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ellesliterarycorner · 2 years ago

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Writing Your Second Draft

The infamous second draft. Allegedly it’s supposed to be slightly easier to get through than it’s little brother the terrible first draft. I normally don’t feel very good about any of my WIPs until at least the third draft, and honesty, in some aspects writing the second draft can be more difficult than first drafts. At least for me, first drafts are harder to write, but second drafts feel like they have all of these expectations on them. Making it even harder, there’s so much advice out there about writing first drafts, but not nearly as much, imo, out there about writing second drafts. So, here are a few tips that helped me writing the second drafts of my novels.

Did You Take A Nice Long Break?

I think we’ve all heard of the advice that you need to take a nice long break after you finish your first draft. Some people say a week or two is enough, but I finished the first draft of my current wip in September of 2020 and I started the second draft in December/January. Taking that long of a break worked really well for me. I didn’t write anything related to that wip during that time, but I did write other things sparingly. I focused mostly on reading, and I rewatched both of the tv shows that inspired my wip (Game of Thrones and the Tudors) to remind me why I wanted to write the story so much in the first place. Oftentimes, your first draft will be a hot mess. It’s good to take a nice long break and remember why you started to write it before you come back to it with fresh eyes and a rested mind. Taking longer breaks will also allow you to see things from a different angle. I had a birthday in that time period, and I think growing up a little definitely allowed me to become a better writer.

What Was Past Elle Thinking?

No, seriously, what was she thinking? I ask myself this question almost daily, and not just with things relating to writing, unfortunately. Reading through first drafts can be a little bit of a humbling experience, and by a little bit, I mean a lot a bit. First drafts are like chaotic little toddlers, and a second draft is supposed to turn them into like a semi-coherent five year old, not completely perfect, but way more understandable. I think a lot of people get discouraged during the second draft process because it often requires a lot of changes from the first draft. First drafts just get your ideas down. They create some semblance of a beginning, middle, and end. From the first draft to the second draft, I cut whole chapters, deleted characters, and almost 10,000 words which I was really upset about, but it’s also completely normal. Going through the whole thing the first time can be a little overwhelming. Take a little bit more of a break if you feel yourself getting too overwhelmed. But, don’t be afraid to make the big changes and improvements that your story may need. That’s what second drafts are for.

Confusing Continuity Errors

It’s the way I have a semi-major plot point revolving around a character being allergic to almonds, and she’s literally eating almonds the first we meet her. I also have described a character’s eye color at least seven different ways in three chapters. Those type of continuity errors are extremely common in first drafts, and unfortunately, in some published books as well. Whole editors have the job to go through books about to be published in order to make sure there aren’t any glaring continuity errors. Before I even start changing anything in my first draft, I simply read through it with another blank Google doc on spilt screen. I write down anything that I personally find confusing, things that are just plain wrong, or contradicting facts or details that could lead to plot holes or continuity errors. That gives me a little bit of a gameplan before I start changing things, and it’s something relatively easy to start with.

Hills Not Mountains

Going off of that: make a gameplan. Another reason I find people get discouraged is that they jump into their second draft without a clear goal in mind. Unfortunately, just making it better than your first draft isn’t a clear goal. It’s vague, and you’re bound to get frustrated that way. Breaking up your second draft edits into smaller hills instead of an 100k mountain, makes everything that much more feasible. For example, I knew that all of my fight scenes were extremely bad because as we’ve established, I’m not good at writing fight scenes. Starting out with all of those scenes gave me something clear to work on. After that I worked on making sure the plot and the climax went together because they absolutely did not. Setting smaller goals to address each element of my first draft definitely helped me divide and conquer all of the important parts of my story, so that they could come together in a cohesive way. Once all these elements have been solidified individually, you can piece them together in a way that makes your second draft feel more manageable.

Get Some Eyes On It

As terrifying and nerve-wracking as it can be, sometimes you just have to get some outside eyes on your work. Some people like to leave this to later drafts because I know my first drafts make it seem as though I can’t write, but I like to do it between all of my drafts. Especially between the first draft and the second draft because up until that point I have been the only person reading my work. Sometimes that can make us a little blind to certain issues in our writing. I have always been a character over plot reader, and I am most definitely a character over plot writer. I have a really hard time deleting character that need to go, and having someone else point out what I already know is true forced me to face the truth. I send my best friend almost all of my first drafts, and she sends me back a list of all the things she liked, she didn’t like, and things that confused her. I know my story, so sometimes I don’t see everything that’s confusing. Having outside eyes from someone who doesn’t know my story as well as I do, always helps immensely.

Elle’s Bonus Tip: Retype It

Retyping your story is incredibly helpful, imo. It takes forever, but to me it’s always been worth it. I take my first draft and open up a blank Google doc in spilt screen, then I go and retype every single word. Okay, not every single word, if I know I really like a scene, I’ll copy paste it. But, I go and retype almost every single word. It forces me to get back to the basics of my story, and it forces me to notice every little thing. I would almost consider it akin to reading an essay or something aloud before you submit it. It forces you to kind of see the story naked for lack of a better word, and seeing your story this way forces you to look at elements you normally wouldn’t see even with close editing. It’s definitely not for everyone because it takes forever, and it’s a massive undertaking, but I definitely would recommend it if you can!

#writers on tumblr #writers #writer #writer tips #writer things #writing tip #writing tips #writing advice #writing #writing resources #writing related #writers of instagram #writers of ig #writersofinstagram #writersofig #writers ref #writing ref #writing reference

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queenaeducan · 2 years ago

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tagged by @skyeventide!

Last song: I’ve listened to songs on shuffle but ngl I don’t really remember which and I cannot be bothered to go get my phone and see which last Spotify song I put on. HOWEVER, I do remember the other day talking about Zelda music and going onto Youtube to seek out the Deku Palace theme b/c it’s one of my fave Zelda tracks.

Last show you watched: I watched episode 8 of HoTD on my last day off. After episode five I was kinda sad b/c I was enjoying the first half of the season so much more than this one, but this episode was good. The dynamics between the characters were at their best here. The time skips are so strange b/c on the one hand I wish we saw more of the stuff that was skipped over, but it is the first time I’ve been interesting in reading (and writing) Westeros fanfic and due in large part to those jumps.

Last movie: Joly and I rewatched the LotR series on New Year’s Eve. They continue to be special films that I appreciate every time I experience them.

Currently reading: I’m about half-way through rereading Game of Thrones. Been in a bit of a writing slump for a variety of reasons and revisiting the world and story has helped me at least think about writing. I love how GoT can be quite concise in its telling and one thing I’ve really been struggling with when it comes to long fic is not deliberating over moments too long. Also even tho I know how it ends I always read it hoping Ned will get out of dodge. It could still happen.

Current obsession: I’m kind of ping-ponging between ASoIaF and Legend of Zeldla. I’ve sort of run out of ASoIaF content to watch or read until I’ve finished HoTD so I’ve been watching a playlist of Zelda theories on my work breaks.

tagging @rosella-writes, @ziskandra, @dreadfutures, @bluewren, @oxygenforthewicked, @delicatefade

#tas talks

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elle9095 · 5 years ago

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So yesterday The Boyz’ Checkmate performance on Road to Kingdom completely blew my mind and it's been all I can think about for like 15 hours so I figured writing basically a dissertation explaining what I saw in their performances is going to help me make sense of life again.

The narrative that I got from the performances tells a story about the power struggles of monarchy, both literally and metaphorically, when you consider the industry. It’s also the concept of the show, giving these bands a chance to play in the same league as the so called kpop royalty.

It like the Boyz were on a show called Road to Kingdom and decided to make it literal.

First performance: Hwarang/ Sword of Victory

I think no one could've imagined what was to come when they made this performance. It was meant as an intro to the group so it was short and impressive and I’d say that it sort of set the style of their performance but not yet the general concept that has developed over the show.

Also I just learned that hwarangs were entertainers before they became a legion of warriors and later an institution, so they're basically old-timey boy groups turned soldiers.

How quaint when you consider the later performances.

Second performance: Danger

This is where it all started I guess. They went with the thieving concept of the song, decided to take inspiration from their first performance and bam now they’re stealing crowns and climbing walls.

Third performance: Reveal (Catching Fire)

So obviously referencing the Hunger Games which is a survival game but essentially a story of revolution.

Fourth performance: Heroine

This one's a bit different since it's a collab but yeah the whole performance is basically a person's journey to center stage, which is usually occupied by the winners/royalties.

Fifth performance: Quasi una fantasia

This one didn't look like it was going to fit the narrative with it being so ethereal and so hopeful, what with the branch slowly blooming, like a good thing coming to fruition, but this is the euphoria after you've made it and they sort of tell you in the title that yes this is basically a fantasy.

Final performance: Checkmate

This one is fucking insane okay? They start off with a deja vu: Yonghoon's with the hypnotizing watch again and you notice the blooming tree in the background but there's something uncanny and the watch stops, you get flashbacks of Juyeon taking down the king, wearing his crown, Q stealing the crown, stealthily sliding and passing it on to Sunwoo who seems like he's finally going to ascend to the throne and next thing you know he's falling and waking from a bad dream…

At this point I was already cursing and gasping and having a heart attack and they haven't even started singing. And it's like everything they've done so far was just a dream, the game is on let's start all over again.

And isn't it exactly like that? Because a game of thrones (though not explicitly referenced) is exactly just that: a game. You come to power but how long is that going to last? Sunwoo’s (literal) fall from power lasted a breath. You win first place on a music chart this week, you start all over again next week. And The Boyz would know that, having spent the the first weeks on top, but it only took a single performance in one episode for them to drop to third place.

And the chess concept is PERFECT. Chess is a game of war and strategy and the big picture and that's all they've been doing on this show: they've stolen, tricked, rebelled, and dreamed before they finally checkmate. All these performances make up one big picture and I don't know if they've planned this from the start but it’s fucking genius.

The Boyz are so good at coming with a concept and sticking with it, they make a song called checkmate and whoa they have a chess concept now, they have black and white costumes, dancers dressed as pawns, chess board effect and choreo, chess piece props… Which all seemed like obvious artistic choices but there's always MORE.

Like can we talk about that fucking table? I was like 'where did they find a three-way chess table omg it's gorgeous' and then someone's dancing on it and you see the glass tube thingy under the table and MOTHERFUCKER ITS A FUCKING CHESS HOURGLASS

Also for someone to be able to dance on it they flipped the table upside down and it's either like turning back time (rewind sound effect at the beginning) or starting all over again, but also I was like 'huh the tables have turned' and then 'OH FUCK OFF'

And it's all in the details in the performances, the small things that they reference, the same imagery that comes back again and again, every time I rewatch a performance I notice something I didn't before.

There’s the flower, something that's fragile and fleetingly beautiful, also the 'hwa' in hwarang. The moon, which is always changing, like an illusion, the full moon referenced in Reveal, which originally had a werewolf-y concept.

The fire, the sword, all associated with war and power. Even the tricks and optical illusions. The chess, the crown, the king. Everything came together so perfectly in that final performance and wrap up so nicely like HOW IS THAT SHIT EVEN REAL

I love how they have all the names of the song in the title cards (Thieves, Reveal, Paradise, Checkmate) and I’ve been thinking about the lyrics 'the show must go on' and 'the game starts again' and how Sisyphean it all is.

And it's almost like in the end they understand how futile the pursuit of power is but is still pushed by their drive to thrive for better, and in the end they realize being king isn't winning the game. Chess isn't about being king, you don't have to be king to win the game.

Their final card says 'As long as the moon shines, the king of all games is the Boyz'. They don't say 'we're the king' they say 'we're the king of all games'. It’s like 'yeah we're good at this and we're ready to go at it again' be it the hunger games, a game of thrones, or a game of chess.

DAMN THESE PHILOSOPHICAL REBELLIOUS BOYZ

These performances are inspiring and stimulating on so many levels, I mean yeah, the concept is mind-blowing, and of course the performances are just (literally) breathtaking but we haven't even talked about the technicalities.

Yes, I know these performances are great but more importantly I love how self-aware they are. They really seized the opportunity to do the kind of performance that they couldn't be possibly allowed to do anywhere else.

You can hardly do these things for a live audience, since so much rely on the camera work. You can't do this on music shows or music awards where people only care about the more famous groups.

And while these performances were created with the camera in mind, they still make the watching experience so incredibly live by making the performances so risky, upping the stakes to insane levels, and I don't just mean having to catch flying weapons or falling members, but like having a crazy domino choreography where one member's misplaced limb could ruin the whole shot, or using cool props and tricks that could so easily go wrong.

Like the branch that Juyeon was so upset about? The whole trick relied on everyone doing the right thing with the right prop at the right time right place TWICE all the while making it look effortless and seamless.

