#I LIKE TRAGIC ENDINGS TOO BUT THIS WAS JUST SO UNSATISFYING. AND THE SECOND SEASON TEASER AMOUNTING TO NOTHING

[aroace-poly-show]

wep spoilers and marlo being pissed

girls when they fight and risk their lives protecting other girls (well. mostly. kaoru i miss you) from their traumas in hopes they bring back their dead friends and they go through hell and back and two of them had their fucking magical pets die and they do all that and then they don’t even get their friends back in the end and their current friend group fucking disintegrates. literally what the fuck was that. im still upset.

[herinsectreflection]

I think the most important thing to remember about Faith in S3 is that she is always searching for a narrative role, and always striving towards an impossible one. She starts off wanting to be the Hero, of course. She is the Chosen One, by all rights she should be the Hero. She doesn't realise that she is in Buffy's show, and so she cannot be the Hero. Faith thinks she should be in Faith the Vampire Slayer, but finds out she's not. Buffy's narrative power is greater than hers in this story, Her rightful narrative role is denied her, and that drives so much of her jealousy and resentment.

I believe that she the second narrative role she tries to inhabit is the Love Interest. She positions herself as Buffy's love interest and performs that role in early S3. Yet that is an impossibility too - partially because Buffy's trauma over her last Love Interest prevents her from committing to another, and also on a meta level, the author cannot abide a queer Love Interest for the main character, and so she is forced into the margins and into subtext. And then of course, last season's Love Interest returns, and forces her out of that role, again

When the incident with the Deputy Mayor happens, Faith has no narrative role left to turn to. She attempted to be the Love Interest in Bad Girls and that ended in tragedy. She cannot be the Hero either, because now she has killed; she is tainted. And so she becomes the Villain. She cannot be Buffy so she positions herself as the anti-Buffy. And there to encourage this, without meaning to, is Angel - the previous season's Big Bad. He tells her she is just like him, and so she becomes him, taking on his old mantle as Villain. She throws herself into the role because the other options in the narrative have been denied her.

In a perverse way, this is actually what allows her to perform the other narrative roles. Angel was both Love Interest and Villain in S2, and so by becoming the Villain, she is able to be both too. She recreates his role from S2, including being kissed and killed by Buffy in the finale. (I find Faith's comment in Consequences just before he turn about how she "bets [Buffy] even dug [Angel] when he went psycho" very interesting through this lens). And her descent into villainy also gives her new opportunity to perform the Hero role. She gets a paternal relationship with a Mentor figure, she gets to be the centre of attention in his world. She even kind of saves the day with her "human weakness" advice. She gets to be the Hero and the Love Interest, but because of her choices it's in the most tragic and unsatisfying ways.

[activatejaydenmode]

The Owl House X Detroit Become Human Preliminary Ideas

(Some spoilers for Season 2 Episode 16 will be discussed here - oh and of course Owl House and Detroit Become Human)

Uhh yeah hello again! Realised I never actually posted about details for my ideas about the TOH x DBH AU, so I’mma just jot down some details right now. Remember, ALL of these ideas are very rough and subject to change! But anyways:

Why do I want to write this AU? 

Because I can! I’ll admit I’m not too involved into DBH at all (preface: I have not done any in-depth background research into DBH lore), but I definitely have followed the story and, after the latest episode, I can see way too many similarities between elements of that and TOH, specifically in relation to our favourite bad but sad boy...

which I’ll get to later :p But next up!

Story & Setting? 

NOT just the DBH story but rehashed with TOH characters. Maybe similar themes and structure, but not exactly the same. Cus’ I’m still a developing writer, I wanted to approach this with a series of one-shots set in the same universe of DBH (the ‘good’ ending timeline), but after the events of the game and maybe an entirely different country. I actually think it would be really interesting to explore how the world reacted to the deviant movement and everything, and especially how laws and public opinion would develop, especially overseas. Perhaps we can kick this off with...

My name is Hunter. I’m the android set by Blight Industries.

Yep! The new ep and Hunter’s tragic backstory inspired me with the ideas of this AU! Like c’mon an artificial being destroyed over and over again for the purpose of achieving the end of a people? It’s like Connor and Hunter are alternate counterparts! 

(I guess that’s the idea of an A U hehe)

...But wait a minute, Blight Industries? Isn’t it meant to be...

CyberLife? I’mma go ahead and say yes and no, for now. This is still an idea I wanna work out (especially if I take this story to another country where androids may or may not exist) but my current idea is this: 

‘Belos’ is a major stakeholder into Blight Industries, a manufacturer of industrial robotics that may be taking a foray into androids. As part of this expansion, Belos commissions an android, BL-93ZR, to work with the local police department to investigate into the CyberLife androids that have gone ‘deviant’ over the last few months, in order to prevent against it when they start their own line of androids (which he may or may not be supportive of...). He names this android ‘Hunter’ and sends it out into the world, being assigned to a certain young hotshot that makes the mission slightly more complicated...

Enter Luz Noceda!

Aged in her 20s in this timeline, Luz is an up-and-coming police officer rising the ranks, working under the stern chief but cool aunt Lilith Clawthorne. Having heard about the deviant cause in Detroit and fully supporting them as a new form of intelligent life, it sometimes interferes with her line of work and her relationship with her co-workers (cough cough Boscha???). But once she is assigned an android of her own, an android that calls itself ‘Hunter’, designed to hunt down deviancy, she will start to question if they are merely machines designed to accomplish a task after all...

Other ideas?

Amity Blight - Unsatisfied with their own twins, Odalia and Alador Blight set out to not just obtain an android of their own, but create one. BL-88MW is Blight Industries’ first attempt at an android, which, in the mind of the Blight parents, is the perfect model of a daughter. They call her ‘Amity’ and use her to promote their challenge to the android market. But little do they know of her undesired ‘quirks’, nor her tendency to sneak out of the manor adorning purple hair instead of blonde. And they definitely don’t know of her secret job at the local library where she meets a suspiciously cute police officer...

Edalyn Clawthorne - The cool second mom to Luz! A chemist, cook, antique’s collector and more all in one! Maybe she did encourage Luz to be an officer just so she can get licences and approvals more easily, but it’s no issue for Luz! She’s happy to keep Eda in line just to make sure she’s not arrested :p

Willow and Gus - Luz’s long-time friends from high school! Willow? Botanic genius and roller derby heavy-hitter! Gus? Journalist, skateboarder, a love of all things that go fast!

Vee? Cabin 7? Gravesfield human realm characters? Everyone else? - They’ll be around! Vee as Luz’s younger/adopted sister, plus some old acquaintances from Connecticut like the Cabin 7 gang and the blonde cheerleader. Everyone else in the demon realm will also make an appearance one way or another!

Cars - ...huh how did that get he-

CARS OF TOH X DBH

LUZ: MAZDA RX-7 SA22

EDA: PEUGEOT 505 TURBO

GUS: NISSAN PULSAR GTi-R

EDRIC: NISSAN 300ZX

EMIRA: MITSUBISHI LANCER EVO VI

VINEY: HONDA INTEGRA TYPE R DC2

SKARA: ALFA ROMEO 147 GTA

RAINE: MORRIS MINI COOPER S

ALADOR: AUDI-

...

...

I am so sorry about that. I think I left that in the list and then I saw it and my automotive-hyperfixations kicked in and added an entire section that was not meant to be there and-

Sorry.

But... I guess on the topic of cars, y-yeah I will be featuring a few real-life ones. Just a few though, since this is the future and most of the cars in the DBH universe are autonomous. It’s definitely not a definitive list, but I mean- I can’t pass up the opportunity, can I?

Anyways I think that’s everything for now! Keep checking this blog for any updates and progress I make!

And for those curious, I do already have a human TOH AU in the works! Racing Into The Boling Night is set within a human world version of the Boiling Isles that Luz travels to on high school exchange! It’s going to be lots of slice of life fun, but also... a little bit of street racing shenanigans :D

I KNOW I KNOW IT’S DUMB BUT I AM JUST LIKE THAT ABOUT CARS AND MOTORSPORTS, AND I PROMISE PART 2 (I’m writing part 1) WILL HAVE SLICE OF LIFE FLUFF AND GAY, SO I’M SORRY FOR BEING ME.

So plz check that out if you’re interested, and you might even see where I get some of the ideas for the TOH x DBH AU (providing I write it), including the cars ^-^

(also this isn’t proofread so sometimes I might say wrong things, so plz let me know too)

[radiosandrecordings]

So, hot take, but I 100% believe that, by the end of TMA, the world will have been returned to close to normal. The world overall will have a happy ending. This does not mean the show won’t be tragic. It will be tragic, there is no way of denying that, but ‘tragedy’ doesn’t equate to ‘grimdark everything is ruined forever’. 

And the reason I think this is Melanie King. Not because she’ll do anything in particular to save it. She might do. She might not. I have the feeling that Georgie at least will play a big part in saving the world, but their future actions within the show don’t actually matter here. What matters is what has happened before. Which is that Melanie King has experienced her character arc. She was introduced to the story, she suffered, and she escaped. She, through her own hard work, earned her happy ending. She sacrificed her sight to free herself of the Beholding, and she got to move on and have the rest of her life with her girlfriend. 

Having the world stay in a state of constant terror would destroy everything Melanie worked for. It would just be entirely unsatisfying. Her entire arc was about recovery, about not letting her anger get the better of her, and how she went to therapy and got help and built a support system in Georgie. And what would a world of terror being her ending say to that? That that is worth nothing?That pursuit of recovery is futile in the face of all the fear in the world?

That’s just a horrible message to put in your story, and one I can guarantee Jonny would never give us. 

Linking from there, my second point is something the man himself said. In a twitch stream of Bloodborne, he at one stage said that he was going to skip a side quest because it was too sad. As far as I remember (The VOD is no longer available to check), his words were something along the lines of ‘It’s not a good tragedy story because there is no catharsis at the end’, and that the story was just sad and dark for the sake of it. That majorly helped to solidify my opinions of TMA and how it’s metaplot will go. There needs to be something at the end to have made the journey worth it. It will be tragic, because TMA is a tragedy, and it will be horrifying, because TMA is a horror, but it will also have that catharsis.

I, personally, believe Jon and Martin won’t survive the series. It’s almost certain Jon will die, and while I’m less sure of Martin (Mostly because he already had an arc about suicidal self-sacrifice), Helen’s comment about Martin not wanting to go through her tunnels without Jon and the general nature of the characters leads me to believe that one would not want to live without the other at this point. 

It would also be remiss not to mention the Mechanisms, because while I am incredibly in the ‘It’s not just Jonny’s band, please pay attention to the other people’ camp, he did write a large amount of it and I feel like the pattern there will probably influence TMA. Mechs endings are all bittersweet, but they do also end with the main couple (or trio) getting to be together, and the goal being accomplished. Loki and Sigyn literally get the line ‘At least they can die together’ as they sacrifice themselves to keep New Midguard safe (Not that that lasts forever, but honestly, it’s an hour long concept album, not a 200 episode podcast, the standards aren’t exactly 1:1). There again is that catharsis to them, OUATIS ends the war, UDAD Ulysses gets to die undisturbed by the Acheron, and in HNOC the world is too corrupt to continue so Mordred burns it. In TMA the world isn’t that corrupt though. It’s been shown time and time again that empathy and love and care for each other exists in the world and it’s the antidote to all the fear. Countless people, including Martin, are saved from the Lonely by love. Jon saved Daisy from the Buried because he wouldn’t let someone suffer like that. Even Agnes, someone raised from birth to be a messiah of the Desolation, doubted. She saw the good in humanity and she died because of it, because she’d been allowed to see the good side of living. It’s something worth not destroying, even when her most basic reason for existing was to destroy anything anyone else held dear.

And to top it all off, even without the type of story TMA is, or may be, not matter what character arcs are happening, no matter what the author has previously been involved in the writing of, from a story structure perspective, having the world stay dead would just… Be bad? Narratively? The three act structure of storytelling has, obviously, three acts. ‘Set up’, ‘Confrontation’ and ‘Resolution’. TMA, being something so incredibly long, doesn’t exactly conform to this, but it can be used loosely as a base. I would call S1 set up, S2-4 confrontation, with the season 4 finale as the obvious climax, and S5 the resolution. The world has gone to literal hell already, the stakes can’t be raised from here, so the threat level, which has been steadily rising and peaked in 160, can only go down from here. We need the resolution. All of season 5, imo, would feel like a waste if they got to the end and just. Jon died and the world continued to be hell done the end go home that’s the resolution to a five year story. That’s like if season 4 ended with Martin saying ‘I should stay in the Lonely’ and Jon going ‘Okay sure’ and leaving him there. We’d been building up to Martin rejecting the Lonely and him and Jon Seeing each other all season! What a failure of a story that would seem to just leave us there! And I feel like S5 ending with everything awful would undermine the entire story so far. TMA to me is a story about the effort it takes to be a good person despite situations you might have been put in, and an ending like that would fly in the face of all the themes we’ve seen so far. 

So overall, I think a term I like for the ending is bittersweet. It will be tragic and it will have hope in it. People will die, and people will live, and life will go on where it can. TMA has never shied away from the real world implications behind it’s story, season 5’s statements especially. It is aware of the story it’s telling and it’s going to be one that, I hope at least, will not leave listeners with a bad taste in their mouth, but instead tears in their eyes and the knowledge that the story of terror was worth something in the end.

[avocado-hater]

My thoughts on AHS Double Feature E6 (Spoilers)

People in this town are insane as f.

GO COACH BESTIE!

I hate that i'm not american because all the characters this season only speak in pop culture references and methafors. I can't understand half the things Holden is saying.

Oh Harry, you're such a kind soul... i mean maybe, i think you lost your soul a few days ago when you treated your wife like trash.

I'm finally getting to understand Harry. He's just stupid and reckless.

"He wasn't bad, it was the pill!" "It was Doris fault, she wasn't talented" "He never meant to hurt people, you just don't understand how awful it is to not being able to use your full potential" I can see it coming. I get it tho, he's a DILF.

Alma calling Ursula a chicken bitch and Harry not reacting at all is just lovely. Great parenting skills.

Are the pale creatures eating Ursula? I don't think so.

That baby would be better in Belle's belly than under Harry's supervision.

Was this untalented/talented fight really necesary?

Leslie looking hot with that gun.

I KNEW THAT THE CHEMIST WOULD END UP TEAMING WITH URSULA!

Bye bye, Harry. You should've seen it coming.

Oh so now The Chemist and Ursula are fruity and they're raising the little devils together. This is gonna end well.

The characters evolution/development this season is awful.

The hustler joke wasn't funny, it was upsetting. Alma is a child.

Prodigy kid count your days.

That was some hell of a rushed ending. Very unsatisfying.

My thoughts on AHS Double Feature: Red Tide.

This is the first season i've watched weekly since Cult and it was kinda cool watching it that way. I was really excited about this season because of the cast and because everyone said it was very dark and very well written, well, i don't know about that.

