#I like to play in the space more than critique the meta if that makes sense

[mudstoneabyss]

my one complaint about how this arc ended. literally nothing came of watching the Sandstorm tape huh

[murfpersonalblog]

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTFqc5yJ3/

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTFqcGyPq/

I hope this isn’t weird but, I stumbled upon these TikTok’s and they reminded me of some your iwtv metas.

@louis-of-nola omg it's not weird at all; thank you for liking my IWTV metas, and for sending me links to these REALLY good analyses of Black & LGBTQ+ people in white media! ❤️ TBH I'm never on apps like TikTok, Twitter or Instagram, so NGL I was bracing myself for rage bait when I clicked the links, only to be pleasantly surprised by these two videos by Mouseabolition on film theory--I sincerely appreciate it!

The first link especially got to me:

Cuz in Mouseabolition's critique of the White Gaze--particularly the White (Female) Gaze--she mentioned one of my favorite horror movies, Get Out.

"A lot of black people I know are able to very deeply care about and empathize with pieces of media that are attempting to speak to our experiences, even when it's done poorly. And we're not necessarily trying to say: 'That's a good thing and that was done well.' But it's the same reason why Chris from Get Out--THE template for black horror--why Chris from Get Out felt like such a new, refreshing horror protagonist. A huge part of what makes Get Out work, and what differentiates Chris from the average horror movie protagonist--outside of just like the surface level analysis of he's a black man--is that Jordan Peele (who is also a black man) was able to write a black character with the realistic higher level of consciousness and alertness towards danger, that all black people have to move with. And that higher level of consciousness is a huge part of why most black people I know can't take white people's horror movies seriously anyway. It's because white people walk around throwing themselves into situations that are destined to create horrific scenarios; and when you are somebody who has to walk around going: 'I can't do that, I'm gonna die!' it's really hard to feel shocked and horrified and surprised when somebody does something that you know damn well is gonna end up with them dead! Black people--particularly like black women and queer folks--don't really have the privilege of walking around with the illusion that we are more or better represented than we are. And so you learn to look at things more critically, and that gets stereotyped as nagging or a bad thing! But it's not, because thinking about things critically, genuinely all the way through, is frequently what leads the black people I know to finding those kernels of good in stories, where most people are just like: 'No, I just think that's silly, it's just dumb.'" (4:10 - 6:02)

I've made four IWTV metas comparing the horrific experiences of Chris in Get Out and Louis in IWTV, cuz I noticed that the core themes of Black men in white spaces wrt vulnerability, exploitation, gaslighting & manipulation resonated between both horror shows in a way that directly reflects IRL experiences.

This is particularly the case when Black people are involved in toxic interracial relationships that end in horrific tragedy for the Black partner. The horror comes into even sharper focus when it's the Black victim who ends up blamed/lied on by their white abuser/murderer that tried to play the innocent victim, weaponizing White Tears to justify/get away with literal crimes--which I've also provided links to before, cuz this BS really happens to us (x).

It's especially effed up when you're dealing with victims of abuse who suffer from mental illness, and are blamed/attacked by the authorities/masses. IRL we see Bipoc mentally ill folk who call the white cops for help and are the ones who get killed (x x); yet the IWTV fandom is overrun with racists who REFUSE to put 2 + 2 together to save their biased AF souls. I felt so vindicated in 2x5 - 2x8 when AMC explicitly showed that Louis & Claudia were telling the truth about the Drop Scene in 1x5, and that Armand had lied the whole time, effing with Louis AND Daniel's memories; after so many racist AF white Lestans & Armstans said the Lou & Claudia were spiteful liars who just wanted poor uwu blorbo Lestat & Armand to look bad cuz they're not Black, like WHAT!? We saw a literal Black LYNCHING happen on screen, where Black!Louis was buried alive & Black!Claudia was burned alive by a bottle-blonde white man in front of a predominately white audience in a "play"/snuff film co-written & directed by 3 non-Black people (Armand, Sam & Lestat); meanwhile the fans INSIST that this show's NOT about race. 🤡 BUFFOONERY!

By race-swapping Louis & Claudia & heightening the abuse they suffered in the books to make their treatment WORSE, AMC was literally talking to the predominately white gaze of the audience that SALIVATES over fetishizing Black people on one hand but still perpetrates injustices against Black people on the other hand; and the racist IWTV fandom proves them right every effing day!

And I also LOVE what MouseAbolition's Tik Tok said about the careful & highly conscious ways that Black people (esp. Black queer people) have to move in society, BECAUSE they're more vulnerable to persecution & penalties & punishment than white people.

Black gay men are marginalized by white AND black people alike; there are Black fans who are also against seeing Louis as a female-coded character. Because this is a white world, the white gaze affects ALL of us, and the panopticon of censure & censorship forces us to police each other and mistreat our own sometimes even worse than white people will--look at emotionally abusive/negligent mothers like Florence who has a particular image to uphold amongst the conservative Catholic Black elite during Jim Crow (vs. white Gabrielle who CAN support her white son's eccentricities); and homophobic women like Grace (who herself is married to a man who's NOT "the man of the house," Levi coddled by Florence & financially supported by Grace's inheritance & Louis' money). But at the end of the day the problem still lies with white (wo)men who weaponize Othering by means of race/gender/sexuality/etc in order to isolate marginalized peoples from systems of support, so that they might be more easily exploited & abused--which I've constantly argued wrt to Loustat.

It grates on my effing nerves when white fans (esp. Lestans) hypocritically talk about gender, culturally appropriating Black queer terminology like "Mother"--which originated in Black gay drag, pageantry & ballroom culture, a la Drag Mothers as exemplified in Paris is Burning, and shows like Ru Paul's Drag Race & Pose--in order to prop up Lestat's femininity and dismiss Louis', all because Louis (as a Black man they've hypermasculinized) doesn't conform to their cis white paradigmatic bias of what femininity & motherhood looks like--which is informed by the white patriarchy to control the social hierarchies of both women AND men, straight & gay alike!

I've adamantly critiqued white female fans' surface-level discrimination against Louis as a female-coded character just because Louis doesn't crossdress--as if Lestat's Mardi Gras dress is the only indexical determiner of gender; esp. for closeted & conservative Black gay men who historically CANNOT safely & freely move in public spaces the way out white liberal LGBTQ+ men can.

Cis white women lusting after Lestat & screaming Yaaas Mother~!, or circling the wagons around Armand cuz they want AMC to move on to Devil's Minion (which not even AR GAF about, lol), just loooove to jump on Louis for being a pimp, for not being feminine enough, for fighting back in 1x5. Black men are hypsersexualized to the point that straight AND gay Black men are perceived as universal dangers to white/non-Black purity, and were lynched by the mob in DROVES whenever if it was even suggested that they stepped out of line; "Louis can sometimes act out."

So yeah, people act like I'm crazy cuz I call this ish out, when the facts are staring them right in the effing face. But I've already been explicitly told by white Lestans that they're deliberately ignoring the red flags cuz it's not fun to turn their brains on & look at their precious blorbos critically and that they'll casually dismiss negative portrayals of Lestat on the show as "poor writing"--

--then the same stans spin their effing tops when they actually pick up a effing book and read for themselves that we're telling the truth when we say AR's darling Lestat's a LEGIT abusive rapist p.o.s.--

--and that Hannah Moscovich was legit for pointing out that it's not character assassination when Lestat's abusive oppressive toxic behavior is effing CANONICAL.

[presiding]

What is your favourite thing about Billie Lurk?

(Answers are obvious possibly but i love when people talk about her👍)

thanks for the ask!! YEAH ME TOO I love when people talk about Billie! I can't say I have a favourite thing specifically, but I can explain why she's my fav. apologies for not taking this qn literally, but -

short answer: she’s really cool

& you can stop reading there, or, for the maybe 2 mutuals who might have time to read this my thoughts on her as a character, her meta, and her character as raw potential...

long answer:

i considered making this entire thing a gush so you could read a gush about Billie. but, part of what draws me to her is that she’s not always well written, and in fandom she’s underrated for a literal protagonist.

since you ask...

billie is a cool character

when I played Dh2 (hadn't played Dh1), I was excited to see a black woman with disabilities who was captaining a massive ship by herself. wow.

then I discovered Billie’s backstory with Deirdre, the way she responded to that, then having to survive while living on the run, and her bisexuality. as well as her history with daud & delilah. fascinating!

she’s an outsider who has so much to lose, and knows what it's like to lose everything - having lost everything not once but three times - but nevertheless speaks truth to power. she's so brave! she went and helped Emily & Corvo and she must have known they might kill her! plus, she’s smart, she’s funny, she gets shit done, she’s gorgeous.

but... the meta

mild critique of fandom & arkane incoming.

skip this bit if you want - you've been warned twice now - jump to tired Hayao Miyazaki and read from there if you'd like my thoughts on writing her.

i thought Death of the Outsider was going to be amazing and then... well. *sad trombone* i've written about that before so i won't keep banging on. i figured others must be disappointed too, so I joined a few fandom spaces in hopes of finding camaraderie.

most people with complaints about DotO didn’t like how the Outsider and Daud were handled. which is valid & I agree. but it seemed like most paid no attention to Billie; when people talk about her it’s with respect to Daud, as opposed to in her own right. you could argue for fandom misogyny because people don’t talk about adult Emily Kaldwin that much either, but in Billie's case, it’s misogynoir (compare & contrast with the popularity of thomas, particularly the popularity of thomas portrayed as a white man for no particular reason that i've been able to discern - i keep asking around, is it in the books???).

i think this is a LOT better now than it used to be, which is fantastic. or perhaps i have found the correct echo-chamber? ha.

ultimately, The Fandom is a fraction of the entire picture, and not even the important bit since The Fandom is not who these games are made for. you can't make money relying on only your hardcore fans even if all of them spent a fortune on merch, this is true for any AAA game.

while it's true that Billie is underrated from a fandom perspective - but Billie as an underwritten protagonist is squarely Arkane’s fault.

it was reasonable when she was a side character - the lack of info in Dh2 makes perfect sense (if anything there was more lore in Dh2 which is kind of wild)-

- but as a protagonist in Death of the Outsider?