Can you imagine what kind of crazy you have to be to come up with that?

I personally think that mistake was a perfect imperfection when you look at the whole picture: something not quite right in this otherwise perfect dream that proved to be a mere fantasy, too good to be true.

Watching the Boyz on Road to Kingdom was pure delight, and for people like me who get off on the thrill of live experience, performances like these are SUCH A TURN ON. And as a writer I'm just a sucker for conceptual plots, unexpected twists and experimenting with structures.

I’m currently torn by a mix of feelings: excitement for Kingdom, anxiety about the safety of the performers, dread of the inevitable end of the show. It kills me a little to think that we'll probably not see this kind of performances as much. That they don't get to perform like this again: go all out and not just tell a story but a fucking epic that will make Bertolt Brecht cry.

I hope they get their own comeback specials or that the company does like OK Go and makes all these crazy fun performance music videos. At this point I don't even know how to organize my thoughts to express my love for the creative team behind the productions, like someone there's got imagination to spare and I want to pick their brains so bad.

I didn’t know anything about this group before my sister showed me their Danger performance clip, and I’m 98% sure I’d never have discovered this group have they not gone on RTK but holy fuck am I glad that this happened because this is probably one of the best things that came out in 2020, making this disaster of a year almost bearable.

So yeah, that's what I thought about the Boyz performances. Thank you for coming to my ted talk or whatevs

Also I have a second theory that the whole season is just Sunwoo getting over his fear of heights through exposure therapy.

#road to kingdom #the boyz rtk #the boyz #rtk spoilers #kpop boy group #rtk checkmate #juyeon #sunwoo #q #yonghoon

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theartofimaginaryfriends · 4 years ago

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Chapter 7 - Movie Night

Fic series: The Final Straw (HP/PJO Crossover Fic)

Premise: Weekly movie night is kicked off with a classic: Mean Girls.

Masterlist

Taglist: @ilvermornymascot, @lukecastellandeservedbetter, @eva-blog-p

word count: 1,343

A/N: We're back to posting at weird hours of the night! It's currently nearly 2AM and that's on having to rewatch Mean Girls for this and ALSO doing that at a weird hour. My staying up throuh the night thing is going to bite me in the ass on Tuesday where I'll likely sleep through the whole day and then deal with around 50 happy birthday facebook messages from family I never talk to. Which, by the way, I'm 20??? On Tuesday??? What??? On that note, I hope y'all enjoy the chapter XD

By Friday evening, the fighting had subsided enough that Nova wasn't meditating every five minutes, and she didn't feel as tired by the end of History of Magic. For once, she didn't feel the need to nap while the Professor droned on about the Salem Witch Trials. Besides, the amusement she got watching her Ilvermorny peers' jaws drop as Hermione raised her hand after every question was enough entertainment to keep the class interesting. She wasn't surprised to see her friend had done research on North American history.

The only thing on her mind at the moment was the movie night. Instead of the usual downtime spent in the Pukwudgie common room, she was in The Great Hall organizing the space and setting up the seating areas. "Are you sure this is going to work?"

"Lucas, for the millionth time this week, yes," Nova answered her friend, exasperated.

"If we can do this on a laptop, we can easily utilize the projector," Cree added, looking up from the muggle technology. "And no I'm still not going to tell you how we managed to get this here."

Lucas rolled his eyes and proceeded to help with the set up by moving the tables to the sides of the room. The three students fell silent as they did their tasks, and listened to the music playing on Cree's laptop through the aux cord. "This is looking great!"

"Thanks, Professor!" Nova smiled at the Headmaster as he admired their handy work.

"Have you picked out the movie, yet?"

"Mean Girls," Cree held up the DVD. "It's a classic."

"Ah, yes," Tahamente chuckled and made his way to the podium. "I hear students reference that film often."

Soon after the set-up was fully finished, the student body began to pile in. Percy, Harry, Ron, and Hermione joined Nova in the section she claimed. "Should we be concerned about monsters?"

"Annabeth didn't tell you?" Nova questioned. She explained how technology actually worked within both the wizard and demigod worlds. Her friends all looked at her like she was insane, especially Hermione who was insistent on arguing.

"But in Hogwarts: A History, it's stated that it goes haywire around magic!" She went off on a tangent about the experiments that wizards have done to test the theory.

"How often does this happen?" Percy leaned over and whispered to Harry and Ron.

"All the time," Ron answered. "It's hard to get her to stop."

"Almost impossible, really," Harry added.

Hermione ignored her friends and continued on the rant as students continued finding spots with their friends. Once everyone was settled, the Headmaster addressed the school. "As you may have seen on the bulletin boards in your common rooms, tonight will be a bit different than usual."

"A bit?" Nova heard from a student nearby.

"To help us all get used to each other's company, our Head Boy and Girl organized a no-Maj movie night," he explained. "In a moment, pizza and snacks will appear on the tables and everyone will be free to grab their dinner."

The student began to whisper amongst themselves, most sounding excited. Nova glanced over at Draco, who had a bewildered look on his face. "What the hell is a movie?"

"It's like the magical portraits, except there's a plot," Nova explained.

"What?"

"Draco, don't worry about it," Harry said, quickly. "You'll find out soon enough."

"Until then, I have an announcement to make." Nova's attention was brought away from Harry and Draco, and back to the Headmaster as he continued his speech. "Professor McGonagall, Professor Chiron, and I have decided to host a championship."

"If this is anything like-" Harry whispered to himself.

"It will be modelled after the legendary Triwizard Tournament," Tahamente hushed the crowd again as the students continued talking amongst each other. Harry and Nova shared looks of disdain. "We have decided to name it The Chimera Games. The rules are simple: twenty teams of two, and it must consist of one wizard and one demigod. There will be no age restriction for the competitors."

"Is that safe?" Hermione seemed worried.

"No, but neither is the life of a demigod," Annabeth said. "A tournament is nothing to us."

"To enter, you will write your name onto a slip of paper, and drop it into the Fountain of Fate." The murmurs started up again, much to the headmaster's dismay. "When it is time for the choosing ceremony, the fountain will reveal two names for each team. The fountain will be in the Entrance Hall tomorrow morning, and everyone will be free to enter until dinner on Sunday. Once the teams have been chosen, I will give out further information. For now, please enjoy tonight's festivities."

Nova attempted to mask her worry, not wanting to talk about what had happened in fourth year. Harry shifted so he sat next to her. "Did you know about this?"

"I had no idea," Nova shook her head. "Do you also have a bad feeling about this?"

"I have a feeling that if I don't willingly enter my own name, someone will do it for me," he scowled.

"I'm sorry, Harry."

"You have nothing to apologize for." Harry gave his friend a small smile and squeezed her shoulder. "We'll talk about this tomorrow, now is not a good time."

"Okay," Nova agreed and smiled back. As worried as she was about the prospect of a tournament, Harry was right. The movie nights were meant to be fun. Dwelling on the news wouldn't benefit anyone.

"Are you okay, Nova?" Cree asked, taking a seat next to her.

"Yeah," she nodded, taking a plate he held out to her. "Just zoned out."

"You better not do that during the movie," he joked. "I'm not about to quote it on my own."

"I would never do that to you," Nova feigned offence. The movie began playing when everyone was settled back in their seats. The two tried to be as quiet as possible as they talked through it, failing at their favourite scenes.

The Head Girl was mostly entertained by Malfoy watching the movie, and Harry quietly explaining to him that shouting at it would do no good since they don't respond. "That makes no sense."

"A movie is pre-recorded," Harry couldn't contain his grin, clearly enjoying Draco be clueless for once. "Which means the characters on screen are played by actors, and they can't hear or talk to you."

"But, how?"

"We might want to save the full explanation for later, boys," Nova teased.

"Says the one saying almost every line," Harry shot back, good-naturedly.

"That's different!" Cree and Nova chorused.

"Do the two of you ever shut up?" One of Lou Ellen's friends, Macie, glared at them.

"No, they don't," Lou Ellen answered her friend and winked at her sister.

Over the course of the movie, the group teased Draco as he kept yelling at the screen and expected a response. Cree and Nova noticed other students quoting the movie as well, making the experience more fun. Movie Night seemed to work in bringing everyone together. Even the wizards that had just been introduced to a movie were enjoying themselves.

"All I'm saying is Cady giving out the crown is unrealistic!" Malfoy ranted as they walked to the campfire. "I mean, you can't just break it in half, that's not how royalty works!"

"How would you know?"

"Do you really think that breaking a crown into pieces and handing it to others is going to make them royalty?" He continued. "No! Because that wasn't accurate."

"Why do I have a feeling he's got his own throne at home?" Percy whispered to Nova.

"That wouldn't surprise me." Nova laughed.

When they arrived at the fire, Nova noticed the whole school was there. It was quite the change from the small groups they've had all week. The flames glowed a bright gold as the Apollo cabin led the activity. The witch enjoyed the moment while it lasted, knowing very well that the fighting would start again the next morning.

#harry potter #percy jackson #pjo #harry potter/percy jackson crossover fic #harry potter/percy jackson crossover

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theastrophilearchitect · 4 years ago

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March TBR/W.

Every book, audiobook, tv show and movie I want to consume in March 2021.

-Hence ‘TBR/W’ - to-be-read/watched.

I’m not usually a fan of pre-planning my media for the month - I plan out all my media obsessively, but doing it by month seems a little too much like setting deadlines for my taste, and I’m sure I’ll somehow manage to turn watching tv into a chore. Regardless, it’s worth a shot, so this is going to be a rough guide - I’m going to pick four of each category, one per week, because I’d rather underestimate and surpass than overestimate and have to defer things to the next month. So let’s go.

Books

1. Skyward and 2. Starsight by Brandon Sanderson

Skyward is set in a future where the human race is on the verge of extinction, trapped on a planet constantly attacked by alien warriors. Spensa, a teenage girl stuck on the planet, wants to be a pilot, but it seems far-off. Then, she finds the wreckage of a ship that appears to have a soul, and she must figure out how to repair it, and persuade it to help her navigate flight school.

In truth, I mainly want to read this because of how highly it’s been praised by Hailey in Bookland on YouTube. I actually tried reading Sanderson’s Mistborn series a couple years ago, and just didn’t click with it. I love fantasy, but I can pretty confidently say epic fantasy just isn’t for me. However, Sanderson’s work is adored by many, and Skyward and its sequel Starsight appeal so much more to me, and I can’t wait to get to them.

3. House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J Maas

This is Maas’s first technically-adult book; Throne of Glass is young adult, ACOTAR being classed either as young or new adult. I’ve been a fan of Maas for a long time, and, though I enjoy her books less now than I have in the past due to how seriously they tend to take themselves, I’d still love to read this one. Where her previous series were both fantasies, this sits somewhere between that and a sci-fi, but I can’t say as-of-yet what I think, because I haven’t read it yet.

Bryce Quinlan finds herself investigating her friends’ deaths in an attempt to avenge them after they were taken from her by a demon. Hunt Athalar is a Fallen angel, enslaved by Archangels, forced to assassinate their enemies, when he’s offered a deal to assist Bryce in exchange for his freedom.

4. Scythe by Neal Shusterman

I listened to this as an audiobook in 2019 as part of BookTuber Book Roast’s Magical Readathon, and didn’t hugely get along with it in truth. The audiobook was excellent as an audiobook, but the story Ian’s I just didn’t really vibe. I think I just want to like this book, so I think it’s worth a reread to see if my opinion changes.

This follows Citra and Rowan, a reluctant pair of apprentice Scythes - in a utopian future where humanity has the means to live forever, it is the job of the Scythes to control the population by essentially reaping the souls of those they choose to die. Neither Citra or Rowan want it, but I don’t remember enough about this book to say any more.

Audiobooks

1. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

This is the last book in the Hunger Games trilogy, and you either already know what this series is about, or you’ve been living under a rock for the last thirteen years. I read this book for the first time nearly seven years ago, and it’s stuck with me. It sent me into a phase of only reading dystopian books (The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken was part of this, and was the series that really got me into reading), but this was the main one that stuck with me.

It contains a powerful message about capitalism and discrimination, and this is the second time I’ve listened to the audiobooks, though the god-only-knows-what time I’ve read the series. I listened to The Hunger Games and Catching Fire in February, which automatically puts this on my to-listen for March.

2. Ghosts of the Shadow Market by Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, Maureen Johnson, Kelly Link and Robin Wasserman

This is a novella bind-up set in the Shadowhunters world, that I would imagine has quite a bit to do with the Shadow Market, an aspect of the Downworld introduced in The Dark Artifices, which I finished in January.

In truth, I’m mainly planning to listen to this audiobook because it’s the only Shadowhunters novella bind-up with an audiobook, and I’d just rather read additions to the main Shadowhunters series in this format rather than physically.

3. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

This is a Hunger Games prequel that was released early last year, and I just wasn’t going to read it. I heard several reviews, the general consensus of which was basically that it’s not as good as the trilogy and is somewhat unnecessary, but, in truth, my curiosity’s got the better of me, especially since I started listening to the trilogy’s audiobooks again.

This prequel follows Coriolanus Snow as a mentor in the Games before he became President of Panem and the wonderful villain of the original trilogy.

4. Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia

I mentioned this in my physical TBR post a couple weeks ago, but have decided to listen to the audiobook instead. A few weeks ago, I’d started to run out of audiobooks I wanted to listen to, and didn’t want to read anything on my regular TBR in this format, including this book. But, I went through a load of audiobook recommendations, and this was one of them, so it joined my to-listen.

I’m not hugely into contemporary books, but I’ve wanted to get more into the genre for a while, and this was the first one to join my TBR.

This novel follows Eliza Mirk, your typical high school outcast, who publishes a hugely popular web comic under the pseudonym LadyConstellation. Then Wallace Warland, the biggest fanfic writer of her comic transfers to her school and begins to draw her out of her shell.

TV Shows

Before I go into my list, I’d like to mention that I am currently watching WandaVision and am definitely planning to watch Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney+, but both come out on a weekly basis, so aren’t being included on this list. Also, I’ve been watching way too much YouTube recently, so I’m not sure I’ll get through all of these this month, especially since I’m watching the Arrowverse shows, which have such long seasons.

1. Love, Victor Season 1

This Love, Simon spin-off follows a character named Victor at Creekwood (I think that’s the name?) High School. I saw Love, Simon twice in cinemas when it was released, and, miraculously, it made me cry. I love that movie.

This series was released last year on Hulu, which is only available in the US, but as of February 23rd, it’s one of the shows that came to Disney+ as part of Star.

2. The Flash Season 1

As mentioned, I’ve started watching the DC Arrowverse shows. I watch tv shows through alternating seasons - as in, I watch season 1 of show A, then season 1 of show B, then 2 of A, etc., then when I finish one, I start watching show C - but I’m treating the Arrowverse as one show (even though it isn’t) so it’s not the only thing I’m watching. So this is technically Arrowverse S3, preceded by Arrow S1+2 (though I haven’t actually started S2 as of writing this because of how much YouTube I’ve been watching, so I’ll be finishing that first).

I genuinely don’t know that much about most DC superheroes, Flash included, but I’m going into this having been assured it takes itself less goddamn seriously than Arrow. It’s my sister’s favourite Arrowverse show, and I can’t wait.

3. Dare Me Season 1

I added this Netflix show to my watchlist when it came out, and my basic understanding is that it focuses on the cheerleaders at a high school, and begins when a new coach arrives. It focuses on the psychological damage behind competitive cheerleading, and I’m not convinced I’m going to love it, but I think it’s worth a shot.

4. Arrow Season 3

I’m so confused by this poster. This is specifically the season 3 poster, and I’m so confused, but I’m sure it’ll make more sense when I watch the season.

I explained the weird way I’m watching Arrowverse (named as such because Arrow was the first show in it) already, but Arrow follows Oliver Queen, the son of one of the billionaires of Starling City upon his return after being stuck for five years on an island when a cruise ship carrying him and his father sunk. His father left him with a list of names of the people ‘corrupting’ the city, and Oliver takes it upon himself to assume a vigilante identity and take them down.

Movies

I’m not a huge movie-watcher, but I end up compiling so many to watch that, to ensure I get round to them, I watch a movie every time I finish a tv show season. I’m also currently re-watching the MCU movies in chronological order.

1. Instant Family

This is just something that came onto Netflix recently and I thought might be entertaining, and so it joined my list.

This follows a couple who decide to adopt a teenager, only to find out she has two more siblings.

2. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

This is just a continuation of my MCU re-watch - I love this movie. I love Guardians of the Galaxy, full stop (on another note, I just generally don’t understand why British people call it a full stop and Americans call it a period. Neither name makes particular sense).

3. Avengers: Age of Ultron

And here we have another continuation of my MCU rewatch. I honestly think this is my favourite Avengers movie, because the whole teams actually together, and Wanda, Scarlet Witch, is introduced - I love her. I really didn’t like Vision until WandaVision came out, though.

4. Behind The Try: A Try Guys Documentary

Not technically a movie, but still. (Are documentaries movies? I tend to think of them as separate categories, but I guess they’re both movies. Hm.) I’ve been watching the Try Guys for years, which means I need to convince my sister to give me her Google password so I don’t have to pay for this.

I’m probably not going to stick to this list, and even if I do, I’m either going to also consume things not on it, or just not finish it. But, you’ll have to wait for my March wrap-up to find out.

#tbr #book #books #reading #reader #bookblr #marchtbr #tv shows #movies #review #films #movie #tv show #writerblr #march tbr

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she-who-the-river-could-not-hold · 5 years ago

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Happy first BFSN of 2020! And the year of the last season!!! I’m feeling a bit nostalgic about all of it tbh, I’ve rarely ever watched a show to it’s finale while it’s live (we don’t talk about Game of Thrones lol) so this feels really cool. I still remember randomly stumbling upon The 100 on Netflix a couple of years ago while trying to find something to watch while I wrapped Christmas presents. I immediately fell in love with all of the characters and the story. And now here we are!

I can’t wait to create more content this year! With the season EVENTUALLY coming (where is our trailer???) I suppose I should work on my canon-spec Bellarke fic asap asdfkls. I’ve also been so blown away by the response to my arranged marriage/royalty AU, “Traces of You,” so far!!! I’m currently restructuring the next chapters so we’ll see where it ends up soon. I’m also still plugging away with my rewatch gif set series – I’m aiming to be done by the new season!

I’ll have some more fic recs soon! I’ve been training for my first half-marathon (it’s this weekend AH) so I’ve been a bit scattered. I’m also editing my gif tutorial for my 1k celebration as well! 2020 is off to a busy, productive start which is exactly what I was hoping for!

The world is in a rough spot right now so remember to love yourself and to be kind to others while we navigate all of this. Do what you can to help others and to protect your circle. Love y’all 🖤

Tag list let me know if you don’t want to be tagged during the hiatus and feel free to tag me if you want to be added!):

#bellarke fam selfie night #bfsn #a visual representation of myself

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pixelgrotto · 5 years ago

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A penny for my Witchery thoughts

The Witcher Netflix series was released at the tail end of last month, giving Geralt of Rivia the interesting distinction of a literary character who’s now a well-known TV protagonist but just happened to achieve international fame through video games first. (Aye, there was a Polish film and show in 2001 and 2002 which called Geralt a “Hexer” instead of a “Witcher,” but they’re not exactly good, though perhaps worth a peek on YouTube for chuckles.)

Geralt’s adventures - both in the stories written by Andrzej Sapkowski and the games developed by CD Projekt Red - are close to my heart. I’ve spilled a fair amount of digital ink writing about the franchise, and my playthrough of the games and subsequent devouring of the books from 2014 to 2016 reignited my appreciation for fantasy and served as the impetus that got me reading more genre fiction and eventually delving into tabletop RPGs in 2017, leading to my current obsession with Dungeons & Dragons. I’m naturally protective of material that means a lot to me, so when the Netflix series was announced I viewed it with only subdued optimism. After all, with the possible exception of a certain HBO thing based on George R.R. Martin’s books (which now seems to be viewed worse in retrospect after the final season), fantasy doesn’t have a great track record on the small screen. I also wasn’t especially impressed when Henry Cavill was cast as Geralt, since I primarily know him from the recent Superman movies, which paint the guy in such a dour light and force him to constantly grimace like someone who’s just taken a dump only to discover that there’s no toilet paper in sight.

But now the show’s out in the wild, and after scanning some mixed reactions (not to mention one truly baffling “review” by two Entertainment Weekly twats who only watched the first episode) I cautiously consumed it with my girlfriend over Christmas break...and can happily report that it’s good. But, it’s also a show that expects its viewers to skip through some mental hoops as we bear witness to three intersecting story lines, all of which are taking place in different eras. Then you’ve got your standard variety of fantasy names, terms and themes, several of which might be tricky to grasp if you’ve never read the books or played the games. For instance, I don’t think they ever bothered to fully explain the “Conjunction of the Spheres” (the time when planets aligned and monsters and humans came to the world, uprooting the indigenous elves and dwarves) or the “Law of Surprise” (when a person’s fate is intertwined with something unexpected - usually an unborn child). I can also see how the show’s numerous mentions of the word “destiny” could seem like wacky dialogue to viewers unaware of the fact that Sapkowski’s realm really does have a strong undercurrent of inescapable fate running through its veins.

Unique structure and terminology aside, the first episode was more of a slow burn than I’d imagined. It starts with an awesome sequence of Geralt fighting a Kikimora, but then transitions into a fairly serious interpretation of “Lesser Evil” from the first short story collection, The Last Wish. The episode then cuts into the exodus of Ciri from the kingdom of Cintra, an event mostly described in flashback in the second short story anthology, Sword of Destiny. The scenes of death and destruction as Ciri flees her burning kingdom are fairly meandering, as are the interspersed interactions between Geralt and Renfri, a woman with seven loyal followers who was supposed to be a grittier version of Snow White in the books. There are some great fights near the end, but as I watched, I couldn’t help but think that I probably would’ve made the opener speedier and a bit pulpier, especially since the tone of these early Witcher tales was more “tongue in cheek fairy tale deconstruction” than plodding epic fantasy.

The second episode also took its time, though the decision to detail the plight of Yennefer the sorceress before she uses magic to change her hunchback form into something that she sees as more conventionally attractive is a good one, since this was once again only flashback material in the novels. But the cream of the hour was certainly Jaskier the bard, who’s going by his moniker in the books rather than the “Dandelion” translation that the games used. He’s played by actor Joey Batey with a perfect blend of magnificent bastard bravado, surpassing his portrayal in the games with a larger than life theme song that’s now something of a cult phenomenon, and his characterization made me feel like the show knew what it was doing at the end of the day.

Episode three is where things truly came together for me, since we barrel straight into the Geralt versus Striga battle from Andrzej Sapkowski’s first Witcher short story. It’s a full-on horror interpretation (which I liked but my girl found too spooky), and also full-on fan service for someone like me who still watches the intro cinematic to The Witcher 1 on occasion. And in later episodes, as my head began getting used to the nuances of the three character timeline, the show seemed to find its footing with this delicate blend of fan service, pulp and seriousness. By the time episode 8 rolled around and the character arcs of Geralt, Ciri and Yennefer came full circle with the Battle of Sodden Hill - yet another event that Sapkowski mostly wrote in flashback - I found myself wishing that season two would arrive sooner than 2021, and my girlfriend felt similarly. I also realized why the showrunners decided on the unorthodox timeline - this is a series that’ll probably excel on rewatches, particularly if you already have an idea of what to look out for.

Series producer Lauren S. Hissrich (who’s quite a joy to follow on Twitter) has mentioned in interviews that this is a show that expects a tad of patience and effort from viewers, but will give a lot in exchange. I’m inclined to agree, and while this depiction of Sapkowski’s lore has some initial roughness around the edges, it ultimately reminds me of how The Witcher 1 was janky even upon its 2007 release but exhibited a unique magic to anyone who stuck with it for more than a handful of hours. Many professional reviewers tend to avoid giving fantasy shows patience and effort (Game of Thrones is an anomaly), which may explain some of the negative reviews. But The Witcher seems to have found a strong-as-nails following from audiences, who made it one of Netflix’s top efforts of 2019, and even friggin’ Anne Rice liked it. (Geralt of Rivia now possesses the other interesting distinction of being a literary character/TV protagonist/video game hero who’s been mentioned in the same breath as Lestat the vampire.)

Speaking of Geralt, I owe Henry Cavill applause. I didn’t think much of his casting, but he pulled through in the end, delivering a silver-haired hero that’s clearly influenced by the games - particularly in the voice and the occasional spell slinging - but still very much his own take, with nary a “where’s the toilet paper” grimace in sight. Audiences can now take their pick between an iconic video game interpretation of the White Wolf and a likely-soon-to-be-iconic TV version, which is a rare choice to have in fandom, especially for a franchise that was once little known outside of Poland. Toss a coin to your Witcher, indeed.

#pixel grotto #musings #the witcher

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jaimetheexplorer · 6 years ago

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I thought I was the Warrior, and Game of Thrones was ASOIAF, but it was just the Stranger

Latest post in the “koops works through the stages of Jaime-Lannister-character-assassination-induced grief” series. I’m sorry I keep spamming the blog with these, but it’s helping me put my thoughts in order and move on, and maybe they can be useful to others too.

