#-where i'm supposed to think the protagonist is super fucking wrong

[aphelea]

somehow i feel like reading this book as someone who is very very far from being a keefe fan made it easier

[starfanatic]

Crafting the most controversial ranking of the olympians (including Hestia and Hades)

DISCLAIMER: THIS POST WAS INSPIRED BY @wanderingmind867

APOLLO: He's just fucking AWESOME???!!! What can I say? He's such a easy to like god when you don't let the stupid retellings poison you. He's the god of writing and music (both topics that I love) and just SO much more. I can't even grasp how much the greeks fucking loved this guy and so do I. In a more fanon-y way, in my head he's the best possible protagonist out of all the olympians for a story. There's so much nuance with him, and I just love psychoanalyzing him. I also think his relationships with other gods and every mortals is so INVESTING and intense if you think about it in the right way. Also I love blondes. Blondes are hot.

ARES: The more people hate him, the more I defend him. He gets so much undeserved bullshit, he should've been the Hades of our modern generation, he deserves it way more imo. He's a great father, a great lover, and he dances! DANCES! He's probably the god with the most misinformation besides maybe Hades. Ares kind of gives me the underdog affect? Yes he's this big huge god, but he loses FAR too much to be considered the "bully" like the myths advertise. And I get that it's supposed to be a message "brain over brawn" but quite frankly I could care less. Ares is treated bad by his parents, he just deserves so much more I love this guy. I love paralleling him with other gods too like Athena or Apollo or Zeus. He's just so fun to write.

APHRODITE: I feel the exact same way for her as I feel for Ares. I used to hate her SO MUCH, until I realized how misled I was. APHRODITE IS FUN. The only thing is that I'd defend her wrongs because I don't give a shit. "Aphrodite was petty" IDC!!!! I hate how authors (Rick.) write her. She's SO much more then what she's reduced too. She's SO powerful. I think the only reason she's not equal to Ares because I don't know a lot of her myths. She's serving cunt ALWAYS.

POSEIDON: Poseidon being so high is probably a disservice to society. BUT HES SO COOL AND SO POWERFUL????!!! Yes he does shitty stuff I'm not gonna pretend he doesn't, but seeing him in stories is just so entertaining. I typically like reading fanfics with him during the titanomachy or just fanfics where he's being a great uncle (so... super not accurate but it's entertaining). Ngl I giggled when he asked Apollo to fight him during the trojan war and Apollo said "nah im good". Poseidon is a BEAST in the fight with cool ass powers and a BEAST in bed (um.. when it's consentual... fuck I hate greek mythology sometimes). STORMBRINGER (i hope that's Poseidon and not Zeus???) GOD OF THE SEAS

HERMES: Hermes is kind of low, but NOT BECAUSE I DONT LOVE HIM. I tend to like gods who are a bit... violent if it wasn't obvious by the top 4? And even though I know Hermes can be violent I never see him BE violent. He just seems too perfect for me? Name one flaw he has that the other gods don't also have. HOWEVER he's so fun to read about, I don't like Percy Jackson but when I saw Hermes in the tv show I jumped out of my seat. I really like him with Apollo though, it brings a level of complexity that I LOVE.

zeus... I can explain. OKAY SO, I LOVE COMPLEX CHARACTER RIGHT AND GUESS WHO IS A VERY NUANCED GOD IN MYTHOLOGY??? ZEUS! I specifically like him from the titanomachy, because I like to think he was just... different when he was younger. Kind of like one of the typical heroes until the power he has changes him over time. I wish someone wrote a retelling because I'd love to see Zeus and Rhea or Zeus and Cronos interactions during the war. Disclaimer, I'm aware he does shitty shit but so does everyone on this list besides like Hestia and...that's it.

DIONYSUS: His low ranking is more to do with the lack of knowledge but also I'm not too interested in the domains he involves himself with. Never went to a party, never did drugs, never drunk alcohol, etc. HOWEVER I love when Dionysus is completely unhinged. God of MADNESS GUYS!!! ITS IMPORTANT! I love the myths where he's genuinely just being scary as fuck, I love how powerful but underestimated he is.

HERA: She deserves better. If I was her I'd do worse, but like... not to innocent children and women. That's all.

ATHENA: I don't find her that interesting. She just kind of reminds me of that one girl in the class who reminds the teacher they have homework. I am aware that I AM biased though, my top 4 gods consisted of 2 gods that are at odds with her. I just don't like how biased the myths were in her favor, it kind of makes her boring. If Ares or Athena lost equally I wouldn't mind her, but she wins every single time. Even when she loses, Zeus doesn't care and let's her get away with it anyway. Athena, for me, absolutely requires other gods to add complexity to her character.

DEMETER: I like her out of spite because I don't like Hades x Persephone shippers from modern retellings. In particular I don't like the Hades x Persephone shippers that hate on Demeter as if they know anything about her. She's only low because I like a lot of other gods better and I just feel like I'd never be able to write anything with her as a main character because I've never "psychoanalyzed" her like I did the other gods.

HESTIA: *shrug* I don't know her that well, and she doesn't seem to really have any myths to jump off from. The lack of myths and personality puts her low on the list. Though I do love how sweet she is.

HEPHAESTUS: ...he bores me. He doesn't offer anything to me whatsoever. I don't necessarily feel bad for him for the Aphrodite situation either, and I hate when a lot of people who like Hephaestus ignore VERY IMPORTANT details on the myths to serve their purpose. The majority of it is just plain boredom, but I hate how everyone villainized Aphrodite and Ares.

HADES: ...sigh. He's a bit of a unfair one. I'm not someone who can seperate the god from the people who like the god. A lot of Hades fans tend to just piss me off based off the most obvious misinformation in the entire world. I HATE how they try to hate on the other Olympians as if Hades is somehow better then him? He has no myths that doesn't make him better, we just don't have a lot of him. I don't find him necessarily interesting, and I desperately wish for the retellings for him to end. It's not really fair because it's less the god and more the "fans" but whatever it is what it is.

[boundlss]

on: the striker problem.

i don't have a bio for this guy yet and even if i did my bios are hilariously barren so i figured i'd make a post detailing my canon divergences and. um. WHY i'm canon divergent in that way. everyone take my hand ...

hey albatross what's wrong with striker?

great question albatross. helluva boss sort of has a villain problem in general where they want their villains to be threats but don't necessarily want to let them change the status quo too much or become too developed as characters. for most of the villains this is fine since they were introduced as comedic (the CHERUBs, DHORKS, tbh even crimson to some extent altho he really shouldn't have been) however. how ever.

striker falls into the category of helluva villain where he's introduced as someone who is a legitimate serious character with like well rounded motivations and goals, and above all that he's a villain that our protagonists don't BEAT in his introduction. which is more than can be said for literally every other recurring antagonist IMP deal with.

the problem comes after this. western energy is um... okay? ish. i liked most things about him in this episode but it's not better than harvest moon festival, and it's really inconsistent to his character in his first appearance at times. "oops" on the other hand is a nightmare episode that striker is literally barely relevant to and everything he was set up to be is completely trampled all over because fuck me for being invested in the things he was setting up i guess.

so what does this actually mean in terms of what's wrong with striker? great question albatross. what's wrong with striker is he's simultaneously supposed to be a pretty big threat but he's ALSO just being shoved into comedic plots and getting his ass beat all the time which is super tonally dissonant and i don't fuck with it.

that's so cool albatross thanks for that four paragraphs of yapping nobody read. what are the canon divergencies?

yet another slam fuckin dunk in the questions department albatross. i think i'm going to put this one in list format because i like myself and value my own sanity. this is chronological.

striker does not get hired by stella to kill stolas the SECOND TIME the first time he still does this is about in WESTERN ENERGY. this has more to do with my stella's canon divergencies but striker does this of his own accord because he assumes stella and andrealphus will turn a blind eye, which they consider doing before ultimately deciding, unfortunately, that they need stolas to remain alive and threaten striker to force him to back down. otherwise western energy is more or less the same.

he does not appear literally at all in "oops". crimson can have some goons surprise blitzø and fizz i don't care but this is a hard line for me in my portrayal of striker. he didn't show up there.

that's honestly genuinely it for plot divergencies. also some other minor things that are tweaked in terms of personality details and little non-chronological things:

striker is not as egotistical as presented. he was playing up his own confidence to piss moxxie off because he didn't like moxxie, but he's not the type to get a giant statue of himself. he's confident but not THAT confident.

also this is less divergence and more just me expanding on his motivations but in general striker wants to kill a goetia to rile up hell's imps and generally "lesser" species about the mistreatment they all face pretty often.

this is also more just me expanding on things but he grew up a ranch hand so he's very much a horse guy he's just more subtle about it than some people.

anyway those are my notes on striker and the striker problem yeehaw and goodnight. < not actually going to sleep

[mermaidsirennikita]

Re romantasy and kingdom of the wicked I totally feel you. It's always annoyed me that when women write fantasy about women it is like, automatically assumed to be YA and now with TikTok we see this weird trend of YA books written for adults not kids. A very similar thing happened with Lightlark where the first book was defended by saying it was for kids, and thus wasn't supposed to be good (which...lol) but then the second one was super Horned Up in a way that obviously was not for kids. Just make it for adults from the beginning! Adult fiction isn't scary! I feel the same about NA--why are we acting as if Adult fiction can't be written with a lighter tone? And this is not to say that YA can't have sexual content. Imho it can but that content should be written with the audience in mind and many of these books simply aren't for teens despite the label. Sorry this kinda got away from your post but I wanted to echo that im seeing what you're seeing!