.... there’s lousy writing, and there’s whatever is going on with Billie Lurk, a black woman who mostly exists as a foil or saviour for light-skinned characters. In her own game there’s barely any of her own lore except where it's relevant to saving two dudes.

lore hints at, but barely touches on what race means in the Dh universe (xenophobia is stronger in Dh1; separate essay i guess), but Arkane has patted themselves on the back for portraying non-white characters, which feels like the same thing as the aesthetic of diversity we're seeing in advertising currently because it’s in marketing trend guides. it's self-congratulatory and it's a missed opportunity for deeper storytelling.

you can see an example of diversity at its most shallow in the way that Billie’s written: there’s little engagement with her as an entire person with history & wants & preferences, and the world she walks through in that game feels like it has nothing to do with her. you could make a case for alienation as a theme, but then, how do you handle the titular premise of 'Dishonored' without ever letting Billie make changes in an environment without a chaos system? it's disappointing from that angle too.

in my opinion, whatever it's worth, it was an accident Arkane created such an awesome character - they needed someone to betray daud. congrats billie.

all this said, it makes her an underdog as far as characters to enjoy & create art & stories for. it's nice to find so many like-minded, switched on people! <3

billie's character potential

she’s got a wealth of unexplored lore, being deeply intertwined with both Karnaca & Dunwall’s fates & criminal underbellies, as well as her connections to the witches & whalers, and three Empresses.

she’s lived a few distinct lifetimes and in the games we get to meet her at two peaks (KoD & DotO) & a low (Dh2 as Meagan).

her voice is very distinct, her dry & often dark humour is entertaining & fun to write. her perspective is really interesting - she’s had the widest variety of void-powers of anyone canonically, and she’s also lived through the highest highs and lowest lows.

she's got everything going for her :) i couldn't really pick a fav thing!

[jacquelinemerritt]

Dragon Ball Z: Episode of Bardock Abridged Review

Originally posted December 14th, 2015

I’m not sure what’s going on, and I’m okay with that.

The scenario for “Episode of Bardock” set up by the source material is a very strange one. After being hit with Freeza’s planet destroying energy ball, Bardock is somehow sent back in time four thousand years, and he finds himself meeting the previous evolution of the Saiyan race and encountering Lord Chilled, the ancestor of Freeza.

He also apparently gains the power to go Super Saiyan, starting the legends that inevitably spread throughout the galaxy when he uses this power to defeat Chilled, which would seem to break every rule about time paradoxes that we know to exist.1 That scenario creates a problem very different from the problem of Revenge of Cooler; Team Four Star has to figure out a way to get us to suspend our disbelief despite the ridiculousness of this story.

Their solution is a damn clever one. To make this story palatable, they turn its ridiculousness up to eleven and add a layer of meta-commentary to the story itself. Right before Bardock gets transported to the past, the narrator claims that this should be Bardock’s end if it weren’t for the need to merchandise him, and then for good measure, the chorus to “Time Warp” from Rocky Horror plays. The purple Saiyans all sound like the exact same impression of Kermit the Frog, and their names are all misspelled derivatives of 90s rappers, with town doctor being named Dr. Dray and his son being named Twopock.

Lord Chilled, Freeza’s ancestor, is even more eccentric and demanding than his future progeny, and he has the most ridiculous British accent and high pitched voice of any character in the series. When Bardock realizes what is going on, it is the ridiculousness of this scenario that causes him to transform into a Super Saiyan and gain the power to defeat Chilled in time to Beethoveen’s Ode to Joy.

And finally, we cut to Goku telling Gohan this tale about his grandfather, who immediately questions the logical flaws in the scenario only to discover that hearing this story had actually all been a dream. Whether or not any of this actually happened to Bardock is left completely unresolved, and we the audience are left more confused than the story’s scenario ever could have made us on its own.

Rating: 5/5

If you enjoyed this review, consider supporting me on Patreon.

Stray Observations

1Unless time travel in the Dragonball Z: Abridged universe works like time travel in Lost, but as we find out in future episodes, it doesn’t.

This episode also serves as a much more effective introduction to Bardock’s character than “Father of Goku” did. His first reaction to meeting the purple Saiyans is to enter into an unfathomable rage, he critiques the people terrorizing the purple Saiyans for doing so ineffectively, and he casts shame upon the purple Saiyans for attempting to praise him. He’s also nicknamed “Violent Savior,” and if that doesn’t tell you a lot about him, I don’t know what will.

Narrator: “So ends the tragic fate of Bardock. Or so you’d think, if you didn’t know a thing about merchandising!”

Bardock’s “spiker” train of thought is very similar to a lot of the things we see Goku thinking.

Chilled: “In honor of their deaths, my men shall now and forevermore be given the names of fruits! Pineapple, bring us to planet Plant.” Yellow Alien: “So am I Pineapple?” Chilled: “Yes!”

Henchman: “Hello. We are the Space Police.” Aice Cube: “Man, fuck the police!”

Space Police: “We are here to collect space criminals and other ne’er-do-wells.” Dr. Dray: “I can assure you we have already exiled Chris of the clan Brown from our planet.”

So, if the purple Saiyans get pregnant by being hurt, does that mean I have to kinkshame an entire race?

Chilled: “Because of Raisins! Raisins is my intelligence officer.”

Chilled: “These people seem to have great respect for you. What is your secret?” Bardock: “Maybe it’s because I don’t look like a giant purple and orange tampon.”

[kamenwriter]

"Space Babies" and "The Devil's Chord" reactions.

Spoilers I'm sure behind the cut.

Space Babies

"It was a genocide" wait I thought the time war got trapped in a painting and then...oh wait the Master killed them all during the Chinbal run, didn't he? God we could just ignore that whole mess but noooooo

The butterfly gag...sigh.

"we made it...we went to the stars" like, I get the whole "hopes and aspirations thing" but when we've got billionaires trying to sell us colonizing mars when it would be a hundred times cheaper and easier to save the planet we're living on, I'd rather a solar punk future not a colonization future. Am I being exceptionally cynical? Maybe. These are just "reactions" not a proper critique.

I can only imagine how difficult filming with all the babies was.

Making the Doctor adopted and all about "embracing what makes you unique" is good Timeless Child damage control but I dunno the idea of him being a renegade of a detached society appeals to me more than him being THE ULTRA SPECIAL TIME BABY.

The AI might actually be an AI?

AND there's something mysterious about Ruby because of course there is.

Star Trek ass looking uniforms on the crew.

"The planet down below refused to stop the babies from being born, but refused to take care of them afterwards" hey now this is getting close to some proper Doctor Who.

"It's like a children's story" this is is a good set up for the mystery here's hoping they stick the landing. Now watch it being some alien that feeds of psychic energy and manifested as the babies fears or something.

The incredibly literal baby raising machine made a bogeyman out of boogers to give the babies a monster to fear. Okay. Acceptable.

I totally understand the Doctor empathizing with the bogeyman but why the babies?

The constant babiesSPACEbabies bit got old so fast.

And a fart joke.

And don't forget, Ruby Sunday is super special and not just some random person we can't have random people do incredible things in Doctor Who nope nope nope

The Devil's Chord

The visual representation of The Maestro sucking out music and eating it is some fucking comic book shit and I am here for it.

The Maestro starts playing the intro oh god don't let this character be meta don't let this character know they're in a story don't fucking lay on that crutch.

"What about my clothes?" Both of those retro ass fits would work fine in the 60s. I'll concede to the hairstyle change though.

...trying to visually communicate the Maestro's influence on reality is definitely a trick. Again this feels exceptionally comic booky (That's a compliment).

Oh that's right Susan was potentially killed during whatever bullshit killed the Time Lords during the Chinbal run.

I do enjoy a camp villain.

The Doctor using the Sonic to actually do something sonic. What a refreshing change of pace

Ugh don't wink at the camera.

"I was born in 2004" well I'll just turn to dust, then.

Power scaling doesn't just affect shonen series the Doctor has to go up against literal gods now...

Callback to the Sound of the Drums yeah okay.

"There's a hidden song deep inside her soul" SPARE ME FROM THIS TROPE OF COMPANIONS BEING SUPER SPECIAL.

"What is this song?" "Christmas" actually it's the Carol of the Bells which was originally a Ukrainian song called Shchedryk do your research.

MuSIC BaTTle hahahaha

DONT WINK AT THE DAMN CAMERA

I want to make this clear I have no problem with a big musical number at the end but making it a meta joke I wanna bash my head in with a hammer. I'M SO FUCKING SICK OF META WRITING.

So in summation Space Babies was kind of what I expect from nuWho nothing amazing I would have loved The Devil's Chord if it weren't for the "oh Ruby is some secret incredible thing" and all the metaphorical and literal winks at the camera.

[onesunofagun]

With Zelda, I think you gotta acknowledge that-- not from a place of ineptitude or lack of care-- the Devs have always been like:

Which is fine. But also, without throwing out the canon details given in the games themselves, I think you gotta be able to take that as free leave to gather up all the franchise materials and be like:

In both a critical and joyful way.

I think if Zelda makes you feel critical more than not, maybe it's not all that good for you to engage with it. I imagine that there's probably a lot of people like that, who kinda like the vibes or were players in their childhood but don't really want to engage the actual media, who are more comfy in the sub-fandom space of heavily reimagined Zelda fanworks. The way I see that is, they're curating their experience heavily.

I'm a fan of the core and official franchise materials mostly, but from my perspective-- there is a lot of lore to play with, and there are intended and interesting themes all over the place. There are a lot of connections that are there on purpose. There is subtext to find. There are a few overarching tales that do have some masterful craftsmanship behind them and they aren't happy accidents fans make up. These things are canon, they are cornerstones that help make the franchise overall fantastic. I think the Zelda team have been consistently passionate and skilled people throughout most of the franchise who produced excellent works.

