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e-adlirez · 8 months ago

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Treasure Seekers 3 Review/Ramble

Welcome to the third and last entry of the Treasure Seekers trilogy :D

"Wait what?" I probably hear you ask. "What about the other four treasures they said the girls would find?"

And to that I say

yeah it do be a bit sad that they never made a book 4

But make no mistake, Legend of the Maze is a doozy of a third book, and I'd say it's almost on-par with book 1 if not surpassing it. Unfortunately there is no free digital copy of the book, so uh if you're down to spend a bit on a digital copy on the E-book site of your choosing or on a physical copy in a bookstore, I salute you for your determination.

As for the rest of you, you're just gonna have to trust me bro :] /j

Ready? Let's go :D (also this is being written by a sleep-deprived E running on hyperfixation juice so if you find any grammar issues feel free to let me know so I can fix them)

The story begins with the Thea Sisters touring the Capelletti House in Verona with their Italian friend/tour guide Sebastiano. Yes, this Verona.

So yeah Colette is fantasizing about Romeo and Juliet as a romantic ship, Vi is trying to kill her Santa by telling her that Romeo and Juliet are fictional characters (which Colette responds to with "oh hush I can dream"), and oop-- loose floorboard-- what's this package under the flo-- LE GAAASSSPPPP LANE LOOORRREEEEE

The girls fangirl about the ABL jumpscare a lil' too loudly and Sebastiano is a lil' confusion, soooooooo the squad goes out for some snacks outside the Capelletti house to explain stuff to Sebastiano

buckle up Sebastiano you're about to get two 300-page books worth of Lane Lore™

While listening to the story, it turns out that Sebastiano may or may not have heard a peep about a legend about a treasure called the Treasure of Eternal Love (adapted Scholastic name is "Treasure of True Love" which ew, snatches the original Italian name instead), which was said to have been owned by Juliet and tho a lotta people are trying to find it, they dunno where it is now. Sounds very Seven Treasures of the World to me :]

How does Sebastiano know a peep about this very obscure legend? Turns out he learned about it from a letter written by his great-grandpappy Jacopo, who was an archaeologist like Aurora :3

So Sebastiano invites the girls to dinner at his place so the girls can look for the letter. Vi don't get too comfy with the house library I know it looks very cool and antique but we got a goal and that is sifting through a lil' box of Jacopo's kept things and find some-- HOLY CRAP LANE LORE™

"Hi Jacopo, tysm for helping me with my research on the Treasure of Eternal Love, you're a real g my guy, regards from me and my sister Linda, also tysm for the tour of Verona."

-- ABL

The girls tell Sebastiano their findings over a dinner of bigoli al pomodoro, give some extra Lane Lore™ about Jan von Klawitz and Aurora's six sisters, and mention the possibility that Linda knows where the treasure is, which means that Luke is probably after it too, but also Linda might know where the treasure is, which means a lead >:3

First stop: Verona's city hall, where Sebastiano's friend Guido works and is able to help them with finding information about a Linda Lane who may or may not have lived in Verona approximately a century ago. They find a document that says yes, Linda did in fact live in Verona once, and also her address is listed there because legalities, y'know how it is.

So the girls head on over to the address, knock at the door, and are greeted by an old lady, and :0 turns out this old lady (her name is Mia) knew Linda personally.

Linda and Mia met when Linda was in her older years and Mia was a smol child. Mia would read for Linda since her eyesight deteriorated in her old age, and they hung out a lot together. When Linda left to return to England, she left the house to Mia, as well as a good chunk of the stuff she had in said house as mementos for Mia to remember her by.

Hey guys you wanna see a trick, it's called "the Lane Lore™ %", aka how fast can we get this old lady up to speed with the ABL drama-- /j

Unfortunately Mia doesn't really know anything about the treasures, but she does have this wack painting of a scenery in Japan that just won't align correctly no matter how much finagling you do to it-- oh there was an envelope inside-- LANE LORE™?

So the letter inside the envelope is a letter from Aurora to Linda basically Aurora telling Linda she found the Treasure of Eternal Love, but because Jan is on her tail, she left the treasure in the "House of the Sun" for now. Now, if you tried looking up "house of the sun", you'd get a hotel in Florida, a manga, a former Incan temple that's now a monastery-- you get the picture, it do be a weird detail and probably not it bro, besides Aurora's too much of a gremlin to be that obvious with her riddles.

At least if you're not a Shakespeare nerd like Colette is (the kind that never read past Romeo and Juliet's wedding), because if you were, you'd know that at one point Romeo equates Juliet to the sun rising in the east. Romeo is simping for Juliet, Juliet is the sun, ergo, the Capelletti house.

But uh, thing is we already went to the house and we already know that Aurora came back for the treasure and took it somewhere else. Sooooo might as well see what the last letter says--

"Hi so I'm on the run rn I can't chat for long because Jan is pissed and he wants to find me and force me to reveal the treasure, and I don't think I wanna know how not-kid-friendly this is gonna get if he does find me. Thanks for introducing me to your friend tho :D she's cool and thanks to her help, the treasure is safe and sound in the shade of the cherry trees! I'll come back for it one day, hopefully that day comes soon. Anyway, hugs and kisses, Linda." - ABL

Spoiler alert, despite having a beeg cherry tree on the painting, there was in fact nothing else hiding behind the painting.

LUKE TRANSITION

So Luke is doing Luke things, not touching grass as per usual. Cassidy comes by to give him a lil' souvenir from great-grandpappy Jan von Klawitz's house in London: Jan's old notes. Luke immediately dismisses Cassidy without even so much as a thank you -- Cassidy girlypop you're not scoring that man no matter what you do, he's the Adrien to your Marinette girlie we're only at book 3, you might as well accept your fate -- and Luke takes a lil' peek into Jan's notebook (he also calls his great-grandpappy "Jan", like just "Jan". I dunno maybe I'm just finding it weird because I'm Asian . .) for the goods.

And goods Luke does find, which he proceeds to consume like a goblin. Bit of Klawitz lore here:

"Grrr grrr stupid Aurora and her smartass tricks grrrrr who does she think she is grrrrr she beat me to the Treasure of Eternal Love in Verona grrrrrrrrrrrr well at least now I know how she works, I managed to find this friend of hers Jacopo, who definitely knows about the treasure even though he keeps playing stupid like I don't know that he knows Aurora. Something something cherry trees, I ransacked every single cherry tree in Verona and there was literally nothing, wth, Aurora why are you like this" - Jan von Klawitz

Luke responds to this seedy lore from his great-grandpappy with "hehehHEHEHAHAHAHAHAHAHH JAN YOU IDIOT, YOU COULDN'T SEE WHAT WAS RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU BECAUSE YOU UNDERESTIMATED THE LITTLE PILOT GIRL, I ALREADY KNOW WHERE TO LOOK"

Cut back to the girls, and they know where to look next, too

It's Japan, i-it's Japan, y'know Japan's relationship with their sakura/cherry blossoms

Turns out Linda has a friend named Kyoko Bianchi, a Japanese-Italian botanist who was raised in Japan. Since Aurora mentions in her letter that Linda's friend came in clutch, she was obviously referring to Kyoko and now the treasure is in Japan.

So Japan transition :D (based on my personal experience in Japan and also a bit of canon continuity consistency, I headcanon that despite being written in English, this segment of the story mostly had the girls speaking in Japanese, a language they would know how to speak a bit of at least (and apparently Vi is conversational in Japanese so c'mooonnnn).)

The girls land at Narita Airport and take a train to central Tokyo (damn Kumi from Cherry Blossom Adventure you came in clutch possibly teaching the girls how to Japanese subway offscreen because they actually didn't get lost using it on their own :D). Kyoko's hometown was Tokyo, so might as well start searching for her descendants/relatives there. First stop: Shibuya.

Colette is playfully ribbed a bit for having a big-ass bag while everyone else only brought smol backpacks around with them, the luck of the girls not getting lost using the Japanese subway must be balanced out so Paulina's GPS decides now is the right time to be a dick, Shibuya Crossing, and finally they make it to the hotel where Amrita Bianchi, their first Kyoko descendant candidate, is at.

And this is the first time the girls come across the concept of cosplaying, I genuinely don't know how they managed to sidestep it for so long especially since they've been to Japan before for a student exchange, all I can really justify it with is that university has been kicking their a-- RATSUNE MIKU??

Gahd even in 2018 Italy there was no escape from her /j

Anyway so Amrita didn't know Kyoko, so their second candidate is Shinobu Bianchi, a guy living in Shinjuku. They find him-- or more accurately run into him (literally) on his way to work, try to explain things to him but this man is running late, so he invites the girls to follow him to his workplace. They find themselves in a cafe on opening time, customers start filing in before the girls can even tell Shinobu what the whole deal is, soooooo karaoke break :D

Vi c'mon it's not like there's much else to do while waiting for Shinobu-- what're you gonna do, sit there and wait? A-actually y'know what that sounds like something Vi would happily do but c'mooonnn Vi where's your sense-a humor :D

Thirty minutes of singing later, they finally get five minutes to explain to Shinobu what they're looking for and Shinobu says "sorry I dunno Kyoko, I am half-Italian on my dad's side, but my mom has a different Japanese surname"

So the girls Peter William a bit emotionally, Pam goes to what Scholastic is telling me is a kiosk but might as well be a 7/11 based on the banger food Pam got from said kiosk, the girls take a taxi to a Capsule Hotel (judging from the illustration it looks like the Shinjuku Kuyakusho-mae Capsule Hotel), and after a bit of dinner, Peter William into their capsule rooms physically.

The next morning, Nicky goes out for a morning jog as usual (she prolly slept with her capsule open so she wouldn't get claustrophobic), and she finds a gardener tending to a Kyoko Bianchi flower :0 like no joke that's the name, it's a K. bianchi, named after a botanist who founded the Fairy Garden (Disclaimer: neither the K. bianchi nor the Fairy Garden Foundation in Japan exist, they're fictional bits for this fictional story and that's fine :3). Nicky gets the address for the Fairy Garden, runs back to the girls who are having breakfast, and they head on over to the venue.

At the Fairy Garden, the girls meet a gardener named Toshio who happily shows them around, and despite not knowing all the Lane Lore™ (yet), he knows enough to lead them to Kyoko's perfectly preserved office, where the late Bianchi has displayed some pictures from Verona, as well as her furniture and encyclopedia collection.

After a search, they find what was presumably a haiku alluding to Jomon Sugi and the writer's voice being hidden in there, and one jaunt to the record of Jomon Sugi in Kyoko's encyclopedia collection and uhp-- a hidden cassette tape inside the volume!

On one hand, victory, the girls have found a VHS tape that is implied to have a personal recording from Kyoko Bianchi herself, so they're super-close to the treasure now :D

But on the other hand, they found a VHS tape in the year of our lord 2018.

Good news, Toshio knows a buddy who's super tech-savvy, and that's including tech things. Bad news, he's in Kyoto, which is about 445 km/283 miles away from Tokyo.

So the girls quickly take a shinkansen and some bento boxes to Kyoto :D (their wallets are probably sobbing in an 86-USD ticket per person)

At Kyoto, meet Ren, are lowkey surprised that his house is a traditional Japanese house as opposed to a modern flat but hey it's a pleasant surprise, and Ren is able to play the tape for them.

In the tape, Kyoko explains the Treasure of Eternal Love, how it ended up in her hands at the ripe age of 20 through Linda and Aurora, and some Treasure of Eternal Love lore, or rather Ring of Eternal Love lore:

Yeah sure Romeo and Juliet were fictional characters, but reality, so it goes, isn't that much different. The Ring of Eternal Love was a courting gift from a suitor to a bachelorette of the Cappelletti household. The suitor and the girl's families had hate boners for each other for a while now, but instead of spiraling into a destructive mess of family feuding and death like in Shakespeare's play, they decided to call off the feud so the two lovers could be happy together. And now the ring, as Kyoko puts it, has been passed down from her to "one who shows love every day, in every way, towards everything that grows from the earth."

The girls are happy they got to see the tape and its contents, but they Peter William emotionally once more because well, they're back to square one now-- literally the only clue they have is the thing Kyoko said, and what is the thing Kyoko said? It's cryptic and weird and h a h ? Ren offers to accommodate them for the night, the girls get to sleep on futons for the first time since Secret of the Snow, and the next day they decide to have some downtime vacay-ing in Nijo Castle. A vacay that results in Vi having an epiphany about the riddle and thus who has the ring.

Meanwhile with Luke, he's planning something. Something that's got Cassidy in Japan and putting her master's degrees in Engineering, Chemistry and Computer Sciences to use by assembling a drone (I'm wondering how Cassidy has so little braincells out on the field despite having THREE MASTER'S DEGREES like holy crap--)

Cassidy tries complimenting Luke on the motherboard he sent in from Alaska and-- ew Omar why are you here I thought Luke fired you-- ooh what's that package thing-- oi don't diss on Japanese people being polite, once you see the ruder options you're gonna be pining for that shnit-- wait what how's this drone gonna find the Ring of Eternal Love--

Anyway the girls plus Toshio and Ren take the train back to Tokyo (istg if they took the shinkansen--) and back to the Fairy Garden Foundation, where they talk to the current head gardener: Mr. Murakami.