This is where I’m at right now. Maybe I’ll come back tomorrow or next week and see it differently, but... here it goes.

Long analysis ahead!

I know some people right now are a bit/very upset at Nikolaj for seemingly supporting D&D’s assassination of Jaime’s arc, after he advocated against twincest and pushed in favour of adapting Jaime’s book arc and his relationship with Brienne for many years. To see him describe the ending as a perfect conclusion to Jaime’s arc, seems very jarring. And I was equally thrown off and confused for a while.

But I think what I have come to realize from rewatching his interviews (especially the ones where Gwen is sitting next to him - because she knows him, and knows how he truly felt about it; her reactions to his answers say a lot about that) is that Nikolaj has simply made peace with/resigned himself to D&D’s (incoherent, depressing and uninspiring) idea of Jaime. The version he doesn’t like, the version he would not have written himself, the version he complained about for years, but the version they might have had in their head all along: the one that served their twincest fanfic best.

I was a show-first fan, but I was always aware that the show had issues with adapting the books (as per GRRM’s own admission of “traumatic” creative differences where D&D pushed for changes more than for adaptation) and that many books fans hated it for that. But I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because I thought they would eventually veer towards the direction the books had taken, and all that seeding and build up would find its payoff and provide closure (even if not as satisfyingly as the books). The S6 finale remains one of my favorite episodes ever. Like Nikolaj, I expected S7 to start with Cersei having to face the consequences of that act and Jaime and Cersei’s rift finally being adapted. Like Nikolaj, I was shocked when the leaks came out showing that, instead, Jaime would stick with Cersei and get her pregnant again. Like Nikolaj, I tried to rationalize that storyline because, in the end, we knew Jaime did leave Cersei “without looking back”. It seemed like S7 might be just more of the usual adaptation problem the show always had but, FINALLY we would get Jaime’s identity arc adapted in the end. Like Nikolaj, I went into S8 full of hopes, which were all met beyond even my wildest expectations, in the first 3 and 1/2 episodes. And then... the shocking, cruel and nihilistic rug-pull in the second half of episode 4 blindsided me completely. This season felt like a sadistic lover who builds their partner up towards climax, lulling them into a euphoric sense of security and vulnerability, only to suddenly knife them in the stomach repeatedly at the end and tossing them out in the street, naked, to bleed to death.

Now, is Jaime’s ending satisfying, especially after so many years? No. Is Jaime’s ending earned and not tacked together in a rush? No. Is Jaime’s ending one that feels true to his character in the books? Definitely not. Does it feel like a lot of foreshadowing and seeding was all for nothing in the end? Absolutely.

But I see where Nikolaj is coming from, once I think about all those adaptation choices that were the total opposite of the books, and that I did not give much weight to because surely they will converge to his book material eventually, and surely ALL this seeding isn’t for nothing, and surely they won’t have characters end up where they started after so much work, and surely they would never do something so horrible to Brienne and her arc. Boy, was I wrong.

6x08 contained the highly questionable adaptation of the dialogue between Edmure and Jaime at the siege of Riverrun. The show decided to make Jaime’s entire speech to Edmure be about Cersei, when, in the original version, the Riverrun siege is very much a matter of honour for Jaime. Jaime wants to avoid, in any way possible, to raise arms against the Starks and the Tullys because he swore an oath to Catelyn Stark that he never would. We thought show!Jaime was using his reputation to manipulate Edmure and bluffing, because that’s what he does in the books (”don’t make me say the words”). We thought he was bluffing, because Brienne was in that castle and they wrote in an entire scene to basically show us Jaime did not want to fight her (I guess they “kind of forgot” about that - the first symptoms of memory loss). Turns out, it truly was all about Cersei for them so that they could use it to justify Jaime’s self-destruction in the end.

Go back just two episodes (6x06) and you have another huge change to the backstory of Jaime’s mission in the Riverlands. In the books, Jaime argues with Cersei against going to the Riverlands because, again, he does not want to fight against the Starks and the Tullys given the oath to Cat. In the books, the Walk of Atonement happens *after* Jaime has already left for the Riverlands, and, as of the books, she’s currently awaiting her trial. That is when Cersei sends the infamous letter begging him to come fight for her (or die for/with her), which Jaime burns, leaving her to her fate, “effectively estranging” them. That is when Cersei is in clear denial about Jaime abandoning her in her time of need to disappear with Brienne instead. In the show, it’s the complete opposite: Jaime is begging Cersei to let him stay and fight for her because she needs him, while she tries to send him away. And in 8x04, Jaime abandons Brienne to go back to Cersei in her time of need.

The show has taken every single thing Jaime does for honour and/or Brienne in AFFC/ADWD and made it about Cersei.

The entire Dorne storyline, a show-only horror, was about romanticizing incest, the tragedy of it all, and how misunderstood JC were in Westerosi culture, from Ellaria’s comments to Myrcella’s lines as she dies in Jaime’s arms about, essentially, happily accepting being a product of incest.

The White Sword Tower scene at the end of S4, which in the books shows that Jaime, in order to maintain the sacredness of the place, rejects Cersei’s attempts to manipulate him with sex in order to get him to help her with her plans, is turned into yet another example of romanticizing incest in the show, with Cersei “choosing” Jaime and them desecrating the honour of the WST by having sex. Later, Jaime never finds out about Lancel and the show omits all the other instances of infidelity on Cersei’s part, thus removing yet another element that could cause a rift between the twins.

And these are just the major, glaring changes/omissions, without adding changes/omissions like Cersei’s revulsion towards Jaime’s stump, her physical and psychological abuse of him with slaps and throwing wine cups at him and insulting his courage and intelligence, her abuse of Tommen, and so on. It all boils down to either reducing the rifts between the twins to a minimum, or making even Jaime’s honourable deeds to be about Cersei.

But I kept the believing, despite all these unfaithful adaptations, that SURELY they would eventually default to the books’ arc, also because they put an awful lot of effort in JB foreshadowing in every season for it not to pay off big time.

Well, turns out I was misguided.

We know for certain that the conclusion to the war against the WWs will not be the same in the books: the books has no Night King (and IIRC, they never will) and far more complex lore surrounding the Others and the WWs. Arya dealing that final blow is something D&D deliberately chose to do three years ago because Jon “was too obvious”, and they retrofitted Melisandre’s line to be about the NK when it clearly was not intended that way. So, if they were willing to alter the lore and the foreshadowing of such a huge plot point, which millions of viewers, no matter whose characters they favoured, had been waiting on for decades, and for a storyline that underpins at least half of the backbone of the books, it was probably naive to think that they would concern themselves with being true to book!Jaime’s identity arc and his love life, a relatively inconsequential story by comparison.

And so I can see what Nikolaj is saying when he talks about the way “D&D *chose* to adapt the story after the books” (look at Nik’s words very carefully in interviews, and how he always talks about D&D’s adaptation choices, and never about GRRM’s ending). D&D made Cersei into a far bigger character than the books ever intended her to be (GRRM didn’t even know if he wanted to give her a POV, because he didn’t think it’d add much to the story) and chose to reduce Jaime to Cersei’s accessory. D&D seem to have never truly moved on from S1 (or maybe even pilot) Jaime, while GRRM wanted to explore identity and redemption with him without making a judgement. D&D deliberately changed crucial Jaime plot points to make them all about Cersei, rather than honour. The over-emphasis on “the things I do for love” is a show-only obsession, when that’s just a very small part of who Jaime is in the books. We all thought/hoped this could still work out to adapt Jaime in the show, because the emphasis would be on the fact that the object of that “love” would change and Jaime would redirect “the things he does” towards a healthier, purer, good kind of love (i.e. Brienne) that inspires him to be honourable. And, maybe, in part, they did. But D&D probably never had any serious intentions to let Jaime break away from Cersei for good and so this ending “makes sense” for them. And I think Nikolaj has come to reluctantly accept this.

That of course doesn’t change the fact that the writing in the last 1.5 episodes was the most horrible, nihilistic, cruel, unnecessary and unearned (especially in the last 1.5 episodes). It doesn’t change the fact that, if D&D don’t seem to see Jaime as anything more than an addict, they don’t even register Brienne and her feelings on their radar. It doesn’t change the fact that they spent so much time and money building up an expectation that Jaime and Brienne were heading somewhere meaningful, only for it to amount to an assassination of their dynamic in the space of half an hour. It doesn’t remove the suspicion that there might have even been a change of plans (possibly out of spite, possibly for shock value, possibly at the last minute) to switch to a failed redemption, rather than a successful one. But I think it does explain where Nikolaj is coming from and I think, perhaps, it’s the healthiest course of action at this point, because there’s nothing we can do to change it (and the fact that so many casual viewers feel just as disappointed is comforting too).

In a sense, for Jaime fans (and Brienne fans, and JB fans by extension), Game of Thrones has been our abusive partner. The TV series is Cersei and we are Jaime. We spent years of our lives hanging on, trying to find positives amongst a lot of negatives, because it kept dangling in front of us the seeding of a Jaime and a JB dynamic that we recognized from the books and seemed to be building up for the future. I think that’s our biggest disappointment, in the end. Jaime in the show was never meant to be as deep and complex as Jaime is in the books. But we hoped he would have a similar trajectory in the end, to give us closure at least. And he didn’t.

These last episodes were our “I thought I was the Warrior, and she was the Maid, but it turns out she was just the Stranger” moment.

And I think this is our time to put it in the fire.

#got meta #got negativity #asoiaf #jaime lannister #anti jaime x cersei #meta #my meta

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annakie · 5 years ago

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Notes on a Blog Cleanup (& some other stuff) Part 4

Made it all the way back to to page 1000.

Started with 3021 pages. Currently have 2954 pages, adding in posting 10 - 13 times a day for the last month... deleted somewhere around 87 pages of posts (or around 1300 total). I’m in April 2015. So it took two and a half years to do 50% of my posting here and nearly another year and a half to get that down to 2/3rds. It’ll just speed up from here.

Anyway, here’s a bunch of words about tumblr, fandom, and Doctor Who.

I’ve found myself deleting more news articles lately. There’s almost no cringe-y stuff left. If I go back and do this again it’ll be even more deleting current events stuff unlessI connected to it somehow.

A LOT of the content creation I ever did happened in this time. I did so much giffing for Who’s Line, a lot of video game stuff, especially Mass Effect, cause you know, it’s me, and a lot of edits and such. Some way better quality than others. I was also getting thousands of notifications a day from the few things I did that were really popular back then (still sometimes get notes on that Whose Line/Elmo/Game of Thrones gifset to this day).

I know I’m not like, the best at gifs and edits, but hey, I think some of it is like, pretty good? There’s a few things I’m a little sad about that just never took off, but I bet all people who try and post OC on Tumblr feel that way about some of their stuff. A few things I made did surprisingly well, though.

I still will make the odd gif/photoset there that’s more than just “here’s some nice screenshots I took slightly edited” but honestly, I feel like these days it’s so hard to get many notes on tumblr at all? Like there’s just so fewer people making stuff, and even less reblogging gifsets/photosets? Idk, maybe it’s something more specific to my overall followers and who you all follow? But I made a joking post a couple of days ago about my dash feeling weird because not everything is specifically tailored to me after scrolling through my blog, but on the OTHER hand, I also feel like, overall Tumblr has become just yet another place to post memes and text posts and has the big problem of the Reddit/Twitter/Tumblr/Instagram (+TickTock) circle where each place is like 50% screenshots/reposts of content the others? This obviously isn’t a criticism of any actual people, but just... what tumblr has become the last year or two? Is it just me? Like you can find some gifsets and such with a couple thousand notes here and there but... just not as much is being produced now? Does that make sense?

Like a month or two ago I spent a couple of hours specifically looking for good general fandom blogs specific to several fandoms I’m in and... it’s hard to even find those blogs anymore. Like, “fuckyeah” type blogs that are someone’s sideblog about a specific topic. And hey, believe me, I’ve created and abandoned several of these kinds of blogs on my time here (and at least one I’d keep up with but.. it just doesn’t have any content being generated for it so it’s just... sparse) so I get it. Maybe I’m just not looking in the right places, I don’t know.

I keep wondering how much longer I’m going to keep doing this little project, and then every 10 or pages I come across a post I didn’t tag properly that’s now been found, or something I just really wanna get off my blog and I’m like “Welp, when I stop finding these, I’ll stop looking. So maybe in like, 2018. :p LIterally finding posts I forgot I ever made in the first place and like has made it worth it.

Notes on TAH Fandom

This was also the phase of being heavily heavily like SO heavily into The Thrilling Adventure Hour. And I have a lot of thoughts on that, too.

