#Destroyer's universe: commentary

[divinityunleashed]

"There is no I in Team."

"However..."

"There are six I's in: Fuck It, I don't care how big the planet is, I cast Sphere of Destruction."

[studentshaul]

"That little Oda girl also has a nice hat...maybe I should swipe that one too...?"

[bonefall]

Looking for advice since you're great with stuff like this: I'm struggling with how to have a character fundamentally change. A character in my cat story loses his memory and ends up working with the main characters to stop his own plan he made to destroy the world (and after the plan is stopped, he regains his memories). I want his time in the Starless to change him, make him less obsessed with power, but I'm really starting to struggle with whether or not that makes sense and how to work that.

Hmm.. well, first bit of advice I always give is that characters are not people. They are writing tools. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be "realistic" or that connecting to the human traits in the audience isn't important.

It means that a character exists to tell a story.

By "tool" I mean "machine." Every trait is a piston, and ideally they work together to drive your story along. What are you saying with each trait? What is your beginning point for the story, and their end? What do you want to explore? What do you want the audience to take away?

So if you feel stuck on a character, find the larger message you want to impart with them. The job they're doing in your narrative.

What do you want to say about power?

What do you want to say about why Character X wanted to destroy the world? Why was he wrong? What feelings and information lead him to that conclusion?

What is his redemption arc doing for your themes?

Every writer answers those questions differently. For example, I feel strongly that power doesn't corrupt, it reveals. When you finally have the influence to make others do what you want, you make them do it. I don't see "power" as being like... a magic, abstract thing, it's influence over other people, and those people are ALSO individuals with their own reasons for following the leader.

Digressing; what I'm getting at is that, as a writer, I have a lot of thoughts on power itself. I got this way with a lot of reading and interest on the topic. You might find it insightful to experience more art, essays, and commentary on the subject, if you ever get stuck, and develop an opinion you feel strongly about.

Not just about power, as broad writing advice.

Anyway.

If I was writing the character, these are the things I'd be thinking about specifically and changes I'd be making on personal taste. I don't know your full story enough so, hopefully it's insightful;

First of all I'm always SUPER wary of the "correct but demonized radical" trope. Does my villain have a point?

Am i just giving them a Kick-a-Baby scene to make them wrong when they should be completely right otherwise

What are my themes and tone? This is VERY important. Steven Universe is about family and emotions with low stakes violence; the Diamonds are essentially abusive grandparents that Steven is coaching through intergenerational trauma. They fit the universe they're in. Jack Horner does not belong in SU.

So I'd look at Character X's purpose.

Knowing me, I'd actually take out full amnesia entirely. I have memory problems related to trauma so I'm a lot more familiar with major, important details blotting out RIGHT when I need them. Enough that I can put myself in the shoes of someone like BB!Fallenleaf who remembers a lot but the details are fuzzy.

So personally I think I could write this villan to be VERY funny lmao

"Hello. I am Gnagnathor the Destroyer."

"No you're not. He has three horns. You have two."

(DID I USED TO HAVE THREE HORNS?????)

I also just find it more resonant when a character still remembers what they did, why they did it, and is able to refute themselves with their own growth.

To me like... when a character remembers NOTHING to the point where they're not informed by their actions or history at all, how are they really still the same person?

in general though I find total amnesia uninteresting. I wish it was less popular.

What did Gnagnathor DO with his power? What did he WANT from it?

The simplest version of this I know is "Gnag was hurting and wanted everyone else to hurt too. Now that he has a happy place, he doesn't want that."

TO BE CLEAR THATS FINE. That's a REALLY common power fantasy and it's not automatically a bad story. It's popular for a reason.

Personally I feel strongly about the idea, though, that people with power don't change unless they lose it. There's no reason to.

People don't change until you break the environment that contributes to the behavior.

Especially with victims unfortunately-- the ugly truth is that a lot of problematic behaviors exist because they protected the victim from their abuser's actions. You need safety to really start to unpack that.

You can personally identify it and address it as much as you want, when your abuser starts to use That Tone you will still seize up. Just try to yank yourself back into your head when you're disassociating during a screaming session; your reward is raw distress.

That said, not all villains HAVE to have tragic motivators like that, or be ex-victims at all. Leveraging power to get what you want can be as ugly as just being taught the people you're hurting are subhuman.

Or making up justifications for why This Is a Good Thing Actually.

Some people will lash out violently when these justifications fall apart, because accepting it would mean they're Being Bad

Most people have an innate desire to Be Good. Like... the vast, vast majority of people. Some sense of morality is observable in all intelligent social animals; dolphins, chimps, elephants.

Tangentially, if you understand that people don't WANT to be bad and that the natural response to a scolding is defensiveness, you understand that convincing people of something is a LOT easier when you approach with kindness.

AND IN TURN: be wary of those who are flattering while trying to convince you of something. This is Manipulation 101.

So back to Gnagnathor

Do I want to talk about environment and how it changes him to be away from power? How traits that previously earned him wealth or influence are suddenly incredibly taboo, so he can't use them here?

On that-- HOW did he get his power in the first place? Re: I'm very wary of the "correct but demonized radical" trope.

Were his minions following him because they have serious issues and he exploited their desperation? .....are you centering the experience of the poor, sad abuser over his victims

Or are they ALL united over something important and legitimate? With the redemption of their villainous leader, how are you planning for that to frame all of their former followers?

(This is why redeeming minions is usually a lot more productive than doing it to the leader, imo. Redeeming Zuko means you can explore the familial legacy, the indoctrination of the Fire Nation's children, their justifications, the way systems make monsters out of people. Redeeming The Firelord would probably have caused Azula, one of his victims, to pick up his slack and now, suddenly, you have a VERY uncomfortable situation where Ozai is thrashing one of his abused children but Good This Time.)

(Not to mention that, again... why would he do this. He has power. He's doing what he wants and is used to this situation. It would be a numbskulled narrative choice.)

Aaaand that's about all I can say without essentially being a cowriter or editor. It's on you to figure out what you're trying to do and say here. I'm a good writer on this subject because I think about it a lot, which has lead to my strong opinions and point of view. Your art is a reflection of you.

[magnetarbeam]

Star Wars Technical Worldbuilding Notes 3

At times, I've thought of "Star Defender" as a formal classification level above "star dreadnought" that was originally conceived for the reasons the term exists in canon, which is that NR politicians thought building ships of that magnitude would be less offensive if they didn't call it a dreadnought, but the Viscount ended up so huge (in my headcanon, which is based on rough volume estimates from the available images of the Viscount, it has 2.86e28 watts of peak output, which outpowers the Executor by more than an order of magnitude) that it justified new terminology.

Come to think of it, I think part of the situation might also be justifying such things to budget committees that probably aren't experts in ship design. Like, "We only ordered three Star Defenders, we promise," but said Star Defenders are literally the highest-powered conventional warships ever built.

It's similar to a common interpretation of the Allegiance-class heavy destroyer (technically something seen in Dark Empire, but most specific performance figures come from FractalSponge's model, which has 6 times the power output of an ISD in 2-3 times the overall volume) about being able to pass it off like that, although it probably doesn't work as well for the Viscount because it isn't actually particularly high-powered for its overall volume, which is a pretty big part of the production cost.