But not all things intended are good, and not all good is intended, and sometimes there's unhappy accidents, mishandling, biases, and questionable themes and messaging too. There are intended connections that have negative implications. It also doesn't mean that there hasn't been a decline in quality in certain games or glaring issues in others.

Both can be true.

Being realistic about the issues and talking about them is important, but I think some slide entirely into a habit of accepting really bad faith takes at face value. I think that loses a lot of the usefulness of effective critique-- which isn't supposed to be a solely negative thing, on its own. It goes both ways.

In a franchise that hugely centres itself around player investment and interpretation, while also not prioritising the narrative intention over gameplay experience as a whole because of this, sometimes there are roads that lead nowhere in terms of overall story. This can be both a disappointing thing, and a good one. Because I, as the fan, am invited to fill them in, and sometimes that's also clearly part of the intent-- and I don't see that as me doing some kind of heavy lift. If I felt that way, I probably wouldn't be a fan.

Regardless of whether people appreciate that approach or not, I think it's important when engaging with media that we can identify when this is the case. Like when something is a conscious choice and when it's not. Whether or not something is actually a failure or weakness of structure in the media itself, or if there's a different reason for a feeling of disconnect in reception. Because there's a difference there between dissection of the meta in how something is presented and why and what the result was, versus criticism or deeper analysis of its conception and construction and chosen ingredients.

One examines reception and impact of the final product -- which is a critical part of the discussion in Zelda especially given its larger reliance around the player interpretation-- and the other looks at the mechanics of how it came to be that and why. Those are deeply related, but also very distinct, focuses in these discussions.

I think if I start lovingly pulling apart Zelda, it's important to me that I have a clear idea of which mode I'm in.

Y'know what I mean?

[n30b1nary]

adding this on seperately because on a more serious and critical note

there's the element of meaner dialogue which is just a personal ick for me sometimes when people choose to be cruel even in "play pretend", but at the end of the day, it's your playthrough and if you're not hurting anyone in real life! that's fine

but the poor fantasy racism dialogue surrounding baldurs gate 3 and a lot of fantasy interactive media just requires another level of critique when it comes to the player's violence and cruelty

like it is just WILD to me how even within my first few hours of playing, the game is already drawing on very real life issues such as (but not limited to) the refugee crisis and mass murder and giving the players choices and quests to carry this out .. ... are there any in-game consequences for this?? im not at all far into the game/have much knowledge on what happens late game but especially in interactive media that video games are, it's just beyond to me how we are given access to be horrible horrible people just with a click of a button

something ive also struggled with in the game so far is not knowing if there is nuance to the fantasy racism, specifically with the goblins. it is implied that on a meta-textual level, the goblins should be killed because obviously they are all inherently evil and don't deserve a second thought. to me, this given and "natural" alignment (which dnd is infamous with from the get-go, i.e. orcs, drows, goblins, tieflings) by the video game itself has the same feeling of in-game tiefling/drow racism. doesn't that defeat the point of having the fantasy racism conversation at all if it's also already happening at game-level?

at the end of the day, i can imagine someone telling me, "if you don't like it, don't play it," but i think you have to lack so much critical thinking skills and empathy in the real world to believe that "it's just not that serious"

don't get me wrong, i still am enjoying the game very much and do intend to continue playing—i'm also not implying we should remove racism or xenophobia from fantasy media altogether—but when creating video games and dialogue around heavy topics, can we not afford to think a little more? to love a little more? to make this a productive space to make self-improving video games and self-improving people?

also! some good reads on this topic:

Baldur’s Gate 3: A Case Study in Fantasy Racism by Rose Yang

The Fantasy Racism In Baldur’s Gate 3 Affected Me More Than I Thought It Would by Tessa Kaur

keep being excited to start a dark urge playthrough so i can do the "arent you tired of being nice, dont you want to go ape shit" and do the kill kill evil evil BUT picking already slightly meaner dialogue options and killing more than baseline necessary is doing numbers to me .....

ive just stared at my screen for minutes now wondering if i should go back to a save because i accidentally lit someone on fire

[faelapis]

one thing i forgot to say about belos, i don't really buy the whole "belos is supposed to play on the idea of a villain about to become sympathetic, but then he isn't!" angle as a response to criticism.

for one thing, there's a lot of people talking past each other here. it seems like whenever someone critiques how he's played, there's this underlying assumption that the people critiquing it MUST want him to be a sad woobie. i don't need that, i just want him to be more compelling. so please respond to what people are actually saying.

secondly, i just don't think that's a reasonable argument in a show where every other moral is the most obvious shit you've ever heard. don't lie, be nice, found family good, propaganda and authoritorianism bad (but not bad as in a compelling story that has deep or complex themes, just bad as in "evil power hungry meanies are bad.")... but i'm supposed to believe that despite being played totally straight, he's actually a subtle and nuanced commentary on setup and payoff and how you've grown to "expect" someone like him to be deep or redeemable? please.

thirdly, and perhaps most important to me personally... its a boring reason for your villain to be written like he is. you have to be Extremely Online to think too much redemption is a real "problem" in animation. if you ask a normie to define "kids cartoons morals" they would say it has simple morals, the good guys win while the bad guys are killed or defeated. i swear some of y'all are just angry that steven universe dared to exist in a sea of more typical storytelling where the main villain is rarely ever redeemed.

if you look at the broader history of the medium as a whole, you can probably find more of the specific villain death where someone falls from a high place than ANY scenario where a big bad is redeemed.

i could go on. these are just the first gifs i could find. (picture description: gaston, the evil queen from snow white, frollo and mcleach from rescuers down under all falling to their deaths.)

there's just this extreme paranoia in cartoon fandom spaces lately that - i genuinely think just because steven universe and undertale came out around the same time - we're somehow never gonna get a real villain who isn't redeemed again.

meanwhile, the reality is like. not that at all.

(picture description: horde prime from she-ra and the princesses of power, simon from infinity train, and emilia from kipo and the age of wonderbeasts).

so if your villain only exists to say "wow there's no evil villains who don't get redeemed anymore, i'm gonna make one just to be meta-commentary on how there's no evil villains anymore." all i can say is like... cry more? and watch something other than steven universe, i guess? because redeeming your big bads is the rare exception, not the norm. yet its somehow completely dominated Cartoon Discourse (tm) as if its redefined the rules of the whole medium.

(just to get our terminology straight - by "big bad" i mean the main villains, the primary antagonists, the people in control who are the reason bad plot things happen. they are rarely redeemed. sure, you get more redemption out of sad abused woobie lackeys... but if you take issue with THAT, you might have less sympathy for abuse victims than you think. like. geez. most of the time they aren't even villains so much as trapped in their circumstances. just be born good, i guess. most media has a true evil big bad even if the abused lackey is redeemable anyway.)

and as someone likes redemption, and is therefore a privileged neoliberal hack who has never experienced abuse or trauma myself, according to my haters, i think thats just... a bit sad. we couldn't have One (1) cartoon redeem its supposed big bads without 3+ years of hysterical crying and posturing from every reactionary fuckhead in cartoon spaces that thats it, SU exists, so from now on its Brave and Revolutionary to have an evil villain.

give me a fucking break. get over yourselves. and if thats the intention behind creating belos (which i don't think, so i'm not here for your analysis of why he really exists, but if), then i extend that invitation to the owl house writers as well.

[magicpotatoobsession]

Heya!!

So there is one thing that has been bugging me about Given.

When we're introduced to Mafuyu, we see that he is ABSOLUTELY CLUELESS about anything related to music. Even till as far as what a band is...

Which is something I find weird since his ex-boyfriend Yuki was the lead singer of a band...

Like, how does that make sense!? I'm sure if your significant other is involved in music, you'll develop some basic idea of how it works right?

Or does Mafuyu's initial clueless, reveal something much more toxic about his relationship with Yuki than meets the eye?

That is a really good question! I think Kizu actually exaggerated that part of the story to make a key point.

Notice how all the music songwriting, compositional, lyrics process at the start of the manga was all done ALONE?

What this shows is that the characters, when they are still figuring out what to truly express, its a space of vulnerability they don't want others to see. Kizu was exaggerating the lack of Mafuyu's involvement in music in his MafuYuki relationship, in my opinion, is to emphasize just how much emotional distance Yuki actually was placing between himself and Mafuyu.

He loved Mafuyu so much, but in his process of "self-expression" through music, where things might not be perfectly expressed, he couldn't bare the thought of Mafuyu seeing that imperfect, vulnerable part of him. So he hid the music part of himself from Mafuyu. And that all ties into the FACADE that Yuki was upholding for Mafuyu and everyone around him.

But notice how different Ue is.

The moment Ue played that chord, EVERYTHING CHANGED for Mafuyu. He was thinking, "WOW someone (subconsciously that looks so cute), literally fixed my strings in two seconds then played music in front of me!"

Ue taught Mafuyu so thoughtfully and genuinely complimented Mafuyu on his progress but also critiqued Mafuyu when the music was not up to par. Ue's NEVER been a facade kind of guy. That why Mafuyu was so excited about learning music. He's never been 'given' this level of honesty before!

Ue through teaching and rehearsing Mafuyu, realised that creating music didn’t have to be a SOLO process! This largely contrasted the start of the manga where we see Ue composing mostly on his own as nicely pointed out by you @cherilyn-rose in your post that Ue composed most of Fuyu no Hanashi by himself.

Leading up to the CAC, Ue was INVOLVING Mafuyu in his own "self-expression process" of SONGWRITING AND COMPOSITION.

What this tells me is that in that CAC arc, Ue was emotionally ready to commit to the relationship, vulnerability, imperfections and all.

But Mafuyu currently isn't, writing lyrics is still a SOLO thing for him.

And all this created a sense of disconnection for Ue and now Ue unfortunately resorted back to SOLO songwriting in order to reach Mafuyu through the Yuki-Ueno song. (WHICH THEN UNFORTUNATELY PROPELLED A SENSE OF DISCONNECTION FOR MAFUYU ALL OF WHICH BUILT UP TO THE AGONY THAT IS CHAPTER 43 T_T)

It's only once we see both Mafuyu and Ue composing the music AND writing lyrics together, that's when we will know that BOTH PARTIES are finally ready to emotionally commit to the relationship.