Literally, one of the best decisions of my life, tbh. Not every moment of being like a SuperFan of this thing was sunshine and roses, but most of them really were. Honestly, I made such good friends. I had some extraordinary experiences, doing things that I wouldn’t have otherwise done, for sure. I traveled to Seattle, Chicago, New York twice, and LA three times, hanging out with new friends, and getting to know the cast of a thing I loved so much, and also somehow getting to be known by them as well. There were things that happened that I didn’t blog about here because I never wanted to come off as braggy, or just to keep a confidence. There were a few not-as-great things that happened during that time, but basically, 2014 through mid-November 2015 will likely go down as one of the best time periods of my life, for a lot of reasons, but a good chunk of that was the experiences I had through TAH.

Hoo boy though, I blogged about it a LOT. Like, it felt like almost as much as early blog was about Doctor Who. I was, uh, real enthusiastic and am now kinda regretful about some of those early fandom tags. Also turns out some of the TAH people looked at my blog more than I knew, I think, so a little yikes there thinking back on it now. But also I was kind and helpful a lot, so all of that was good.

This is a good recap post of all of the awesome stuff. And even that glosses over a lot of the really cool stuff, or skirts around some of it, just to try and stay brief about it.

One of the big things I learned from that experience was that being a very involved person in a fandom is such a double-edged sword. For one thing, it honestly became somewhat of a second job for me, which I 100% put upon myself. But running FYTAH (with Shannon!) and admining/writing a large percentage of the TAH Wiki (with Ange!), working in the booths at conventions (with Jena + Shannon/Kitty/Jamie/Dani) and being available to help in a variety of other ways was A Lot. Which again, I took on willingly. And Ange warned me about it several times but I was like “No I want to do this.” So then it also kind of turned into like a customer service job even outside of working at the cons. After awhile you gotta smile and be nice allllll the time. I ended up taking a lot of things offline to a small subset of friends. And most of that came from other fans, not from the show itself (except like, feeling like I couldn’t show my true disappointment when the show was ending, or feeling like I couldn’t air any criticisms I had about the show except in very private conversations.)

At one point I was having an email conversation with a couple of those friends and realized that, for the first time in my life, I was like a “popular kid”, which was weird. And I tried my damnedest to be as welcoming and inclusive and not to let anyone feel left out. But also there’s a point where like, you can only take on so much, and you can only be actual friends with so many people? You can be kind and welcoming and enthusiastic and all, but you only have so much time and energy to give away. There were so many messages I never answered still sitting in my / the FYTAH inbox or in email and some on twitter because I just didn’t have the bandwidth to give away sometimes. It was a weird lesson to learn because I knew it so well in general in my personal life, but had never had to apply it... in this way before? Does that sound weird? Or braggy? I feel like I’m walking on land mines with this one.

For a more specific example of what I mean, in March, 2015 ten of us rented a house and lived in it for a long weekend for the TAH 10th anniversary show + a fun getaway vacation. Everyone invited was someone I knew or were close with someone else in the group. A few more people had been invited but couldn’t afford it, so word got around a little bit. And it was AMAZING. But I later heard that there were a few people, most of whom I didn’t really know, were hurt that they weren’t invited. Jena and I spent dozens of hours and put a lot of financial risk into being the custodians of the trip for even the ten of us, and it was a huge undertaking. It was never meant to be a thing for the entire fandom, just a group of people who were already friends. But there was still a small kerfluffle from a few people about it. Which, I TOTALLY get feeling bad about being left out but... it was always supposed to be a relatively small thing, never any kind of “Official Fandom Get Together”. And we definitely didn’t have the time/money/ability to host an “open call for anyone to come” type thing. Just coordinating 10 people (and about 25 - 30 overall getting together to hang out at designated times over the weekend) was... more than enough.

At one point sometime later people started suggesting that we organize and hold an actual TAH-Con and I... let that one pass me by without really talking about it. It was definitely too much, and even then I knew it. And I mean, the shadow of Dashcon was still hanging over all fandoms heavily in those days. I wasn’t about to become the next Dashcon. It never got past a few emails being passed around.

So yeah, to be honest, if I could go back and do those years again, I absolutely would, it was like 95% awesomeness. But I think in regards to some of the fandom-specific things, I’d be a little less of a doormat, and I’d be a little more careful about spreading myself too thin.

So now that the show is “back”, I am enjoying listening to it, and I’ll reblog some things or post big news on FYTAH, but I’ve been lazy about even helping out with the wiki (I keep meaning to get back to it, Ange is still doing great) because... although I’m still a HUGE fan, I also am gonna be more laid back about it now.

I also haven’t REALLY loved a thing in the same way since TAH. The closest there has been is Critical Role, and I’ve been real careful to stay out of any actual fandom stuff there. I really love the thing, but I’m gonna keep with my group of 5 or 6 other fans I already know (all from other fandoms) who love the thing too, and stay out of wider discussions. With some of the stuff happening there lately, it was a good decision.

Wow, that was a lot of words. Sorry.

Hey one last thing to catch up on.

Doctor Who Rewatch 2019!

I’m now already at 6x01, into the Silence episodes.

So I did finally rewatch the Desert Bus episode that I hated so much before and like... this time... it was fine? Cheesy and all, but not so bad that I should have hated it as much as I did? Also noticed the Doctor doing the classic “gonna hit on this girl really hard in the beginning then drop her so quick at the end” thing to the companion of the week. Ah, Ten. The most bi-polar of all Doctors. I’m gonna be honest, I decided to skip on through Waters of Mars because I realized I was just ready to be done with Ten at that point. I’ll probably go back to it at some point but I wasn’t ready for another Ten Temper Tantrum, maybe the worst one of all, in that episode.

So I finished Ten (and oh man that whole two-parter to end Ten with... like the whole Master plotline is such a stinker. The first half, in particular, is so bad, the only really good scene is the one in the cafe with Wilf. The rest of it... wow. Wasn’t that whole thing written like the week before filming and never really edited or something? IDK.) The last half hour or so is really good though, with Ten’s sacrifice (after a tantrum) and then all the companion goodbyes (except Joan Redfern’s granddaughter, bleh).

But yay, on to Eleven and Amy and Rory and more River!

Season Five is... wow it starts off strong and really stalls there in the middle for a bit. Picks back up a bit with Rory returning, then somehow has two great episodes without Rory and ends strong, though the first pretty nonsensical Moffat-era “this doesn’t make sense but it looks and sounds so good you don’t care, right?” season arc and ending. Season six, I’m already remembering, is way, way worse for that. But anyway. Rory remains my second favorite companion ever. And episodes with Amy, Rory and River continue to be my favorites. Also? Matt Smith is so good.

But even early on in season six I’m remembering how really dumb the overarching plotline is... Moffat is great at “Oh man this will be cool so I’m gonna throw it in there! (and it really is some very cool stuff!) and hope it all makes sense later! Or just don’t think about it too hard!”

Honestly though, despite all the quibbles, most of the episodes work on an individual level if you don’t think about the the overall arc Moffat is trying to do. Even those that are a bit sloggy, like the Cold Blood/Hungry Earth two-parter, have enough great moments to justify watching them. (Ambrose is still maybe one of the worst “regular people” characters to ever be on this show, though.) There’s still no “Fear Her”. And that’s pretty good.

Also? The blog itself is now about as Doctor Who oriented as it is in the last year. Like... oh the season is airing? There’s a lot more good stuff to reblog, I’ll reblog good stuff. Season not airing, a scattered post here and there. It’s a much better place to be.

After Amy and Rory leave, that was about the end of my true like “Doctor Who Obsession” phase. On my Blog we’re in the break between Amy and Rory leaving and Clara showing up. I never really clicked with Clara, I think like a lot of people. Like I really liked the season with Danny, but after that season I never really rewatched episodes, so I’m looking forward to getting there and experiencing some stuff again for the second time.

#personal post tag thingy #notes on a blog cleanup

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justsomewhump · 6 years ago

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Whump Profile

I was tagged by @killian-whump, who knows how much I love doing those things! Thank you, dear!

Name: For personal reasons, I don’t want to disclose it publicly.

How old were you when you first realized you liked guys getting hurt?: Kinda hard question... when I was younger, I was always trying to find a way “around it” and not straight-up admit I liked “guys getting hurt”. Like, when I made up stories in my mind, I always weaved the plot so that there would be no other way for it to go than them being hurt. But that was in the “middle stage”, like when I was in elementary school, I’d be like, “And then he got hurt and started bleeding :D”

What was that very first scene you remember gave you those glorious butterfly feelings?: That’s quite possibly that Digimon episode where Yamato (Matt) is lost in a snow blizzard and finds refugee in a cave, but he’s still too cold and shivering, so his digimon, Gabumon, takes off his... fur coat, whatever that was, and covers Yamato so that he wouldn’t freeze to death. I must have been around 6-7 at the time. Yamato ended up becoming one of my all-time favourite characters, as well as probably my very first whumpee - being subjected to as much whump as a 7yo could make up XD

When and how was it that you realized “Hey, I’m not so messed up in the head!” and that there’s a definition and community for this sort of thing?: Well I have killian-whump to thank for that. I distinctly remember going through my notes of my non-whump blog one day, and seeing a “killian-whump liked your post” note, and an icon with Killian from 5x13, with blood on his face and all that. I was intrigued, and checked her blog. Kinda got shocked at first, wondering how she would even like that that much, even if she clearly said she loved the guy... but I couldn’t stop visiting her blog, even with the 80 posts or so she had at the time, so I ended up following her. I don’t remember exactly how things went, to be honest... but I started chatting with her, then I made some gifs for her blog that she posted “anonymously“... then ended up making this blog, unable to keep all my whump thoughts secret. The rest is history :P

What’s your favorite whump trope?: Oh, man. My first impulse is to say clutching their chest, partly because of broken ribs or something, partly because there’s a wound there they’re trying to keep from bleeding out. I couldn’t really choose, I think. I also love spiritual possession and sexual whump...

What’s a whump trope that you hate?: I’m gonna copy killian-whump’s answer to that, pretty much, and answer with death, along with extreme gore and eye/fingernail torture.

What’s your favorite whumped character?: I haven’t really explored the character of many whumpees, and even my original ones sound shallow now, but currently it’s Killian Jones from Once Upon a Time. Apart from the fact that I’d been loving the character to bits, he then went and got marvellously tortured, being a perfect little defiant stoic woobie... How could I not?

What’s that whumped scene(s) that you’ve watched over and over again. (We know you do it and we understand): I’m so glad there’s that little “s” over there because I’d feel so bad if I had to choose... *cracks knuckles*

- Pretty much everything with Killian in OUAT, over and over again, but I’ll put these below, where I was rewatching them before I realized what whump is and that it’s okay to like it.

- That scene in 2x11 where Gold beats the hell out of Hook, and though there’s not that much blood, for me it’s also marvellously angsty as well, so I remember watching that one a lot.

- That scene in 4x15 where Ursula wraps Hook in her tentacles and squeezes him a bit.

- I almost forgot the heart theft and heart squeezing scenes from 4x08 to 4x11 and I feel ashamed. How could I?!

- Jamie’s rape and torture scenes in Outlander 1x16 (is that the episode?)

- One specific lady whump scene in Game of Thrones 1x02. I’m on the verge of feeling bad because of how many times I’ve watched that one.

Bullet or stab wounds?: Stab wounds, cause they’re usually bigger and you need more hands than one to stop the bleeding, and the hands get all messy and bloody... yes. I am actually a bit bummed that Wish Hook got stabbed, but in his memories as Rogers, he remembers being shot. And I’m like... why you gotta change this?? Let me enjoy my preferable whump when headcanoning about him! XD

Fevers or Hypothermia?: Oh, I love the classic “sweating like crazy and trembling and being covered with a blanket and maybe being a bit delirious” thing, so yeah. One of my favourite parts in The Hunger Games is Katniss describing how Peeta behaved while burning with fever.

Emotional or physical?: Well, obviously, both, but if I had to choose, I’d choose emotional, preferably over past physical whump. I mean, there’s a reason I’ve written 11k and 9k words for two different fics respectively, focusing on the aftermath of heavy whump. If mainstream media ain’t gonna show me whumpees having PTSD, I’mma do it myself.

Injured and asks for help or tries to cover it up?: TRIES TO COVER IT UP. I have such a huge love for stoic whumpees, as I mentioned above... one scene in my first big “original” idea for a story has the whumpee injured somewhere on his upper back and leaning on a wall, while his sister is talking to him, oblivious to the fact that he’s bleeding to death because the whumpee refuses to take his jacket off... until he pushes himself off the wall and walks away, and his sister, to her horror, sees blood on the wall and asks him what the hell’s going on, and before he manages to say anything, he collapses. I just love this kind of shit so much - but my absolute fave is them ending up collapsing and being forced to ask for help, barely getting the words out because they’re in too much pain by now.