Not sure if I've mentioned this in previous posts on the matter, but the assumption in Saxton's Technical Commentaries about ship classifications is that because Star Wars is inherently a translation into our language from Galactic Basic, the terminology used for this is the same as ours. In increasing order of size: Corvette, Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser, Battlecruiser, Battleship. Clearly, I don't tend to be quite that strict about it in my own interpretations, but it's useful to mention as a point of reference here.

Most major shipyard planets have one or more orbital construction rings that encircle the planet, and ships are constructed within the interiors and on the surfaces of the rings themselves. That's an insane amount of construction space, compared to the size of the ships. Never mind Kuat's star system-diameter ring that they have, that's referenced in Iron Fist.

Said system ring is something I've headcanonically assigned the name Stellar Halo. That's mostly inspired by the Essential Guide to Warfare, which gives that name to one of the warships defending Kuat when the New Republic took it, so I can connect that the ship was named after the ring.

Even for the largest shipbuilding organization in the Star Wars galaxy, something that big would be a hell of a project. Probably the work of centuries. But on the overall timescale of galactic history, that's more than manageable, and it's plausible enough in the context of the universe's tech levels that I can totally see it as the kind of thing a giant industrial corporation does just to prove that they can.

At times, I've imagined that the system ring was destroyed by the Yuuzhan Vong, but I don't think they would have been able to do that in the time they had. Like, a cross-section of that thing is probably thousands of kilometers across. They'd essentially need a planet-killing weapon to do it.

This is the kind of thing that leads me to not try to use realistic galactic scales in my writing, because I don't want to have to use scientific notation just to write out the number of ships in a battle.

I wonder if Wedge's original Wraith concept of effectively intelligence commandos that all had pilot training was kept by the New Republic and then Galactic Alliance.

Certain older ships like the Eclipse would be retroactively reclassified as Star Defenders if it was separate. Because that thing has a peak output of 1.07e28 W in my headcanon, although it's definitely not the ultimate super-dreadnought that youtubers with no critical thinking skills like to pretend that it is. Even the RPG sourcebook asspull gun counts give the Eclipse fewer standard weapons than the Executor. Most of its resources and hull space go into the axial superlaser.

Speaking of star defenders, the Corellian Strident-class is a full-scale star defender to me. Same reactor as the Eclipse, but armed like a regular ship of the line, and also faster than a Viscount. In that, I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit on them being part of the Corellian defense fleet at Operation Roundabout, where they're also referenced as being smaller than the Galactic-class destroyers, which are explicitly the same length as an Imperator and 1.5 times its mass.

Not currently sure how I feel about the "Corellian Dreadnaughts" from LotF: Tempest, in terms of size classification. I have them written down as Peregrine-class star defenders (named for Bel Iblis's first flagship) with 2.54e28 W of peak output, but I'm starting to doubt them being that heavy, because they were part of the assault fleet that Thrackan kept secret for ten years, and only so much money can disappear without people getting suspicious. Although of course the exact fleet numbers in the book are not the kind of thing I pay attention to when writing these kinds of headcanons, the spirit of the scene is that Bwua'tu's GA fleet, when it finally arrived, did outmatch the Corellian assault fleet, which would be a stretch if the Corellians actually had anything that heavy.

Also finding that I'm gonna have to scale up the MC90 (technically the Defiance-class of the MC90 design generation) to make it as voluminous as the Imperator that it's supposed to match.

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball Super 102

WULL IT’S TIME!

IT’S TIME!

IT’S!  RIBRIANNE!  TIME!

So if you’re like me-- and I know I am-- you’re probably watching this arc and wondering where the hell Universe 2′s team is during all of this.   We’ve been following U7 the whole time, and we just saw a bunch of stuff with U6 and U11 in the last few episodes.  U9 got erased, so they’re accounted for, and U3, U4, and U10 have provided a steady supply of jobbers for the main cast to whale on. 

But Universe 2 has been largely absent from this battle, except for a scene or two where their Yardratti fighter, Jimiz, tussled with Goku for a bit.  They’ve suffered zero eliminations so far, and while they also haven’t eliminated anyone else, that’s not the object of the game.  The team with the most members standing at the end is the winner, so as of this episode, Universe 2 was technically in the lead, even though they haven’t done anything.  If a team could make it through the entire Tournament of Power without fighting while the other teams whittled each other down, that would totally work. 

However, that is not Universe 2′s strategy.  In this episode, Brianne de Chateau, the team’s captain, basically calls out to everyone else on the stage to watch her perform her transformation.  I don’t know why she waited this long, or what her team was doing until now, but they clearly weren’t hiding from the competition for any strategic purpose.  She’s literally inviting everyone to watch her.

So the big gag here is that no one in this cartoon outside of Universe 2 understands any of this.  Pell, their Supreme Kai, starts marking the fuck out, and Helles the Destroyer provides a running commentary on every move her team makes, but none of it really makes any sense, and none of the other characters get it either.  I mean, I like Universe 2′s gimmicks, but I’d be lying if I said I understood any of this.  But I’ll try to explain it as well as I can. 

So for starters, Brianne is part of a trio called the Kamikaze Fireballs.  Or... Tokkou Hintotama.  Or... the Maiden Squadron.  The Dragon Ball Wiki can’t make up its mind.  We’re not off to a great start.  Geez, I could start a sideblog just trying to unpack Team Universe 2. 

All right, let’s soldier on.  Brianne’s the green-haired lady in pink, and that’s Sanka Coo on the left in blue, and Sousu Roas on the right in yellow.  I like her li’l hat, that’s adorable. 

I’m not totally dense here.  They’re clearly doing a Magical Girl/Pop Idol thing with this, although the rest of Team Universe 2 looks like a mishmash of completely unrelated genres.  From left to right, we have:

Bikal, a rejected Darkstalker character

Jimiz, an OC based on a single filler scene from an episode of DBZ (respect)

Rabanra a demon kid or something?  I don’t know

Zarbuto: Former star of the 1940′s sci-fi serial  Zap Astro’s Star Patrol.

Zirloin: A big blue dude in a Roman Soldier costume.

Also there’s a couple of snipers on the team, but we’ll get to them later.

Anyway, despite the aesthetic clash, the whole team is into Brianne’s love act, so they cheer her on as she and her partners to their big Magical Girl transformation.  Everyone watches, transfixed by confusion, resentment, or curiosity. 

Except for 17, who shoots hand lasers at them.

Everyone bawls out 17 for this.  In his defense, the Fireball Angels or whatever they’re called were wide open, and he already spared the last two girl opponents they ran into.  They’re here to win this thing, aren’t they?  But Goku wanted to see how much stronger the Kamikaze Maidens got, and he’s no stranger to long transformation sequences.  Also, Top buts into this argument, since he’s a big proponent of theatrics and elaborate poses in battle.  So 17′s like “Sheesh, fine.”  And the Fireball Squadron goes back to start over. 

Okay, so let’s be clear about this.  Lot’s of smartalecks out there love to poke fun at this stuff, and say things like “Why don’t they just shoot the hero during the long transformation sequence!”  This episode answers that question.