Mr. Murakami does in fact know Kyoko personally, and after a bit of persuading (it involves a bord like many good things in this world), he decides to bring them to his hometown Nara (which involves a train to Kyoto and then a train from Kyoto to Nara which on the Kodama plus the cheapest option from Kyoto to Nara is-- CHEESUS CRUST 91 USD PER PERSON AND THEY HAVE TO GO BACK TO TOKYO AFTER THIS???)

ANYWAY Mr. Murakami takes them to Nara Park, where he hid the treasure. He brings the girls to it, he checks the hiding place and

It's empty?

Wait, the hiding place is empty?

WAIT WHAT THE HIDING PLACE IS EM--

Off in Alaska, Luke is cackling in his fancy custom-made not-gamer chair.

Mr. Murakami is distraught, most of the girls stay to comfort him while Nicky and Ren scout out the area. In their search, Nicky and Ren find a big broken drone that seems to have crash-landed in the garden, and oop-- LVK logo. It was probably used to spy on Mr. Murakami to snatch the treasure. "DAAAMMMNNNN YOOOUUUU LUUUKKEEEE" Nicky probably would've shrieked at the top of her lungs if she weren't A. in Japan (it's very quiet generally), and B. within earshot of poor Mr. Murakami, who's still recovering from the horrible shock. The girls, Toshio and Ren take the drone to Kyoto while Mr. Murakami stays in Nara with the fam to recover because man, he deserves the break :(

In Ren's house in Kyoto, Paulina and Ren get to work hacking into the drone to snatch its data, and they find that the drone's memory goes as far back as to being in Alaska for some reason. Why would an LVK drone be in Alaska? Unless-- :OOOOO SECRET BASE??

With that lead, the girls depart for Anchorage, Alaska (if I plugged it into Google correctly the price for the flight totals out at a 567-USD one-way flight holy crap girlies have mercy on your wallets-- not including the mini shopping spree for winter clothes Colette was more than happy to drag the girls on). Ren gives Paulina a little flash drive with some written code that could come in clutch in whatever shenanigans they end up in in that secret base of Luke's. Yes Violet as much as I think you're the only person in the group who seems to be concerned for your wallet, ya'll are nawt surviving Alaska with those summer clothes ya'll are wearing.

Behold, a long rest/14-hour timeskip in the form of the last two letters the girls have yet to read from Aurora to Linda. (Well the girls besides Vi, God's sleepiest soldier over here is eeping in the back before the flight's even taken off--)

(These are the real letters this time around lmao, if you're confused, Aurora addresses Linda in these letters via her middle name Amaryllis.)

Dear Amaryllis,

I'm very sorry that, because of my job, you are taking on a responsibility that is perhaps too great, and that puts you at risk.

It's all because of the greed of my former professor, a mouse who is incapable of recognizing that beauty should be shared. My dear sister, I have thought about it for a long time, and I have come to the conclusion that the best solution is to take the Treasure of Eternal Love from Verona, where it is not safe... and put you at risk. I am sending you a copy of one of the photos I hold the most dear, in memory of the love that binds us. I hope it will help you make the best decision...

Yours, Aurora

Dear Amaryllis,

You wrote me that you are making a decision about the treasure. I agree that the mouse you're planning to entrust it to is worthy of that trust, and I will wait for more news. But you must be careful, even when you write to me, to not mention names or places. We need to watch out, because my former professor is more alert than ever.

It seems that he's building an underground shelter for his riches, designed as a kind of maze to test anyone who manages to enter it...

Professor Jan is clever, and he's always loved riddles, puzzles, and mysteries. I wouldn't wish for any mouse to find themselves in his maze!

Now I must say good-bye, my dear. Sending a big hug.

Yours, Aurora

Once the girls land in Anchorage, Alaska, they rent an SUV, pull out Google Maps, read some of the brochures Ren printed out for them just in case, fangirl over a moose (Nicky that's not something to fangirl about have you seen what they're capable of--), and accidental secret tunnel discovery?

Well, accidental secret garbage chute discovery, anyway, since the one thing that allows the girls to not break their ankles when landing is some garbage bags. Food waste garbage bags no less :D Ew :D

Some old aircraft bits are found too which is nice but it's never elaborated on whose old aircraft bits those were so we're moving on to the girls entering Luke's secret headquarters and Nicky trying not to die from claustrophobia :D

CCTVs pose an initial problem, but Ren's flash drive comes in clutch and allows Paulina to freeze the cameras so they can go in undetected (Ren how do you know how to program that is there something you wanna share to the class--). One lengthy labyrinth later, the girls manage to get out of the "we're walking in circles" loop-dee-loop they wound up in and find this little room with a little lit fire pit and an ominous riddle involving the "elements of nature". Pam has the idea of extinguishing the fire pit, and sure enough, inside the fire pit is a key that fits perfectly into the door across the room.

And right after Pam turns the lock on the door, a trapdoor opens up beneath her and she falls into the pit below. It's padded, it's kinda cozy, but it's way too deep for the girls to reach Pam from above without a rope or attempting to risk falling in and getting trapped as well. The girls are very reluctant to leave Pam, but Pam unfortunately only metaphorically slaps some sense into the girls and tells them to go on because they've gone too far to back out now so COMMIT TO THE BIT GODDAMMIT

(you guys like the rhyme-y bits? They're kinda fun to write I do like the rhyme-y bits a bit <:])

And thus the girls minus Pam go through the door to the next room, where there's this swimming pool with a key inside it, which Nicky swims down for, assuming that the trap in the room will only activate once they get the key into the door leading to the next room. Obviously she winds up being very incorrect, as the moment she takes the key from the bottom of the pool, the water starts to drain away until all you got left is a sopping wet Nicky in an empty pool and the key to the next room, which Nicky tosses over to Paulina while asking for her shoes and her dry clothes that they packed. Colette is devastated, devastated I tell you at the idea of leaving Nicky behind, on top of having to leave Pam behind, but Nicky's got faith that the girls will pull through and come back for her; so Colette, Paulina and Violet move on to the next room.

A LOT of walking down a twisting hallway later, the trio make it to the next room (which they use Nicky's key for), and we got four pots with something or other in them, lighting too dim to discern properly what's in the pots, a button sequence puzzle with no margin for error, and a wack riddle. Oh and Paulina's tablet's finally died after possibly uh, 18-ish hours of not charging it. RIP Paulina's tablet, that's gonna be set aside in the corner for the time being.

The pots turn out to have different types of sediment in them, and the wack riddle turns out to be the clue to the correct sequence to input, so the three figure that out fairly quickly and slide down the chute leading to the next room. Except for Paulina, who had to get her tablet from that corner she set it aside in, and wasn't able to make it to the trapdoor-chute in time before it closed on her face, leaving her trapped "forever", as the wack riddle states. The one time you're told to stop holding it, man, unbelievable. I'm never letting go of my tablet again /j

Now Vi and Colette find themselves in an empty room, and they only realize when they get down that Paulina wasn't able to make it out in time. Now this entire time, Colette has been going through it. Of the girls, Colette's been taking the whole leaving-my-friends-behind-for-the-greater-good thing not well at all, and it culminates in an emotional breakdown. Violet comforts her and reassures her that they'll get the ring, they'll pick up the other girls and they'll get outa here soon, but they gotta be brave now for the other girls. (Kinda hard to capture in short and sweet words what the emotion of the scene was but oh well). After a bit of calming down, Colette and Violet look around to find themselves in a... surprisingly simple room? There's a door on the other side of the room from them, and besides that there's literally nothing but thin air.

The two go to the door and move to open it. Yeah this one's surprisingly simple. Just walk on over, pull the door open, walk o-- a gust of wind slammed the door shut . .

Yeah that's right. You ever leave a window in your room open on a windy day and leave your door also open, and the wind going into the room slams the door shut? Yeah, it's that multiplied by uhhhh how much is a vent opposite the door opening up just to blow f%#ken WIMDY-level winds just to slam that metal door shut? However that much multiplies that. The two find themselves in a situation where had all five of them been there to do this puzzle, it would've been far easier; but it is doable with only two people. The plan is one of them wedges themself between the door and the frame and prop it open, while the other crawls under the first person's leg. Transitioning to the second person propping the door open for the first person is gonna be a bit dodgy, but it is doable kinda.

Now Colette has been going through the ringer emotionally, and if you've seen this trope before, you'd know that it'd be a real damn shame if they lost their emotional pillar and had to carry the entire plan on their own, riiiiggghhttt? She's been the handling this situation the worst (emotionally), and it would bring her a belly of the beast to trump all bellies of all beasts and force her to do a The Next Right Thing (hot take: Anna's arc in Frozen 2 was really good), presumably after a lot of sobbing in the corner! It's perfect for angst, and it's perfect for empowerment to see Colette pick herself up and be strong for the girls and save the day!

Which is why Colette doesn't end up being the last one standing :D

Colette was the one who propped the door open for Violet, who crawled through to the other side. The plan was to have Vi switch with Colette so Colette can get through, but one thing they didn't take into account was the fact that the vent would slowly create stronger and stronger winds the longer the door is held open for, so Colette winds up allowing herself to be trapped in the air room so Violet can do the thing. (Oh and the plan was Colette's idea too.)

Heeyyyy Viiiiiiii~ Do you have some cash left over in your wallet? Because I think it's time for you to put your money where your mouth is :DDD

So yeah Violet continues on alone.

Also if you're wondering where Luke is this entire time, he is in fact in his base, still not touching grass and none the wiser about the whole five lil' rat girls sneaking into his base because of the whole frozen cams situation. He does technically notice something's off, but he thinks that the clock in one of the cameras is broken and he ends up complaining about it to Cassidy, haha L. It is also at this point where we learn that the girls have been in Luke's base for a little over three hours at this point :D

Meanwhile, Violet goes down the narrow metal staircase in the hallway outside of the last room and finds herself reminding herself to stay calm but also inside Luke's treasure room, where treasures of all shapes and sizes reside. From whole dinosaur skeletons to ancient Egyptian statues to paintings to suits of armor and-- holy shnit Luke has the Ark of the Covenant in there too o o yeah this guy means business holy crap--

The Ring of Eternal Love is in there too, the lone treasure in the set of seven empty pedestals that Luke was prolly intending for the Seven Treasures of the World. So Vi, clearly not having watched Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Ark, attempts to lift the glass case protecting the ring, which sets off the alarms in the treasure rooms, and whoa holy crap there's a robot voice speaking through the alarms? WAIT WHAT DO YOU MEAN FIFTEEN MINUTES TO SELF-DESTRUCTION

Luke, having the shock of his life, comes down to the treasure room to see what's up, and of course it's one of the five brats who's been getting in the way of his endeavors. Hardly a surprise, really, those five have been a pain in the ass from minute one of Luke looking into the Seven Treasures-- from stopping him getting the Alabaster Garden (he didn't even get to see what it was smh), to duping him with the most audacious of gottems to exist only partially due to his goon's stupidity, and now sneaking into the heart of his base without him, his cameras, or his sensors noticing. Strange how there's only one of them, though.

Just like Aurora Beatrix Lane almost a hundred years prior, this young lady is naive, morally stubborn, and idealistic. She is preaching out about sharing these treasures to all, even when the worth of these treasures comes partly in the luxury of not everyone being able to enjoy them. There is value in that sense of rarity, and it's not like any of the uncaring, ignorant whelps working in the museums look at the pieces that sit before them and realize the true value that they have the privilege of looking at everyday. They wouldn't care about them-- they would do the bare minimum to these unique masterpieces and leave it at that. And this naive brat thinks that they are more loving, more caring to these pieces than Luke is?

But as naive and morally pretentious and... ignorant of time and place this woman is (did she really not hear the self-destruct alarm and is thus willing to babble to her grave?)... she is clearly very intelligent. She was able to affect the base's security system such that she could come in undetected. She was able to get past all four traps without getting trapped herself. It is strange how she is alone here, though. She is usually with four other girls-- ah, that's it. They got trapped, and she left them, so she could get to the treasures on her own. What a show of common sense, that is! She must've seen that the traps were designed such that risking oneself to rescue a trapped person is just not worth it, and that first point already makes her far more intelligent than Cassidy or her buffoons could ever be. It could even be on-par with Luke himself. What if... perhaps....

What if they worked together?

Luke, after a bit of back and forth with Violet, gives Violet an offer to ditch her friends and become his partner. If she accepts they can divide everything between each other in the vault, and together, they'll be able to uncover the treasures of the world and enjoy them all to themselves.

I mean of course Vi turns down the offer in favor of sticking with her friends but y'know what it was worth a shot, Luke, kudos to you for spotting a gemstone instead of covering it with mud and pretending it's not there.

Heavily disappointed by Vi turning him down for the sake of "the power of friendship" (I wish I was kidding)(Scholastic!Vi's (?) words not mine)(I would be incredibly disappointed too), he turns to leave her in the treasure room, and it's only then that Vi realizes she kinda effed up. Luke is the only guy here who knows the base inside-out, and thus would know a way to get the girls out so they can Not Die. And to add insult to injury, Luke made a bomb shelter out of his treasure room, so the entire base may explode and the girls might die, but the treasures are gonna be completely fine. Intact, even. Luke leaves, and the robot voice announces ten minutes before self-destruction.

