#Also he managed to make a really compelling story out of it

[leafatlaw]

Just saw new pentar video dropped so I decided to watch all his s6 videos real quick and— Hello ?? This is the most nicely edited video I’ve seen in a while ???

[felassan]

New today from IGN: 'Dragon Age: The Veilguard's Devs Reveal New Info About Each of the Companions (and Solas and Varric, Too)'

It turns out The Veilguard really is the friends we made along the way.

Intro:

"Friendships, romantic relationships, and everything in between have always been an integral part of not just the Dragon Age series, but of BioWare in general. From Mass Effect’s Garrus Vakarian to Dragon Age’s Varric Tethras, the characters – and how they get along with the player – are inseparable from titles from the studio. But, perhaps more than any other BioWare game, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is leaning in heavily on this idea, as it’s already easy to see from the marketing material. For one, the name changed from Dragon Age: Dreadwolf back in June, with BioWare general manager Gary McKay telling us at the time that it was out of a desire to shift the focus to a “really deep and compelling group of companions.” That would be followed by a first official trailer at Summer Game Fest that put the focus squarely on seven new companions that will be tagging along with the player character, Rook, in The Veilguard. With all that in mind, it’s little surprise to hear game director Corinne Busche talk about how these companions aren’t just central to the story of The Veilguard, but the gameplay and combat as well. “Building a relationship with companions has always been a staple of Dragon Age, but this time around, that relationship translates into how well you work together as a team,” Busche tells IGN. “It is how you're actually going to level up your companions, by getting to know them better. That's how you're going to unlock skill points. So when you look at all of the various abilities the companions have, there's inherent combos and synergies and roles that they'll have on the battlefield.” She uses the example of Neve, the mysterious detective mage who has a wildly useful special ability to slow time in combat. “But if I really get the opportunity to know her,” Busche explains, “whether it's platonic or romantic, I'm going to help be able to shape her skills and augment those abilities that work really well with my own personal build, so our sense of teamwork really deepens.” During our time with the game, IGN got to see some of this in action; unsurprisingly, Dragon Age: The Veilguard has an approval/disapproval system, with pop-up text on the side of the screen indicating whether or not a companion liked what Rook just did or said. But something new in this Dragon Age: even just completing a quest with a companion in your party increases your “bond” with them, whether they agree with how you handled things or not. Your relationship, Busche says, isn’t necessarily about “how much they like you, but how well you get to know them.” “This is about a found family,” Busche tells us. “That is, they have the same goals, different complications in their life, but they're all giving everything they have to defend Thedas. You're going to get to know them really well. You're going to develop trust, understanding. That doesn't mean you're always going to agree.” But, we’ll have plenty more to say about the game systems and combat later. With Busche, we had the opportunity to really dive into the seven companions at the center of The Veilguard and what they’re all about. Here’s what she had to say about each one:"

"DAVRIN Busche: “When we were thinking about Davrin, how we were going to develop him as a character, we had to think about, 'How is he going to show up on the battlefield?' And it was unique because he has this, I guess you could say, companion of his own, the griffon Assan. That makes him, as a companion, very unique, because Assan shows up on the battlefield. So we had to think about how that integrates into his abilities, where Davrin as a Grey Warden is capable on his own, but also, when does he call upon Assan and what does that look like? What happens if you're indoors?... And indeed, when you're doing some of Davrin's content, just seeing Assan gliding through the environments, you really get a sense that they care and they're protective about each other. “…When we think about Davrin and his being the representative of the Grey Wardens within the team of The Veilguard, it was an opportunity for us to really go back to some of those roots that we know our fans, our players, deeply care about. Dragon Age: Origins, of course, was so Grey Warden-forward. We want to evoke those memories, those connections that our players have. And I absolutely love when you're journeying with Davrin, not only his aesthetic, how he carries himself as a Warden, but how he interacts with his fellow Wardens. The little wrinkle of, 'Hey, there actually are some griffons remaining in Thedas,' how he learns as a Warden to train and interact with these griffons that, to our knowledge, haven't existed for quite some time, it's a learning experience on a lost art of the Grey Wardens that is really unique to Davrin's character.”"

"HARDING Busche: “To talk about Harding as a companion, I guess I'd have to go back to Inquisition. Of course, Harding showed up. She was your scout on the field. There was a light romance with her, and I think one of the things that the team didn't quite expect is how much Harding would catch on in Inquisition. Players fell in love with her, and we heard them. They wanted a deeper romance, they wanted more engagement with Harding. So for the team, I felt like it was kind of a no-brainer for us to bring back Harding, and we also wanted to reestablish that connection to the Inquisition in the world of Thedas, which occurred 10 years ago, the events of Inquisition. “Harding serves as our proxy back to those events, and you get to learn about what's happened with the Inquisition since, so she presents some really lovely opportunities for us. I will say, personality-wise and her role on the battlefield, she is among my favorites. When you see her leap into the air, unleashing these devastating attacks with her bow and arrow, I just can't get enough of her.”"

"TAASH Busche: “Taash, in the creation of their arc, is one of our more complex characters. It's a journey along their arc that is about introspection. 'Where do I belong in the world? What are my boundaries? What do I fight for? How do I become at peace with who I am?' So I love the juxtaposition, actually, between Taash's personal journey and this imposing literal dragon slayer, that sort of hard exterior and really gentle interior. It makes Taash a really special companion for me.” (When asked which companion had the steamiest romance): “I'll just speak for me personally, but at the culmination of the romance arcs, I'd have to say Taash. When I got to that scene and saw the finished version of that cinematic, I was hollering. Hollering.”"

"EMMRICH Busche: “The thing about Emmrich that is going to surprise our fans the most is his relationship with necromancy. I really love that we kind of turned the idea of a necromancer on its head here, where you think of them as these conjurers of evil, the certain malice when you hear the term 'necromancer,' but it couldn't be farther from the truth for Emmrich. There is a reverence about the dead. He has a unique relationship with death. You get to explore how he ended up in the Mourn Watch. Death has shaped this character in all aspects of his life, and we frequently refer to him as our gentleman necromancer. I think his proper, kind nature stems from that respect that he's learned about this cycle of life and death throughout his life. “Manfred is like a son to Emmrich. He very much has an affinity for this wisp, this life force that he's given a second chance through this skeletal body, and in many ways, it's the story of a parent raising a child. Emmrich, he needs to teach Manfred and help him along to develop as a character of their own, things like learning new skills, how to assist The Veilguard. Some of our most charming moments are in dealing with Manfred, and I must say I absolutely love the interactions. They just have me rolling whenever Manfred steals the show. “…In my last playthrough, I romanced Emmrich. What I also loved is as I'm synergizing with him as we're doing combos, just having him refer to me as ‘my dear’ on the battlefield. ‘Well done, my dear!’ It just fills me with joy every time.”"

"LUCANIS Busche: “The character that went through the most changes [throughout development] without a doubt was Lucanis. Lucanis is very complex. He's an assassin. He is very skilled in the art of death. The Antivan Crows, they pursue these contracts with a certain level of dispassion, but also, Lucanis is a romantic, and he's dealing with some internal struggles. He's been through a lot of trauma. He's relearning how to trust. And all of those elements come together with a richness, but it creates a lot of complexity in how we tell that story. So I'd say Lucanis is the first one that comes to my mind in terms of the thought that's gone into it, where we've had to make adjustments to really cover all facets of his character.”"

"NEVE Busche: “Neve is our confident noir detective. I love to bring her onto the battlefield because she's just so incredibly capable. She's our ice mage, so really big on controlling the battlefield, and that's actually a good metaphor to her arc. She wants to fight for change. She wants to fight for a better Minrathous, and she's going to use all the tools at her disposal to try and reshape Minrathous into a better place for all. She's very much a Shadow Dragon. This is among the mantra of the Shadow Dragons. They operate from the shadows, fighting for a better Minrathous. So as this accomplished ice mage, she's fierce. She's not going to shy away from any challenge, whether it's taking down darkspawn or dealing with the Magisterium in Minrathous.”"

"BELLARA Busche: “Oh, my dear, sweet Bellara. I relate to Bellara a lot. She is joyous. She's been through a lot, but she remains curious, optimistic. She's kind of a geek. She really likes her fiction. She fangirls over Neve a little bit. She's just so relatable, and I think that's what our players will find and fall in love with when they get to meet Bellara, is just how much you'll recognize some of those patterns and sensibilities that she holds, but don't let it fool you. She is also a Veil Jumper. She's very comfortable in elven ruins. I frequently bring her with me in my party. I like to play rogue. I like to play the Veil Jumper, or the Veil Ranger. Bellara's a fantastic companion to set up that spec with electric vulnerabilities, so I love her both on and off the battlefield.”"

Bonus rounds:

"SOLAS Okay okay, so Solas isn’t technically one of your core companions who will travel with you, but given his place in the Dragon Age story, we still had to ask about his relationship with Rook. Here’s what Busche had to say: Busche: “Rook's relationship with Solas is a complicated one. Everyone has seen, at this point, the gameplay reveal and the opening moments of the game, so you'll know things got shaken up pretty radically for Solas already. He's trapped. He's basically communicating with you as an advisor, and I absolutely love that idea of, ‘He's your lifeline right now, but can you trust him?’ And those touch points with him, ‘Do I take his advice or not? Can he be trusted? Is he going to betray me?’ All the while giving you this information that you absolutely need in order to be successful. “It creates an interesting stage for us, where, I think our fans will agree, Solas is very complicated. He firmly believes he's doing the right thing, and some of our fans will agree that he's trying to do the right thing. Others will not, and this creates a stage for you, the player, where you get to lean into those tendencies of your own as you're taking advice from Solas throughout parts of the game. I think those really interesting debates about, ‘Was he ever redeemable? Can he be trusted? Was he wrong all along?’ You're really going to be able to dive in deep on that.”"

"VARRIC Varric, while a part of Dragon Age: The Veilguard and a series mainstay, isn’t part of your core companions either. But, as fans can see in the trailers, he’s still very much in The Veilguard, so we asked Dragon Age creative director John Epler about how he’s changed since we last saw him in Inquisition: Epler: “Since the events of Dragon Age: Inquisition, he has spent the time, just briefly, obviously, [serving as] Viscount of Kirkwall. I mean, anybody who knows much about Varric knows how well a job where he sits around and tells people what to do is going to sit with him. He has been participating in the hunt for Solas. And I think for Varric in particular, that's a very difficult thing for him to do because Solas is his friend. Solas is somebody that he grew close to over the events of Inquisition. They adventure together, they work together. “And now knowing who Solas really is, that eats at Varric. Because Varric always sees, Varric believes he can always make somebody do the right thing. Varric believes he is the most convincing, charismatic, because he cares about people. And he has this belief that as long as I get a chance to talk to Solas, I'm going to be able to turn him. But as he's seeing what Solas' ritual is doing to the world around him, as he experienced in the comics, Dragon Age: The Missing, that eats at him a little bit. That's challenging his world view of him as always being the best judge of people, being able to see that somebody is able to be redeemed. And he's starting to question a little bit, ‘am I right or am I being a fool by believing in Solas?’ ”"

[source]

[trustmypoison]

SVT when the company asks him to break up

Requested? Yes!

