a type of electrical component- oh, forget it.

By the time the script made it into Eric Pearson's hands, it's obvious that he simply was not thinking about it that deeply. He describes the genesis of a scene where Bumblebee introduces his imaginary friends, "A-atron, EP 5-0-8, and Steve." A-atron was impov'd by Keegan-Michael Key as a reference to one of his own skits on Key & Peele. Steve ("He's foreign.") was literally just because Pearson thought it would be funny. It's true that Steve is an inherently funny name, and I guess if you're struggling to come up with jokes of your own, it can be handy to fall back on something which is inherently funny.

And again, our silly answers to these silly questions beget yet more questions. If he started out as "D-16", then where did the name "Megatron" come from? And if all the Primes have epic made-up fantasy names, then surely that one guy can't just be called "The Fallen", right? That's not a name, that's an epithet. Unfortunately, someone at Hasbro had the bright idea to answer both these questions at once: The Fallen's real name was "Megatronus". Later, for consistency, they threw on the title, and we get "Megatronus Prime", which sounds like what a thirteen-year-old on deviantART in 2014 would call their Steven Universe fusion of Megatron and Optimus Prime. So you see, Megatron actually named himself after Megatronus Prime, famously the most evil of the Primes. In Transformers One, this is changed slightly so Megatronus is merely the strongest of the Primes, as part of its overall effort to make Megatron not look completely insane.

Which, it must be said, is a tall order. Better stories have tried and failed. Back in 2007, Scottish writer Eric Holmes came up with Megatron Origin, a perfectly-fine comic miniseries which drew heavily from the miners' strikes that took place in the UK from 1984-1985, coinciding with the inception of the Transformers franchise. In that comic, Megatron is a lowly miner who, through a series of chance events, winds up at the head of a dangerous political revolutionary movement.

For some reason—I guess because nobody had ever tried to make Megatron anything other than a bloodthirsty cackling madman before—this take on Megatron as a guy who rose up against a corrupt system became the defining interpretation of the character, copy/pasted pretty much wholesale into the Binder of Revelation. Orion Pax also opposes the system, and bonds with Megatron over it, but they disagree on how to fix it: Pax believes in peaceful reform, Megatron just loves to kill. In Transformers One, the problem everyone has with Megatron is basically "whoa, this guy's a little TOO angry!" and there's a point towards the end of the film where Megatron suddenly starts jonesing to kill literally anyone who stands in his way, because he's irrationally angry.

The core problem here—and it's kind of the Magneto problem, the Killmonger problem, whatever better-known example you care to insert here—is that these guys all fundamentally exist just to be a big villain who loves to kill people and who ultimately gets defeated, but the kids who grew up on this stuff in the '80s are now adults who are no longer satisfied with cardboard cutout villains. People like a complex villain, they like a villain who has a point. They like to root for both sides. And in fact, it's easier to sell more toys to people who are rooting for both sides, if your villain is just another kind of hero. But you don't really need to take the same effort with the good guys: they're good by design, righteous by nature. They don't need to stand for something, they just need to stand against the guy whose whole thing is that he loves to kill people.

But again, we're starting from a place where the evil faction—who half the planet will ultimately align themselves with—are literally called "Decepticons". It's a name you'd only ever call yourself ironically, maybe reclaiming it from your enemies. In this film, there's some tortured logic that implies they're called Decepticons because they were deceived by Sentinel Prime. Like if you met a gang of guys who call themselves "The Robbers", but it turns out to be because they got robbed one time, and they actually have zero intention of stealing from anyone.

The Autobots are easier, of course. "Auto" is a prefix that just means, like, the self, or whatever. And the most agreeably American ideal of all is selfishness the power of the individual, the freedom to seize one's own destiny. Prime's original '80s motto, "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings," is bastardised in Transformers One into the slightly less rolls-out-off-the-tongue "Freedom and autonomy are the rights of all sentient beings," because (I can only assume) they forgot to work the word "autonomy" earlier into the script. If they ever greenlit Transformers Three, I suppose the motto would have ended up as something like "Freedom, autonomy, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope are the rights of all sentient beings." Even though bodily autonomy is one of the most salient motifs present in the film—all but referred to by name—I suppose the filmmakers were worried that you might think, when Prime says "freedom", that he actually means something completely different. So now you see! "Autobots" is actually the descriptive name of a political movement which believes in obviously good things. Like "Moms for Liberty".

Okay, so the cannier among you have probably spotted the mean rhetorical trick I'm pulling with this encyclopedia-entry-ass introduction. By sarcastically relitigating all the storytelling choices I dislike from the last 20 years of Transformers lore, I can build up a negative association with Transformers One without even reviewing the movie itself! On a subtextual level, I'm deliberately misattributing these bad ideas to the filmmakers, conveniently ignoring the mountains of evidence to suggest that they were just trying to make the best of whatever Hasbro handed them from on high. If anything—you might think—the filmmakers deserve even more credit, for spinning this shite into something even remotely good on the big screen.

Like, you'd be wrong, but I can see why you might think that.

II. The Spider-Verse of Transformers

Okay, I can see that I've spat in your soup. I'm sorry. There are lots of good bits in Transformers One. I can even think of one or two of them off the top of my head, without really racking my brains.

Maybe halfway through the film, there is one specific moment where the story suddenly promises to get good. You can pinpoint it down to the word, down to the frame even. Our heroes have just discovered that their planet's leader, Sentinel Prime, is a complete fraud who's been secretly exploiting them ever since they were born—and worse, castrated them by removing their transformation cogs. They are all very cross about this. Orion Pax expresses that he wants to come up with a plan to expose Sentinel Prime. Megatron is too angry to listen. Orion Pax asks, "Don't you want to stop him?" And Megatron replies, "No, I want to KILL him!" And there's like, a little tint of red creeping into the glow of his eyes.

Whoa. Chills. Up to this point in the film, Megatron has been kind of surly at times, but he's otherwise a generic kids' movie protagonist. He's often chipper. He makes quips. He has this banter with Orion Pax where he's always complaining. It's literally that one "Optimist Prime"/"Negatron" comic, committed to film. Like I'm not even being facetious, one of the film's few obligatory "emotional moments" has Elita-1 sit Orion Pax down and say, "You know what I love about you? You always see the bright side. Like you're some kind of OPTIMIST or something." And then later completely unrelatedly God gives him the mandate of heaven and says "ARISE, OPTIMUS PRIME!" Y'see, as originally conceived, "Optimus" is the word "Optimum" if it was a name, which is why people sometimes localise his name as "Best #1". But it's genuinely kind of cute to reverse-engineer the etymology as coming from "optimist", I guess. Like, it's stupid, but it's cute.

Argh, I got distracted with naming minutia again! Entirely my bad. That's the last time, I promise. Where was I? Right, we'd just found out that Megatron is kind of scary. Brian Tyree Henry's line delivery as he growls "KILL" is his crowning achievement in this film.

Where Optimus Prime's character arc in this movie sees him change from a funny, rebellious spirit to a complete personality vacuum, Megatron's character arc is kind of the opposite. When we're first introduced to him, it's weirdly hard to get a handle on who he is. He's a fanboy for Megatronus, the strongest and most morally-unremarkable of the Primes. He looks up to Sentinel Prime. He likes sports. He doesn't like breaking the rules. In fact, we get the sense that, were it not for his friendship with Orion Pax, he would be literally indistinguishable from the legion of silent crowd-filling background characters he works with. But the moment he starts to become Megatron, it's like everything starts to click. Gears catch, where once they ground and idled. There is something in this guy that was made to fight, made to kill, made to rule. It's sick.

And the underlying tension in his friendship with Optimus suddenly snaps into focus. Megatron is mad at Sentinel Prime, but Sentinel Prime isn't there, he's somewhere else, far below... and he can't help but turn that anger on the next closest thing to an authority figure he has in his life, which is his peer-pressuring bestie, Orion Pax. There is a part of Megatron that wishes he'd never learned the truth, and he blames Orion Pax for his cursed knowledge, for constantly leading them into predicaments on his stupid flights of fancy. Now that he knows, he can't go back to how he was. He can't stop thinking about it.

I'll be honest, it rules. Obviously it rules. It's complicated and toxic and darker than this movie was marketed to be. In interview, Josh Cooley describes the draft of the script he was presented with when he joined the project as having been far more jokey, light-hearted, glib—and it seems we can credit him for saying "Look, this ain't right, the minute the credits roll these guys are going to be at civil war for millions of years."

So, they started talking about it in — what did you say, 2015? I came on board in 2020, and when I came on board there was the first draft of the script. So I don't think they'd been working on it that entire time, but they'd been thinking about it, for sure. And the script that I read was a little more comical? But it was clear that that wasn't the right tone for this film specifically, because we know there's gonna be a war, civil war on Cybertron, you can't have everybody making jokes and then all of a sudden there's a war. So, um, the stakes were really important for this film. And because our characters at the beginning are a little naive, and just on the younger side, not as experienced, it allowed more freedom for them to be a little looser and have fun really getting to know these characters. But once they realize something's going on and things are getting real, it needs to get real.

Cooley also describes his "in" on the film as being the brotherly relationship between Optimus Prime and Megatron (they're not literally brothers in this film, though they have been in the past), which perhaps explains why Megatron and Optimus Prime get to be characters, instead of just like, guys who are there.

That was always the goal from the beginning and what got me on board. It was this relationship between these two characters that was very human and brotherly. I thought about my relationship with my brother and how I could bring that in. It’s not like we’re enemies, but we grew up together and then went down our different paths, but we’re still brotherly. I became a writer-director and live in a fantasy land, and he became a homicide detective who deals with reality, so we’re two very different mindsets. I have always been fascinated by the idea of two people who come from the same place but end up in different ones. From the very beginning, I was like, ‘That’s something I can relate to.’

Anyway, things I liked, what else. There's that joke at the very start, after the excruciating lore powerpoint, where Orion Pax does a fake-out like he's going to transform, the music briefly swells, and then it just cuts to him legging it down the corridor. In a similar vein, I liked the idea behind the Iacon 5000, where Orion Pax has them run in the race. I felt like the execution of the race left a bit to be desired—the only other participant who matters is Darkwing—but it's still honestly the best big action setpiece in the film. There's also that bit at the end where Megatron and Optimus Prime are both changing into their final forms simultaneously, and it's basically a Homestuck Flash (what would that be, "[S] OPTIMUS PRIME. ARISE."?), so obviously I liked that. Oh, and I really liked the environment design where the planet's landscape is constantly transforming, that's brand-new, someone had an Idea there, and it creates visual interest during the initial Energon-mining scene... even if I wished it had actually paid off in a more meaningful way than "the planet's crust opens as Prime falls to get the Matrix"—like, someone really should've gotten eaten by the planet, that's a cracking Disney death scene and they left it on the table! I also liked getting to see my blorbo, Vector Prime, on the big screen.

I think, as a Transformers fan who's had to sit through a lot of really quite sexist, racist, and plain bad films, you're well within your rights to come out of this one ready to give it a fucking Oscar. You should be ecstatic! It has none of those pesky humans clogging up the frame. It has plenty of robot action. It has jokes which- well I struggle to call many of them "funny", but they're at least trying to be funny in a different way to Michael Bay's films. The film is obviously a massive love letter to... honestly every part of Transformers except the live-action movies. It is an incredibly faithful and earnest adaptation of all the lore and iconography that has randomly accumulated the way it has over the last forty years of bullshit.