No I'm glad you brought this up!

Honestly, I think that much of the fantasy romance discussion is so colored by a confusion regarding the audience. For many years, a lot of publishers really thought that the only way to sell fantasy romance or romance-adjacent fantasy was to market it as YA. I think that part of this was because, prior to that, there was a real sense of fantasy being a (nerdy) man's space. Like, women enjoyed it, but they were more a bonus than the audience, in the mind of publishing. I don't think they thought of women as the people reading GRRM or Brandon Sanderson. Certainly not Tolkien.

Whereas I believe the YA boom was often attributed to teen girls--and I say that because there was a surprising lack of YA fantasy with male protagonists, at least when I was reading it. Or solo male protagonists, at least; you might have boys thrown into an ensemble, but if there was a solo POV it was usually a girl. And of course, part of this was an extension of looking down on the female audience, right? This isn't "real" fantasy, it's for kids! Despite the fact that there is of course, thoughtful and well-written YA fantasy.

Then, as it had been happening with Twilight (and everything YA, but I think with Twilight it became this very recognized deal) adult readers became a huge part of the conversation. And I say this as an adult who read YA fantasy primarily for years--I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But I do think there has been a real issue with YA in general being taken away from its original audience. Which is a big reason why things graphic sex have become more prominent in YA. The voice of the adult reader is overshadowing the voice of the teen. (And of course, adults often have more free income to spend on these books--especially as ebooks have become so dominant. A lot teens have e-readers, a lot of them can read on apps, but many of them do not have independent bank accounts they can link to these products, which means they can't buy as freely.)

And while I think it's totally fine for adults to enjoy YA, I don't think it's okay for adults to speak over the primary audience. If you're upset that the teen books aren't giving you the adult content you want, content I think is absolutely fine to want when you read... Grow the fuck up and read adult books. Like I did lmao.

The thing is, for a lot of those readers that's going to mean transitioning to romance, because romance gives them the things they want--it's commercial, it's focused on relationships, it has sex on the page. But for a while--during the YA boom at least--I feel like there were certain authors singled out as like. Above it all. Like they were doing Writing whereas romance has long been seen as... just writing. If that. And I think a lot of readers bought into that.

(So did a lot of writers, for the record. Romance writers have drama, absolutely. But Jesus lmao. The high-handedness of YA authors on Twitter can be something ELSE. Like people, you're writing commercial fiction like all the rest of us. You aren't any better and your drama is not any more impactful.)

So, yeah. I'm glad to see fantasy romance for adults becoming more of a thing, because I personally feel that many authors probably wanted to write for adults, but were pushed to age down by agents and publishers. (Understandably, for agents.) But the transition can be tricky, because I do think the automatic assumption many readers still have is "fantasy with kissing" = YA fantasy. I saw Kerri Mansicalco on Insta being like "we are trying to be very clear that these standalones are adult". To me, these Kingdom of the Wicked books read as soooo adult lol. And it almost seems like you can read the transition in real time. Which is so interesting.

[purplecobra52]

Okay, I was scrolling through YouTube shorts like the total cretin I am when this short popped up discussing the new Fairly OddParents remake.

Now I didn't grow up with The Fairly Oddparents, but I had seen a couple images of the new protagonist circulating, so I knew what it was. And my first thought upon seeing this image is "that looks off". And what I mean by that is Hazel's (the kid) left arm. That fucking arm.

It looks so wrong. It looks like it's protruding from the side of her head. It is not where an arm should be. It's also way too long compared to the other arm. What is it connected to?

And now I know what you're thinking: It's a cartoon, doesn't have to be super realistic, you're just being dramatic" and yeah I am being dramatic cuz yeah that's how I be, but consider this: Cosmo. Yeah his arm looks a little longer than it should be but at least you can tell what it's supposed to be connected to. Same with Wanda. But for Hazel I genuinely cannot tell how that arm is connected to the rest of her body.

My best guess is this, but this just looks way worse.

Logic with dictate that The pose works out like this, but I guess that wasn't good enough.

So I decided to make the pose better. Just to give myself closure for this awful looking poster. So I got to drawing. (And yeah I traced most of the image but my style isn't like Butch Hartman's and I didn't have the energy to draw it out. I hope you can forgive me one day.)

No, I'm by no means an actual cartoonist but I think I did a pretty good job even though I essentially just moved the arm around. Something I realized as I was doing the pose was that the arm was short so if it was actually connected to the body like it was supposed to be, and they tried to do the pose they were aiming for, the arm would would have been mostly obstructed by the head, which is maybe why they decided to put it on top of the head for some reason instead of maybe just...making a different pose like I did. Maybe they were really dead set on having Hazel wave at the audience, but I don't know.

All in all I give this poster 1 detached arm/10 and Butch Hartman should quit his job. I'm out.

[boyakishan]

Uhh. Hi? I'm a little confused. First and foremost.

HI DIPSHITS. THIS MIGHT BE MISINFORMATION.

Whoa there cowboy, why do you mean.

So. That theory on why he's better. Here's an example he had in the video. Feel free to watch it on YouTube since I'm just a dipshit making a video.

There's this video segment were he goes "here's a bunch of similarities that don't really make a lot of sense" and then he admits. Yeah, but like. This series does this specific thing with protagonists and characters within their games where they do this.

Leaving it as a thread. He explains that shit.

Second thing. I don't know if he did source that shit. I'd recommend finding the actual fucking video and then like, check the description. Because I'm not doing your work you lazy assumptive dipshit.

Yeah, you. You who read this thinking "Har Har, mat Pat's a fucking dipshit"

Fuck you. No, seriously. Fuck you.

Unless you're just curious and reading this, you're fine. You did nothing wrong. Everyone else who read this shit.

Fuck you.

The jokes, the things that are SUPPOSED TO EDGE THE LINE.

Uhm. Huh. Wow, I don't know about you. But a guy who seems to fuck things up, try say sorry and y'know. Tries to do good.

Like, he made homophobic comments.

Aren't those like, jokes? Or him being dumb and not realising that hey, this shits more complicated.

That gay video. It's a cringe meme video, have you like. Watched it? The sex thing. Uhhm. Like, maybe? But those look very old from the new video thing.

Ooh, the doxxing thing. I'd like an explanation on what that is, and how Mat Pat could have possibly seen that coming. Or why that's his fault, specifically. For making a video explaining, step by step, each evidence why he doesn't really like a certain part of the demographic.

Like, I'm not smart. I'm pretty dumb.

...

No, fuck that. I'm pretty smart. I'm not super smart, but like. I've watched the videos. Go watch his videos.

If you wanna hate him, just say you hate him. Don't pull this half ass bullshit. Read the fucking apology, still be mad he fucked up.

Don't fucking keep saying he's a fucking massive baby bitch unless you've got the balls to doxx yourself. And like. I'll do it, I'll make a poll and do that shit. It'll take forever to set this shit up if y'all vote yes.

But I'll fucking doxx myself.

And what will you do you big fucking bitch baby?

You gonna whine and go "FUCK THAT PRETENTIOUS PIECE OF SHIT."

Scream at his fucking house and go beat his ass?

No? Because "you're better" or "he's not worth it?"

Bitch. I've started reading your fucking post.

During the shoot he says they were chill. They talked about stuff. Who gives a shit.

You wanna come at me mate? I'll set up a discord channel. You can record it, upload it to YouTube. I'll fucking die on this hill because while I don't give a shit about that pun making motherfucker.

I really fucking hate cowards. I hate people who go all "OH YEAH, I'LL FUCKING BASH YA CUNT"

And then back off when you rear back. Who run away going "OH YEAH YOU CAN'T HIT ME."

Like, that fortnite shit. Unacceptable. Fucking bullshit he didn't reference people.

But isn't it more bullshit to not link his videos? To not clip his videos, to not SHOW what you mean in a video. Step by step and not SHOWING the videos you claim he's homophobic around?

HMMM. @a-stone-slab

Are you that much of a dipshit, or are you going to fucking come at me mate. C'mon cunt, we're waiting.

Hey all, MatPat made a video on TADC, so I think it’s time to give a quick refresher on what a terrible person he is, so it doesn’t turn into his second FNaF-Cashcow for theories.

We all know how scummy of a person he is, with doxxing, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and more.

Not to mention his recent video where he talks about the hate towards his FNaF theories, where he spends the majority of the video explaining how him and his staff are smarter than the majority of the population due to a personality test that his staff has all taken.

He then ends the video by taking around 10 minutes to promote their new merch, and ties the merch plug-in into the main point of the video, trying to guilt the audience into giving him more money.

He’s not some “funny theorist man”, he’s a horrible, bigoted scumbag who doesn’t seem to care that his words have an impact on the world and actual, real life people.

So yeah. This was a post detailing the horrible actions of this man, and I hope it serves as a reminder of what a horrible type of person he is. Do not support his content, especially not now when he’s jumping ship from one fandom that hates him, and going to a new fandom thats getting more mainstream.

[langernameohnebedeutung]

I feel like part of the reason why all these new YA-"dystopias" are Like That and create discourse Like That is because they pursue their entirely own goal and have an audience and a following for entirely different reasons from the cLaSsICs(TM) of the dystopia-genre.