Red Tide strong points were the score, cinematography, the aesthetic and the cast, it had some cool "social messages" and in some ways it felt really personal, it was upsetting and dark at times and i liked it, but the writing was not out of this world, most of the characters were annoying and awfully developed. It was very predictable and rushed and no, don't blame it on the number of episodes, i've watched limited series with 5 or 6 episodes and some of them are masterpieces. But it had its moments. it had a great premiere and episode 5 is in my top 5 of the best episodes in the AHS universe. I liked the tension at times, but it was messy and overwelming in a bad way.

Frances Conroy, Sarah Paulson, Lily Rabe and Evan Peters were the highlighst of the first half. Even tho Belle and Austin were villains, it wasn't hard for us to root for them, they were both very interesting and compelling and yeah, Evan might be playing the hot weird guy again but he does it so well and i kinda missed his particular voice. Same with Frances, the way she delivered her lines and how she made us empathize with Sarah was awesome.

We can't say a bad thing about Sarah Paulson's performance, plus she was playing Linda Tripp at the same time, no one is doing it like her, and Lily? She should be doing Oscar winning stuffs, the way she made us empathize with Doris in episode 5 only proves how much she loves what she does and how good she is at it, Doris might not be talented but Lily sure is.

Doris fate was one of the highlights of this half too, same with TB Karen's. The whole thing was very tragic and memorable and i really liked that.

I'm sure Sarah Paulson will be nominated twice next year (Lead actress (Linda) and supporting actress (Karen)) and i fear for Frances and Lily because they really deserve some awards, but horror is underrated and with the amoung of upcoming limited series this year, i don't see it happening anytime soon.

Finn Wittrock did really good as the lead and Leslie Grossman did great too but i'm kinda tired of her playing the same annoying bitchy character over and over again and i know it's not her fault. Lily and Finn have zero romantic chemistry, they could play friends or enemies or siblings but they aren't believable as a longtime married couple, mostly because Finn looks like he's on his late 20s.

Macaulay Culkin and Ryan K.A were amazing additions to the cast and i hope they come back for another season and i hope they play very different characters from the ones they got to play this season.

I don't have a lot to say about Billie, Adina and Angelica. Adina was doing great as always but they killed her off in episode 3 and i was expecting The Chemist to be darker and a more complex character.

I like upsetting, disturbing endings but i never got to connect with The Chemist or Ursula and it felt too rushed and even predictable. Cheesy at times, messy, kinda silly and where is the major plot twist? A very Murphy ending.

If you were expecting a redemption arc or justice at the end, i think you didn't understand this season.

I don't have high hopes on the second half but we'll see, right? I'm excited about Sarah and Lily playing historical figures tho.

[cryptidjeepers]

Stranger things deaths prediction:

-brenner, vecna, rest of the bad guys (Good Ending)

-eleven along with the bad guys (Really Bad Ending, seriously dont get how people think she should die at the end when she hasnt had a moment of catharsis or normality. It would feel like a slap in the face)

-one of the kids (Absolutely Hearthbreaking Ending. Dustin is shaping up to be the possible death since lucas and max had a whole think in vol 1 i dont think they'll get killed off. Mike and will have had nothing going on so it would feel weird for them to throw them into a bunch of plot development and immediately kill one of them. Plus will is in the same corner as el where neither have had a moments respite and it was feel unsatisfying for the narrative).

-one of the new cast (Sad but Unsurprising Ending. Eddie, the enzo guy. Maybe even jason. The duffers have a habit of only killing new characters to the season (sans Billy but it was still only his second season))

-one of more of the teenagers (Tragic Ending. steve, nancy, jonathan. I think Robin is safe (gay). Personally, steve is the glue that makes a lot of other characters work so it would be kind weird for them to kill him off and render most of their strongest dynamics obsolete. But killing him would aggect virtually every Hawkins character and create Big Dramatic moment so Steve is not safe. I also can't see them killing off nancy before she sees mike again but that tvspot of her going after vecna alone has me worried. Jonathan is pretty much fair game. The section makes me the most nervous)

-one of the adults (Meh Ending. joyce, karen, hopper, one of the other parents, murray. Hopper and joyce are probably safe since they already had that big dramatic moment last season. Murray, it's not looking too good, bud. Also the scene in the og trailer of holly and karen 🤔🤔🤔)

-a combination of some of these (Bloodbath Ending).

-all of the above (Season 5 is just their ghosts solving mysteries Ending)

[prairiedust]

Purgatory Revisited Part One

We’re going to Wally World!!!! I’m laughing so hard like going after a leviathan blossom lolololkhfhfdshfkh;aharihfndwhat the ever lovin hell with this show does it come with a ramekin of Blossom Sauce TM?

So back to Purgatory. This is fine.

no it’s not fine asdfh;jkhgifgrhhg so the reason I’m keysmashing is this: I have wanted another “descent into the underworld” plotline (plot, not incidence) since Cas made his deal with the Empty, because that is just a truckload of unfinished business. And I thought that we’d gotten “all” of the underworld allusion in The Rupture and Golden Time, and that the next textual underworld journey we could expect would have something to do with the Empty! (Although it really is starting to feel like that has been dropped completely, esp in light of the Shadow and Billie both waking up Jack and appearing to be allies. Unless that is another “gotcha” waiting to hatch unexpectedly...) So circling back around to Purgatory when there’s other loose ends to tie up is a surprise.

When I think about it, Sam’s underworld journey was allegorically bringing back Eileen, Cas’ would (supposedly) be settling his score with the Shadow, and so Purgatory 2: Return to Purgatory would be Dean’s. But Cas is allegedly coming with Dean… this is interesting. Hey look, kids, there’s Big Ben, and there’s Parliament, and there’s Big Ben, and there’s Parliament!

Why am I excited about a “descent into the underworld”? Why, when our heroes jump back and forth between different realms like they’re walking in a park? Why was I not yelling about this when Castiel and Jack jumped into the Hellmouth? (psst it was partly because he was going with someone else, yet here we are.) And how many times have our heroes been dead? I mean, Dean was dead just as recently as Advanced Thanatology! And all three of them just now held onto a magic bowl and were Bedknobs and Broomsticked into Hell in the midseason finale, it wasn’t even that hard??? What’s the big deal and why is Purgatory 2: Return to Purgatory any different than any other trip to one of Spn’s many otherworlds?

This is the first of at least two, and possibly three, and four is not entirely out of the question, hot-mess posts over the course of the hiatus and is just over 4k. I’ve rewritten this so many times and I still don’t know what the point of posting it would be, but here, try to enjoy some rambling about mythology and heroes’ descents into the underworld.

Many mythologies and works of literature have stories about descents into the underworld. The descent of a hero into the underworld is called “katabasis.” Actually almost any descent into the underground in myth and literature is called a katabasis/catabasis, but I’m talking about a typical “hero goes to hell” kind of story. In Greek mythology, Hercules goes to the underworld to complete one of his twelve labors-- as his final task he has to capture Cerberus, the guardian of the gates to the underworld, so down he goes, has some adventures in the netherworld-- and as half-divine, he gets back out-- and then goes back down to give Cerberus back to Hades, and gets back from his second journey okay too. Odin journeys to Hel in order to find out what happened to his son Baldur, who it turns out was in Hel. The Japanese god Izanagi journeys to Yomi, the underworld, to try to get his wife Izanami back (but similar to other legends about otherworlds and underworlds, Izanami has consumed food and can never leave.) In literature, Dante Alighieri wrote one of the alleged masterworks of Western literature about an imaginary descent into Christian Hell in The Inferno, where Dante and Virgil descend into the famous nine circles and he basically spills the tea on most of his contemporaries and passive-aggressively doles out everyone’s just desserts and then witnesses the morningstar’s icy torment, and climbs back out through the center of the Earth and out Mount Purgatory. In Michael Chricton’s Jurassic Park-- just kidding. Ha ha no, I’m not. There’s a powerful catabasis at the end of that book that leads to a revelation about the dinosaurs. Think about how many movies and books there are that feature a descent underground, a descent into a netherworld, or even just a trip to an otherworld. Tom Sawyer. Hellboy. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Empire Strikes Back. The Last Jedi. It’s a powerful tale type. 

So @drsilverfish and I have talked a bit about one of the most famous “descent into the underworld” stories, Orpheus and Eurydice, as it features in season 15. Orpheus and Eurydice were deeply in love-- however, on their wedding day, Eurydice was bitten by a viper and died. Orpheus, the most skilled poet and musician in the world, was unable to go on without her, and played a song so sad that every creature in the cosmos wept with him and eventually he journeyed to Hades’ kingdom in order to plead to Hades for Eurydice’s return. Orpheus sang so compellingly that Persephone, Hades’ part-time wife (herself able to move between these two worlds on a technicality,) was moved to tears and convinced Hades to let Eurydice and Orpheus go. However, Hades has one requirement: Orpheus is NOT to turn around to see Eurydice’s shade until the sunlight touches her. We all know, however, that as soon as the sun touched him he turned around. It was too soon, Eurydice had not crossed into the upper world, and she disappeared back into the underworld forever.

Stories about descents or attempted descents into the underworld often ask us to reflect on the cyclical nature of time, as in the story of Persephone, loss as in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the finality and inevitability of death, as in the Epic of Gilgamesh, or themes of vulnerability, justice, and cosmic/karmic balance as feature in both the story of Inanna and the sister-stories of Odysseus and Aeneid. Supernatural has dealt with those themes, as well.

What makes descents into the underworld different from other journey-into-otherworld stories is that usually there is no way out of the land of the dead, and the ability of our hero or heroine to cross that boundary both ways sets them apart as truly exceptional. So there is also an element of liminality to descent stories-- while not necessarily liminal places in and of themselves, there is usually a border, gate, doorway, wall, or membrane of some sort that has to be navigated, and these gates are supposed to only work one way-- into the netherworld. Yet our heroes cross and sometimes re-cross. But we already know that about Sam and Dean and Cas, they’ve died multiple times, came right back, visited Hell, came right back, went to Purgatory, made it back, so what’s my deal?...

Well, getting into this allusion, tne thing that makes the story of Orpheus so unsatisfying is because the contract of the story is not fulfilled, the thing we’re rooting for does not happen-- in many descent into the underworld stories, the hero takes on the journey voluntarily, has an objective, and ascends successfully with that objective or having fulfilled it (this is a tentative thesis afaik, because other stories are considered to be katabasis stories that don’t necessarily fit these requirements. But for Spn, this seems to be what is coming up based on the template from The Rupture, Last Call, and especially Golden Time. And I really wanted to find something to back this up but goddamn is the internet (and even databases like JSTOR) a freaking mess nowadays.) 

Golden Hour was a clear allusion-- almost a retelling-- of the Orpheus and Eurydice story. There was the “descent” into the land of the dead-- Rowena’s hexed apartment-- and then the only living person who could enter it without dying was Sam, marking him as exceptional. Therein he found a spell, authored by someone who has become the queen of the dead, to bring Eileen back to life. While doing the spell, he kept his back to her during her journey back to life-- on the surface level reading, it was (maybe!) because he knew her ghost-clothes wouldn’t come back with her, but on the allegorical level it was because Sam, as Orpheus, passed the test and didn’t look back until he knew that the sun shone on her. When an underworld quest fails, it is often because there is some lesson that the hero has to learn about death and life and grief; the lesson for Orpheus is that of the peril of thresholds, the permanence of loss, and patience-- those are not lessons that Sam necessarily needs to learn.

In the allusion we got to the Orpheus and Eurydice story, we also got a terrible wrong righted-- as it was unjust that Eurydice died on her wedding day and it wasn’t fair that Orpheus didn’t follow the rules, Eileen had been dragged off to Hell when the Hellhound killed her, and by Chuck’s rules could not get into Heaven, and so bringing her back into the “sunlit lands” was a rectification of that injustice. In the myth, when Orpheus loses Eurydice at the end, it’s just so goddamn sad, and is an unfulfilled expectation. Glynn fixed that. 

Golden Time was a beautiful subversion of a famously tragic ending. There are some ways in which subversion of stories are fulfilling-- when Glynn altered and subverted the Orpheus and Eurydice trope, it satisfied a lot of viewers and gave the myth a happier ending. But sometimes, subversion of a story just leaves us wanting…

I thought fleetingly that the Orpheus trope might apply to Cas in the Empty in season 13, but again it didn’t fit well, and ultimately he wasn’t rescued from the Empty like Eurydice from the underworld. Man did I want that, though, I really wanted someone to fight for Cas to get back. What we got was terrific, for a variety of reasons. Cas’ “perma-death” and The Empty plotline was a partial Gilgamesh and Enkidu reference from The Epic of Gilgamesh for Dean’s side of the story, if you squint-- Gilgamesh’s best most perfect companion Enkidu (a wild man who was literally made by the gods specifically to be his partner in adventure, which has interesting connotations for deancas subtext in light of how heavy a hand Chuck has had in the Winchesters’ lives) dies, and Gilgamesh prays to the gods to allow him to join Enkidu in the afterlife. In season 13 we get Dean praying for Castiel’s return, as opposed to an underworld reunion, but God does not grant his prayer; Dean then actually kills himself in Advanced Thanatology but is sent back by Billie. This is a bit like the Gilgamesh and Enkidu story, but ultimately the allusion was subverted in that Castiel gets to fight his own way back to the sunlit world-- he becomes a partial underworld hero in his own right, which was a fantastic arc for him (this trip to the Empty doesn’t completely “fit the bill” because Castiel was killed, he didn’t mean to go there, and he did not necessarily have an objective, although he discovered his will to return to the sunlit lands.) There was further obfuscation because Mary was missing in the AU at the same time, so it wasn’t “pure.”

Another reason why Gilgamesh and Enkidu only worked to a certain extent was because on Castiel’s side, his “journey to the underworld” can be likened more to that of Inanna, the widely worshipped Mesopotamian goddess. Inanna desired to visit her sister Erishkegal, who was queen of the dead, but her sister was not happy to see her, and made Inanna remove an article of clothing at each of the seven gates of the underworld until she was naked (and symbolically humbled,) but nonetheless Inanna dared to sit on her sister’s throne; the seven judges of the afterlife saw this and killed her for it. Her devoted servant Ninshubur in the upper realm prayed to Enki, Inanna’s father, who created two beings who could rescue her from the underworld and bring her back to life-- however, Inanna is hounded after this by the demons of the underworld because the cosmos is unbalanced by her rescue, and someone must take her place in the underworld. Themes from this, if not a well-fitting allusion, at least crop up in both Cas’ meeting with the Empty Shadow, who humbles him over the course of their interlocution and then bizarrely gives him new clothes, hello subverted motif, while they are in a necropolis of sorts where Castiel’s brothers and sisters lay sleeping, and in the way in which Inanna can be conceptualized as a “sleeping beauty” while a corpse in the underworld, much like Cas had to be awakened from an eternal slumber, and then later on we see the theme of cosmic imbalance needing to be restored in the deal he makes with the Shadow to trade his life for Jack’s in Byzantium, which is still a swinging pendulum of doom.

I side-eyed Cas’ and Belphegor’s free-fall into Hell, but they were journeying together, and there are not a lot of mythological katabases (that I could find) that feature two or more journeyers. When you get into the realm of literature-- and we are dealing with the concept of the “written word” there are too many to deal with-- it’s almost everyone’s favorite trope, you can even argue that there is an underworld episode in Sean of the Dead-- so I’m keeping the focus narrow.