My main point of contention, then, is with the overriding sentiment I'm seeing from pretty much everyone else in the fandom: that this is not just the best Transformers movie, but that it's a great animated movie period, that it does for Transformers what Into the Spider-Verse did for Spider-Man, what The Last Wish did for Puss in Boots, and what Mutant Mayhem did for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That, in effect, this film will make you "get it". That it's better-looking, better-written, and more meaningful than a silly toy commercial has any right to be.

I think you can definitely see some loose influence from Spider-Verse in the overall look of the film—particularly in its color grading, and in the design of its main setting, the underground city of Iacon, where the upside-down skyscrapers hanging from the ceiling evoke the iconic "falling upwards" shot from Spider-Verse. Like The Last Wish, it's an animated franchise film that spent much longer than you'd think in development, only for the release of Into the Spider-Verse to have an immediate impact on its visual style... without actually affecting the basic story to the same extent. Both Transformers One and The Last Wish, in many ways, feel like stories concocted using an older formula; in particular, Transformers One bears startling similarities to a similar toy-franchise-prequel, BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, which was released twenty years ago! By contrast, Mutant Mayhem—which had a much shorter development period—is a direct reaction to Spider-Verse in both aesthetic and narrative, and it has a much more distinctive creative direction as a result.

If you look at how all these titles have performed in cinemas, I think you can make a pretty strong case that audiences are perfectly willing to go out and see this kind of flick. A glance at Wikipedia tells me that Mutant Mayhem, The Bad Guys, and The Last Wish grossed double, triple, and quadruple their budgets respectively. In terms of the pre-existing cultural cachet they were banking on, we're talking about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a children's book series I'd never heard of, and fucking Puss in Boots. You cannot tell me that Transformers, as a brand, is on the same level as any of these properties. Meanwhile, Transformers One hardly broke even, while The Wild Robot—another DreamWorks film based on a children's book I've never heard of, which it ended up competing with in theatres—grosses three times its budget. My friends who've seen The Wild Robot say it made them cry.

Face it: Transformers One has not lit the world on fire. I've seen a lot of people cope with this by suggesting that it's to do with the film's staggered release, or even by claiming that the film's marketing was somehow misleading. I'll be honest, upon seeing it, it did not strike me as being at all dissimilar to the trailers. You can maybe say that the trailers undersold the depth of Orion Pax's and Megatron's relationship—which is its best aspect—but honestly, I think if they'd taken a lot of those scenes out of context and put them in early teasers, audiences would've laughed it out of theatres. Like, c'mon, it's toy robots, stop pretending it's Shakespeare. And otherwise, what you see is what you get; it's exactly what it says on the tin.

I wonder how many Transformers fans, on some level, have noticed that even when we're supposedly "eating good", and watching "peak cinema", our films just aren't as good as everyone else's. They're something you'll enjoy if you're already highly predisposed to enjoy them. But otherwise, they're not turning heads. They're not as funny, or as heartfelt, or as complex, or as exciting, or as charming, or as memorable, or as beautiful as these other films. Unlike with Spider-Verse, there's no word-of-mouth amongst normal people to say that this is a film worth seeing.

What I perceive in studios hoping to recreate the flash-in-the-pan success of Spider-Verse is a misunderstanding of what made people go crazy for that movie in the first place. Yes, it changed our conception of what an 3D-animated film could look like. Yes, the multiverse is very cool and all that. Yes, it had a huge IP attached to it. But on a more fundamental level, that movie has a fantastic story underpinning it. The script is razor-sharp. The story is beautifully complex. The vision of New York City it presents is a living, breathing place, populated by real people. It has the kind of craft to it that can only come from truly obsessive creators cultivating an absolutely miserable professional environment for a legion of passionate animators.

In interview, Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura actually spoke surprisingly candidly about his view on crunch:

I probably shouldn't answer this question, because I'm not exactly PC on my answer. I think the nature of filmmaking is, we're really lucky to work in a business that's about passion. Passion doesn't fit really well into a timeline, so inevitably you come to a crunch time. It's just true in the live action, it's true in every movie, and authors always tell me that about when they're writing their books — it's the same thing happens to them! There's something about the creative process that's not — it's unruly. So, I think if you're enjoying it, you need to recognize that. Like, you know, I don't wanna abuse anybody, and y'know — if you get into that period where people have to really work too hard, you gotta help them in that situation, then. 'Cause it's gonna come. It does on every movie. I've never seen it not come, no matter how well you plan, et cetera. 'Cause it's not a science what we're doing at all, and there's all these discoveries that happen near the end, which makes you go "oh, let's do some more, come on!". We discovered that on this movie, where we're calling ILM going "we've got a few ideas, you know, do you have enough man-hours?". [...] Like, you gotta be conscious of it — in live-action, for instance, there are some studios that are so cheap that when you're on — sort of medium location-distance and you're shooting 'til midnight, they don't pay for a hotel room. It's like, well, no-no-no, you pay for a hotel room. You protect the people.

According to everyone who worked on Transformers One, everyone who worked on Transformers One was very passionate about it. But there are parts of this film where I think you can say, pretty objectively, that it's falling short of its intended effect. So I guess maybe they weren't that passionate. I'm not saying that to be mean! It's just... isn't that better than the alternative—that this was the best they could do?

III. I did not care for The Godfather

At one point in the film, the gang's magic map leads them to a scary cave, which looks like this:

Bumblebee fills the dead air by saying, "A cave, with teeth. Nothing scary about that!" The joke here is that this is a cave that looks like a mouth. But as depicted, it's a cave that looks like a mouth that doesn't look like a cave! I get that this is an alien planet, but stalactites don't grow that way on Earth, so when you see the cave onscreen, your gut reaction isn't "oh my, what a frightening cave!". No, this is a cave that makes you say, "that's not a cave, that's some kind of alien monster".

(It's not like "cave turns out to be a monster" would in any way be a fresh twist. In BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, there's a bit where a character swims into a scary cave, and it turns out to be the mouth of a massive sea serpent. In The Empire Strikes Back, the Millennium Falcon briefly hides in an asteroid tunnel which turns out to be a giant space worm. So I'm definitely not saying Transformers One would've been a better film if it had used this stock trope.)

Then once the heroes go inside, we're whisked off to an entirely different set of concept artwork, for this lush organic underground paradise. There's no danger there. The cave itself is reduced to a strange little footnote. Maybe it's only in the story because a concept artist drew it before they'd worked out the finer points of the narrative, and Keegan-Michael Key just ended up ad-libbing the "teeth!" line when he was told to vamp for a few seconds. Or maybe the teeth gag was fully written into the script from the start, and the environment artists just interpreted it way too literally.

Like, I'm sorry, I don't mean to start off on the wrong foot here by harping on about the cave thing—it's not a perfect example anyway—but to me it's a microcosm for my frustration towards what I perceive to be a lack of creative vision in this film. So much of the film feels like it's not there to be entertaining, or meaningful, or narratively load-bearing... it's just obligatory, something they threw in for the sake of having anything at all. It's colors and sounds. When you see the spiky shape onscreen, you think, "ooh, this film was pretty bouba earlier, but now it's more kiki!" They get the comedian to improvise a few one-liners while the characters walk from place to place. And it's like, yes, this is a film for children. Of course the heroes have an adventure map with a big red X on it. In many respects this is a glorified episode of Pocoyo, or the modern equivalent, which I guess is "Baby Shark | Animal Songs For Children".

Nowhere is this sense of "we are obliged to put this in the movie" felt more strongly than in its supporting cast. When you look closely, you notice that Bumblebee and Elita-1—placed prominently in the film's marketing and being technically present for much of its runtime—don't actually do anything of narrative significance. They don't make choices that impact the story; they're just there, and it would not take much rewriting to excise them entirely, so it's just Orion Pax and Megatron on their little adventure. In fact, I'll just come out and say it: I think Transformers One would have been a better movie if Bumblebee and Elita-1 were not in it.

It helps that, from a Doylist perspective, the motivations for their inclusion are perfectly transparent. Firstly, think of the merchandise! Secondly, in Bumblebee's case, it's fucking Bumblebee, he's the whole reason half the kids will be watching, you can't not have him in there. Whenever Bumblebee's not onscreen, all the other characters should be asking, "where's Bumblebee?" Also, I think the creative team felt that they could use Bumblebee tactically to balance some of the darkness in the story.

In the G1 cartoon, Bumblebee just has the default Autobot personality—good-natured, a little sarcastic—with the dial turned a little more towards friendliness. There's this iconic anecdote from the production that cartoon, where writer David Wise found himself in exactly the same situation Transformers writers are finding themselves in forty years later: he was told to write a story about something called "Vector Sigma", and he had no fucking clue what Vector Sigma was supposed to be. So he asked story editor Bryce Malek, who also had no fucking idea. Malek in turn asked Hasbro, and was told that Vector Sigma was "the computer that gave all the Transformers personalities". Upon hearing this, Malek said, "Well, it didn't do a very good job, did it!" Vector Sigma, in case you missed it, does actually appear in Transformers One, as the polygonal shape that transitions into the Matrix of Leadership in the opening powerpoint; I guess they're one and the same now. Some things never change: in Michael Bay's Transformers movies, there is again just a single default personality that every single Autobot shares, a braggadacious action-hero facade over genuine bloodthirst. Who can forget that iconic moment in Revenge of the Fallen where Bumblebee rips out Ravage's spine in grisly slow-mo?

Aside from the fact that he's small and yellow, Bumblebee in Transformers One bears very little resemblance to any incarnation of the character kids might be accustomed to. Instead, he occupies a stock comic-relief archetype, he's a zany guy who goes "Well, that just happened!" If anything, his one joke in the third act—wanton murder—reads like it could maybe be a reference to his many Mortal Kombat fatalities in Bay's films. Beginning in 2007's Transformers Animated, Bumblebee has sometimes possessed deployable "stingers" that flip out from his hands, as a fun action feature for toys. Clearly someone on Transformers One saw this and thought it was the funniest fucking thing that Bumblebee has "knife hands", because the character spends the third act of the movie just shouting "knife hands!" and cutting people in half like a medieval terror.

(In the UK, Bumblebee's lines were re-recorded at the last minute so he says "sword hands" instead. This is because in the UK, we generally aren't able to kill each other using guns, so it's knives that are the big armed-violence boogeyman. Everyone's always talking about how all the kids have knives. And look, I'm not someone to indulge in moral panic, but genuinely, when I look at Bumblebee chasing around people with knives, saying, "I'm gonna cut these guys, watch!", I'm like... what the fuck were they thinking when they wrote that?)

Frankly, whatever is going on with Bumblebee is just an entirely different movie to everything else that's happening. When Bee shanks his twelfth nameless lackey in a row, the movie's like, awww, you're sweet! But when Megatron tries to kill the one (1) evil dictator who's just fucking branded him, who's still lying to his face while his people continue to die to the guy's fuckin' honor guard, Optimus Prime is like, HELLO, HUMAN RESOURCES?

Bumblebee is solely here to be funny, but there's a point in the film where it needs to become a war story, and the best they can think to do with Bumblebee is to have him kill people but in like, a funny way.