1) 17 just tried it.

2) It doesn’t work.  The ladies aren’t even hurt.

3) Everyone yelled at him for being impolite.

4) They’re just gonna start over again, so you might as well lay out and let them finish their spot. 

5) They don’t fly the ring to Mt. Doom because Sauron has flying monsters who would intercept those eagles you’re thinking of.  You’re not clever.

So yeah, we’re starting over.  That’s fine by me, I could watch this stuff all day.  KISS COSTUME CHANGE, ACTIVATE

  LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-OOOOOOO-VE GUN!

People try to tell me GT wasn’t that bad or the Zamasu Saga wasn’t that bad.  All I know is that I really dreaded sitting through all those shitty epiosdes, and this one is a breeze.  Everything’s so colorful and I like how the tournament stage looks like a Road Runner cartoon now, and nothing hurts.  Anyway, Brianne turns into Ribrianne, which has always confused me because it’s just her first name with two more letters in front of it.  

Sanka Coo becomes Kankusa, which.... they just rearranged her name for that, didn’t they?   Also she’s another cat lady, so if you missed the one from Universe 9, we’ve gotcha covered.

Sousu Roas becomes Rosie.  Well... that’s just a regular ass name.  That’d be like if Billy Batson said “Shazam” and turned into a guy named John.

Fuck yeah!  Fireball Ballfires Squadron in full effect! 

So first off, Ribrianne starts shooting pink hearts and pink smoke everywhere.  It’s not really clear what this is or how it works or what it does.  Helles just keeps talking about how it’s “love” and “beauty”, but that doesn’t actually convey any information.  At best, it just raises further questions. 

Top refuses to inhale the stuff...

But Goku takes a sniff, because why not?   It doesn’t seem to hurt him or anything. 

The Team U7 guys are unaffected, which they seem to consider a sign of their discipline, and they point out Roshi isn’t bothered, even though he would be the most at-risk.  He credits Puar for helping him overcome his uncontrollable horniness, so is that what this is?  Did Ribrianne shoot pheromones into the arena?  Is she trying to make everyone too horny to fight back?

I mean, part of the gag here is that the trio is supposed to start out pretty and then get super-extra beautiful when they transform, but Krillin thinks their transforms are kind of a step backwards, while Universe 10′s guys all seem blown away by how hot the girls are now.  So whether Ribrianne is beautiful is a subjective matter, which... I mean, that’s an interesting approach to a character, but it also gets kind of confusing.  I don’t think Ribrianne would be Roshi’s type, and yet he acts like he’s achieved something by resisting her charms.  The U10 guys are seduced by her, but it doesn’t matter because most of them are already eliminated.  And then you’ve got Vegeta, who seems to find her so revolting that he can barely stomach fighting her. Then again, Vegeta acts disgusted by everyone. 

So finally, these two go at it, and it’s my favorite pairing from this tournament, even though it doesn’t really amount to much.  They put a quick sequence of Vegeta fighting this big pink clown lady in the opening credits, and I was blown away by how awesome it looked, and so I was looking forward to Ribrianne ever since.  In this episode, they finally throw down, and the same cool fight sequence gets recycled here, with a little more thrown in for good measure.

I can’t explain it.  Maybe it’s the color scheme, or the fact that Vegeta is my second favorite DBZ character.  Ribrianne looks like his complete opposite, like they shouldn’t even be in the same cartoon.  She looks like an elementary school teacher who went a little overboard with her classroom’s Halloween party.  But she sees Vegeta coming at her and she’s like “Let’s go, jackass!”

I just love this image of a cutesie character just taking it to Vegeta, and he’s not gonna back down because he’s a Saiyan warrior who doesn’t run from a fight... except...

Rirbrianne comes at Vegeta with this rolling attack (Fireball of Me!) and Vegeta can’t bring himself to strike back.

He’s just too grossed out.  I don’t know if this is a fatphobic thing, or he can’t handle Ribrianne’s face looking like an old-timey TV screen, or maybe the rolling made him dizzy.  Or maybe the love smoke finally got to him.  Anyway, he backs off.

That suits Ribrianne just fine, as she hits another opponent instead and eliminates him.  Dyrasem, if you were wondering.  And yes, he’s a Universe 10 guy. 

So what about the other Jumping Bomb Angels?  Well, Rosie goes after Goku, and seems to do okay, although Goku’s been hustling fighters this whole Tournament, so “doing okay” against Goku is kind of a tricky thing to judge.  Still, you gotta hand it to these gals.  They jumped right in and went after the biggest cats in this tournament. 

Same with Kankasu, who’s determined to punish 17 for interrupting their transformation sequence earlier.  This is no place to hold a grudge, as Universe 9 already demonstrated.  But Kankasu is driven by animal passions or something, so she’s not exactly the level-headed one of the team.

She seems to have 17 on the ropes, just scratching, clawing, and biting him at will, but then he throws up his force field and shuts her down without any trouble.  He’s got infinite stamina, so it’s pretty easy for 17 to rope-a-dope someone.  I’m not clear on this spot, but I get the impression that Knakasu is somehow stuck?  Like, maybe she ‘s trapped within the forcefield instead of just clinging to the outside of it?

17 nearly eliminates Kankasu, but she’s saved by her teammate Bikal.  Good hustle, ladies.  Nice to see a team that watches each other’s backs.

Uh...

Okay.  Uh...

Yeah, I’m pretty sure Kankusa and Bikal are an item, you guys.

18′s like “Ha ha, those lesbians really wrecked your shit, 17.”  And 17′s like “Shut up, I was too distracted thinking about my cool park ranger job.” 

Now 17 means business.  To be fair, there’s dinosaurs at his job, so I can see how it would be hard to get in the right frame of mind for this event.  Anyway, he takes out Bikal first, so she won’t be able to save anyone else.

This enrages Kankusa, which also makes her fight sloppy.  17 gets the upper hand, and when Ribrianne tries to assist, Kankusa tells her to stay out of it.  Ribrianne respects her decision, which sort of exposes the team’s weakness.  The whole love thing is a great motivator and it keeps the team united, but also makes them a little too sentimental for their own good.  

Somehow she gets 17 up in the air and leaps after him, right into the path of the big light that shines down on the stage...

And this was 17′s plan.  He bounces off the surface of the light and launches himself back at her with an energy blast ready to go.  Is that even legal?  The Grand Zenos allow it,since it’s cool. 

17 congratulates Rosie for a battle well-fought, sort of like his muted appreciation to Piccolo when they fought in DBZ.  Then he blasts her out of the ring. 

Well, now they can hold hands on the bench, at least. 

So 17′s looking pretty great right now, but he’s also incurred the wrath of Ribrianne.  This looks like a pretty good cliffhanger, but I’m pretty sure the next episode has nothing to do with this at all.  I guess we’ll see.

[33-108]

"Swami Lakshman Joo did not have to give a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, and by extension, neither did Abhinavagupta, but they did so to demonstrate the differences between Kashmir Shaivism and the other schools found in India.

If you sit down and compare the commentaries by the Advaita Vedanta Gurus, and the Vaishnava Gurus, with the Kashmir Shaiva Gurus commentaries, you will clearly see the fine differences between each school.