As soon as she's able to, Vi calls the elevator, juggling anxiety and being able to think under pressure. She figures out that Luke oh so helpfully uses pictograms for his elevator buttons instead of numbers, and presses the button for the control room (the heliport floor is locked by a key). She arrives in the control room, eight minutes before self-destruction.

Just as Vi enters the control room, the cameras get kicked back into action, oh so conveniently showing to Violet a timer ticking down to the big kaboom in real time, and footage of Nicky waiting anxiously in the pool room (and Luke leaving), for extra stakes. One Perception check said "yeah, this is a LOT of buttons, TOO MANY BUTTONS", and the tablet sitting on the desk required a password, so oh god what do

Six minutes before self-destruction and one panic attack later, Vi manages to psyche herself up enough to roll for Investigation. She finds a button for disarming the traps, and that allows the girls to get outa the traps and meet up again in the treasure room. Happy reunions aside tho, four minutes to self-destruction

Turns out the girls (thankfully) didn't know about the self-destruct situation. No need to explain tho because Vi is deadlifting the group braincell like she's never done before. She drags them down to the base's... basement, where a train that was probably used to carry the treasures into the base sits unused and ready for the girls to figure out how to work. Three minutes before self-destruction, no pressure :D

Pam sits at the train's controls, Paulina tries to help but immediately brain crashes at the old-timey controls, thus deciding she'd rather help Nicky get the bars off the rails up ahead. Two minutes left, and Pam figures it out and is ready to-- wait they need electricity-- okay cool Nicky and Paulina are taking care of that, cool

Pam gets the train to start up, Nicky and Paulina manage to hop back into the train, and escape the base's explosion range with about ten seconds to spare :D

After stopping the train in a spot where their braincells could afford to deflate, the girls take a minute or two to breathe y'know, just take a minute to breathe, nibble on some wild raspberries growing in Denali National Park, before figuring out what the hell their next move is.

Vi suggests they tell the authorities about the whole secret-base-under-the-park situation and the treasure room and the stuff inside it (since Luke oh so foolishly gloated to Vi about the treasures being perfectly safe), on top of removing the train so it's not getting up in nature's business. They head back to the car talking about their adventure, get a bit sad that they weren't able to find the Ring of Eternal Love-- and oop just kidding, Vi pocketed it in the treasure room right after Luke dipped :D

So on top of the girls escaping with their lives, not only is Luke gonna lose the Ring of Eternal Love as quickly as he got it, he's also losing his entire treasure vault. Can I get a ripperooni

And that's Legend of the Maze :D

I would say that the hyperfixation-that-consumed-these-girls'-lives-for-a-whole-week energy is very strong in this one in the best way, and the girls' personalities are at their most showcased here. The banter is bantering, the girls' dynamics with each other is very believable here, Vi is carrying the group's braincell the entire time and she looks like she's a bit tired from carrying it but y'know wut she's still willing to carry it because it's honest work and she knows how important it is to have it :3 also her trying to kill Colette's "Romeo and Juliet are so romantic" Santa but failing miserably because Colette unashamedly likes believing in the power of love is hilarious

The main thing I wasn't sure about was.... all the infodumpy bits? The infodump goes a significant bit harder in this book than the previous ones (even more than Compass of the Stars, which is an achievement), and it's Scholastic-style infodumping, so you get the girls calling Luke an "evil mouse" or "selfish mouse" and I'm sitting here like "just call him sewer rat please ya'll had no problems calling him that before please for the love of god use that instead it sounds better--"

Don't even get me started with Amrita Bianchi explaining to the girls what cosplay is like she's the damn Merriam Webster dictionary--

Also the Japan segment with y'know Japanese culture and stuff had the terms localized for some reason??? Like haori became "dark jacket", kimono became "long, elegant Japanese dress", they didn't even mention Ren's hakama (he was wearing a very traditional Japanese look), they felt the need to explain bento boxes as "typical Japanese portable lunch boxes" even though "Japanese lunch box" probably would've gotten the point across just fine and also there was an illustration of the bento boxes, Japanese characters became "logograms" for some reason, and dango became "rice dumplings" which became infinitely more confusing for me because the illustration made it look like takoyaki--

I could go on and on but yeah, there are a lot of these and it felt very infodump-y to me. I'm hoping it's just a translation thing, because the story overall feels pretty solid. Scholastic, what happened to the asterisks? Were they just too much for one page? I feel like you would've been able to squeeze them in just fine to make the reading experience a little smoother,,, just like, so it's an optional thing for the reader to read the mini-infodump of the term if they dunno what it means,,,

Other than that tho I don't think I have much to complain ab--

COUGHS GAGS SCREAMS CRIES WRITHES ON THE FLOOR

(I have the magic-of-friendship-invocation tolerance of an angsty teen I'm sorry :'3)

Scholastic, buddy chum pal buddy chum buddy chum pal,,,,

You could've had Vi say "the only way I got here was thanks to my friends", and it would've been fine and infinitely better-sounding and probably more in-character,,, o<-<

Gahd I hate it when Vi's used as the power of friendship prophet -m-

There's a more minor one as the girls are going back to the car and Vi is telling the girls about the deal Luke offered her, and the girls ask her what she said, and she says "I told him I already had the greatest treasure in the world... true friendship!"

Meanwhile I'm sitting there like "MMMMMGGGGGGHHHHHH 'friends like you' or 'sisters like you' or 'my friendship with you' would've sounded better -m-"

(Also the girls call each other like "friends", so like "you were in fact right, friends", which is like, what happened to "sisters" or "girls" those work perfectly fine and get the girls' close relationship across significantly better than "just friends")

Most of what I'm saying here tho are just nitpicks and probably (hopefully) are just stuff with the English translation-- in all seriousness, the book is pretty good.

Aurora's trail here makes sense and is rather logical, and the interesting thing I find about it is that it feels different from the previous two books' worth of shenanigans. Aurora in this one had far less veers and nation hopping shenanigans, and I feel that it was perhaps intentional. Perhaps to give off finale vibes-- Aurora works far more closely with her sister in this one, and the main thing the girls had to work with was not Aurora's diaries, but the letter she wrote to Linda when they were discussing the Ring of Eternal Love. Something about it feels closer, more intimate, more tragic than the previous ones. I felt the need to put her last to letters in the book verbatim because they were emotional dammit -m- Damn you British Amelia Earhart you've done it again /lhj

Luke's character I think is the strongest here. He gives off in a way the most... normal? Vibes here? He's still not touching grass and muttering to himself ominously a whole lot, but his mindset is nice and easy to wrap your head around here. He literally doesn't care about his goons unless he needs something from them, he is more than happy to overanalyze the crap out of a piece of text if he feels Cassidy didn't look through it thoroughly enough, and he wants what he wants right away, and that includes the things he needs to get the thing he actually wants. He as a character literally observes everything happen from his base in Alaska and backseat gamers the crap out of his goons if he sees something they didn't, or if they fumbled the bag and it was perfectly avoidable had it not been for SM being SM--

Also his blatant disrespect for his great-grandpappy Jan is holy crap haha-- it might just be my cultural background, but when I saw Luke call his great-grandpa "Jan" and then say "you disappoint me, Jan", I was flabbergasted haha, not a criticism I just wanted to mention it because I thought it was funny

I really like the fact that Stan and Max (aka SM) didn't show up at all in this book. It would've been easy to have them show up for regularly scheduled hijinks, but in Luke's mind, none of SM's operations have ever been... up to Luke's standards. Especially with how much of a ruckus they tended to make with their presence, they were more of a liability to Luke than an asset; therefore Luke changing up his strategy to be as hands-off and clean and non-intrusive as possible feels like something he'd do, what with how laser-focused he is on min-maxing efficiency to get what he wants as soon as possible.

Omar still being there despite being "fired" might just be a Scholastic oopsie so I can forgive it, Cassidy is still simping for Luke and trying to impress this man and trying to prove she's at an equal level to him, but every time nah. Just nah. Girlie you think you're on the same level as him, which can't possibly be further than the truth. I haven't seen Miraculous Ladybug, but I'd bet Cassidy has even less of a chance of impressing Luke, than Marinette had a chance at getting Adrien to see her as more than "just a friend" before they finally got together.

Now here's something I've been wanting to ramble about for a while: Violet being left alone instead of Colette. It's actually pretty clever when you think about it: Colette is the closest the girls have to a heart (tho she plays hot potato with Paulina when it comes to that role imo), so she's been the most emotional and the most sentimental of the group this entire time. From daydreaming about Romeo, to wanting to believe in love, to happily picking up a microphone to sing karaoke with the girls, to her strong reactions to having to leave the girls behind one by one for the sake of their mission, Colette was being set up for a moment where she is the one who is left alone. You see it a lot in media: the main character is the most sentimental one and as their friend squad make their way to the Big Bad Evil Guy, the supporting characters are forced to get left behind one by one to either hold the evil minions back or because there's no way for the character to move forward with the MC; so the MC is forced to go through the five stages of grief knowing that their friends trust them to get the job they'd set out to do done. It literally happened in Geronimo's third Kingdom of Fantasy book Amazing Voyage, and in that one Geronimo was the one who desperately didn't want to be alone, but he wound up carrying on alone anyway. You see this kinda thing everywhere.

However, in this bit, it makes total sense that Violet is the one who ends up carrying the last leg of the journey alone instead of Colette. Compared to Colette (and honestly the rest of the girls), Violet is the most level-headed. She's the girls' braincell keeper (in this trilogy), the babysitter holding the leash tied to the four gremlins, the one keeping everyone on track and also making sure that the group's collective ADHD doesn't spiral down as badly as it could possibly be. Whenever the girls make a big move that could affect the whole group, Vi is the one asking if it's a good idea or if it's worth doing, and she's the one thinking ahead enough to say "if x happens instead of y, what then?" You get the idea-- Vi is the most capable of keeping herself level-headed even when she's under all this pressure, and she's good at analyzing and planning on account of her often taking the position of the quiet observer.

With this context, it sort've makes you wonder what was going through Colette's head when she offered to help Violet get out of the air room. Violet and Colette in particular get paired together fairly often, and it's probably because of how well they're able to understand each other-- so with the plan, was Colette volunteering herself to prop the door open out of "it was my idea" courtesy, or was she thinking that maybe Violet would be able to figure things out better and thus needed to get to the other side? She probably was expecting to get to the other side with Vi, but would she have thought far enough ahead to a what-if where that wasn't possible? :3c

And Scholastic and power-of-friendship funkiness aside, Violet did handle the situation well, all things considered. The one bit where she only realized Luke was hers and the girls' only ticket out of there was a bit weird, but it can be chalked up to her not being able to take that into account in the moment because of a mix of stress, sheer bafflement from Luke's deal, and the fact that when put on the spot, observers don't exactly handle taking the driver's seat that well :'D (speaking as an observer myself here)

It makes me wonder a bit if Violet and Luke were meant to be foils of each other, what with how similar they are to each other (both of them being observers and planners who delegate more often than they do the work themselves), yet different enough that the contrast between the two is striking. Said difference being

Violet touches grass. Luke does not :)

Anyway so yeah, that's Treasure Seekers 3, and while it is kinda sad that this is where Treasure Seekers ends, y'know what? It gave a solid show as the last installment in the trilogy. I liked it, I liked the canon compliant blorbo angst, I liked the characters character-ing when the dialogue was letting them breathe :]

And of course, we can't forget

God's sleepiest soldier <3

She deserves that nap after what she went through and you know it--

#geronimo stilton #thea stilton #thea sisters #violet conked out the moment she got into the suv and the girls drove off to plan stuff out. change my mind /j #there's a bit where nicky fangirls upon seeing a moose like she suddenly turned ten and like #she inched closer to the window to see it better but violet was like “hey you're squishing me”#and nicky was like “sorry vi.. i got a bit excited.... y'know how much i love nature”#and vi in this moment where she gave straight-up the most mom vibes #was like “here let's swap seats"#like UEUEUEUEUWAAAAA....#also like remember the bit where colette wound up lugging a big-ass bag around with her while the girls had smoller backpacks #well surprisingly it backfired but not in the way you'd think #the rest of the girls were basically stuck wearing the same clothes the entire time #meanwhile colette was happily not having to deal with wearing clothes that weren't accumulating sweat from having to walk around #if not y'know because of japan's heat #i wrote this while i was sleep deprived so maybe i missed more than a few things in this review that i wanted to say because forgor #maybe i'll end up editing stuff in here a bit after like #i'm more awake #but yeah <3 #if the infodumpy bits and dialogue quirks are the same in italian i will cry /hj #*psst hey angst lovers wait for my next post i got something for you*#wait for like #when i wake up and hopefully actually get to sleep tonight lmao #before i go consider #alternate scenarios where any of the other girls end up in that same situation with luke #i'll leave those ingredients on the counter. take them and use them however you wish :3 #book rambles #book rant #book review #rambles

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otakween · 1 year ago

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Digimon Adventure Drama CD 3 (Character Song + Mini Drama 3)

The final part in this drama CD trilogy! There are other Digimon Adventure CDs for me to go through, but this is the end of the character song + mini drama collection. So great that these are easily accessible online. I've had a lot of fun going through them.