As for Elita-1... look, to put it very bluntly, she is in this movie to be a woman. Transformers has had a long, long forty-year history of boys'-club exclusionism, if not outright misogyny, and each new series usually has a token female character, as a kind of fig-leaf for the fact that really, the only fucking thing Hasbro cares about is that the boys are buying the toys. Beginning in the 1986 movie, it was Arcee who got to be "the pink one" for many years of fiction—but not toys, y'see, when parents want to buy something for their beloved young lad, they don't buy "the pink one", no sir. In the 2010s, wow-cool-OC Windblade took over for a stint as leading lady, decked out in a commercially-non-threatening red color scheme. Recently, though, it's been Elita-1—Optimus Prime's girlfriend from the original '80s cartoon—who's been the go-to female character, and she's increasingly allowed to be pink.

There is a lot of love for these characters amongst creatives and fans alike, and especially in the last decade, female Transformers have been both more numerous and better-written than ever. Unfortunately Transformers One, which depicts Elita-1 as an arms-crossing career-obsessed buzzkill, whose arc sees her learn her place in deference to a less-competent man... well let's just say it struck me as a significant step back in this regard.

There's this great interview with Scarlett Johansson, voice of Elita-1, where she's trying to describe what makes her character interesting, and it's like she's drawing blood from a stone. She's like, "yeah, so Elita-1, I would say, she's on her own journey, because at the start of the film it's sort of like she's working at a big company, you know, and she wants to get a promotion, but then later on she learns that she can't, y'know, get a promotion". Look, it's not that Scarlett Johansson does a bad job—in fact, considering the material she's working with, she practically carries Elita-1 entirely on the back of her performance—it's just that I can't shake the impression that the filmmakers would rather pay Scarlett Johansson god knows how many thousands of dollars than try to think of a second actress that they know of.

As I've already complained, Transformers One has a pretty thin cast, but it effectively only has two other female characters who do anything. Airachnid is a secondary antagonist, Sentinel Prime's spymaster/enforcer, and it's clear that some concept artist really fucking popped off when designing her. She has eyes in the back of her head, and it's ten times creepier than that makes it sound. Her spiderlegs also create some visual interest during fight scenes. As a character, Airachnid has zero internality and is not interesting, but she is cool, so you'll get no complaints from me there.

The film's other other female character is Chromia, who wins the Iacon 5000 race at the last moment. She really comes out of nowhere to clinch it. It's funny, because the leaderboards show this one guy, Mirage, hovering near the top of the rankings for almost the whole sequence. And Chromia's character model really looks suspiciously like Mirage's. In fact, there's a different character who stands around in the background a couple of times who looks much more like Chromia. Funnily enough, that background character is even called Chromia in concept art! So if you connect the dots, it really seems that the "Chromia" who is the best racer on Cybertron was originally meant to be Mirage, a guy, until they switched the character's gender at the very last minute, and didn't bother changing the leaderboards to match.

There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that Mirage was the dark horse of Rise of the Beasts, and for some reason they felt like his depiction in Transformers One would've gotten in the way of their plans for the character somehow. It's plausible, I guess. The second, infinitely funnier option, is that at some point someone working on the movie realised that they only put two women in the film, scrambled to look through the feature to find a suitable character to gender-swap, only to discover to their horror that they'd forgotten to put in any characters whatsoever. Fuck it, the racer guy! He can be a girl. Diversity win, the fastest class traitor on Cybertron... is a woman!

In case you were wondering about the Transformers One toyline leaderboards, by my count, Orion Pax has ten new transforming toys currently announced or in stores, Bumblebee and Megatron have six each, Sentinel Prime has four, Alpha Trion has two, Elita-1 has two, Airachnid has one, Starscream has one, Wheeljack has one, and the Quintesson High Commander has one. In fact, one of Elita-1's toys—the collector-oriented high-quality Studio Series release—isn't scheduled for release until some undetermined point later next year, and she was entirely absent from leaked lists of upcoming releases, which to me smacks of "we realised last-minute that it would look really really bad if we didn't bother to release a good toy of the one woman in the film". Oh, and obviously, Chromia has no toys—but there is an "Iacon Race" three-pack consisting of Megatron, Orion Pax... and Mirage. Go figure.

The thing is, all of the stuff I'm grousing about here is pretty much standard fare for kids' films targeted more at boys. Hell, even The Lego Movie—which is basically the gold standard of toy commercials—gave supporting protagonist Wyldstyle a pretty similar arc to the one Elita-1 gets here, which was probably the weakest element of that film. Evidently conscious of this, Lord & Miller redeemed themselves by devoting the entirety of The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part to deconstructing common narratives surrounding gender roles. I guess I just wish the young girls who presumably comprise some portion of Transformers One theatergoers could actually get anything out of Elita-1 as a character. Ah, what do I know, maybe it's still considered countercultural simply to depict a woman punching people.

Still, to give credit where it's due: Transformers One doesn't remotely touch the gender-essentialism prevalent in the Binder of Revelation, treating female Transformers no differently to their male counterparts in lore terms. Solus Prime is, it seems, just a Prime who happened to be a woman, rather than the mythological Eve after whom all women are patterned. There's a scene where our heroes are gifted the Transformation Cogs of the fallen Primes, and the Primes named thankfully bear no particular relation to the characters; in other words, Elita-1 isn't given Solus Prime's cog. As Alpha Trion puts it: "What defines a Transformer is not the cog in his chest, but the spark that resides in their core." Dude really remembered nonbinary people exist halfway through that sentence huh.

(Actually, the bigger mistake would've been with Megatron: if he was given Megatronus Prime's cog from the start, then this would've created the unfortunate implication that his descent into evil was only the result of Megatronus Prime's fucked up and evil cog, rather than a choice Megatron made of his own free will. The film instead has it the other way around: Megatron's radicalisation into a "might makes right" philosophy is what causes him to covet Megatronus Prime's transformation cog, to steal that power from Sentinel Prime, who stole the cogs of both Megatronus and Megatron in the first place. That's cool! This does create a bit of unfortunate narrative dissonance with Alpha Trion's words, alas, as it does seem like Megatronus Prime's cog really is more powerful than the others, because it gives both Sentinel Prime and Megatron a powerup.)

There's just something that I find so dreadfully mercenary about this movie's cast—honestly, everyone except Orion Pax, Megatron, and maybe Sentinel Prime. Take Darkwing, for example. Bro was clearly designed from the ground up to fill this stock character role of "bully who pushes our guys around and later gets his comeuppance". For a more interesting take on that exact same archetype, look no further than Todd Sureblade from Nimona, a bigoted knight who gets a whole damn character arc in the background, which directly complements that film's main themes.

Again, I'm not playing some kind of guessing game here, the authorial evidence is right there: Darkwing didn't even have a name until Hasbro designer Mark Maher was shown a picture of the character and asked, "If this was a Decepticon flyer, who would it be?" This is actually par for the course with ILM; most of their concept art is labelled with very basic descriptions, with the exact trademarks being picked in conjunction with Hasbro at a later point. Darkwing just stands out in Transformers One because he's the only recurring speaking character who's an OC in all but name (unless you count Bumblebee), he's the one guy who's been invented from scratch with total creative freedom, and he's boring as sin. It's like the filmmakers just couldn't conceive of a children's movie without that stock character—and they clearly had no idea what to do with him once they'd invented him, because he disappears entirely from the film at the start of the third act, when Orion Pax throws him into an arcade cabinet, which they have in the mines on Cybertron for some reason.

In a film with as painfully few named speaking characters as Transformers One, there's really no excuse for having this kind of one-dimensionality in their portrayals. Genuinely, I ask—who are Orion Pax and Megatron fighting to liberate? Jazz, one of the biggest personalities from the original G1 cartoon, who gets all of two boilerplate lines here? Cooley seems to think so:

As you’re designing them the background characters are almost like Lego pieces where you put different heads on different bodies just to fill in a crowd. But some of them would be brought forward and be painted specific colors so that it represents a character that I didn’t know was such a big deal. But there was stuff—like Jazz, for example, has a pretty big role. It was important to have a relationship with a character that we know gets to be saved.

To me, the idea that casual cinemagoers would be invested in any of the Transformers as characters is laughable. Michael Bay's characters are famous for being hateful non-entities. In terms of the films, Jazz is best remembered for dying at the end of the first one, seventeen years ago; he looks completely different here. The one breakout character in recent years—Mirage, as played by Pete Davidson in Rise of the Beasts—was, as I've already mentioned, written out so that the movie could reach its girl quota... not that he would've had any lines anyway.

And I just don't buy the idea that the complete dearth of compelling characterisation in this film is just an unfortunate side-effect of its clipped one-hour-thirty runtime—that, given even half an hour longer, the film would suddenly be crowded with rich portrayals of all your Transformers faves. Bumblebee and Elita-1, ostensibly two of the most important characters in the film, are not in this movie because the movie is interested in telling their stories. They are in this movie for the sake of being in this movie. It insists upon itself.

IV. No politics means no politics

In fact, putting aside merchandising considerations, Elita-1 and Bumblebee serve one very specific purpose in narrative terms. The trait Optimus Prime and Megatron have always had in common is that they are both leaders—and what is a leader, without anyone to lead? Without Bumblebee and Elita-1, you'd have this farcical situation where the only person Optimus Prime ever gets to boss around is Megatron, until the very end of the movie when God makes him king of all Cybertron. The High Guard, Starscream's gang of exiles, serve a similar narrative purpose for Megatron; they're a ready-made army who've just been sitting around waiting for him to show up and take charge.

Towards the end, the movie does actually take care to show both Orion Pax and Megatron rallying groups of Cybertronians: in Pax's case, he reveals the truth to his legion of interchangable miner friends, while Megatron riles up the High Guard mob. Again, there's a bit of that narrative sleight-of-hand, a bit of a thematic cop-out, where the question of "how do Optimus Prime and Megatron come to be leaders of their factions?" is answered only in the most literal possible interpretation. Yes, we technically see the exact chain of events that lead to this point—but both characters are portrayed as born leaders. We don't see them grow into the role, except physically. The moment Megatron decides he wants to rule, he's able to take charge. Likewise, Optimus Prime just gets divinely appointed by God. At a key point, Megatron loudly declares "I will never trust a so-called leader ever again", and the movie plays a fucking scare chord like this is supposed to be ominous. Like, oh no! Optimus Prime is a leader! And they're friends! Whatever will Megatron do when he finds out his friend, Optimus Prime, is a leader?

I don't think the movie has given any real thought to what a leader actually is. It seems to take a stance that power cannot be taken, i.e. through violent action, as Sentinel Prime and Megatron do. That one scene with Elita-1 suggests the most important trait for a leader to have, above and beyond any particular competency, is simply hope and optimism. What I just can't wrap my head around is the fact that the counterpoint the movie presents to Megatron, in the form of Orion Pax becoming Optimus Prime, does not support a belief in collective action or basic democracy—rather, it's a boring sword-in-the-stone divine-right-of-kings fantasy.

Except I do have a theory for why the film is like this. Let's look again at that interview with Eric Pearson, who came onboard in the "late middle" of production:

One of the first things that I did was a big pass on Sentinel Prime. I just felt like he was too obviously telegraphing his wickedness in previous versions, and I felt like, “No, he’s a carnival barker.” He’s got to be a big salesman. He’s a bullshitter, honestly is what he is.

(Honestly, if this is Sentinel after a "big pass" to make his villainy more of a twist, I shudder to think what the earlier drafts were like.)