Lastly, does anyone know about this addiction of yours?: Apart from people here, technically, no. A friend once said she was writing a story which was an OC going through torture and stuff, so I guess she likes whump too without realizing it. However we never happened to talk about it since, but I guess she got that I’m also kinda into it? But you know, we haven’t actually discussed it in detail.

I’mma tag @hookaroo for this one ;)

#personal #meme #whump meta #srta

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settiai · 6 years ago

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some spoilery cr rambles

I posted two threads on Twitter earlier today, one here and then a follow-up here. Considering some of the comments I’ve continued to see throughout the day, though, I wanted to elaborate on those tweets a bit. And, well, Twitter isn’t the best medium for long posts.

First things first: I'm pretty sure that I'm going to have to stop watching Critical Role for awhile

I've seen several people making similar comments to my own about how, for personal reasons, they're going to need to take a break from the show. And I've seen many more people making derogatory comments about people in that situation, acting like anyone who needs some time to cope with what happened isn’t really a fan and doesn’t deserve to be in the fandom. That's what prompted me to make my initial tweets and now this post.

First of all, I want to make this clear: just because I'm having my own personal issues with current events in the show doesn't in any way mean that I agree with people who are harassing the cast. That's bullshit behavior. A large part of D&D is decided by the dice, and it's rude as fuck to blame the cast for the way that the dice fell when it's clear that they're just as hurt by the turn of events.

But on a related note, it would be nice if the CR fandom in general would stop trying to support the cast by saying things like "if people stop watching because of this then they aren't real fans" or "people who are upset right now don't deserve to be in this fandom." There are plenty of us out there who need to take a break for at least a while who very much are real fans, ones who support the cast wholeheartedly and are against the hate that some of them are getting. So it's really getting exhausting seeing people saying that we're not over and over again.

Permanent character death is a hard "no" for me, especially when it's so early on in a story, and that's been the case for a long time. It doesn’t matter the medium: movie, tv show, book, rpg. It’s something that I have a lot of trouble dealing with, and when it happens? It takes time for me to do so. I know that it's not anyone's fault when it comes to Critical Role. It was mainly due to a series of bad rolls, mixed in with some questionable decisions, and there was nothing that anyone could do to stop it once it started down that path. And that fact will hopefully let me start watching again in the future instead of completely leaving the fandom like I've had to do for scripted shows in the past when similar things have happened. But that doesn't make it any less of a hard "no" for me.

I've seen lots of people making comments about fans who are upset about Molly’s death, asking questions like "what do they do when they watch Game of Thrones?" Here's the thing: some of us don't watch shows like GoT because we know that we can’t handle it. I purposefully don't watch shows or movies where I know people are going to die, and characters dying in a TV series often means I stop watching a show. It's just who I am. Fandom is an escape from the real world for me, and when events in said fandom start mirroring the real world too closely, then I need to step away at least for a time.

I understand that D&D has rules, and death is quite often up to a roll of the dice. Unfortunately, that aspect of the game is something that I can have issues with in some situations. There are plenty of people who don’t have any problem with it! And that’s great! But for me, personally, I can handle a permanent PC death more if there’s at least a chance of resurrection and then it fails. It’s the fact that in this case there really aren’t any options that’s making it hard.

One of the things that I love about D&D is that it's a world where magic exists and death doesn't always win like it does in the real world. So when death does win, especially in a situation like what happened last week where it came out of nowhere and took a character whose story was just starting, one who I identify with quite a bit, it throws me out of the fantasy world. It makes my brain go "oh, this is just like the real world, so everyone's going to die and the bad guys are eventually going to win because that's how the world works." And even though I realize intellectually that's not the case, it takes awhile for my brain to realize it. Hence the needing to step away for a bit.

If I try to keep watching, all it's going to do is give me anxiety and potentially send me into a depressive spiral. And I have enough of that just dealing with the real world right now. I don't need to get extra from what's supposed to be my escape from reality. Which kind of sucks, to be honest. I've said in the past that when I started watching Critical Role back in 2016, it helped pull me out of a pretty dark place, so it hurts more than I expected for that same show to be pushing me back into one. Especially with everything else that 2018's been throwing at me lately. Critical Role and my own D&D games have been my escapes, and it's painful that I'm losing one of those out of nowhere, with no real warning that it was coming.

That said, I'm really hoping that I'll get to start watching Critical Role again in the future. My tentative hope is to give it a month or two for the new character to find their feet and mesh with the group, so that I can press through with a marathon and get back to watching it. But that doesn’t change the fact that I need to take some time off to process things, as do plenty of other people who are having similar reactions, and a large number of people are acting like that’s a bad thing that we’re trying to take care of ourselves.

I've been trying to look at spoilery fanart, in the hope that it would help my brain accept the new status quo and let me keep watching, but it hasn’t helped. I’m at the point where I've tried to watch the second half of last week's episode several times, and my brain has immediately gone "nope" each time. Right now, I haven't even been able to go back and rewatch episodes from earlier this year. As soon as I do, my brain is basically going "why bother? there's no point in getting attached to any of the characters because they're all going to die in the end," which... definitely isn't a fun place to be.

I get that people want to support the cast when there are so many people sending hate in their direction. But it would be nice if you could do so without throwing fans who are upset but not reacting that way under the bus. Seeing comment after comment from people saying that I'm clearly not a real fan of Critical Role because I need to stop watching the show for awhile to take care of my own mental health... well, it hurts a lot. I'm taking a break from Critical Role because I do love it, and I don't want my bitterness over recent events to ruin it for me.

It would be nice if people could remember that just because someone is reacting to recent events differently than you doesn't mean they don't care for the show, the cast, and the fandom just as much as you. Everyone is different.

#critical role #settiai talks about critical role

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jemmafitzsimmons · 8 years ago

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A few thoughts on the Framework arc...

I haven’t really spoken out that much about this current arc of Agents of SHIELD, and more specifically, the FitzSimmons storyline. This is mainly bc I’ve really enjoyed it. But the level of disappointment coming from this fandom has gotten me thinking about how we perceive the show in general, which is why I wanted to explain my point of view. Hopefully, this may help others enjoy it a bit more as we move into the final two episodes of the season.

To put this into context, I watch quite the variety of shows across different networks. AOS is my fave, but I also devotedly watch Game of Thrones, Mr. Robot, and How to Get Away with Murder (besides a shitload of others that aren’t so dark, lol), but these are the shows I’m going to be discussing alongside shield.

For me, AOS is doing something that not many shows can get away with - telling a highly complex story across 22 episodes of television with a production value of some major movies. But AOS is not on HBO, or Netflix, or cable. It’s on network television, and that is where I let go of unrealistic expectations. Not my expectations for the quality of the story, oh no. I’m talking about the expectations of what a show of this caliber is capable of doing under those circumstances - 22 episodes on a major network.

For shows like GOT or Mr. Robot, where the networks basically worship them (legit - I think USA Network will let Mr. Robot get away with anything at this point), the creators and writers have a lot more freedom. For Mr. Robot, creator Sam Esmail directed the entirety of season 2, and they’re even pushing back season 3 bc he wants more time to develop the show to make it better. GOT was pushed back to summer bc of the current story arc, plus the creators David and Dan have a lot of sway as far as how the story unfolds. (and although I don’t watch it, Westworld is doing similar work, and they literally stopped production for months to write the final four scripts to figure out a better story for the entire series.)

In other words, they have time - time to write intricate stories, where every detail is thought out, so fans can rewatch the episodes to catch everything they missed, where everything actually connects.

For some shows, (like GOT and the first season of Mr. Robot) this works out in their favor. The shows are engrossing, with details that reward fans for paying close attention. And I know we wanted this from AOS in this current arc. With the scope of the FW, there was definitely an opportunity. But let me tell you - it doesn’t always work. It can actually have a negative effect on the narrative.

For example, this is where I felt Mr. Robot ran into trouble in season two. The story got so invested in keeping the audience in the dark about this big mystery, setting up complex clues and small details left and right, that by the end with the big “reveal,” it fell flat. Yes, it was a carefully crafted narrative that relied on extremely intricate storytelling, but in the end, it ran away with the idea. The narrative also relied heavily on the audience theorizing about what was actually happening to an extent that the big reveal wasn’t so revealing at all. It turned out to be the most obvious narrative choice that fans had already figured out.

ANYWAY (and I’m getting back to AOS, I swear) Not all shows have the luxury of planning stories to this level of detail. This reminds me of How to Get Away with Murder, another ABC show. The creator, Pete Nowalk, has stated in countless interviews about how he doesn’t choose who the big “reveal” character is - as in a person that killed someone, or a person that will die at the end of the season, etc. - until the very last minute. And he’s allowed to do that bc he has so many episodes to work on. When I learned this, I was a little disappointed, as I like to think these decisions are made from the beginning in order to create the entire narrative around this choice, but that’s obviously not the case. Yes, some creators have major end games planned for their characters and stories, but some don’t. And that’s okay.

And I think this is where Agents of SHIELD falls. Jed and Mo have an idea of where the season will go at the beginning, but I don’t think they plan it out to a T. It’s obvious the FW arc has left many FS fans disappointed with how the arc could have gone (or how many feel, myself not included, should have gone). We wanted a FW arc with an entire backstory about FitzSimmons! A look at how SHIELD fell! And we wanted it all in five episodes.

That’s a lot to accomplish in such a short number of episodes. But because this is a show that airs on ABC with 22 episodes in a season, they don’t have the time or luxury to set up every narrative beat perfectly. They don’t have time to write the most complex storyline and flesh out the FW as much as possible to satisfy all the fans. And they certainly don’t have the time to devote an entire arc around a single relationship (no matter how beloved that relationship is) without the rest of the show suffering. Yes, we would all love for the FW to be all about FS. But that’s not the story they’re telling.

So, how do I still enjoy the story when my OTP is suffering, you ask? Of course, it’s not easy. I was so gutted after Fitz killed Agnes that I didn’t know how they would resolve any of this. But two things have helped me through it.

1. I’ve stopped having unrealistic expectations (bc of reasons I’ve discussed above), and 2. I’ve stopped trying to predict what will happen in the narrative.

From my own personal experience, theories send me down a line of thinking that makes me wish for narratives on the show that will never happen, regardless of what evidence I have to back them up. And in the end, I’m always disappointed. If my theory is right, it feels good for a moment, but then I lose the element of surprise when I actually watch the show. And if my theory is wrong, I suddenly feel like the show went down the wrong path. I theorized the hell out of season 2 of Mr. Robot, and I was left disappointed. And unlike my usual tactic for watching AOS, I theorized about the FW arc in the beginning. But now, I wish I hadn’t. If I had just let the story play out without having these expectations, I would have probably enjoyed it even more. Luckily, I’ve let my theories go, and now I watch these new episodes with more excitement than ever.

I can enjoy this arc even if it didn’t tackle the most complex version of the narrative or the FW. I’m completely fine with that. And at this point, I have no clue what’s going to happen in the next two episodes. But that’s the way I like it best.

#agents of shield #fitzsimmons #mine #personal #ish

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wendynerdwrites · 8 years ago

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Im glad that u also like archer. Ive been rewatching it (im on s2) and i feel guilty as a feminist for liking it so much :( i know a lot of the jokes are supposed to be ironic but i still feel bad for laughing, and my bf has made comments abt "how can u laugh at that as a feminist" (he isnt one, hes using it as a gotcha). How do u feel about this? Any advice for separating myself from toxic fandom to just be able to enjoy something problematic? Love ur blog btw happy friday 💋💋

Thanks, and don’t worry, anon: You’re not a bad feminist.

It’s funny you ask this, but I used to have an entire essay series on this exact topic, and on Archer, particularly!

My philosophy is: don’t ignore the problematic, examine it. Use it as a springboard for analysis so you can learn more about the issue conveyed. Use your problematic responsibly! Because, let’s be honest, there ARE no unproblematic pieces of media. So just use it to educate yourself instead. For instance: my love of West Side Story (starring Natalie Wood as the Puerto Rican Maria) got me to learn more about the issues of white-washing.

Being a feminist is not about being perfect, it’s about learning and being open to examination and learning. Use your fandom for good!

Laughter is the balm for the soul. And listening to your boyfriend telling you how to be a feminist… less so. Kind of the opposite.

My old articles are lost, for the most part, but under the cut, I’ve pasted them for reference and included a great video on satire that also very easily applies to this discussion (just substitute feminism with the Holocaust)

Our Faves Are Problematic (And So Can You!)

Nothing and no one is perfect, so isnt it about time we learn how to call out the things we love?