Kizu I believe exaggerated Mafuyu's lack of musical knowledge to highlight the contrast between the MafuYuki relationship and Mafuyama relationship and just how much more open Ue is with Mafuyu! I hope that answers your question!

P.S I wrote another post that covers everything about Mafuyu's complex relationship with music if you're interested to do some further reading about the topic covered in this post. I touch on parental trauma, romantic trauma and Mafuyu's core needs and wants.

---

Masterlist of my Given Metas

If you like what you read, all I post is basically Given analysis content! Give my blog a follow to be notified of new posts! #metapotato

[attemptsonherlifepdf]

bojack horseman and bo burnham: the art of acting like you’re acting and the comedy of misery

at the core of bojack horseman, raphael bob-waksberg’s 2014 comedy, is a story about the relationship between performance and depression. the protagonist of this renowned tragicomedy is best described as a sympathetic villain; he is shown to clearly be in the wrong across various events of the show, and is explicitly referred to as a bad person, but the audience is granted deep access to his personal struggles, resulting in some portions of the audience finding themselves on bojack’s side. the duality of his character is complex, but can be broken down into some core components, that all stem from the impacts of stardom and performance. the standup comedy of bo burnham arguably echoes this sentiment in real time. having been a performer from a young age, burnham creates work that serves as a satirical commentary on the life of entertainers. he uses original songs to explore the reliance upon and resentment for his performative nature both onstage and within his personal life. both the comedian and the netflix show are widely understood to be thinly veiling their critiques of the entertainment industry behind a particular brand of witty and absurd humour.

both bojack and burnham’s content openly criticises their audiences and explicitly states the manufactured nature of the narrative the audience is fed. in the fifth season of bojack horseman, the show satirises itself by having bojack star in a police procedural drama, parts of which are actively written by other characters to reflect events of bojack’s life. the titular character he plays, philbert, is the epitome of selfish male angst, and an example of what bob-waksberg’s show could have been; another story about a sad and angry man whose guilt supposedly makes up for the people he has hurt. according to bojack, philbert teaches us ‘we’re all terrible, so we’re all okay’, an interpretation that is harshly disputed by diane: ‘that’s not the point of philbert, for guys to watch it and feel okay. i dont want you, or anyone else, justifying their shitty behaviour because of the show.’ this moment is a direct reaction to some of the online reception bojack horseman has received. various circles of the show’s fanbase have found themselves relating to the protagonist to the point of defending his untoward behaviour, a response not intentioned by the show’s creators. this is not the only example of bob-waksberg’s ability to make his work self-evaluative. in season six’s exposure of bojack and sarah lynn’s problematic relationship, characters question their sexual encounter from the first season. the writers use this as a way of examining their own choices, and the harmful tropes they played into when using this exploitative sexual encounter as a gag. this self-evaluative quality is what sets bojack apart as a show that assesses the performance it participates in, much like the comedy of bo burnham.

bo burnham is known for directly addressing his audience, particularly in terms of discouraging idolisation and parasocial relationships. some examples of this manifest as responses to hecklers rather than a planned bit in the show, for instance:

heckler: i love you!

bo: no you don’t

heckler: i love the IDEA of you!

bo: stop participating!

he actively addresses the issues posed by being an entertainer, and encourages the audience to understand and recognise that his onstage persona is just that: an exaggerated persona. not once does burnham claim to be fully authentic onstage, and even moments of authenticity we see in his latest special, inside, are staged. we make the assumption that having the physical setting of a stage stripped away grants us a more personal look at the entertainer’s life, but he makes it clear that even in his own home we still see the aspects he has carefully constructed rather than the full truth. arguably though, parts of the show really are authentic; in his monologue during make happy, bo deconstructs his own show in a way that is similar to bojack horseman’s later seasons, admitting that all he knows is performing and thus making a show about the more mundane and relatable aspects of life would feel ‘incredibly disingenuous.’ in his attempts to separate himself from this onstage persona he actually manages to blur the lines between what is acting and what is now part of his nature as a result of his job. this notion is echoed in bojack horseman as bojack’s attention seeking nature is attributed to his years acting in front of a camera every day.

bo suggests that the era of social media has created a space in which children’s identities mimic that of an entertainer like himself, describing the phenomenon as ‘performer and audience melded together.’ in this observation he criticises the phenomenon. bo attempts to force the audience to recognise the ways in which their lives are becoming shaped by the presence of an audience and to some extent uses his own life as a warning tale against this. he points out the way in which the ‘tortured artist trope’ means that your cries for help or roundabout attempts of addressing mature themes such as substance abuse, mental illness and trauma become part of that on stage persona and therefore become part of the joke. both bo and bojack address these topics in more discrete manners earlier in their careers, but this eventually becomes expected, and thus they are forced to explicitly detail their struggles with these topics in order to be taken seriously. even then, portions of the audience are inclined to see it as part of the persona or as something that fuels the creators creativity and thus does not need to be addressed as a legitimate issue. the emphasis on creating a character or persona promotes the commodification of mental illness: any struggle must be made into a song or a joke or a bit, must be turned into part of the act in order to have value. this actually serves to delegitimise these emotions and create a disconnect between the feeling and the person, as it becomes near impossible to exist without feeling as though you are acting. even when an artist’s cries for help become blatant, they continue to go ignored because now they serve the purpose of creating content that criticises the industry they stem from. online audiences can be seen as treating bo burnham and his insightful work as existing to demonstrate the negative effects entertaining can have, and because this insight is useful or thought-provoking to audiences, he is almost demanded to keep entertaining and creating. in response to this demand, his work becomes more meta and his messages become clearer, and the more obvious his messages, the more people he reaches. this increases audience demands and traps entertainers in a cycle fraught with internal conflict.

during bojack’s second season, bojack’s date asks him, ‘come on, do that bojack thing where you make a big deal and everyone laughs, but at the same time we relate, because you're saying the things polite society won't.’ this moment exemplifies how aspects of his genuine personality have now become a part of his persona and this is demanded of him in genuine and serious situations, undermining the validity of his emotional reactions. he immediately makes a rude comment to the waitress at the restaurant they’re in and satisfies his date by performing that character he has set himself out to be. some circles of the fan base have argued that bojack is written as a depiction of somebody with borderline personality disorder, offering a psychoanalytical lens through which to view this notion of performance. a defining symptom of borderline personality disorder is a fluctuating sense of self; having grown up on camera, being demanded to perform to others as young as six years old, bojack’s sense of self will have been primarily dictated by the need to act.  whether this acting is for the sake of comedy, or as a representation of masking his mental illness, when they need to act is taken away bojack entirely loses his sense of self and relapses into his addictions: ‘i felt like a xerox of a xerox of a person.’ burnham’s depictions of depression run along a similar vein; in his new special he poses the idea that his comedy no longer serves the same personal purpose it once did for him. he questions ‘shit should I be joking at a time like this?’ and satirises the idea that arts have enough value to change or impact the current global issues that we are facing. burnham’s ‘possible ending song’ to his latest special, he asks ‘does anybody want to joke when no-one’s laughing in the background? so this is how it is.’ implicit in this question is the idea that when the audience is taken away and there is nobody to perform his pain to, he is left with his pain. instead of being able to turn his musings and thoughts into a product to sell to the public, he is forced to just think about them in isolation and actually face them, an abrupt and distressing experience.

the value of performance and art is questioned by both bojack and burnham, particularly during the later years of their respective content. burnham’s infamous song, art is dead, appears to be a direct response to the question ‘what is the worth of art?’ he posits that performing is the result of a need for attention (‘my drug’s attention, i am an addict, but i get paid to indulge in my habit’) and repeatedly jokes throughout his career that the entertainment industry receives more respect that it deserves (‘i’m the same as you, im still doing a job or a service, i’m just massively overpaid’). his revelations regarding the inherent desire for attention that runs through all entertainers is frequently satirised in bojack horseman. bojack is comically, hyperbolically attention hungry and self-obsessed, and the show has a running gag in which he uses phrases along the lines of ‘hello, why is nobody paying attention to me, the famous movie star, instead of these other boring people.’ his constant attempts to direct the focus of others towards himself result in bojack feeling like ‘everybody loves you, but nobody likes you.’ his peers buy into his act and adore the comical, exaggerated, laughable aspects of his character, but find very little room to respond to him on a genuinely personal level because of this. interestingly, bojack appears to enjoy catering to his audience and the instant gratification it produces, whereas bo burnham becomes increasingly candid about his mixed feeling towards his audience. ‘i wanna please you, but i wanna stay true to myself, i wanna give you the night out that you deserve, but i wanna say what i think and not care what you think about it.’ he admits to catering to what audiences want from him, but resents both the audience and himself in the process as it reveals to himself which parts of his character are solely for the sake of people watching him.

within bojack horseman, this concept is applicable not only to the protagonist, but to the various forms of performer demonstrated in the plot. towards the show’s end, sarah lynn asks ‘what does being authentic have to do with anything?’ to which herb kazzaz responds, ‘when i finally stopped hiding behind a facade i could be at peace.’ this highlights the fact that because entertainers are demanded to continue the facade, they do not receive the opportunity to find ‘peace.’ this sentiment is scattered throughout the show, through a musical motif, the song ‘don’t stop dancing.’ the song stems from a life lesson bojack imparted to sarah lynn at a young age, and becomes more frequently used as the show progresses and bojack’s situation worsens.

sarah lynn is also used to explore the value of entertainers; in the show’s penultimate episode, she directly compares her work as a pop icon to the charity work of herb, arguing that if she suffered in order to produce her work. it has to mean something. she lists the struggles she faced when on tour: ‘i gave my whole life...my manager leaked my nudes to get more tour dates added, my mom pointed out every carb i ate, it was hell. but it gave millions of fans a show they will never forget and that has to mean something.’ implicit in this notion is the idea that entertainment is the epitome of self-sacrifice. there is a surplus of mentally ill individuals within the industry, largely due to the nature of the industry itself, but some may argue that the cultural grip the industry has, and the vast amounts of respect and money it generates annually, gives the suffering of these prolific individuals meaning.