Now, let's see how WIRED introduces their interview with Josh Cooley, titled "Transformers One Isn't as Silly as It Looks":

He liked the script, which traces how Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry) went from friends to enemies. But as the world went into lockdown as Covid-19 spread, Cooley found his story changing, if only slightly. Trump was still in office when Cooley started working on the film, and he was having meetings with the producers and they’d “start these meetings off on Zoom just going, like, ‘Holy crap what is going on in this world?’” he says. Ultimately, the infighting they were seeing between Democrats and Republicans in the same family became an undercurrent in the film’s friends-to-enemies storyline, “because that’s what Transformers is.”

So it's like, oh, this is a 2016 election thing. This is just that one election that broke everyone's brains. Of course this movie about a made-up political struggle on an alien planet being developed from 2015-2020 wouldn't be like, hey, you know what might fix our society's problems, is if we had an election. Of course the main villain is a "big salesman" "bullshitter" who says things like "The truth is what I make it!". Wow, guys, your film is so-o-o politically-conscious, and very pretty.

The fantasy is more or less that Donald Trump's army of reactionaries is marching on Washington to seize power through violent means, and on the way he drops Joe Biden into the Grand Canyon, but just before Joe hits the ground a giant fucking bald eagle swoops in to catch him and squawks, "God finds you worthy! Arise, President Biden!"

In our escapist little morality play, our best friend slash allegorical dad gets made king of the planet, and we all get jobs in the government. As in, one of the funniest lines in the movie is straightup Bumblebee exulting, "This is the greatest day of my life. I get to work for the government!" When Prime met Bumblebee—an hour ago—the dude was talking to imaginary friends, and honestly the only fucking skill he's demonstrated since then is cold-blooded murder. We have this dissonance in the storytelling, where it's mostly a story about four friends going on an adventure (are they even friends? Most of them hate each other!), but it's also a founding-fathers political origin story, which means there comes a point where our hero just suddenly starts bossing his friends around in a deep voice, and they're like, "Yes, sir!" It creates this unhinged situation where the "good" faction on Cybertron is ruled by the biblical chosen one and his nepotism buddies.

Per that quote from WIRED (or are they just putting words in Cooley's mouth? I can't help but notice they don't give an exact quote!), the film is ultimately sympathetic to the bad guys (the Republicans, I guess). It deliberately suggests that there is really nothing that should divide the Autobots and the Decepticons: their political goals, it claims, are identical, and they only disagree on the means by which to achieve them. The Decepticons, who are angry and hateful, have simply been misled by a power-hungry liar with charisma—first Sentinel, then Megatron—and so the tragedy is that they are artificially pushed into conflict with their fellow men, when really they should be uniting to stand against their common enemy, the foreigner illuminati trying to steal Cybertron's wealth.

Now, I know I've just handed you a get-out-of-jail-free card. My political allegory here is chock full of holes. What, are Sentinel Prime and Megatron both Donald Trump? Get a grip. Obviously any real-world commentary in Transformers One was only intended in the loosest sense imaginable: things like, "people should be free to change into whatever they want!" I'm being unfair, I'm reading too much into it, this is a cartoon movie for children, and if I want politics, I should start reading some fucking books. Also, come to mention it, my whole argument about that cave earlier really didn't hold water, and- I know, alright? I know.

V. Place / Place, Cybertron

I'm not mad at this toy commercial because its politics don't quite align with mine. I'm not mad at it for having a boring-ass supporting cast. I'm not mad at it for reheating a bunch of half-baked lore I didn't care for from the early 2010s. I've actually spent a lot of time mad about Transformers media that I've thought was bad. There's Transformers: Armada, where the English translators are fully asleep at the wheel and render even the most basic cartoon plots incomprehensible though constant mistranslations. There's Transformers: Micromasters, where two white guys wrote a downtrodden race of tiny Cybertronians who greet each other like "Wattup, my micro!". There's the recent series of Transformers: EarthSpark, where there's an episode that I can only describe as "the Wonka Experience but it's an episode of a children's cartoon", with a plotline that mostly revolves around our child heroes straightup robbing a Onceler-looking businessman of his most valuable possession. There's Transformers: Age of Extinction, with that one scene, and also the rest of that movie. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most Transformers fiction is some combination of bad, offensive, and offensively bad.

So even though I've just spent thousands of words whinging and moaning about how I didn't like Transformers One, the truth is that I had a perfectly nice time at the cinema. I got to go see it with five of my pals who love Transformers just as much as I do, and we had a blast. It is easily in the top 50% of all Transformers fiction.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I guess I've always given a lot of thought to what Transformers looks like from the outside. Maybe it's that I'm compelled to spend so much time and money on it, that it somehow compels me to vomit up these kinds of essays, and all I want is to be able to make it make sense to anyone in my life. It would be so, so nice if I could just sit down in the cinema with a friend or family member for a couple of hours, and at the end of it, they'd be able to walk out and say, "Okay, I guess I see what you get out of it." Rise of the Beasts was kind of that movie for me, but Rise of the Beasts is also the seventh instalment in a blockbuster franchise. It kind of takes for granted everything about Transformers.

It doesn't answer, "what the fuck is a Transformer anyway?"

For many years now, fans have noticed a marked aversion to using the word "transform" as a verb, or even as a noun. Optimus Prime no longer says, "Autobots, transform and roll out!", he just says, "Roll out!". Transformers no longer transform, they "convert". In fact, Transformers are no longer Transformers at all: they are "Transformers bots", the italics here serving to distinguish a registered trademark. This is because the worms in suits at Hasbro are worried that, if they continue to use the word "transform" by its dictionary definition—that is, to change—then rival toy companies will be able to make the case that anything that transforms can legally be described as a Transformer. It will become a generic trademark, like Velcro, or Band-Aid, or Dumpster.

Yet in Transformers One, "Transformers" is not just the noun by which the characters are referred to—rather, it's used in a descriptive sense to specifically mean "Cybertronians who can transform"! Characters are constantly talking about whether they can or can't transform. Prime gets to say his catchphrase in full. It's a miracle. Not only that, characters even get to say the word "kill" instead of "defeat" or "destroy".

Transformers One has a level of unrestricted creative freedom not seen since the 1986 animated film. This is a film unconstrained by location shooting, or licensing deals, or uncooperative actors; through the magic of CGI, for every single frame of its one-hour-thirty runtime, the filmmakers can put literally whatever they want on the screen. They were given the assignment, "Make an animated prequel set on Cybertron telling the origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron", handed an estimated $147 million and a blank page, and told to go nuts. Like those born with transformation cogs, Transformers One had the power to become anything it wanted to be.

The 1986 animated film took that carte blanche to do whatever the fuck it wanted, and basically singlehandedly defined the direction of the franchise ever since. On a lore level, in terms of tone, I would say that Transformers owes practically everything to The Transformers: The Movie. Cartoons, comics, films, and video games have adapted every single one of its scenes countless times over. I'm not necessarily saying that it's a good film, or even that it's a particularly original film—much of it is ripped off from Star Wars—just that it took the franchise somewhere it hadn't gone before. It was looking to the future. As in, literally, it was set in 2005, at the time two decades into the future.

What gets me down about Transformers One is that—like most major franchise media released since The Force Awakens—all it can do is think about the past. Swathes of it are devoted to painstakingly recreating or setting up the various bits of iconography which have arbitrarily come to define the franchise. Even when it appears to be taking things in a new direction, it's not long before it course-corrects back into familiar territory: Steve Buscemi invents a surprisingly fresh take on Starscream's voice, and then Megatron half-strangles him to death, saddling him with a post-produced rasp to emulate Chris Latta's iconic performance from forty years ago.

The very title of the film, Transformers One, is an allusion to the line, "Till all are one," which originates in The Transformers: The Movie. In an early script for that '80s feature, it was actually "Till all life sparks are one", referring to a literal metaphysical process in that draft whereby one Transformer's life force could be passed on to another, presumably with the belief that they would all eventually be merged into a single afterlife. In the finalized story, it's just this kind of mystical phrase vaguely evoking concepts of togetherness and unity.

Transformers One brushes up against the phrase a couple of times. Alpha Trion almost says it at one point, when passing on his dead siblings' transformation cogs: "They were one. You are one. All are one!" Whatever that means. Later, Orion Pax starts a chant amongst the miners: "Together as one!" And finally, at the very end of the movie, during his obligatory film-ending monologue, Optimus Prime again goes: "And now, we stand here together... as one." (Half of Cybertron has just been banished to the surface forever.) "[...] Here, all are truly... Autobots." (Again, half of Cybertron- Optimus, what the fuck are you talking about?) Regardless, this is inexplicably the one instance where the movie doesn't twist itself up into knots trying to nail the exact phrasing.

Actually, there is one other sideways reference like this I can think of. Early in the film, Orion Pax is chatting up Elita, and he remarks, "Feel like I have enough power in my to drill down and touch Primus himself." To which Elita replies, "You don't have the touch or the power." This is kind of a nonsensical retort unless you know that in the 1986 movie, one of the most iconic songs on the soundtrack was "The Touch" by Stan Bush, which had the chorus line: "You got the touch! You got the power!" It's a banger. Anyway, remember when I said Darkwing gets chucked through an arcade cabinet? Well, here's Cooley revealing why that arcade cabinet is in the film:

I actually wrote [that exchange between Orion Pax and Elita] because I love that song. [...] And we had this one version where D-16 and Orion were playing a video game, like a stand-up old arcade game—it was inspired to look like that, but a Cybertonian version of that. They’re playing that together like friends and the song, like the 8-bit song that’s playing is ["The Touch"]. But that scene got nixed. And so I wanted to work it in there somewhere. And I just felt like a natural place for it. But that was one where I’m like, "I just love that song and those lyrics and that’s Transformers to me so I want to get that in there."

(I've had to amend that quote to fill in the blanks where the article has redacted "spoilers" for the movie. Spoiler culture is an absolute pox, I swear. Can't have the audiences knowing about one (1) mid joke in advance—the movie barely has enough jokes to fill a "Transformers One Funny Moments" compilation as it is!)

This actually isn't the first time Hasbro has "nixed" a reference to "The Touch" in major Transformers media. In the Transformers: Cyberverse episode "The Alliance", a character references "The Touch" right before a training montage which is clearly supposed to have the track playing, except instead it's been replaced by a generic rock instrumental, presumably because they couldn't afford the license. And in Daniel Warren Johnson's Eisner-award-winning bestselling comic run, there's one panel where he clearly wanted to include the song's lyrics as a sound effect, but wasn't allowed, so the final sound effect famously reads "YOU KNOW THE SONG". But that's a random episode of a bargain-bin cartoon, and an indie-darling comic series—not a $147 million blockbuster. You really have to wonder if it came down to money, or if it was something else. God knows Transformers One would not actually be improved for having a chiptune remix of "The Touch" in it, anyway.

The most egregious misplaced bit of fanwank in the film isn't even in dialogue. In the 1986 film, there's this one iconic moment when Optimus Prime arrives at the besieged Autobot City, drives through a crowd of Decepticons in truck mode, then fires some afterburners, launching his cab up into the air, where he transforms mid-leap, drawing his blaster to shoot a couple of Decepticons before hitting the ground. It's a fantastic bit of original animation. It's the Akira slide of Transformers. And, surprise surprise, it crops up in Transformers One. In the climactic final fight, Orion Pax shows up to save Megatron, and he does the thing.