Request: ‘Agency telling seventeen to breakup with their s/o to save their public image and group from attacks or public scrutiny so what do you think, they'd react to controversy about their relationship and what they'd do? (i don't like unresolved or with sad ending angst but ig it's up to you however you wanna write it ^^) Love you 😘’

A/N: *deep breath* LET IDOLS DATE AND BE HAPPY!!

Might actually consider breaking up for his career - Jun, Hoshi, Vernon, Chan

I think they really love what they do, and someone in management saying that dating is a huge risk to his career would make him feel some fear. Don’t get me wrong, he would be majorly conflicted about it. But it would probably hurt that he’s even considering it. This one might have to be left unresolved, if only because it would depend on who would make the most compelling argument. I don’t think he’d feel good about any decision in this situation. 

Might actually consider breaking up for your sake - Seungcheol, Woozi, Mingyu

Would feel majorly stressed about this, not because of his career but because of how this strips away your privacy. He’ll ask if you want to follow the advice of the company to eliminate any risk to yourself. How you react would kind of determine how this plays out. If you feel a lot of pressure, either to maintain your privacy or to help him save his career, then he’ll suck it up and mutually end things. But he’d harbor a lot of bitterness if that’s the outcome. If you insist you don’t want to break up, then he’s sticking with your decision because he ultimately wants what you want. 

Will refuse to break up but might agree to keep things lowkey for a while - Jeonghan, Wonwoo, Seungkwan

Doesn’t even consider breaking up and will let the company know that upfront. But he’ll agree that things need to be kept on the down low for a while to let some of the tension subside. Letting the news die down would also benefit you, too, taking you out of the limelight when another top story comes up. He’d be borderline angry if you said that maybe you should listen to the company because while he loves his career, there will be a time when his career will fade, and he wants you around both now and then. 

Might actually sacrifice his career for love - Joshua, DK, Minghao

Might straight up threaten to leave the company. Might even dare the company to terminate his contract. Feels that it’s totally unreasonable to let the public or the company control his personal life and will stubbornly put his foot down to maintain his personal life the way he wants it to be. Will not hear a word from you about thinking about other options because there are none. Naturally, I think at their age and this far in their career, the company doesn’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to terminating a contract for that reason. 

[scurvyboy]

Not to beat a dead horse or whatever, but you don’t see fiddlestan being healthy at any point? I feel like your version of them would have most of their issues figured out by the time they’re old and stuff. Can you talk about their dynamic a bit more pretty please? (I know you just had an ask about this so sorry to keep bringing it up aha 🤪. I’m obsessed with them, and I love your art/au and want to understand them.)

the basis of why i like the fiddlestan ship is strictly because it doesn't work and is doomed to fail. it's a relationship between two extremely damaged people that are only together for transactional reasons.

the way i see it starting: fiddleford comes back to gravity falls after being kicked out by emma may in hopes that he can patch things up with ford. he finds stan there instead and decides to help him fix the portal despite his crushing anxiety about it because he has nowhere else to go. they're both stuck alone in this situation and urges become apparent. things are awkward for a while before they start banging fuck nasty brokeback mountain style.

fiddleford wants stan because he's delusional and still in love with ford. sure he grows to appreciate differences between them and has a separate chemistry with stan, but he is also completely out of touch with reality and rebounding off of his failed marriage with a man who looks just like the one he cheated on his wife with. working on the portal triggers intense panic attacks, which makes him use the memory gun more, which makes him less and less stable.

stan is working himself to death trying to get ford back and just needs affection. the sexual aspect of their relationship helps him blow off steam, but fiddleford also treats him like a person with a brain and allows him to be emotionally vulnerable for the first time in a long while. having someone finally break down his walls is equal parts frightening and addictive for him; he wants to be loved so badly but knows deep down that fiddleford doesn't actually love him, just the person he represents. he's just second best again.

things start to fall apart when it becomes clear that fixing the portal will be impossible without the other journals. fiddleford basically gives up trying to do the work in earnest and just lives in a domestic fantasy world. stan starts to get more and more impatient about the lack of work getting done and the stress makes him a lot more irritated and volatile. the two enter a vicious cycle of violent fights and honeymoon phases until things boil over: stan confronts fiddleford about the memory gun and kicks him out after he tries to use it on him.

post break up fiddleford, now with his cult and savior complex, murder suicides the portal and their affair from both of their memories. however, stan gets his portal memories back being at the shack and goes on to do what he does in canon.

the whole relationship takes place over the course of a few weeks and is as canon compliant as i could manage. i think it's a really fun concept and i think about it all the time.

to be real, i really dislike the idea that all relationships in media have to be healthy and resolved in order to be compelling. the idea that characters NEED to end the story happy and together is just plain unrealistic. i prefer when stories go outside of the limits of "and then they got together and everything was great after that", especially if being in a relationship isn't necessary to a characters arc.

i do think that them getting together when they're older could work and be very nice. however, i also don't think it's entirely necessary, especially since i did make their relationship rotted gutted awful bad. it is cute though, they can kiss and watch tv and marry for taxt purposes i guess.

[rederiswrites]

Just saw a (perfectly good otherwise, which is why I'm making my own post, because I have no desire to beef) post that talked about how good Veilguard is and hinged part of its argument on the idea that bringing down the Veil would kill everyone and would definitely be a bad thing. But that theme worked specifically because they forced the narrative that bringing down the Veil was a bad thing, and purged all evidence to the contrary from the game's lore!

Look, I think Veilguard IS a great game! I love it! But, like every other DA game before it, it leapfrogs right over some established lore to tell a different story, and the story it ultimately told was not about quite the same Solas many of us loved in Inquisition and Trespasser, and the difference is significant.

There was quite a LOT of reason to believe that the Veil is an unsustainable artificial structure that, by its existence, does literally incalculable harm. And no one, probably Solas included, knows what the final consequences of bringing it down would be.

The Veil was a mistake in the first place. It changed Thedas so completely that even the ancient lore of all currently existing cultures does not talk about what it was like before. It's unimaginable. We see only tiny glimpes of a world where gravity might as well not exist and form is mutable and elves don't age and if you got bored you could go on a whole-ass vacation from your body, for centuries if you wanted. Where magic was inextricable from physical existence. Where you could spend centuries playing a piece of music. And not only was it a mistake, but it didn't quite do what it was designed to do! The Blight got out anyway! Slower, and less, but it still got out.

So what Trespasser set up was a choice--continue the deep harms of the current world, a world that is in a near-constant state of apocalypse, or incur the terrible harms of bringing down the Veil for what might be a better world after. But what Veilguard gave us was a man who was used by someone he loved, betrayed by people he trusted, and never in all his wisdom managed to move past that. And your choice is to either trick him or help him move past that. It was actually a compelling story! I can buy it. The story of a spirit, deeply damaged by the things he felt trapped into doing. But it WAS a forced narrative, and they had to brush a bunch of really pivotal lore under the rug to make it work. "What is a Circle" levels of don't mind the man behind the curtain.

I defend the right of creatives to alter their story and tell it the way they want to. I also recognize the difficulties they face dealing with technical and business realities. But let's not pretend that people who were disappointed with Veilguard just don't get it or didn't understand the lore correctly. We can enjoy the game and also not invalidate that disappointment.

[vi-arcanes-left-biceps]

So... I wanted to write about the Caitlyn hate train because it's flooding my twt.

First I'd like to start by saying that you're entitled to dislike a character. Arcane is a work of art, but it's also just cartoons -whatever, just hate the cartoon character. I don't even like Caitlyn that much, mostly I find her arc very compelling.

But. The amount of hate and the shape it takes, for me, is very clearly influenced by a few factors.

With Caitlyn I feel like half of the folks are just regurgitating discourse they read before and try to earn internet morality/politics points while very much forgetting to touch grass. There is no"I don't like her", there is a sense of rightgeousness in disliking her that doesn't make much sense. "She's literally Hitler!" Please think. There are real life fascists and nazis over here. This is a cartoon who's the bad guy for like four and a half episodes.

There are interesting conversations to have about how Caitlyn's actions mirror real life oppression, as many also point out as a reason to hate her. It's fair that you dislike her those actions, to be honest. But 1) stories are not made to be morally perfect but to explore themes and emotions -characters will do bad, even evil things; 2) critical consumption of media exists; 3) using political language to hate on a fictional character with no real political critique/analysis behind makes me think you don't really believe that much what you're saying & you just want to use buzzwords you learned on the internet.

Takes like this are tinted with some sort of attempt to a moral high ground for disliking a fictional character for political reasons, while simultaneously refusing to understand the narrative of the character and think critically about what it is trying to say about real world politics.

To analyse a story you have to engage with it. See what it wants to tell you. See how it does it. See how it fails. You can dislike Caitlyn and tbh disliking her because of her role in the story is more than fair. But that doesn't equal media analysis. And I'm sorry but not liking a character doesn't make you more politically committed than the rest.

There are so many interesting things to say about Arcane's flawed portrayal of politics. How it uses the aesthetics of oppression to tell a story without deeply analysing the oppression itself within the narrative, how the context in which it was created and the beliefs held by its authors afect the portrayal of themes... Among all these, "Caitlyn is evil and irredeemable because we saw a montage of her and Vi doing police violence" is a very superficial take. Please, please, pleeease analyse those montages frame by frame and discuss how they showcase police violence, what bias they have, what purpose it serves. Analyse how it takes from real life events in a way that is insensitive. I'd love it sooo much to see posts like this.

On the other side, I've seen people say both that say Caitlyn is evil because of the acts she commits and then say that Silco is a revolutionaire. What? Silco WAS a revolutionaire, and he still had a motivation to make Zaun free, but his motivations do not match his actions and that's pretty obvious. "Sometimes revolution requires violent resistance" = "Silco is a revolution hero" showcases a very shallow level understanding of the first phrase there. Silco flooded the streets of Zaun with drugs. The Firelights were born out of willingness to defend zaunites from Silco and Jinx. Silco did not do violent resistance against Piltover, not since the rebellion he had led with Vander. He tried to invent shimmer as a weapon to fight again and the only thing he managed is to make many people misserable and dependent on it -and he didn't care. His character and his actions are quite more complicated than "he's doing everything for revolution"; but again, another character reduced to a catchphrase that fails to actually engage with his story. Only difference between these people's opinions on Silco and Caitlyn is that Silco's character has the word "revolution" near in the script and Caitlyn's script includes "cop".

Another thing is, why hate Caitlyn so much and not say a single thing about Ambessa? I can think of a few reasons but I'll summarise like this:

1) Not being aware that Ambessa is always the one calling the shots here even if Caitlyn is given the title of Commander. Even though the show is very much making this clear.

2) Because Caitlyn gets a redemption and Ambessa gets "punished" aka is a villain and dies. As if humans where not more complex than good and evil.

3) Caitlyn's more popular than Ambessa I guess? It's always more fun to hate on the popular character. Also she's a main character so she'd obviously get more more attention.

3) Some people just want women to be perfectly moral all the time, and in wlw relationships even more. I didn't want to bring up fandom misoginy & lesbophobia but I can tell if it was Jayce having her narrative and redemption the discourse would be quite different.

Anyway. Acab and long live critical thinking. I guess I just want to say please send some nuanced Caitlyn takes my way because I'd really love to read those.