the juxtaposing responses entertainers feel towards their audiences manifest as two forms of desperation: the desperation to be an individual who is held accountable, and the desperation to be loved and validated. we see both bojack and bo depict how they oscillate between  ‘this is all a lie’ and ‘my affection for my audience is genuine’, or between ‘do not become infatuated with me im a character’ and ‘please fucking love my character i do not know how to be loved on a personal level.’ bojack explicitly asks diane to write a slam piece on him and ‘hold him accountable’, similar to bo’s song ‘problematic’ in which the hook includes the phrase ‘isn’t anybody gonna hold me accountable?’ for his insensitive jokes as a late teenager. their self-awareness is what enables their self-evaluative qualities, but self-awareness is its own issue. bojack grapples with a narcissistic view of his own recognition of his behaviour before settling on a more nuanced, albeit depressing take. originally he makes the assumption that in recognising the negative aspects of himself, he is superior to those who behave similarly: ‘but i know im a piece of shit. that makes me better than all the pieces of shit that don’t know theyre pieces of shit.’ eventually, during his time at rehab he is forced to reconcile with the fact that self awareness does not, to put it bluntly, make you the superior asshole, it just makes you the more miserable one. the show does, however, make a point to recognise how the entertainment industry protects ‘pieces of shit’, prioritising their productive value over how much they deserve to be held accountable, demonstrated using characters like hank hippopoalus. the show itself obviously stems from the entertainment industry, as it is a form of media produced by netflix, one of the most popular streaming platforms available. bojack horseman and bo burnham represent the small corner of the industry that is reflective enough to showcase the damage it inflicts. this is powerful in terms of education and awareness, and urges audiences to question their own motives and versions of performance, but the reflection alone is not powerful enough to help the artists in question. burnham’s candid conversations surrounding his mental health continue to reveal a plethora of issues somewhat caused or sustained by the nature of his career. within bojack horseman, bojack is only able to stop hurting other characters when those characters construct a situation that forces him to face consequence, his introspection alone is not enough. while bojack ends on a message of hope, suggesting to the audience that reverting back to the status quo is not the only acceptable way for events to end, it leaves stinging lessons and social commentary with the audience regarding the unnatural and damaging narrative that performers live through. on a similar but markedly different note, bo burnham’s work and personal progression is playing out in real time, and not in a way that is as raw and genuine as it appears. each bit is planned, even the most vulnerable moments that appear unplanned and painful. his latest special is not entirely devoid of hope, but does translate to audiences as a somewhat exaggerated look around the era of social media and the development of performance, using himself as an example.

the absurdist humour that often acts as a vehicle for poignant statements or emotionally provocative questions is very specific to each media creator. bob-waksberg’s use of puns, tongue twisters and entirely ridiculous circumstances served to simultaneously characterise his points as an expected part of the show’s style of humour, similar to bojack’s emotional instability, but also to make them appear gut-punching in comparison to the humour. burnham’s work is similar in that poignant but blunt statements are often sandwiched between absurd and exaggerated jokes, making them stand out via contrast but not giving the audience too much time to dwell upon them as they are said. performance art is second nature to entertainers, and is presented a an issue that is infiltrating the general population via social media rather than solely affecting the ‘elites’. bojack horseman and bo burnham present the duality of artists simultaneously attempting to level the playing field and increase their chances of survival in the industry, and encourage audiences to know that everyone is bluffing and you’ll never have the right cards anyway.

i.k.b

[thethermocline]

I've been in fandom for over a decade. Writing fanfic, reading fanfic, reading metas, so on and so forth. Tolkien has been my biggest obsession, but plenty others have come and gone. I was on fanfiction.net, even some live journal, and then of course ao3.

I don't believe in public critiques of individual fanfics, generally. We're all doing this for fun, and putting our work online for free. So I don't condone harassment or flaming a work in the comments or anything. "Don't like don't read." Okay.

But I do think that it's acceptable, and even necessary sometimes, to call out wider trends. And there's something that's really been bothering me. I don't like drama, and I didn't want to make this post for the longest time for fear of getting caught up in some. But there's a distinct possibility that I'll lose most access to the internet in the next month or two. So I've decided, y'know what, let's do this.

Fandom has a massive incest problem.

It is not any one fandom in particular, though some are certainly worse than others. But it's a general trend throughout, and it's growing.

Now - okay - let's be clear about a few things. I'm not pro censorship. I'm also, like... I'm writing a post on Tumblr that tbh I expect like three people to read. I have no power to censor anything anyone wants to post. But I think it's fair that, just as y'all have that right, I have the right to comment on what I'm noticing. Because it's not just that incest keeps popping up; it's how it's being portrayed.

I am a victim of incest. I can tell you, it is not a ~forbidden love.~ It is not sexy. It is horrific. Even the mildest cases. There's a difference between exploring mature topics and romanticizing abuse, and a lot of fandom is firmly in that second category. So then what that means is a space is being made where victims won't feel comfortable but perpetrators will. I've even seen victims mocked for raising concerns. And I just. I just want people to be aware of that. It does matter, it does have an impact. I've been in fandom for years, just watching more and more and more sibling ships come up...If there are siblings in a franchise there's gonna be hot! Sexy! Fic of them getting it on....... A lot of people just seem used to it now. If someone says they're not into that sort of thing, I've noticed they often go out of their way to stress that if anyone else present does like it then that's fine and they're not judging.

I'm a very laissez-faire, "curate your own online experience" type of person. But I do think that it's a bit weird to fall over yourself to assure people that if they ship parents with their children they're totally valid.

Offline, I have found that I need to be careful about mentioning any aspect of the incest I survived. The terrible thing is just, there's a non zero chance the person I'm talking to will be aroused by my trauma. It has happened before. I am not blaming fandom for this. But fandom is absolutely part of the societal romanticizing of ~forbidden love,~ even to the point of eroticizing abuse.

At one point the fandom I was in was so intolerable to me that I thought about writing an incest story myself - the way it actually is. Because I've never seen an incest fanfic that portrayed it honestly. They don't seem interested. It's curious to me, how disconnected fandom's idea of incest is from how it plays out irl. I do not know why this is.

I've said most everything I wanted to... Thank you for listening.

[animepopheart]

Wonder Egg Priority, Episode 11: “The Temptation of Death”?

Wonder Egg Priority is a beautiful, uncomfortable, moving and confusing series that starts out engaging all the things we don’t talk about—self-harm, abuse, rape, bullying, gender dysmorphia, and homosexuality, to name a few. Our silence and blindness to these issues have a weight and pressure to them, and WEP shows how this reinforces the isolation and hopelessness of the young women of the “eggs” who turn to suicide for relief. The first ten episodes have been exhilarating and exhausting alike.

And then there is Episode 11. This past week, the series took a bit of a turn, leaning hard into the sci-fi-philosophical, with appearances from Greek gods, a murderous artificial intelligence, and really, really disturbing insect girls, one of whom, despite being a brutal killer, is apparently a vegetarian. Has the show gone off the rails? Has it lost its way in departing from the familiar procedural approach of engaging a differing social or mental health issue with each episode?

Such a critique is perfectly legit, but before you write off the penultimate episode of WEP, just hear me out on why the abstract, meta turn in episode 11 may just be the most valuable thing this series has to offer so far.

Before we begin though, a little recap of what we learned this week. In episode 10, we hear the eggheads, Acca and Ura-Acca, discuss the need for warriors of Eros to battle Thanatos. This is our first hint that things are about to get lore-full and maybe a bit weird. Eros and Thanatos are of course gods in the ancient Greek pantheon, Eros being the god of love, and Thanatos, of non-violent death. Within the first minute or so of episode 11, it’s clear that the eggheads’ hope is now focused on Ai becoming the long-awaited warrior. At this point though, rather than continuing with Ai’s story, the episode shifts into flashback mode and we are finally introduced to the villain, an artificial intelligence created by the eggheads back when they were still human. Their lives gradually come to revolve around her: She is the fulfillment of their obsession to create life, and she is good.

Frill is associated with hydrangeas, which symbolise heartlessness and pride in Japanese flower language. But is it her heartlessness and pride, or that of her makers?

(Atelier Emily has done an outstanding series of posts on the flowers in WEP. Check it out!)

Only, it turns out she doesn’t play so nice when others join the happy family. After killing Acca’s wife, and putting the life of the unborn baby at risk, the AI—who named herself Frill—is unrepentant, all traces of her seeming humanity now revealed to be illusory, a mere affectation. Acca locks her away in a hole in the cellar. Years pass. The baby, Himari, grows up and is a ray of sunshine. But after effectively confessing to her ‘uncle’ (why does anime always do this?), she commits suicide. Ura-Acca discovers that Frill is still very much alive and active from her hole in the cellar, having powered up all the discarded monitors and laid down reams of electrical cables—to what end, we do not yet know. Though Ura-Acca surmises that she has somehow influenced Himari to take her own life. How else would the girl have known about Ura-Acca’s admiration for her mother? Where else would she have learned to make what will forever be to me now that uncannily sinister popping sound?

Here’s where it gets weirder. Unlike the suicides of subsequent egg girls, there is no indication that Himari, Frill’s apparent first victim, struggled with any mental health or other issues that would motivate her to take her own life. Indeed, her ‘uncle’ did not even reject her confession. (Again anime, why you do this thing?) Instead, the eggheads explain Himari’s suicide as being on account of the “temptation of death.” What now?

This is implying that death is somehow attractive, not just to someone facing overwhelming brokenness, trauma or pain, like the egg girls we’ve met so far, but to someone on the verge of stepping from a (relatively) happy childhood into young adulthood, with the promise of potential love to look forward to; someone who has not known suffering, but rather only smiles and cake. (To be fair, it is always possible that she experienced trauma in the womb, or was more deeply affected by her father’s sadness than Ura-Acca’s memories belie.)