But the problem is... he's not in truck mode! The film just cuts to him standing there in the middle of some anonymous mooks, then he does a standing jump into the air, the movie momentarily goes into extreme slow-mo like he's doing a fucking quick-time event, then he shoots a couple of guys and drops to the ground. There's no momentum. It exists purely to create that simulacrum, to take the single most iconic frame from that bit of 1986 animation, and stretch that one frame into infinity. The context is discarded, irrelevant. All that matters is that brief moment of recognition: "I know what that iiis!" God knows Transformers One has precious little in the way of impactful fight animation of its own; the choreography is stiff and uninspired, while the shots themselves are nauseatingly cluttered. Often, the best it can do is pilfer from older, better stories.

"Did you clap at any of the new moments and memorable characters?" "Were there any?"

Look, I get it. Transformers One is a prequel. By definition, it can't change the future. It has to play with the characters that are already in the toybox. But I do think it had this really special opportunity: to show theatregoers where the Transformers come from. To show us Cybertron not as a distant star or a barren scrapyard, but as a living, thriving alien world, unlike Earth, something special and worth protecting in its own right. Something new and memorable. In Rise of the Beasts—probably the best Transformers movie by default—when Optimus Prime is at his lowest, he wants nothing more to return home... but home is something we've only ever seen as a cold dystopia, ruled by Decepticons. The version of Transformers One I had hoped to see was one that would have imbued Optimus' homesickness with greater meaning. I wanted to feel his loss, and to hope that one day the war will end, and Cybertron can be restored.

I think Transformers One sincerely tries to achieve this effect. The concept artists have clearly put a great deal of time and thought into Cybertron as an environment. When the artbook comes out, I'm keen to see how much stuff didn't make it into the finished film. You have to assume most of it got cut, because there's next to nothing left!

At the end of the film, battle lines are drawn, the civil war is about to start... but strangely, the movie's setting does not convey the sense that anything beautiful is being lost. Nobody is unwillingly turned to violence, innocence-lost; they're all too eager to get to killing, friggin' Bumblebee is gleeful about it. There's no beautiful, iconic landmark, which gets tragically destroyed, like in some kind of Transformers 9/11—"What have we done! Where will this war take us!". There's no part of Cybertron's natural ecological environment to be ruined by the war, because the surface world is already turbofucked by the Quintessons to begin with. No, rather, we have the total opposite: Optimus Prime finding the Matrix (which was just, like, hanging out in the core of Cybertron or whatever) actually restores Energon to the planet, removing the unnatural scarcity which was the entire impetus behind the film's dystopia. He made Cybertron great again. So again, Transformers One fails to answer one of the most fundamental questions one might expect of a Transformers prequel: "When did things on Cybertron get so bad?" The movie ends with the planet in better shape to how it started!

The big original idea that Transformers One has is that Cybertron, the planet itself, should be in a constant state of transformation. I've already talked about the beautiful shapeshifting landscapes, but it's also the moving buildings, the complicated mechanisms, the roads and rails that magically lay themselves between the vehicles and their destinations. I've already mentioned how odd I find it that none of these environmental transformations have any significance to the story; the closest it comes to some sort of payoff is when Orion Pax falls into the hole that makes you king.

What I find most perplexing are the deer. When the gang makes it to the surface, the idea is to show the natural beauty of the surface, which the cogless have been denied their whole lives. The mountains glisten as they move. Nebulae glow in the night sky. The surface is blanketed in organic (?) plantlife, like a watering can forgotten in a garden. And, most strikingly, there are deer: mechanical animals, just like those found on Earth, being hunted for sport by the evil Quintessons. When the cruisers near, their glowing horns turn red with alarm, and they prance around in fear.

I'm reminded of a brief gag from the third season of Transformers: Cyberverse—one of very few shows to have devoted any serious effort to Cybertronian worldbuilding—in the episode "Thunderhowl". Bumblebee and Chromia stumble across a "singlehorn" (read: unicorn), and when it senses danger, it neighs, transforms into a rocket, and blasts out of frame. And apart from being really cute and funny, it's like, oh, of course that's what animals are like on Cybertron! Everything on this planet transforms. Why not the animals?

For whatever reason, the deer in Transformers One are like the one thing that don't transform. Why the hell not? If Cyberverse could find the budget for its split-second sight gag, surely this blockbuster could, I don't know, have them turn into dirt bikes with antler-handlebars. That would've been something, right? If not, then at least could we maybe see some other animals on Cybertron, to really get across that alien biodiversity? Of course not. See, the deer exist to communicate one very specific story beat: a single moment of trepidation, where the heroes know there's danger nearby, but they don't know what. And all you need for that is a single kind of prey animal, with some kind of warning light to let you know, hey, there's danger! Once this purpose is fulfilled, the deer have no further significance to the story.

We need only look to BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui to see this exact same beat play out with a modicum of competence and creative flair. Also in the second act—in fact, at practically the exact same timestamp—our heroes, the Toa, have a run-in with the bad guys, and they're nearly captured... but then there's this sudden rumble of danger approaching, we don't know what. It turns out to be a herd of giant Kikanalo! They send the bad guys packing, except they nearly trample our heroes too! But then, Toa Nokama's mask begins to glow, and she discovers that her mask grants her the ability to talk to animals. They learn some vital information from the Kikanalo, and are able to ride the creatures for the next stage of their adventure. Finally, when they can go no further, the Kikanalo cave in the passage behind the heroes to ensure they won't be pursued. Holy shit, that's like, five different story beats with just that one type of creature!

It's not just that Transformers One struggles with that kind of basic narrative flow, where a single element serves multiple purposes. It's that often, it wastes precious time creating redundant setups to achieve the same effect twice.

For example, Megatronus Prime's face happens to look exactly like (what we know will be) the Decepticon insignia. At the beginning of the movie, Orion Pax mollifies Megatron by giving him a rare decal of Megatronus Prime's face. Traditionally, Megatron wears his insignia in the middle of his chest—but in this film, nearly every character has a big hole in the middle of their chest, where their missing transformation cog should go. So Megatron sticks the decal on his shoulder instead.

Later, he gets a cog, and the hole in his chest is filled. When Sentinel Prime captures Megatron, he notices the Megatronus sticker, and rips it off. Then, he re-applies it on Megatron's chest—purely so it's in the "right" place for the iconography. And then, he uses his gun to crudely brand Megatron with a tracing of Megatronus' face, inadvertently creating the Decepticon symbol. Finally, in a post-credits scene, Megatron has fashioned a proper Decepticon brand with which to brand himself and his followers. So in effect, there are four separate moments where Megatron gets the symbol! Orion sticking it on his shoulder, Sentinel moving it to his chest, Sentinel mutilating him, and finally Megatron branding himself. You can make an argument that the symbol starts out meaning one thing, but ends up meaning another thing, which has a kind of tragic significance—but I think you would struggle to distinguish subtle shades of meaning from all four of these brandings. Considering the movie only has an hour and a half to work with, I find this lack of narrative economy to be honestly embarrassing.

(My friend Jo also points out what a misstep it is to just have Megatronus Prime's face perfectly resemble the Decepticon symbol from the start. Had it been a looser, more stylised—that is to say, original—design, the moment where Sentinel Prime roughly carves it into Megatron's chest could be a shocking reveal, as the basic outlines are abstracted and simplified. Gasp, that's the origin of the Decepticon symbol! Instead, from the very moment that sticker first shows up, it's like... oh, well, there it is I guess.)

In a similar vein, both Optimus Prime and Megatron undergo two different transformations at different points in the movie: first, when Alpha Trion gives them transformation cogs, and second, when respectively they obtain the Matrix of Leadership/Megatronus' cog. The gun that sprouts from Megatron's arm in his intermediary form bears a much closer to resemblance to his iconic "fusion cannon" than the triple-barrelled cannon he ends up with in his final form. Again, in such a short film, can we really say whatever subtlety this brings to Megatron's arc is worth all this fanfare? Now, Redditors ask: "What is the EXACT moment D-16 became Megatron?"

In fact, probably the only point of criticism I've seen levied at Transformer One from within the Transformers fandom at large is that Megatron's arc is maybe a little "rushed". He starts out being best bros forever with Orion Pax, and by the end of the film, he's ready to drop the guy into a bottomless pit. The film takes a lot of time to justify his anger at Sentinel Prime, but the deterioration of his friendship with Orion goes much more unspoken, and is framed more as a point of irrationality: psychologically, Megatron comes to conflate his bossy friend with his oppressive ruler. I liked this, personally. I liked that it's as if a switch gets flipped in Megatron's head. But you do just kind of have to buy into it. The film itself does not put in the work to really sell you on the friendship souring, because again, it's too busy fucking around with two (2) magical girl transformation sequences for each of them.

Everything in the film is like this. They go into the cave and meet Alpha Trion, then leave the cave so they can watch a FMV cutscene with Sentinel Prime and the Quintessons, who've coincidentally arrived at that exact moment, basically just to rehash what they've just been told... and then they go back into the cave so Alpha Trion can resume his infodump, and then they end up clashing with Sentinel Prime's forces once that's done. At the beginning of the movie, they're at the very bottom in the mines, then they get banished to an even lower level, then they banish themselves all the way up to the surface, then they return to Iacon, and then Megatron gets banished to the surface again so he can be mesmerized by the beauty of the world and/or get gunched by Quintessons depending on what the film wanted me to take away from this. Compare to Minecraft but I survive in PARKOUR CIVILIZATION [FULL MOVIE], where the theme of class struggle is pretty efficiently depicted in the vertically-stratified setting.

I just find it so wasteful. Outside of the one scene where they're introduced, the Quintessons—ostensibly the true architects of Cybertron's oppressive status quo—may as well not exist. If not for Orion Pax addressing his closing remarks to the Quintessons, almost as an afterthought, I'd assume the film wants us to forget about them entirely, as it knows full well that its paltry runtime does not give it time for a second action-climax against the aliens. Even as sequel bait, it feels halfhearted at best; Josh Cooley is clearly already bored of Transformers, and seems unlikely to come back for another round unless the money is really really good (which *glances at the box office* it's not). So what the fuck are the Quintessons here for? Was the idea that Sentinel might just have pulled off his coup singlehandedly really so hard to stomach? Could the conspiracy not have been simplified to just involve Sentinel and his Transformer cronies? Hang on, are all the Transformers seen at the start of the film in on it, or just some of them? How's it decided who keeps their cogs and who doesn't?

VI. Into nothing

Why does this movie, where the main selling point is ostensibly that we're getting to see Transformers civilization for the first time, mostly focus on all these guys who can't fucking transform? Surely the entire thing that makes the setting fun is the Zootopia angle of, look, they're all different animals! Or the Elemental angle of, look, they're all different elements! Or the Emoji Movie angle of, look, they're all different emoji! Or the Cars angle of, look, they're all different cars! This is a Transformers film which features several significant sequences involving these cool trains, and there is absolutely zero indication that these trains are themselves Transformers. This is a Transformers film which extensively focuses on miners, and none of them transform into mining vehicles; they're holding, friggin', space jackhammers. Even the premise of "isn't it sad that these ones can't transform" is kind of undercut by the fact that all the miners get to wear fucking jetpacks, which is a frankly much cooler and more effective method of locomotion than driving.