[etirabys]

meandering post about reading Orson Scott Card again

I've been offline starting at 9pm every day (except once. I was drunk at karaoke and asked for anons at 8:30pm) for six weeks, with the result that in befuddled boredom two nights ago I picked up Orson Scott Card's Songmaster from the house bookshelf.

I read Ender's Game and three sequels when I was a teen thought the books were mid. Since those are OSC's best works I assumed he had nothing more interesting to offer me and didn't try more of him for fifteen years, but Songmaster was compelling enough that I immediately afterwards picked up The Memory of Earth, the first book of a pentalogy.

TMoE is extremely my jam: after humanity blows itself up on Earth, AIs monitor thriving human civilizations in the planets that survivors managed to escape to, and suppress any tech that enables large scale violence by exerting low key mind control via satellites. But forty million years pass, many of the satellites break down, and the AI needs help from humans to restore capabilities. Because as its control wanes, people are starting to e.g. conceive of airplanes or bombs again, and override the injunctions against entering military alliances more than two edges of connection away.

The AI is worshipped as a god all over the planet, but the fourteen year old protagonist that becomes one of the AI's agents tells the AI from the beginning that he'll break with it if its morality seems wrong to him. I like the fourteen year old – unlike Ender or Songmaster's protagonist (adult minds piloting ten year old bodies), he's a normal gifted kid who's unpopular 50% due to his ego and big mouth and 50% because he's socially inept and offends people even when he's trying to be nice.

Songmaster is also partly about a permanent solution to large-scale violence, albeit through one guy who establishes a monopoly on violence and sweeps in pax galactica. Both it and TMoE are preoccupied with the eradication of suffering from evil / human violence, which is closer to my resonant frequency than narratives about defeating particular people or ideologies. At the moment I can't think of any other book with such an insistent focus on the matter than T.H. White's The Once and Future King. It's hard to make a compelling story out of, and I don't think Songmaster really succeeds, but TMoE's premise is well suited to explore that. (I'm also enjoying the matriarchal culture where everyone is expected to have multiple serial-monogamous marriages.) After reading 70% of TMoE last night I wrote:

Usually when I read fiction there's a small part of me going, how can I use this as fodder for my own growth, how can I remix or improve or react against this, how do the author and I measure against each other? (If the quality and content are at an anti-sweet spot, the small part becomes quite large and I feel all teeth towards the author.) But on occasion I read something so close that the absence of that measuring-feeling is its own sensation – ego departs, or at least is split across two bodies. There's just amity and recognition

And it's pretty interesting to feel this way about Card for, well, the reasons.

(If you're familiar with Card drama none of the following will be new to you; I'm coming to it fresh so the rest of this post is me going "uh... wow")

I vaguely knew he was a homophobic Mormon who'd gotten into fights about gay stuff, but I couldn't tell from the Ender books I read. But in Songmaster his issues spring off the page in such a weird way. Every fifth Goodreads review of this book is "Card, u gay?" because, well,

(One review, possibly from a fellow Mormon, that went "Card, it's so sinful of you to be this gay in your novel". Why did he write this book that would predictably make everyone mad...)

it's full of gay male desire. The protagonist (Ansset) is approximately a castrato and characters notice him sexually a lot. The first and only time Ansset has sex it's with a Kinsey 4-5 male character he loves, who's married to a woman but has fallen in love with Ansset. It turns out the drugs Ansset took to prolong his singing career painfully and only-kinda-figuratively explode your balls when you have your first orgasm and you'll never feel sexual desire again. (You'd think his loving teachers would have warned him of that, but, whatever, they didn't.) The other guy is literally castrated in punishment for inadvertently torturing a highly valuable castrato. It's pretty bald: GAY SEX IS ALMOST IRRESISTIBLY TEMPTING BUT YOU SHOULDN'T DO IT.

(Sidenote: both Ansset and the guy's wife are very close and have a "there's enough love to go around" attitude about the gay sex initially, before they go "wait Josif is a SERIAL MONOGAMIST... he can only love one person at a time... the moment he had the gay sex his marriage was destroyed". It's funny in a mildly stupid way that Card would set up this parable of homosexuality destroying lives and a marriage but almost everyone involved is peacefully ready to sail into an open marriage. I guess it makes sense if you want to say very clearly that THE GAY PART IS THE BAD PART)

which is fascinating to me, because... why would you tell on yourself like that

(81k also told me secondhand of an essay? interview? where Card openly says "we have to stand against legalizing gay marriage because everyone will get gay married and society will collapse", so that's informing my read of Songmaster as well)

I am pretty dang open about my personal life online but if I had a lot of feelings I thought were disgusting and immoral I would not write a novel dripping with those feelings before pointedly castrating the leads for them. Especially if it wasn't relevant to the actually highbrow themes of (checks notes) winning over your adversaries with kindness and never relinquishing your monopoly on violence. I would be so so so so embarrassed to let this go to print, it's so psychologically transparent, what was he thinking

(Well, I assume he's a very different person with different social incentives. For all I know, people in his church went "hey Orson we read your book and it's clear that you're gay but signaling strongly that you won't give into the gay feelings, we're here for you, it was really brave of you to publish this".)

[hotvintagepoll]

Una O'Connor (The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Invisible Man, The Bride of Frankenstein)—One of my favorite character actresses! While many people know her as the shrieking innkeeper's wife in The Invisible Man, I've always loved when she played a character who was a little more grounded (though that scream of hers is pretty iconic.) Her character of Bess is warm and loving towards Marian, but also tough and takes no prisoners. When they are captured in the forest, she comes forward to protect Marian with so much ferocity that Sir Guy (the villain) moves out of the way so quickly because even he doesn't want to feel Bess' wrath. She could switch from hilariously over-the-top to gently and sweet in the blink of an eye and she deserves a little more recognition! Also her hats in Robin Hood are ridiculous and I love them.

Zero Mostel (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, The Producers)—Archetypal. Comedian of all time. The worst combover in cinematic history, probably. Could make more laughter with one muscle in a singular eyebrow than 98% of all men across the face of the earth. Hardcore Committer to the Bit. Man of all time, and also told HUAC directly where they could shove it, which is a primally appealing and scrungly quality.

This is round 2 of the contest. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. If you’re confused on what a scrungle is, or any of the rules of the contest, click here.

[additional submitted propaganda + scrungly videos under the cut]

Una O'Connor:

she eats this:

The things this woman does with her face when she sees Frankenstein's creature. Your fave could never.

Zero Mostel:

"The chase scene in FORUM is just. it's fucking iconic. It's one of the funniest pieces of cinema I've ever seen in any context, everything about it is genius, and the heart and soul of it is Zero Mostel as Pseudolus. Casting him alongside a young Michael Crawford (of later Phantom of the Opera fame) really highlights the differences between the young romantic lead and the older, sensible, and yet entirely scrungly middle aged man (Mostel was 55 at the time) somehow manages to come off as even more desirable. He has no shit together, not very good plans, is panicked for most of the story, and the charisma of a champ. His flailing, helpless attempts at fighting the gladiator is so... he's so scrungly. "

"He's not fancy, he's not pretty, he's not good at much of anything, but he is Genius despite that."

"There is a magic to Zero Mostel that he manages to bring to roles where he is simultaneously the worst person ever, and also, compelling in every possible way. He had his biggest period of fame in middle age after he got taken off the Hollywood blacklist, and being a fat middle aged man with thinning hair is what gives every single bit of his characters power. As the original Max Bialystock he would eat the entirety of The Producers except that Gene Wilder as Leo Bloom is a genius casting decision, as Mostel's intensity against Wilder's deep discomfort ends up being the right chemistry. In many ways he reminds me of Buster Keaton, the pinnacle of hot scrungly little guy—a unique and expressive face, an instinctive understanding of comedy, active at the same time, and also they were both in FORUM together. Mostel came from an Orthodox Jewish family, was a trained painter with a degree in art, spoke four languages, and when he was blacklisted during the Red Scare and brought before the HUAC, he didn't just refuse to name names, he made fun of the senators. He was disabled after an accident, and still did dancing in movies and things like stunts in FORUM. He did a ton of work on Broadway too, including originating Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, making the musical more Jewish as he did so. Frankly, I don't think any of those roles (or the eventual later film versions of Fiddler/musical version of the Producers) would work with anyone else. It had to be a fat balding middle aged leftist Jew from Brooklyn. The scrungly is essential.

"the scrungle factor of max in every version of the producers is through the roof but nathan lane does it as suave scrungle. zero mostel does not do suave scrungle. he does old jewish man getting into an argument with the rabbi at the full synagogue passover seder about how much wine has to be in the glass for it to count as "one cup" scrungle; he does old jewish man whose entire fridge is full of pickled herring scrungle. it's offputting in all the ways that make it genius."

[lurkingshan]

Hey Shan!! IDK if you're planning to do a BL wrap up or superlatives or anything like that this year so this question might be a bit too early but um...what has been a few of your favorite first watches for 2024 bls?

Hi Eboni! This is actually pretty good timing for a list because most of the shows that will end within 2024 are already over! The only two I could see maybe making my list that have not ended yet are Love is Like a Poison (Japan) and Blue Canvas of Youthful Days (China), so I'll mention them here (fingers crossed they end well and stay favs).

That said, here are my favorite completed BLs of 2024 (alpha order)!

At 25:00 in Akasaka (Japan, Gaga)

Two actors who first met in college are cast in a bl together, old feelings resurface, and the lines between their professional and private lives start to blur. This show is super beautiful and moody.

Cooking Crush (Thailand, YouTube or WeTV for uncut)

Ten and Prem are my favorite of OffGun's many couples. Ten is a med student with food issues who wants to learn how to cook, and Prem is a chef in training. Their romance is super sweet and I also really like the side couple and friend groups in this one.

Cherry Magic Thailand (Thailand, YouTube or Viu, requires VPN)

I still can't believe this show happened. How on earth did GMMTV manage to make a superior version of Cherry Magic?? Tay Tawan had a lot to do with it, along with a very smart adaptation. It's so sweet and funny and perfect (if you just pretend ep 8 doesn't exist).

City of Stars (Thailand, iQIYI)

I was surprised by how much I liked this charming little Thai pulp. It had an interesting story with strong writing and the pair was very good together. More people should watch it!

I Became the Main Role of a BL Drama (Japan, Gaga)

This is a short and sweet and note perfect BL comedy about two actors falling for each other while making a BL. Loaded with meta jokes about the industry and stan culture and very loving about it.

Knock Knock Boys (Thailand, Gaga)

I am obsessed with this excellent Thai BL that not nearly enough people watched. Two couples, both compelling and sexy and fun, and amazing friendship dynamics. I want everyone to watch it!

Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo (S Korea, iQIYI)

My top BL of the year. It's a second chance romance, you see the characters both in high school and later as adults and I don't really want to spoil anything else about it. It's beautiful, the characters are so compelling, and the story is masterfully told.

Love for Love's Sake (S Korea, iQIYI)

This one is special and quite unique, and I also don't want to spoil much about it! It begins with a basic isekai set up that then goes to some unexpected places. Really, really beautiful show.