That’s my question too, Ai.

The notion of death as somehow attractive or even beautiful is rather alien to Western culture. Certainly, there will always be some who romanticize death, à la star-crossed lovers (Shakespeare, I’m looking at you). But in general, Western culture views death as something ugly and frightening, something to avoid until it is staring you directly in the face, and even then, closing your eyes in denial is a perfectly reasonable response. Death is one of those things we don’t talk about. In my experience, Anglo-American culture is not very good at even mourning death. We lack the grieving rituals and observances of other cultures, and instead seek to confine death to the sealed, sanitized spaces of hospitals, care homes, and funeral parlors. We keep it shrouded tightly in silence. How could there ever be anything like the “temptation of death”? How could we ever consider death to be something desirable? Are the eggheads or CloverWorks simply aestheticising suicide and death here to make it sound deep and philosophical?

No, I don’t think that’s it. Instead, Acca and Ura-Acca are doing what all good researchers do—and indeed what all Christians, as believers in an unseen spiritual reality, are also called to do: They are looking more deeply into phenomena that seem, on the surface, to already be explained. The two idol fans were consumed with their obsession, so when their idol killed herself, they followed suit. The young woman whose identity was wrapped up in her own appearance ended her life to preserve her beauty. The abused gymnast saw no way out, no hope in ever living free from torment. Some explanations may be more sympathetic than others, but they all possess their own internal logic. Contemporary society is full of a vast array of pressures and stresses and each one, taken to breaking point, can result in death. Case closed. This might very well be our conclusion from the first ten episodes.

Only the case isn’t closed. Because there is a question that has pervaded every episode until now, but has remained unspoken: How is it that death could even become an option for the egg girls? Why does reaching a breaking point trigger suicide? What made death seem like a savior to these girls? This is the question that episode 11 tackles, in its own admittedly obscure way. The eggheads are focused on the underlying, deeper reality that unites all the eggs’ stories, as disparate as they are—the common thread, which is the idea that death is a release, a rescue, a beautiful ending, and as a result, it is tempting.

“But we wondered if there could be another push that drove them to suicide,” explains Ura-Acca.

This is a really important question for us to be asking. Because it’s not just these traumatized, vulnerable girls who fall for the seduction of death. We do, too.

Just ponder for a moment: Have you ever anticipated how wonderful it will be when, in heaven, you no longer struggle with that particular temptation? When your temper is no longer so short, when you’re not afraid of being hurt anymore? Or maybe you think about how one day, on those gold-paved streets, you won’t have to worry anymore. All your hard work coping and just keeping it together will finally pay off and you’ll cross that finish line and heave a sigh of relief, knowing that you made it in the end. Have you ever contemplated these kinds of things? I know I have.

But here’s the thing: When I expect my liberation to come only after I die and not right here, right now, then it is not Jesus who is my savior, but death. I am waiting for death to free me from temptation and sin and fear and brokenness, and usher me into eternal life. I make Thanatos my god.

The temptation of death is not limited to the drastic act of suicide, but also permeates all the accusations and fears that inspire us to put off living the fullness of life in Christ here and now. It’s the temptation to believe that it is death that will ultimately solve the more difficult and painful problems in life.

Acca and Ura-Acca seek to create a love that suits their ideals, just to relieve their stress.

The source of this “temptation of death” in Wonder Egg Priority is Frill, the AI. That is, a man-made, artificial version of love—with ai meaning “love” in Japanese. According to Ura-Acca, they made her “just for fun,” as a way of dealing with the stress of their enclosed lives. They designed her to suit their preferences, to make it easier to love her and forget that she was artificial. In this sense, Frill is the fruit of their self-centeredness, her every characteristic designed to satisfy their own ideals of how a daughter and woman should be. And this artificial love born of selfishness brings death into their midst and beyond, spreading it through the horrendous deformities of girlhood that she in turn creates, in imitation of her fathers. (Only perhaps her creations are less deceptive than theirs, wearing their monstrosity plainly on the outside…)

Frill’s creations. We’ve met Dash (right) and Dot (center), but who is that on the left? And is her name Morse??

To counter her destructive influence, Acca and Ura-Acca need true love, a genuine love. They need Ai, a messy, at times very weak human being, but one who nevertheless is willing to fight to live up to her name and maybe, just maybe, become a warrior of Eros.

There is also a deep, underlying force at work in our world, one that connects all despair and the actions born of it. A wide range of social issues, traumas and mental health challenges can and do trigger suicide, but they do not explain it fully. The deeper reality is the existence of an enemy who seeks to manipulate us into believing our true savior can only be death, whether it is right away by our own hand, or more subtly, decades from now by natural causes. But this is a lie, and it is one that we can combat. Just as I’m sure we’ll see in the final episode that Ai is equipped to wage the coming battle in WEP, so too are we armed, here and now, with the power to overwhelm the enemy’s “temptation of death”—we possess already the words of life, given to us by our true savior.

Jesus began his ministry with a public announcement that he had come to heal heart wounds, comfort those in pain, fill broken lives with beauty, and wrap those in despair with reasons to praise like a warm protective blanket, so that they might celebrate with joy once again. He came to bring freedom to prisoners and captives alike, giving a fresh new life to those locked up because of deeds done wrong, and those punished and injured at the hands of others. He came to take the outcasts, the weak, the traumatized and broken and transform them into mighty oaks, clean and strong; into people with the vision and skill and compassion and fortitude to rebuild a broken world (Isaiah 61:1-4, Luke 4:18),

He came to rewrite and restore our experience of life here on earth, and through us, to redeem our communities, cities, nations, and the world. God does not withhold the fullness of life from us until we finally make it to him in heaven. No, instead he moved heaven and earth to get right up close so that he could pour his own life out into us, even going so far as to breathe his very spirit into our hearts and bodies and minds. We don’t need to wait for death’s rescue—our hero has already come. But we do need to remind each other and ourselves of this truth pretty often, and let it work down deep into all the cracks and bruises in our souls until it strengthens all our weak spots.

In Deuteronomy 30:19, God tells the Israelites that he has given them the authority to choose between life and death. But he also tips the balances in their favor, urging them to choose life. In Jesus, he comes to tip the balances even further, making it possible for us to step into eternal life here and now, immediately and forever. So let’s do it. Each day, through each struggle we face. Let’s choose life and not death.

Warrior of love? And is Ai’s himawari (sunflower) related to Himari somehow?

Join me (in spirit) for the final episode on Tuesday to see Ai’s love triumph! (At least, I really really hope that’s what happens!)

[qqueenofhades]

Keeping my fingers crossed for that Black Widow meta

Aha, okay. As usual, I am ludicrously easy to enable, so let's take a crack at this. The ask obviously contains SPOILERS for the Black Widow film (and is also tagged "black widow spoilers" if you're planning to filter), and discussion/reference to other films/properties in the MCU, though I don't feel like any of those are still a secret.

Anyway, as I said in my earlier post, I can't believe I am actually still trying to critically analyse a Marvel production in the year of our Lord 2021, but then, I feel like we all have a complicated relationship with it. Likewise, the feeling of "oh wow NOW you're giving Natasha a solo movie after you killed her off in a cheap and fairly sexist way in Endgame?" If this film had come out ten or even five years ago, it would have been major, but holding it off until now seems to have left most of us justifiably unimpressed. Plus, as I am absolutely not the first person to point out, it renders Natasha's sacrifice in Endgame "because I don't have a family" even more narratively incoherent. I realize that this film was written after that one by totally different people, there's no point in expecting the MCU to make consistent canonical sense throughout its eighty billion different films/series, we were all stuck with a mess after the Whedonified Age of Ultron Nat, and so forth, but still. Natasha explicitly SAYS that she has two families (her wacky Russian found family of spies and the Avengers) and her decision to leap off the cliff in Endgame to save Clint and his retconned perfect white heterosexual nuclear family.... Hmmmm. To which I say to you, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I do bite my thumb at Male Writers, sir.

Likewise, while I am wildly attracted to Florence Pugh as Yelena and deeply desire to be wrapped between her thighs, the movie felt more like her story than Nat's. Yelena drove most of the plot and the action, while Nat was just kind of along for the ride. As a solo piece, we really didn't learn that much about Natasha aside from the opening scene (which felt like it was straight out of The Americans and probably worked the best of the whole film for the reason) with her childhood in America. But even the infamous "what happened in Budapest" backstory with her and Clint was quickly info-dumped rather than shown, and they could have taken more narrative risks or included more flashbacks or otherwise given us more NATASHA, y'know??? Instead of cramming the film into the small space between Civil War and Infinity War and making it even weirder that Nat seemingly has no memory or reference to these events when she returns to the team at that time. Why not show her looking for Yelena or her actual defection to the Avengers or anything else we might want from a film that purportedly exists entirely to provide backstory for a now-dead character? It felt like even in the film universe, the main quest was being repeated -- she tried to kill Baddie McSoviet once before and it didn't work out, so she has to do it again, something something. Okay.

As for that, good ol' Marvel and its American Superiority TM. The only actual Eastern European actress in this film about Eastern Europeans was Antonia/Taskmaster, played by the Ukrainian Olga Kurylenko (and I was very interested in her?? If she's supposed to be a narrative foil and a ghost of Nat's past and mark of her former sins, etc., why not develop her as an actual character?) Everyone else were Brits and Americans hamming it up with even more chew-the-scenery fake Russian accents than Elizabeth Olsen's "Sokovian" accent as Scarlet Witch. If it's established that they all have perfect American accents at the start of the movie, why is Nat the only American-accented character in the modern day if she had presumably the exact same childhood as Yelena? I know it's another way to set her apart, but that and Baddie McSoviet (the Russians are finding a way to steal free will from people's brains! Zomgz!!! Is this 2021 or 1981?) were straight out of the Cold War in terms of its not-so-veiled American Supremacy Message. Likewise, making modern!Natasha a former KGB agent never really made sense, since she says in Winter Soldier that she was born in 1984, and we see her in this film as an 11-year-old in 1995. But the USSR collapsed in 1991, when she was seven, and the Red Room appears to be an entirely unrelated flying....lab....thingy run by a generic evil Russian (Ray Winstone, likewise Hamming Up Accent). So like. What is she, guys?? Make up your minds!!!