We joke about the cliché YA-dystopia protagonist (special girl oppressed for Random Trait who basically takes down the Evil Overlords single-handedly) while we also know the popular counter argument (Luke Skypotter gets to do it why not Katboss Everdeen??)

And honestly, the counter-argument is right, there is nothing inherently wrong a character like that. (although we should engage critically with the way marginalisation and oppression are portrayed in these stories)

But when it comes to conveying a larger-than-the-story message, every kind of protagonist has specific strengths and weaknesses. That's normal - every character has their own point of view that they're inviting the reader to share in. This type of protagonist generally really has limitations when it comes to engaging with the psychology and self-sustaining mechanisms of the systems portrayed in these dystopian settings.

It is very difficult to discuss compliance and internalisation and normalisation if from the very first page, your character is like: "These are our evil overlords, these are the horrible things they do to us, everyone in this District/Town/Zone hates them!"

- because

a) once you do that, you have to come up with a more functional explanation for why this system is still in place like ... they have all the military power or they have super-powers or something like that and

b) your reader immediately sees the world from that perspective. They identify with the one hero who sees through their environment as if its glass and immediately knows who the enemy is and is entirely separate from that force. But if a story actually tries to comment on such structures in the real world, we also have to make room for the fact that 1) the average person is the leader of the resistence and 2) one person isn't going to dismantle the system and 3) one rousing speech is not going to start a rebellion.

This kind of narrative comes from a very different perspective than a story where your protagonist is fully integrated into a fucked-up system and is so deep in the labyrinth, they don't remember getting lost to begin with - here, you, the reader, are fully aware that this entire system is fucked-up. You're horrified. But you accompany your point-of-view character while they only yet slowly, very slowly are beginning to realise that they're not happy. That maybe some things they're told aren't true - and then, eventually, that they are also part of that same system.

If you compare a character like Guy Montag to a character like Mare Barrow from Red Queen, you notice that they send their readers on entirely different journeys of discovery (journey of discovery is btw a thing I'm trying to make happen in book talks so spread the contagion):

Mare Barrow is unhappy with the dystopia she lives in. She makes that pretty clear pretty early on. She is basically our tour guide, completely aware of the 2020ies western mindset of her audience when she tells us all about her world - because she is someone we're supposed to identify with. And not in the Bella Swan way where she becomes a canvas to project on by being as bland and passive as possible - but by being relatable to a 2020ies audience not native to her red-vs-silver world.

She thinks a lot like us and has a very similar concept of justice - and even comes from a comparable background to the point that her family interactions often read as if a normal middle-class family fell through some dimensional crack and fell into that world.

Guy Montag, asshole he is, is unhappy - but he still has to find out why he is unhappy and how his dissatisfaction relates to the world he lives in. In fact, you might argue - if we start regarding these specific types of YA-dystopias as its own genre - there, Clarisse would be the protagonist, not Guy just like making Guy's wife the protagonist would again make it an entirely different genre.

And I'm not trying to be judgemental here and rule either as inherently (!) better than the other (although, if you want know my personal opinion: nuance is the best way to convey a complex message). Plenty of rubbish has been produced with either goal in mind.

I'm also not saying that this format cannot be used to convey critical messages about society (for example, when I discussed Hunger Games with my students I did feel like the novel got them thinking critically about how media twists things and what shape an unfree press might take in our times).

But I do think that it might be time to just own up to the fact that these types of dystopias do not aim to accomplish the same things that for example George Orwell when he was very specifically mirroring the Soviet Union in his criticism. And that the people reading them are not looking for the same thing they'd crack open Animal Farm for.

Many of these stories are just the author coming up with a fucked-up scenario that fits neither sci-fi nor cyberpunk nor fantasy to a T. And some special girl defeating it while choosing between two extremely bland boyfriends, one of whomst is kinda rude sometimes and might even have at tattoo. And sure, the individual stories should be subject to criticsm and genre tendencies should be - but I just feel like we save ourselves a lot of time by assuming they're not trying to accomplish the same thing as Brave New World - but are actually loaning from that tradition - and engage with them under that premise.

[sometimesrosy]

Rosy that's fantastic news for your book!! I'm really happy for you. And just seeing "bellarke consum their love and even have grandkids" makes my heart full. Bob and Eliza said tthey were disappointed that 1/the charaters couldn't have kids in the end and that 2/ there was no hope. I totally agree with their interpretation of the end. Some people said the ending was super cool, and inkeeping with the whole show, and somehow hopeful. HOW WAS IT HOPEFUL?? the human race gets wiped out...

People said the ending was “super cool?” How?

Wait. I need to wrap my head around that. What are they looking at that seems super cool?

I actually don’t have a problem of the concept of transcendence that they worked on all season, nor Cadogan, the fake-spiritual, love-your-fellow-man-but-also-sacrifice-them-because-they-mean-nothing cult leader who favored his daughter, used his son, tossed his exwife into the apocalypse and killed Becca because she had power and knowledge beyond him.

Like, that could have been super cool if they’d kept him the villain, the antagonist, but instead they made him the protagonist who was, somehow, right about transcendence as if it wasn’t just another fucking doomsday cult that wanted humanity to end. I mean, it WAS just another fucking doomsday cult that wanted humanity to end, and the aliens vacuumed up humanity and allowed for no dissent. Here, have your perfect happy transcendence...but your body dies, the world ends, and humanity is gone. That is EXACTLY what ALIE did, and she was a villain. Perhaps a well meaning villain, but a terrifying villain.

How did the SAME story, get switched around to being some sort of victory for the state of humanity? How did the end of humanity, no chance to continue on, because they removed their ability to have children and carry on?

Why couldn’t they just fucking stay on The Ring if that was going to happen. At least they could have a small community up there.  But no. Without the info that our heroes brought, they wouldn’t have reached transcendence. 

That wasn’t transcendence. It was judgement day. Transcendence means you have worked your way to a higher state, and yes, it might be condescending and elitist, but you at least worked for it. And it wasn’t really a judgement day because they just took everybody, despite the fact that those idiots were fighting for no fucking reason. It was a PUNISHMENT day for Clarke, one of the only people who was actually TRYING to be better and do better. 

What was cool? The way the aliens brought back the people they cared for? Yes, that was cool. It wasn’t them of course, but some people would be impressed by the alien dressed up in the costume of their fav. I could see that being considered super cool. But honestly... that’s a story line that would have worked better in season 3 and in fact DID work remarkably well in season 3 when Lxa showed up in the COL. And it was ACTUALLY her, not some facsimile.

Was it cool to take away the agency of the hero of the story who we’ve been following for 7 years? Was it cool to erase the personality and motivation of our dual protagonist? Ok. So lets say you didn’t love Clarke or Bellamy. Octavia’s character was erased and she didn’t have a thing to do until the final battle, and then she got a romance that frankly made me uncomfortable but that’s taste. Echo was erased and she didn’t have a thing to do until the final battle. Raven was also erase although she got to be the one to convince the aliens that they weren’t totally awful beings. That was cool, but it seemed like a patch put on top of a story that had failed. The story being about how Clarke saves humanity, and Bellamy saves Clarke, which has been THE STORY FOR SIX YEARS. We spent six years building up a team with these two heroes who have been through so much shit and made the CHOICE to be the good guys, and in the end, Bellamy gives his power over to a charismatic obsessive leader (also happened in season 3 with Pike who was a great character and FAR better than Cadogan and actual sympathetic awful villain who thought he was saving his people while doing evil.) And Clarke actually becomes THE BAD GUY, who loses her sense of reason and commits violence due to loving too much-- a really tired, misogynistic storyline. Give women power and they go crazy. The hysterical woman. THIS DOES NOT FIT WITH CLARKE GRIFFIN. Also, we saw her go through that trauma of fear for her daughter, and she DID NOT GO CRAZY. Ruthless, yes. And then she worked through what she had done and recognized she was wrong and promised not to do that again. I honestly don’t know why she did it again.  Even if Bellamy betrayed her again, it didn’t make sense that she couldn’t work through it.

They had to keep the two characters apart in order have that ending happen. Why? Because Clarke acts as the center to Bellamy and Bellamy acts as the Center to Clarke. This season is the story of the FAILURE of the duo protagonists of the show. They separated them and broke them individually, and this meant they were unable to save the universe. 

Is it cool to make a show about heroes and then destroy them in the last season? But frame that destruction and the end of humanity as a VICTORY and positive ending? Maybe if you hate those characters and humanity and think there’s no hope for us anyway, so lets just burn it down.

Oh wait. I’m trying to figure out what’s SUPER COOL about that ending.

The purple sparkly aliens. Ok. How is that cool? That there’s actually an omnipotent alien out there that has the ability to just snap a whole race of people out of existence or into their big ole stew pot of consciousness.

1. Why? 2. How? 3. Where did that power come from? 4. Who are they? 5. What do they get out of erasing races and basically eating them?

Okay, putting aside the questions about how these omnipotent gods aliens came to be... is it possible they can be see as “super cool?” Let me go through.

1. Omnipotent aliens going through the universe, deciding when life forms were “ready” to be judged and then either wiping them out totally, or wiping them out totally but accepting their consciousnesses into their massive consciousness where they don’t want any “bad” lifeforms, which makes them now a higher lifeform but not at all what they once were. 