I'm just sick of Transformers stories having zero interest in the basic premise of Transformers, which is to say, they transform into something. I also think this is the biggest dissonance between casual audiences, who think "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, that guy who turns into a truck", and Transformers fans, who think, "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, the messiah or something". Normal people love to know what the Transformers turn into. They ask, "Wait, is there a Transformer that turns into [insert silly vehicle here]?" Of course people are interested in that angle! Vehicles are such a huge part of our daily lives—honestly, for those of us living in cities, more so than animals, the classical elements, or emoji—but the closest Transformers One comes to engaging with this lens is that aforementioned Iacon 5000 race sequence. By and large, it presents a world which is made for standing up and walking around. And personally I do think that's an insane approach to take?

Is the excuse that cars can't emote? Nonsense. If you've ever seen a traffic jam, you'll know that cars can sure as hell emote. Pixar, where Josh Cooley cut his teeth, famously spent a lot of time working out how to put a facial expression on a car. No, the problem dates back to the very start of the franchise.

In the 1980s, two main people were responsible for writing the comic stories: American writer Bob Budiansky, and British writer Simon Furman. Budiansky approached the premise of the franchise from an external, human perspective, writing about culture clash, and taking delight in the Transformers' mechanical alien nature as "robots in disguise". Meanwhile, Furman wrote the Transformers as giant people: he focused on their own internal conflicts and motivations, and the grand history of their war. Pretty much every Transformers story ever told can be boiled down to one of these schools of thought: Budianskian, or Furmanist.

Budiansky quit the comic after fifty issues, allowing Furman to take the reigns as sole writer, and Furman basically got the final word on what the Transformers are. They did not evolve from naturally-occurring gears, levers and pulleys. They were not designed by a supercomputer, or built by an alien race. They are the chosen sons of God. The Thirteen are, of course, an invention of Furman's. And Transformers One is perhaps the most Furmanist story ever told. It's the culmination of years and years of lore building up, ossifying into something you can no longer describe as the history of a universe—no, this is a mythology. It's the most perfect form of brand alignment imaginable: this is not an origin story, this is the origin story. It's been the origin story for a better part of the decade—and now that everyone's seen it in theatres, it will be the origin story forever.

It's not just the fiction, either, by the way. These days, if you go into the store to buy a Transformers toy, chances are it'll turn into some misshapen made-up futuristic concept car with unpainted windows and wheels that don't even roll—and that's terrible.

There's truly a lot to hate about Michael Bay's Transformers films, but with each new entry that's released following his departure from the franchise, I feel like I only find myself appreciating them more. In the 2007 Transformers movie, we see the Transformers crash-landing on Earth in their "protoforms", and their movements are animated like they're shy, like they're naked until they scan an Earth vehicle and adopt a disguise. The visual impact of Megatron, meanwhile, is that he doesn't adopt a disguise in that movie: he's a horrible metal skeleton that turns into a jet made of knives. It's weird and alien and it rules.

In the 1980s Transformers cartoon, and in the last-minute Cybertron-set prologue added to Bumblebee, and now in Transformers One, the Transformers look basically the same on Cybertron as they eventually do upon their arrival to Earth. Optimus Prime turns, unmistakably, into a truck. He has windows on his chest, and smokestacks on his arms. He doesn't have these features because he disguises himself as an Earth truck. He has those details because that's just what Optimus Prime looks like. They're his "essential brand elements", or "trademark details", which "identify the must-have elements in character design to be carried across all creative expressions". Prime may take any form he wishes, so long as it looks exactly like himself. A mask of my own face—I'd wear that.

What I find fucked up about the reception towards Transformers One is that a lot of people seemed very invested in its success—and not its popular success, certainly not its artistic success, but rather its commercial success. They wanted this to be the first film to make one bumblebillion dollars. They wanted Hasbro to line its fucking pockets and make movies like this forever. So if you express any kind of negativity towards this film online, which might theoretically affect some other person's decision of whether or not to go and see it, which might theoretically affect the profit it makes at the cinema, which might theoretically affect the future of the franchise in some unknown way, then you're some sort of fandom traitor who oughta be executed.

If you're so worried about the future of the franchise, the fandom really isn't where you should be looking. Like, c'mon, the Transformers fandom has been good as gold, we buy so many toys. Meanwhile, Hasbro just got finished laying off around 100 employees with no warning to make their books look a bit better. Transformers designer John Warden—who'd worked at Hasbro for 25 years, is widely credited with inventing the modern paradigm of Transformers toylines, and ultimately became the creative director of both Transformers and G.I. Joe—was on assignment to a convention in the UK with the rest of the Transformers team when he heard the news. Suffice to say, he did not end up making a public appearance at the convention. With his work's health insurance snatched away without notice, he's had to resort to crowdfunding to pay his family's medical bills. As a well-known figure in the toy industry, he will presumably find a new job and land on his feet, but the same cannot be said for all 99 of the remaining employees we're told have been unceremoniously dumped.

The Binder of Revelation, which has been something of a holy grail of behind-the-scenes material for over a decade, has finally been leaked—presumably by one of these guys, presumably out of spite.

Now, I'm not going to pretend to have been paying particularly close attention to Hasbro's financials, but from where I'm sitting, it sure seems that ever since the sudden death of then-CEO Brian Goldner in 2021—credited for saving the company in 2000, and overseeing the explosive growth of its intellectual property ever since then—his replacement, Chris P. Cocks (or "Crispy Cocks", as we're all now calling him), has been dead set on gutting the company for all it's worth. The Power Rangers franchise, which the company acquired for $522 million in 2018, is dead in the water, with huge quantities of physical assets being flogged at auction for quick cash. In 2019, they acquired the entertainment company eOne for $4.0 billion, and now they're selling off the whole shebang (except the cash-printing Peppa Pig franchise) for just $500 million. I guess maybe they just fucked it big style?

Because now, Crispy Cocks has proudly announced that Hasbro is going to stop financing movies altogether.

I'm sure that in the wake of this announcement, many of those aforementioned fandom pundits will be drawing a correlation between this announcement, and the box-office figures for Transformers One, and the fact that you personally failed to convince your Mom to go see it with you or whatever. "Ah, you see! They didn't make enough of their money back, and now they're consolidating. Simple economic cause and effect. Market forces." And look, I'm not going to sit here and claim these things are wholly unrelated. Of course they're very related. But I am going to make the case that, in truth, nobody at Hasbro really cared how Transformers One did. Unless it turned out to be some pie-in-the-sky runaway hit, I don't think the future of the Transformers film franchise would've been particularly different if only the film had done better.

With Paramount, Hasbro has been making these movies and having them underperform ever since 2017's The Last Knight—which apparently lost Paramount $100 million—and that's because at the end of the day, what they're most interested in isn't making movies. It's making toy commercials. And on that level, the Transformers films have clearly been a success so far.

Now, Crispy Cocks' skinsuit fashions itself as a gamer, so he can personify Hasbro's hardcore pivot towards digital and tabletop gaming. While we await the release of the assuredly-dogshit, assuredly-hell-to-have-worked-on, assuredly-never-coming-out Transformers: Reactivate, the brand has been whored out to a procession of mobile games you've never heard of, glorified gambling machines designed to hack the monkey part of your brain with bright colors and Things You Recognize. The exact content of these games is irrelevant; all that matters is the announcement, on every single pop culture news outlet simultaneously (naturally—they're all owned by the same company, talk about Monopoly), of New Collaboration Between Transformers And Goon Warriors Free To Download Now. Your daily, weekly, bi-annual reminder to think about that thing you can buy.

That's all any of this stuff is.

All these words spilled about what a good movie Transformers One is, and how bad it is, and why the marketing failed it, and what the next one might be like, and- none of it mattered! It does not matter. From the beginning, this movie was always going to be too preoccupied with its own mercenary interests to be something anyone would ever be able to seriously talk about as a work of art, even corporate art. The actual content of the movie is irrelevant; I've spent very little of this review talking about it, because there's nothing there to talk about. It is the mere fact of the movie's existence that serves its purpose. Like the Optimus Prime Fortnite skin, it's enough for it to occupy our attention.

Maybe that's why they staggered the film's release date: because some marketing exec watched the rough cut and realised, if everyone saw it at once, we'd be done talking about it within a fortnight. And in ten years' time, after it has been paraded around whichever streaming services survive 'til then, and nearly every last cent of revenue has been squeezed out of it, the kids will be able to watch it on YouTube with ad breaks, and decide what they want for Christmas.

To the Transformers fans reading this, I am begging you, unless you happen to own shares in Hasbro for some fucking reason, to disabuse yourself of the feeling that you owe any kind of loyalty to a toy franchise. It shouldn't matter to you one jot how Transformers One did in theatres. The people who actually make the product you care about, the friendly faces paraded before you on livestreams and press tours, don't see this money anyway—they too are merely assets, who can be fired and replaced with cheaper, inferior equivalents.

I'm sure many of you will have, from the very start, seen this review for the foolish endeavour it is. I've wasted all this time criticising Transformers One for its lack of artistic vision, when the truth is, Transformers One is playing an entirely different game. Like the Disney Channel running "Fishy Facts!" segments to subliminally get kids interested in fish a full year and a half before the release of Finding Nemo, this is not a product—it's an ad for a product.

...

Okay I'll be honest, I don't entirely love where this review has ended up. It ends on kind of a "bummer note", I guess you could say. Flashing back to sections I. and II., I feel like things started out so fun. We had that whole bit at the start where I was telling you about the Transformers, remember that? We learned so much together. And there were even a few moments where I was able to express some kind of sincere joy and appreciation over this thing that I supposedly adore so much. Sure, I did a lot of complaining, but it was fun complaining, right? It had like, a sarcastic edge to it, sort of.

What happened? Why am I suddenly talking like I want to cut someone's head off? As I grow more bitter, I type this essay with increasing difficulty. The massive gun that's sprouted from my forearm keeps colliding with my monitor.

Hasbro descends from on high to reward @TFHypeGuy, a grown-ass adult who has spent untold unpaid hours fearlessly replying to every single viral tweet to tell people to go see the film, somehow netting himself 80,000 followers in the process, with a crate of toys, which was probably his end goal from the start. He and I duel. We trade blow after blow. Finally, he clobbers me with a Walmart-exclusive light-up Ultimate Energon Optimus Prime figure. "It didn't have to end this way," he says. Then he banishes me to the surface world to think on my sins.

VII. The Wrong Trousers 👖 | Train Chase Scene 🚂 | Wallace & Gromit

When Eric Pearson came onto the project,

It was late middle of the game. They had a script that had the outline of the story, which is still very much the structural bones of the story now. But what I found interesting about animation is there are certain things that were far along in the process. The train escape to the surface was very far along, so that was just kind of locked. Maybe you could change a line here or there. Meanwhile, the opening, the whole first 10 minutes, was all storyboards and sketches, which changed a bunch of times.

And I do think that's a really difficult position for a scriptwriter to be in. Sure, the parts of the screenplay I feel able to attribute to Pearson, I wasn't particularly impressed by. But I think this anecdote goes to show how unnatural the constraints can be on a story like this. When you think of like, a scene that's key to Transformers One, you're probably imagining something like the Megatron/Optimus fight, or the scene in the mine—not the train scene, which is basically a bit of arbitrary connective tissue bridging the two main locations in the film.

Josh Cooley, the film's director, the face of the film on the press circuit from a creative standpoint, came onboard after five years of previous development work was already done. Writers Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, who originally pitched the film and presumably wrote the early drafts of the story, might have already left the project by that point. Aaron Archer and Rik Alvarez, the creative forces behind the Binder of Revelation, left Hasbro years before the film was even pitched. It's no wonder to me that the final result feels incoherent, disjointed, and oddly stilted. It's certainly no wonder that nobody at Hasbro today really seems to care about the film; it's not their baby. If any of the people credited with bringing the project to completion had been given full creative freedom to make whatever Transformers movie they wanted, it would've looked completely different.