Download link

Translation

The Stolen First Dreams of the Year - Parts 1 & 2

The gang realizes that none of them had a New Year's dream (it's a Japanese tradition to analyze your first dream of the year). Yamato and Takeru go to investigate and Bakumon reveals he ate everyone's dreams! Dun dun dunnnn

Gotta love the totally realistic conversations of people being like "you didn't have a dream either, so weird!" I feel like I don't remember my dreams most nights lol.

I've always known that tapir were associated with dream-eating in Japan (due to anime and video games), but I've never looked up the origins of this. According to Wikipedia the nightmare eating, supernatural "baku" and the tapir are both called "baku," but they're different...but also baku look just like tapir lol. Not confusing at all!

In part 2 of this drama Yamato and Takeru are trapped in Takeru's dream. Takeru is a cat, Patamon's a kite, and Gabumon's a shishimai. I thought it was funny that Takeru had a profound reason for Patamon to be a kite, but Gabumon was a shishimai because...he just kinda looks like one lol

Takeru uses the power of lucid dreaming to defeat Bakumon and escape his dream...that's a pretty obvious weakness

Image Song 1 - Walk on the Edge (Yamato Ishida)

Translation

A very "cool" song for Yamato, very fitting. A lot of it is directed at Taichi, telling him to stop being so hot-headed and just be cool, like Yamato.

I feel like there's some conflicting vibes here because at one point in the lyrics he's like "we're the chosen children, we can do anything!" but then he's like "I'm fine on my own." Kinda jarring that both ends of his arc would be put into one song like that. Like...pick a personality.

I liked that they incorporated his harmonica in the song's intro. Smart.

Image Song 2 - Be All Right (Takeru Takaishi)

Translation

This had a similar vibe to Hikari's song, kinda abstract and hopeful about the future. (Makes sense since Hikari and Takeru become a duo).

I feel like Takeru's voice actress didn't even try to do her character's voice when singing this. It just sounds like some lady lol. In my opinion, when it comes to image songs, I prefer the song to sound more authentic to the character than to sound "good."

The Digimon’s New Year Performance

This was definitely the best gag drama yet! They threw a lot of dumb jokes in there that made me laugh/roll my eyes. Best bits were probably: Gabumon finally taking his fur off (in the AUDIO drama), Tentomon speaking without his accent (cursed), Sora and Joe praising Piyomon and Gomamon for their lame tricks and Hikari judging Tailmon for acting cutesy.

I felt bad for Agumon for being booed, glad he got his revenge at the end lol.

Image Song 3 - Shinka de Guts! (Partner digimon, minus Tailmon)

Translation

This one snuck up on me. It's so cute!! I feel like this is one of those anime songs that make you feel like you can do anything and everything's gonna be alright ;w;

Love hearing the digimon sing. This is what I was talking about in my critique of Takeru's song. I love in-character songs that aren't worried about sounding kinda goofy.

The digimon sing about their power together and their love for their human partners, very wholesome. There were also some lyrics thrown in there about taking it easy and stopping to smell the flowers. Cozy.

#digimon #digimon adventure #drama cd #drama cds

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nicki0kaye · 1 year ago

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There was a lot of Gender exploration at the center of HtTYD, but it was never going to be what Dreamworks centered for the sequels, if only because the first movie already explored that angle

There was a lot of depth to Steve's portrayal in CA:WS, but they were never going to fully deconstruct or in any way emasculate a male power fantasy that is analogous to the American war machine, which has a say in how the movies turn out bc it is Literally funding the fucking movie

There were a lot of great ideas and potential to Overwatch, but the goals of Blizzard and Activision are antithetical to transgressive art, and they never lied about who the characters were or what they intended to do with them, they just made the mistake of leaving us alone with so many open ended questions for so long, anything they gave me would have been a disappointment

There is something beautiful about the new direction of the Star Wars franchise, about the passion for the original trilogy and lore of the universe that is allowed to drive much of the creative direction under Filoni and Favreau. Creating for streaming services, especially Disney, has to be a nightmare and I'm still honestly impressed they've managed as much quality control as they have doing this marathon of project after project after project ESPECIALLY now that we know that certain shows were shot with no clear direction, singular writing staff, pitch bible, fucking nothing but the hope the editors could make shit make sense in post.

I dont want to keep letting media break my heart. I'm trying to be realistic a bout my expectations. And I have become so fucking sensitive to seeing my mistakes being repeated

Din was never going to keep the dark saber; what the audience interpreted as a position of weakness the character could grow from was Filoni showing the audience this was not Din's path. People were pissed and I deeply empathize with that fury, but he didn't bait and switch you. He didn't forget all the Mandalorian lore he helped bring to the screen. He and Favreau had specific goals that then had to travel through what has to be the most hellish marathon of a development cycle one can imagine and it resulted in a season that reflected that strain in ways previous seasons did not, purely by virtue of being sandwiched in the middle of Disney's unrealistic and frankly inhumane development cycle.

now in conversations about fandom expectations I keep referencing Din and the Dark Saber bc...what y'all made from what canon provided you was better than what canon ended up doing. Unquestionably. But that was you. And you deserve to be disappointed it wasn't anything nears a good. But you were not cheated or tricked or betrayed. You came up with something awesome and the creator wanted to do something different and was kneecapped in the attempt by the studio which fucked up the execution even more

#nik v fandom

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endpoem · 2 years ago

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Stuff I liked in 2022

‘Saul’ good (and other TV)

It’s not easy to say goodbye to Better Call Saul, the supposed end of Vince Gilligan’s Albuquerque cycle. I bought my dad the complete Breaking Bad on DVD for Christmas in 2014, and we watched the entire thing together, back before I had kids or a real full-time career. Jesse Pinkman, Nacho, Jimmy and Kim—these characters have meant the world to me for the better part of a decade, and Saul was absolutely the pinnacle.

El Camino, Saul season five, and the two halves of season six have been such a gift of flawless storytelling these last few years; sometimes they were the thing that got me out of bed in the morning. Logging into work on a Monday ain’t so bad when you’ve got more of Kim and Jimmy’s mischief to look forward to. Peter Gould, Gilligan, and company stuck the landing. If one of your favorite characters must die, you can’t ask for a more beautiful sendoff than “Rock and Hard Place.”

Bob Odenkirk’s book, Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama: A Memoir, was a great way to spend a weekend, as well, deepening my appreciation for an actor who’d already won my heart in the first couple seasons of Saul. (I’ll admit it: The character was never my favorite part of Breaking Bad. It took the Jimmy dimension to win me over and sell me on the idea of a spinoff. Mission accomplished, I guess.)

It’s a nice treat to see Odenkirk back in his home country of comedy, and it made for a good excuse to watch Mr. Show season one while I was waiting for Better Call Saul to come back from its mid-season break. Bob and I have a shocking number of things in common: five-nine, Irish-Catholic, Illinois guys, a cynicism born of trauma, severe impostor syndrome, et cetera. Anyway, I can’t wait to see what he does next.

I loved Atlanta season three; “New Jazz” was my favorite episode by far, probably because it focuses on Al (Paper Boi) and is weird even by Atlanta standards. I also enjoyed Stranger Things season four, which was a definite high for that series—Joseph Quinn was brilliant. And as a Halo fan going all the way back to 2001, I mostly dug the TV adaptation’s first season, though the finale was a bummer.

I’m a couple seasons into a Mad Men rewatch, trying to fill the void left by the Gilliverse, and it’s a different show now that I’m a father with two kids and more of a career. Unbelievably good.

‘The Rings of Power,’ classic Tolkien, and other fantasies

This was the year I got really into epic fantasy outside of, say, the Elder Scrolls games. The Rings of Power came along just in time to cure my post-Saul blues, and it certainly did the trick. It’s a gorgeous (and expensive) spectacle, with a rich, expansive world, mythic stakes, and some really great performances. And have you seen how beautiful that cast is? I’ve been known to develop the occasional TV or movie crush, Your Honor, but Morfydd Clark’s Galadriel is in a league of her own. My God. She’s great in Saint Maud, too.

After Rings of Power, I rewatched the extended cuts of the movie trilogy and bought a stack of books for good measure—The Hobbit, Rings, The Silmarillion, The Fall of Númenor, Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I just finished Fellowship of the Ring, which is exquisite, and I’ve been reading The Hobbit aloud to my daughter. We’re about three-fourths of the way through that one.

I finally saw the original Willow and Legend (1985) earlier this year, and thought both were excellent. (The Legend Blu-ray from Arrow Video looks stunning.) House of the Dragon was pretty fantastic—as good as Game of Thrones in its earlier seasons, only more focused. And the Disney Plus Willow series is probably my second-favorite fantasy work of 2022; it’s playing around with the same kind of Lovecraftian terror as John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, and I can’t help but see it as a riff on the Star Wars sequel trilogy.

‘Andor’ and more

There was some good star stuff on the tube this year. “The Tribes of Tatooine,” the second episode of Book of Boba, elevated that series above the disposable feel of Mandalorian season two (“The Believer” notwithstanding). And Deborah Chow’s Obi-Wan Kenobi gave those of us who grew up on the prequels a magnificent bookend to the Obi-and-Ani relationship.

Light & Magic, the six-part docuseries on ILM, offered a phenomenal overview of special-effects history beginning with the inception of Star Wars and ending with the biggest breakthroughs of the CGI era. You could easily do a second season on the last couple decades of blockbusters and stuff like StageCraft, but maybe that’s a series for down the road.

But of course no Star Wars discussion this year could pass without addressing the main event, Andor, which can safely be called the best Star Wars story since 1983. Tony Gilroy is a masterful writer and showrunner, responsible for much of what people loved in Rogue One, and he brings all his intelligence and rage and love to Andor. He and his crew ought to be very proud. Who knew that all Star Wars needed was more Andy Serkis and Diego Luna? Gilroy, evidently.

Shadow of the Sith, a 496-page novel by Adam Christopher, was another Star Wars highlight in 2022. If you’re looking for a good Luke Skywalker book, or a good Lando Calrissian book—or some spooky Sith magic—you’ll find all of that and more in this moving Rise of Skywalker tie-in. For those curious about Rey’s parents, this is largely their story, as well, and it’s beautifully done. My favorite Star Wars book in years.

Always gamin’

I’m not a full-time games journalist anymore, so my gaming habits are a lot more relaxed than they used to be. Which is to say I play to have fun, now, and I can’t recommend it enough. I buy far fewer new games these days, for one, though I did love Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, Destiny 2: The Witch Queen, and several games I’ve started but not yet finished.

One of my biggest games this year was Final Fantasy VII Remake, which I finally finished on the PS5. Hell of a game—if any video game can be called a masterpiece, that one comfortably belongs in the category. I also rolled credits on Mass Effect 2 and 3, and thought the latter was far superior to the middle chapter in spite of the general consensus. Regardless of how you feel about the very end, that game is quite an achievement for BioWare, and I hope Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is even half as engrossing.

I spent a lot of time playing Fortnite and Call of Duty online this year—something I plan to do a lot less of in 2023—but had plenty of fun doing it. I replayed a lot of familiar favorites: Skyrim, Halo Infinite, Fallout: New Vegas, Miles Morales. Most of my hours on the Nintendo Switch were spent with KotOR and KotOR II, and I’m currently struggling through an attempt to replay Morrowind on the Xbox, which is both painful and rewarding. I’m rediscovering a lot of the reasons why I fell in love with it twenty years ago.

At the movies

I didn’t go to the theater much this year, but I did watch 209 movies—most of them at home on my 65-inch TCL 5-Series. My top ten films of 2022 were The Fabelmans, Top Gun: Maverick, Elvis, del Toro’s Pinocchio, Watcher, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Pearl, The Batman, Nope, and Hellraiser. Fabelmans and Top Gun in particular made my heart soar; it’s nice to see both Spielberg and Cruise still delivering career-best work a full two decades after Minority Report, which was my favorite movie for a long time.

Outside of those ten, I also loved Kimi, Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Revealer, and Confess, Fletch.

As far as new-to-me classics, I had a very fulfilling year working my way through the gaps in my Carpenter and Mann viewing, if nothing else—They Live, Prince of Darkness, Elvis ’79, Big Trouble in Little China, In the Mouth of Madness, Cigarette Burns, Ali, The Insider, The Keep… I spent a lot of time studying my favorite Carpenter flicks last year as I wrote the treatment for a horror script that’s lived in my head for a while, but I didn’t want to watch Prince of Darkness till after I’d finished a detailed outline of the story. In 2022, I logged fifteen Carpenter films and seven from Mann.

I saw Citizen Kane, F for Fake, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Godfather, Part II, Solaris (2002), The Meyerowitz Stories (every bit as good as Marriage Story), Twin Peaks season two and The Missing Pieces, Killing Them Softly, Jaws, Your Name, The Gambler (the one with James Caan, not Marky Mark), Bonnie and Clyde, Near Dark, The Hidden, Silent Running, the original 3:10 to Yuma, Joe Kidd.

It’s been a hard, stressful, scary, transformative year. But I’m grateful for the strides I made, both personal and professional, and for the media and stories that inspired me along the way.

Subscribe to my Substack newsletter.

#andor #better call saul #rings of power

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bellerpblog · 5 months ago

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How do we feel about Mondays?

Started work today. Honestly I partied too hard last night, and then was plagued by some awful nightmares so I didn’t sleep well and it made me spend the entire day wanting to go back to bed. I love my job, and today was a great day at it, but good lord was my heart not in it.