Likewise, Baddie McSoviet/Dreykov as a villain obviously plays into the hoary old Hollywood "All Bad People Are Recognizable As Being Terrible Sexists and Also Probably Russians" trope, but aside from that, he doesn't make sense. He has this entire army of basically unstoppable Widows and he has just been.... waiting around and causing random explosions? Or was just waiting for Nat and company to return so he could Put His Evil Plan Into Motion? Are we really supposed to believe that this guy has just been sitting up in his flying saucer and essentially never doing anything this whole time? He had about a million chances to launch this take-over-the-world plan long before Natasha ever got there. Plus, I.... am.... not sure what to think (aside from /deep sigh/ MARVEL) about the fact that all the Widows we see dying/getting killed on screen are women of color. (Then the Black surgeon who was about to remove Yelena's brain in the Red Room and the only other Black guy being Natasha's errand boy, which just... in context... YIKES.) I think the fact that there are random Black background Widows are supposed to mean that they're inclusive and badass or something? Scarlett Johansson also has her own issues with White Feminism and all the other things we've critiqued her for before, so after TFATWS and the Flag Smashers, Marvel clearly has found its subtly racist sweet spot. As usual?

The end of the film also just basically turns into the standard Marvel empty-spectacle/cool-looking fights/people flying through the air thing, and I wanted a lot more focus on the wacky found-family Russian-spy hijinks (I did love them, for reasons) and character dynamics, rather than all of them separately fighting baddies in different places. I did obviously have feelings about Natasha putting the parachute on Yelena to save her life. But why were we then denied Nat/Gamora parallels/relationships/any character development or interaction at all in Infinity War/Endgame? Both of them are trained assassins adopted into a non-biological family that they have a complicated relationship with, but end up forging a strong bond with their sister (Yelena/Nebula) nonetheless. Of course, that would have required Endgame to put more effort into its female characters than what it did, which was one (1) Epic CGI Charge Scene at the very end, and literally nothing else. Not that I am still salty about this or anything.

Anyway. The movie was genuinely fun in places. The wacky Russian found family of spies was definitely the best part, even if it made Endgame even more nonsensical as a result. But I wanted this movie to be a lot better than it was overall, though I probably would have liked it more if it had actually come out in a timely fashion and wasn't only released after they killed her off. It just feels like there were so many possible threads of potential that could have been done with Natasha if they were actually interested in experimenting and exploring the character and not just coming up with new baddies and ways to go boom, and it unfortunately missed the mark with that.

[shebeafancyflapjack]

Defrosting Grumpy Three (a Season 8 meta)

I keep thinking about how Season 8 of Classic Who is almost like the first one the show has to a ‘season long arc’ that I don’t feel gets talked about enough. Obviously everyone knows it as “the one where the Master is in every story” but I feel like there is a subtle character arc for the Doctor in this season as well which is tied to the two main characters introduced in the first episode; the Master and Jo Grant.

I’m not the first one to point out that out of Three’s five seasons; this is the one where he’s at his most grumpy and short-tempered. I know a lot of people point to this season as reasons for why they don’t like Three and I totally get that, he’s a real git sometimes, in particular the first and last stories. There are moments where he’s asking for a slap and, no, I’m not talking about him claiming to be buddies with Chairman Mao and a Tory MP. Because I would’ve thought it was obvious that he drops those names purely to gain trust of these people who don’t trust him (at least that’s my headcanon because it doesn’t fit with the anti-capitalist, anti-pollution, anti-imperialist writing). Just him being constantly ungrateful to the Brigadier, snapping at Jo, or just being childish in the most ‘kid throwing a tantrum’ way possible.

But it’s easy to get why. By Season 8 he’s been trapped on Earth for we can assume at least a year. New Who fans who’ve seen the Power of Three and saw how crazy Eleven went when he tried to stay on Earth to study the cubes just for a few days/weeks know the Doctor can’t stand staying still, especially in one time and place. In his first season he could be short-tempered but slightly less so. In Spearhead he’s quite polite and motivated, though that could be the most pleasant form of Post Regeneration Trauma he’s been through. Plus he had Liz, who you can see he immediately clicked with. A fellow genius who finds herself out of place or treated a little unfairly as a female scientist surrounded by men, both of them willing to sass the Brigadier when he deserves it. He also still keeps trying to fix the TARDIS, as if convinced this won’t be as permanent as the Time Lords intended.

But by Season 8 (or you could say even before that, in Inferno) his attempts clearly haven’t succeeded past slipping into a terrifying parallel universe, and now cabin fever is setting in. And Liz, his science bud, has gone off and left. And while it’s sad we didn’t get a goodbye between the two of them, her passing remark towards the Brigadier about the Doctor just needing someone to pass him test tubes and fill his praise kink maybe implies that, at least from Liz’ POV, they weren’t as equals as Three thought, or she didn’t feel that fulfilled working with him, even if she did appreciate him as a friend. 

So enter Jo to replace Liz, who is everything Liz wasn’t. Liz had to study and work her way to her position; Jo is a spoiled girl who got to play spy by sheer nepotism. She failed A level science and doesn’t have the same sharp-wit he and Liz shared. Three is mean to her even before she introduces herself as his assistant when she only tries to help, and doesn’t hide his disappointment when she tells him. Perhaps it might also be that she reminds him of his companions before Liz; she’s cute and perky like Zoe and also loyal and determined like Jamie, even though she lacks Jamie’s physical strength and Zoe’s genius. Still, she’s young and he might not want to put her in danger the same way he nearly lost his previous young companions many times in the War Games.

When Three goes to the Brigadier to try to get rid of Jo, the Brig is far more smug than in the previous season, as he seems to have worked the Doctor out by this point. Their little moment at the end of Inferno where Three insults him and tries to escape only to then come back with his tail between his legs acting all buddy has shown him who Three really is; that this whole grumpy shtick of this is just a defence mechanism while he’s so out of his depth. I like to think the Brig hoped Jo would soften him up, to bring out the compassion that was more overt in his previous incarnation, as well as just pass him test tubes and keep tabs on him. His knowing smile when he watches Three try and fail miserably to fire her seems to prove his point.

In the same story we also have the Master showing up for the very first time. He was created to be the ‘Moriarty to the Doctor’s Holmes’. These kind of ‘foil enemies’ that pop up in so many stories, where you have a villain who is supposed to be a perfect match in intelligence or skill to the hero, are more often than not presented as ‘what the hero could have been’ if they chose to be evil rather than good; the Master is no different. And even though it’s not established until the next season that the Doctor and Master used to be friends, there’s clearly an underlining fondness in their banter which hints at past feelings as well as mutual respect. It says quite a lot that Three is more relaxed and friendly during his conversations with the Master half the time they talk than he is with the humans he’s meant to be saving, or even his own close friends. Because, for all their moral disagreements, the Master is his own kind and his only link - other than his broken TARDIS - to the rest of the Universe. 

In almost every story of S8, after the Master has revealed his evil scheme only for the Doctor to point out how it will backfire on him, they have to work together or form some kind of alliance of convenience. In Claws of Axos, the Doctor outright pretends to betray his friends and elope join forces with the Master to escape, only for it to be a trick in order to defeat the Axons. But considering Three’s attitude in this season, it’s a very convincing act as much to the audience as to the humans. And then in Colony in Space, the Master offers the Doctor half-ownership of the Universe....and the Doctor clearly hesitates! Yes, the Master tempts him with the persuasion of ruling ‘in the name of good’ but Three has to take a moment to remember what a slippery slope that line of thinking is. He’s so tired of being trapped, sick of being leashed by the Time Lords, that the Master comes along as a devil on his shoulder at his most vulnerable point. Considering the last story involves the Master summoning the actual Devil (or close enough) and is also where Three’s temper seems to be at its peak seems all too fitting.

It’s also interesting that the Master’s greatest fear that appears in the Mind of Evil is an image of the Doctor laughing maniacally over him. It’s the closest we get to an image of Dark!Three in the show. To contrast; the Doctor’s greatest fear isn’t the Master, it’s the eruption from Inferno. Seeing the Earth swallowed by flame - not because of an outside force like the Daleks or Cybermen, but by humans themselves. It’s easy to imagine him wondering why he even bothers with them when they’re their own worst enemy.

(Side note; apparently the Evil Overlord in the Inferno parallel world IS the Third Doctor, according to the Expanded Universe, though I haven’t read up on this. We were robbed of seeing Pertwee play an evil Doctor.)

So while this is going on and the Master is playing his games with the Doctor while also tempting him, intentionally or not, to the ‘dark side’, we also have Jo at his side. And Jo takes all of the Doctor’s snapping and mood swings like a pro, and is very quickly overwhelmed with a lot of the stuff she’s faced which that she didn’t know she was signing up for - being hypnotised, captured by aliens, taken to alien worlds in the far future etc. She screams as most companions did at that time, but because it is what you would expect from a girl fresh out of school and throwing herself into something she clearly didn’t properly prepare for. The Doctor has to save her a lot, more than often because she tried to help only to get herself captured. As much as he does warm to her - because he’s not immune to how adorable she is - it serves to prove his point. Even when he finally gets to leave Earth for a day, she’s too frightened to want to leave the TARDIS. What good is she to him?