Love Sea (Thailand, iQIYI)

Definitely my favorite spicy romance of the year. I really loved a lot about the story for this one, in particular the class dynamics that defined the characters and their relationship, and Mahasamut (played by Fort) is on my list of favorite drama characters this year.

Marahuyo Project (Philippines, YouTube)

We didn't get much from the Philippines this year, but they did drop one absolute banger in this show about a fierce and proud gay kid who gets booted out of school in Manila and sent to live with his grandma and mother on a small island. He makes friends and enemies and starts an LGBTQ+ club, and falls in love along the way.

Mr Mitsuya's Planned Feeding (Japan, fansub)

An excellent age gap romance about a young editor and the chef who writes for his magazine making food together and falling in love. Lots of fun side characters, too. I loved every minute of this show.

Perfect Propose (Japan, Gaga)

Two old friends meet when one of them is in need of housing and one is on the verge of a nervous breakdown from a soul-sucking corporate job, and help each other heal. This one is short and sweet.

Ossan's Love Returns (Japan, Gaga)

This one is technically a sequel, but you can enjoy it without having seen the original (and might like it better that way, tbh). One of the funniest shows of the year and featuring a main couple that is a personal fav and are now on my ride or die list.

Takara's Treasure (Japan, Gaga)

This one is a simple story but so, so sweet. A cute little bean follows his mysterious idol to university and joins the hiking club to get to know him better. They get to know each other slowly and fall in love.

Unknown (Taiwan, Viki)

ALMOST my favorite bl of the year, but we had a few issues on the back end. Despite that, I still loved it a whole lot. A family drama and a love story about two chosen brothers whose relationship changes over time. Easily the best BL Taiwan made this year.

Looking at this list, I am realizing how absolutely invaluable my Gaga and iQIYI subscriptions have become; it's where nearly all my favorite BL is airing.

[meraki-sunset]

This is a long letter of gratitude. Embrace my endless words of pure gratefulness.

Dear Autor of the most amazing thing I've ever read.

I was writing this letter from the moment I reached the middle of your Crow Strider AU fanfiction. There is so many things I want to say and I'm so happy that I can say it to you all here without words limit. Forgive me for exuberance, I'm squeezing out all my abilities to express what I feel in this foreign language that's not of us first language.

Let me list all the things I'm grateful for, because I'm autistic and I love listing:

1. Crow Strider

The arc of Davesprite you created is masterpiece of writing. The process of deconstructing his personality, forgiving and letting his part behind as well as embracing his new identity and new body is written so thoughtfully with such a care of details. I love how you made him so different from Dave as well as still kept his Daveness in full glory of Striderness. You made him happy and more emotional available and open, at the same time it felt so natural for him to be that way because of the proper build up you gave him. Thank you so much for creating Crow Strider and letting us read his well written arc.

2. There's a Dave for everyone

THERE'S LITERALLY DAVE FOR EVERYONE. You have no idea what struggles I went through trying to understand what person Dave ended up with in canon, and then being sad of what happened in epilogues. I wanted Dave for Karkat. I wanted Dave for Jade. I wanted them to be happy. And you did it. You made it possible. You made them all happy. I love it so much. Thank you so much for making them happy. You even gave Teresi one Dave for her. I can't believe it. It's so beautiful it's unreal.

3. More Davepeta

This part is simple, I simply love Davepeta and you gave me a lot of good Davepeta content. Thank you for that.

4. You made me like characters I didn't like

I wasn't big fan of Tavros. I got tired of Vrisca by the end of Homestuck. I didn't really see Hal as an interesting character. I honestly hated Gamzee. And Jasprosesprite squared was so annoying for me

Well, not anymore! You somehow managed to write these characters more compelling for me than Hussie did. Now I love Tavros and Hal, I mean, cat Hal? Is there anything more cute and cool at the same time?

And NGL I genuinely wanted Gamzee to die and I can't believe that now I'm not, because I just read a very good redemption arc of this clown. I also love the way you dealt with Vrisca. Heck I love all characters written by you!

5. God tier Karkat

I've dreamt of seeing a good piece of god tier Karkat. I was so curious how does it even work to be Knight of Blood, we didn't see any version of Blood god tier in canon. I'm big fan of your version, it fits the character and the aspect so well, and the execution of his arc as he is chosen to open the door... Honestly? I prefer that over canon, though it wouldnt make as much sense as in your fanfiction. It just feels like you took a much better care of Karkat than official ending of Homestuck. Don't get me wrong, I love Homestuck an it's ending, your fanfiction wouldn't exist without it. I honestly think that Hussie didn't really have as much time and space to give his characters as extended arcs as you gave them without losing the dynamic of his story. But you could. And you did. Thank you so much.

6. So many people got better, more extended arcs

Like above. You made Jas much better. You gave Nanna much better, more compelling arc than she had in canon. You made Hal and Tavros much more relatable and gave them very well character development plot, even if short. You took your time to write very needed and wanted dialogues between characters than didn't have their time to interact in canon. Like Jake and Dirk (ESPECIALLY THEM OMG). Like Erisol and Feferi. Like Jas and Rose. And I didn't even know that I needed the last one. Thank you so much.

7. You made ships that I didn't know where even possible and I like them????

Seriously, Tavros and Jane?? Erisol and Arquius??? Josh and Dirk??? I love how your brain works

8. You absolutely nailed the delicate topic of transgender

I used to not be a big fan of June, because there were no realistic signs of John having any kind of thoughts or doubts about his gender in canon. You made a very much needed and really great thoughtfully written arc from June and Josh, even caring about the topic of transition and executing it really great. Thank you so much for yet again being so good at writing arcs.

9. Eridan and Sollux

I love them both and their weird toxic rivalty, and I absolutely love that you gave them some attention and let Eridan grow and try to redeem himself while also helping Sollux with hii2 p2iioniic problem2. I download almost every single frame of it.

10. YOUR ARTSTYLE

You're artstyle. I don't know where to begin with that. It's so amazing. Expressive, dynamic, cute, beautiful, colorful. I love every line of your comics. Your style is the way I always wanted to draw. It's just perfect. And also perfect for Homestuck fanfiction. It's just so similar, yet gives it a bit of softness as well as the kind of expressiveness I love, that makes every single shot more appealing. Warm scene are so warm, sad scene are so sad, dynamic scenes are so epic, it's like so delicious. Yes, I just ran out of words. Let me grab a dictionary...

Your style is outstanding. It gives me this feeling of familiarity, it's similar of Homestuck style, yet so different, its fresh and new while also feels like home.

I wish you have a printed version of your fanfiction (but I probably can't afford it sadly). There is something so soothing in this simple colors, it's not too loud, not too many colors, yet so many and smooth colorful lines. I will learn to draw like you, I'm sorry for adapting your style, but I really want to draw like that and you even posted some tutorials how to draw like you.

Thank you so so much that you put so much time and effort into making this wonderful comic and then share with all of us completely for free. You drew so many expressive pages, sometimes even 10 pages per static dialogue, which means you officially outbested the master of overdoing Andrew Hussie himself, that did maximum of 3 pages per 1 static dialogue scene. I noticed you slowed down a bit at the end and drew much more simplified panels as well as you started using same panels many times. Good. It's okay to go the easier way. No one wants you to overwork yourself and burnout. No one wants you to have trauma with drawing and not wanting to draw comic ever again. It's extremely generous of you that you posted for absolutely free such a wonderful and huge piece of art. I'm endlessly grateful.

11. The plot

I love how you started from one simple idea of giving Crow more arc, and then gradually extended it into a whole huge fixfiction. It went so smoothly it looked like really one different decision of one person can change the whole timeline. It went so naturally, it felt so realistic as if I read something that Andrew Hussie wrote as a coexisting canon.

I have to admit, the whole idea of not doomed and not canon timeline is pretty ridiculous, and I love every bit of it. Paradoxally, it sounds so much like something that could actually exist in Homestuck canon. I love it

A few little things I didn't like that much

I wouldnt be myself if I didn't comment on some stuff that wasn't perfect. I'll be bery brief with that, because these things didn't really bothered me that much, I just want to share a little bit of criticism I have.

I hope it won't sound rude when I say that I didn't really felt like you understand the character of Nepeta very well? She didn't felt that like Nepeta in your fanfiction, at least for me. I felt like some stuff were explained a bit too many times. I know that characters needed that, yet we as viewers already know some stuff and didn't need to read it again. Also, I really missed the type styles of characters. I know how hard it is to keep it through entire fanfiction, especially writing some of the characters with quite complicated type style. I just missed it a bit. On the other hand it made a few characters much more comprehensive.

I hope I didn't hurt you with this few words of critics. Now I want to share a few of my favorite pages, I hope you don't mind if I end this letter with fangirling over your drawings. I actually wanted to do a lot of comments during reading your fanfiction, but the website didn't let comments. Sadly. That's why I'm writing here. And now is time I will do what I wanted to do back then:

This scene, my fav scene in Homestuck, got so extended in your fanfiction, I felt so gifted and it wasn't even my birthday

I cried.

This. Made me laugh so hard. And it's even funnier without context.

I just reached photos limit. Sadly. I'm so grateful for your comic. I love it so much. Thank you again for making it. You're a wonderful person

Hey there! Thank you so much for the letter, and for taking your time translating it to English for me to understand. Since it’s in a list format, I guess I’ll answer as list as well! So:

Crow strider

It was challenging writing Crow because I needed to basically write Dave but with a twist in his personality due to living with the Harley-Egberts and their grandma, in a very cozy and caring environment.

Honestly I don’t think I managed to portray enough Daveness, his personality is very particular and difficult for me to replicate, but I did the best I could and my friend and editor will help me reach the right amount of striderness in the epilogue

2. A Dave for everyone

Indeed, there’s Dave for everyone. The homestuck epilogues made me realize how lonely Jade ended up, and I always loved Davesprite and jade, but with one being human and the other one a Sprite the relationship was bound to fail, and even tho I wasn’t fond of JadexDavepeta, still i would’ve prefered it to jade being all alone and Davepeta dying fighting Lord English. So now, not only Jade has Crow, and they’re happy, but the Karezi – davekat – daverezi mess all got fused into one, because I love them and their trip was a Little different from in canon. And also Davepeta is around, I don’t think they’ll end up with anyone, but they’ll vibe on EarthC.

3. More Davepeta

They’re alive, and I like showing the craziness that comes from them knowing all timelines but being above them and detached from them. 

4. The characters you didn’t use like

I like exploding underused characters. Because with them, you’ve only seen the Surface, but at the same time you have info about them that can be used to make them more profound. If Tavros got revived, why isn’t he mad at Vriska? What was he doing those 3 years in the bubbles? If Jasprose is a seer and has knowledge of all timelines due to being ultimate self, doesn’t that make her the ultimate clairvoyant? Doesn’t that mean she’s the key to winning? Does she miss the mother like rose does? If there’a already an Arquius, why make another? Why not have just Hal as a Sprite and have him figure out what being alive is actually like?. You get the Surface of the characters and knowing what you know about them, you dig deeper, until you find their humanity and write about it.

5. Godtier Karkat

I love Karkat on Homestuck, but I feel like the character lost weight towards the end of the story, he stopped being the leader and while everyone went and fought someone important like the Condesce, the jacks, the dogjack, or Lord English, he was just somewhere else doing whatever. I wanted to give him his hero moment that closes his development.