Gonna make up for it with a movie night tonight. Gonna try to talk my brother into trying out Phantom of the Opera with me. We share a TV and have some very different tastes in films. I’ve been wanting to watch some musicals and cry at something hammy for a while and today is a great day for it.

Since I made this blog to talk about movies, I’ve been trying to think of a good one to rant about, but nothing has inspired me yet. So I’ll share a few of my my hot takes:

I think Oz the Great and Powerful is the best Oz movie. It tells a really neat story about redemption while allowing the character to remain the flawed man he is in the original Oz story. It’s colorful and fun and has lots of fun tricks. I honestly don’t care for the original Oz film at all.

I can’t stand Will Ferrel. This is weird because so many people I know seem to think he’s great, but I find him absolutely insufferable. I enjoy him in his animated roles, but most of his stuff is live action and he’s just so much to deal with.

I also enjoyed Last Jedi. Not excellent, but it certainly had balls and went out of its way to tell its own story and have its own identity, which is more than can be said for the other films in that trilogy.

#happy monday #zzz belle #movies

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adamwatchesmovies · 9 months ago

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The Matrix Resurrections (2021)

While I didn't enjoy this film, that doesn't mean you won't. No matter what I say, the people involved in this project did it: they actually made a movie. That's something to be applauded. With that established...

In its defense, The Matrix Revolutions did say that we might one day see Neo again so The Matrix Resurrections doesn’t come out of nowhere. It even introduces some interesting ideas in its first half - only to abandon them in favor of familiar territory.

Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) is the creator of a video game series called The Matrix. Upon release, it revolutionized the gaming world and now, Warner Bros. wants another chapter. Having based many of the characters in the game on his real life, Tom worries revisiting the world will cause his past mental health issues to return in force. How could they not when his partner at the company, Smith (Jonathan Groff), irritates him, he keeps running into the woman that inspired Trinity (Tiffany, played by Carrie-Anne Moss) and events from the adventures in Zion creep into his psyche despite repeated sessions with his therapist (played by Neil Patrick Harris)?

I like what this film does in the beginning. What is this? Another layer of the Matrix in which Neo has been tricked into believing he’s just an ordinary person who dreamed up the war between humans and machines? Is this the next version of the chosen one after something went wrong and Zion was destroyed? Could it be something different altogether? The original trilogy defined the early 2000s action genre. It feels strange to see Keanu Reeves reprise his role in a world that’s so much like it was back then but also… not. People are glued to their cellphones and the originality of The Matrix is being turned into a soulless franchise by the corporate machine. It’s meta in a way that feels smart and seeing Tom in endless meetings where people insist this new Matrix can’t be just “another reboot, retread, regurgitated” while they provide no innovative ideas is an even more hellish prison than the cubicles we saw Neo escape from. The way the colour blue is so clearly present in each therapy session, combined with the parallels between the ordinary people and the icons from the trilogy of films (shown through archival footage) make you wonder what’s happening. Or at least, they would if the movie didn’t give it all away in a scene that introduces a bunch of new characters, played by Jessica Henwick and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II.

It’s pretty obvious that we are, indeed, seeing Neo and Trinity in some new digital prison. That’s not necessarily bad but it does show that director Lana Wachowski (more likely, the studio) didn’t have much confidence in the audience. Once Neo catches up to us, details about the world prove things have changed since we last saw these characters… but only superficially. By the time the second hour begins, we’re just seeing the same things we saw before: Neo and Trinity fighting against the Matrix, Agent Smith causing trouble and the artificial prison trying to keep everyone in check. I would’ve much rather seen some of the events mentioned in passing play out, like a machine v machine war for energy, a great purge within the Matrix that saw many familiar faces deleted (though not all; there are some eye-rolling cameos), or the rebuilding of the human civilization. What we get instead, I’m sorry to say, feels an awfully lot like “another reboot, retread, regurgitated”.

The action scenes are fine. There are a couple of new tricks brought up but nothing compares to the excitement we saw in the first three movies. The special effects are solid but again, they don’t dazzle the way they did back in the day. Everything feels nerfed because we know Thomas Anderson is just a cage Neo is trying to break out of, and the mystery comes to us half-solved. Say what you will about the Matrix sequels. Maybe not all of it made sense, maybe they weren’t as deep as they thought they were but they were memorable. You have vivid memories of that highway chase with the twins, of that endless wave of sentinels rushing towards those mech suits, etc. Resurrections does not feel like an uncompromised idea; it feels like another piece of an IP.

I actually watched the film twice to cement how I felt about it and enjoyed it more the second time. I still feel that we didn’t need another Matrix and that what it brings could’ve been used better elsewhere. At one point, Tiffany asks “How do you know if you want something or if your upbringing programmed you to want it?” and the picture touches upon this idea that when you become successful, fans will analyze something to death, finding all sorts of meanings in things that probably didn’t have any in the first place. Those are great ideas that don’t pay off. If you choose to watch The Matrix Resurrections anyway, do yourself a favor and skip the scene at the end of the credits. It’s one of the worst I’ve seen in I don’t know how long. (March 2nd & 3rd, 2022)

#the matrix resurrections #the matrix #movies #films #movie reviews #film reviews #Lana Wachowski #David Mitchell #Aleksandar Hemon #Keanu Reeves #Carrie-Anne Moss #Yahya Abdul-Mateen II #Jessica Henwick #Jonathan Groff #Neil Patrick harris #Priyanka Chopra Jonas #Jada Pinkett Smith #2021 movies #2021 films

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your-resident-boat-person · 2 months ago

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Here are some non-pokemon DS recommendations!

1. Ghost Trick - Phantom Detective

It's a puzzle game visual novel. Imagine you need to stop a rube Goldberg machine where someone dies at the end, but you're a ghost and can only manipulate objects in a very limited capacity. It's my favorite game of all time, and it was created and written by Shu Takumi, the creator of the Ace Attorney franchise. Speaking of,

2. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

A mystery visual novel series where you need to use critical thinking to find contradictions in testimonies and solve each mystery. The writing and comedy are fantastic, the mysteries are excellent, and the characters are really engaging.

3. 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors

Another visual novel, but this one is different. One of the small handful of M rated DS games. Do not play this game if you can't handle gore. Anyway, 9 people are trapped aboard what looks like the RMS Titanic, and have 9 hours to escape before she sinks with all of them trapped inside. This game has escape room puzzles. The gameplay is pretty good, but the story is definitely the highlight.

These 3 games all have remakes. Personally, I'd recommend the DS version of the Ace Attorney games. At least for the original trilogy and Apollo Justice. The HD graphics just make the art look revolting. For Ghost Trick, I'd day that the remake is pretty much 50/50 with the original, but if you play the remake, go into the settings and change the soundtrack to be the original, not the new one they did. For 999, it's a bit tougher. In the original, on the top screen, you see dialogue, and on the bottom screen, you see in-depth descriptions of things like you'd see in a book. In the remake, there's only one screen, so you have to pick between which one you want, and it's pretty clunky. Most people just set it to the regular dialogue and play it like Ace Attorney without those descriptions. This would make it sound like the DS version is the way to go, right? WRONG. Well, maybe. The remake adds voice acting. Really good voice acting. It's really difficult to pick between the two. Honestly, I'd recommend playing both, but which one you play first is up to you. The voice acting might leave a better impression if you dont know what they're going to say already. They're both pretty radically different experiences, and thankfully, the game has pretty great replay value, with lots of different paths to take.

Alright, more DS games now.

4. Fossil Fighters

Most people just kinda file this one under "pokemon clone" and carry on with their day, but it's SO much more. Unlike pokemon, you only get one of each Vivosaur. Now, I know what you're thinking, "but what if I want one with better stats?". Well, friend, Vivosaurs are VERY different from pokemon. The Vivosaurs stats are determined by how well you clean its fossils. If you damage the bone, its stats will go down. Each fossil cleaning is graded out of 100, and you can always go out and find more fossils and try again. But rare Vivosaurs will have fossils that are more difficult to clean. You can actually perfect the stats of every single Vivosaur you have. The battle mechanics are unique, and the story is fantastic. And I hear this games sequel is even better, but I haven't played it yet. Also, the 3D models of the Vivosaurs are dope as shit, and seeing them fight is rad as hell.

5. Club Penguin - Elite Penguin Force/Herbert's Revenge

What?! A shitty licensed game?! What's going on here?! Well, the secret to these games are that they're actually good. If you've played the EPF missions in the browser version of Club Penguin, you'll be familiar with these. They're point and click adventures. Actually, a lot of the missions are actually just upgraded versions of the EPF missions in the browser game, but they added lots of new ones, too. The story is okay, nothing nuts, it's a kids game, but the characters are pretty strong. Especially Herbert. He's written shockingly well, and I think he's a pretty complex villain for a kids game. The gameplay is pretty good, too, albeit nothing revolutionary. Just standard point and click adventure puzzles, but without the moonlogic of Sierra games. The music, though. Oh my god, the soundtrack to these games is incredible. I'm sure many of you are already familiar with the gadget room. But other songs like Robot Battle, Epic Challenge, and One Very Grumpy Polar Bear are all standouts. These games are criminally overlooked, and I'd highly recommend giving them a go.

So anyway, yeah, if you've always just thought of your DS as your Pokemon machine, give these games a go! The DS's library is criminally underlooked. The DS had a lot of really cool and unique features that make porting these games to new platforms really difficult. Hell, even emulating these games can be a pain. The DS has a really cool and creative library full of unique games, and it's easily my favorite console of all time.

top 5 ds game recommendations!

pokemon black

pokemon white

pokemon black 2

pokemon white 2

replay pokemon black

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carica-ficus · 1 year ago

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Review: Six of Crows

Author: Leigh Bardugo

Date: 03/08/2023

Ocjena: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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Years ago, I read both "Six of Crows" and "Crooked Kingdom". To say I liked these books is sort of an understatement. I was extremely excited to hear that Netflix was making a series based on the first trilogy of books and that the characters from the second duology would also be in it. The casting looked great and the planned high budget gave it the opportunity to be amazing. Unfortunately, I found it quite disappointing, but I did grow nostalgic over the characters after I have watched the second season earlier this year. I decided to bribe my boyfriend with the collector's edition of "Six of Crows", so he could read it with me during our summer vacation. And it was one of the best decisions I made this year (as far as books go, at least).

"Six of Crows" is an incredibly popular young adult fantasy book about six members of a gang who come upon a deal to rescue a scientist from the most tightly guarded prison in the world, in exchange for an almost unimaginable amount of money. It is a job that is theoretically impossible, but they don't have a lot to lose. What's more, most of them don't even have a choice because they desperately need the money.

The book highlights the painfully obvious and immense difference between the lives of the rich and the poor. While the poor fight for survival each day, the rich enjoy a life of luxury and abundance. It is the higher classes which exploit and control the lower classes. The imbalance of the system is deliberate, and the lower classes simply do not have the power, money and resources to rebel. Throughout her characters, Bardugo displays all the different ways the society profits off of its most vulnerable components, and just how much a person is ready to sacrifice in order to achieve a better life. "Six of Crows" is a book about breaking into a prison, but in its foundation it is a comment on the unfair and exploitive system that benefits the rich and profits off the poor.

The element that unquestionably separates the book from others of its genre are its remarkable main characters: a ruthless leader, a charismatic sharpshooter, a deadly assassin, a powerful witch, a strong soldier and a timid bomber. It is a very diverse and memorable group where each character has a distinct background, origin story, beliefs, motivation and personality. The book is told from their points of view which provides for a wider understanding of the dynamic between the them, their relationships and emotions. While they do go through specific character development throughout the story, they still stay true to their identity and this is what makes them such a strong literary device. Bardugo never allows any of them to stray away from their own nature because that would diminish the whole foundation of the book. "Six of Crows" is a work that is dependent primarily on its characters, not its plot.

Although, the plot should not be taken lightly either. The premise on its own is relatively basic, but the way Bardugo approaches twists is simply ingenious. Her writing completely conceals the turn of events and keeps the reader continuously in partial deceit. The text is formulated somewhat like a magic trick - it pinpoints the reader's attention to what it wants them to look at, but only later does it expose its true intentions. In turn, this makes every revelation unexpected and exciting, but never too unbelievable.

Aside from plot twists, the story itself is remarkably thought out. It's filled with action, tension and drama from the very beginning, all the way to the very end. The writing style is easy to read and to understand. The pace is fast and thrilling, but also allows enough moments for the characters to interact with one another as friends and colleagues. This offers many cute, lighthearted, heartwarming and simply loving moments which is why it is not very surprising that the book is widely regarded as one of the most beloved depictions of the found family trope.

Even though the book obviously falls under young adult fiction, it could be argued that it is on the very edge of its definition. If the characters were slightly older and the writing a little more mature, it could easily fall into the category of adult fiction. It is definitely gory, gritty and grotesque enough to be catered even to adult audiences.

Personally, I am both glad and surprised that I have loved my second reading of this book so much. I guess my taste hasn't evolved as much as I thought. In any case, "Six of Crows" is an amazing, unforgettable, and exciting book with unique, memorable and fun characters who fight their way through a cruel mission set up against them. Out of all the YA fiction I have read to this day, "Six of Crows" is definitely one of the top titles I would recommend to anyone.