We are all familiar with guilty pleasures: those things we like in spite of ourselves, that we are ashamed to admit we enjoy. Usually the term is applied to something we enjoy despite a perceived “lameness”, or because we’re not the right demographic for something. For instance, I still have a deep, abiding affection for Sailor Moon: that colorful, stock-footage-laced Japanese phenomenon that still gets me shouting “MOON PRISM POWER!” when I’m in the right mood. Yes, childhood is over, and yes, the show’s American dub did give me incest panic as a child, but I can’t help but love it.

But then there is the more difficult brand of guilty pleasures guilty pleasures that involve actual guilt instead of “mild embarrassment”. I’m talking about problematic faves the stuff that we love despite it containing clearly objectionable material.

willing18

(Image copyright Vertigo Comics)

…This is a panel from Bill Willingham’s Fables. The character there is Bigby Wolf, one of the main (anti) heroes of the story and the character the writer identifies with most. The person Bigby is waxing poetically on pro-Zionism to is someone literally called “The Adversary”.

Fables also happens to be one of my favorite comic book series on the planet.

Safe to say the issues surrounding Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East are a bit more complicated than that. And my own feelings on the matter are far more complicated. But this glorification of Israeli military policy is… um… in very tame terms… uncomfortable. After reading this, I resolved to only check Fables out of the library: a way for me to enjoy these comics in a legal way without financially supporting these ideas, however indirectly.

There are other problems with Fables: a lack of ethnic diversity, some murky racial and class commentary, and instances of some objectionable tropes, but there is a lot to recommend of these books as well. The stories are fantastic, the art brilliant, the characters well-fleshed out, and there is a definite progressive take on issues like gender and sexuality. But as much as I love this series, there is no getting around the fact that these stories have issues.

No excuses.

But it’s not just Fables that has disappointed me in the past. I am now and forever a Trekker, yet despite how horribly sexist episodes like “The Turnabout Intruder” are, or the very troubling anti-Semitic coding of the Ferengi. The Star Wars prequels famously had racist caricatures with the Trade Federation and the infamous Jar Jar Binks.

In the world of media, there’s no shortage of problematic content. From the novels of Robert Heinlein containing pro-fascist commentary, to HBO’s Game of Thrones misogynistic adaptation decisions, there’s nothing that is quite free of some messed up messages, subtle and blatant alike.

Now, when we talk about such media, we don’t merely mean triggering factors (i.e. the presentation, portrayal, or discussion of potentially traumatizing issues like domestic abuse, racism, hate crimes, substance abuse, or sexual assault), but rather how these matters are portrayed. A piece of media, such as Marvel and Netflix’s excellent Jessica Jones series, can portray certain issues (such as sexual assault, domestic violence, and mental illness) in a respectful, progressive, and sensitive light. Thus, while the content of the show can be triggering, the skill with which they portray these matters keeps it from being problematic.

In contrast, something like Game of Thrones, which portrays sexual assault in a thoroughly insensitive, exploitative, and misogynistic manner, is highly problematic.

Unfortunately, progress has been a slow-moving process, with many issues such as race, gender, sexual identity, mental illness, substance abuse, and violence only being examined in a more nuanced way fairly recently. As a result, almost all media is problematic in one way or another. Especially since even today, the majority of executives crafting, publishing, and greenlighting books, shows, comics, movies, and other forms of media are in fact cisgendered, heterosexual white men.

So what do we do?

Good news: here at Fandom Following, we don’t believe in dropping something you like just because it’s problematic. Why?

Because knowing, examining, and yes, even appreciating problematic content can be incredibly important. While certain content can be damaging, it can also teach us a great deal. Not only about current issues, but also about how to go about discussing these matters, and constructing narratives in general.

The racial issues in things like Star Wars and Star Trek can teach us much about how coding works, and how to avoid reinforcing stereotypes. The exploitation of women and rape on Game of Thrones can open up a dialogue of how to portray these things properly and improperly.

There are three tricks to enjoying problematic media: 1) Recognizing that there is an issue, 2) Being ready for a dialogue, and 3) Not ignoring or silencing the complaints about said issues.

Well, we here at Fandom Following have decided to tackle this issue head on with a series called “Our Faves Are Problematic (And So Can You!)”, where we will be exploring specific media franchises, creators, and works and, specifically, the problematic content they contain. In this series, we’ll be examining the issues, talking about why they’re important, discussing what this piece of media did wrong, how to approach the issue in a more progressive way, and the best ways to go about discussing the issue itself. Various writers will be contributing to this project, and we’re excited to present this feature to you!

So let’s get down and dirty, people. We all have our problematic faves. Let’s talk about them.

My Face is Problematic: Archer

Honestly, doing a post like this on Archer, a show which is deliberate in its dark humor, is a bit hard for me. Not because I like the show, but because I think there’s true validity in the argument that humor and narratives about really messed up, problematic stuff has its place. The show exists to be as outlandish and absurd as possible. The extremes and the awfulness of the characters’ personalities and their actions is the point.

I VUZ BORN IN DUSSELDORF AND THAT IS VY THEY CALL ME ROLF!

Joking about awful things, awful circumstances, and awful people is hardly new ground for comedy to cover, nor does it send a poor message, necessarily. Mel Brooks wrote a movie in which one of the characters was a Nazi, who wrote an overblown pro-Nazi musical produced by men deliberately trying to make a flop. Springtime For Hitler, as it exists in our universe, is not problematic. The Nazis are the butt of the joke, in which any pro-Nazi sentiment can only function if it is wildly fabricated and over-the-top, and even then, it will still be taken for satire. Because Nazis are utterly terrible, they built their movement on total bullshit that they dressed up in shiny boots and Hugo Boss uniforms and German exceptionalism and “glory”. This song-and-dance number about “Don’t be stupid, be a smartie, come and join the Nazi party” only ever deserves to be a joke, as the Jew who wrote it can tell you. Nazis fucking suck and it’s hilarious that anyone would ever suggest otherwise.

There’s justice in reducing Nazis to self-parody, and doubling down on that by making a joke about them being reduced to self-parody. Especially when said self-parody and depiction of it is crafted by the very people Hitler tried to destroy. No one enjoys or masters mocking Nazis like the Jews. Plain and simple.

Joking about awful things and how terrible they are can be a good way to process things and not allow them to hurt you anymore. Comedy, at its core, is a defense mechanism against horror and pain. There’s a reason slapstick is a classic subgenre of comedy that people have built entire careers around. Laugh at terror and pain to make it go away. Unfortunately, some of the things we manage to find humor in can really make you wonder if were all just terrible and have no limits.

Angela’s Ashes is a memoir by Frank McCourt about his impoverished, abusive, dangerous childhood in Ireland. In it, he chronicles his own starvation, life-threatening illness, abuse, and suffering at the hands of alcoholism and brutality from adult authority figures. He was a child laborer who went days without food while his father drank away the family’s money and abused the rest of the family, who often came down with horrifying illnesses as a result of the terrible conditions he lived in, and spent his formative years suffering along with all the people he loved. Three of his infant siblings die within the space of a chapter. We get a glimpse of the time when his father, overjoyed at the birth of his daughter, finds the will to stop drinking, stop mistreating his family, go to work, provide for his family, and just generally be a better person so that his children don’t have to suffer. For a short period, the McCourts have food, heat, and happiness. Then the baby promptly dies and Frank’s father is back in the pubs, once again squandering any pay he manages to acquire on alcohol and returning home at three am to scream at and beat his wife while his remaining children try to cover their ears and sleep on the cold ground.

Along with being praised for it being a both an unflinchingly brutal depiction of poverty and a testament to the triumph of the human spirit, the book is also praised for its humor.

Remember: Angela’s Ashes is a true story written by the very man who suffered through all of these horrible things. And it’s considered a pretty funny book. And the author who, once again, is the person who actually suffered all of these horrible things, actually did intentionally try to make people laugh as they read about that time he was in the hospital with Typhoid Fever and enjoyed it because it was the first time he’d been in a place where he was fed regularly and got to sleep in a warm bed.

Hilarious.

That being said, there’s satire and dark humor, and there’s just gratuitous, shock-jock bullshit. There are jokes that are terrible simply because of what they’re about and how they’re handled. George Carlin said that anything can be made funny, even rape, if you imagine Elmer Fudd raping Porky Pig.

If we can build entire films and musicals about how any pro-Hitler sentiment can only ever be taken as satire, isn’t that proof that you can joke about anything?

Yes, you can, but that doesn’t mean you should try, that the joke is funny, or that it’s alright, necessarily. Maybe Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig, and Springtime for Hitler prove that anything can be made funny and that’s okay. But if that’s true (and no, I’m not saying that it is), that still doesn’t mean every attempt at making something funny is either acceptable or funny.

Springtime for Hitler is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for any attempt to make a terrible subject the object of humor. Standards need to exist.

Unfortunately, the line between good or acceptable dark humor and simply gratuitous, insensitive, inherently problematic jokes can blur. The excuse of humor can only go so far. Yes, make light of Nazis. But there’s still a point where “humor” is used an excuse for people to act like assholes. And it’s an excuse that is used all too often. Radio Shock Jocks have been using that excuse to help reinforce racism and rape culture for quite a while. Whether certain dudebros like it or not, there’s a point where it stops being gross-out and just starts being gross.

Which brings me to Archer, the animated spy comedy on FX that premiered in 2011. Like many comedy series like Seinfeld or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a major part of the premise is that certain characters are, quite simply, terrible people. These characters and their abhorrent behavior is the joke. And, as the show is about spies, these terrible people are often put into highly dangerous, outlandish, and traumatizing situations.

So, the main characters, by virtue of their profession, spend a lot of time killing people in cold blood. Or trying to seduce or manipulate enemies. Or engaging in clandestine operations of sabotage that harm a lot of people. Horrible, violent things are going to happen, things violent enough to serve as narratives on their own. But most of the characters are as awful as the situations they encounter, so the horror is amplified. And it’s a comedy.

Indeed, in the first episode of the fifth season, we get the whole main ensemble recounting all of their actions and experiences working for the spy agency ISIS that we’d witnessed over the course of the show’s run at that point. Drag racing with the Yakuza, knee-capping the Irish mob, encountering human traffickers, 30 year affairs with the head of the KGB that only ended when the guy was blown up because one of the ISIS members had choke sex with the victim’s cyborg replacement, actual piracy, paying homeless people to fight for spectators, defling a corpse, defiling a different corpse, sexual assault, kidnapping the pope, blowing up oil pipelines, “smuggling Mexicans”

Yeah.

There are comedic arcs about cancer, illegal immigration, kinky S&M bondage murders, cocaine addiction… a lot of stuff, basically.

Now, take those situations, and add in characters who get aroused by things like homeless people, being choked, sex with food, and the thought of their mother dying. Who spend their weekends starting fires, making hybrid pig-people, rubbing sand into the eyes of their employees, competing in underground Chinese Fighting Fish tournaments, and calling in bomb threats so that they can get a table at a fancy restaurant. You get the idea.

And it’s all totally awesome and hilarious and god damn it I kind of love these characters.

This show has a season-long sub-arc about one of the main characters getting so aggressively addicted to cocaine that she not only consumes (literally) half a ton of it in the space of a few months, but almost gets her head chopped off for buying amphetamines from the Yakuza with counterfeit money. It’s one of the most incredible things the show has done.

Pictured: An absurdly self-centered man feeling genuine dismay and concern over his friend risking her life to achieve an unrealistic standard of beauty.

The title character has a butler named Woodhouse who practically raised him. One of the first interactions we witness between them is Archer not only threatening to rub sand into Woodhouse’s “dead little eyes”, but making him go out and buy the sand himself and check if they grade it, because he wants the sand to be coarse. He’s also done things like make the man eat a bowl of spiderwebs and deliberately keep him in the dark about his brother’s death and funeral.

Another character is a mad scientist and possible clone of Adolf Hitler who kills a young intern by giving him a drug designed to turn him gay. That’s one of the less disturbing things Dr. Krieger has done.

Frequent gags on this show include one guy repeatedly getting shot, another character repeatedly getting paralyzed (it’s complicated), people trying to remember the inappropriate puns that they wanted say as one-liners, the horrific abuse and neglect Sterling Archer has received from his mother his entire life, and basically everyone being a sex-maniac.

There are plots revolving around mind-control, drugging people, and hypnotism. You can imagine the paths some of those episodes go down. Yes, there is a character that has tried to sexually assault one of her sleeping co-workers. And later deposited two unconscious, naked coworkers in a bathroom stall with an octopus, in an episode that has already made tentacle hentai jokes. Yes, the openly gay character on the show is often the target of jokes about him being gay or a woman from his coworkers. Yes, the female lead, a black woman, is referred to as a “quadroon” at one point by one of the characters.

Yes, the following exchange of dialogue does take place in an early episode:

“Oh my god, you killed a hooker!”

“Call-girl!”