I’m also basing all of this on the pattern we’ve seen in-universe. We can see that Sam and Eileen have been heavily paralleled to Dean and Castiel in Our Father-- where Sam and Eileen have long and soulful conversations with just their eyes, Dean and Cas can hardly look at each other, and where Sam and Eileen have held hands, there was a big glowy gap between Dean’s hand and Cas’ when Cas healed Dean. So taking Sam’s underworld adventure (that he made with Eileen) as a template for Dean’s (who is going with Castiel) is fair. But, then again, the next episode is called The Trap....

Going back to what I’ve said about each “hero” in TFW getting a katabasis, setting Purgatory 2 aside as “Dean’s” descent story satisfies most of the criteria for a full-blown Descent into the Underworld: 

On Dean’s part, finding out that Chuck has been yanking them around their whole lives has robbed him of his worldview as an epic hero-- if nothing he’s ever done is real, the only thing that set him apart as exceptional was Chuck’s obsession with him, which has been called “pervy.” Pervy has a sexual connotation, true, but in the purest sense means turned away from the natural course. Dean’s descents into the underworld have not been “natural,” they have not always followed the outline of “voluntary descent, attainment of objective, and ascent out of the underworld.”  They’ve been engineered. His first encounter with the underworld almost-but-not-quite fits the catabasis requirements-- it was done only reluctantly (yes, he made the crossroads deal but in the end he very much did not want to go;) he digs his way out of the grave, which is a very powerful “ascent” image, but he also had no goal in the underworld; he was not going to receive enlightenment, visit an old pal, or retrieve an item or person or whatever. In fact, he experienced possibly his most catastrophic failure there by breaking, torturing damned souls, and starting the first Apocalypse. His second descent, into Purgatory, was also involuntary, as he was yanked into it by the vacuum created when he and Castiel ganked Dick, recognized an objective only once he was in Purgatory; in contrast to his rescue from Hell he does fight his way out of this underworld and achieves “anabasis,” or heroic ascent into the upper world, but the other two criteria were not met. After Metatron killed him, he became a demon, an underworld being, and so was not a “hero” if and when he visited Hell (and all signs indicate he spent his demon days topside iirc.) In Advanced Thanatology, he undertakes a voluntary journey into death order to stop the evil ghost in the haunted house, but ends up in Death’s Library, which is an otherworld or at least only underworld-adjacent, and he is sent back up by Billie possibly against his wishes, hence no heroic ascent, even though this does deal with the themes of cosmic balance and righting injustices (sending the trapped souls to their true afterlife, for instance, and stopping the implosion of the universe, for another.)

Finding out that some or all of the “big��� events of his life were actually orchestrated by Chuck has stolen Dean’s identity. Last Call went a good way to restoring his faith in himself, but he definitely has reconceptualized Dean Winchester as someone who “looks after the little guys,” not a hero involved in epic stories of good and evil and right and wrong where the fate of the world is on the line. Which is fine, but we need our epic hero back in order to defeat Chuck. Purgatory 2, should it prove to not be another one of Chuck’s plots, will go far as an underworld descent that Dean undertakes more-or-less voluntarily, which has an objective (retrieve the Leviathan Blossom,) and it is presumed he will return under his own steam back through Michael’s Gate. (We know it will not be that easy, but that’s the template.)

We assume he’s not going alone. Catabasis usually involves a separation/individuation of some sort. In the story of Inanna, she leaves behind her companion Ninshubur, who waits in the upper realm for three days before mounting a rescue. In the stories of Odysseus and Aeneas, they leave their crew and their new city respectively, and after going to the underworld they each meet different shades who also have differing values to bring to the theme of separation. Gilgamesh and Enkidu are separated by death and deliberately kept apart by the gods. Izanagi seeks a reunion with his wife. In Orpheus and Eurydice, well, separation is the overarching theme of the story. So, other underworld stories that we might see referenced this time are the twin journeys of Odysseus and Aeneas, since we have two characters going to Purgatory. Odysseus goes to Hades’ realm, and encounters three shades, (one of whom is a fallen comrade, echoes of Benny LaFitte) and receives prophecy about what he would be in for during the rest of his travels. In the Roman sister-story (fanfic rewrite) to the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Aeneas also visits the underworld with the sybil, meets some ghosts, and receives prophecy about the future of Rome. (And BY THE WAY who in this show just appeared in an underworld and believes in prophecy and just told Dean and Cas to fix their “tiff” right before they were sent to Purgatory...) 

In Purgatory 1, separation was also a big deal, as Cas wanders off to have adventures in the woods while Dean and his underworld companion search for him, and then Cas ultimately decides to stay, making his separation from Dean almost permanent. In each of the Winchester’s deaths, we have separation of brothers. In a tiny little in-universe reference, the Winchesters found the Seal of Solomon, or the key to the AU, in an episode that featured lovers/mates separated by a rift, that had a tiny little “descent into the underworld” shot of Dean going into the RI Chapterhouse.

But interestingly, we *just* got a subverted Orpheus and Eurydice story, where all three bells were rung, and wherein in the “lovers” were allowed to remain together. Additionally, in Our Father Who Aren’t in Heaven we see two entities-- Adam and Michael-- remain together after ascending from the underworld, although both are now free to go about their separate ways, which is very different from what we were expecting. BUT in the main arc, Dean and Sam have just been separated by Chuck’s trap. It’s all very... interesting.

So now I have to decide. Do I see Dean and Cas’ journey to Purgatory as a descent into the underworld, or as the retelling of an in-universe myth? Or as both? Or will it be something completely novel? That partly depends on how Purgatory works in the upcoming half of the season, and I’ll be talking about Purgatory as a possible liminal setting in another post. Right now it’s not necessarily shaping up to be one, but there are hints...

Since there is a strong possibility that this will be a retelling of old Supernatural story, much like Last Call can be seen as a retelling of Nihilism, the idea of retelling and revising stories is an even larger theme this season than last-- an “anabasis,” or rising emphasis, so much so that it has in part become text. We can say, maybe, that Purgatory 1 and all of it’s baggage is now myth, and hope that what we’re getting is “new story.” If we get Purgatory 2 as a retelling of that myth, though, we might hope for new character development or a different outcome, the way Last Call retold the story of Nihilism with different themes and devices.

My last thought about descent stories is that, well, there are more than a few that feature romantic partners. These stories almost always involve those three criteria and the theme of separation that I set up as expectations: the lovers are separated by death or abduction, the mission is undertaken voluntarily-- the hero is going to find their lover in the afterlife-- there is an objective-- find the dead person!-- and there is a successful ascent-- at least by the hero-- to the upper world. I already mentioned the stories of Izanagi and Orpheus, both of which feature lovers separated by death, a journey to the underworld in hopes of reuniting with them, and a “successful” return to the sunlit lands (in that our heroes themselves return, at least.) The Shasta people of the Pacific Northwest have a story of a pair of woodpeckers; the wife falls into their fire and dies, so her husband chases her spirit into the afterlife (where she is incarnated as a human being) and to join her he has to go back to his abode and die himself in order to be reborn also as a human. Ninshubur may have been described at times as one of Inanna’s lovers, and to a modern reader the subtext is definitely there, as it is between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. That’s not to say there are a majority of underworld stories that are romantic, because I can’t possibly read them all, but it is a notable trend, and one almost explicitly evoked in-show. I’ve tried to stay away from deancas subtext lately because I personally am not an endgame-positive viewer, but is there something romantic about Dean and Castiel going to the underworld together? There certainly seemed to be in Purgatory 1: Journey Through Purgatory. P2 following so quickly after what Sam and Eileen undertook together, it’s almost like it was foreshadowed. The deancas subtext at this point in the season isn’t “oh there was a beer sign in the background” (although that’s some of my favorite kind of subtext ngl) it’s now “Sam and Eileen have been giving each other soulful looks and holding hands while Dean and Cas won’t even look at each other and see how they almost held hands but didn’t” and so it isn’t hard to reach. It has been accessible for a while now. But are we still in a place where textually Sam is getting the “romantic” plotline and Dean is getting the “platonic” one, a la season 8? The mirroring is too perfect, and the writing room was even playing on the word “mirror” by adding the connotation of “opposite.”. I will say that If subtext is all that can be written about a deancas narrative in season 15, well, to paraphrase Dean Winchester they sure are putting as much sub into that text as they can.

So going through the midseason hiatus, I will be thinking a lot about “old” Purgatory, underworlds, borderlands, and otherlands, liminal settings and liminal experiences, the peril of the threshold (besides the infamous “letting go” scene from Purgatory 1, the gateway will only exist for twelve hours!) and who knows what else. This has gotten long enough. On to liminality! I think. No, maybe I’ll do old Purgatory first. Anyway I’m cutting this off here.

Hallelujah, holy shit, where’s the tylenol?

(I’m linking to the Shasta myth because it’s a little hard to find and I want to be able to come back to it, as it has given me some ideas about resurrection/reincarnation and becoming human….

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shasta_traditional_narratives got me to:

Voegelin, E. (1947). Three Shasta Myths, including "Orpheus". The Journal of American Folklore, 60(235), 52-58.)

[thegreymoon]

giuliano de medici?

Obligatory disclaimer here, anon, I’m really not a fan of this show and Giuliano de Medici. I think it’s a terribly written show and he’s a terribly written character, and even though it’s no secret I find Bradley James to be one of the most beautiful people alive, I’m going to go with 

Not My Type | Alright | Cute | Adorable | 🤗Pretty🤗 | Gorgeous | LORD MERCY

Mind you, when I say ‘pretty’, I mean so goddamn beautiful I was willing to wade through THREE seasons of utterly infuriating bullshit just for him! (OK, two, because I still haven’t summoned the willpower to sit through season 3 even though I absolutely still plan on doing it 😭😭) I mean, just look at this man’s eyes: 

He’s so gorgeous, I could weep 😭

Also, I’m not going to pretend even for a second that the fact that the costumes gave off such strong Arthur vibes didn’t have anything to do with me sitting through this nonsense and almost enjoying it. When he said ‘I don’t have time for this,’ in this very scene, I got hit over the head with so much deja vu, because it is Arhur’s line, and it was totally Arthur’s delivery! His battle scenes gave me life, but why were they so short? Why was there not more? Why does everything about this shitty show have to be so goddamn unsatisfying? Did the Medici producers not see Merlin season 5? Did they not see what this man can do? Such a wasted opportunity, oh my fucking God! 

Anyway, rant incoming: 

Mind you, I don’t blame Bradley for the unsatisfactory mess Giuliano turned out to be, he did the best he could with the nothing he was given. Only Lorenzo got some semi-decent writing (and even this was not consistent), but Giuliano got such nonsense story arcs, I was sitting there not believing my eyes and ears! I’ve seen gutter trash soap operas with more believable cliche romance! Hell, I’ve seen twelve-year-old girls write better self-insert fanfiction! Even cartoons have better villains than that caricature of a husband, I was laughing out loud at what they were trying to get us to swallow! I mean that line, “It’s not the mask that attracts me, it’s what lies beneath it,” OMG, YOU’VE SEEN HER TWICE IN YOUR LIFE AND SPOKEN THREE WORDS TO HER, JUST SHUT UP!! 😣😫😭

It never gets better, unfortunately, and they wasted the character on this laughable romance instead of doing just about anything else with Giuliano! More of his relationship with Lorenzo, with Bianca, with Lucrezia, or even with Francesco! Hell, I would have even taken Sandro (even though the guy playing him can’t act to save his life and the character is beyond annoying)! Or, I don’t know, and this is just a radical idea here, they could have made Simonetta less two-dimensional and given us an actually believable romantic sub-plot with properly developed characters!

Oh, Gwen, how I missed you! I was forced to eat my words on each and every criticism I ever made about how poorly Arwen was written on Merlin, because it was perfect, perfect writing in comparison! So good, it could be taught in a literature master class! Oh my God, just how do you take two such beautiful people like Bradley and Matilda, put them together and end up with something so infuriatingly nonsensical, forgettable and bland? Colin Morgan has spoiled me and I confess that there was a moment in all my frustration where I had an ugly thought that Bradley James just has no chemistry with women on screen at all, but that’s not really true, because even at it’s worst, Arwen was never this bad and there was never a time when he and Angel actually made me roll my eyes at some of the worst pieces of dialogue I’ve ever heard. Then, of course, there was his performance with Barbara Hershey in Damien, which was on a whole another level of intense, so I have to conclude that the reason Giuliano and Simonetta and that whole ridiculous subplot were so terrible is because the writers could not write for shit. 

Also, as much as I love Bradley, I feel like he was tragically miscast in this role. I just didn’t buy him as Daniel’s younger brother at all. Not only is Bradley older IRL, he has the older brother vibes as well. It’s in his voice, his posture. Better writing for Giuliano notwithstanding, I feel like this show could have been vastly improved if Bradley and Daniel had switched roles. Again, did none of these people see Merlin? Did they not see how iconic Arthur was and what Bradley can do? Because, damn, that man has presence when you give him the proper material to work with, and they took advantage of none of it! I like Daniel, I really do, but even though he was given the best material on this show, he just didn’t fully deliver and I have yet to see him in anything where I am impressed by his performance and not just sitting there for his pretty face.

And since this has devolved into a looooooooong post that no longer has anything to do with the hotness of Giuliano de Medici, let me just mention him: 

Who is this guy and how do I get more of him, because, OMG!  😍🔥🔥🔥😍

He has the most fascinating face I’ve seen in a while, and the way he moves and carries himself is mesmerising! He deserved better-written villainy than what he was given! This show truly did not deserve its cast! Francesco Pazzi was so terribly written, it’s laughable, and yet, here was this guy, stealing the show left and right, in spite of the shit material he was given to work with! Somebody please cast him in something more worthy (preferably in English, or at the very least with English subtitles so that I can watch)! 😭😭

The thing that infuriates me about this series is that they had some fantastic actors here that totally deserved better, such a fascinating period to work with and some of the most interesting figures in history and they spent all their time and money on making them as cliche, two-dimensional, cartoonish and bland as possible.  

Also, I can’t end this post without mentioning how much I loved Sarah Parish as Lucrezia! The woman is perfect, OMG! 😍 The wives, in general, were too good for their husbands in both the seasons I watched so far. The mistresses can go choke, though, and I hated how much they tried to white-wash adultery all over the place. In addition to the poor writing, this show sent out some really gross messages and did nothing to call out all the misogynistic tripe. 

I must exclude Simonetta from my mistress-hate because she died a horrible death, and frankly, other than that, there was not much there for me to perceive her as a real character anyway. I wanted to like her so much because I saw the gifs on Tumblr before actually watching the show, but the writers gave me absolutely nothing to work with and in the end, all I was left with was that she died all alone and with no help or comfort, sick, cold and thirsty, which is one of my big personal fears. The fact that the writers did this to her for no logical reason but to play up Sandro’s and Giuliano’s selfish man-pain - after I really did not buy either of them actually loving her - was just an additional disgusting layer on this poorly written story arc. She deserved better. 