Cool/Not Cool. I dunno. Kind of seems like some sort of puritanical god who willy nilly decides if people are worthy of heaven. Will He, Nil He. That’s what that means. If we’re gonna get aliens at the last minute, I want aliens. I want to know who they are and what’s up with them. THAT’S the story. Those alien guys. Instead, the story was about the flotsam and jetsam at the end of humanity, either getting swept up into the god-form in the sky or being pounded to bits on the rocks. The heroes of our story have no say in what happens. They’re toast either way. Oh you mean we can be erased into nothing or erased into your hive mind? The only way this is cool is if you like nihilism. Which, yeah, some people do. NONE of their struggle over the past six years meant a damn thing. None of it. Their beliefs, their sacrifices, their mistakes, their heroism. It al reduces down to whether those sparkly purple aliens like them or not. That’s some bullshit. 

Not cool. 

2. Cadogan. Cult leader from the first apocalypse who conned the bulk of his followers and left them shady shelters that let them die. Kept the good stuff for his “best” followers. Paternalistic, obsessive, ruthless, megalomaniac framing his leadership and personality as “Love for Humanity,” while discarding every human who he deemed unworthy. Including his own family. Actually. Pretty cool.  AS A VILLAIN. Ending up at his cult colony in space hundreds of years later with thousands of years of development in time dilation. Cool. They’re creepy but make some bit of sense. Ok. Waking him up and then making him this fucking GURU who preaches love for humanity but sacrifices 99.9% of humanity all so that he can reach his mythical transcendence which is really the eradication of all humanity.... well, that’s actually cool. AS A VILLAIN. But somehow in the last season, Cadogan turned out to be the one who was right all along, and the story seemed to accept HIS concept that transcendence was the best thing that could happen to them, because humanity sucks and they always fight so they should be erase by paternalistic omnipotent gods. CADOGAN’S choices were the ones that were enacted. Bellamy gave his will to Cadogan and made CADOGAN’S choices, not his own. Never before in all the seasons did Bellamy “need it all to make sense.” He fucking KNEW it made no sense and he didn’t want to make those choices any more. And he did it to be a better person and make better choices and keep his family safe. The excuse they used for our hero to side with Cadogan did not fit. CADOGAN became the protagonist in the second half of the season. CADOGAN made all the choices that furthered the story. Our heroes were reduced to either brainwashed followers or ineffective, hysterical messes, our really not wanting anything to do with anyone’s salvation and just interested in their love life. It left Raven, Echo and Octavia to scramble around in the end and try to convince the purple sparkly gods not to erase them out of existence, just erase them and swallow them. :/ Cadogan as protagonist bringing humanity to “transcendence.”, Our supposed heroes as useless flotsam and jetsam floating around on the wreck of humanity whose choices and actions make no goddamn difference.

NOT COOL.

3. Character Storylines

Clarke’s storyline. NOT COOL. Bellamy’s storyline. NOT COOL. Octavia’s storyline. S.A COOL. S.B NOT COOL. Raven’s storyline. COOL. Echo’s storyline. S.A COOL. S.B NOT COOL. Murphy’s storyline. SUPER COOL. Emori’s storyline. SUPER COOL. Indra’s storyline.  COOL. Hope’s storyline. S.A COOL S.B NOT COOL. Jordan’s storyline. NOT COOL.  Diyoza’s storyline. COOL Gabriel’s storyline. COOL. Madi’s storyline. NOT COOL The grounders. Fucking morons. You really shouldn’t make a whole culture’s choices based around being absolutely too stupid to be allowed to live. EVEN when you get past xenophobia and learn about who they are and why they do things. NOT COOL. The culty people. Cool set up and world building. The society was dumb and had too many plot holes. MIDDLING SHEIDHEDA. NOT COOL. pointless plot device just used to make everyone forget everything they learned from 6 seasons. CADOGAN. COOL AS A VILLAIN. But he was the protagonist. So the ruination of the entire show and universe they created. NOT COOL.

SEASON A COOL OVERALL.  SEASON B NOT COOL. TOTAL SEASON NOT COOL

I think if people think the ending was supercool, they’ve never heard of a deus ex machina, and how that’s a BAD ending that is really just a cheat because you can’t figure out a way to get out of the story mess you made. 

I really hate post apocalyptic fiction that ends with no hope for humanity. JR kept telling us there was hope. I mean narratively, not in interviews, although he did that too, and in the last half season, he switched it around so they wouldn’t have hope, not even just our heroes, but all humanity. It was a bait and switch I did not appreciate. And I’m not talking about ships, I’m talking about the essential genre of the show. 

PS. thanks. I love my book and I hope someone picks it up so you all can read it. It also has elements of Han/Leia and another couple, Brashen/Althea from the Live Ship Traders book by Robin Hobb. They are, however, less traumatized than the characters in The 100. 

[danceworshipper]

So I used this website to find which characters/people I have the same personality type as. Some of them are... confusing, to say the least

Me talking about them all under the cut!

Harry Potter: BILL and CHARLIE??? There's gotta be some mistake here, I'm not that cool. Blaise though - I can see that. And I'm happy about it. Harry Potter characters are also all a hit.

Undertale/Deltarune: How... do you assign a personality to a heart? Bob, sure, he's hilarious, Doggo, yep, love him, SUSIE MY BELOVED, I don't really remember who Seam is whoops, but... Yellow Soul. Okay. Overall, this is a hit. Still confused though.

Undertale/Deltarune: How... do you assign a personality to a heart? Bob, sure, he's hilarious, Doggo, yep, love him, SUSIE MY BELOVED, I don't really remember who Seam is whoops, but... Yellow Soul. Okay. Overall, this is a hit. Still confused though.

Favorite Shows: SPIKE???????????? This one made me the happiest. He's one of my favorite characters in that show - I'm so not as cool as him though. Chris Kratt just made me happy because I loved that show. Hunter fits me actually super well, wow. And Sir Percival - I haven't actually gotten to where he's introduced in the show, but from what I have seen he's great. So yay, all of these are good!

Hogwarts Mystery: ERIKA! She almost makes up for them sticking me with Jacob (derogatory). I'd much rather be a badass Quidditch bitch than that useless fuck. 1/2 good.

Video Games I Love: HANK FUCKING ANDERSON I LOVE YOU. Okay, now... how do you get a personality from two animatronics that kill you just like the other ones?? Don't get me wrong, Foxy makes me happy and Withered Bonnie is cool too, but huh??? All good though, even if those two don't make sense!

Real People: Jensen Ackles, eh? And Kristen Stewart, damn, the website must think I'm hot as hell. Also how am I half of Fall Out Boy, my favorite band ever?? Can't complain. Sam Golbach - I feel like we're very different, but the more I think about it the more I can see it. I haven't watched anything from him in a long time - guess I know what I'll be doing later! And yeah, Rosemarie, cool. I like that. Real people are all a hit.

Misc Games: I wasn't aware that Diogenes had a name, or a personality, but okay. Protagonist is cool, love him. I haven't kept up with Yandere Simulator, but Nemesis does look really cool so I'm going to be happy about her. Robert... buddy, I wish your ending was better. I was so mad when I immediately went for you and looked up a walkthrough and everything to get stuck with that bullshit. Ellie, sure, she's cool I suppose, and 47 is here because he made me crack up laughing. All in all, these guys are a hit as well!

Shows/Movie I Liked: Beck Oliver, eh, he's kind of an ass, but he is actually really similar to me. Mittens I love, no complaints there! Perry and Vanessa... why does this website think I'm cool? I'm not. 4/4

Shows/Movies I Haven't Watched: I've heard good things about both Bobby and Claire. It also gave me Ruby the demon, don't know why I didn't screenshot her. Nice, we love demons. My dad says Jasper fits me, and my mom says that Salem does, so I guess these all work. (technically I've watched spn but only the first season and years ago so it doesn't count shut up)

Misc Others: Edith is fun. I like her. Max? Eh, I could never be that quiet. It also gave me Charlie from Charlie and Lola, but I don't think it fits so I didn't put him here. Eddie yeah, I'd get super pissed off by Roger too and have my head up my ass, I can see him. Artemis I feel like is a direct attack against my hatred of men and chronic virginity, but she's also a badass so I'll allow it. Mulan - again, I'm not that cool. And Jessica Rabbit - I'm not that hot, but thanks for the ego boost.

[bacchicly]

Character vs Performer

My first attempt at writing this post started out with an apology for overthinking and for how long this might be and how the ideas are kind of self evident and likely already stated better by those who came before me.

But I am trying really hard to stop apologizing for being me and for doing what I enjoy (i.e. "over" thinking - pouring out words - writing about what interests me and what I care about - in this space that is mine).

So instead THANK YOU for reading and for any thoughts you want to share on this subject! And if you don't want to read my stuff or interact with me - don't. If you don't like my content or it makes you unhappy - block my blog - set your own boundaries and curate the shit out of this space. I'm old - I always have the right number of friends for the moment - and fuck it - I don't deserve to apologize for existing - neither do you. Hurt someone? Yeah we need to make amends and do what we can to stop it from happening again - but just being and doing our best. No apologies required.

Why am I preoccupied with thinking about this?