One of the major differences in which Kashmir Shaivism stands apart, which is best highlighted in the commentating on the Bhagavad Gita and its traditional message and interpretation, is that in Kashmir Shaivism we do see ourselves as the Doer.

In other systems of thought, there is no identification with the Doer, either there is no Doer and it is just the play of Prakriti, of Maya, of the Gunas, or it is just the play of Lord Krishna, and/or his Yogamaya, but in Kashmir Shaivism, we not only say "Yes, I am the Doer" we say that this "Doer" is none other than the Supreme Lord, who is none other than our own Self, who is doing everything, everywhere, all at once.

As Swamiji has said in his exposition of the Gita, "It is not meant that I tell you that I am the creator and destroyer of the whole uni-verse; it does not mean that. It means that you should also behave with this kind of behavior within your own self. You should also say, “I am the creator and destroyer of this whole universe!” You should attribute it to yourself. You should not attribute it to God, that Lord Śiva is the creator and destroyer of this whole universe. No, [you should feel that], “I am, I am the creator and destroyer of [this universe].” You should attribute these aspects to yourself. This is [the reason] the Bhagavad Gītā was produced.'"

That is the true understanding of Kashmir Shavism, that you are the Doer, You are the Self, you are the Lord, and everything that you see and experience, it is your own glory, it is your own Shakti, and you are never away from it, you are never apart from your own energy, you are not just a witness to some process, some impersonal consciousness, but very much intimately connected with it, always one with it, the true origin of it, the true origin of everything.

You have to attribute it to yourself. You have to own it. You have to take responsibility for it.

You are the Hero! You are the Doer!

This is the cream of Kashmir Shaivism!"

Guru Daeva Stone

[zirhlikuzgun]

Sean Allison's classic experience: A classic saga of Sean Allison's good-old adventures (prior to the Pokémon experience) - Part 17 = {Driving Ib and Ib - Part 17 🠊 The Triss team's sitcom show - Part 17 🠊 Parody adventures with Luffe and Sjanne - Part 17 🠊 The Angora guys by night - Part 17 🠊 Fritz and Poul (ft. Split) records their livestream commentary for "Sean Allison and co.'s hero-brave sad-to-fab quest thru their hero-brave journey from sad to fab" - Part 17} ▶ [Mr. Müller's audio/video commentary for "Sean Allison and co.'s hero-brave sad-to-fab quest thru their hero-brave journey from sad to fab"] Sean Allison's hero-brave journey from sad to fab - Part 17 = [Mr. Schüster's audio commentary for "Sean Allison and co.'s pre-historic quest"] Sean Allison and co.'s pre-historic quest - Part 17 = Savan reveals some secret plans - Part 2: Satan captures Scylla / Rescuing Sean Allison

And now, back to the show.

...runner SS Scylla, a ship in the service of its imperial senator witch Scylla, who are secretly one of the Aytien's leaders, that are in possession of the plans, cause she has obtained its schematics, and however, many rebel prisoners aboard the Death Star are managing to riot and get control of a technical readout while an imperial-turned-rebel retrieves further plans, but however, from there they beamed it on Scylla's ship, the SS Scylla, while the 501st legion, under Satan, tracked rebels to Bard'abish, well however, this was only a set-up for Hades, and even so, the rebels, who fought with the defensive upper hand, were crushed, so the imperial forces are soon discovering the true plot and the star destroyer, as well as its dreaded devastator, under the command of Satan himself, that captures the SS Scylla in a space battle above the Aytien universe, where Scylla had been trying to reach. The SS Scylla gets intercepted by an imperial cosmic destroyer under the command of the ruthless empire leader Satan, the evil dark lord of Hades. When Scylla and the Rebel Alliance are hoping to enlist the help of the bogo king who had been a fugitive bogo in exile on the planet, while being in possession of holding the plans for the chairman's secret weapon of the Death Star, Imperial Satantroopers of the 501st take control of the ship, and Satan arrives alongside his group of Satantroopers, as they go ahead to assess the damage and retrieve the plans, but however, Satan is outraged by the resistance and questions the captain, whom he eventually strangles and kills, in a fatal interrogation, and however, Scylla is spotted by part of the 501st squad of troops and is shot with a stun blast. Just before Scylla gets captured by Hades who will gently transfer her aboard the ship as well as those dreaded star destroyers, while battling those rebels on the ship, Satan questions her as well, and Scylla are hopefully able to record a holographic message by hiding the plans, as well as an holographic recording in the memory system of a homeless monkey (who will soon be adopted thru being named as Mr. Nilsson), who gets sent alongside an nameless horse (which becomes the companion of that monkey), into an escape pod room, though hiding the pland inside itself, and therefore being sent down to the nearby desert. Satan orders a command to be sent to the imperial senate that the ship was destroyed, with everyone on board killed, and then afterward, he captures Scylla, by taking her prisoner, and he starts to interrogate her. Later afterwards, Haded Slater, who were threatened with his own imprisonment in the Phantom Zone if he makes his theory public or attempting to flee, had already been worried of being unable to convince the ruling council of elders about the impending danger, despite that he is correct, and even though he had resigned to his and his planet's fate, and with very little time left, he assembles an experimental spacecraft to take advantage of a loophole in the pact that he had made, which is that he is free to send Sean Allison and Sophie Baker back to their home planet (that has suitable atmosphere, to which the inhabitants bear a close resemblance to those foreign people) which is known as Earth. He are at the same time preparing the spacecraft, so that it can transport Sean Allison and Sophie Baker back to Earth, but his ex-ally questions Haded Slater's action, and he feels that the environment and culture on Earth would give Sean Allison and Sophie Baker the advantages they would need to survive, and due to that, Haded Slater reassures his ex-ally that Sean Allison and Sophie Baker will have a decided advantage on Earth since the planet's yellow sun and weaker lighter gravity will give them extraordinary powers, making them completely invulnerable. Later, the council members discover that Haded Slater may be misusing energy, and begins to suspect that he could be violating the agreement he had made, and however, the senior councillor orders a full-scale investigation. Well eitherway, Haded Slater, who is joined by his...

We'll be right back after the break...

[risingsouls]

            “ Hmpt...I may not have seen the whole universe, but I have seen enough to say with confidence that Earth’s food doesn’t even rank in the top ten of best tasting or creativity. Not that that stupid feline would know any better since he spends most of his time sleeping... ”

[nmbh1-moved]

nigie’s wall

                                                   ❝      that’s  . . .    vague  .    who  is  this  ?      ❞

                                                   ❝      just  . . .    come  talk  to  me  ?    i’m  sure  whatever  is  going  on  we  can  talk  through  ?   uh  . . .    i  can’t  really  say  much  without  context  ,    but  if  we’re  friends  i’m  certainly  open  to  hearing  what  you  have  to  say  .      ❞

                                                   ❝      are  we  REALLY  doing  this  again  ?      ❞

                                                   ❝      noted  .    thank  you  ,    dexter  ,   really  .    i  appreciate  it  .      ❞

                                                   ❝      i’m  having  dinner  in  the  next  eight  minutes  .    thank  you  for  the  concern  though  ,    pearl  .      ❞

                                                   ❝      the  kids  next  door  moonbase  is  way  cooler  than  your  moonbase  .    no  offense  .    i  mean  ---    i’m  fighting  against  them  and  even  i  know  that  .      ❞

                                                   ❝      wow  ,    haven’t  heard  THAT  one  before  .      ❞

[david-talks-sw]

"I think the overriding factor on Obi-Wan's ship and all of the Jedi ships… is that I wanted them to be reminiscent of the design of the Star Destroyers and the Imperial ships, because ultimately that's where those ships grew out of: out of the former guardians of peace and justice in the universe, which were the Jedi. I didn't particularly want - for thematic reasons - that to shift. I wanted to keep that wedge-shape design."