In conclusion, if it wasn’t for Bradley James being pretty, I would have quit this rubbish halfway through season 1 (if anyone is interested in reading just how much I hated it, you can find all my bile here). Season 2 was just as bad, but Bradley, Daniel and Matteo made intolerable characters bearable, which was something Richard Madden was unable to pull off. Of course, all my pure love goes to Contessina, Lucrezia and Clarice, because they were the only characters that I genuinely enjoyed in this mess and didn’t just put up with because I liked the people playing them.

[gejnialnie]

im thinking about sp/op season 5 again and how i feel similar to when i watched season 6 of vol//tron, in a sesne that i really do not care about canon or what creators say is or isnt canon, for me it just. exists on the same level as fanon.

(im putting my reasons “why” under the cut bcos its long and im just basically rambling to myself):

i mean. its not AS BAD as v*ltron.

and yes, i am thankful that we got gay kisses and gay relationships confirmed on screen, (netossa saying “my wife” on screen? very good) its really important and all that stuff but you know what, id love if they actually put effort into their endgame relationship that (supposedly) is a “heart of she-ra” (and didnt make a stereotypical villian out of their only (very alien like looking) nb rep from whom they made a big deal out of to just use them in one episode for comedy and then delete their existence until 5 second finale cameo (no im not still salty about dt what r u talkin abt)) i think we should expect more from show on streaming platform, especially from dreamworks that was met with outrage after their queetbaiting with v*ltron.

i know i may sound like priviliged bicz but i expected catr///adora kiss in one way or another, at very least in the background. i didnt expect for them to say “i love you” and to make a dope utena ass scene though. and i did like this scene, it was a little bit cheesy but i like cheese... i didnt really enjoy the journey to the shop to get that cheese though.

the line “you never gave up on me” makes me go “... :\ “ because... adora litterally did give up on her. remember how season 3 ended? remember the look adora gave catra? remember her punch? remember that catra almost destroyed reality and actually killed angella? remember that scorpia left catra because she couldnt bear catras abuse? and then forgave her after seconds without full apology? the redemption showed in season 5 works only if we forget about seasons 2-4, because. man. was that rushed and unrealistic. i believe there was too much focus on catr/////adora and too little on catra herself. like. i believe catra would benefit if she spend more time away from adora, maybe if she escaped from prime on her own or smth idk, maybe she would discover something about herself outside of “im in love with adora” maybe she could get redemption arc ala zuko or some szit. catra deserved to be her own person and not just “the girl that loves adora”. her whole being revolves around adora, its honestly not healthy (i mean she almost destroyed reality out of spite, if this doesnt say something about her relationship with adora idk what does). like, is this really a romantic story we all wanted? for me its very unsatisfying.

and i still think people forgave/trusted catra too quickly, and yes i think that about perfuma too. i honestly think it would be really good messege if at least one person didnt forgive catra and for catra to heal despite that, because! when u used to be a szitty person of course not everybody will forgive u! but u still can try to heal! u cant and shoudlnt aspire for all people to forgive you and writers had an oppurtinity to show that with catra but i guess not.

adora got a little more space to be her own person but it still feels like she didnt live up to her own potential and in the end her whole being ended up being revolved around catra anyway, even tho season 3 finale stated otherwise.

this cartoon could be a great show about forgivness and redemption but... its just not. just because it has gay kiss in it it doesnt make it automatically great, you know? there was a massive decrease in quality in the last season.

same with vol*ron, there was a massive decrease in quality in last seasons but just because they confirmed shiro to be gay and there was gay kiss at the end it doesnt make it automatically great. thats why these two shows feel familiar to me (and in its style kinda, also in advertising themselves with “diversity” (v*ltron saying “we have a queer character!” and then sidelining him, and shera saying “we have a nonbinary character!” and then sidelining them) but for some reason people seem to forgive shera for its shortcomings, maybe bcos it wasnt as tragic, and we got actual representation but my point still stands.

(also i see some people say that “shera will open doors for lgbt+ creators” and im just here looking at legend of korra and su like--- hey, doors are already open, shera may open them a little wider or make sure they wont close but this show isnt some gay cartoon jegus....  did we all forget that we got gay wedding and gay kiss on national television for kids, these cartoons did so much for lgbt+ creators and people seem to ignore it just because they prefer shera/dont like su anymore. i truly believe we wouldnt get such great catra////dora kiss without rub///pphire wedding)

[precuredaily]

Precure Bonus Day: “Futari wa" Era Overview

Across the last year and 4 months, I rewatched all of the Futari wa Precure branded shows that ran from 2004-2007. These three shows form the foundation of the Pretty Cure franchise that currently spans 16 television series, 27 movies, and multiple stage shows. The end of the FW era marks the beginning of a shift away from the franchise’s roots, so before I dive into Yes! Precure 5 and beyond, I want to take the time to reflect and analyze the past three seasons as a whole. What did they have in common? What aspects did they change? Where did each show succeed and fail, and what common threads are there between these successes and failures?

Hopefully it goes without saying that there will be spoilers, but just in case, I will be discussing each of these series in their entireity, including plot twists and details about their finales.

Futari wa Precure (2004)

Obviously, this is the show that kicked it all off. Toei made this two years after their highly popular Ojamajo Doremi series ended, with the gap year 2003 being filled with a non-magical girl shoujo anime called Ashita no Nadja. I don’t think they meant to start a franchise, and honestly I don’t think they even meant to make it a year-long show. The plot wraps up pretty nicely in episode 26: Nagisa and Honoka have defeated all the henchmen and the main villain and they can return to their normal lives, having become great friends along the way. However, it was popular and the merchandise sold well, so they continued it. At least that’s my theory, maybe it really was meant to be an annual show, but the back half feels extremely stagnant and not particularly connected to the first half. They changed the objective, changed the villains, and the animation quality went down the toilet.

Nonetheless, it established important concepts for this era: most obviously, the two-girl team. It’s in the title: “We Two are Pretty Cure” (there’s a reason you don’t see it translated much, lol) The two girls also come from different walks of life, and would probably not have much reason to interact if it weren’t for being Precure. This first season in particular establishes something of a yin-yang theme with the two. Short hair and long hair, sporty and scientific, middle class and upper class, black and white. While less prominent, this idea of girls from diverse backgrounds coming together will remain a theme well beyond the FW era, to the point where the current (as of this writing) team consists of two space aliens. A key element of the two-girl teams is that they have to transform together. They cannot operate as individuals; they are a pair and they are strongest when they work together. From a writing standpoint, this is an excellent idea that allows for a lot of scenarios that can test and strengthen their partnership.

Another big aspect of FWPC is the supporting cast that flesh out the world. Nagisa and Honoka have friends other than each other, who sometimes have their own story arcs despite not being the main characters. Shiho stands out from this series, as we saw her develop and explore an interest in theater, but possibly the unexpected breakout character was Odajima Yuka. I’m getting ahead of myself, because she didn’t really click with me until her single appearance in Max Heart, but that wouldn’t have been meaningful without her sporadic presence in this show. There are also a half dozen other characters who get a focus episode and then recur in the background throughout the show, and I love the consistency. The girls have love interests and we get to see them wrestle with their feelings. It all makes the girls feel more ordinary, despite their secret lives as superheroes. They have normal lives with normal problems. The girls aren’t the center of the universe, they just happen to be the focus of the show, and there are lots of other people that also inhabit it, going about their lives, whose paths sometimes cross with the main characters’.

FWPC established a bit of a trend for the villain faction: they were fronted by a big, giant monster of literal darkness and each of the subordinate generals has a portion of the macguffin. Each general had a gimmick in how they plotted and attacked, be it brute force, overwrought scheming, subterfuge, or infiltration. The inevitable result of this was that some villains felt more interesting than each other, of course. Pisard and Gekidrago were nothing but archetypes. Poisony had a personality, because she played off of her brother Kiriya, and he had his own arc where he learned to appreciate the good side of humanity. Ilkubo combines aspects of several of them, being extremely powerful and basically the Dark King’s right hand, but for all his gesturing he doesn’t amount to much. The Three Seeds of Darkness from the second half of the show have less going for them. They have personality quirks but they’re not particularly memorable as characters. A lot of their time was spent sitting around saying “We need to find the macguffin.” Their most interesting moment was when they realized that they would be consumed by the Dark King, and tried to betray him (unsuccessfully), otherwise they were just kind of there to pad out the series.

Aside from the down-to-earth nature of the characters and the world, the other biggest element that FW gives us, which the series became famous for, is the fighting. The show’s director, Nishio Daisuke, had recently come off of work on the Dragon Ball series, and he went into Precure with the mindset that “girls like action too.” The combat is physical, the girls kick and punch the monsters rather than fighting with magic wands or special attacks, except for the finisher. This set Precure apart from the crowd and I honestly think it was a big contributor to its early success. It offered little girls something they didn’t often get without branching out into the other Sunday morning offerings, which were targeted at boys. Nishio was good at directing action and he made the fights entertaining to watch.

The major failures of FWPC are some truncated character arcs. Kiriya deserved better than to be forgotten halfway through the series, only to come back as something of a guiding spirit at the end and then die an unsatisfying death. Yumiko (the lacrosse captain) was completely forgettable despite the show trying to make her a notable recurring character. Some of the early guest characters of the week had really lame reasons to exist, like Mayu (the girl who looked like Nagisa). The Seeds of Darkness were utterly lame villains so the second half of the show feels less compelling than the first half. Also, the ending is just kind of strange. Mipple, Mepple, and Porun go to sleep seemingly forever, and Nagisa and Honoka’s graduation feels bittersweet when they think about that and see a boy that looks like Kiriya. I’m still not sure if the ending was so sad because they knew the sequel was coming or despite it, so if it’s the former, it’s a strange choice that only kinda works if they knew that the audience knew that Max Heart would be starting the next week and all the sad stuff would be undone. If it’s the latter, then it’s a bold choice to have a downer ending that was undercut by the show’s own popularity. Either way, I don’t think it was effective given the direction Max Heart took. Without Max Heart I’d consider it strong, but I can’t ignore the effect of the sequel. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Futari wa Precure Max Heart (2005)

Max Heart is an interesting animal. As the sequel to a fairly closed-ended series, it has to invent a reason to exist and uh.... it doesn’t do that very well. The Dark King apparently attacked the Queen of Light before his defeat, and now a few months later she dies and splits into her life, heart, and 12 wills, each of which are marketable in their own way. It essentially turns into another Macguffin quest, but the girls aren’t even actively seeking out the Heartiels, they just come to them. And unlike FWPC’s quest which wrapped up in the first half of that show, they stretch this one out for the entire season, so it gets tiring. That’s my big criticism of MH, but it’s not all bad.

Nagisa and Honoka were enjoyable characters in the first season and I am beyond delighted to get to spend another year with them. This season sees them deepening their friendship as they deal with their new leadership positions in their clubs, offering advice to underclassmen who are struggling with issues they dealt with in the first season, and further exploring Nagisa’s romantic feelings. She finally confesses to Fuji-P at the end of the show, even if he doesn’t actually hear her and consequently nothing comes from it. Season 1 Nagisa would never have gotten that far. Honoka’s development is rather subdued. She learns how to be a good club leader, and in episode 17 she helps push the club out of safe territory for the sake of their passion, but there’s really not much else to be said. She acts as Nagisa’s life coach sometimes when she has anxiety about her future, and helps her confess to Fuji-P, but she really does take a backseat this season next to Hikari. With that said, let’s talk about Hikari!

Hikari is, of course, a new character for this show, and thus her character arc is the most prominent of the trio. She also has more room to grow, since she starts out as basically an empty shell. Even if she is the Queen’s Life, she fully develops into her own person with her own life, friends, interests, and personality. Her overall kindness is probably a side effect of the Queen but she’s still not the Queen. She goes to school, makes friends, gets a job, builds a family, and generally discovers the joy of life. She’s a really enjoyable character to follow, because her journey isn’t just friendship like Nagisa and Honoka’s was, but becoming human. The tragic irony of her character is that the more of an individual person she becomes, the closer the Queen’s resurrection is, which means losing Hikari, and by rights this should form the backbone of the show’s conflict, but they don’t really seem to get this until the last quarter. They raise the question periodically but they don’t give it the discussion it deserves, and that’s a major weakness of the series. They ignore the problem until they can’t anymore. If they had given the audience the sense that this was intentional, that they were actively ignoring the matter, then it could have been interesting. Unfortunately, we never get the sense that Nagisa and Honoka were deliberately ignoring the inevitable question, and it seemed more like they just didn’t care.

As Shiny Luminous, Hikari somewhat changes the team dynamic, but she’s also not just a third fighter like Black and White. She is less combative, except when she has to be, and instead her abilities are more support-oriented. She stays back and activates barriers, slows down the enemy’s movements, and powers up Black and White. Her lack of combat skills means that sometimes Black and White have to protect or save her during fights, which interrupts the flow of battle and can make the fights a bit more drawn out than in the first season. I appreciate what they were trying to do by adding Luminous, and I am not in any way calling her a bad addition to the team, but her particular skills aren’t a very good fit for the style of fights that this show was built on. A lot of times she hides away from fights instead of transforming, making her more vulnerable. It seems like the staff wrote themselves into a corner with that aspect of her, and weren’t sure how to properly utilize her abilities.

The villains in Max Heart are an odd bunch. They’re slightly more memorable than the Seeds of Darkness, but no more competent. Their fights are meaningless, because Baldez is the only one who understands what’s going on with Hikari and Hikaru and the Dark King’s resurrection, and he doesn’t explain anything to the other three, so sometimes they just straight up defy his orders because he hasn’t told them what their objective is. I’m fine with villain infighting but I want there to be a good reason, a clash of ideals or something, not just straight up lack of communication. They have personalities, but that doesn’t play into their fighting styles in any meaningful way. The most interesting thing about them is how they form a family around Hikaru, and try to nurture and protect him while he grows. It brings out the soft side in some of them at home, and causes them to lash out in anger if he comes in contact with the girls somehow. Watching how Hikaru grows and parallels Hikari’s growth was a nice subplot. I’ve never been certain if the audience was supposed to recognize that he was the Dark King’s life before they reveal it in the series, but I really hope they were. Hikaru goes from a carefree kid content with living in the manor to wanting to get out of the house and see more of the world, which leads him into contact with Hikari on a few occasions, spiking each of their innate powers. Since he’s younger, though, he never reaches Hikari’s level of emotional maturity, which actually makes him a little more tragic because he’s just a little kid who unknowingly hosts this great evil. He just wants to do his own thing. Fortunately, in the end he is able to have a life with Hikari and Akane, even after the Dark King is destroyed. Which brings me to.....

Baldez. The final arc where Baldez revives the Dark King and then reveals that he himself now has the power of the Dark King is a neat subversion on expectations. He was always the most mysterious villain of the bunch, he was absent for half of the series and when he was around he played his cards close to his chest. He encouraged Hikaru’s growth by stoking Hikari’s development, and got in the way of Uraganos, Circulas, and Viblis when they tried to defeat her outright. He was a large threat to the girls whenever he did appear, and in a lot of aspects he seems like a precursor to Gohyaan. Ultimately though I can’t say he left a big impression. Most of the time he sat around the mansion saying “They’re developing nicely, the Dark King’s revival is soon....” and rarely set foot on the battlefield. He had no personality to speak of, and didn’t answer to anybody, so he was just flat and boring.