#six of crows #soc #the grishaverse #grishaverse #leigh bardugo #fiction #ya fiction #fantasy #reading #book #knjiga #recenzija #moja recenzija #book review

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denimbex1986 · 1 year ago

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'By 2014 Christopher Nolan had established himself as one of the most exciting and important filmmakers of our generation. In addition to the genre-defining Dark Knight trilogy, Nolan made his name with complex, intellectually challenging thrillers such as Memento and Inception. His 2014 release Interstellar seemed primed to expand that reputation. That one’s the story of a mid-21st century astronaut (Matthew McConaughey) who leads an expedition into a wormhole which carries their vessel to another galaxy. It also used its sci-fi context to further dabble into shifting timelines, one of the English-American director’s favorite conceits, via the theory of relativity. The film was a hit, earning more than four times its budget in box office sales. But amidst the praise, a single, recurring complaint could be heard, loud and clear: “I can’t understand what anyone was saying.”

Interstellar was hardly the first time people charged the director with mishandling sound design. Tom Hardy’s Bane original vocal recordings in the first footage of The Dark Knight Rises screened half a year before that film’s release became a joke that no film bro could defend. Some audiences assumed the studio had made a mistake with how the footage was released (and the studio did subsequently ask Nolan and Hardy to redub Bane’s lines via ADR).

The original audio wasn’t a mistake at all, however. And as his influence grew, Nolan has remained committed to massive soundscapes with deafening music, immersive effects, and murky dialogue. But as understandable as it may be for audiences to want to hear what characters say to one another, Nolan’s sound design cannot be dismissed as a quirk or even a mistake by an otherwise precise filmmaker. Rather muffled dialogue must be understood as a tool to advance his movie’s themes.

The Unspoken Rules of Christopher Nolan’s Games

Few directors seem to invite as much heated discourse as Christopher Nolan. He tells stories about shifting dreamscapes, magical illusions, or scientific theory. Even movies based in historical fact use overlapping timelines. To guide viewers through these narratives, Nolan usually includes expository scenes, in which characters explain the rules of the film.

Nolan’s breakout film Memento starred Guy Pearce as a man who could not make new memories. The studios marketed Memento as a film that moves backward narratively, beginning with a scene of Pearce’s Leonard Shelby looking at a polaroid of the man he killed, and each subsequent scene taking place earlier in the story. But in between each of these moments are intercut black-and-white sequences that move in a traditionally linear fashion, in which Shelby talks to an unseen interlocutor about a person called Sammy Jankis (Stephen Tobolowsky), who suffered a similar condition as him.

Nolan has used similar moments in nearly all of his films, whether it be Michael Caine outlining the three steps of a magic trick in The Prestige, or Robert Pattinson calling for a temporal pincher movement in Tenet.

Few Nolan movies better demonstrate this tendency than Inception, a mind-bending caper that devotes nearly half of its runtime to establishing dream world mechanics. Only after characters have lectured viewers about totems and kicks does the film settle into a heist across multiple layers of reality.

But if you were to ask someone to describe any of the rules scenes, few would recount the dialogue. Instead they’ll probably talk about what has become the movie’s most iconic aspect. As Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) teaches Ariadne (Elliot Page) about constructing dreamscapes, the city folds in on itself and windows explode harmlessly. None of Cobb’s warnings about the subconscious acting like white blood cells resonates like those remarkable images.

While it might be tempting to say that no exposition dump can match the massive visuals of Inception, Nolan buried his talkier moments in earlier movies, even when he didn’t have access to big-budget effects. In Batman Begins, when Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) tells Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson) about his journey, Nolan restricts the dialogue to voiceover, melding it with the score from Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, sweeping the camera across mountains or circling around people performing the actions described.

Time and again, Nolan has shown that the words in his movies don’t matter. Nothing a character says is as important as what they do or how they respond to the world around them. There’s nothing the dialogue communicates that isn’t better related by music, lighting, and composition.

Nolan demonstrated this way back in Memento with the resolution to the Sammy Jankis story. After getting to the end of his narrative, Leonard realizes that he’s forgotten who he’s talking to. Eventually, we learn that Leonard misremembers the Jankis story; that he’s combined it with his own life to give himself a sense of justice. But the tragedy of Leonard’s self-deception is better relayed in the panic Pearce plays, tightening his body and jerking toward the phone. It’s better relayed by the black-and-white photography, which uses lighting to highlight shades of gray, suggesting that the truth isn’t as simple as it seems.

The Human Heart of Nolan’s Cinema

Nolan’s latest film Oppenheimer is full of memorable moments, but none as striking as the speech the title character (Cillian Murphy) gives after the bomb he and the scientists of Los Alamos created was then dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The camera trails behind Oppenheimer as he walks through a stomping and cheering crowd, searching for his composure before he reaches the podium. Each jingoistic remark he manages to spit out earns more screaming applause until the sound suddenly drops out leaving only Murphy’s unvarnished audio.

One might think that this decision would only intensify the importance of Oppenheimer’s words, but it actually has the opposite effect. The specific things he’s saying don’t matter. They are empty boasts, war-crazed rabble-rousing that fail to match the importance of the bomb. Instead the sound design draws attention to the real concern of the scene: the weight of humanity. As Oppenheimer speaks, the background shakes and blurs, highlighting Murphy’s crumbling and frail frame. An explosion of white illuminates the room, engulfing Murphy’s gaunt face in light and shadow, drowning his heretofore striking blue eyes. Even before Oppenheimer’s POV sees skin melting off the face of celebrants in the audience or charred bodies at his feet, we understand the extreme human cost of the moment.

The Oppenheimer speech is a surprisingly humane scene from a director who can sometimes seem chilly and intellectual. Movies such as Interstellar, Inception, and Tenet have established Nolan’s reputation as a filmmaker in the Stanley Kubrick vein, more interested in technical bombast and puzzle-box plots than in human connections. But Nolan’s muddled dialogue suggests otherwise. Take Dunkirk, the most small-scale film of his blockbuster era. Detractors might argue that Nolan’s insistence on layered timelines distracts from what is a fairly simple plot about rescuing British soldiers from the titular beach.

However, the movie isn’t terribly interested in the plot mechanics. Instead it focuses on the human experiences of the people involved. By interlacing the three timelines, we get the full weight of Tommy’s (Fionn Whitehead) attempts to escape the beach, of Dawson (Mark Rylance) crossing the channel to rescue the soldiers, and of the pilot with the callsign Fortis 1 (Tom Hardy) providing air support. Each one of these characters have significance, no matter how insignificant to the actual mechanics of the evacuation, simply because they are people.

Dunkirk succeeds by minimizing the dialogue, making most of Hardy’s lines incomprehensible over the sound of his Spitfire engine. Even the most important words in the film, Winston Churchill’s “We will fight them on the beaches” speech get recited by a mumbling Tommy, who is nearly drowned out by Zimmer’s soaring score. However, it works because we don’t need those words barked with bombast, as Gary Oldman did playing Churchill in The Darkest Hour that same year. Instead we need to see the sadness in Hardy’s eyes as his pilot lands his plane behind enemy lines, the relief on Alex’s (Harry Styles) face when a civilian passes him a beer, the sad recognition shared between Dawson and his son (Tom Glynn-Carney).

By diminishing the words, Nolan forces the audience to pay more attention to the face, the emotions, and the struggles embodied by the actors. It frees the characters from being exposition machines, allowing them to be human beings instead.

Christopher Nolan’s Wordless Humanism

While on the press tour for Interstellar, Nolan offered a rare defense of his sound design. “There are particular moments in this film where I decided to use dialogue as a sound effect,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “So sometimes it’s mixed slightly underneath the other sound effects or in the other sound effects to emphasize how loud the surrounding noise is. It’s not that nobody has ever done these things before, but it’s a little unconventional for a Hollywood movie.”

That approach can be seen and heard in several notable moments in the movie, from the heightening of small sounds inside Coop’s cockpit to the muffled conversation between Coop’s adult daughter Murph (Jessica Chastain) and her dying mentor Professor Brand (Caine). In contrast to his films, Nolan offers a simple, straightforward explanation. “That’s the way I like to work,” he admitted. “I don’t like to hang everything on one particular line. I like to follow the experience of the character.”

That defense may be irritating to those who want to hear the scientists pontificate on time and space travel, but it’s clear that the film isn’t truly interested in those expository details. Instead it’s interested in Coop’s visceral experiences, something made clear by the movie’s most defining image. When we think of Interstellar, we recall not the various planets Coop visits or even the dusty cornfield of Earth in the 2060s.

Instead we think of Coop crying as he watches a message from Murph. McConaughey’s face captures everything, the reddening on his cheeks and forehead, the elongated look as the hand over his mouth stretches his skin, the tremor accompanying his tears.

That image sticks because it is the heart of the movie. Nothing any character does say, or could say, matches the intensity of that simple human moment. Coop’s crying represents the pinnacle of Nolan’s cinematic project, the level of connection he strives for in each of his films. No matter how convoluted his movies become, they fundamentally try to communicate human experiences, something that can rarely be put into words.'

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imagine-silk · 2 years ago

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Masterlist (Old)

🍮 My Favorites

AtSV

Peter B staring down Jess while hugging Autistic!Younger!Spider

Peter B taking Autistic!Younger!Spider to a meeting

DRAGON AGE

Dragon Age Inquisition characters finding comfort with you

Yan!Sera headcannon

Josephine Montilyet headcannon

Cassandra Pentaghast headcannon

Varric with a Noir Detective 🍮

Dorian, Cassandra, and Cullen finding out a Scout has a crush on Varric🍮

What if Sten was Pining

Vegas AU ideas

Okay hear me out... Trian and Alistair

Origins Fake dating ideas(Commenter has a great one for Shale)

DAI Modern summer events (Sera, Josephine, Iron bull)

You're a dark elf (Solas, Dorian, Josephine)

How they show affection (Varric, Cullen, Morrigan)

Their child is sick (Cassandra, Josephine, Vivienne)

Pining over a scout (Varric, Cole, Josephine)🍮

Days Recovering; One, Four

FALLOUT

Fallout Yan!Dudes with a courser s/o who left the Institute

Yan!Cait w/ Institute scientist Darling

Sole turns into a supermutant

Preston reacting to Sole w/ Auditory processing disorder (APD)

Yan!Girls Meeting your Assaultron Girlfriend

Yan!Girls w/ a tourist Darling

Reactions to terrifying super-ghoul

Super-mutant wing-man

Sole's accidental trick-shot

Sole painting companions in a surreal art style

Missing Sole turns up as a glowing ghoul

Girl companions meeting your ghoul parents

Sole sobbing uncontrollably when they come back from the Intitute

Modern!Companions comforting reader after a pet death (Not dogmeat's)

Cartoon door beat-up thing

Sole high on painkillers confesses (Deacon, Preston, MacCready)

Yan!Danse and Haylen react to Sole being former Enclave

Yan!Girls react to you saying you want to have a baby w/ them

Yan!Girls react to Sole leaving to hunt down an item and returning months later

Insults between dumb and dumber

Sole having four arms

Peaceful!Sole finally snapping at an ungrateful settler

Telling Yan!Girls you were once in the Enclave

Shooting Yan!Girls w/ a bubble gun🍮

Pouring your heart out to Yan!Girls

Companions gaining fire abilities

Companions (+Proctor Igram) react to a ripper doc

Life w/ Codsworth after the bombs dropped

Reader giving love-nips (Hancock, Nick, MacCready)

Scribe Haylen headcannons

Piper Wright headcannons

React to a magical girl w/ guns

Hancock, Deacon, Nick, and MacCready react to M!SS who shaves too much and ends up with a babyface

Companions react to Pacifist!Lycanthrope!SS who is stuck in werewolf form🍮

MacCready, Deacon, and Danse after a gore-y fight with blood everywhere🍮

X6-88's guide to cure love sickness🍮

React to the song Until I Found You by Stephen Sanchez

Chipper!SS breaking down after going to the institute

React to the song Glimpse of Us by Joji

Child giving them a friendship braclet (X6-88, Cait, Vadim and Yafim)🍮

Taking care of a Asian!Teen!SS(Travis Miles, Nick Valentine, Deacon)🍮

Deacon traveling with a Vampire SS(not romanced)

M!SS is protective over non-human companions (+Kent, Sturges)🍮

House husbands (Preston, Hancock, Deacon)

Favorite place to go for a date (X6-88, Preston, Hancock)

Yandere (Cait, Curie, Piper)

Having a trouble-making twin (Hancock, Nick, Piper, Deacon)

Yandere Preston, Gage, Danse

Relationship milestones (Deacon, Preston, Gage)🍮

Modern Companions

Modern Companions Love Interest/Ocs

You have a stutter (X6-88, Hancock, Piper)

When someone reacts negatively to them being a synth (With no interference)

What their kisses are like (Deacon, Hancock, Curie)

What are mornings like (MaCready, Cait, Preston)

Danse and Nate smut I wrote drunk

MARVEL🍮

Marvel characters being inebriated

Finding a portrait of them you painted

Secretary!Trilogy!Peter finding out he's in love with you

Natasha and sleepy kisses

Secretary!Spidermen; You doze off

Secretary!Spidermen; Winter dates i guess

Secretary!Spidermen (MCU, TASM, Trilogy, Peter B., Miles Morales)

Secretary!Spidermen; Getting you ready before a meeting

You're a Slime (Peter, Tony, Bruce)

Glass in my hands (Scott Lang/Fem!Reader)

DBH

Yandere husband!Hank + son!Connor x willing!Darling

Supernatural lore ideas

Gavin having a surgeon husband

"You're so cute." (Hank, Gavin, Chloe)

Hugging them out of the blue (Hank, Gavin, Chloe)🍮

You don't like androids (Simon, Luther, Markus and Carl)🍮

Meeting your parents (Hank, Markus, Gavin, Elijah)

Darling is very tactile (Yan Connor, Hank, Gavin)

Misc.

