Let's talk about what happened with Brookenji.
And no, I don't mean the fallout in Chaos Theory. I mean what happened in the original show. At least, what I believe happened. This is--mind you--total Conspiracy Board style speculation based on little pieces of evidence collected and gathered throughout my years looking into behind-the-scenes stuff and following social media. It would really help if I could find one particularly tweet, but I think it was deleted either in anticipation of spoilers or just because he regularly deletes them.
But...here's the one responsible for that:
Xi.
Xi was the Original Ben, as you can see. Young and nervous. While Ben was...
Well. Ben. Big Ben. But obviously the jock character. The tall, smarmy, rich white guy.
You may be able to see where this is going, but I submit this evidence to you from my memory, and you'll just have to trust me:
One of the showrunners of Camp Cretaceous tweeted ages ago (Season 1-2, well before Season 4 and the Nonsense), tweeted about how there's a disappointing lack of Asian romantic leads in media.
And you know what? He's right. Very much so! Think of ten major tentpole movies from the past thirty years and pull a Japanese, Korean, Chinese, or Vietnamese romantic lead. No, no, no, not the women! The men. An Asian man.
"Oh, well, Shang Chi--" no. Don't get cute.
The fact is, it's just...not a thing that happens. And I think one of the goals with Camp Cretaceous was to change that. Just like they struck ground with Yaz and Sammy being an interracial wlw romance in a children's cartoon, they were gonna put an Asian dude in the romantic partner position.
By now, you obviously see where this is going...and what happened:
If Xi had remained the scared kid, he would have fallen from the train. He would have grown in the jungle and emerged as a wild child. He would have an mmensely different feel in Season 3 where he was breaking away from the group and determining to stay on the island...until the end, when he bonded with the group.
And that is when Brooklynn--or Jules, rather--would have suddenly taken interest in him. Xi and Jules, the wild kid and the rich girl. It would be cute!
But they changed things and took them in a different direction--possibly pretty close to the time the show started. Which meant that the whole first half of the show barely had any setup planned for Kenji and Brooklynn, as they were now known...and they didn't really want to go with Ben and Brooklynn. Especially with how strong the dynamics between Ben and Bumpy and Ben and Darius became.
But they still had to set up the Brookenji romance, and the plans for OG Ben and his Rich Dad to shatter the group dynamic suddenly had to adjust...and you know what? Throwing the romantic strain into it was a pretty good idea! Not bad! But...with the timing of his arrival, the writers only had one season left to them. So they had to jam it all into one season, because there was a little race-swapping done at the last minute that wound up being super-crucial to the endgame.
And personally?
As messy as Brookenji was, I think it was better for them not to remain rigidly focused Xi-Jules and turn it into Ben-Brooklynn. While it would have neatly paired off everyone for the final seasons--Ben and Brooklynn having their Rich Girl/Wild Child romance, Kenji and Darius having their Friends-to-Brothers arc as Kenji betrays the group for his dad (SEE HOW SMOOTHLY THAT WORKS, TOO?), and Yaz and Sammy...well, you know...I think I like what we got with Ben a lot more.
But you can see how the original plan of broad strokes would have been a lot smoother. Turned out that the characters evolved more than planned. And obviously they could have stuck with the Kenji/Darius focus being the main fallout of the group...but that also sort of leaves Brooklynn high and dry with regards to the plot. What's she got left? Though, also...looking back on those seasons...even her romance with Kenji didn't do much for her. Probably because it wasn't really supposed to be a thing. We don't know what the plans for Jules were in the original script, but when those got ditched (PRESUMABLY. THIS IS ALL ME SPECULATING!!!), they had to scramble with her. Maybe she was supposed to have more parental issues. I dunno.
But whatever the truth is, I do still maintain that Kenji was written to be a romantic guy with that in mind. Listening to Brooklynn's color preferences, feeling awkward, being protective...eck, he even kept that rizz through to the new series:
But the bottom line is that Kenji isn't Xi. He didn't have the growth that was planned for Xi, which would have tsngentially influenced Brooklynn/Jules's sudden interest in him.
This is also one of the consequences that comes with having shows compressed and rushed so much in the modern era. If we'd been getting filler episodes over the seasons, they might have been able to start building Kenji and Brooklynn up during the E750 arc, if not sooner.
NOTE: I'm not sure what the scripting and planning timetables were with this show. But from what I've gathered, the characters were swapped well after the conceptual stages. And they made it work! There's still a coherent story! I think the sloppiness just came because they had to hurriedly change tracks on some parts, and we noticed.
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tbh my latest biggest theory for why HoO and onwards is such a dramatic drop in quality and consistency is just. Rick stopped making teaching guides.
Like, the Lightning Thief teacher's guide is SUPER in-depth with even stuff like sources about middle grade child psychology and exact specifications of where he's applying that, explaining what different character's goals/motivations are, their dynamics with each other and their environments, etc etc. Even specifying which specific myths certain plot elements are supposed to reference or be about.