The next thing I want to discuss about Max Heart are some continuing storylines. I discussed the evolution of Nagisa and Honoka’s characters, but their friends get some further development as well. Shiho comes to mind, of course. In the first season she flexed her creative muscles by directing the action version of Romeo and Juliet for the cultural festival. In the sequel she goes a step further, deciding that she wants to be a Hollywood movie director, and chooses to incorporate special effects into their school play. It’s not a lot, but since not a lot of the side characters even get a character arc, it sticks out. However, there’s one character from the first series who didn’t get much to work with who suddenly is a lot more interesting when she recurs in this season, and that is Odajima Yuka, which is especially surprising since she only appeared in one episode, but due to it, all her past appearances suddenly make more sense. This is the episode where she, as a high schooler, joins the middle school science and lacrosse teams on their annual retreat, and ends up challenging Nagisa in a game. She gets out there, works her hardest at a sport she’s never played, and goes toe to toe with the team’s star player. They never outright say this, but what Yuka needed was to be challenged, to compete against somebody at her level. In all of her encounters, Nagisa is the only person who can outrun her. Nagisa may be clumsy at times, but she excels at athletics and gives Yuka the challenge she craves. In fact I think Yuka even envied Nagisa’s laid-back lifestyle. It is remarkable to me that the writers brought her back for Max Heart at all, and saw fit to conclude her story. She was never an important character, but she was memorable, largely because of this season. Later seasons with more main characters tend to sideline their supporting cast, so it’s nice that a minor character gets this kind of focus.

Lastly, there was some attempt to develop Akane early on. There was a three episode arc where a man from her old job stopped by and the girls all thought he was trying to pull her back into an office job. In the end, she declined his offer but he was still interested in dating her. She seemed to take to the idea, and there had been some hints that she wanted to get married and have kids someday, but after this arc, her potential suitor was never seen again and nothing more ever came out of it, beyond her effectively adopting Hikari and Hikaru as her children. It would be interesting to see adult romance play out, even in the background. The first season had Ms. Yoshimi getting married but we never saw any of her life outside the classroom, so giving Akane a little bit more spotlight would have been nice. Sadly, this was not the direction the show took.

Max Heart also got the theatrical treatment, and the movies were honestly very good. Famously, it’s the only series to get two movies, because the first film was originally intended to be just a FWPC film. They share a premise of whisking the girls off to a different land to resolve a problem that the locals are having, and they have their friendship tested along the way before coming out as better and stronger friends than before, acquiring exclusive new forms to defeat the villains. These would become signature elements of all Precure movies.

As I said earlier, the ending to FWPC was very finite, and that was strange juxtaposed to the fact that there was an imminent second season. There’s some strange irony, then, that the finale to Max Heart, the final series that will ever follow this cast of characters, feels a lot more open. It ties off loose ends, of course, and Nagisa and Honoka graduate from middle school, but while it’s implied that Mepple and Mipple go to sleep again, and Hikari is gone after reviving the Queen, less than two minutes pass for the viewer before they find out she and Hikaru are living with Akane, and that all their fairies are awake and as energetic as ever. Even though there ultimately weren’t any shows with these characters, there is room for more. Could they have known what the franchise would become? Could they have had any idea that these characters would still be popular 15 years later?

Futari wa Precure Splash Star (2006)

Splash Star is of course the first full reboot. I don’t know why, maybe they didn’t think they could continue the story of Nagisa and Honoka into high school. Could’ve been neat, but I’ll save the “what ifs” for another time. It rebooted the series, and that set a precedent for shows to follow. It keeps the two girl dynamic of course, and the visual similarities are hard to ignore, but those are fairly superficial, and it manages to find its own identity while improving on the ideas of the prior shows. The theme of the show changes from yin and yang to nature, and that affects everything: the aesthetics of the heroines and villains, the objectives they fight for, and most especially the combat style.

Once again, one girl is athletic while the other has a more academic hobby. Saki has two major friends on the softball team where Nagisa had two major friends on the lacrosse team, but Mai’s companion in the art club is less notable than Yuriko was to Honoka. This time they attend a coed school, and their circle of friends includes a couple of boys, as well as another girl who isn’t a member of either of their teams. Splash Star does the best job at managing its recurring and ensemble cast out of these three seasons. Characters are introduced, have their focus episode, and continue to make notable appearances, often hanging out with the main characters. Kenta even helped Miyasako find a hobby outside of being a class representative. They keep the number of recurring characters lower than FW/MH, use them in better roles, and the result is that they’re better developed and remembered. The romance plots are less fleshed out than in FW, but that’s about the only drawback. Also, Saki and Mai’s relationship with each other is much more immediate. Nagisa and Honoka took a few episodes to warm up to each other and only really cemented their friendship after a big fight, but Saki and Mai are fast friends by the second episode, and all attempts by the villains to introduce discord just backfire because they have absolute trust in each other. 

The villains are also extremely fun and memorable. Whether you like them or not, they leave a distinct impression, much like the generals in the first half of FW. They have unique designs, quirky personalities, and at the end of the series we get to see them interact with each other. Karehaan was fairly straight-laced and I don’t like him much. Moerumba has a spicy personality, his problem is his short-sightedness. Dorodoron gets a laugh from me for being so timid. He might have been boring on his own, but he got to spitball with the Kiryuus, which helped him a lot. Miss Shitataare is powerful and cocky but completely inept. Kintolesky was easily my favorite of the lot, being honorable and straightforward and impeccably muscular. Aside from Karehaan’s overall blandness their biggest problem is not having enough cross talk with each other, with that being saved for their revival arc. Later shows do this a lot more often and better, thankfully.

Speaking of villains, however, Gohyaan stands out. He kind of serves multiple roles as both the comic relief of the villains, like the Zakenna Butlers, and as the right hand to the big bad. He spends most of his time sucking up to Akudaikaan, but occasionally he does go out on the field and demonstrates how powerful he actually is. His memorable personality and the twist where he reveals he’s the mastermind all make him a welcome addition. And just to reiterate, that twist had very minimal foreshadowing! Akudaikaan himself was the opposite, very not memorable, he’s blander than the Dark King, and that’s no easy feat. The most interesting thing about him is his physical design, as rather than being an amorphous blob like the Dark King, he has a defined face and a robe. His head resembles a Samurai helmet and a demon mask, and he has fire in his eyes. It’s a shame this theme didn’t really amount to anything.

Michiru and Kaoru’s redemption arc has to be the highlight of the show. The writers took some cues from Kiriya’s similar storyline in the first show but they gave the sisters a lot more time in the limelight, which allowed their characters to be better fleshed out. Over the course of the second quarter of the show, we get to see these girls go from a faux friendship with Saki and Mai into a legitimate one, because they actually listened and learned about the beauty of the natural world. They start to understand what it means to be cared for, to be appreciated for who you are, and not have your value be dependent on what you can provide for someone else. If more villains would take the time to see things from the perspective of the people they’re trying to defeat, they might also understand this, and truly some of them do. We’ll explore several types of redeemed villains in the shows to come, and I look forward to comparing and contrasting them with this. The biggest problem I have with the Kiryuus is that they were absent between episodes 25 and 41, and barely mentioned. Mai and Saki worried for them, and Miss Shitataare gave them hints that they were still alive, but it was sad to see them shoved aside for half the show with no particular explanation being given about what Gohyaan was doing with them. That’s my only major strike against Splash Star.

The fighting in the series is still punchy, but this time the spirits spice things up. There’s bursts of spirit energy whenever they kick and punch, they can concentrate the spirit power in certain parts of their bodies to jump farther, punch harder, and block attacks. As Bright and Windy they have elemental attacks using the light and wind. It’s an evolution of what the first series started, and I enjoy it. Finally, the victories feel meaningful, because every battle they get the reward of a Miracle Drop. Every seven episodes or so they collect enough drops to revive a fountain, and Princess Filia grows more and more complete. There is constant progress throughout the series, so even the slow parts of the show feel meaningful.

Of course, the series got a movie, and it was very similar to the prior two in overall plot: Tension arises between the two, they’re thrust into another world before they can resolve their feelings, the villain takes advantage of their personal conflict to overpower them, they get separated, then they make up with each other and come together stronger to defeat the villain. The closes they get to a movie form in this one is a glowing outline surrounded by the spirits of the zodiac, somewhat bucking the trend, but it’s an excellent movie. That really isn’t something I can say about all of them, so I’m grateful that these early films are so strong.

Splash Star has been described as the perfection of the Futari wa formula, and overall I have to agree. Of the three shows, it is the most consistent in all regards. There’s constant progression, character growth, meaningful supporting characters who you really sympathize with, and a fun and enjoyable cast of both heroes and villains. The first half of FWPC may be more fun, but the second half drags it down. Max Heart as a whole isn’t really sure where it wants to go. Splash Star sets a destination and arrives there at the right time, with some twists and turns along the way. I strongly recommend it to anyone trying to get into the series for the first time.

Unfortunately, despite Splash Star being arguably the best of the three seasons (both Eastern and Western fans ranked it above Max Heart), it tanked in sales after its first quarter, so it was decided that, if the franchise was going to continue, they needed a new look. Thus, they turned to the most enduringly popular magical girl series around for inspiration for their next season. But that’s a story for later.

Analysis

The most obvious shared elements between the three shows is the two-girl team, which they each used slightly differently. In FWPC, it’s the two of them against the world. That’s it. Max Heart switches things up with a third hero, who is not combative, but supports them, and they have to protect her at times, sidetracking their fights. Splash Star goes as far as to introduce two more fighters whose power stems from the darkness but they use it for good. They help the Cures out and the Cures help them out, but it’s Bloom and Egret at the core. The key aspect of this period of Precure is that the duo are regular girls who can only transform when they’re together, and that their powers become stronger when their feelings are in harmony. The shows each explore the pros and cons of this setup, concluding that their teamwork is the most powerful force in the word, and this is quite possibly the best thing to come out of this period of the series. The thing I especially like, however, is that being Pretty Cures means that the protagonists have an especially close bond with each other, moreso than their other friends. Since they have to transform and work together, they more intimately understand each other, and they share experiences their other friends will never know about. They look out for each other in every aspect of their daily lives, they have absolute trust in each other, and they will go through hell to protect each other. Pretty Cure’s most powerful weapon is friendship.

As far as their individual personalities go, Saki tends to be more optimistic than her counterpart. Nagisa is lovable and relatable as all heck, but she had kind of a pessimistic view of the world at times. It’s evident even in their catchphrases: Nagisa always says “I can’t believe this!” while Saki proclaims she’s “In top form!” Neither of them would ever hesitate to help a friend, and especially their partner, but during the daily grind Nagisa is more likely to be upset at her circumstances. Meanwhile, Honoka and Mai are even more dissimilar to each other. Honoka has a scientific mind, she’s very astute and good at picking up details. She kind of struggles with making friends but she tries to help people out, always, especially when they don’t want to help themselves. She puts up with a lot of crap but she will chew you out in the name of making you a better person. Mai, however, is observant but she tends to hyperfocus on one thing while drawing and space out a lot. She is a little timid but not afraid to express when she’s upset. Both Mai and Honoka serve to temper and balance out their more energetic partner, serving as the voice of reason when they get heated, and in general keeping them grounded. I love how, despite the differences in their friendships, both sets of partners help to round each other out and make each other better people. It’s a testament to what a good friend can do for you, and of course the central motif of the shows.

Consequently, other friendships form a big part of these shows, too. The small cast means that the girls have friends besides each other, and in each series we see how the protagonists influence their friends, their friends influence them, and we even get to see Hikari make new friends of her own. Again, all the shows handle this well, and it’s something that will be missed next season, since the larger team size means their friendships are more insular. Having friends outside the team grounds the shows in relatable situations as the protagonists go about their daily lives, hanging out with their friends who become beloved characters and get story arcs of their own. Shiho, Rina, Yuriko, Nao, Miu, Hitomi, Yuuko, Kenta, Miyasako, and Kayo are all memorable and important pillars of the shows. They encourage the leads when necessary, get into hijinks with them, explore their own interests, hang out, and have fun together. This also allows conflicts to be resolved without the Precure. In most superhero media the central conflict of the episode is between people’s feelings or beliefs rather than a physical altercation, but the fight usually resolves things somehow, while in Precure, since the combatants are often not the ones with a disagreement, it instead helps them figure out how to help their friends resolve their troubles.

Since these are the stories of regular girls dealing with regular adolescent issues, love is not a strange subject. Nagisa and Saki each had crushes on slightly older boys in their shows, and they handle it remarkably similarly. They get flustered, embarrassed, and have trouble even speaking to their partner about it. However, Honoka is shrewd enough to discern Nagisa’s feelings, while Mai never learns that Saki has a crush on her brother. The writers even approach their romances differently. Nagisa tends to be more proactive in exploring her feelings. She makes active efforts to make gifts for Fuji-P and confess her love to him, ultimately culminating in that fateful Max Heart Christmas episode where she yells it for all the world (but him) to hear. Meanwhile, Saki tended to just admire Kazuya from a distance, except when he came to her. She got jealous when it appeared he had a girlfriend, but she never acted on her affections in a direct way. I theorized that Fuji-P might actually suspect Nagisa’s feelings, and possibly share them, but he wants her to be ready to tell him. Meanwhile, as far as we can tell, while Kazuya finds Saki interesting, he doesn’t really see her as anything more than a friend. I like these different representations of young love, they show how much or how little of a priority it can have in someone’s life.

Famously, Honoka also got a brief pseudo-romance with Kiriya. She helped him grow as a person, he challenged some of her overbearing ways, but they clearly respected each other. She was distraught when he was taken back to the Dusk Zone, and that was one of the most heartfelt episodes in the entire series so far. There were echoes of his impact on her in the rest of the first series, but I never felt like they explored that story to its full potential, and he was not even mentioned in Max Heart. Mai never got a corresponding love interest, and Hikari’s love was more familial: for Nagisa and Honoka as her partners, for Akane as her guardian, and for Hikaru as the only person who could possibly understand her existential crisis. She learned about romantic love but never experienced it herself, which is fine. Girl has enough to worry about as it is.

The physical fighting pioneered in FWPC set the groundwork for the rest of the series, and you can see it slightly evolve over the course of these three shows. While FW is pure punching and kicking except for finishing moves, Max Heart introduces a character with support spells to help the team, and Splash Star gives the combat a bit of flair and style with the spirit trails and elemental attacks. Each show has carved out its own little niche, and I really think that’s one of the fascinating elements of the series. YPC5 will usher in special weapons, which are a genre staple that the original trilogy avoided. That will become standard for all series going forward, so these three shows with their almost entirely unarmed battles are a true highlight of early Precure to me. They manage to keep the fights interesting, always, it’s not just straightforward sparring. The girls do a lot of jumping around, flipping, fighting in sync with each other or tag-teaming. They always have to find weaknesses in monsters that are designed specifically to be hard to beat. Sometimes they’re fast, other times armored, or they’re heavily offensive, they have special abilities of their own, or the commander is threatening someone else. Always, the heroines find an innovative way to defeat their opponent and save the day in a visually exciting manner.