I am a trained theatre creator. I could not swing a full-time professional career - money, ADHD, family stuff and a desire for stability are some of the reasons. Ideally I would be directing or dramaturging new stage productions - but there is no role on or off stage that I haven't done - I have worked for student, amateur, semi-professional, fringe, and professional productions and companies. I come from a family of writers, teachers, and theatre people. I am married to a writer, performer, and artist. Some of my best friends are performers, writers, and/or techs. The separation between performer and character has always interested me fiercely. I vividly remember acting classes where we dealt with the subject.

So what's my take?

Personally, I would feel wrong writing the type of fictional scenes I'm writing about 99.99%* of real living people without either adequately disguising their identity AND/OR without their explicit consent.

For me this also applies to deceased folks with alive people who loved them who could be expected to defend the person's best interests...

...so DaVinci - ok. Carrie Fisher - no.

*99.99% I still have to put some additional thought into what I believe are the boundaries around including certain living public figures as characters in fiction...so for example a political figure as a lead protagonist in a novel...

Conversely a character - for me - especially in the performance arts - is perforce an imaginary concept that is constructed through a variety of mechanisms and is ultimately malleable and can be reinterpreted within certain bounds...

i.e. You might think of Leonardo DiCaprio if I wrote a scene between Romeo and Juliet...but you might also think of the high school senior you saw play the role in grade school...or your most recent crush. All versions would still be Romeo and valid - but each version would be unique. It's actually tied to one of the key concepts they teach you in theatre school - what responsibility do you have to the original text as a director / performer / designer? How does it differ if the playwright is alive and had clear purpose - than if you you are using a text like Shakespeare? Over and over we are encourage to ask - why? Why this costume? Why these colours? Why this tone of voice? What impact does it have - how do all these choices tie together into a single gestalt?

I suppose at some point a character may be changed so much it is no longer that character... and there is nothing wrong with that.. but the fascinating question is always why? Why claim a character is a character if they are unrecognisable as the original... there are good reasons... there are bad reasons.. but that's what I am always super curious about the why.

Why have you cast both Romeo and Juliet as women? or both as men? Or Romeo as a woman and Juliet as a man? Why have you staged the show in a pool? Why have you made Romeo a chain smoker who is not attracted to Juliet? Why is Romeo clearly in love with Mercutio but trying to convince Juliet he's into her? Why? Why? Why? If you've got a good reason that I can understand - then I can engage with it. Maybe I agree with your point - maybe I don't - but I can deduce what the work is trying to get across or trying to do and how well (or not) it's achieving what the creator set out to do. And yes "to amuse" can be a totally legitimate reason. Full stop.

Where my thinking got muddier, was when I considered the ethics of using - transforming - a character which is currently inseparable from a specific performer.

Is it ethical to use that type of character in this type of writing?

I think... I think I have concluded it's ok... whether the writer is like me and has thought it through ad infinitum or is someone who has jumped into a glorious hobby without much thought... just for the joy of it or whatever personal reason they engage either as a creator or as reader... because I think most people instinctively understand that there is separation between performer and character.

I am ignoring the whole issue of ownership and financial gain.... that is a whole other ball of wax...and for now I've just decided that as long as I make no money at this whole thing - I'm ok on that front.

Further... as someone who has acting training, has performed a variety of roles, and who has helped actors and writers create performances as a director and/or dramaturge...

I believe that most performers have access to training and resources which allow them to separate themselves from their characters or at least identify when they are not doing it in a healthy way.

There are classes dedicated to character thoughts vs actor thoughts.

There are workshops (so important) that teach directors how to create safe spaces for performers and that give actors the tools they need to navigate intimate, violent, or in other ways upsetting scenes.

More and more people talk about boundaries and how to set them...

Consent. It keeps coming back to consent.

If you have read my first fanfic Mountain Air...you will have seen my extremely long embarrassing terrifying author's note in chapter 5 😬...

But if you haven't here's the gist:

I write sex scenes - explicit ones - about characters who will likely always be associated with a single individual performer. So I literally have spent hours upon hours wondering about the morality of me doing this. Is there harm in me creating these works? Am I stealing something from those people? Could the work I do hurt them?

What about readers? Could what I am doing inspire someone to do harm to the performers? What responsibility do I have?

Is it better that I just assume that they will only come across this work I am doing if they want to and therefor it is not harmful?

Did I google a couple times to see if the performers had any hard statements on record about their stance on explicit fan fiction...yup...was it extensive? Nope.

Should it have been. Maybe?

With T.V. I worry less about the writers etc. because of the multiple hands thing...although some of these arguments could definitely apply to characters who have been written by a single creator.

Should I ask for the performers directly for consent? If yes, how could/should that work?

Honnestly could you imagine being a famous actor (it might be different if you were not someone famous on the world stage) and receiving a letter from me... I mean I would phrase it differently but the gist would be:

Dear X,

I promise I am not a crazy stalker but I would like your permission to invoke your body and performance in the minds of my readers.

I really really respect you as a performer and love the character you portrayed and really really want to write about them because of xyz.

BTW I write explicit sex...

So people will definitely be imagining what you look like naked - which we all know happens anyways - since you did the whole XYZ sexy movie thing... but y'know consent in one context does not constitute consent in another.... So what do you say?

I promise to be exceeding verbose about the fact that I am evoking the character you played and not you as a real person... which will probably turn off readers who are really just there for a quick orgasm and some serotonin - which I totally support btw.

So yeah...is that ok?

Thank you and Best Regards,

Bacchic

Ultimately I decided that what I - we - gain by assuming consent due to the lack of easily findable statements denying consent, is more beneficial than us not having this community and the works not being created.

But this is also why I am so fierce about articulating my whys and my boundaries and using the work for what I see as "goodness" instead of "evil".

Using these characters permits us to tap into a community and shorthand which is valuable to me as a writer and to the members of the fandom. We can stand on the shoulders of the work done by the show's creators.

Plus reading and writing and participating in my own weird intense way in this fandom makes me damn happy. It is making me a better writer. A better artist. A better partner and mom. Healthier and happier.

Hopefully my contributions do something similar for someone else?

Based on what I have let myself learn about the performers I am concerned about - I believe that they could get behind being a part of all that. At least I devoutly hope so.

More about why fanfiction (link to be added).

Return to masterlist.

[missnight0wl]

Are you going to check out Magic Awakened when it comes out? Should release soon. Perhaps the story will turn out to be better than HPHM? I watched some videos of the Y1 story on youtube and saw that the DADA professor is a witch wearing a hood all the time so you can't see her face. I don't know why but she already intrigues me. I'm kinda getting Rakepick vibes from her. She doesn't seem to be super relevant in Y1 but I'm hoping she'll get more focus later.

Yeah, I’m going to check it out! Although I’m gonna be honest, I don’t have high expectations.

I didn’t look too deep into the story, but from what I’ve seen, the first year feels more like… a bunch of the side quests and not really a cohesive story? I dunno, but it’s kind of weird that I basically still don’t know what this story is about. Does it make sense? Not really, but that’s kind of the point. I’ve heard that it gets more fleshed out in later years, but weirdly enough, it’s apparently also not really connected to MC, like at all. And while it might be an interesting choice to not make your protagonist a Chosen One, it’s a bit alarming if your protagonist feels detached from the story entirely. But… we’ll see about that one, I suppose.

Either way, there are two things that concern me way more about HPMA. The first one is the fanservice. It’s just sooooo in your face. Like, of course that Hagrid takes you to Diagon Alley because why not. And of course that Harry Potter himself happens to be around when you look for the platform 9 ¾. And then we have Flitwick teaching Alohomora by using Harry and Ron as an example... And I saw that other spells also have descriptions including Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that the Golden Trio became super popular after the war. But I just doubt it’s how this popularity would show. I don’t know, it’s just quite immersion-breaking for me personally.

And I know that a lot of people criticise HPHM for the fanservice as well, but I feel like HPHM at least tries to incorporate it into their story. For example, they came up with their own All-Wizards Tournament. Was it super original and creative? Not really. But I suspect that HPMA would make someone tell us about the time Harry was in the Triwizard Tournament, and then we’d cut to the recreation of the scene where Harry retrieves the Golden Egg.

The second one is the whole cards system. It’s just... really not my cup of tea. It seems boring and tedious. And sure, you could say the same about tapping in HPHM. But here, I can at least learn something about the characters, or there’s even a joke sometimes etc. The cards system? Eh… I guess there’s some strategy to it, but as I said, I simply don’t find it appealing.

That being said, the DADA professor caught my attention, too! And I agree she’s quite intriguing! Her name is apparently Brindlemore. And you know what? I get what you mean with Rakepick vibes. In fact, when I saw her for the first time long ago, I had a silly thought that she is Rakepick. It’s not entirely serious, of course. Like, I doubt the devs would use one of the HPHM original characters. Still, I just love the idea of Rakepick going back to teaching after the war because I believe she truly enjoyed it, and I want nice things for her. And it’d make sense that she’s hooded all the time, right? I mean, if she was a double agent all that time, and so she wasn't sentenced for her "crimes" with R, but hiring her at Hogwarts was still considered controversial by some people? And just to be clear: I realise that it wouldn’t work at all for the version of Rakepick fucked up by Jam City.

But even that aside, I also hope that Brindlemore will get some more relevant role in the story because she seems neat.

Long story short, I do see some potential in HPMA, but I think it’s safer to be sceptic for now. In the worst-case scenario, I’ll leave the game with no hard feeling. Otherwise, I might be pleasantly surprised.