- George Lucas, Attack of the Clones, Commentary Track 2, 2002

[divinityunleashed]

"FRIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEZAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!"

...uh oh.

Mention: @lawain-dimensional-heroes

[knickynoo]

Back to the Future: The Animated Series, s01ep03 "Forward to the Past" Review and Commentary

Onto episode 3! Previous episodes linked HERE.

In this episode: Doc invents something a supervillain would love to get their hands on, Marty is hit by a car, and Doc wipes humanity off the face of the Earth.

As many of you know, we were cheated out of a portion of Real Doc content last episode–due to the segment at the beginning being cut. This time, though, we get to see him right away. :) He's hanging out in 3,000,000 B.C. with the dinosaurs, and he's—he's doing great, everyone. He is cool, calm, and collected.

Doc begins to tell us about another time that he, Jules, and Verne were almost "dino snacks," which brings us into the cartoon portion. Goodbye for now, Real Doc. I'll be counting the minutes until I see you again.

Cartoon Doc is showing the boys his "proprietary subatomic ultrasonic molecular redistributor", which is basically a vacuum that breaks down the molecular structure of an object and disintegrates it. Which. I dunno, sounds dangerous to me. You could destroy a person with that thing. Just rip them apart molecule by molecule. Terrifying invention, Doc.

His intention is for it to be utilized at landfills, however, NOT to annihilate people. Jules wants to test it out, but Doc is worried about causing an accident if it malfunctions. He reveals that, in 1961, an experiment gone wrong caused him to accidentally break "every window in the Greater Hill Valley-Medfield Basin." And I know this is just a silly cartoon and not necessarily in line with any canon happenings of the actual BTTF universe, but this is a fun one to imagine as actually having happened. What in the world was Doc working on? How did he break every single window in that specific area?

Anyway, he decides a safe place to test it would be prehistoric times. And as SOON as the DeLorean busts out of the garage and takes off at full speed into the yard, Marty is suddenly there. Pinned to the windshield.

Doc screams in horror and slams on the brakes, sending Marty flying several feet away.

There he goes. See ya, Marty. I love this show.

So, turns out that Marty was on his way over to the lab and got no warning that Doc was about to come flying out. Yes, he was hit by a speeding car. No, don't worry; he's completely fine. (This is Marty, after all) He immediately gets up and tells Doc that he needs to honk or give him a hand signal before he takes off like that. No biggie.

Marty hands Verne a videotape of a movie Jennifer has apparently filmed, in which Marty is the star. And that's–that's it. Doc tells him they don't have time (yes you do, Doc. You're in a time machine) and catapults up into the sky via a very large slingshot. I assume this tape will come into play later.

Literal seconds after arriving in the Cretaceous Period, Doc and the boys are chased by a T-Rex and then carried away by a pteranodon.

There was definitely a better place to test out your molecule destroyer, Doc. If you'd tried, you probably could've thought of like 10 other options before visiting the dinos. You just like to complicate things and cause chaos.

Thankfully, the dinosaur is friendly and just takes them for a little ride before safely depositing them back by the DeLorean. Doc is just about to take the boys to test his atom-destroyer when they spot a giant meteor headed straight towards Earth!! After a brief moment of panic, Doc realizes his molecular redistributor might be able to disintegrate the meteor, but he needs additional power. 1.21 gigawatts, to be exact. He's able to get this power by rerouting the Mr. Fusion through the car battery. And just like that, he zaps the meteor and saves the day! The whole crisis lasts like 20 seconds, honestly; they figure it out pretty quickly.

So...Doc just prevented a major meteorological event from happening. They're surrounded by dinosaurs, and he stopped a giant meteor from hitting Earth. This will come back to bite him.

As they return to the car and prepare to leave, they discover that the battery is dead. It's not because of the Mr. Fusion thing, though, it's because Verne was sitting in the car and watching the videotape Marty gave him.

I have no clue what is going on here.

Also, can I talk about how weird it is that Marty is in this show so little so far? He was in a good deal of episode 1, but only had 5 seconds of screen time in episode 2 and only about 30 seconds so far in this one. Where is he? Where is my Mart-Mart? Also, where is Clara again?

Doc decides they can try to power the car using lemons. No, really. There is a convenient lemon tree grove nearby, and they connect copper, aluminum, and wires to hundreds of lemons and then run it all back to the car. Upon arriving back to 1991 Hill Valley, they find it to look almost identical to the Cretaceous Period. Surprise! Preventing a huge meteor from wiping out the dinosaurs actually had consequences!

Except. Um. They're not exactly the consequences I would have assumed would happen. Instead of dinos just sort of running rampant all over, they've evolved to the point of wearing clothes and driving cars? But they still look exactly like dinosaurs.

Here's a screenshot of the DeLorean next to the tire of a dinosaur car and one of a bunch of dinos wearing clothes.

It's all very silly. You know, except for the realization Doc suddenly has that everybody is dead. Or rather, they never even existed in the first place. Doc has literally wiped out all of human existence because he thought prehistoric times would be the perfect place to test out his molecular redistributor. May I remind you that Doc was against testing it in present-day because he didn't want to cause another incident like whatever happened in 1961 that caused all the windows of everybody's houses to break. Now he's gone and created a timeline without any people. Thumbs up, Doc. At least you didn't break any windows!

Here is Doc, sadly staring at a photo containing three of his loved ones whose existence has been obliterated. I do think it's cute that Marty was included in the family photo, though.

Obviously, Doc, Jules, and Verne must go back to the Cretaceous Period moments after their other selves have left and use the molecular redistributor (set to reverse) to put the meteor back in the sky. They complete their mission and leave mere seconds prior to impact.

We return to present day, where the car appears just as Marty is delivering the punchline of a joke to Einstein (he told the first half of it right after Doc and the boys left earlier in the episode. It's the classic, "Why'd the nerd throw the clock out the window? Because he wanted to see time fly," joke lol) Doc and the boys are reunited with Marty and Einie–still an alarming lack of Clara, though–and that's the end of the cartoon portion. BACK TO REAL DOC!!!

Real Doc makes a joke about making sure to bring his running shoes next time he visits prehistoric times. He's wearing an absurd amount of watches and an awesome shirt. Look at him.

Also, this scene led me on a mini-quest to find the origins of the "___ went to ___ and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" thing. Because this is a really specific joke that relies on being aware of the trend of these shirts being sold as souvenirs. My research was inconclusive, though it seems that it may have started somewhere in the 1970s. Interesting! Now I'm curious: tell me in the comments or tags if you've ever owned or seen one of these shirts being sold at a tourist destination.