As for the door, I feel like in canon john was the right choice to open the door, he’s the hero and the leader, not to mention it’s a human session, it makes total sense and I wouldn’t change it

Every story has things that don’t get to be explored, because that would make them too long and cut the flow, making it unreadable. That why we love fan fictions and AUs so much, they take the pieces and reassemble them into something new, filling the empty spaces.

What makes the events on AUs fun is that they didn’t happen in canon. So if John opened the door in canon, and it was right, then Karkat can open this one, and it can be right on this specific timeline. He gets closure from the door he never got to open, and takes back his role as a leader, even if it’s just for a moment, since the battle is over by now. He’s the leader once again, but this time he understands the weight of it in a way he couldn’t grasp when he was 13, claimed he was in charge and let everyone down. He now understands it’s not just something you ask for, it’s something you earn, he’s now the Knight of blood, god of bonds, he took down the Condesce in the name of his species, and will open the door for his peers to enter the new universe they created together where they’ll create a free society, he became what the signless predicted, his rightful successor. His arc is completed.

6. Extended arcs

Jas was planned since the beginning to close crow’s arc about his rose and his regrets about leaving her behind. It’s only when he’s made peace with losing her, has left his old self behind and is ready to face the battle and his future, that he gets his reward. He gets her back, in the strangest way

With Nanna, i just though nobody ever focused that there was an actual adult around during the whole adventure, Nanna would’ve spent a lot of time around john and jade, them being each others remaining family. So I tried to give her the role of a guardian, breaking a Little with this “orphaned children on their own” that all characters have.

Honestly I tried to make it as interesting as I could, sometimes I would take characters that didn’t have any screen time and think, what can they do? What’s in their mind at this moment that they could tackle in conversation? And with whom? Who else needs screen time?. And that’s how you get, Jake and Tavros bonding, Nepeta, Fefeta, Davepeta and Feferi ship-chat, Arquius telling Terezi and Karkat about Erisol, Hal comforting Eridan, ect.

It’s actually a really cool writing exercise I do sometimes. I grab two characters that have nothing in common, and write a conversation between them. What’s the common ground? Are their stories alike in some way? Do they have a common hobby or worry? It’s really cool because you find stuff about the characters you never paid attention to before

7. Unlikely ships

Tavros and Jane came from me wanting Tavros to be more assertive. In canon Vriska instructed him to not interact with the Alpha kids during those 6 months, but since this Tavros doesn’t listen to her because he took self-esteem lessons from Rufioh, I felt like he probably spent that time actually being a guide to Jane and then becoming Friends while solving puzzles, Jane being a fan of mysteries and Tavros probably missing his flarp days. Also theres a funny thing about Tavros and Jane, and it’s Tavros is supposed to represent Peter pan, while Vriska is supposed to represent both Tinkerbell (she dressed up like a fairy for him and later became an actual fairy) being attracted to him but being short fused when rejected, and also represent Captain Hook, Peter pan’s enemy (with her flarp persona and her ancestor being a pirate), but she’s not Wendy in any way, and I feel like Jane is, she’s the homeschooled girl, with blue eyes who looked through her window waiting to be free because her father wouldn’t let her out (also Wendy’s brother was named john who used big glasses). She’s a normal girl coming in contact with this fairy boy from a world of only children. Idk, makes sense to me. (besides, Wendy darling’s daughter, who Peter pan later takes on adventures too was named Jane, who also has blue eyes)

Erisol and Arquius was a crack ship that suddenly made sense, because it’s one-sided, and I feel like arquius is a caring person, he just has a difficult time socializing like a normal person. He’s just really happy to be a sprite and is pissed by Erisol’s insistence on wanting to explode.

Also, Arquius promising Fefeta that he wouldn’t break Erisol’s neck unless he had a good reason ( he kinda wanted to) and eventually having to break his neck for the good reason of god tiering him (he now doesn't want to and feels bad about it) was something I planned for months

Josh and dirk, i think it’s funny. Dirk wouldn’t have dated jade because she’s a girl, but Josh is a boy so it’s good, AND, he’s like a more direct, version of Jake who takes no bullshit.

8. The topic of transgender

Originally the second spaceship post retcon was supposed to arrive empty, or with only Davesprite, but I saw an opportunity to solve a division in the audience. Some people were interested in John remaining as he was, while others wanted to see June. Since John never showed any doubts about his gender in canon, it wasn’t in my original plans for June to make an appearance during CSAU, because the comic only covered the same period of time as canon. But when it came time to write the retcon I realized I had an opportunity to make them both coexist, making a shift in the timeline, but said shift being there both since the beginning and for the purpose of surviving the recon. Making June and Josh a reality since the beginning, so the timeline would survive the consequences of the two Egberts crossing paths post retcon.

It’s nice to hear you liked it, I know not everyone did. I tried to be respectful but at the same time be true to the nonsensical nature of canon Homestuck that makes timelines twist and change to the story’s convenience, making the events real but chaotic. Also since i knew John’s dad wasn’t coming back and Jane’s dad wouldn’t make it, June would be the last remaining conection to John’s old home and so John would be June's, relying on eachother for comfort when it comes to the loss of their father and home.

9. Eridan and Sollux

I want to cover Eridan’s redemption in the epilogue, since all we know is he grew as a person during his time in the bubbles, leading to his change of heart interacting with Sollux and Kanaya

10. Art style

Thank you! I like to give the characters a full range of emotions and for the surroundings to accompany that

No need to be sorry for learning through my art, in the end my style, like everyone else’s, is bits and pieces from other artists we’ve seen, admired and/or learned from. Just make sure to add your personal touch to make your artstyle trully yours

It’s true that by the end I reused more static panels for dialogue, both because there was a lot for the characters to say, not that much action left, and my battery was running low haha

11. The plot

I tried my best for the story to be a big butterfly effect steaming from crow’s decision to ascend, working towards the most possible outcomes like Crow getting grimdarked by the Condesce too, the sprites surviving because of Nanna and so on

I wanted this timeline to coexist with canon because I don’t like the idea of overwriting it, canon happened and was important, CSAU just happened to be taking place close by

12. Things you didn’t like

I do in fact not understand the character of Nepeta very well, I reread Homestuck in order to get the original troll's personality better, but Nepeta is a character I don’t get. On top of that, she doesn’t appear much in CSAU so didn’t have much time to develop her.

I do struggle with over explaining, I think is stems from not wanting the reader to be confused (it has happened on discord that people come and ask me what was going on in the story when i thought I had written it in a way people could understand with no problems), which leads to me explaining everything too bluntly sometimes, so the characters sometimes ramble TOO much, and I wish I could go back and reduce the dialogs, but that would involve going back to the page’s codes to delete certain pages and replace others, and also changing the programming for the page’s backgrounds, not to mention my computer crashes when I try to modify pages too far back, since they’re 4000 of them. It’s one of those things I can only learn from and try to do better in the next project

The character’s typing was a core part of Homestuck because it was mostly portrayed as blocks of texts and the quirks made it easy to know who was talking even with people having the same typing color. The reason I didn’t use them it’s simply because I could barely write good enough in English, let alone add quirks. My friend offered me to add the quirks at some point when we were revising the dialogs, but I declined because some people found it easier to read without them and I didn’t want to add another step to the render of the pages.

13. Favorite pages

I also cried with that Gamzee panel, I planned it for months and i waited a long time to draw those last panels, I’m glad they made people laugh

Haha, also yeah, the Strider reunion got really extended with so many extra striders. Davepeta, Crow and Hal making the reunion complete

Thank you for this message! i'll do my best to write a good epilogue (which by now is actually a secuel) and i hope you have a great day🌻🌻🌻

[incandescentflower]

You can always tell when the writing for two characters and their conflict is compelling because you start to see continuous fights break out about which character is "right."

But in the case of Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo in particular, it really feels like the entire point of this drama is being missed by a mile to engage in that kind of thinking.

It does remind me of that quote from Blueming that my mind comes back to from time to time.

About pain, it's an absolute thing for a person. It's not something you can compare. If I feel pain, then it is pain. No body can judge you.

Some very wise words about how pain is not something that can truly be compared. And I do think those ideas continue through this narrative as well, but with the nuance of what if it's the person who you love that hurts you because you are both trying to manage that pain.

I know for many people it comes down to how one person treats the other - either directly (Dohoe pushing on Juyoung, challenging him, trying to make it seem like he can cut off Juyoung because it doesn't matter) and indirectly (Juyoung keeping a relationship with Dohoe's father who was both their abuser, pushing him to confront things he isn't ready to confront, thinking he needs to protect Dohoe from himself by keeping the gym even when that is the opposite of what Dohoe says very directly).

It's interesting because I identify with Juyoung's way of dealing with this trauma more, but it doesn't make it the correct way. And I do feel like the story is trying to say that. The 12 year separation really emphasizes that you can't make someone else deal with their trauma on your timeline no matter how much you love them. Love isn't this magic balm. You can't save someone else. But love can be a brightness in the dark, love can be hope. It's a really beautifully nuanced message.

And when you love someone you can hurt them and be hurt by them. You have to be able to see outside yourself and listen to the other person's needs to be in a relationship. And sometimes you have to decide that loving that person is too harmful to you.

It's Dohoe we see struggling with this, thinking loving Juyoung might be too harmful to him, thinking him loving Juyoung is harmful to Juyoung.

Juyoung is not thinking of that harm so people want to protect him, but that is about his own issues he also needs to deal with. He is just as responsible for figuring out his boundaries and deciding what he can manage and what he can't. He has to communicate his truths to Dohoe. There is still so much that he has held back.

And we see him start to do it. We see Juyoung calling Dohoe out on not saying how he feels and retreating so quickly. We see Juyoung saying what he needs. We see them starting to communicate, starting to smooth some of those edges and we can only hope they keep doing that.

Juyoung apologizes to Dohoe, but it seems like it's for trying to push Dohoe too hard too fast. Dohoe is being very clear about what he needs and Juyoung is now finally listening.

It's like a quote from To My Star (another Hwang Da Seul drama) I think of often:

I really like people like you. People who have their walls up. They seem really strong.

Dohoe's shutting things out is what has helped him survive. You can't just open the flood gates up all at once. Dohoe's avoidance is his protection and you can't just bulldoze it down.

This is a dance of loving someone where their needs are in direct conflict with yours and trying to manage that and figure out how much you can accept a little less of them or give a little more of yourself and hopefully bit by bit you come to some place in the middle together.

[thrashkink-coven]

People ask me all the time why I’m not a Christian. Why would I possibly be pagan? I claim to know all this stuff about the Bible but I somehow don’t subscribe to it? Do I not believe in Jesus’ teachings?

You wanna know the real reason why I personally feel compelled to not be a Christian? It’s not because I disagree with certain laws or think that Jesus didn’t have any valuable teachings. Despite my differences in opinion on morality, things like being lgbtq, the role of a woman, the importance of witchcraft etc, I could get over all that nitpicky stuff if I felt truly inspired by the story.