Please I need this Bagginshield ending

Yandere Elliott

Yandere Sam, Sebastian, Emily

Star Trek: Next Generation; Having a crush on Data (+Socially awkward)🍮

Overprotective!Yan!Parvati/Nyoka + trying to escape

Parvati romance headcanons (still ace)

#masterlist

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baraste-legacy · 11 months ago

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Ships: not many of those, now that I realize, which is curious. Maybe it's because I spend most of my potential shipping energy (Metric or Imperial units? 😛) in my own stuff. I've read tons of movie, TV, and game characters-based fanfics, and I guess it's more about the themes and writing than the specific pairings.

That said, there is one that I never see around (I even made an attempt at writing it): Mass Effect's Kaidan Alenko with… Ashley Williams! Not so much an actual thing going on as having Kaidan being enchanted by her and her antics without acting on it (the whole Normandy gang has enough shenanigans going on already).

Last Song: a cover of Sophie & Peter Johnston's "Torn Open" by Brothertiger and Yvette Young (that old synth-pop song has been forever with me, and I never expected anyone doing a cover, even less so a recent one).

Current reading: re-reading some of Charles Stross' Laundry Files series books. Also, some Cthulhu Mythos compilations, looking for fresh takes and angles on them (the less Euclidean the better). Thinking about getting some more Alastair Reynolds stuff: I'm a sucker for hard scifi's imaginary tech.

I recently re-read William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy in the original English (I read a translation decades ago, when my English wasn't able enough): it was nice getting to taste his style from back then. I tried his most recent stuff, but it was difficult: he has his tricks, and they feel more like vices at this stage.

Last Film: there was an attempt 😐. Several popcorn ones I tried to watch and couldn't get through, either out of cookie-cutterness (Lift) or bombastics (Rebel Moon's slomos-within-slomos). I hardly go to movie theaters these days: the really good multiplexes are far enough to be too inconvenient. Avatar 2 merited the effort. Dune 2nd part might, too, if it's not a dubbed version.

TV-wise, I'm watching True Detective Season 4th. Jodie Foster feels like she's having great fun playing this one.

I'm a Trekker (the weird kind whose first contact and love was Star Trek: The Motion Picture. TV SF-wise, Space:1999 was it 😤). ST:Lower Decks holds my faith on quality Star Trek, which is hysterical but I just don't know what's going on in the writing rooms these last decades: TNG-era Trek used to have a strong procedural TV element to it, and Deus-Ex-Machinating their way out of situations used to be a shameful last resort.

Damm, I'm such a greybeard 😂.

That said, ST:Strange New Worlds is a guilty pleasure. Cautiously curious about ST:Discovery's final season (it's been just too uneven a series).

Craving: a better attention span and willpower. I tend to overwhelm myself with projects and become paralyzed instead of just investing my time on them in an evenly fashion (even my fan art collectioning is suffering: there's a pile of a thousand plus drafted reblogs yet to tag and post 😭).

I think I won't tag anybody, if it's ok. I'm happy to show a little bit of ankle 😛, and everybody around is interesting, but I'm good with just whatever personal stuff casually emerges through the normal, daily Tumblring 🙂, so, reaching feels like I'd be imposing (I'm more expansive in other, more inherently chatty spaces, such as Discord. Here, I'm more of a lurker, I guess).

9 people you'd like to get to know better (Tag Game)

Tagged by @jukkariart - the little gremlin they are ;D

3 Ships • Canon Ship: Sarah Kerrigan & James Raynor (I am that old, yes) • OC Ship: My Gray Warden Aedan Cousland & The Witch of the Wild Morrigan (They're all bad decisions. These idiots hold a special place in my heart ❤️) • Ship of the Week: Tahr'rys Nelubin & Ashara Zavros (codependent idiots and disaster semi-couple partners)

1st Ship I'd say Jan Ors & Kyle Katarn but also Scully & Mulder. Can't decide. Seems I like complex and complicated ships the most. Sorry for not being sorry here.

Last Song: Many. I usually listen to Future-/SynthPop or a diversity of Trance radio channels at di.fm - depending on my mood Death-/Power-/NuMetal can occur too. It's radio guys - I don't know all the names of the songs they play lol

Current reading: I have the bad habit of reading several books and/or comics at once… 🫠 • The Cycle of Wind and Sparks aka The Chronicles of Hara by Alexei Pehov (Алексей Пехов) • The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers • The 13th Paladin Series by Torsten Weitze

Last Film: Trash! Rebel Moon, Forbidden World and our annual viewing of The Room on New Year's Eve, for sure.

Craving: Does it sound sad when I state that I crave some free time? There's only work, more work & even more work. I want some time to sleep and charge my creative batteries. Money can't buy that, though. Still, bills must be paid. So, it's back to work, I guess? 🥲

Tagging: No pressure (don't mind them if you were already tagged) @baraste-legacy @bigbadvv0lf @pioneer-over-c @xanthouransong @generouspicklesaladhumanoid @theoasiswinds @swtorpadawan @dingoat @kemendin

#social #baraste-legacy

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jadelotusflower · 4 years ago

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It’s Cold in that Fridge: The Case of Nakari Kelen

Since The Case of Mara Jade has been doing the rounds again, I’ve finally gone back to this post that has been sitting in my drafts for literally years. So let’s honour this absolute badass who deserved better:

Once upon a time, the Star Wars universe was but six films (and a tv series) in the story of the Skywalker family. But beyond George Lucas’ story was an absolute boatload of books, comics, games, and other materials that made up the Expanded Universe. When Disney purchased Lucasfilm and the rights to the Star Wars saga, everything in this universe was decanonised and deemed “Legends” - some aspects of this universe were retained or re-purposed, others sit in Disney’s figurative vault and will likely never see the light of day (and seeing how the ST turned out, maybe that’s for the best).

But this transition between Legends canon and Disney canon was not so simple, because the nature of publishing meant that there were novels approved during the time of Legends canon that would be released in the time of Disney canon. In particular, there had been the planned trilogy “Empire and Rebellion”, set between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, with each novel from the perspective of one of The Big Three.

Razor’s Edge (Leia) and Honor Among Thieves (Han) were released prior to the Great Canon Split of 2014. But while the Luke-centric novel had been planned, it was not due to be released until well after the Split. So Heir to the Jedi (so called as an homage to the Legends progenitor Heir to the Empire) became one of the first books of the Disney canon.

What does this background have to do with Nakari Kelen? Perhaps nothing, but I do wonder how the writing process was affected by the shift from Legends to Disney - was the novel a relic of the old EU with any reference the LFL storygroup didn’t like excised during editing, or was it a trendsetter for the new EU, a Sign of Things to Come?

The most salient point being, of course, that Nakari Kelen - like so many love interests before her - was not allowed to go along her merry way at the conclusion of the novel, but was shoved into the fridge.

If there was one constant of the Legends EU, it was that Luke Skywalker’s love interests couldn’t catch a break. Mara Jade naturally lasted the longest relationship-wise, with almost twenty years of marriage to Luke before some bright spark decided she had to go (as per the aforementioned case study). But before Mara there was Jem, Shira Brie, and Gaeriel Captison (who came close to escaping the curse), and in the Legacy of the Force series they brought back sole survivors Akanah and Callista, only to kill them off for good too (and rather brutally, if I may add).

So perhaps when Kevin Hearne began writing HttJ within the confines of the Legends continuity, he was merely sticking to the status quo, or perhaps once subsumed by Disney they needed to make sure Luke's slate was clean (so to speak). And I can’t put all the blame on Hearne since I don’t know whether it was his idea, or LFL mandated - but regardless it was a poor decision.

The root cause of fridging, imo, is limited imagination. How best to cause your male protagonist pain if not kill off someone they love, or at least have strong feelings for? The answer is of course, easily. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Luke Skywalker of HttJ is fresh from his victory in ANH, a lieutenant in the Rebellion: young, not dumb, and full of...

Nakari Kalen is an absolute Queen a civilian volunteer and crack-shot sniper who loans her ship Desert Jewel to the Alliance. Luke is immediately attracted to her, they bond over a mutual love of fast ships and leaving behind desert home planets, and engage in the inexpert flirting of two nineteen year olds while also risking their lives several times over.

I want to make it clear: I actually really like this book. It's a breezy read, almost serialised as The Early Adventures of Luke Skywalker, and is ofttimes genuinely funny. And credit where it’s due to Hearne, many of of the supporting roles in the novel are female. Other than Nakari, there's Soonta, the Rodian who gives Luke her uncle’s lightsaber, Sakhet the Kupohan spy, and the Givin cryptographer/math genius Drusil Bephorin. In a genre where male characters are often the default for these kind of roles, it was nice to see, but makes the regressive fridging of Nakari even more egregious.

Luke and Nakari make a good team fighting brain-sucking monsters and Imperials, but more importantly they have fun together - she encourages him to work on his Force skills, and he successfully moves objects with his mind for the first time (leading to Nakari adorably dub him "a little noddle scooter"). It's a very sweet, if brief, relationship, and a respite from the danger of the mission. They spend the night together (leaving the reader to decide exactly what happened behind closed doors), and share a kiss before splitting up to try and escape bounty hunters. No prizes for guessing what happens to Nakari immediately after she received the Skywalker Kiss of Death.

I assume there were two motivating factors for why Hearne and/or LFL couldn't let Nakari live:

1. If she survived, fans would wonder why she doesn't appear in ESB/subsequent material.

I recall this bandied about on forums back at the time of the book's release, and to that I say - so what? Fans are always going to wonder, and try to paper over the gaps in canon, to make up their own headcanons to explain any any perceived inconsistencies. It's certainly no reason to kill someone off.

It is in fact possible for two young people to have a romance that just fizzles, or doesn’t work out for whatever reason - it should not require great maneuvering or explanation. If Nakari doesn’t show up in the next book in the timeline, what about it? The reader is smart enough to assume she and Luke broke up, decided to just remain friends, whatever. But it seems that the only way for a female character to exit stage left is for her to die, which is bullshit.

And actually, there's no reason why she couldn't have shown up again. ESB and RoTJ cover a month and a few days, respectively, of Luke's life - just because there was no mention of Nakari doesn't mean she didn't exist at that time, whether or not she and Luke were an item. She could have made an appearance in a subsequent novel, or Rebels, or the comics - she could have become a recurring character, showing up when the Rebellion needed her, or - heaven forbid - even have her own comic/book/show! Her existence in Star Wars canon didn't need to begin and end with Luke Skywalker, merely to service his plotline and backstory and abandoning the richness of her own.

No, the only reason Nakari had to die was to facilitate this:

It was a blow to the gut, realizing what that sudden absence meant. I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, but I had felt Nakari's life snuffed out through the Force, and into that void where she had shone anger rushed in - anger, and a cold sense of raw power and invincibility...I took a step to join in the hunt but stopped, breathing heavily, unaccountably sweating even though I felt so cold inside and the power of the Force roiled within me... I shook with emotion and power, and none of it felt the way the Force had before...I saw what kind of space it was , a black hole that would always be hungry no matter how much I fed it. I might never feel warm again if I didn't get myself under control.

Luke feels the dark side and is tempted by the boost of power it offers him, but immediately identifies it as dangerous and unnatural. I can understand why Hearne wanted to include this - it is a book of firsts after all: Luke's first solo mission, his first time using telekenisis, and ending with story with his first experience of the dark side makes sense. But it wasn't necessary, which leads to:

2. How to push Luke to touch the dark side without killing someone he has romantic feelings for?

Also, obviously, shite of the bull (or nerf, if you prefer). Even if this brush with the dark side was absolutely necessary for the novel's climax, there's any number of ways it could be achieved. At this point, Luke is fresh from losing important people in his life - Owen and Beru, Ben, and Biggs - lumping another death on top of that a narrative trick for Luke to react not only to losing Nakari, but the others as well. But it's cheap, the first card in the deck, and why not show a bit of imagination? Luke is young and inexperienced enough at this point that any number of things could be the catalyst - the whole book he's struggling with his growing powers, why not try and reach too far in the firefight with the bounty hunters, his anger and frustration with himself in not doing enough trigger the dark side temptation? It would work thematically and doesn't involve a fridging that ultimately has very little payoff.

Because Nakari is killed less than ten pages from the end of the book - afterwards Luke grieves, but ultimately chooses to honour her memory and be grateful for what he learned with her, recommitting to becoming a Jedi. It's all very surface level, and once again a female character's death facilitates a male character's development. Was it so imperative that Luke lost someone he cared about as part of this story? Sure, this was a time of galactic civil war, and it's far from unrealistic that these stories have a high body count, but who to make collateral damage remains an authorial choice, and in this case Nakari Kelen was (a) a female character of color, (b) a love interest of the protagonist - not just of this book, but the entire Original Trilogy.