That's all for now. Join me next time to see Marty accused of witchcraft and put on trial.

[bedlamsbard]

@comentter asked about the TCW series finale

Sorry if I don't remember, but did you ever talk about the last 2 episodes of TCW? I only remember the motion capture thing from the first 2 of the arc. I was annoyed at the changes to the story they previously established in the novel and Rebels (which included Rex and Ahsoka splitting up) and for some reason I can't figure out, it didn't feel like a real ending to me...

I don’t think I’ve talked about it past expressing my annoyance about using Sam Jackson!Mace and Hayden Christensen!Anakin during Ahsoka’s vision. (WHICH I AM VERY ANNOYED ABOUT.)

I don’t have particularly strong feelings about Shattered/Victory & Death -- I think they’re two of the better episodes of S7, but I think S7 is honestly the weakest of all TCW as far as theme and story arc go.  They are also, unfortunately, probably the most aggravating case in S7 of throwing out previously established canon from Johnston’s Ahsoka novel and from Rebels.  And like, there’s not really all that much to throw out! So you mostly have to work to do it!

(Under a cut because this got long and honestly I probably forgot stuff since I haven’t rewatched in a while.)

The big difference is, obviously, the change in location from Mandalore (I believe the novel either strongly implies or outright states it’s in the middle of the battle?) to the ship.  Putting aside Filoni’s comments from SWCE a few years ago about Ahsoka teaming up with giant wolves (I think it’s extremely likely that that was wistful thinking and concept art on his part, rather than George Lucas’s actual plan), the advantage of putting Order 66 on a star destroyer in hyperspace is that it’s about as confined a space as you can get with no escape.  And that works pretty well in the actual episodes -- it’s a nice callback to “Brain Invaders,” as well, though I’m not sure it was done deliberately.  It also limits the number of moving parts available, so rather than having to worry about Mandalorians on both sides (and civilians...would have liked to see those in the Siege eps...that’s a different rant), all that the audience has to worry about are Ahsoka (and Rex, later on), the clones, and the wild card, Maul. Which admittedly is done very well -- like, the way the clones turn on Ahsoka?  Terrifying!  I don’t think they really played into the claustrophobic atmosphere of being trapped on a ship in hyperspace with no way out enough; I actually do think Brain Invaders and A Test of Strength, and even the flashback scenes in Jedi Fallen Order, did it better.  (Not even ONE scene of crawling through the vents? are you even Star Wars?)  On the one hand, it’s been done before, do you really have to do it again?  On the other...y’all made the decision to do this.

I actually hate that Ahsoka has the ~vision of Anakin’s fall -- it’s very jarring, it makes no continuity sense (in all honesty, it’s the sort of thing I’d expect from the ST, so maybe in that context it does make continuity sense, lol), and I think to some extent that it weakens her later reaction to Vader/Anakin?  Also, as I’ve said before I’m very, very aural and pretty sensitive to character voices: the decision to use Jackson!Mace and Christensen!Anakin, even with Hayden transitioning into Matt Lanter, threw me out so badly that the scene lost all emotional impact.  This is a me problem.  Most people I know were just happy that Hayden was getting acknowledged.  Which is honestly not a great storytelling method, we want to tell the story and not acknowledge other actors. But again: this is a me problem.

I really do love the rising sense of tension from the beginning of the episode to the actual Order 66 moment.  It’s just genuinely terrifying, since the audience knows what’s coming all along.

Maul -- *flips hand*  I love Maul.  I think these two eps did a really good job at showing how terrifying Maul can be, even without a lightsaber -- especially without a lightsaber, rather.  I was a little hesitant initially about Maul being able to destroy the hyperdrive with the Force alone, but after thinking about it for a day or so (back when the ep aired, last May) I was fine with it.  I think Maul’s the one character for whom that kind of sheer power is believable, going back to his TCW debut -- if you ever look at spider-Maul closely (and Sam and Dave talk about this in the commentary to that arc), you’ll notice that some of the pieces of metal on his spider body aren’t actually attached, they’re hovering nearby; he’s holding his spider body together with the Force itself.

Rex. The other big departure from canon, because of his “we all had a choice / I didn’t betray my Jedi” comments in Rebels.  From a storytelling POV, this is the most dramatic possible route to go, and it makes sense that they did it.  I think it was either @alexkablob or @mylordshesacactus who said back when that it works well that Rex can’t shake off the command from the chip, that none of the clones are immune to it, because otherwise it looks like none of the other clones cared as much about their Jedi as Rex did about Ahsoka.  I do genuinely wonder if back in the original plan for the remaining two seasons of TCW, there was a scene where Rex had his chip removed, given that comment from Rebels. (And I’ve talked before about changes made from the ~original TCW scripts used for the Rebels backstory to the actual S7 and Mando, though admittedly in that context it was about Ahsoka.)  If originally the plan was for the Order 66 sequence to take place on Mandalore, then that suggests the unlikelihood (though not impossiblity) of Rex and Ahsoka removing his chip.  Given the arcs that we actually got in S7 there was no place to do it...I really do wonder what was in some of the scripts that have been talked about elsewhere but didn’t make the cut for S7.

(God, the one I actually really wanted was the Rex and Artoo’s Excellent Adventure one, I’ll be bitter about this forever.)

I assume Ahsoka and Rex split up afterwards -- the fake grave from Ahsoka was kind of weird to me, tbh, so I’m fine with them not going that way, but.  *shrug*  It is what it is.

The end is...fine. Like, emotional!  I had an emotion! They wanted me to have an emotion! My TCW and Ahsoka feelings have been broken for a while now so my emotions definitely were not what they would have been even two or three years ago.  (And I mean this by when the ep actually aired, not what my emotions are now; they haven’t really changed that much.  Well, my resentment grew, but it is what it is.)

I think...I just recently saw again the comment from Filoni about this, so it’s on my mind -- one of the major problems with S7 across the board, and honestly highlighted in the finale (which, again, is great), is that according to Filoni, TCW was always about Rex and Ahsoka, so S7 had to be about Rex, then about Ahsoka, then about Rex and Ahsoka, together.

TCW is not about Rex and Ahsoka.

That’s not to say that Rex and Ahsoka aren’t main characters, because manifestly they are, but the previous six seasons of TCW are not about Rex and Ahsoka.  At its core, TCW is about Anakin Skywalker, in the same way that the PT is about Anakin Skywalker (and the OT, to a different extent); TCW’s big strength compared to the films, however, has always been that it has the space to go beyond Anakin’s immediate story and deal with everything else going on in the galaxy, some of which overlaps with Anakin and some of which doesn’t.  The choice to make S7 three four-episode arcs has the side effect of narrowing the universe and limiting the stories told -- S6 is, I think, only one ep longer but feels like it’s a full season, because it’s a mixed bag of arcs of varying lengths, with a number of different foci.  Some of the claustrophobic feel of the focus on Rex and Ahsoka works for the finale because of the actual setting of the episodes, on the very claustrophobic ship, but on the other hand...thematically the whole season feels off because Filoni’s interests are very different from Lucas’s (and while we all love to give Filoni credit for everything in TCW, Lucas was showrunning it and all the really weird and controversial stuff in TCW, including Ahsoka, Satine, Mortis, and Maul, all came straight from George Lucas).  The finale feels aggressively narrow as a result -- which on the one hand, works, because yeah, it’s kind of neat and makes sense that Rex and Ahsoka don’t know anything else about what’s going on in the larger galaxy or if anyone else is alive.  On the other hand, it...doesn’t work.  (For me, obvs! Your mileage will vary!)