Luckily, there are still plenty of areas of the franchise where creators have just been allowed to go ham. Over in Japan, TRIGGER has taken a modest budget for a music-video and produced one of the most visually-striking bits of animation in the franchise, a true love-letter to all the weird parts of its forty-year history. And in America, comic creator Daniel Warren Johnson is halfway through his Eisner-winning new run on the title, which is the kind of thing I would basically recommend to anyone without caveats as being a phenomenal story, period. If that comic can be said to be an advert for anything, it's for Skybound's other, nowhere-near-as-good comic series, or for the unofficial unlicensed copyright-infringing Magic Square Optimus Prime toy Daniel Warren Johnson apparently used as reference the whole time.

I dunno, maybe Hasbro stepping back from financing these films is a good thing, in the long run. Maybe we can do without Transformers movies for a while. And however many years down the line, maybe Paramount or some other studio will put together a new team of talent, and they'll get to do whatever it is they want. And maybe the movie they make will be the one that knocks everyone's socks off.

Truly, I don't know where the road leads from here. It hasn't been built yet. It could turn out to go anywhere.

If you made it this far, I hope some of what I've said has been entertaining or interesting. Thanks for reading!

Time to for me to come clean. There is one other reason why I've waited so long to release this review... and that's because I have a special announcement to make. Last month I set myself a little challenge: to write something that's at least as long as this review, but which isn't another negative-nancy tirade. It's a story.

The working title is "Ice Road Transformers". It's like an episode of that one reality TV show about Canadians driving trucks across frozen lakes—except the truck is Optimus Prime.

Early reviews say it's good! It'll be going through several rounds of revisions, to turn it into a well-oiled machine, hopefully in time for a seasonally-appropriate wide release in February. I'm very excited for you to be able to read it. You can follow me here or on Bluesky to be the first to find out when it's ready!

I'd like to thank my friends Jo and Umar for their work interviewing Cooley and di Bonaventura during the film's press circuit, along with Viv, Callum, and Omar for allowing me to enjoy this film much more than I otherwise might have. I wouldn't have been able to express many of my feelings about this movie nearly so cogently if not for the conversations I had with them. Additional thanks go to Chris McFeely, as his Transformers: The Basics videos (linked throughout this essay) refreshed my memory on a lot of the Aligned stuff, sparing me from having to read The Covenant of Primus again.

[rhowena]

The core problem of Campaign 3's god debate is that the only real support offered by the anti-god side is "some people are mad at the gods" and no one -- in-universe or out -- seems to realize that the mere existence of people who dislike the gods isn't sufficient to make "should the gods stay or go?" into a hyper-complex morally grey debate, any more than the mere existence of global warming denialists is sufficient to make the factual reality of climate change into a hyper-complex scientific debate. "People who are mad at the gods exist, therefore the current system is broken somehow" is the mentality of people-pleasing: if someone is mad at you, it proves that you're a bad person who did something to make them mad, and you are now morally obligated to internalize everything they say about you and devote all your energy to appeasing them.

I am, personally, of the opinion that it is vitally important for people in positions of power to maintain a healthy awareness of their own fallibility and cultivate lines of feedback from lower down in the chain the way software developers provide bug report forms; however, the reality I encountered when I accepted a forum moderation position years ago is that, if you're an Authority Figure™ of any stripe, for every person with a good-faith criticism of a poor ruling you made while overtired or an outdated policy that needs to be revised, there are a dozen who shake their fists at you because they want someone to be mad at. And when you look at the actual substance of the complaints being made (nearly all of which display a fundamental refusal to grapple with the scale the gods operate on and how that affects their decision-making) and ask "what, if anything, could/should the gods have done differently?" and "is getting rid of the gods actually a viable solution to this problem?", they're all firmly in that latter category.

To go down the list:

Vecna: If we're treating "people who are mad at the gods" as a Marginalized Group™ whose grievances are Good Points™ and Worth Considering™ simply because they are grievances with The People in Power™, then Vecna is part of said Marginalized Group™, seeing as he holds a massive grudge against the gods who helped banish him beyond the Divine Gate and per the campaign books his ultimate goal is to eliminate the worship of all deities other than himself. One can only imagine how hard he's kicking himself for failing to find out about Predathos before his own ascension.

Ludinus: His parents will still be dead whether he succeeds or fails, and preventing the same thing from happening to others is what the Divine Gate is for. Killing the gods would not only not prevent similar tragedies, it would, at least in the short term, actively make things worse: assuming Tharizdun doesn't just eat everything, how does he expect Lesser Idols like Uk'otoa to react to a glorious new age where there are no gods to keep them in check and millions of newly deity-less clerics are stuck watching people die whom they could have saved if they still had their spells? Moreover, what happens when people discontented with his glorious new era swear vengeance on those they blame for taking their gods from them, as Ludinus swore vengeance on those he blames for his parents' deaths, or start idealizing the lost age of the gods and looking for ways to somehow bring them back, as Ashton does with the Titans? Does the perspective of people who like the gods then become Worth Considering™, if they've gone from being Privileged™ to being a Marginalized Group™ who have been collectively traumatized by the loss of something precious to them?

Aeor: One of the major takeaways from Downfall was that Aeor was extremely decadent, corrupt, stratified, and generally dystopian at its height. Their main reason for wanting the gods dead seems to be not liking the existence of anything more powerful than them, and anyone arguing that the gods are Too Powerful To Exist needs to explain why the tiny cabal of mages at the tippy-top of Aeor's societal pyramid, wielding power that 99.9% of Exandrians will never have access to, were not themselves Too Powerful To Exist, especially given their evident imperialist ambitions.

Dorian: I won't downplay the genuine grievance there, but a. Opal was victimized by one of the Betrayer Gods, and what to do about them is a question that Vespin Chloras and Cassida Previn, for all their hubris, approached with considerably more nuance, and b. per the post linked in the previous bullet point, if your ultimate goal is to prevent all ill-advised deals with powerful entities and the unpleasant consequences thereof, where exactly do you stop?

Tuldus and Hearthdell: Plenty of irreligious people across Exandria are living their best lives unmolested, so the whole "you must be religious OR ELSE" isn't something the gods themselves are demanding in a systemic way, and getting rid of them wouldn't prevent all oppression any more than it would prevent all cataclysms and mass deaths. (It might not even stop the oppression committed by those specific religious people; per 'personality predates ideology', the ones who are in it to bully others and feel righteous about it will simply look for a different excuse to do so if their current one is taken from them.) There's a genuine debate to be had about how much responsibility the gods bear for their followers' actions and one could, more reasonably, accuse them of having become too lax and needing to be more stringent about telling their priests to cut that kind of shit out (though that in turn opens the question of how much they can micromanage their followers' behavior before it becomes genuinely smothering and oppressive), but it runs counter to the "the gods have too much control" narrative the Vanguard is pushing.

Liliana: Every parroted accusation she levies at the Exandria's pantheon is something Predathos and its worshippers are far, FAR more guilty of, but Predathos doesn't present itself as a caring, benevolent entity in the same way the Prime Deities do, and she expects us to believe that it admitting that it's bad somehow makes it good. (There's a Slacktivist quote that I think sums up the underlying logic here: "Once you've decided that the Most Important Thing is to avoid the wolf in sheep's clothing, your safest course of action is to embrace the wolf in wolf's clothing.")

Ashton: Essentially blames the gods for refusing to micromanage reality on their behalf and, in focusing so much on his own pain, hasn't stopped to ask what the world would look like if the gods actually felt obligated to micromanage reality on behalf of everyone who petitioned them that way, not just him personally. My dad is an agnostic and specifically doesn't believe in a god who answers prayer because what's a god to do when there's a baseball game and both teams have fans praying for their victory (or when there's a war and both armies include adherents of a given faith)?

Bor'dor: It's one thing to say that the gods have certain obligations to their followers and quite another to say that that the gods are supposed to keep their followers swaddled in bubble wrap 24/7 and prevent them from experiencing any consequences for their own actions whatsoever, and arguing that the Wildmother should have somehow stopped Bor'dor's family's suicide charge from resulting in their deaths is the latter.

Vox Machina: Continue to hold a grudge against the Matron for taking Vax away and would like to believe her being gone would make him mortal again, but when you stop to think about Vax as a person with his own feelings and opinions about his relationship with the Matron, instead of as a passive object to be fought over, the "what if Predathos eats the Matron?" scenario looks a hell of a lot bleaker. There's also the question of whether or not Predathos would consider Vax himself edible; a mere celestial might be one of those half-crushed potato chip fragments at the bottom of the bag in comparison to a god, but when you've been trapped and starving for thousands of years...

Zathuda: Objects not to being told 'no' but to the existence of forces who could potentially tell him no, which to me reads as an asshole whining about how unfair and oppressive it is when people see his assholery and tell him to cut it the fuck out.

[raghdaelsamman]

My name is Rana Al-Samman. I live with my family in Gaza, including my husband and our four children. Our lives were once filled with hope and happiness, but everything changed in a moment due to the devastating war in Gaza that has been going on for the past four months. My family and I have become victims of this bitter conflict.

Deep sadness engulfs my heart. I have lost loved ones in this destructive war, and my beautiful home and city, which are considered sacred land to us, have been destroyed.

I feel immense sorrow because I have lost those I loved, my friends and relatives whom I embraced with love and warmth. They were an integral part of my life, and now I feel loneliness and deep emptiness. My heart aches every time I remember them, and I wish they were still by my side, bringing joy and happiness to my dark days.

Alongside this overwhelming sadness comes the pain of irreparable loss. My family home, which was a refuge for me and my loved ones, has turned into a pile of rubble. Waves of destruction have taken everything I had, leaving me alone and displaced. I cannot find the appropriate words to describe the bitter feeling that overwhelms me when I see my destroyed home, as if it reflects my sad state of mind.

And it doesn't end there. My beautiful city, once a place of hope and life, has been destroyed. Every street and building has turned into ruins, and the familiar scenes I grew up with have vanished. I feel profound grief as I wander through its lifeless streets, remembering the days of smiles and laughter that used to fill its corridors.

With all the hardships I face, I fear for the safety of my young children. Their innocent souls do not deserve this torment and the constant fear that engulfs us day after day. I long to provide them with a safe and stable environment where they can grow and thrive without limitations. I feel extreme anxiety when they hide under the bed or wake up frightened in the middle of the night.

My heart bleeds for the suffering of my young children. Their childhood has been stolen, and their development hindered due to this harsh war. As a mother of four children, I feel helpless and deeply saddened by my inability to protect them and provide a safe environment. We are living in a dilapidated tent, under harsh conditions of freezing cold and limited resources. And the most concerning part is the danger that surrounds us, as there is no safe place to live.

My innocent children do not deserve this living hell we are going through. They have committed no wrongdoing that warrants such punishment. I desire for them to have a normal and happy life, not this nightmare that robs them of their childhood. They experience trials that are not befitting their young ages and witness tragedies that strike hearts and leave deep scars on their souls.

I am losing them day by day, as I can't provide the basic necessities of life for them. Education, which is a fundamental right for every child, is completely absent from their lives. There are no nearby schools, and there are no qualified teachers who can guide them and instill in them the values and skills necessary for their future.