When it’s not showcasing awesome girls fighting for friendship and love, Precure is about selling toys. Bandai has a long history of designing toys to coincide with Toei’s Sunday morning shows, and they put their experience to work here. Nonetheless, they had some difficulty with the rather nondescript themes of the early shows, so the toys sometimes come across as very out-of-place. The transformation toys are generally cutesy enough to pass, the powerup braces stand out, the mid-season fairy’s compact forms are extremely gaudy (ESPECIALLY the Splash Commune, it’s literally just a computer in a show about nature), and the macguffin storage object of each show (Prism Hopish, Queen Chairect, Fairy Carafe) starts a proud Precure tradition of being a large, expensive toy first and a sacred artifact later. Additionally, there’s at least one object in each show that is Precure-branded merch in the real world which has no combat use and is forced into the plot of one episode before being quickly forgotten. As the years go on, the toys will be more unified with the theme of the show, and we’ll see some new patterns emerge.

One last element I realize that I forgot to bring up before now, but that becomes a franchise trend, is a trademark food and a restaurant of sorts. In FWPC and Max Heart, of course, their food of choice is takoyaki from Akane’s Tako Stand, where Hikari winds up working in Max Heart. Splash Star’s restaurant is Panpaka PAN, the Hyuuga family bakery, and their signature food is chocolate coronets. The restaurant or food stand is always a recurring location, where the girls and their friends often meet to talk and hang out and eat some delicious food. This is certainly not exclusive to Precure, or even the magical girl genre, as having recurring locations saves on the budget, both in animation and live-action, and food is an easy way to get people to congregate. Nonetheless, it’s sort of brought up in Precure All Stars, and there’s some truly great food ahead of us, so I wanted to point out that the trend goes all the way to the start of the series.

Obviously, 2004′s Futari wa Precure wasn’t intended to kick off a franchise, so when it got popular they stuck to what they knew for the second season. I’m not sure why they didn’t take the Doremi approach and keep aging them up a year for more seasons, but perhaps they thought they had exhausted the storytelling potential of the original cast and realized that it had franchise potential if they followed the annual reboot model of other superhero shows. The biggest issues with the first two shows are pacing, which is fixed in Splash Star, and you can see them tweaking and refining the formula in other ways through the three shows as well. If I had to describe this era in a word, relative to the overall franchise, it would be innovative. While the two-girl partnership would take a break for a few years after this, these shows laid the foundation for plot structure, villain organization, toy integration, and combat that would be utilized and enhanced by the rest of the franchise, so it’s cool to trace the roots of many Precure conventions back to their origins. What began as a humble action show for girls meant to sell some toys got popular, and continued past its intended conclusion. It was even referenced in other pop culture of the time.

Powerpuff Girls Z (2006)

The series had gotten the attention of the masses and was a proven success. We got five memorable and lovable heroines, a bunch of beloved supporting characters, some wonderful villains, and even some welcoming food stands. Of course, there were bumps in the road. The series was still finding its footing during this period, and will continue to do so as we head into Yes 5, but without these three shows laying the groundwork for the franchise, I might not be here talking about it.

That’s my ode to the Futari Wa era of Precure, I hope you enjoyed it, I’m sorry that it took so long to get out. Look forward to Yes! Precure 5 reviews coming your way shortly, and remember:

Your best! My best! Ups and downs! Together We are Pretty Cure!

[mugen-monogatari]

Kabukimonogatari - Shinobu Silence; Humanizing a Monster

This post is the second part of my Kabukimonogatari posts. In the first post, I talked about Hachikuji and her key scene, while in this post, I’ll be talking about Shinobu and her important scene. To me personally, this climax of the arc was probably one of the best scenes in Monogatari as a whole. This entire exchange, was so satisfyingly, unsatisfying. It left me feeling empty, and almost disappointed (which sounds like a bad thing), but that’s what makes it so great. The crushingly painful realism. This entire arc was a commentary on how even our smallest actions and decisions can affect the greater world around us. It shows how we take even the smallest things for granted, with some pretty insightful commentary on depression and being in a dark place.

So with that brief introduction out of the way. Lets talk about shinobu and her climactic scene in Kabukimonogatari. For this analysis, I’ll be potentially spoiling all the way up to episode 10 of the Monogatari second Season. Keep that in mind if you haven’t yet seen up to that point. Also, this is all just my interpretation, none of this should be taken as fact.

Ironically, this arc was the first which made Shinobu, a vampire, an aberration, feel the most human in the entire series. She demonstrates, while seeming like a transcendent being, she’s very much so susceptible to the same problems everyone faces. Jealousy, pride, depression. They affect her just as much as they would anyone else. Which was top-notch characterization for this point in the story. Up to then, Shinobu was almost an enigma, being incredibly cute and wise, but having very little going for her in terms of emotional depth (that is unless you watched or read Kizumonogatari before this).

This entire humanization is what leads to the apocalyptic events of Kabuki. Shinobu’s jealousy. Her envy for the people around Koyomi, her pride and child-like stubbornness. Most of you probably didn’t remember until it was mentioned, Shinobu was missing at one point in the story, only returning upon seeing Koyomi’s efforts to find her. She saw this as an act of mutual affection. Him searching for her demonstrated his need or care for her, so she returned the kindness by helping him with the Hanekawa situation. However in this reality, Hachikuji had never incentivized Koyomi to go search for Shinobu, prompting her to destroy the world in her solitude and envy.

And that was one of the really heart-wrenching things about this arc- It shows even that little ounce of effort is enough to save someone, or to change things, even fix things. In our case, Koyomi actively put that effort in, going out of his way instead of settling for the easy route of just waiting for her to return. Shinobu while having lived for hundreds of years, still has the mind of a spoiled brat. She felt as if it was Koyomi’s job to come searching for her. She refused to be the one that put the effort in. She acknowledges this herself- “If I had only made one tiny compromise.” She realizes that you can’t expect things to happen for you, if you’re not willing to put some effort in yourself. She comes to terms with the unreasonable nature of her actions, having created this entire situation and forcing Koyomi to search for her, to see things from her perspective. But in this alternate reality- He never did.

I feel that's a painfully accurate depiction of human emotions. A lot of the time, we expect things from people that aren’t entirely fair. We can’t always admit we’re wrong, and we’re often too stubborn to just apologize. We instead run away and blame it on everyone else. “It was his fault for not chasing me-” That’s the sort of mentality she had. And that’s a mentality a lot of people have. But this entire arc shows you have to compromise. You can’t rely on one party in a relationship to fix everything. You both must actively work towards whatever happiness you seek.

“If I’d only opened up my heart to this boy a little more, Believing and entrusting…”

It also shows a slightly nihilistic view of our actions. Running away, destroying the world was completely pointless, she accomplished nothing in doing so. The void in her heart was not filled, she was just left feeling even more empty and depressed. Had she just waited slightly longer, or better yet, compromised, she would’ve had the happiness she sought after. Which is a good message told in a depressing way. Patience is key. Don’t run away from the problem and expect everyone else to fix it. If you’re not happy with the way someone acts or a situation you’re in, you can work on improving that, even when it’s hard, time and effort will help you ultimately achieve happiness.

This was a very rough scene for me personally. Your actions aren’t permanent, but your mistakes are. Running away isn’t the end of it. Had she just returned everything would have been okay, while never returning led to the end of our world as we knew it. Her world too. She was left with nothing but regrets. “My running away from home caused me to lose you… Making me feel like I had lost a wing, A half of myself.” A quote that just goes to demonstrate her pain. Her misery at making one, small, stupid, stubborn choice, which led to everything she knew ending. Leaving her with nothing but a destroyed world and a void in her heart.

Which leads me onto my second part of this scene. Depression. I know it’s a little cliche to talk about it, but I think this is a fairly accurate depiction of it. It’s not a switch or something that happens overnight. In the case of Shinobu and most people, it’s a downwards spiral, one bad day leading to another, before they pile up. In her case, she was stubborn. Taking her anger out on the world, before realizing in feeling alone, she truly became alone. She destroyed her own life, with her own hands. As DJ Khaled once said; “Congratulations, you played yourself.”(Had to get one meme in there to lighten the mood plsdontkillme).

Shinobu feels truly alone. She struggles with the fact that Koyomi is surrounded by all these girls, forcing him to divide his attention between them all, making her feel unneeded and desperate. So she flees. She runs away with the hope that he’ll chase her, and when he doesn’t- She kills everyone. In doing so, she realizes that she truly has become alone and is prompted to take her own life.

But then upon seeing her alternate self, it becomes all so painfully clear the futility of her actions. This could have all been avoided if- you guessed it- she compromised. There most definitely was a reality where she was happy. There was a certain almost guaranteed chance that everything would be okay, had she just waited or tried to put effort in herself. It’s a very touching moment actually, when she has the tragic realization that everything she did was pointless. She had ruined everything for no reason. That there was a reality where both her and Koyomi could happily snuggle together.

While that may sound bleak, I think the real hidden message is that things get better. Life will improve, and even when it’s difficult or hard or stressful or lonely, it’s not the end. There’s a lot of people out there who suffer from very serious, very real problems, and many see no way out of it. It can be draining and scary. But it does truly get better, with some time and effort, you can make a life for yourself. It’s unfair, yes, but if you just work at things, one day you’ll be able to look back on you life and wonder why you ever even worried. I think this arc was kind of like a really really depressing way of saying- “Hey. It’ll be alright. Just stick with it. It’ll pay off, your hard work and effort will be rewarded,” which is both sweet and touching. If this was truly the author’s intentions, I have to give him kudos, since I think that’s a good message to give people.

To relate this to my own life, me and my own Girlfriend argue sometimes. Occasionally the topic of breaking up will come up, but we never do. She always puts it best saying; “I won’t break up with you because that’s a permanent decision. This argument isn’t, we’ll move on and forget about it at some point.” And I think that applies perfectly with this entire arc.

Kabukimonogatari was another fanatastic arc in an amazing series, and I’m just glad I got to experience it and share it with you guys. If you take anything away from this arc, just remember, no matter where you are in life, one day it’ll get better.

Thank you so much for reading this, if you made it this far, maybe consider sharing this with someone. Next up I’ll be doing some stuff for the Fate franchise, as well as more Monogatari character stuff, don’t forget more Bleach posts too, So keep your eyes peeled.

Take Care of Eachother, Saki~

[immortalpramheda]

The 100 6x09 ‘What You Take With You’

Octavia doesn’t remember anything that happened in the anomaly, much to Gabriel’s disappointment. He’s been waiting for 150 years to find out what the anomaly actually is. Because Octavia is healed, clean and her hair is longer, he’s convinced that she was in there for a lot longer than a few seconds (I still really want to know how time works in there. Is it actually time travel or just somewhere where time moves differently?).

He makes up a serum of plants from around the anomaly that he calls Red Sun Toxin. Which seems to have a similar effect to what happens during the red sun by opening up a part of the mind that is being repressed. He hopes that it will help Octavia remember.

When she is under it’s influence, she has a choice. The green box, which will presumably show her what happened in the anomaly (we hear Diyoza’s voice coming from there). Or the red box, which is much more enticing to Octavia.

She’s surrounded by red radioactive butterflies, and then she’s taken back to the fighting pits. It seems that the red box forces her to face her demons, which is something that she has been wanting to avoid. A montage of the most traumatic events in her life flash by, Lincoln’s death, killing Pike, the Dark Year, Bellamy in the fighting pits. It’s all too overwhelming for her.

I was not expecting to see Pike so his appearance was a very welcome surprise! He’s a representation of her inner self because she hates him more than anyone else because he killed killed Lincoln. That’s when she feels like she, Octavia Blake, died. It was after that when she started on this downward spiral.

And it’s through Pike that she comes to the realisation that she hates herself. That’s what he represents in her mindspace, how much hatred she has towards herself and what she became. That’s why she’s been on this self destructive path. And it’s him who forces her to admit what it is that she really wants. Forgiveness? No. Deep down what she wants, and what she needs, is redemption.

Does she deserve redemption? It’s not about deserving it. It’s something that must be earned and the big question is, what is she willing to do to get it? She can’t go back and change things that happened, and as Pike says, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is insanity. But it’s always possible to do better from now on. That’s what Pike was trying to do when she killed him. She rationalised it as justice when really it was cold blooded murder.

Bloodreina, the darkest version of herself, tells her that she did what she had to do to survive. That’s how she’s always justified what she did. That’s why she was so desperate to get to the last survivable place on Earth, because once they got there, then everything she did would have made sense.

Pike gets down on his knees, a parallel to the way that Lincoln died. It’s now that Octavia finally decides to slay her demons. Bloodreina is no more, signifying that part of her life is in the past and she’s ready to move onto the future.

This is what Octavia has been desperately needing to come to terms with to get out of this place. Since they got out of the bunker, she’s still been in that mindset of fighting to stay alive. Holding onto that persona because it was all she knew for 6 years and she didn’t know who she was without it. That’s her justification for burning the farm, she couldn’t bear the thought of not winning. But Wonkru was no more and she couldn’t bear to acknowledge that. I LOVED how this whole thing went down. She seemed stuck before but now she knows exactly what she wants and where she’s heading. And I’m looking forward to seeing Bellamy reunite with his sister, who is now on a journey back to her old self.

Josephine/Clarke and Bellamy’s journey this episode was fantastic! After she had a seizure, he just casually wiped the blood off her nose, and then cut himself and put his red blood on her forehead (similar to when he cut his arm so Octavia wouldn’t be caught) so no one would know she’s a Prime.

Being captured by the Children of Gabriel gave them some time to talk (and kinda bond?). Josie admits that she’s been in love with Gabriel for 236 years, the last 70 of which he’s been trying to kill her.

Clarke can hear them, meaning that there isn’t much time left. The barrier between their brains is getting weaker. She communicates in morse code again. Boo-hoo. Which was just perfect.

“I won’t let you die.” I think the way in which Bellamy said that brought up something in Josephine. Her expression changes, because I think she understands why Bellamy won’t give up on Clarke. Someone used to feel the same way about her - Gabriel couldn't let her die and spent 25 years trying to bring her back. That kind of love is something she has experienced, and something she wishes she still had.

She calls out his ‘weird’ relationship with Clarke. At first, they tried to kill each other, and then they became best friends, bonded by committing genocide together, locked each other up, left each other to die, her on Earth, him in the fighting pits. It’s exhausting, their relationship (loved how Josephine obviously knows how he feels about her, because it’s very similar to her relationship with Gabriel). Bellamy’s reaction to when she mentioned ‘love’, the way he turns away and doesn’t acknowledge it, was very telling.

CLARKE IS BACK!!! Josie gave up control so that Clarke could fight her way out when it was discovered that she’s a Nightblood. Bellamy immediately could tell by her mannerisms that she was back! Clarke didn’t want to leave Bellamy behind, she won’t do that again. But there’s no time and she quickly slips Bellamy the keys before running off.

Clarke is back in control and can now see Josephine, which means that there is really not much time before her brain completely deteriorates. Clarke refuses to give her back control, and has also stolen some skills, how to ride a motorbike and speak Mandarin. Clarke is back and it feels so good!