There are only two real reasons why I don’t subscribe to the Christian doctrine

1. Return to a perfect past

I find it hard to conceptualize a God that refers to his people as his slaves and servants, I have a lot to say about the doctrine that is supremacy, which lays the foundation for Christian theology, but beyond that, this idea of “God is all good and the only reason anything negative ever happens is because Satan brought death and sin into the world” is actually a very interesting idea to me. Like no, evil and death isn’t natural at all you’re just so used to living in an evil world that you can no longer recognize the original creation. God tells us to turn away from the world because the world is no longer his perfect creation but an amalgamation of his creation with the evil of Satan and man.

I like this idea, but I also think it’s incredibly flawed. It’s typical for many religions to glamorize the ancient past, and believe that there is a perfect beginning.

I think about when my bf buys me roses, I immediately hang them out to dry and let them die. Somehow they seem more beautiful to me that way, in an eternal state of dead perfection, wilted and faded, but somehow still alive in some way. Death doesn’t do us part, I can appreciate them forever though death and beyond. I think about moldy bread, how disgusted it makes me, but how fascinating it is to view up close when you actually pay attention.

In a pre-sin/death world, dead, dried roses and moldy bread wouldn’t be a thing. Is a world without death perfect? Is eternal life greater than eternity in death? Is a painless world perfect to a masochist?

I think that ancient peoples romanticized the past for the same reason we do, they weren’t there. Somehow, it’s more comfortable to believe we fucked up somewhere along the way, and if we could just figure out what it was, we could return to that state of perfection.

One of my favourite stories is Paradise Lost. Within it, when Adam and Eve are banished from the garden of eden, there is a very powerful exchange between the two, wherein Adam says to Eve, despite our sins and the wickedness of the world, I will still love you. You are still the queen of eden to me. We still have each other. The true testament of love is being able to love even in the face of adversity.

Although tragic, I believe this is what humanity has always been doing. Perhaps we didn’t come from a perfect beginning, perhaps we crawled our way to the top of the evolutionary ladder with white knuckles. Perhaps the world has always been perfectly imperfect, and we have still managed to find this divine love along the way. I don’t see the point in desperately trying to go backwards, when these experiences have only made us stronger. The tragedy is the acceptance of cause and effect. Is suffering a perfect invention because liberation was born from it? Christianity says it’s not, that the cost of human suffering was not worth whatever we gained, that satan made an unnecessary and frivolous mistake. I struggle to conceptualize world in which the entirety of human history as it has played out has been a cosmological mistake.

I believe that we are children finding our way, slowly, very fucking slowly, but surely.

and this leads into my second reason.

I honestly don’t really have anything against Jesus Christ. In my mind he is an entirely neutral character, not because I don’t believe in his existence, but because if I believe he is real, I pity him more than anything else.

In my opinion, Jesus Christ’s sacrifice, though a very beautiful and interesting philosophical idea, did not save humanity, and did not set us free. It didn’t save the world and it does not provide us with the tools to save the world.

Within the Christian theology, no man can get to God except through Christ. This is because Jesus died for our sins, he payed the price so we could see salvation. God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that all those who believe in him may have eternal life. Christianity fundamentally operates on the idea that the sacrifice of the most pure, most innocent, is the necessary price to pay for the salvation of everyone. To deliver humanity from sin, the most virtuous human had to be sacrificed. Humanity had to essentially spiritually cannibalize itself, eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus to be cleansed. And I honestly, absolutely despise that idea.

I say I pity Jesus, not only because of the way his legacy has been bastardized and fetishized on a global scale, (Jesus was God but he was also a human, at one time he was a child. Imagine being a 10 year old Jesus and knowing the implications of your existence) but also because I don’t think his sacrifice saved the world, I don’t think it saved me. Spiritual salvation is a plan to bail everyone out after they die, after revelations. There is no plan to save this world because at least theologically, God does not have faith in humanity to save this world. Jesus’ plan is an escape plan, one that comes to save all the righteous while the wicked burn for eternity.

I disagree, and maybe it’s my naivety. I believe that we can save this world, not by casting out the wicked, but by collectively doing the basic human fundamental, just loving each other. The key to save the world has always been simple. Love has never been a popular movement. Every conflict in all of humanity would be resolved if we all saw each other as kin. Disentangling the systems of oppression and supremacy that have always rotten the world. That means fighting evil, that means tragedy and violence. But just as we have taught ourselves many doctrines over the centuries, I believe, or hope, with enough time, we can teach ourselves a doctrine of love and empathy. I believe most humans are capable of this. And I believe that we can have extra humanity to handle and disarm those that aren’t.

“but Jesus tried to do that and humans killed him!”

They killed Huey P. Newton too. We keep on fighting. Not because we want to be assured in death that we are good people. But because, if there is a chance for a world in which children can sleep on fields of grass and the words “war” and “hunger” are ancient memories, where trees whose names I know can grow as tall as the heavens and water is always clean, then I will fight my hardest to push the world towards that future. And if I die before I see it, then I hope you keep on pushing for me. That is the love that humanity has for itself, and there is no God that can do that for us.

The Bible says that God so loved the world that he gave his only son. I wish that God so loved the world that he came to fight alongside all his children, and didn’t give up until he had finally touched the heart of every human, made them understand the value of this world, the world we have right now, and the life we have right now before it is engulfed in flames. You, all powerful God, could not change the hearts of men? Because they refused you? Because they, in their ignorance, embraced the world that birthed them, and not the stranger that abandoned it? Shook it up and started over, again, because the mess was too ugly to clean up? I don’t believe you.

There are multiple times in the Bible where it says that humans are evil, and I simply don’t believe it. People are born with mental disorders and acclimate to trauma, but I do not believe that people are born evil, and I don’t believe in a God who lets his children burn. Whether that be in a fiery Hell or in the dark separation from light.

It is only through knowledge that we have disabled these beliefs in evil people. You aren’t possessed by demons, you have BPD. You’re not evil, you have autism. We can understand each other if we only take the time to try. And understanding is the one thing that humanity has always craved.

We are children, we are born without understanding and come to know the world as it interacts with us. We have the infinite potential to learn and that’s what makes us so special as a species. Humans, these insatiably curious creatures who will not stop until they have seen every star, turned over every rock, and documented every crevice of the ocean floor. What better creature to inhabit the earth, and who else to save it?

If Jesus died for my sins, thanks. I didn’t ask you to do that, and I’m not going to depend on it. If there truly is a God that is good, then I will prove myself to him though my actions and love towards his creation. And if he deduces that I am evil, I will not use the shedded blood of the innocent to rectify myself. I’m sick in dealing in blood, I don’t have to think in the same terms as a War God.

Idk, maybe that’s just the Luciferian in me.

[hiskillingjar]

First of all if this is a question you are not going to answer you can skip it.

If Mc got pregnant and told them she/they was pregnant, how would Ren Strade Law react?

g-d i've been on such a pregnancy kink lately. i blame it on the end of my twenties approaching and being in a relationship with a heterosexual cis man. anyway.

ren 🦊

ren would be absolutely fucking delighted oh my g-d

he might just cry. like full on

you do a test and he might start crying

he gets someone new to take care of (and depend on him), and your bond is going to get even stronger. why wouldn't he be delighted!

he'd also have a brain and be super gentle and. Normal Boyfriend with you while you were pregnant

because like obviously you can't stand some of the things you usually do, and he's not going to put your body through any stressors. you might have kind of an easy go of it, to be honest

he'd even take you to a hospital for check-ups and stuff, just to make sure there's nothing to worry about, in spite of the whole. kidnapping thing. what a nice guy!

and like. obviously he's gonna get a little eager about your body changing, your hips and tummy filling out (your breasts getting bigger)

seeing the effects of his "love" on your entire being, your body might make him go a little insane (positive)

that's fine though. you're pretty insane by the end of it too <3

written this with fox :)

law 🥀

law would freak OUT

oh my g-d they are not ready for that at all

idk law is so. on the precipice of death at all times, so the very idea of creating life with you would really make them panic

like. okay in the context of them in canon, they might lose themselves and accidentally kill you

(and open you up and cut out the foetus to put in a jar. freak)

but okay. you make a baby and SOMEHOW you manage to carry it to term

they still wouldn't really know what to do but may be a little more intrigued as time goes by

the human body changes so much during pregnancy, your bones shift, your organs move to make room for this...invasive thing inside you. that's pretty interesting

and they'd definitely be compelled by the idea of you sharing your body with them to such an intimate degree. you let them curl up inside you, be carried there, be assimilated to create a combination of the two of you...there's romance to that

things that freak you out can be pretty sexy!

strade 🔨

strade would honestly be in two minds about it

like on the one hand, he's a total hedonist who wants to do what he wants and works in porn and snuff. what business does he have having a child?

but then. he's a man (derogatory). the idea of claiming you, corrupting you, taking everything you are and creating a legacy for himself...that's compelling. that's interesting!

and what man can say no to big boobs and a heightened libido

and like if you're insane (like i am), the whole pseudo-housewife thing just has its natural conclusion in him knocking you up so. that may be where the story takes me

granted, he's an idiot and would treat you like he normally does, baby be damned (ren would be sooooo mad at him for it which just gives him more incentive to do it)

and he also wouldn't let you go to a hospital for check ups so like. hope you have a lot of pregnancy books, because you're doing this on your own babes

he MIGHT pay a dark web surgeon to deliver it though, american mary style. he doesn't really want you dead, after all

unfortunately he might be a pretty good dad.

he's got a lot of energy to keep up with a baby, he's interested in seeing it grow, he's interested in seeing how it develops.

might see it more as like. a neat houseplant or a dog, not really a human being though

[inkdemonapologist]

Do you prefer Bendy and the Ink Machine or Bendy and the Dark Revival

Gosh…. Tough to answer! I didn’t play either game, nor have I even watched them played all the way through (I just got obsessed and learned as much as I could indirectly). So my relationship to these games is kind of difficult to pin down. If gameplay is better in one than the other, I wouldn’t know. And I’ve talked about this before, but I think neither of them really have a well-told story – the shortcomings are just more obvious in Dark Revival.

TL;DR: the answer is Bendy and the Ink Machine. But I had to really think it over; at first I wasn't sure. After all, I’ve drawn a lot more game-canon art for Dark Revival than Ink Machine! And so much of the appeal of Ink Machine is the Promise of it, which sort of feels unfair to factor in – like, Bendy had a very compelling premise, but Dark Revival didn’t have the luxury of JUST being a cool premise – it had to try to deliver on BatIM’s promises, something BatIM itself didn’t really manage either.

Dark Revival in some ways embraced its human characters more than BatIM ever did (and had very nicely designed human models), which admittedly appeals to me a lot as someone who’s most invested in the humans and the history of this place. But... it’s also a game where that history no longer matters. BatIM’s story leaned heavily on the intrigue of discovering What Happened, while in Dark Revival, what happened in the studio back in the 30s and 40s feels strangely irrelevant? In BatIM I feel like that was the big appeal --

Like, yeah, Sammy’s a weird inky cultist, but the main reason he’s interesting is because we know he didn’t used to be like that. He was annoyed with the cartoon but working here Did Something To Him and now he’s become This. Susie is similar – Twisted Alice would be sort of a shallowly tropey evil lady and not much else were it not for the history of her, the way we strongly suspect that Susie became her out of desperation. And crucially, you’re never directly told these things; you discover the pieces and put them together. I think that was the part of BatIM that really captured me, and is also why I really liked DCTL and especially Illusion of Living when I read them – I think they fit in with that core of BatIM: unreliable documents from one point of view with pieces and discoveries to be held up and compared to other parts of the franchise.