[grandhotelabyss]

I’m no storyteller, I basically loathe stories. I am a story-destroyer, I am the epitome of a story-destroyer. In my work, whenever any sort of portent of a story appears, or I see any sort of suspicion of a story surfacing from behind a massif of prose, I shoot it down.

Thomas Bernhard (qtd. in Steve Mitchelmore, “The Withdrawal of the Novel”)

(I find this quotation in Mitchelmore’s latest and characteristically thoughtful meditation on fiction as sign [when it’s good] and symptom [when it’s not] of God’s recession. It’s a theme I know well from Gabriel Josipovici, but then I first heard of Josipovici from Mitchelmore’s blog, over 15 years ago, so it all comes around. 

As ever when reading this pair, I concur with the diagnosis but dissent from the prescription. Here is the pill we are offered in the lead-up to the above quotation:

When it was suggested to Thomas Bernhard that his writing displayed “universal indifference” to the world because there is almost no empirical description, he answered that he was only interested in perfecting his art, as “getting to know the world happens anyway”. Perhaps the answer is that literature exposes us to that which withdraws from description, the place in which we are ourselves withdrawn, and we recognise this in the experience of reading a novel or, rather, as the experience of reading a novel, which we seek to mitigate with appeals to the getting to know the world or the guilty pleasures of an imagination run wild, when, really, neither have much to do with why we are drawn to novels. Realism and Fantasy thereby become indistinguishable, as all genres become one in resistance to the ideal. This may also explain the exulting iconoclasm of the art Thomas Bernhard was trying to perfect...

Well said, and the equivalence of realism and fantasy—often a clear formal equivalence—must be taken into account. Iconoclasm can only be an intensification of the original irritant, though. I am rather by nature an iconoclastclast. Why must we live without any images even of a recessive transcendent? Is an image as such necessarily in bad faith? For me, proper art is the image and the critique of the image given at once and as the same thing. Image without critique is stupid, but critique without image is dead.

I am more sympathetic to Bernhard’s quoted antipathy to story. Literature is posterior to story, commentary on story; it should not therefore tell a story, which, as the verb implies, belongs not to literature but to orature. Yet the writer needs a story to comment on—and I would say the same of images [one of the first novels is a long ekphrasis].

If I may, when I was experimentally speed-writing The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, César-Aira-style, I decided simply to follow the logic of the narrative rather than seeking to derange it overtly. It’s actually very vulgar on the surface: boy finds himself in a chaotic new world, encounters interesting strangers, meets the girl, struggles with the villain, gets the girl, kills the villain, emerges a man. I just set this plot in motion and trailed along behind as it gathered its downward force, such being one way to speed-write. Yet twice in the narrative a lifted blade is allowed to fall from a height and kill the one who stands beneath it. This killing descent is the momentum of the plot, and I can’t imagine readers are not usefully disquieted by the “happy” ending. Story per se is not interesting, but a writer can do all sorts of things with it. We don’t have to eliminate it. 

In line with my iconoclasmclasm, I generally recommend against worldviews based on eliminating this or that perennial feature of the human condition. Such worldviews usually just eliminate a lot of human lives or human things before burning themselves out to leave the condition where they found it. In that way, ironically, these worldviews are a perennial feature of the human condition; but we shouldn’t have to like it.)

[antihumanism]

One of the many great things about the Gamera franchise is that it is completely schizo. The first Gamera is a kid friendly Godzilla, dropping the radiation burn victims and Oxygen Destroyer for a human plot that focuses mostly on a kid who just loves the shit out of this giant turtle. The giant turtle sort of reciprocates by saving the kid's life at one point (admittedly, the kid was only in danger because of Gamera's destruction, but whatever).

Gamera vs Barugon completely ditches the kid angle. The human plot is a dark morality tale about greed, revenge, and colonialism. There's still admiration for the monster, but it is comparable to Monsters as the female lead speaks in admiration about how beautiful Barugon's rainbow is and how no one has seen such terrors in a thousand years.

Then Gamera vs Gyaos swerves hard back into being a kid's movie, bringing back the child lead who is smarter than all of the adults and who drives both the human and monster plot. The kid even watches the final monster battle, cheering for the giant turtle to vanquish the dreaded Gyaos. But Gyaos also introduces another distinctive bit of Gamera schizo in that it is gory by kaiju standards. Gyaos nearly severs Gamera's arm in one battle and his tail in another, there's a giant pool of blood to lure out Gyaos because he lusts for blood, Gamera bites into Gyaos's neck and worries him like a dog with a feral cat while blood sprays across his face before the Friend to All Children drags his dying prey into a volcano. Godzilla Showa movies largely followed the rules of 80's kid's cartoons, where judo throws, blunt objects and energy blasts are okay, but thou shalt not shed blood in anger. Gamera Showa movies followed the "rules" of an illegal dog fighting match, where you bite down hard through the jugular and keep shaking your head and don't let up until the hated Enemy stops moving.

The remaining Gamera Showa movies follow a similar logic of obviously kid targeted but inexplicably gory kaiju movies. Sometimes they did this with honor like Gamera vs Jiger (a movie written for 12 year olds but with adults in mind and that presages the rival Godzilla franchise's Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla entry in it's commentary on Japan's relentless quest for modernization and monoculturalism at the expense of native cultures, and a movie that followed the logic of the first Gamera in constantly asspulling newer and crazier powers for the baddy just when you thought the heroes had this in the bag), but mostly they were not very good. Gamera: Super Monster was the series’ nadir, coming from a place of pure contempt for the audience on the basis that unaccompanied toddlers who accidentally stumbled into the theater wouldn't realize they were watching 60% clip show of previous films and 40% super shitty Super Sentai rip off with no meaningful connection between the two parts because the audience has no object permanence. Nevertheless, these movies are something of a trip. Imagine that Barney the Dinosaur had a gritty reboot that was two-thirds exactly what you'd expect, and the other third featured a newly introduced character called KnifeMan who just hated children like crazy and would pin Barney into a corner and try to disembowel him with his knife body while blood spewed everywhere. Then the movie ends with Barney the purple dinosaur chomping down on KnifeMan's head hard enough to burst his skull sending gore everywhere. That would be fucked up, right? Well, that’s like half the Gamera movies.