That stuff just doesn't exist for later books. There's activity guides and smaller, significantly more simple teacher guides for later books but they don't go into anywhere NEAR the same level of depth. The TLT one is a full lesson plan that breaks down the book at every level and explains what's going on and more or less why Rick did that. The others are all basically just glossaries of terminology and some simple question guides.
And they didn't even use the TLT teacher's guide for the Disney+ show because they clearly aren't adhering to any of what's discussed in that breakdown of the book.
By creating a teaching guide alongside writing the actual book, that's forcing you to document what you're doing, why, your sources, and information about your characters and the story they're in. It's like an even more in-depth version of a series bible. But that's lacking for later books (and etc) and it shows because that level of thought and depth and attention just isn't there anymore.
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MY BLANKET OF DARKNESS HAS BEEN COMPLETED
✨👁️✨ I AM SO COZY NOW ✨👁️✨
So I started working on this blanket around June of 2022. Got like, maybe half-way through the blanket and then the yarn I needed for the blanket went out of stock at my local yarn shop.
Now I didn't know the yarn would be completely unavailable for like 6 months (until the stop closed permanently), so I just kept on waiting, hoping for it to come back in stock-- but it never did, so in January I finally looked online if I could find the yarn elsewhere and I did, I got the yarn I needed, and finished the blanket.
So it kinda took me 6 months to make this blanket but also not
What made this blanket a truly exciting and fun project for me is that this has been the first blanket I actually made for myself and designed for myself. Like I've enjoyed every single blanket project I've had so far, but having a blanket that's Just For Me is just. It's nice
I originally planned the granny squares out digitally because I wanted to have a fun pattern of different granny squares, something that wouldn't be too busy looking and was carefully planned, and here's what I came up with
I had two versions of the square pattern, one with moon phases right in the middle of it and another without them. I do like how the moon version looked and part of me kinda regrets not making that one, but I'm not sure the moons would have really gone well with the eyes... So I did go with the first version
(Sidenote, it's not on the pattern above but I added extra rows of just black squares at the top and bottom of the blanket, so there's two rows of black instead of just one)
(Sidenote 2, although I knew I wanted the blanket to be mostly black from the begining, I wasn't entirely sure what accent color I wanted to use, it really was depending on what colors the shop had available. Like I used yellow as kind of a default color since it worked nice with the stars and eyes, but I could've gone with some other color too. In the end, because I didn't like the color options for the yarn at the shop I ended up going with a yellow anyways) (Also I tested out a reverse color version with the pastel purple and white base and no eyes, just for funsies, it looks kinda neat)
But yeah, that's how the planning of the blanket went.
The blanket is made of 231 squares in total, 11x21 rows. 186 of the squares are plain black, the rest are patterned. The star squares were the worst to make because of how many strands of yarn I had to weave in, 0/10, would not reccommend.
I used the Cedro 100% wool yarn (reccomended hook size 5, 50g=100m), and it took me about 38 balls of yarn to finish the blanket (including crocheting all the squares together and doing a single round of double crochet around the blanket to finish it off)
This is literally all the yarn I have left from this blanket; one untouched ball of black and three partially used balls.
I gotta admit.
I'm kind of shocked by the size of the blanket. Like I very carefully measured it to make it the exact size to fit my bed, and it fits perfectly. But I'm still kinda shocked how big it is. (Which is why I didn't make the border of the blanket any bigger, even though I could've with the yarn I have)
Also
It's HEAVY
Like, of course it's heavy, it's 100% wool and thick, but MAN I didn't expect it lmao
But that kind of makes it perfect for cold winters especially, it's super warm and the weight makes it cozy- like who needs a weighted blanket when you can have one of these lmao
Now I just need to figure out how to protect the blanket from being covered in my white cat's hair...
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the company i work for decided that its switching from the german formal "You"(Sie) to the informal "you" (Du) in all of our websites so now we have to scour the entire database to change it and i quite frankly hate that, not just bc the unecessary extra work but especially bc its such a weird and unecessary change
i bet its bc everything here is getting englishfied (both literally and culturally it feels like, when my new boss talks its half in english bc every second german word is just replaced by an english one despite there being perfectly fine words for it in german too, its so annoying) and bc they want to sound more personal in hopes of getting more clients bc 'company is your fwiend uwu!!', i know this here is the amercian tm site so you wouldnt understand really but i do not want to be greeted with 'du' by companies, no, thats too personal, you dont know me and im not giving you my data, stay away!!
i guess thats how i would describe it .. the formal you is like a polite distance, like someone you dont know staying outside your personal space, but when its the informal 'you' it feels invasive unless i told you you can call me that, and that goes double for companies
maybe its a small thing that doesnt seem important but i cant stand it, im just a little part time worker doing data work so i got no say in it but the companies founder also announced hes giving his post to his kids some time ago so ...... since then theres been alot of changes and new projects that solely aim to imitate whats popular and whats done by other companies, despite ours being one that is, or used to be, intentionally different, like, that was the POINT, but i guess chasing trends is just too appealing for CEOs
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