And that is in fact the part that I feel Dark Revival deviated from: the story told and implied in the negative space between audiologs. One of the first notes you find in Dark Revival is from Sammy, and seems to pick up where BatIM left off – Sammy’s insistence that he’s loyal to the company, his casual mention that he speaks for both himself and Jack, are the same sort of Clues we got in Ink Machine, one side of the story that lets us compare with other things Sammy and Jack and Joey have said to figure out which bits are true, and what these relationships we can’t see must’ve been like. But after that, the audiologs and notes shift. It’s a subtle difference, because technically they still have characters talking about what happened in the past, but Dark Revival’s feel less like a story told in negative space and more like an explanation. The audio logs and notes are there to make THIS GAME, the story we’re in now, make sense.

Like, for comparison, the most interesting things that happened in Ink Machine’s past are things we put together: Posters of a cartoon character. An audiolog of Susie getting attached to voicing that character. An audiolog of a distraught Susie losing the part. A toymaker admitting the merch isn’t selling. A living cartoon who appears to be the character, but deeply messed up and desperate to be Perfect. An audiolog of Joey offering Susie a new opportunity to “become Alice.” The things we see happening in Ink Machine are just a piece of the story, the consequences that let us put together what happened in between.

What’s interesting in Dark Revival’s past? Joey had a daughter, created via magic and ink – which is revealed to us not from multiple perspectives, but from Joey playing a literal slideshow to directly explain it. A little Bendy was created, but nobody seems terribly interested in weighing in on that, there’s just an explanation about what was done to change the Ink Demon into Bendy. See the difference? It’s no wonder there’s so many theories about Joey’s Story Being Untrustworthy, because in Ink Machine, one side of the story would be seen as just one piece. We wait for the other side of the story and are confused when it never comes... but this wasn’t meant to be a piece of a story for us to discover – it was meant to be an explanation.

So, yeah, overall, I think Dark Revival introduced some concepts that were very strong and resonated with me (I love Memory Joey, and I love Joey's messy decision to raise a child) but ultimately my preference lies with Ink Machine. Putting together the pieces to search for the truth in the negative space between them was what really captivated me for so long, and I find I really miss it in the sequel.

[deconstructthesoup]

Okay, I had thoughts on forming a legit DBD Hadestown AU, and seeing as they kept me up literally all last night, it seemed only fitting that I actually write them down. So:

Charles and Edwin are, obviously, Orpheus and Eurydice respectively. However, rather than having just met and falling into a whirlwind romance, I decided that they're childhood friends who've met again and rediscovered feelings that they'd both been ignoring for a long time. Edwin is dedicated soley to figuring out why the world is dying and if he can help people while he can, and he hasn't really let himself rest, or even feel happy, in years---to the point where he feels that any good thing is too good to be true, even falling in love. Charles, on the other hand, has long since made the decision that someone has to be happy and keep spirits up in the trying times, and it might as well be him... even at the cost of his own health, as he works tirelessly on a song that he knows, despite all logic and understanding, will bring back spring again.

Crystal is Hermes, but she is also Hecate---she is the goddess of the in-between, magic, trickery, the crossroads, and restless souls... and that last part refers not only to the dead that she guides to Hadestown, but to anyone who chooses a life of wandering the road, from the honest messenger to the thieving highwayman. And yet, since the world has begun to die, she's been slowly slipping away from her role, choosing to spend her time among the mortals. This decision, of course, is helped by the fact that not only is Crystal one of the few gods who thinks there's more to the world dying than it just being "a reflection of mortal hubris," but that she's managed to make a friend in Charles. She's seen the way that music can change the world, after all, and knowing that there's at least one mortal who still has hope means that she can still believe.

Niko is a combination of Aphrodite and Dionysus---she's the goddess of love, revelries, happiness, and abundance, yes, but she's also the goddess of the mania that comes when all of those things are taken too far, and she's been dipping more and more into that side of herself as the world gets worse and worse. She wants to forget all the pain and suffering, and she gives herself and others the means to do so, even if it's all temporary. And while Niko does care for the mortals, and wishes that things could get better... deep down, she's lost a lot of her old hope, and even she can't disguise the fact that she's living with a broken heart.

Monty is Persephone, but he's also Apollo---he's the god of rebirth, prophecies, the stars and the earth, and new beginnings... and for what should be half of the year, he rules over the dead. He used to find just as much joy in watching over the souls as he did creating spring with Niko and charting the stars to bring prophecies to the mortals, but as Hadestown gets more punishing, more people die up above, and the world just gets worse, Monty grows even more bitter and closed off. He's unable to even properly enjoy his time on the surface, knowing full well that he won't stay for six months like he should... and the man he loves is wearing his patience thin.

The Cat King is Hades---and yes, somebody did make a very compelling argument for him being the Fates, but it works for the story, so just hang on. Once upon a time, he was happy just ruling over souls and managing the afterlife, and he cherished the time he spent with Monty as much as he could. But over time, wealth became added to his already vast domain, and his fascination for making and collecting things became an obsession... in no small part due to the fact that those six months spent away from Monty started to weigh incredibly heavy on him, and he eventually loses himself in his effort to replicate everything his husband loves about the upper world as it dies along with the way they used to feel about each other. Not to mention, his old empathy and compassion for the souls has hardened into cold indifference at best and a sick enjoyment of their suffering at worst. And all this change is making one person in particular very happy...

Esther is the Fates, but she's also a version of Demeter---the goddess of nature and all of its love and cruelties, and the one who spins everyone's path on her loom, punishing those who dare to stray from what she has determined for them. She's despised the Cat King for years, ever since he whisked Monty away to Hadestown, and she wholeheartedly believes that the reason the world is dying is only because he's been keeping Monty down there for too long, not because they've begun to fall out of love. So, when Esther spins a tale of a pair of lovers who are destined to end tragically, she sees it as an opportunity to finally push the Cat King and Monty to the breaking point---to save her son and the world, she tells herself, but mostly for revenge.

[jadelotusflower]

Rewatch: Return to Oz (1985)

I've been on a bit of an Oz kick recently, revisiting the original Baum books and of course anticipating Wicked coming out later this year (which I'm managing expectations for to avoid disappointment).

Return to Oz was a staple (and nightmare fuel) for many a millennial childhood, at the tail end of the "dark fantasy" era popularised by The Neverending Story and The Dark Crystal, the antithesis of the Technicolour, musical world of MGM's The Wizard of Oz - a dystopian future that reflects the fracturing of Dorothy's mind and her inability to reconcile the trauma of her previous Kansas-Oz journey.

Return lives in a sort of mirror world to the 1939 film, taking elements such as the ruby slippers (for which Disney had to pay MGM a hefty fee), but returning to the original illustrations for the character designs, and drawing inspiration from Baum's novels but not explicitly adapting them. It also returns Dorothy to a child rather than Garland's quasi-teenager, which is important as I feel Baum (an advocate of women's suffrage) had a keen interest in the empowerment of girls as the heroes of their own stories.

To evoke that other turn of the century fantasy classic, Dorothy is to early modern American folklore as Alice is to English, and if The Wizard of Oz is Wonderland, Return to Oz is Through the Looking Glass. In fact Return relies heavily on the mirror motif, not only literally, in the mirror that entraps Ozma, but Ozma herself as a mirror to Dorothy. Return also takes the Kansas/Oz dichotomy from the film in reflecting people Dorothy knows in Kansas to characters of Oz (a concept not found in the books), but while in Wizard it’s Dorothy’s trio of friends that are personified in the Scarecrow, Tinman, and Cowardly Lion, in Return it is her trio of antagonists from Kansas who appear in Oz - the Dr Worley/The Nome King, Nurse Wilson/Mombi, and the Orderly/Wheeler.

Her Oz friends in Return are instead pulled from inanimate objects - Ozma gives her a pumpkin that personifies in Jack Pumpkinhead, Tik-Tok resembles the "Electrical Therapy" machine with the face, and the gump...well, I guess they forgot about that one.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Fairuza Balk was just 11 but has a compelling screen presence - her Dorothy is troubled and serious, befitting the overall darker tone of the film. While she would go on to embody "witchy" energy in later roles, here there's a world-weariness yet innate strength to her Dorothy.

Aunt Em helpfully tells us it's been six months since the tornado and Dorothy can't sleep. Her body may be back in Kansas, but her mind remains in Oz.

The film doesn't really pick a lane between the "it was all a dream" of the 1939 film and the "Oz is an actual place" of the books, leaving it for the viewer to decide. We are told the old house was "lost" but that can suit either interpretation, same with the OZ key being either delivered by shooting star or the key to the old house (as Em posits). Dorothy's inability to sleep is either unresolved trauma from the tornado, or longing to return to her friends in Oz and/or sensing that there is trouble in Oz.

I'm much more sympathetic to Em as an adult - she has a husband unable or unwilling to finish building the new house, Dorothy won't stop rabbiting on about nonsense rather than helping with chores, and she has to borrow money from her sister to pay for medical treatment to try and cure Dorothy's insomnia.

Justice for Aunt Em! Played with grace by three-time Oscar nominee Piper Laurie (for The Hustler, Carrie, and Children of a Lesser God respectively).

Poor Toto doesn't get to come on this adventure, but hey, he's still around, guess Mrs Gulch didn't make good on her threat to have him destroyed (or she died in the tornado, which is probably likely given the Witch's fate).

Just a guy patronizing a child that the machine intended to surge electricity through her brain is perfectly safe because it has a face.

But there is a face in the machine - Ozma, stuck in the glass.

Nicol Williamson is our villain, with a fantastic voice. Mostly known for theatre and Shakespeare, you may remember him as Merlin from that other dark fantasy classic Excalibur, or as Little John from Robin and Marian.

Jean Marsh is our witch, complete with black gown and pointed sleeves - to continue our fantasy bingo she was Queen Bavmorda in Willow (which I've actually never seen) and Rose in the original Upstairs Downstairs (which I've never seen either). She'll always be creepy Mombi to me.

We see Ozma in the glass again before she appears in Dorothy's room, ethereal barefoot child gifting her a carved pumpkin because "it's Halloween soon". Okay, whatever you have to do to get there.

On that note, the screenplay was written by Gill Dennis (who would go on to co-write Walk the Line) and Walter Murch, who also directed. Murch was film school friends with George Lucas, and they wrote THX-1138 together - Lucas has a "special thanks" credit on this film. Murch worked steadily in sound design and editing (nominated for 10 Oscars with 4 wins), but after Return was a box office failure he never directed another film, which is a real shame.

Dorothy "combs" the pumpkins hair, which I find very charming.

The growing tension of Dorothy's isolation, being strapped to the gurney, the squeaking wheels, the far-off screaming: this is a horror film for children.

My sister and I used to re-create Ozma and Dorothy's escape on our grandmother's porch all the time.

Because we’re in a mirror, the streaming river of Kansas becomes the deadly desert of Oz - water, of course, also being a mirror and common pathway/doorway between worlds.