Before riding off, she sends a radio message to Gabriel, which is sucked up by anomaly and Gabriel hears it on a loop. This is going to be very interesting. He’ll be reunited with someone who he has a very long history with. I do think he’s most likely going to try to save Josie, he keeps staring at the photo of her so his feelings haven’t gone away. But I think he will do whatever it takes to give Clarke her body back because it’s the right thing to do.

Kane cannot get used to this new body. Despite his mind being intact, all of his scars, and the coalition brand, are gone. Those things were a part of who he was, his body was a part of him. Abby tries to help him make sense of it, but none of this feels right.

He meets Gavin’s wife, who believes that Gavin is still in there somewhere. They’re not, their minds are wiped. The people are lied to about their religion to get them to worship these false gods. This man had a life, a family, and now because of Kane it’s been taken away.

Indra is finally woken up!! Meeting her friend who now inhabits a different body was a little strange. But her friendship with Kane runs so deep and she is willing to do whatever he believes is right.

These people murder people and will continue doing so unless they do something to stop them. This guilt at taking this innocent mans life is tearing Kane apart. And so they come up with a plan to float the Nightblood. Make it so they can no longer create more hosts. And Kane knows what needs to be done to make sure that this horror does not continue.

I’ve never been a big Kane fan, or Abby fan, but this death scene was absolutely heartbreaking. It hit all the right emotional beats and was very true to who Kane was. And I’m so glad that Abby got to say a proper goodbye to him in his original body.

“This is how we get our humanity back.” This was Kane’s choice. He’s making sure they deserve to survive. His sacrifice will ensure that Abby, and everyone else, can make a better life for themselves. To give them the chance to do better.

Indra recites the 'Travelers Blessing’, an Ark tradition, one that she learnt from Kane. She adds in a little of her culture in at the end, ‘Yu gonplei ste odon’. At this point, I couldn’t stop crying. And to make this whole thing even more tragic, this is the same way that Abby’s husband died.

Kane wasn’t mad at Abby, he made that clear. He’s knows that if the roles were reversed he would have done anything to save her. But he can’t live with himself like this. A very noble send off, perfect for his character.

After the last episode, I was skeptical about Kane’s storyline from here on. I was weirded out by the new body and was worried it would continue on for the rest of the season. But I wouldn’t have wanted his journey to end any other way. If he’d just stayed cryo with an uncertain future, or died right after being unfrozen, then that would have been a very unsatisfying send off. He died on his own terms and made sure that everyone else deserved to survive. May we meet again.

Another great, and very emotional, episode. I can’t believe the season is nearly over and can’t wait to see what the remaining episodes have in store!

[myassbrokethefall]

OK, my GoT thoughts under the cut. Summary: Motivations technically understandable/justifiable; execution bad/dramatically unsatisfying/anticlimactic/baffling.

Essentially: I can buy what happened to Dany and I can accept the ending for Jaime, but the way the show got to both of those points makes no sense to me, and undercut the effectiveness and the meaning severely for both.

Dany: Was I expecting this character to just fly into King's Landing with her giant terrifying dragon(s), roar at Cersei, peacefully take the kingdom, and have a parade thrown for her as she happily fulfills her destiny? No.

Am I mad that we got a "mad queen" arc? I am not. One might almost say it was inevitable and has been foreshadowed with every word of the show and the books since the beginning.

But I was expecting SOMETHING redemptive, not just "Dany goes crazy and kills everyone for no reason." I also was looking forward to clash of the two queens, both crazy for power and increasingly unstable in their attempts to hold onto it, and for it to become clear that Cersei was irretrievably gone to the dark side, and Dany was not. I was expecting Dany's reckoning with her "mad" side to involve her somehow overcoming it, or trying to overcome it, even if in some small symbolic way that ultimately ended in tragedy for her. Not just her...becoming evil, full stop.

This entire season has felt super rushed, and I also am annoyed that we have had TWO hour-and-a-half episodes almost entirely dedicated to battles. When there is so much shit to get done!!! Character arcs are getting short shrift but we gotta have all the gore and destruction, not just in one episode, but in two episodes, directed by the same dude who is their “battles” guy I guess. Having this battle almost cheapens the other battle. I was like, remember when we all united against the ice zombies and humans finally prevailed, and it showed all these other conflicts to be ultimately petty and meaningless in comparison to the fight against death and existential (and literal, lol) darkness? That de-escalated quickly.

So it's not that I didn't want Dany to go mad or I think that was impossible. But it felt very pointless the way it was executed, and felt like it happened because it's the end of the series, not because anything particularly organic made it happen in this moment. (Yes, she lost two dragons and Missandei and Jorah, and Jon froze her out. Her changing her whole personality into a crazed murderer of civilians -- in the face of a victory, no less -- still made no sense to me.) Like I could see her going crazy on the city if they threw rocks at her or something after she was like "I just killed Cersei, you simple dumbasses! I LIBERATED YOU! LOVE ME!!!! I'M THE GOOD RULER!! OK FUCK YOU THEN!!" But to be flying around, basically accomplish her goal of taking the city, and then suddenly be like "Rarrr, Dany go crazy! Because Targaryen blood! Kill all humans!" It's not like Cersei even likes the humans; we spent a long time establishing that she doesn't give a fuck about the people. There was no reason, to my mind, that Dany snapping would involve her burning the whole city that she's fought to get for so long. It felt like it was for shock value, both at the loss of life and at us going "omg Dany was the villain all along!" But it did not, to me, feel earned. Just baffling and disappointing.

If anything I thought CERSEI would do some huge evil gesture to pointlessly fuck the city just to go out in a blaze of glory, and Dany would fight AGAINST her own nascent rageahol Targaryen feelings and experience character growth and transcend her fate in order to try to prevent that from happening. Or NOT ultimately be able to do that, but at least make a gesture towards such a thing. It was just weird the way it happened. And I don't see how Dany can come back from this, as a character, and that is disappointing because we've invested so much in her. It's really deflating. It's just like, oh, I guess Dany is bad now. She was a crazy Targaryen after all! Everybody thought she might go mad, and now she did. D'oh. But it's a weird and oddly anticlimactic ending for such a character. (I realize it hasn't ended yet, but I don't think redemption is in the cards for her after this episode.)

(Also, what was Varys, etc.'s basis for suddenly deciding that she bout to go crazy and we can't trust her? Her being impatient to get to King's Landing and get going on the sacking last week? Arguably she should have let the armies rest, and I took Sansa's side in that argument, but you could make a case for Dany’s side as well, which was essentially "sure, we're tired, but if we wait longer they'll also regroup and it will be even more difficult, let's just get this the fuck done already." That to me doesn't say "I'm dangerously unstable and everyone knows it!" so much as "Our military strategies differ!")

OK. So what I was expecting was Dany versus Cersei, both power-mad, both not wanting to back down, but one of them at her essence having a heart that truly does care about justice (the beat of these warring impulses within her has been struck MANY times with Dany's character) and managing to see through the power-lust fog to remember that. Whether too late or not, for that to happen in some capacity. And this also ties into Jaime's arc.

I wasn't upset when Jaime heard about shit going down in King's Landing last week and decided that his happy chill Winterfell life with Brienne wasn't going to be that easy and he had to go back to fix the mess he helped make and sever his connection with his twin once and for all. (I mean, I kinda was, but I was like, yeah, I can see that this has to happen.) And he was fucking pissed about it and he was all, this is my shit too, I'm an asshole who has done bad stuff that I have never really atoned for, as this jaghole in the rolly chair keeps reminding me, I can't be with you until I get back in the mud with her and end it once and for all. That is where I ASSUMED they were going. And I think they sort of were, but it didn't end up that way at all.

So what I thought was going to happen was Jaime would get to the city, insinuate himself in somehow, get to Cersei, and talk her down. Or make an attempt. That this was how Jaime would finally cement his redemption, as the only person who could reach Cersei. I thought all the "I'm bad, I've done bad things, I'm as bad as she was" was him essentially being pissed that this was his task. When Tyrion was going on about you can escape and get in a dinghy and start a new life together with your incest baby, I thought, oh dear sentimental (perhaps not in an entirely in-character way) Tyrion, Jaime is going to go and KILL her ass and not a moment too soon. He knows that the blood on her hands is on his hands as well. He doesn't want to start a B&B with her in Europe; he needs to cut the cord, to use an apt metaphor. He doesn't want to, and he's dreading it, but he's the only one who can make it happen because he's the closest to her and she trusts him and he's the only hope of saving the city. He may hold her and TELL her that they can escape, and might even say "oh yeah babe there's totally a dinghy waiting for us if we can just get through the tunnels," and then he's going to stab her in the gut and avert that battle that I dumbly thought they would not stage an entire second one of after they just had one two episodes ago. Jaime the kingslayer, who slayed the queen as well, his own sister, but he had to do it and now he's finally fully redeemed. Even Dany who didn’t trust him will see that he was ultimately the only one who could do what had to be done.

If Jaime died in THAT process I wouldn't be surprised. Like if Cersei fought him and he had to somehow sacrifice them both (a la the Cleganes) in order to get her to die, he would do it, and that would be tragic but meaningful. Or if he dispatched Cersei and THEN got buried by the collapsing castle or whatever, he had accomplished his mission but it was too late for him. Hell, maybe they even make it to the fabled dinghy of redemption and he's talked himself into the idea that he can control her, and then he has second thoughts and drowns her or something because he knows he will never be free if she's alive, and neither will the world because she will always lust for power. OR EVEN if, at the last minute, he gets sucked back into her orbit and he's like "bitch we ARE gonna escape!!! WE CAN START ANEW, IT'S ALL LIKE WE DREAMED" and then she kills him or something but at the last second some shit that he puts in motion causes her to die and the city is saved that way.

But what I was NOT expecting is Jaime to be told "go get her, put her in a boat, start a new life together!" and just like, DO that, or try to. To just apparently shrug off the whole Brienne thing and get to Cersei and be like "hi baby! I missed you" and "let's hug" and then they just die in the castle FOR NO PURPOSE. It didn't redeem Jaime, it didn't tragically NOT redeem Jaime, Jaime just sort of went back there just in time to die with nothing resolved. What is the point of watching this character grow over the seasons and then be like "well I guess he realized he had to go back and die with Cersei because THEY ARE TWINS" (pretty much what the showrunners said). Yes, They Are Twins, which is why it's tragic to have one kill the other, or for him to outgrow her, or for him to give up a promise of happiness to go back and put a stop to her evil deeds because he's the only one who can. What I'm saying is, it's not the tragedy per se that I object to! But to just be like, well, he came back to her because remember they were incest twins and they love each other! They died, the end, is just...such a weird anticlimactic way to do it. “He couldn’t escape her orbit after all; that’s the tragedy!” I guess, but to me that was not supported at all in the rest of Jaime’s arc. It felt like we were pointedly amassing evidence that he WOULD be able to escape her orbit in the final inevitable confrontation. And then that just didn’t come up at all. 

And I love Brienne and I loved them together but like, I don't care THAT much, this isn't a shipper thing. I'm not surprised that Jaime ended up dying. It just makes no sense for the character for it to happen the way it did. I kept thinking we were going one way and then something would happen where I'd be like "huh??" As with my old friend Christopher Carter, I can't tell if they just didn't convey what they were supposed to be conveying (maybe Jaime WAS supposed to be intending to kill her, or to do SOMETHING other than just go back to hang out? and it didn't come through?) or if they just legit wrote it like that. Like the Brienne storyline was just a way to pass the time before the timer went off and they had to cut all that short and dump it in a drawer and get Jaime back to King's Landing so he could die with Cersei because once they thought of that ending scene 5 years ago or something.

I mean: Jaime was the Kingslayer. We were reminded of that A LOT, and also of the fact that the king he killed was Dany's father, and that Dany's father was "mad" and evil, and Jaime killed him ultimately to protect the city, and then got shit for this for the rest of his life.

And we are also shown that Dany is becoming a Mad Queen, who may be about to follow in her father's footsteps after all.

And Jaime goes to all this trouble to get back to the city, where almost these same events are playing out all over again. And...

...Jaime just goes to hang out with Cersei? And then dies? How is there not a whole situation where there is SOME parallel to the Kingslayer thing that we keep being reminded of and that is repeating itself? Such as:

Jaime slays a Mad Queen, but it's Cersei, not Dany.

Jaime has a chance to slay a Mad Queen, Dany (we've literally already had a conversation about this a few eps ago, that she was worried this would happen), but instead he is able to reach her and show her that she is different from her father and it DOESN'T have to play out this way.

Jaime has a chance to slay a Mad Queen (either could work) and prevent the destruction of the city, again, but this time he makes the other choice and doesn’t do it, and it results in tragedy.

Jaime, transformatively humanized and experiencing non-incestuous love for the first time and no longer at the top of his fighting game, no longer has the killer instinct to pull the metaphorical trigger on slaying whichever queen, and Tyrion pops in to do the job for him.

Like any of these things would have made more dramatic sense than what happened, which was, NOTHING. Jaime doesn't even get near Dany and once he gets to Cersei he's just like "hi! time to die I guess" and then they die.

(Maybe something along these lines will happen in the finale? Again, I'm not sure how at this point.) (I suppose it's not IMPOSSIBLE that Jaime could be pulled out of the rubble, but if he is Cersei might be too, and I am REALLY done with Cersei and do not want to dedicate the finale to trying to kill her YET AGAIN.)

Anyway. I was being flip about male showrunners yesterday but honestly, it feels like they are like, let's just wrap this all up fast so we can have 1.5 hours of battle scene. THE PEOPLE NEED A(NOTHER) BATTLE EPISODE.

It WAS cool seeing Drogon FINALLY destroy the Iron Fleet, but literally, why didn't Dany do that last episode. I couldn't enjoy it because that continues to be so baffling to me.

This is longer than I intended; oh well.

[overthinkingkdrama]

Exit Rant: Mr. Sunshine

[This is intended to be a spoiler free review of Mr. Sunshine but it may include a few minor spoilers throughout. It’s also long as all hell. Enjoy.]

Wow, here I am with my Mr. Sunshine review and it's only...*looks at wrist despite not wearing a watch* nearly three months after the final episode aired. Totally in keeping with this blog's commitment to publishing consistent and relevant content *manic laughter*.

The truth is, even if it hadn't been bad timing schedule-wise, Mr. Sunshine was going to be a difficult drama for me to review. This drama has so much to recommend it in terms of beautiful production, epic scope, unique period setting and blockbuster cast. There is something conceptually mesmerizing about Mr. Sunshine that engaged my basest fangirl and aesthetic sensibilities, but the actual experience of watching the episodes does not live up all the premise promises. What Mr. Sunshine delivers as a drama is, paradoxically, less than the sum of it's parts.

Let's focus on the positive first.

The cast in this drama is god-tier. You're rarely going to find an ensemble cast like this outside of Chungmuro. Your first, second and third leads all can and have headlined films and dramas of their own, and a lot of the stars here (like Kim Tae Ri of The Handmaiden fame) have critically acclaimed film pedigrees.

There's a lot to say about the actors and the performances, and there's no way I'm going to get to all of it. The extended cast is large and exceptionally great, and I'm not going to be able to remember and talk about everyone by name, so I'm going to have to limit myself to the main cast.