And when one of them falls ill or requires medical care, finding a hospital becomes a difficult and sometimes impossible task. I feel helpless in those moments because I don't have the ability to meet their basic healthcare needs.

Why are my innocent children subjected to all this misery? What is their fault that deserves such a punishment? We must remember that children are the hope of the future, and we must protect them and provide them with the suitable conditions for growth and development.

Therefore, from the bottom of my heart, I hope to be able to travel far away from danger, where children enjoy their basic rights and live in a safe and stable environment.

My innocent children deserve to live a normal and happy life, and to receive the necessary education and healthcare. As a mother, I will do my utmost to protect them and secure their future, and I will continue to fight for their rights and give them a better life.

My newly purchased home, which I had worked hard for and made sacrifices, has been destroyed. It was a beautiful home that represented our hope for a new beginning. But unfortunately, before we could even repay its installments, it was bombarded and turned into rubble.

Not only that, but my husband's project and his work have also been affected. He worked diligently and persevered to provide a living for our family, but now everything is destroyed. Sadly, we have no place to stay, no job, and no life.

We lost everything in an instant, and now we are living on the streets without shelter, exposed to danger and harsh conditions. My innocent children are living in a state of constant danger, unable to stop crying and feeling fear. They suffer from health and psychological problems, and I feel extremely helpless in providing the protection and care they need.

I feel immense sorrow for the loss of my dearest loved ones, my dear nephew who was 24 years old, and his wife, who were killed in this cursed war. They, along with their unborn child, were our hope and support, and we were all attached to them. They had no fault in the suffering we are going through. I had hoped to see their children, but now all we find is sadness, destruction, and fear.

We have become lifeless, displaced and homeless, and I feel utterly helpless in protecting my children in the usual ways.

I realize that traveling may be the optimal solution to obtain a safe life for my children and ourselves. However, unfortunately, I do not have the necessary funds to cover the costs of travel, which are very expensive. I know that we deserve the right to live safely and with dignity, but reality impedes the realization of this right.

I know that there are many difficulties and challenges we face, but I am determined by the strength that the love for my children grants me. I will continue to search for solutions and new opportunities, and I will work with all my might to provide a safe life and a better future for my children.

Despite the difficult circumstances we are living in, I still have faith that there are kind-hearted people who can assist us in obtaining financial support, temporary shelter, covering the travel expenses, and finding a safe life elsewhere.

Despite the hardships we will face on the journey, I will remain determined and optimistic. I will continue to work with all my strength and make every effort to provide the safe and dignified life that my children deserve.

Let's work together to save children's lives and secure their future. Donate now or spread this advertisement to reach as many people as possible. With your help, you will be the reason for hope and change in the lives of these children.

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[nikethestatue]

I thought of something interesting about Azriel and the nature of his approach to the Archeron sisters, and of course, Elain specifically.

He first meets Feyre, and then he meets Nesta and Elain.

With Feyre, he is rather opaque, and doesn't have the same friendship that she has with Cassian for example.

However, it is Azriel who says 'Be careful how you speak about my High Lady' to a High Lord. No fear, no hesitation, no trepidation. Presumably, he is only a bastard-born soldier and spy in another Court. Yet he doesn't let that stop him. Later on, he OFFERS to train Feyre to fly. When she voices the desire to do so. Then, when he trains her, he trains 'her skills'--not her. (I'll get back to this later).

When it comes to Nesta, Azriel was the only one who never spoke badly about Nesta--by her own admission--never mistreated her and never tried to change her. (I'll get back to this later, too)

And then of course, there is Elain. Elain, who was seemingly going mad after being Made. Elain, who confused and frightened everyone with her detachment and mumbling. Elain, whom no one understood. Her sisters, her mate, Madja, Rhys--they all thought that Elain needed something to change. And only Azriel, was the one to look at Elain and say 'she doesn't need anything...' Only he, understood that there was nothing 'wrong' with her. She was still Elain, his Elain, only with different powers, with something additional that she received from the Cauldron.

And that brings me to my main point.

Azriel never, ever attempted to CHANGE anything about the sisters. It's like he is the only one who understands what they are, their personalities, and their powers.

When we consider Rhys and Feyre, Rhys's main objective, especially early on in their relationship was to hone her. He wanted her to live fully into her powers, and worked relentlessly to develop them. Sometimes, his methods, even in the eyes of Amren, were 'brutal, but effective'. He sent an untrained Feyre to the Weaver's Cottage. Exposed her to the Attor. Began working on her mental shields. Forced her to learn to read. All things beneficial to her, of course, but at times, almost forced out of her by Rhys.

Let's call his approach 'development'.

When we consider Cassian and Nesta, the approach was 'change'. While perhaps Cassian always enjoyed the back and forth, the bantering, the sharpness of Nesta's tongue and her nonchalance, deep down, we know that he was always troubled by her attitude towards both Feyre and Rhys, and repeatedly took their sides against her. The training that he and the IC devised for her was fundamentally to change her. Soften her up. Make her more...palatable. He was in charge of making her do something that she really, really disliked initially, which is working out. Not only that, he also took her to the Illyrian village, not realizing how at odds it was with her whole persona. Only upon much deeper reflection did he understand what he was doing wrong. And while there is no doubt that he loves her, I am not sure if he understands her, to this day. Hence, him going along with Feyre and Amren and Rhys and wanting to change Nesta's wayward ways.

And then, there is Azriel and Elain. Azriel, who is so frequently accused of 'coddling' Elain, and 'limiting' her--though he's never done anything of sort.

BUT, Azriel and Elain both have exactly the same approach to each other, which is absolutely unique. Acceptance. Azriel accepts Elain how she is. He doesn't limit her, he doesn't try to change her in any way, he doesn't push for her to scry for the IC, or use her powers. Yet, at the same time, he trusts her with Truth-Teller in the middle of a massive battle. He trusts her voice and her visions, and doesn't question their validity. It's like he understands what she is. Her abilities', limitations, and powers.

Azriel isn't Rowan, or Rhys, or Cassian. He doesn't yell 'shift'. He doesn't order 'change'. He essentially, 'works with what he's got'. He 'perfects' it. He accepts Elain as she is, and he plays on her abilities, using them when needed, but not forcing them out of her.

And I think that's the most interesting and very important difference in this relationship. Because we've seen SO. MANY. couples where it's always the push and pull, the 'training', the molding of the FMC into something 'bigger and better'. This killing machine with tremendous powers.

And that's another thing that gets me so excited about Elain and Azriel's book. I really hope that SJM continues in the same vein and doesn't alter their dynamic. Not only is it the dynamic between couples that I personally love (which isn't important), but also, the dynamic which SJM's arguably best couple possessed and celebrated--Elide and Lorcan.

[byeuijoo]

am i in love? 𐀔 boynextdoor

genre : fluff ⋆ warnings : very, very cheesy ⋆ word count : 594

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⭒ park sungho

when he realized he loved you as more than just a friend, sungho tried to play it cool. which is funny because, in reality, you soon realized that something had changed : he was trying more to flirt with you and get your attention, while selling his merits by making you understand that he was better than the others. he'd show you a bit more of his muscles, show you his soccer skills.. and even though he tried to be discreet about his feelings, he failed miserably when you asked him directly if he had a crush on you.

⭒ lee riwoo

when he realizes he's fallen in love with you, sanghyeok tends to be more distant with you, but simply out of sheer shyness. but he'll still do his best to get your attention in subtle ways : he delivers flowers at your house with a little card and a hand-written poem, he tries to send you signals on social networks, hoping that miraculously you'll understand that he's talking to you.. he's a discreet admirer whom you've noticed and whom you like to panic by getting a little too close to him, just to see his cheeks redden because of your smile.

⭒ myung jaehyun

he was already clingy, but when he realizes he's developed feelings for you, oh boi, jaehyun is even more clingy. nevertheless, there are some changes that you can easily notice : the tips of his ears get redder when you flirt with him, he's always trying to hold your hand in his, even when you're doing nothing but sitting close to each other, he always tries to get your attention and gets sulky when you talk to other boys.. he's so down for you, he can't help reminding you that he exists all the time.

⭒ han taesan

to have spent so much time by your side, getting to know you and finding out more about you, dongmin realized that his heart was beating faster than normal when his eyes met your smile. he'll become more shy, without giving you radio silence. but let's just say that he laughs more easily at your jokes, that he observes you smiling like an idiot more often, and most of all, he'll share more of his favorite music with you. (he's probably trying to convey his feelings through the lyrics, but you're too blind to see it.)

⭒ kim leehan

to say that donghyun has had a crush on you since first sight would not be a lie — of course, his feelings built up gradually, but you were already running through his mind every day since you met. he's quite calm, and has no trouble keeping his feelings to himself, but he tends to look you in the eye in a different way now. more warmly, more tenderly, with a hint of shyness in his eyes. and he has to admit that your smile makes his heart skip a beat.

⭒ kim woonhak

woonhak is totally vocal about the fact that he loves you. he don't care about other people opinions, he just wants to make sure you know he likes you. so every day, he brings you a carton of his favorite chocolate milk, leaving a note on it, reminding you that he likes you — again. or he'll probably just show up when you least expect it, standing in front of you with the most dazzling smile, and you have to admit that hearing him say those words in person makes you all shy and smiley. even if you need time to make a decision, woonhak remains patient and does everything to keep your full attention on him.

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reblogs & feedbacks are highly appreciated !

taglist ౨ৎ @wtfhyuck @florainnie @dazzlingligth @yuma-is-mine @lilriswife4life @leehanascent @wantmatthew

[meinkatzchen]

Mate I'm just seriously loving your take on ren, it's impressed so much so far too!

Also could I patch up your y/n? Poor gal looks scared out her wits.. Gonna pull that fox's tail if it happens again [[Still fab art, keep it up hon!!]]

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! 💕💕💕 I have a cold right now, so I hope my thoughts won't come across as jumbled. I still really like to see Ren not as such a harmless fluffy ball of shyness, as Gato showed him in the original BTD (although he is quite cute there, but still…I don't see any interest in developing relationships with MC, whom Strade decided to keep, if they initially get along with Ren x) ). As for the remake, I am building my own image of the fox-boy based on the available screenshots from Gato's Patreon and it seemed to me, no, I had a strong thought in my head that he could be hostile at the beginning if: MC is beastkin, and Strade keep them alive (I already wrote why in post), MC is trying to escape from the basement, and he does not want to help them, or if MC attacked him first. And he will be dangerous, I mean, he has claws and fangs! And, it seems, strong arms. And also, a strong fear of Strade and deep submission to him. But in general…Fights with MC and those nasty/painful actions that Strade can force two to do together are just the tip of the iceberg in this house, which can affect the emotional background of two. Ren can frame MC at home and manipulate them if they are cold and hostile to him. But if they treat him friendly, respectful and affectionate, then he will definitely reciprocate! And I think that the two of them can cooperate to take care of each other's mental and physical condition. I have too many headcanons for the relationship between the fox-boy and my cat-girl and I hope that I can gradually show them somehow. In general, I advise you and everyone to dream and come up with your own heads, it's fun!

AWWWWWWW!!! Btw, my cat (her name is Mist) will be fine 💕 I'm coloring this picture now and I understand that, judging by the fresh wounds on Ren, she scratched him pretty badly, so, temporarily, she is not his friend, but his sparring partner…….but Mist is cunning, if she caused you sympathy and a desire to treat her wounds and drag Ren away, then she did everything right ;)