Speaking of gritty reboots, the 90's Gamera trilogy hard swerves again and grittily reboots the series, ditching the Friend to All Children in favor of the Defender of the Universe. The 90's trilogy takes so much inspiration from Evangelion that one is almost tempted to give it the D-word label. They even use an ingenious and never again matched twist in Gamera 3 of showing a scene from the final battle of Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (in which our favorite giant turtle bursts through an apartment building) from the perspective of the poor, stupid fleshbags who happen to be in the apartment building at the time. Two of those poor, stupid fleshbags had names and family and that family included a surviving daughter, and Ayana swears vengeance on the Friend to No One Actually He’s Kind of a Dick. The whole 90′s trilogy is really good and does everything that the American Godzilla series seeks to do so much better than any American Godzilla movie is likely to accomplish, and when I’m not being a contrarian I’ll acknowledge that it exceeds the first three Gamera movies, but it is also very much not a kid’s trilogy. Not to say that a child can’t watch it and enjoy it, I am a child after all, but imagine if a My Little Pony movie leaned so hard on Rescue at Midnight Castle that it broke itself in half and went full grimdark with Megan returning as a murderous, remorseless, Rambo-tier psycho who carves a bloody swath through Dream Valley in her relentless pursuit of Tirek, killing anypony that happens to end up in her path. That would be fucked up, right? It’ll be a few years before I show this trilogy to my niece, is what I’m saying.

And then the last (so far) Gamera hatches. Gamera the Brave is, in every possible way, a direct repudiation of Gamera 3. We’re a kid’s series again. We get a rehash of the central conflict of Gamera 3 (Gamera killed someone’s mom fighting a monster, that someone finds an egg, etc) but now that egg is Gamera’s offspring/sibling/reincarnated self and instead of the angry tot becoming an avatar of vengeance, he heals by bonding with a magic turtle that burps and farts fire. It is E.T. if E.T. was a kaiju. It is as gory it’s predecessors, but changing opinions and advancing special effects have decided that this degree of bloodshed is normal so it is fucking weird in context because it is normal.

[cruddyborderlandstheories]

H2o au, give me strength.

Aka guesswho just figured out how to do read mores in mobile and now tumblr is forever stuck with me rambling merfolk thoughts at 1am isnstead of my poor discord server

Tl;dr: why did they feed the Destroyer humans. Or, you know, just why did they feed the Destroyer. Period. I'm never letting this one go. If it's not a plot hole then the Eridians are so totally not-dead and so totally fucking with us for science.

Also let us team up with the Guardians to take down the Eridians instead of making both of us fight. We're in the same boat here. Let's team up.

I mean, okay, H2o au is slowly being enveloped into canon with every new content drop anyway, so...

Soon.

I guess.

So I am finally. Finally. Done with chappie 5.lovely shit. Means I finally get to work on the. Beyond. Which is just anything past the introductory phase of the black ops squad.

I know chapter 6 will be explaining Barnabas's role in the gang and also bringing Zane into the Black Ops squad that was abandoned by Dahl. And finally getting off Pandora. That's a big one. But after that I want to lead into the Obsidian Black (part 1) and Junpai-7 (with the Pandoran interlude between). But I also want to do the Venus Ambassador arc before both of those, just to solidify everyone as a team. Because it's a good story Brent.

The pronlem: my dumbshit idiot brain is like "OK. Good. But. Consider: Tannis."

Because Tannis is my life of course, I love that crazy binch. So instead of doing literally any of the stuff I need to do to get to rewriting Bl3 and beyond. My brain is: fumk it. You're gonna write beyond Bl3. The Eridian war. Team up the guardians"

Because I'm still kinda salty that the Guardians are just basic bitch mad at humanity. Instead of making the Eridians a parallel to the corporations in universe, and having the Guardians and humanity team up to take them down (which could enforce the whole 'don't get mad at the people the higher ups tell u to be mad at' dealio with corporations and all that. COMMENTARY!). like imagine. Humanity has these corporations. They test on their people. Humanity is a shit show. And then it is revealed that the Eridians are actually testing on humanity. Where is your God now, bitch.

So anyway. I've just been vibing with the Driver and Tannis for a bit. I wanna bring her to Sanc-III but I get the feeling Zane and Moze would both be VERY against that. Plus I don't even think she'd want to leave Junpai-7 since the planet is her testing zone. Her place of power. She's its unseen ruler at this point. Packing up and booking would probably have horrible consequences.

Context: the Driver was tasked with experimenting with new (or alternative) types of Guardians (like a handful of other smart Guardians across the universe were also tasked with). The Overseer tests those new types of Guardians, or pre-existing Guardians, to ensure they're up to the task. The Watcher was supposed to guard Eleseer and the Vault of the Sentinel and look for potential threats, then send the Guardians out to stop them.

I don't know how Scourge fits into this line, but I imagine he is some sort of strict rule follower who got way into his own head and defected from the others.

I mean, not to say the others haven't also corrupted from their thousands of years being stuck in the same mindless job over and over. But Scourge definitely went off the deep end with no new rules to adhere to, since the Eridians abandoned them (again! Think of the parallels, Gearbox! Eridians -> DAHL in BL1!!!). The Overseer is... On the edge, I think. She's definitely trying to escape the job she's stuck in. I think the Watcher is the most stable out of all of them, probably because she has the most 'free reign'.

The Driver is... Bored. Extremely bored. She began testing her limits, playing god with the people of Junpai-7. Using her experiments as her avatars when she could just to see, to get some form of interaction with the world around her. She sort of became like the Eridians in that sense, just on a smaller scale. Also, she'd been micromanaging the planet for so long she figured she had every variable in-check, but she didn't, and now she's obsessed with getting information regarding the things she can't control (friggen humanity).

I think if any one of the Guardians resembles the Eridians the most in this AU, it's her. And when she teams up with the gang to go against the council, they'll probably use that against her.

The difference is she was physically trapped doing her job for thousands of years due to her programming (thanks Eridians). The Eridians chose to do all of this and nobody forced them into this position. They just wanted to see what would happen. This is all an experiment for them to watch >:(. Mayhaps even entertainment.

I will say it 1 billion times: I do NOT trust the Eridians. No sir. Not after Nyriad talked about the Destroyer. Plot holes be damned, that set my alarm bells off so god damn fast. "we had to feed it. We had to feed it humans, specifically. Even though its hunger is endless and feeding it changes literally nothing. And if not feeding it would kill it, that'd be good because we want it dead. But no, let's fed it. Humans. The people we are now asking for help. Yes. Those humans. Even though there are hundreds of other life forms. And also plants. And if it's hunger is endless maybe it will eat rocks, too. All this sand everywhere. But no. Let's just feed it humans."

BULLSHIT. THEY'RE UP TO SOMETHING THOSE DAMN ERIDIANS.

I don't trust like that.

And all the humans depicted in statues and murals everywhere in Vaults that haven't been opened/explored since the Eridians vanished????? Nah. And THE FORGETTING that's completely brushed over??? Nah nah nah. I'M GOOD. these alien binches are so totally up to something.

I don't trust them at fucking all.

Even the Overseer hints at them not actually being fully gone.

So anyway.

H2o au is a way for me to have fun while fixing/rewriting lore and making more lore and also having merfolk in borderlands because. I need it ❤️. I also use it to answer lore questions I have and fix disappointing plot hooks. And it is being unintentionally (I fu king hope) incorporated into canon every time a new dlc drops and they reference something I've written about before.

Is weird.

Kthxbye.