Billina the hen also appears, because Dorothy needs an animal companion, who can now talk because she is in Oz. The question is whether Toto could also talk, as all animals can in Oz, and simply chose not to (iirc in the books he didn't because he could "make himself understood" without words or something). The chicken puppetry is really quite good, I'll always prefer puppets/animatronics over cgi.

The voice of Billina is provided by Denise Bryer, who was the "junk lady" in Labyrinth (have we got that bingo yet?).

Another reflection - the packed lunch that was taken from Dorothy at the sanitarium in Kansas is returned to her in the form of a lunch pail tree in Oz, which leans towards the reading that Oz is a projection of Dorothy's mind as a way to cope and resolve/repair the traumas of her Kansas life.

Dorothy comes across her old house that is seemingly not in Munchkinland, the broken remains of the yellow brick road nearby. How much time has passed in Oz? Since everyone was turned to stone it could be hundreds of years and we're in a Narnia situation - at least long enough for a forest to grow where there once was a munchkin town square.

Glinda is conspicuous by her absence - probably because the plot couldn't happen if she was around.

Also absent are any stone munchkins which has very dark implications - the Emerald City still has ruins and stone inhabitants, but Munchkinland has been completely obliterated.

lol, Dorothy runs to the Emerald City in literally minutes, a journey that previously took half a film.

Sleep well, kids!

If we go with the interpretation that Oz is a manifestation of Dorothy's mind (maladaptive daydreaming?), it is interesting how she projects people and objects from her real life into her fantasy life - obviously her threats in the sanitarium become the villains, but the Electric Shock machine becomes Tik-Tok, her erstwhile protector. In this, she transforms a threat into an ally, and yet much is made that he isn't, and cannot be, "alive."

Many of the elements of this film - Billina, the Wheelers, Tik-Tok, the Nome King, and the princess with a hundred heads - came from Ozma of Oz, while Ozma herself, Jack Pumpkinhead, and the witch Mombi (combined in this film with Princess Langwidere) originate in the earlier The Marvellous Land of Oz, with a different backstory.

Oh to be a wicked witch, playing a mandolin, in a gilded, mirrored palace.

I enjoy this costume! Reflective of the high structured sleeves of nurse but sharp to emphasise the danger Mombi poses, and with the same mechanical accents/coloiur scheme as the Wheelers

Those cabinets full of heads are still so creepy. The way they watch Dorothy - are they alive and aware the whole time? Horrifying.

Jack Pumpkinhead was voiced by a young Brian Henson (who also acted as puppeteer).

I always used to fast-forward the scene where Dorothy steals the key and gets chased by headless Mombi as a kid, it was just too tense.

I mean maybe this isn't scary to kids today, but it sure freaked the fuck out of me. Especially with all of those heads screaming in their cabinets.

But how exactly was zombie Mombi snoring without a head?

Interesting that the cabinet with Mombi's original head is the only one without transparent glass, but instead has a mirror. Her original head is also kept in cabinet 31, which was Dorothy's room in the sanitarium. As a kid I was always dead set that Oz was real and Dorothy really went there, but now I'm leaning more towards Oz as a manifestation, or at least a world directly influenced and constantly adapting based on Dorothy's experiences. Was she unable to sleep in Kansas because she knew Oz was in trouble, or was Oz in trouble because of her mental discord?

"If his brain's run down, how can he talk?" "It happens to people all the time Jack!" is a nice callback to "Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking don't they?"

In which we strain the metaphor.

But all these mirrors also serve a story purpose as well as a metaphorical one - the mirror world is where Mombi has trapped Ozma, so she can look on every surface and see her victory. The mirror is also a connection with the real world, and how Ozma can reach Dorothy and draw her back to Oz. Mirrors are reflections, but they are also doorways, as we see in this very scene as Ozma directs Dorothy to the right passage to get back up to the tower.

We also get another Dorothy/Ozma parallel, in which she becomes a surrogate mother to Jack in place of Ozma, his creator.

There's almost some social commentary in the Nome King's grievances: "All the previous stones in the world are made here in my underground dominions...so imagine how I feel when someone from the world above digs down and steals my treasures? All those emeralds in the Emerald City really belong to me. I was just taking back what was mine to begin with." But of course he didn't just take back the emeralds, he turned the populace to stone or into inanimate objects so that does undercut his point a bit.

Her descent visually recalls (deliberate or not) Alice's fall down the rabbit hole in Wonderland. The VFX are pretty rough though.

Dorothy points out that he has so much, implying perhaps he could share, and the Nome King retorts "that's not the point." It is the point in later books, where under Ozma's leadership the Emerald City is essentially a utopian communal living society.

She also points out that the Scarecrow didn't take the emeralds rather they were there when he was made king, but the film is uninterested in exploring the culpability around generational wealth and repatriation of cultural property.

But it's interesting how much the Oz story revolves around powerful objects and theft and/or appropriation of them. Glinda steals the Witch of the East's ruby slippers and gives them to Dorothy, who then steals the Witch of the West's broom to give to the Wizard, Mombi steals Ozma, someone stole the emeralds from the Nome King, who steals them back, Mombi steals heads, Dorothy steals the Powder of Life, etc etc

At this point the Nome King is merely a face in the stone, but when he comforts Dorothy he starts to takes a more humanoid rock form, with a hand to reach out to her.

Is his sympathy genuine or feigned? I'm going with the latter, since he manipulates her into playing the "guessing game" to try and get the Scarecrow back.

Worst production of Starlight Express ever.

When I was a kid I always wanted to try the limestone pie and hot silver drink, but now it looks super gross.

The Gump chose…poorly.

The Nome King making points again - Dorothy and co didn't ask what would happen if they got it wrong, even Tik-Tok only brings it up after the Gump has already gone in. But they press on in order of most expendable, Jack (with Billina hiding in his head) and then Tik-Tok.

As each get turned into ornaments, we see the Nome King become more and more humanised in his rock form - a nice subtle indication that his motives aren't purely spite and he gains power from turning living (or living-adjacent) things into inanimate objects, the opposite (mirror) of Dorothy's power in turning inanimate objects into living things in the journey from Kansas to Oz. If Dorothy had chosen wrong too, he says he would have become completely human - would he have been able to access the path to the human world? Was his goal to eliminate Oz, the fantasy world, in favour of the human world, much like Worley was obsessed with harnessing electricity and the "modern" world?

It's revealed that Chekhov's ruby slippers that Dorothy earlier told Dr Worley had fallen off on her way back to Kansas the first time were found by the Nome King, and their power enabled him to conquer the Emerald City.

It's unclear whether the rubies were first mined from the Nome King's caverns, but Dorothy really can't complain given the shoes were magicked off the feet of a dead woman and onto her own.

I'm actually surprised that they kept the ruby slippers in given the license fee they had to pay, since nothing really turns on their inclusion, other than the Nome King's offer to send her home with them, allowing Dorothy the choice between her own safety and the lives of her friends, of course the parallel to Worley offering the ECT to wipe her mind of Oz. I do like the callback, but it didn't need to be the ruby slippers rather than some other power the Nome King had.

Hee, the Nome King's little stone feet kicking out of his stone robe with the ruby slippers is so camp.

It is interesting through to think about the chain of events - Dorothy, eager to get back home, lets go of the ruby slippers, they fall into the Nome King's hands, he uses them to conquer Oz and install Mombi, who has imprisoned Ozma in the mirror (at some point long in the past). The fracturing of Oz influences Dorothy's mental state which drives her to Worley, where Ozma is able to contact her through the mirror world and bring her back to Oz, depose the Nome King/Mombi, and restore Ozma to her throne. It's quite neat writing.

There's an interesting green/red dichotomy - red seems to represent the witch's power, the ruby slippers that originally belonged to the Witch of the East, Mombi's ruby key, fire/red smoke being used by the Witch of the West, and even pink was the colour associated with Glinda in the 1939 film, while green represents Oz in the ornaments they turn into, the Emerald City, the Gump is green, etc. Both rubies and emeralds are present in the Nome King's costuming, perhaps indicating that the raw items did come from his dominions.

When Dorothy chooses correctly, the Nome King reverts to his claymation rock form, and the room turns red. I don't think it's explicitly green=good and red=bad (the Witch of the West had green screen after all), but both are associated with power.

I always used to fast forward this sequence as well. The Nomes coming out of the walls? *shudder*

The Nome King, felled by a classic egg poisoning.

Dorothy liberates the ruby slippers from another dead body, lol.

At the celebration in Oz, the costuming does lean heavily into either red or green - so maybe that was just standard complementary colour palette and I'm reading too much into things.

We get a nice long pan over the mirrored ceiling of the parade, just to really hit the point home.

Oh hey, the Wheelers are here too! All is forgiven I guess? Except Mombi, she gets to be paraded about in her cage by the woman whose heads she stole. Hey, at least she's able to smirk about her villainy.

Dorothy turns down queenship of Oz but wishes she "could be in both places at the same time" - the ruby slippers grant her wish and Ozma is released from the mirror.

Ozma's backstory: "Her father was king of Oz before the Wizard came. Ozma grew up as Mombi's slave, but when the Nome King promised Mombi thirty beautiful heads if she kept Ozma a secret, she enchanted her into the mirror." The first part is the much the same in the book, although there we get some interesting gender-bending stuff where Mombi transforms her into a boy name Tip and she doesn't discover her true nature until much later.

Dorothy gives Ozma the ruby slippers, combining the power of green and red (I'm just going with it now), therefore healing the kingdom of Oz from the discord first created when the Wizard arrived (in the book he was the one who gave baby Ozma to Mombi), and drawing Ozma's real world counterpart Dorothy to fix it by deposing the Wicked Witches and then the Nome King. But with Ozma returned, there is no need for Dorothy to remain in Oz, the two sides of herself are split and no longer warring inside her.

Billina however remains, to be Ozma's animal counterpart to Dorothy's Toto.

As a kid I coveted this gown, and I still kind of dig the headdress. Well, the OZ circlet anyway.

I also acted out the pulling Ozma from the mirror scene many times.

Although kind of a bitch move on Ozma's part to send Dorothy back before she could give her proper goodbyes. It's like, off you pop, thanks for freeing me but this is my kingdom now.

Dorothy wakes up beside the river (with a close up of a reflective pool of water/Dorothy's eye), and again, this could either be her actually returned by Ozma, or her simply waking from her delirium.

But the real world counterparts have met the same fate as their Oz reflections - Worley died in the fire and Wilson is carried off in a police cart.

Henry, after the shock of almost losing Dorothy, is motivated to finish building the house, and Dorothy is able to look back fondly at Oz through her reflection, but has learned to keep it a secret and not let it consume her life.

Her trauma is resolved, Oz is at peace; Dorothy and Ozma can live contentedly in parallel, with a connection between both worlds.

This is also a nice callback to the books, where Ozma would check in on Dorothy once a day through her magic mirror to see if she needed her assistance.

Maybe it's just my nostalgia goggles, but this film really holds up for me! Yes the effects are a little dated and it's on the darker side for kid's fare, but overall the story and acting is strong, there's meaty subtext around the importance - but necessary limits - of fantasy as escapism, it unequivocally centers girls/women as the heart of the story with their own agency and harnessing their own power. It's well worth the rewatch.

What do you think? Am I blinded by nostalgia? Reading way too much into a kids movie? Am I just rambling into the void here?