“No, Cyril, when they’re dead, they’re just hookers!”

And yet… Oh my god. How it manages to play around with stuff in an amazing fashion. For one thing, it is amazing how often this show skewers micro-aggressions and fucks around with stereotypes. And, despite how unabashedly messed up it is, the writing in it actually manages to be oddly pro-social progress in ways that most modern media doesn’t even seem to be aware of.

I take pride in my sex work and I will not put up with your bullshit!

For instance the “hooker” referred to in that exchange? (spoiler alert: she wasn’t really dead) She’s Trinette, and she an unbelievably refreshing and strangely progressive depiction of a sex worker. While she’s a minor character, every time she shows up, it’s awesome. Trinette is a sex worker who is unashamed of her job, a woman who truly does take pride in and enjoy her work, who does not put up with poor behavior from her clients, and is just generally awesome. She call people out and makes them pay for any mistreatment she receives, from calling out micro-aggressions by insisting on her preferred terminology for her profession (“Call-girl, you puke!”), shaming men for their sexual misdeeds (“How can you cheat on Lana bare-back?!”), demanding restitution for any injuries or threats she’s suffered (Threatening Archer into giving her his car after he fakes her death and stuffs her in a rug to fool Cyril into thinking he killed her), and determining her work and clients (“What about Trinette? She said that? Damn it!”). When she has a baby, she gives it her last name along with his father’s (“Magoon-Archer”) and she unapologetically proud of her Irish heritage. She’s easily one of the most functional characters in the show, and every one of her appearances on the show manage to defy at least one whore-phobic trope a minute. She’s the best.

Then there’s the show’s handling of race, which is mixed. While arguably the most important female character in the series (the show, despite its name, is very, very much an ensemble, especially as the series progresses. But in the early episodes when they focussed on fewer characters, she was the one who got the most screentime) is Lana Kane, a highly-competent (for ISIS) African American woman who is really, really well-developed, there is also the fact that she’s the only POC in the main cast. Granted, part of that IS the point. One of the earliest episodes is “Diversity Hire”, where, aside from Lana, the spy agency is so overwhelmingly white that they hire a “diversity double-whammy!” Conway Stern, a black Jew.

“Sammy Gay-vis Junior!”

Now, granted, that doesn’t sound great the way I describe it, but there are so many great moments in this episode alone. For instance, when Mallory Archer, terrible woman and owner of the spy agency mentions their lack of diversity, Cyril, the tragically white accountant and “nice guy” puts his hands on Lana’s shoulder and says he thinks they’re pretty diverse, a statement Lana finds hilarious. Cue Sterling Archer, other horrible person, telling Lana she’s “black-ish”, then responding to her offense at this with “Well, you freaked out when I said quadroon!”. The framing of this entire discourse is that Cyril and Archer are fucking idiots and Lana is of course taking offense because, duh, she should. The episode proceeds with a lot of references and discussion about racism, highlighting casual racism in a nuanced, funny, and organic way. For instance, Archer’s relief that Conway didn’t sleep with his mother. While Archer freaks out about anyone sleeping with his mother, regardless of race, Conway believes it’s racism on Archer’s fault. And in no way does the narrative act like he’s overly-sensitive or irrational for thinking that. Because the stereotype about black men seducing white women and fear from white men about this is still a very real, pervasive thing that has somehow managed to survive in our “enlightened” times. Of course Conway encountering a guy who displays a downright violent fixation on whether or not his new black coworker is sleeping with his mother will assume it’s a race thing. Because why would anyone be so preoccupied with such an idea? In that situation, it’s almost certainly based on the long-standing paranoia white men have about black men’s sexuality “conquering their women.” It’s one of the most common varieties of anti-blackness in existence.

Of course, since it’s Archer, who has kidnapped a LOT of people under the suspicion that they were having sex with his mom, we know this is the one case that it isn’t racism. It’s Archer’s disturbing, Oedipal relationship with his mother. He even kidnapped and threatened his role model, Burt Reynolds, for dating his mother. When he says “Not in a racist way” to Conway in this episode, it’s actually true. He’s just honestly that screwed up where his mother is concerned.

Conway’s conclusions on this, regardless, are still framed as a totally understandable. To the point where the episodes suggests that it would make no sense for Conway to think otherwise. Part of the joke is that no, Archer isn’t a horrible racist at all. He’s way too screwed up for his actions to be motivated by racism.

And before anyone asks, no, this wasn’t the “episode that acknowledges that racism is a thing.” You know the ones… The episodes that talk about race and why racism is bad to prove to the audience that they’re not racist, then proceed with the rest of the show, which never acknowledges race and racism again. There are frequent instances of highlighting racism, from violent outright bigotry to common micro-aggressions to clueless white people demanding how the thing they just did/said could POSSIBLY be considered racist! They’re not racist! How is THAT racist?! Cue Lana face-palming.

I just really, really like this. It doesn’t just end there, either. Racism is called out pretty frequently on this show, and not in a cliche, strawman way. Nor is it treated like something that only exists in the form of aggressively bigoted bad people shouting slurs and holding cross burnings. Nope. The “heroes” of this show just say shit that you could easily imagine someone saying in real life, shortly before getting defensive about any racism on their part. It’s treated as a common, pervasive thing that Lana and other PoC have to deal with every day, and the offense they take at it is treated as nothing short of sympathetic or justified (even in the cases of misunderstandings, like with Conway). This includes Mallory telling Lana to “put [the race card] back in the deck!” as reminder of how much of an unapologetic douche Mallory is.

It’s made clear: people say and do some super racist shit on a regular basis with realizing it or meaning to, and regardless, it’s still uncool and people have every right to get upset and call you out on it. See: Ray’s bionic hand at the end of season six.

Lana’s reactions and how they’re framed is usually pretty awesome. Mostly they come in the form of small, reasonable confrontations, which are never framed as an overreaction on her part. The fact that she “freaked out” when Archer called her a quadroon is framed as “well, duh, of course, she should.” Then there are instances like when she, Archer, and their child visit a high-end nursery school where they encounter a pretty obvious racist. The guy ignores and dismisses Lana at first, then expresses surprise at the fact that she’s the mother of the child (despite the baby being black), remarking about the “times we live in” and telling Lana “good for you!” when she informs him that yes, she is the mother, not the nanny or the maid.

Not all of the racism stuff stems from Lana being back, either. They skewer bigotry against Latinos on a pretty regular basis. When an Irish mobster rants about Latinos (he doesn’t refer to them by that name) “taking American jobs!”, Archer immediately calls bullshit, recalling actual history of the Irish being accused of that exact same thing during the mass immigration of the Irish to America during the potato famine, and it’s just as shitty and bigoted to say such things about immigrants now as it was in 1842. He is extremely irate about a mission ISIS is assigned to do on behalf of border patrol to arrest people who just want to get a job, and he ends up siding with and befriending the Mexican illegal immigrants he encounters. All of this while aspects of certain Latinx cultures are often highlighted, often very favorably (“Ramone is Latino, so he’s not afraid to express affection.”)

That being said, there are still a lot of issues in the show. The lack of diversity is definitely an albatross around this show’s neck. Especially so many seasons after the “Diversity Hire” episode. While I do praise Archer for not treating racism as a thing that is rare and only needs to be addressed in one twenty-minute block of time, it is telling that the lack of diversity at ISIS is never addressed again.

Then there’s the approach to sexuality. The show loves gross-out sex humor, especially regarding Krieger. And the depiction of sexuality is actually pretty mixed. On one hand, the openly gay character in the show adheres to a lot of stereotypes about gay men: he mocks Lana about her “knock-off Fiacci drawers”, his go-to alias is “Carl Channing”, his free time is spent at raves, and he loves to make effeminate poses. He’s also a frequent target of homophobic jokes and remarks. His outrage at this is treated as being every bit as valid as Lana’s, but it doesn’t change the fact that their main gay character is basically ALL of the stereotypes, as are a number of the other gay characters.

“Alright! Were off to get our scrotums waxed!”

Then there is the sexual assault. Which, once again, is called out for being what it is, in defiance of many common biases (such as the idea that female-on-male sexual assault isn’t a thing). But this show is way too flippant about this.

While I consider Archer to be very sex-positive, allowing every character, regardless of sex, age, or orientation, to be comfortable and expressive about their sexuality without judgment (a lot of jokes, yes, but not any that come off as particularly shaming). Almost every character, male or female spends a fair amount of time naked or scantily clad. We see Archer stripped down just as often as Lana. And the fan service isn’t relegated to just women who adhere to the typical youth and weight obsessed eurocentric standards we all know and hate.

Pam, who is a big woman (and often the target of fat jokes, which the show always treats as nothing short of detestable) is a total sex goddess who grows to be utterly confident in herself as a woman to the point where she’s giving Mallory (one of the most desired women on the show) advice. When she reveals that she keep ingesting cocaine because it’s made her thin with big boobs, Archer is utterly dismayed, telling her she was way better off the way she was, acting horrified that she’d risk her life to be “hot”, and just generally freaking out about Pam’s desire to be thin. It manages to avoid being cliche or empty given that Archer considered Pam the best sex he ever had before she got thin, to the point of blowing off assignments just to have sex with her, because she’s just that awesome. After she gains the weight back in season six, she’s still sexy, making Archer’s jaw drop in the episode “Edie’s Wedding.” She’s also unapologetically pansexual, which is awesome.

Mallory, meanwhile, is still actively sexual and treated as desirable. While sex and sexuality are always sources of gags and jokes on Archer, never do the jokes about Mallory’s sexuality ever come across as ageist. Sure, some characters make ageist comments on the show, but it’s never treated as valid. Mallory is still treated as being extremely sexy and confident about it. While Mallory is generally a horrible person, her enthusiastic sexual agency is never once treated as a flaw or something disturbing or gross. What’s disturbing, gross, and worthy of ridicule is her son being so preoccupied and reactionary about his mother having a sex life. It’s clear: if you have a problem with Mallory having a lot of sex and enjoying it, you’re the one with issues.

Even the one young, thin, white woman in the main cast gets to be unapologetic about her kinks. It’s really only a problem when her desire for choke-sex motivates her to lead a KGB cyborg to the ISIS safehouse. Or when she coerces Cyril into sex. And generally acts like a violent, awful person.

Essentially, there’s no tolerance for shaming women for being sexual. All of it, regardless of preference, age, size, or race, is nothing but fun and should be enthusiastically represented. “Can’t talk, got a pussy to break!”

Being a predator is shameful. Having belly rolls is not.

Who on Earth finds this funny?

But, then there’s the flippancy about sexual assault. There ARE gags about Pam and Ray dropping their pants when encountering an unconscious Cyril. And sorry, but the framing of it is all manner of screwed up. There’s tons of sexual coersion as well. Another one of the most problematic instances comes in an episode of season two, where Archer is repeatedly sexually assaulted by a sixteen-year-old German socialite. The show goes out of its way to make it clear that Archer explicitly refuses consent, that he’s being violated, yet the show treats this as funny.

While I get that this is a comedy show and that in-depth exploration of the trauma of sexual abuse isn’t going to be something they can spend a lot of time on, the option they should have gone with is, you know, not base an episode around a german schoolgirl raping the main character. It’s not funny, guys. It’s not necessary. It’s actually just uncomfortable and off-putting.

The show mentions things like alternative gender identities, emotional triggers, and sexual exploration in ways that treat these things as totally valid, which is good. It also frequently portrays poor people as jokes in and of themselves, which is a lot less good. While materialism is lampooned frequently, it’s not treated as a joke in and of itself the way poverty is.

The way the show often portray legitimate abuse for laughs also often goes overboard. While the show does a good job of exploring and following through on all the ways Mallory’s abuse screwed up Archer, there’s a point where the volume of “abuse humor” gets to just be downright gross. Dark humor is one thing, not being able to go an episode without a “Haha, ten-year-old archer was abandoned in a train station at Christmas!” joke is, uh… Not great.

Archer is an awesome, immensely watchable show. But it’s not one I always feel clean watching. It’s a show that celebrates extremes, yes, but there’s a point where certain lines are crossed and it’s just problematic rather than gallows humor.

Archer is one of those series that really makes me struggle to distinguish the gallows humor from the simple tastelessness. To give pause to the idea of problematic content being the “point.”

The line blurs with Archer. A lot. It often manages to distinguish itself with the things it gets right, especially since they often do well on things that most shows, movies, and books are often terrible at. And that’s enough to buy it some goodwill for when they screw up.

But seriously, guys, please stop treating sexual coercion and child abuse as bottomless gag wells. I would have really preferred to have Pam and her awesome sexuality without her sexually assaulting Cyril and Ray. It’s not funny or clever or edgy. It’s just gross.

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#archer fx #your fave is problematic #anon #feminism

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