[zuckarr]

My thoughts on Arlo the Alligator Boy!

Just finished watching Arlo the Alligator Boy, I loved it overall, but there are a few things that they could've fixed easily in my opinion! I'll write down a quick list before the hype fades and I forget:

!!! SPOILERS FOR ARLO THE ALLIGATOR BOY !!!

-Bertie is a GREAT character, finally a fat character that everyone can relate to and isn't just a funny sidekick! But she never said the word 'fat', why? There is nothing wrong with being fat, I'm fat, and saying it out loud is a revolutionary thing to do. The movie is super strong against fatphobia because they weren't afraid to give dignity to a fat character, by letting her be a co-protagonist + by letting her dance and by showing her fat limbs, but It would've been great to hear her say something like 'I'm fat' and Arlo responding with 'so what? I'm green and we're still best friends!'

-I don't really understand why Arlo would even need to go meet his biological dad, considering the amazing adoptive mother he has. Don't get me wrong, I understand wanting to go out and see the world and meet people and find out where you come from, but the feelings of emptiness concerning a biological parent are a bit unclear to me. This is probably something only adopted kids could understand. I'm trying to think it could also be about finding yourself, but to me, blood will never be thicker than water. I'm a person who was traumatized and abused by my own biological mother so I would honestly die to have a good mother, no matter if it's a step-mother, adoptive mother, mother figure... I'm probably biased, but I am glad that a lot of adopted kids will relate to Arlo and see him get a happy ending nonetheless.

-They didn't do a good job with worldbuilding... are half-animal people judged by society? Am I just supposed to guess it? Why would Arlo's father risk everything just because his son looks like an alligator more than a human, when there are fish-people, cat-people etc. all around and they seem to be doing fine? Is it a metaphor for disabled children who 'don't come out right' and their parents reject them? (God this feels disgusting to write, I'm gonna puke if I just think there are actually parents who do that to their kids)

-SORRY BUT I AM ITALIAN AND I HAVE TO SAY THIS... TONY WENT CRAZY OVER PEPPERONI PIZZA BUT PEPPERONI PIZZA ISN'T EVEN A POPULAR THING IN ITALY!!! THE POPULAR ITALIAN PIZZA IS *M A R G H E R I T A*

-Why was 'the beast' just a muscly furry dog who looks like he's from Beastars and WHY DIDN'T WE GET TO SEE BERTIE VS THE BEAST OMG I WANT TO SEE HER KICK BUTTS

-What's with the random adult jokes... they kinda feel out of place, were the authors trying to make adults laugh? I'm an adult but I didn't really laugh to be honest! I was overwhelmed with the cuteness of this movie and it was just so fucking weird to suddenly see a cow and a cat making out??? Also the 'get a room' joke was so... bad????

-No capitalist would be like Arlo's father... because you just can't become a billionaire by being a decent human being. I'm not justifying him, he's made mistakes (good job at throwing your son away), but he's clearly still kind at heart. Wouldn't get him far in the rich world lol, but I'll accept it, it's nice to think a rich person could be a nice one.

-I find Arlo's design a biiiiit not-as-cute-as-it-could've-been? Idk I feel like they could've improved it, but this is just my taste!

-The songs are kickass, I love them ALL

-This is a wonderful movie and you should all watch it!! 🐊💚

[frumfrumfroo]

Hello! I'm a (former?) star wars fan who was utterly devastated by TRoS and had to take an indefinite break from the fandom as a result. During lockdown I discovered kdramas and they're my new obsession! I saw that you recommended Coffee Prince and My Love from the Star in a post. I've already seen and loved those (and my own current favourites include Are You Human and Hwayugi) so I was wondering if you could recommend a few more? Thank you!!

Coitenly! /curly

Her Private Life- my new favourite. The curator of an art museum leads a secret double life as a hardcore kpop fangirl; both her identities get off on entirely the wrong foot with famous artist Ryan Gold who has been suffering from an art block caused by the same mysterious painting she’s determined to buy for her idol oppa. If you want a funny, fluffy, character-driven romance where you can really love the leads and will never want to strangle them: this is your show. It is the most purely enjoyable romcom drama ever imo, there’s none of the frustration over ridiculous behaviour or contrived stakes that you typically have to deal with and it has a satisfying, perfect ending. The villains all aren’t so bad after all, everyone gets an arc, the gentle little mystery has a happy resolution, and it’s just about some people facing their issues and helping each other grow. It was very healing to watch in this media climate.

The plot is nothing to write home about and includes a unneeded kdrama cliché towards the end (well-handled and not dragged out, so I forgive it), but the real ‘story’ is the character development and the plot is just a frame to hang that on. Overrall, it’s incredibly refreshing because of the high quality characters and the emotional maturity of the relationship. The leads have insane chemistry, the sexual tension is legit palpable, and the intimacy once they get together is genuinely next level; they are so natural and so endearing it feels like they’re not acting. Ryan Gold is also the best boyfriend in kdrama history and is played by the world’s most beautiful living man, Kim Jae Wook, whom you’ll recognise as our Waffle-kun Sun Ki from Coffee Prince. So it’s got that going for it as well.

Other romcoms: Sungkynkwan Scandal (historical disguise romance! girl needs to dress up as a guy to take the national exam so she can support her family, shenanigans ensue), My Princess (normal girl discovers she’s a lost princess, the guy her ascension will disinherit is in charge of grooming her for the role- it’s cute), Prime Minister & I (contract marriage), What’s Wrong With Secretary Kim (I think this show is pretty overrated but it’s definitely a fun, low-stakes romance with lots of fluff and lots of kissing and we probably all need a bit of that right now).

Change of pace:

Tell Me What You Saw- this is for my clannibals. Crime drama about a green country cop getting tied up in the apparent resurfacing of a famous serial killer who is officially supposed to be dead. She was driven to become a police officer to solve the hit-and-run death of her mother, but she hasn’t made it out of her home town. Then a body is dumped in her neighbourhood and her photographic memory of the scene draws the attention of the big city team leader. Said team leader takes her to meet the reclusive, ex-detective criminal profiler who originally worked the serial killer case.

A bond develops where she acts as his eyes and ears in the field and he trains her to observe like a detective, but our recluse is a very damaged dude and he’s not exactly being forthcoming about his real agenda.

This show has plot and logic issues, sometimes to its profound detriment, but the characters are extremely strong and everything else about it is fucking A+. Atmosphere, acting, action, pacing, intrigue, etc. are all fantastic. The ending was also unexpectedly wonderful and I was so grateful for that. Oh Hyun Jae (the profiler) is a secretive, broken, lonely, manipulative genius who is always fifteen steps ahead of everyone else and I find that very, very sexy of him. He is an anti-hero for most of the series and contrasts with our more idealistic protagonist both in that and in other more subtle ways. Their relationship is super interesting and I ship them really hard.

My Country- I’ll just tell you that the main characters are a mess and the plot leaves a lot to be desired, but watch it for Bang-won. He is a sad angry murder prince and he’s amazing. The whole show is peak eye candy throughout, every episode looks like an epic film with insane production value, so if you want quality action spectacle with a dangerous hot woobie way more interesting than the leads who seems to have wandered in from an infinitely better story to replace the ST- you’re set. Great news, he’s a real historical figure and became king, so they can’t kill him off.

[thedogsled]

You seem to be having a not a great day today, so here's a light-hearted ask. I'm having a good day, curled up in pjs with cuddly pets watching Leverage with my sister. Leverage is one of my favorite shows, because it's smart and fun and has great characters that grow over the seasons. Besides Supernatural, what's a show you really enjoy and why?

Thank you so much for the ask! I’m sorry I didn’t reply to it sooner, I’ve come down with a head cold and this is really the first day in several I’ve been able to compose more than a tweet about how much it sucks (swallowing = a knife jammed right into my inner ear, it’s super fun). But I did want to answer your question so I’ve been musing on it since your ask came in.

If it was just “what’s your favorite show right now” it’d be an easy answer: The Boys. The Boys, back to front, front to back, upside down and inside out. The first season was fantastic, and it felt like it woke me up to being excited about TV again after my interest in The Walking Dead waned mid-season. Everything new has seemed very plastic recently, and even The Mandalorian, which is super cool, is kind of like the Cartoon Network dub of Dragonball Z, so Disneyfied in its bloodlessness that although I’m enjoying it it feels even more synthetic as a result. The Boys was the opposite of that, and also just whoever invented Karl Urban, period, just deserves a nobel prize for that masterpiece. He pronounces twat wrong (okay okay it’s a dialect thing) but you can’t have everything =D

So instead (and because it’s cheating that I can pimp The Boys and wax lyrical about loves of old) I interpret your question as sort of like “Which show is your comfort food?” Which show do I go back to when I’m feeling like TV needs to give me a cuddle. I had a good think about it, because there’s a few…

(aside: I shouldn’t have put that gif in before I started writing. ahem.)

There’s been a few over the years, for sure. As a thirteen year old I used to watch and rewatch Buffy episodes, mostly season 2 (baby Spike!). At eighteen, it was old VHS of Deep Space Nine, my favorite ep was “Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night” which I watched repeatedly and think about constantly even today. 

But the show I keep coming back to is due South.