I don't know to what extent (if any) race had to play in the decision. I'm sure there was a segment of the fandom absolutely livid that Luke Skywalker kissed (and maybe had sex with) a black woman. Was her death LFL hedging its bets, or demonstrative of the general lack of attention/respect they show their characters of colour?

In any case this was a chance to stand out from the old EU and it's fridge full of Luke's dead girlfriends, but instead they chose to introduce and kill off Nakari for the sole purpose of Luke's manpain and character development, and that's gross.

And then there's this:

A grisly yet reliable fact about custom bounty hunter ships is that you can always count on them to have body bags stashed somewhere for the easy transport of their kills. They often have built-in refrigerated storage, too.

NAKARI IS KILLED AND LITERALLY STORED IN THE FUCKING FRIDGE I COULDN'T BELIEVE WHAT I WAS READING.

I really hope this was unintentional on Hearne's part, because yikes. He was halfway there, this book was full of interesting female characters who had agency - Drusil in particular was a delight with her super math and inability to understand human interaction. Nakari was full of life and fun - capable but relatable, showing a different side of the Rebellion and those that suffered under the Empire's rule. Fridging her in her first appearance is considerably more vile, because it reduces her to a footnote of Luke's story, a plot device to Help Him Grow, rather than a springboard to tell more of her own story.

Because Nakari was a compelling character ripe for spinoff potential. I would absolutely have read or watched her continued adventures, juggling missions for her father's Biolabs company and trying to aid the Rebellion, shooting her slug rifle and cracking wise, maybe even finding a way to amplify her mother's song Vader's Many Prosthetic Parts to really stick it to the Empire, or try and free the political prisoners on Kessel.

The old EU was made great by allies and enemies of Our Heroes showing up again to help or hinder them, and/or branching out into their own material. We fell in love with them, and followed their stories even as they diverged from the main saga, eager to read more about their lives.

Nakari Kelen never got that chance. In many ways, she exemplified what Disney Star Wars was to become: an exercise in wasted potential.

#star wars #star wars meta #heir to the jedi #nakari kelen #luke skywalker #fridging #it's cold in that fridge #star wars expanded universe #nucanon

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charlieconwayy · 4 years ago

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D3: The Mighty Ducks (1996) is the best Ducks movie and a flawless coming of age movie

It’s no secret that The Mighty Ducks are a beloved trilogy. The three films spawned a professional NHL team named in their honor, 2021 sequel series, as well as many knockoff films released in the 1990s. But with any movie series, fans tend to rank the films and have passionate opinions on which is the best. For most Ducks fans, the answer is simple: D2. It has the Bash Brothers, Team USA dominating, the iconic “Ducks Fly Together” scene and two Queen songs. What’s not to love? But upon a rewatch of the trilogy, I came to realize that it’s not D2, or even the original, that is the best in the series.

It’s the criminally underrated 1996 D3 that for me, is the most mature and has the most heart. Perhaps it’s that the Ducks are now old enough to carry their own weight on screen. Perhaps it’s that the film takes a look at trauma, specifically trauma in teenagers, and how that manifests itself. Perhaps it’s that the film is maybe ahead of its time, in the way it discusses classism, racism and sexism. There is so much about this overly hated film that makes it the best Ducks movie and a perfect coming of age film.

The movie starts presumably a few years following the Ducks’ win against Iceland. They all look noticeably older - definitely older than the middle schoolers we left behind in 1994 - and all of the male Ducks’ voices have dropped a few octaves. Gordon Bombay, played by Emilio Estevez, is presenting the team (except for unfortunately, Jesse Hall, a leader among the Ducks who would’ve made for a strong presence in this mature film, as well as Portman, but we’ll get to him later) with scholarships to his alma mater, Eden Hall, a preparatory high school in Minnesota. Charlie Conway, played by a young, pre-Dawson’s Creek Joshua Jackson, is the Ducks’ captain and unspoken leader. There’s been much debate over the years over whether or not Charlie is the true captain of the Ducks. Adam Banks, played by Vincent Larusso, is far and away better than practically every Duck combined. Fulton Reed, played by Elden Henson, has shown more maturity and leadership at this point. It’s probably true that the Ducks as a team think that Charlie is Captain because of Bombay’s favoritism towards him (and his mother), but I think that this film makes it abundantly clear why Charlie is the captain.

D3 is Charlie’s story. We see that in the opening scene, when Bombay tells Charlie he will not be following the team to Eden Hall, accepting a job instead in California. We learned in the original Mighty Ducks film, that Charlie and his mother left a bad situation in Charlie’s father when Charlie was very young. We also hear about Charlie’s mother, Casey’s marriage to a new man in the D2, who we can assume from what Jan says, that Charlie doesn’t like. We see in that first film, Charlie’s reaction to Bombay announcing that he is leaving the Ducks after the two of them have formed a bond. It is very clear that Charlie deals with abandonment issues, stemming from trauma in his early childhood. Charlie freaks out when a D3 Bombay announces the same thing, and storms off.

Change is the biggest theme in D3. We see how change affects each of the Ducks, even those who don’t get many lines. Some, like Russ Tyler, played by SNL’s Kenan Thompson, think it’s a good thing. All of the Ducks don’t come from good neighborhoods and we assume that most of them don’t have the best home lives, especially when Charlie tells their new coach, Orion, played by Jeffrey Nordling, that the Ducks are the only good thing that any of them have had. Going to a preparatory school should be a good thing for them. But for most of them, it’s not. The new Ducks (who by the way, three of which are people of color, and one of which, is a woman) are immediately told that “their kind” is not welcome at Eden Hall. The Varsity team claim that they feel this way because the captain’s younger brother was not admitted onto the JV team because of the Ducks’ scholarships, but it’s very clear what they really mean. Russ commented that he’s the only black person on the whole campus earlier, and he, Luis Mendoza (The Sandlot’s Mike Vitar) and Ken Wu (Justin Wong) are the only people of color we see in the film. Change takes a toll on each member of the team. We see it the most in Charlie, but we also hear from Fulton on how the separation from his best friend, Dean Portman (Aaron Lohr), who decided not to enroll at Eden Hall, is taking a toll on him. Connie (Margerite Moreau) and Guy (Garrette Henson) have presumably broken up, as the two small scenes we get of them, they are arguing. It’s a transition period, one that the first year of high school often is. But it’s also a look on how a rich, white privileged world is vastly different than the one that the Ducks are used to.

Coach Orion seems like a hardass, especially when he tells Charlie at their first practice that he will no longer be “Captain Duck” (as coined by D2’s Gunnar Stahl, played by Scott Whyte, who now plays the level-headed Varsity goalie Scooter). This, to the Ducks, is a line in the sand. Ever since Bombay turned District 5 into the Ducks four years previous, Charlie has been their captain. They’re in a whole new environment, where the man who gave them so much happiness and so many friendships isn’t, and their “little Duck tricks” won’t work anymore. Orion thinks Charlie is a showoff, and perhaps he is. This Charlie is vastly different than the sweet, shy Charlie we see in D1 and D2. But this Charlie is older, has just been abandoned by a man he considered a father, and is being harassed on a daily basis for being, as Varsity Captain Reilly puts it, “white trash.” I find it hard to believe sometimes that fans can look at Charlie from the outside, and not see who he is on the inside. All of Charlie’s closest relationships that we see portrayed in this movie, are with women. His mother (who he, as a teenage boy, says “I love you” to in the final scene of the movie), his teammates, Connie and Julie, who he gets a lot more screentime with, and with new love interest, Linda (Margot Finley).

I think now is a great time to talk about the shockingly impressive way all of the female characters are portrayed in this series, particularly this movie, especially for a 90s sports film. Connie has always been a leader on and off the ice. She’s in a relationship with Guy, but it’s not her only character trait. Dubbed “the Velvet Hammer” by Averman (Matt Doherty), she stands up for herself, and for her shy teammates (she literally shoves Peter Mark - a character cut out of D2 and D3 for good reason - in D1 when he insults Charlie) and stands up to the entire Varsity team despite them telling her that they hope they can “fight” with her later. Julie “The Cat” Gaffney (Columbe Jacobsen) is the second best player on the Ducks, despite the little ice time (thanks, Bombay) we see her have. She is the first person to tell of the Varsity, telling Captain Reilly that his little brother “just wasn’t good enough.” She’s a huge facilitator in the fire ant prank and despite the very weird and out of character game she had against the Blake Bears, shows that she deserves the number one goalie slot that Reilly gives her - despite what Goldberg, and the obvious underlying sexism there, have to say. I’ve also always been very impressed with Charlie’s mother, Casey (Heidi Kling). Although she has a romance with Bombay in D1, she makes it clear from the get go that her first priority is Charlie. We know that she took the two of them away from an abusive situation, and she’s a goddamn hero for that. Her scenes in D3 are limited, but they always show her chastising Charlie’s antics and encouraging him to stay in school. It goes unsaid, but it’s clear that she knows that he’s not going to get an education this good in the problematic public school system. But according to Linda, Charlie’s love interest, the private school system is no better. The first time we see Linda, she is protesting the “outdated” Warriors team name. This was in a 1996 kids movie, no less. She holds her own against Charlie, calling him out when he’s wrong. No one aside from Charlie, and maybe Fulton, get much screentime or lines aside from Bombay and Orion, but her presence and the point of her character is clear - not every rich person agrees with the horrible things that wealthy people do.

Back to the plot.

When the Ducks receive their positions, they learn that Banks, as a freshman, has made Varsity. From an outside perspective, they seems obvious. Banks is the best player we see in any of the films, definitely miles better than the losers on Varsity, so it seems obvious that he would be promoted. But Banks is unhappy with this. Adam Banks is a fan favorite character, definitely due to the sweet, understated performance by Larusso, but we don’t see much of him. From what we do see of him though, he underwent a huge character arc from D1 to now. In D1, Banks goes against his father’s protests and joins the Ducks, claiming that he “just wants to play hockey.” Here in D3, we see that Banks is utterly miserable despite playing with some of the best players in the state, purely because he’s not with his friends. At the end of the film, he makes the (questionable) decision to rejoin the Ducks and go against the Varsity. But Varsity seems to feel that Banks fits in with them, for obvious reasons. He’s the only Duck who comes from an affluent background, and he’s definitely the most clean cut. Captain Reilly is visibly angry in the final showdown with the Ducks that they no longer have Banks on their side, as if he’s betrayed “his kind.”

The turning point of the film comes when after Charlie has quit the freshman team (no longer the Ducks), Hans, a father figure to the Ducks and Bombay, suddenly passes away. It’s an insanely dark moment for a Disney film, especially when Bombay returns to the funeral and reminds the Ducks that it was “Hans who taught them to fly” and Charlie storms off, crying. I think Joshua Jackson, in the Ducks films, as well as in Dawson’s Creek, is phenomenally good at portraying teenagers who wouldn’t normally be seen as leading men. Who let their emotions overtake them, who have anger issues, who deal with familial problems. Characters like that in leading roles were almost unheard of in the 90s, and in the upcoming scenes, it reminds us why this side of Charlie that we’ve seen throughout the movie is not the only side of Charlie.

Bombay takes Charlie to the rink to see Orion skating with his disabled daughter, who was injured in a car accident. He reveals to Charlie that Orion quit the NHL to take care of her, and this immediately changes Charlie’s opinion of him, but he’s still unconvinced about rejoining the team. The next scene is without question, the greatest and most important scene of the trilogy. The last two films spent way too much time telling us how great of a person Bombay was, how he was the Minnesota Miracle Man,despite us seeing so little of that onscreen. We see him making mistake after mistake, hurting the team, being an unjustified dick to those around him. But this scene more than makes up for all of that. I’ve put the quote from this scene below.

Bombay: I was like you, Charlie. When I played hockey, I was a total hot shot. I tried to take control of every game. I wound up quitting. So I tried the law. I ruled the courtroom, but inside, I’m a mess. Start drinking. Man, I was going down. But then this great thing happened, maybe the best thing ever - I got arrested and sentenced to community service. And there you were - Charlie and the Ducks. And as hard as I fought it, there you were. You gave me a life, Charlie, and I want to say thank you. I told Orion about all of this when I talked to him about taking over. I told him that you were the heart of the team and that you would learn something from each other. I told him that you were the real Minnesota Miracle Man.

Charlie: You did?

Bombay: I did. So be that man, Charlie. Be that man.

It’s a callback to D2, when Jan tells Bombay “Be that man, Gordon. Be that man.” This scene is flawless. Every good thing that has happened to the Ducks, came because of Charlie’s heart. It came because of that game when Charlie refused to cheat, and made Bombay see his wrongs. It came because of when Bombay first tried to quit the team, and seeing how hurt Charlie was, agreed to stay. It was Charlie who stepped out of the game against Iceland so that Banks could play. It was Charlie who found them Russ. Giving the credit to a young, emotionally unstable teenager, rather than their Emilio Estevez, hotshot Bombay, is the best thing this series ever did.

This movie, in my opinion, is nearly flawless. Every moment has been planned to make the same point - change sucks. Especially when you’re a teenager. Even more so when you’re a teenager with trauma.

#the mighty ducks #gordon bombay #charlie conway #meta #i'm so proud of this pls read gay people!!!

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