It's really the cast that moves heaven and earth to make this script work. To the degree that sometimes it felt that each actor lived in their character and lent flesh and texture where the writing let us down. Kim Tae Ri, played Ae Shin with so much fierceness and unshakable dignity that I couldn't stop cheering for her, even when the plot sidelined her character for what felt like episodes at a time.

For many people, the rousing showstopper performance of the drama was Yoo Yeon Seok as Gu Dong Mae. Early in the life cycle of the drama I recall hearing that Kim Eun Sook got herself embroiled in some controversy because people felt that the Japanese-sympathizer Dong Mae was far too likable considering his political ideology. Some hasty shuffling was done and rather than being characterized as a bald-faced fascist, Dong Mae became more of a freewheeling mercenary gangster-type. This was a positive change in my opinion. I don't want to retread what has already been said (a lot of it by me) about Dong Mae, but YYS has never been and may never be as interesting or as sexy as he was in Mr. Sunshine, in my opinion. He plays the morally grey character with edge and blazing charisma and, if nothing else does, makes the drama worth checking out.

Information broker and enigmatic owner of the Glory Hotel, Kudo Hina, as portrayed by Kim Min Jung and (my personal favorite) and the soulful Hui Seong, born into a blood-soaked privilege he can't escape, played by Byun Yo Han, wonderfully round out the cast and are, if anything, tragic underutilized by the plot. The only person here who perhaps underwhelms is Lee Byung Hun as the titular main character. I don't have strong feelings about him as an actor or as a person one way or the other. I've enjoyed some movies he's been a part of. I do feel that visually he looks too old for baby-faced Kim Tae Ri, but I'm almost used to that kind of thing in Dramaland. His performance is perhaps meant to be restrained--nigh on repressed--but it comes off as a bit bland and wooden. Which isn’t to say he’s bad, and I feel Eugene had a lot of potential to be a very interesting character just...decidedly less interesting than everyone else.

A lot of praise has been heaped on the way this drama looks, and I will agree, it’s a very pretty show. Personally, I disliked how heavily color graded certain scenes, especially outdoor scenes were. I found it a bit distracting and it took away from how otherwise gorgeous some of the scenery in this is when the sky is tan or everything in a scene is tinted blue for some reason. But the production deserves a lot of credit for creating a full and lived in feeling world, for the beauty of the sets and the costumes, the sheer attention to detail, and the way they used all four seasons to set the tone and give you a sense of the passage of time.

And let me just state that during Mr. Sunshine’s run I was decidedly obsessed with it. I posted about it, I talked about it to my friends, I talked several of those friends into watching it with me...and a few of those people still speak to me to this day. When I start criticizing it here in a few seconds, know that doesn’t mean I didn’t get a lot of hours of enjoyment out of this drama or that I think I’m too good for this show. I’ve seen 4 of Kim Eun Sook’s dramas so far and this is easily the best one. It’s not just better than Goblin, DOTS and Heirs, it’s miles better. Is that everything? I think that about covers it.

Now for the bad stuff...

I’ve said this in the past in relation to Goblin, but it bears repeating: Kim Eun Sook is good--possibly even great--at creating singular, iconic story moments and absolute rubbish at developing a cohesive plot that builds tension over multiple episodes and pays off in a logical way. At the time I said it I was basing it off of relatively little experience with her writing, but I’ve seen the pattern repeat itself two more times since then and I’m increasingly convinced that I’m a genius.

I do believe there are extenuating factors that account for the poor pacing of her dramas. The number of episodes and the episode length might not be within Kim Eun Sook’s control and she’s not responsible for poor editing either. Both Goblin and Mr. Sunshine suffer a lot because of bloated run time, and maybe that’s the network’s fault but it leaves plot feeling thin in places, even like it’s futilely spinning it’s wheels waiting for the next important event to come along.

With Mr. Sunshine the issue wasn’t even that there wasn’t enough interesting plot or character backstories to fill 24, hour plus episodes, possibly even more, it was that at times it felt like the drama flatly refused to delve into the interesting details, preferring to leave us miserably treading water in the doldrums of the story. It felt like we had to beg and wait for even morsels of backstory about certain characters--the drama was especially mum regarding Kuda Hina’s history--while the two leads endlessly mooned over one another. How many scenes did we need to watch Eugene and Ae Shin soulfully stare at one another?

Mr. Sunshine never successfully builds momentum until the last 2 or 3 episodes of the run. And while there is a lot of lip service paid to guns and glory and sad endings, but much of the drama feels like it's milling around with hands in pockets waiting for the tragic curtain call. Even the badass sniper heroine is frequently sidelined. It feels like the story remains stubbornly in the set up phase, one step forward and two steps back. It's as though Kim Eun Sook has all of these wonderful toys--great characters, huge budget, interesting time period/setting--and she simply doesn't know what to do with them.

Consistently my frustration with Mr. Sunshine was its inability to effectively incorporate the extended cast into the plot. It feels like all characters exist in separate bubbles waiting for their turn to have a scene. Those scenes are interesting but maddeningly brief, and then they are shuffled backstage once again until it's once again time for their requisite 5-10 minutes of screen time per episode. 

This problem is especially present in the main cast with Dong Mae, Hina and Hui Seong. And that is what is so deeply exasperating about this drama, because there is just enough good peppered in to keep me invested, so many great elements poorly employed. It makes one want to take KES's script away from her and take it home and fix it yourself, because you just know she's not treating it right.

When calamity comes, and it does, it feels disproportionate and somewhat unsatisfying, because the build up didn’t do it justice. The drama ends with a rousing crescendo, but it feels that the individual character arcs were never allowed to reach their full potential. I’m not one to shy away from tragedy, but it left me feeling rather empty.

I wish I could a finer point on it than that, but it’s a murky issue to me. I know I’m not connecting with the story as much as I want to, but it’s hard to put my finger on the exact reason and that just adds to my frustration with it.

I stand by my assertion that this is still the best KES drama I have watched. Thought admittedly I’ve still only seen 4 of them, this one shows the most promise and, I think, the most growth. But it’s not there yet. I don’t know if I could ever watch it again, but I’m glad I watched it once. If for nothing else for the fantastic performances of several old and new favorites. I give Mr. Sunshine an 8.5/10, which is probably too high considering everything I’ve said about it up to this point. However, it’s just too strong in terms of overall production and cast for me to feel good about rating it any lower.

[8-evil-annoying-catboys]

slightly controversial take among people who actually watch stranger things although it is not the least bit controversial among people who don’t: season 4 was kinda fucking disappointing. eddie becoming a hero at the last moment is what makes the most sense for his character arc, but when a show introduces a beloved/mostly-beloved doomed side character in EVERY season it takes away the suspense and the surprise of them dying. also, hopper being alive after being presumed dead at the end of season 3 ruined the suspense of other characters’ peril, specifically max’s, and his own peril in volume 2 after they broke back into the prison. i knew he would be fine and i knew max would be alive at the end of the season. the only thing i didn’t see coming was max (technically) dying and her coma after eleven revives her, i didn’t anticipate there’d be any sort of chink in the plot armor around her and the other main characters for that to happen even if she did come back after. i remember before volume 2 came out, i talked to my coworkers about stranger things who were worried steve would die, and i was like “no dude, if anyone dies it’ll be eddie, which i really don’t want that to happen because i love eddie, but it’s the only thing that really makes sense as a conclusion for his arc, because how the fuck would they convince the town that he didn’t kill 3 people?” and i hate that i was right but it was so predictable that instead of being surprised or even sad i was just pissed because they’ve done this to us every season, except arguably season 3 because billy wasn’t universally beloved and i personally sure as hell hated his guts, but they introduced a hot dangerous guy that people woobified tbh and then killed him so he kinda counts. but in season 1 they did this with barb, season 2 it was bob, season 3 it was billy, so as soon as chrissy died, or arguably as soon as eddie was introduced, you could clearly see his death coming. for me that part was the most irritating of the entire season. i also don’t like the weird shit they’re pulling with steve and nancy and i don’t like the way robin and her love life were treated either. maybe im just gay but nancy had the most chemistry and sexual tension with robin out of anyone else, and the chemistry between her and steve felt like… like, okay, yeah, if you’re around your ex that much by necessity without your current partner around, there’s gonna be some tension, but it felt forcibly amplified and deprived nancy of her agency. i would’ve been much more satisfied if she had the same dilemma of “oh shit, i have a boyfriend, but damn…” but in the process she discovers she’s a bisexual queen, and robin’s band crush just sadly turned out to be straight. it’s cool that it seems like she’s bi so they’re giving us (bisexuals) a crumb too, but it would’ve been cooler if it was nancy, a central character, especially because it wouldn’t have been the writers forcing her back into a relationship that was toxic based on the “if we met now” “changed man” shit. “sorry, steve, that ship has sailed, maybe ya should’ve been more respectful to nancy while ya had the chance, but we’re glad you’re more mature now, also i’m discovering that i’m bisexual because i’m totally into your lesbian best friend” would be much more interesting and satisfying than “well, damn, if we were meeting for the first time now And I Didn’t Have A Boyfriend i’d fuck you so maybe we SHOULD get back together.”

honestly, there’s so many things to complain about, but this post is so fucking long already. let me add a disclaimer though that while i don’t think a story has to be unpredictable to be good, i DO think that if you circle through the same basic narrative structure enough times in a single story, it gets boring and unsatisfying. the comedic rule of 3s (the first time it’s funny, the second time it’s a little funnier, the third time it’s HILARIOUS but any more is overkill) applies to dramatic or tragic works too. if you create a show and you get to season 4, you should switch your basic outline a little. but honestly i think season 3, or even season 2, would’ve been a perfectly fine place to end stranger things, the story had pretty much run its course by the end of season 2 and definitely had by the finale of season 3. but if you’re gonna run a story past it’s natural end, using the same plot structure isn’t just beating a dead horse, that horse is a fucking pulp, my guy.

[curestardust]

if you want: military drama / (realistic?) mecha fights / very plot focused story / most importantly if you liked the previous seasons

And I’m back already with another controversial opinion. I saw the entirety of Full Metal Panic! when I was around 12 and watched anime from CD’s that I borrowed from my classmate. And yet even at that impressionable age where my sisters and I were fawning over and incredibly ecchi and weird anime, I couldn’t care less about FMP. I found it BORING (in capital letters) and from what I remember, this anime was my first introduction to “tragic romance” and tsunderes. Both of which I try to avoid like the plague even now. So here’s IV. 

There are many problems. The OST is not lackluster, it basically doesn’t exist or just plain something that came from “Copyright-Free-Music.com”. This was even more glaring when the anime played the first seasons’ opening theme at the very end which invoked some major nostalgia so there was a huge missed opportunity there. 

Second, the mecha fights are incredibly boring. Like so-so-so sleep inducing. I’m going to say this now; I’m not a big fan of mechs. I don’t care about them. But I’ve seen my fair share of mecha anime and none of them bored me as much as this. 

Next, the lack of interesting characters and lack of interaction. I just didn’t care about anybody. There were like 2 moments where the plot surprised me but that’s it. And when the plot is too boring to carry an anime you fall back on the characters. And if the those are also boring then...?? What’s left?

 Finally, I’d also like to mention the quality. The mechs are 3D rendered so nothing to say about them but the animation wavered from “WOW” to “TF am I even looking at”. It was obvious that most of the money went into the mech fights and the more important physical conflicts. Episode 10 was especially tragic in this department.

Whatever I say here doesn’t matter much however, as this franchise has a cult following similiar to other great oldie anime which I understand completely. If you liked the previous seasons (not the comedy ones), you will most likely like this. If you didn’t, you won’t. As for those who’re new, I wouldn’t recommend jumping in with this one as this is set between 2 previously existing seasons so you won’t understand much. [5/10] (x)

Recommend: HELL Yeah! | Yes | Eh??? | Nope | This anime killed my parents

if you want: to philosophise about the big questions of life (not so much in the anime, just makes you think) / nice music / video game adaptation

Caligula is a video game adaptation. I just wanted to get this out of the way cause this is a turn off for a lot of people. Is it good, though? Not really. Ok so first off, Miu is a virtual singer, like Miku from Vocaloid. Her songs are played throughout the anime, during fight scenes and they’re really nice (including the Opening and Ending songs). The OST has some nice tracks but it could’ve used some variety.

Miu’s voice actor was incredible. Ritsu’s (protagonist) was good as well however the others were QUITE awkward during emotional scenes. 

The colour palette was questionable. The whole world is white and dull and only the fight scenes bring in more colour. I suspect this was done on purpose and while I understand the point of it, that doesn’t better that I had to stare at like 3 colours moving for 24 minutes at times. The character designs were also very meh, I liked a few of them but it was like the creator ran out of design ideas halfway through making them and said “You know what! why don’t we have TWO blonde characters who wear their coats on their back without giving either of them much of a personality! That’ll surely not confuse anyone!”

Oh and that’s where the characters come in. The game has 9 main characters. The average playtime of the game is 26 hours. This anime was 4.5 hours long. I THINK you can all see the problem here. There are maybe 4 characters we get to know a bit but for the others?? I literally didn’t even notice there was one more character in the “squad” for like a whole episode! And this is what lead to possibly the worst offense of this anime. They literally had the characters tell their tragic backstories. As in, there was one episode where they sat in a room and everyone just talked about themselves. Umm??

The setting and the ideas presented were quite intriguing however. Intriguing enough for me to check up on the game which is going to be released on PC next year. I’ll probably check it out, not gonna lie but purely because the anime left me unsatisfied with its lackluster execution. [5/10] (x)

Recommend: HELL Yeah! | Yes | Eh??? | Nope | This anime killed my parents

if you want: cute girls and cute girl friendships / idol anime / (CGI) performances / lots of great and varied songs / basically to just chill after a long day

I’m not sure if writing a review on Aikatsu is even necessary as from experience I can say that like 80% of Precure fans also watch this one so...but here we go anyway.

First off, let me say that you need to be a fan of idol anime. If you aren’t, leave right now. Second, you also need to like the “monster of the week” formula. In this case we have performances instead of monsters but the structure is basically the same. And finally, you need to consider characters more important than plot cause there isn’t much in Aikatsu. 

To put it bluntly, this is an anime for kids, just like Precure but even....kid-friendly-er? There are no high stakes, the outcome is predictable 99% of the time and while that may sound boring, that IS what some people look for. Yes, Aikatsu is a great “come home from a hard day at work and just watch something nice and sweet before going to bed” anime. 

You’ll also be delighted to hear that the music is excellent. While the performances being CGI is a little weird at first, you get used to it. And because they don’t have to hand-draw each performance (jesus) the animation quality very, VERY rarely wavers which is kinda incredible when you consider that there are 178 episodes.

Lastly, I just want to mention the characters. They are driving force of Aikatsu (besides the music and performances) and every one of them is likable. At least to me, but I have a soft spot for cute girls and have a hard time hating any so my experience may be a bit biased. Anyway, only drawback is that the main cast of characters switches around and that if you fall in love with a secondary-character you are pretty much doomed to see them for like 3 minutes in total after their arc ends. So be careful! [8/10] (x)

Recommend: HELL Yeah! | Yes | Eh??? | Nope | This anime killed my parents