This post is a long post, it also deals with discourse (because my relationship to entertainment is so often mired in it, so please don’t proceed if you’re rather avoid it) and this is where it begins:

Okay, so fun fact: I watched due South the first time it aired with my parents (I was about 9) and then when it was on TV again as a repeat, I recorded it on VHS by RUSHING home every single day from school with nothing else on my mind but sitting on the floor two feet from the telly to watch it. Quantum Leap was on right after, and I had an entire different set of VHS tapes to record that on, so had to quickly switch between them. I’d stop recording at every break so that I could get more episodes on a tape. It’s not unsurprising to me now that both shows vibed with me as a young person who hadn’t yet really accepted that she was queer; due South’s main character is coded as Other both to the Americans whom he lives with, and his fellow Canadians, while Quantum Leap explores a straight white man jumping into the lives of Others, and living through them some of the hardest moments in their lives. Even though both keep it exceedingly, textually hetero, one has two men riding off into the snowy sunset together (leaving behind a straight lover to do so) and the other features a love between two men that in the original framing of the finale would have seen God/fate reconnecting the two of them even though one was lost in time, and the partner’s wife begging him to go.)

Of course young me didn’t give a shit about that, or didn’t realize that’s what she cared about. Young me loved the buddy-cop partnership of both shows. Young me liked the half-wolf, and the episodes where they ride horses, and honestly just waiting with bated breath to find out where Sam would jump to this time. “Oh boy!” Retrospectively, these shows (especially QL) are a lot more oh boy in a yikes context now than they used to be, but it’s good that shows age into yikes territory because it means that society is steadily advancing. Particularly, pointing out that these shows both feature white straight guys like…welcome to the nineties.

I was introduced to queer coding in part by watching due South. The show is laden with it. With writers, actors, and ultimately an executive producer who was all three, it makes you wonder if they would have gone there if they could; certainly the ending reads that way. They couldn’t, of course, because it was the nineties (and it was CBS that revived it after enormous international fan demand). Still, there was just nothing else analogous to what we have now that was going there on TV at the time. If you were queer (or discovering your queerness) then watching the show meant everything, as it did to me. So I snuggle up on the couch often these days and go back to that, because it gave me such joy, and because I was left with the opportunity to decide for myself how deep the relationship was. There was no promise of anything, because the context at the time was of course you can’t go there, nobody can go there. Queerbaiting was a word that simply hadn’t been breathed. There was no intent, no companies behind the curtain pulling strings going “Yes, make it more gay, we want those queer dollars”, just invested people slipping what they could past the studio censors.

Like this:

Sigh. A less enlightened time. =P (Incidentally fun meta here but this was after a conversation where Ray suggested that communication in a relationship should be intuitive, like breathing.)

So I guess in part I escape back there because none of that representation was ever as loaded as it is today. It doesn’t require me to judge it, or weigh it against the harm it does - because the politics of the time meant I thought it was doing good (retrospectively, and only through the lens of someone who had nothing to lose). It seemed to scream out into an unyielding universe to force it to move. It did a fraction of that, because of course it did. It was the nineties. It stole indigenous narratives and romanticized colonialism just as much as it beat the drum of environmentalism and kicked at the doors of corporate greed and racism. Old shows are inherently problematic. Today’s shows are too. Being able to examine them doesn’t mean not loving them, but it lets you say “Okay, so what do I expect from the things I watch today? What do I expect from the things I watch in five years time?��

All that aside, the show is just damn good. It’s watchable and rewatchable. It struggles to age because it was already so out of pace with the age it was made in–despite its flaws in representation, it was better than other shows at the time that demonized, tokenized, or outright killed minorities to push white narratives on their own shows (Kendra being murdered on Buffy, for example). It’s standalone enough that you can go back and watch any episode you like because overarching story arcs were way less of a staple as they are today.  It’s witty, fast paced, full of action and moral dilemma, do gooding and the consequences of it. Although still severely unbalanced, and very, very white, it did still have indigenous actors playing indigenous characters, and minorities portrayed in stories about them. There’s a dog. There’s classic cars. And it’s all put to the soundtrack of Canadian bands and singers. 

tl;dr ahead for rambling about subtext and being a disaster queer, but please scroll past for more gifs.

Queer me needed this show, in a world where I’d been taught to look and see myself in straight white male protagonists, it felt like A Lot to see all this on screen. It wasn’t, but it was all I got when I was growing up. I envy the good fortune of kids who can see themselves on screen these days while they try and figure themselves out (and hopefully more so in the future) with far less of having to negotiate through the confusion of looking at it through confusing fractals of different lenses and instead just see someone who looks like them showing them that their POV is normal, heroic and wonderful. Those lenses fucked me up big time. Like I’m not even sure right now what flavor of queer I am. I cling to bi like a lifeline of sense in my life, but it is complicated because I overwhelmingly desire the company of women way way more. But also I was was taught to look through the lens of a white dude in order to see myself universally, taught to be both desirous of the female body and humiliated by it, ashamed by sex, taught men were awful, and taught that I was supposed to marry one anyway. I look at my sexuality/romanticism like it’s a meta puzzle that I haven’t figured out yet, wondering how to put it on paper, how to break apart the different influences I experienced as a youngling and as an adult to try and negotiate if I’m misreading my own impulses. How I was brought up, who I’ve known, the relationships I’ve experienced and seen in real life and on TV. I’m 34 and I’m still no more certain. Subtext is both my friend and my enemy. I hate it, and I owe everything to it.

So when I need a rest from giving a shit about any of that noise, I go back to my comfort food. I go right back to subtext, which gave me the tools I needed to desire romance that wasn’t heterosexual, that somehow was more intimate because it relied on longing stares and never stepping foot out of the closet, that was just someone liking another person without any expectation of sex just because they have opposing genitals, and their colleagues hassle them a lot. There’s nothing wrong with the sex, I write a lot of consommation of the feelings that I see bubbling under the surface. I have even grown to appreciate het romance when it’s done in a way that doesn’t reduce the woman to a love interest–I was thrilled when Simon Baker’s Patrick Jane got together with Teresa Lisbon in The Mentalist. Their relationship was filled with subtext too. Subtext isn’t a queer thing, it has a role in all well written romance. Hell, it has a role in terriblebad tropey misogynistic romance, too. And just you know basically all storytelling (and more). 

Queer romance existing only in the subtext, though? It’s heartbreaking explicitly because it feels like a story that isn’t finished, and that’s where subtext reliant shows can hand off the story to be finished by fandom itself. In due South, as I mentioned before, Ray and Fraser jump into a dogsled and ride off over the snowy horizon to “Find the hand of Franklin, reaching for the Beaufort sea”. It’s where I chose my meta name, as I’ve mentioned before, because that ending - that ending - handed us all the subtext so far and said “Here, take it, it’s yours now. Do with it what you like”–and we did. But that was twenty years ago. I loved that ending (I still think it was a very elegant solution) and it was expected and appropriate for a show that in itself is a “Faves Are Problematic” show, but that’s also why I get so passionate about discussing the subtext in Supernatural.

It’s younger than due South. While it may have begun back when Willow from Buffy had her first girlfriend, it is ending now, not at the turn of the century where a dogsled was still good enough to get the point across and none of us had Twitter. My own experiences, my lifelong queer confusion make it so I feel pretty damn bad for people trying to use Supernatural as a medium for their own self-exploration, using characters from SPN as their lenses. A show these days that makes bank on those tropes and doesn’t inform its audience (positively or negatively) is doing so irresponsibly because of the modern context in which the show presently (not historically) sits, and the increasing awareness of the issues surrounding it. Networks, then, are ultimately responsible for that, but they are in a way which is entirely different and far more directly culpable than they were 20 years ago, because people are out there making money out of those intentional subtextual devices. They chose to do it; took a deep breath and backed right up away from Gamble’s problematic queerbashing tropes, chewed it over, then hired gay writers and dived right back in with more grown up, progressive, and less shitty subtext–but still subtext. 

This show that ended 20 years ago was able to cross way more lines with subtext in one episode than Supernatural has done sometimes in an entire season. It did so despite and because of it’s international audience, on a conservative network that would late purchase Paramount, and Star Trek, and ended with a powerfully subtextual ending. Supernatural, of course, is under a far more powerful microscope from the bigots than those oblivious to subtext back in the 90s could have ever produced. due South, like SPN was just “wholesome family entertainment” to a conservative audience that was completely oblivious by all accounts, yet was laden heavily with queer innuendo. It was also blissfully short, and existed in a social media world which consisted of Yahoo groups and not much else. 

In modern context, Supernatural gets a fox in the henhouse treatment from that same audience, and acts accordingly (when it’s not using that same subtext to deliver earnest Fuck You’s to that audience). While I expect Supernatural to bravely - even considering this scrutiny - deliver a dogsled subtextual ending on a good day, there are bad days, too, because the queer subtext has been underlined so loudly that everyone can see it, because it’s “practically text”, because the bottom line is increasingly more concerned with satisfying those bigots (even while they mock them), and because queer fans are “too loud” about what they want. How dare they. /s The pushback caused by being loud about things you care about, the bigots actually seeing subtext in front of their noses, isn’t bad because now they know what we’ve been doing all along, and we won’t be able to get away with it any more; it means they’re becoming more aware of narratives other than their own. Yes, some people will push back, but “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”, and they can shove it right up their asses.

All I ever ask of myself when I interrogate my present day viewing experience, is this: when I sat as a youngster watching due South thinking “This subtextual ending is enough for me”, did I truly believe it was okay to be watching a show about two white guys with a subtextual ending 20 years later? Was that the future I dreamed of and aspired to? Would I be disappointed? The answer is yes, I am disappointed. No matter the whys, the fundamental and societal reasons–I am disappointed. I still love the show probably more than I should, but I am disappointed in the society it sits in - which is increasingly capitulating to far more powerful global financial powers than a couple of red state homophobes - and I’m disappointed in the way we’re treating each other for even caring, and I’m disappointed in myself, too, for being naive and imagining we would be much further down this road now than we are. But we are a capitalistic society, and being both the commodity and the customer should be a surprise to literally nobody at this point. It doesn’t mean you have to like it.

And if you don’t feel that way, that’s okay. We all come from different places. We have different perspectives. We need and want different things, for different reasons, and find joy in different things for different reasons. Variety of opinion is as much a wonderful thing as it is completely terrifying.

I’ve wandered somewhat off topic, so I’m going to go back to the show I love, my chocolate pudding and custard comfort food TV show, and the long stares and the beautiful uncomplicated subtext.

And sign off with half a dozen gifs.

Eye fucking:

Conversations in closets and bathrooms:

Going down with the ship

Intuitively understanding each other without a word spoken

His hobbies humiliate me in public

“Do you find me attractive?”

Sulking in the corridor while you reunite with your ex

This whole ep with original Ray:

And his wolf approving of both

Not pictured “I love you” “And I you”, “Get out of the closet”, actual hand holding when it’s unnecessary, formally handcuffing your buddy, getting stuck in an ice crevasse and a mini submarine together–and so so much more. I invite you to watch the show if you can find it (I have it on a really nice set of DVDs, but there’s some dodgy ones out there that look like they recorded the DVD straight off a VHS, so do check reviews) or else try and find it online. There was a Canada promoting YouTube channel which published both due South and shows like Slings and Arrows, which I recommend as well (It’s not actually bury your gays if the ghost of your gay best friend haunts you, right?) so you should be able to poke around and find a legit copy somewhere. I’ve bigged it up and talked it down, and wandered a long way off topic (that describes my relationship with every show, but especially when I recommend them) but I hope somewhere along the line I also answered the question. The way I hear it Leverage is a similar sort of comfort food, though I haven’t seen it. Sounds like I should put it on my To Watch list.

[lastoneout]

10/10 post and those jokes have legit ALWAYS made me so fucking unbelievably uncomfortable and they really do read like sexual harassment so I'm glad you pointed that out, but like lord it was also so weird to see this site turn on him?

Not only cuz some of it was based on wilful misinformation about his books(I keep seeing people say Paper Towns is about how its right to objectify women when the whole entire fucking point of that book that is repeatedly spelled out at like a kindergarten level is that no, actually putting people you don't know up on a pedestal and expecting them to like you based on your perception of them is Wrong and Creepy. The book makes it super clear that the protagonist is wrong.)

But even then, like the Green Brothers were like the McElroys of the pre-2010 internet. They were funny and popular and made videos that everyone loved and watched. They did sold out panels and con appearances and had all sorts of fun inside jokes that their fans used(if you have ever heard a YouTuber refer to leaving something in the description as "leaving it in the doobly-do" the Green Brothers popularized that). His url was even an inside joke. Ngl before all this people adored that John Green was on tumblr. Seeing people turn on him(cuz as far as I know Hank was never on tumblr and seemed to escape this shit unscathed) was so confusing. I think it really was the first real instance on this site of people just attacking someone who was popular because they just decided he was cringe for no reason, which is a cycle that continues to this day.

On top of that they were super wholesome? They ran(and still run) an huge charity event every year in honor of their dead friend that dozens of youtubers participate in. They started Crash Course just because they loved making learning more accessible and fun for people who were struggling or even just liked learning. They leveled with young people and respected them and their thoughts and agency(which I assume is another reason teens liked them). Like genuinely they were the most unproblematic people on the goddamn internet in the age of shit like the nostalgia critic and johntron.

But then John Green wrote one book that everyone deemed as "pretentious" (which it does NOT escape my notice that it was his first book with a female protagonist) despite the book kinda acknowledging that teens are struggling to find an identity and tend to experiment with cringy stuff, especially teens who are suffering and that's OKAY(like you weren't supposed to take August's cigarette thing at face value ffs but this site has 0 reading comprehension so). The book got popular and people just decided it was dumb and cringe and as always they came up with moral reasons to label it problematic(namely that a book about teens contains, oh my god, a barely T rated scene where they have sex dear lord won't someone think of the children) and hell I even saw people claiming he was bad for exploiting the memory of his dead friend which god imagine saying that and thinking you have the moral high ground. And that was enough for everyone to bully the shit out of John Green accusing him of being a pedo for writing teens doing things teenagers do tastefully and then added what's basically sexual harassment to it until he bailed and now its still some big fucking meme everyone is SO proud of for some reason. (He also has a right to be upset as a YA author that's carrer could be ruined by people putting words in his mouth that people were making him out to be a creep.)

So yeah, I will never find those fucking cock and balls taste jokes funny and tbh it's really gross that people still think of them as something funny and good when if you look into the situation even a little it's clear it was an unwarranted hate mob against a decent guy who just wanted to be cool and engage with his fans all because I dunno people hate popular stuff I guess.

do y’all ever have a thought you want to post and you can just FEEL it being screenshotted and ridiculed

[frumfrumfroo]

That ask about Ben, "turning into a boring ass goody two shoes character that always does what Rey says and becomes super buddy buddy with Finn and Poe". I guess they're thinking on the way Ben's portrayed in many fanfics out there where if Ben wants to turn to the light and be w Rey, he must 'get along w Rey's friends and be a good boy no matter what', implying he's the only one who needs to change (something I hate very much), but I'm more confident the movie won't go that way... Hopefully

I just can’t sympathise with this as a fear, though. This is Star Wars. There are no squeaky clean boring perfect characters with all their rough edges sawn off. None. Any character who appears enough/is characterised enough to count as having a personality has flaws, can be abrasive/combative in some way, and has been significantly wrong about something. It’s wall-to-wall strong personalities.

Our Heroes:

Luke - anger problems, cavalier, impulsive, stubborn, doesn’t listen to anyone about anything

Han - thief, smuggler, self-aggrandising liar, flake, low key redemption arc in ANH prior to which he was very shady and very selfish indeed

Leia - no chill, judges everyone around her constantly and out loud at full volume, hostile, uncompromising, workaholic

Obi-wan (who for some reason keeps being mentioned as some kind of ultimate paragon and the supposed perfect moral example of the ideal Jedi- where do people get this idea? I’ve had quite a few asks assume this as something we all take for granted and lol no) - hard core manipulative, imperious, hypocritical, secretive, high-handed

Lando - introduced as a feckless Quisling, shady past, fluent liar, flatterer

etc. etc. I can go on. I can do all the ST characters, too. As soon as P0e became an actual character rather than a plot device, he was given very serious character flaws and was allowed to fuck up hard. There are consequences, these flaws are something our characters struggle with and which continue to impact them through their entire arc. This is not a story about paragons who were born Good and Pure and everything they do is Good and Pure because They Are Heroes, it’s about enduring hope in messy humanity and the choice to do good. The ongoing and always available choice to do good no matter how many mistakes you’ve made or how many times you’ve been wrong in the past.

The fact that our two most important Wise Mentors, the characters with the most authority and whom the audience trusts the most, lied to our protagonist to hone him as a weapon to kill his own father and were very wrong about what ‘winning’ meant should really give one pause about drawing these cliché lines in the sand between Boring Perfect Goody Two Shoes and Cool Sexy Evils. No one is perfect, every single character is vulnerable to the same human frailties and even the most illustrious can fall prey. Evil is not sexy in SW, evil is sad and cannibalistic and painful, it’s a trap and a prison of your own making.

There are no anti-heroes, no cool gritty grey area, there’s just fundamentally decent people who haven’t got their shit together and are still struggling with fear and selfishness. Han and Lando aren’t anti-heroes, they don’t lack courage, compassion, idealism- they’re just out of touch with those qualities, hiding them from themselves. They aren’t heroic out of self-interest, they rise above their self-interest in order to become heroic. They conquer it. Like, that was Han’s explicit arc in ANH, from anti-hero to hero, because being an anti-hero is not a destination in SW. But he doesn’t become a different person, his flaws don’t disappear, he’s just more in touch with his authentic self and more willing to show his soft gooey centre. He’s willing to stand for something now, to admit that he cares, to be selfless.

But, you know, equally all of these dodgy misfits are accepted regardless of their history. The Rebellion welcomed Han and Lando with open arms, gave them rank and trust. The forgiveness is total! You do have to ‘get along’ with other humans and it’s easy because the good guys will not hold it over you after you make a change. That’s why they’re the good guys.

If by hating that ‘he’s the only one who needs to change’ you mean you don’t like it when people put Rey on a pedestal, absolutely. She has flaws and made mistakes and still has more growing to do. She’s not Artemis taming him to her heel, she’s not his morality chain. If you mean ‘she has to meet him in the middle’, we’re parting company. He’s on the wrong side and there is no middle ground. There’s no compromise to be made with his position, only compassion to have for him as an individual who believes that’s where he needs to stay.