Now she continues to prove she has her uses. She has her escapology skills which get them out of a few tight spots. Depending on the writer, she can turn into an Emma Peel-esque agent capable of self-defence and subterfuge. And she’s always patient with the Doctor, no matter what mood he’s in, and extremely loyal. She’s also kind and compassionate with every side character she comes across. There seems to have been a backlash to these kinds of qualities in female characters in the past twenty years or so, what I like to call the Cinderella critique, where if a woman is kind and generous more so than smart, sassy and sword-wielding she’s seen as ‘weak’. Jo is always there at the Doctor’s side when he’s managed to get hurt or knocked out (Three took a lot of naps, anyone else notice this?). Even after he does whisk her away to another planet and nearly don’t make it back, she could easily throw her job away if it was too much, but she sticks with it because you can see that she wants more than anything to be useful and do good for her world - it would be another two season until she found what her own passion was with being an environmental activist but this is where she wants to start.

But it’s not until the end of S8 that we see Jo’s greatest strength and how it saves Three when every other defence he had was gone. He’s spent most of that story chastising her for believing in magic and superstition, as well as anything else he can find to snap at her for like criticising the Brigadier even though he does the same thing all the damn time (this could be seen as a ‘I can insult my bro but you can’t’ moment but it’s still not pleasant). But when he learns the Master is preparing to sacrifice her, he runs in to save her despite knowing it’s a suicide mission. He also gives a cold exchange to the Master when told he’s a ‘doomed man’. 

Oh I’m a dead man! I knew that as soon as I walked through those doors so you better watch out! I have nothing to lose, do I?

It’s a telling line that, behind all his patronising and abruptness, he’s reached a point he doesn’t feel he has anything left to keep going. He’s lost his freedom and his knowledge of time travel; but he’ll die before letting Jo die or letting the Earth burn again. When Azal claims the daemons gave humans knowledge, Three responds: Finally he’s turning his anger on the one who deserves it to save the one who has been his friend, even at his lowest points, for the past several months, while still showing his disappointment in what he’s seen of humans living amongst them:

You gave them knowledge to blow up the world and they most certainly will. They can poison the water and the very air they breathe. 

When Azal appears, he nearly makes the Master’s greatest fear come true by offering his power to the Doctor instead. And the Doctor looks horrified, immediately doing a Jon Snow and refusing it. Unlike when the Master offered him power before, he doesn’t hesitate for a moment, even though Azal’s powers could probably get his TARDIS working again in a snap. He looks almost scared at the thought of possessing something like that. Perhaps his dark persona in that other world became that way because he did take such an offer?

Azal prepares to kill the Doctor for refusing his offer, which is where Jo saves the day by offering her life for his. A lot of people dislike this ending for the idea of the villain being destroyed ‘by the power of love’ more or less, but this was a lot less common a deus ex machina as it is in New Who. The Doctor explains how it works when they’re free as:

Azal could not accept a fact as irrational and illogical as Jo being prepared to give up her life for me.

Three says it as he’s just as baffled, if also amused, by it as Azal was. Why would Jo give up her life for him? Compare that with when Ten has to give up his incarnation to save Wilf, how he rants that Wilf isn’t important but he has ‘so much more’ to give. Even the Doctor wrestles when it comes to sacrificing himself for others sometimes but Jo did it without a seconds thought, made even more illogical given Three’s often harsh treatment of her. But one thing that is obvious is that Three’s grumpy face is gone; he’s smiling for the rest of the episode, looking at Jo with quiet heart eyes, and letting her drag him into the maypole dance, conceding that she was right and there is ‘magic’ in the world. 

Much like Rose was the companion Nine needed after the Time War to enjoy seeing the Universe again and appreciating life, Jo serves a similar purpose in S8 in that she gradually reminds the Doctor through her actions of the strengths in being brave, kind and selfless. She and the rest of the UNIT family are there to remind him of the goodness in humanity and that we’re always learning and trying to improve; as Three says to Azal that ‘they need a chance to grow up’. Jo is the angel on his shoulder to contrast the Master as his personal devil; right down to having her dressed in the sacrificial ‘virgin’ garb opposite the Satanic Master to cap the season off.

Three still has his sour moments after this but he’s far less cantankerous going forward and sweeter towards Jo especially, praising her bravery and learning in future, just as Jo also grows more confident in her abilities and enjoys her adventures with him. He seems far more relaxed on Earth and less desperate to get away because of the people he has around him that make it worth staying around for. Three’s morals and loyalty to humanity might not have been so firm had Jo not been there to ground him, especially with the Master constantly there almost holding out a hand to him offering freedom and excitement. Like all good companions, she saves the Doctor as much as he has to save her, in more ways than one, which she doesn’t get nearly enough credit for. And it’s what adds to the heartbreak of her eventual exit because of the effect she had on his life.

It’s just one of my favorite tropes when a character gets better and softens or becomes kinder not because they had to ‘change for someone else’ but because they were inspired by them, especially if it’s the person they underestimated the most.

[omegangrins]

A Rant on the End of Tremors 7: Shrieker Island

As the main man said,

Throwing caution to the wind because this blew up elsewhere.

If you can do it with Justice League, fuck it, let's do it for every shitty movie we've got.

While we're at it, can we change the ending of the 7th Tremors movie so *MAJOR FUCKING SPOILERS* Burt Gummer doesn't die or at least bring Jamie Kennedy back, or Marvel style recast Jon Heder, so he dies saving his son instead of a random-ass person who could have easily saved themselves. Or cut the forced montage of Burt clips at the end so his death is at least ambiguous. Seriously beyond pissed about that one. THAT is no way for him to go.

I would also like to point out that the next Tremors *HAS* to be titled Tremors 8: Ouroboros and bring everyone back for Burt's funeral . Otherwise, what's the fucking point?

I have feelings about it, people. *FEELINGS!!!*

One of my favourite childhood memories is picking out Tremors 2 from the local gas station's movie rentals and forcing my parents to watch it. I was probably 5-6 at the time.

Let's say that it's been a lifelong love affair ever since. It took me another 10 years before I even watched the 1st. Probably why I hold good sequels in such high regard.

I didn't even know about the 1st until it played as a trailer in front of 2 and never thought to watch until years later. That's a testament to its filmmaking if I ever knew one.

So seriously, that's how they chose to kill off one of the most well known and prolific characters in a movie/TV series known around the globe? With an unnecessaryily needed death and a montage of clips from all the other movies that are obviously better than this one.

And I'm saying that as someone who defends Chibnall/13th Doctor...

...and I'm fucking fuming because THIS is how you *actually* destroy something people love and hold dear to their hearts. It's like the ending of Game of Thrones. His shitty ass death has made it a loooooot harder to rewatch. And they are one of my favourite series!!! Not flawless but fun. But I will defend every other movie and all the episodes except this. Honestly I'll still defend 7/8ths of this one as well.

Like I said, it's easily fixed too. Fucking vice versa swap out Jon Heder for Jamie Kennedy, who the movies have been building up for the last two, and have Burt save his son in front of his old flame. Boom, you won't even need the montage of clips cause you can just have Travis and his mom reminisce about Burt instead. Show not tell. I don't even care he died by Graboid (although in all honesty, I've allways wanted El Blanco to take him down or Burt kills himself from the PTSD. It would have AT LEAST MADE SENSE. Hell, the best would be a heart attack to callback Val's "Yeah, Burt, the way you worry, you're gonna have a heart attack before you get a chance to survive World War Three.". But none of us ever get the best death.). And it's not even about Burt sacrificing himself to save a nobody. Cause that could work too. BUT YOU NEED TO BUILD THAT SHIT UP. Not just fucking drop it like it's hot.

Like I said too, the first 7/8ths ain't bad but it's an entirely different story than a swansong for a hero.

It's all about some billionaire scientist/cowboy hunter dude who likes to get his jollies off hunting the biggest and the baddest who ends up inviting people to this island so they can hunt down Super-Graboids he designed for shits and giggles. But then some Shrieker-fy....

And the pretentious douches come and die one by beautiful one while Burt tries to save them anyway and it's all spectacularly dumb fun until it comes crashing down in the final 10 minutes. Fuck, they should just cut the last 10 minutes. Then it's a perfect little Tremors ditty.

#RELEASETHE7THTREMORSWITH10MINUTESFROMTHEENDCUT

This isn't even about Jon Heder either. He's just doing his job. Hell, do what /u/VoiceofRonHoward pointed out.

"It is clear that Jon's character was just pasted in over Jamie's, the artifacts of the father-son relationship are all over it. They should have gone full Marvel and just replaced Jamie with Jon and acted like nothing happened."

CAUSE FUCK YES!! The only time a story sucks is when they don't commit. Commitment makes all the difference. Now, I'm pissed double-pissed they didn't do that instead since Heder and Kennedy are similar in terms of white-boy-ness.

Even Michael Gross agrees:

"Yes, yes. Now I can't presume to speak for Jamie [Kennedy]. My understanding was they asked him and he said no. And so that's why they went with somebody else. So I had nothing to do with that decision. I just heard the stories. I missed him for that reason. You begin a relationship with the character, and you want to continue it....

...As you build a relationship with this son, we had two, it would've been nice to have three, but that was the hand I was dealt."

One of my favourite bits of Tremors lore comes from the 5th too so it's not like I hate sequel changes out of hand:

"This is a warrior dance. Our ancestors hunting the lnkanyamba and the Impundulu.

"What's that?

"Impundulu. It's what you call the Ass Blaster.

"Ass Blaster.

"Yes.

"Yes.

"Hey, you know, you make Ass Blaster sound good.

Primitive cultures fighting Graboids, Shriekers and Assblasters. I just love that thought.

Hilariously, my meta opening to the 8th movie would be a flashback to 10,000 years ago and a Neanderthal-like Burt Gummer teaching others how to drive Graboids off cliffs like they did with mammoths.

Thank you for giving me the space to rant. Cause fuuuuuuhhhhhhhhuuccck!!!

Here's Michael Gross' own words from his AMA that prove the people making Shrieker Island didn't know their shit.

"The Tremors series is one very close to my heart and I want you to know how appreciated your continued effort is for your core fan base.

My only question would be were there ever any studio decisions made for Burt that you refused to comply with? Or was everybody pretty much always on the same page on what to do with the character?

Thanks again for your dedication.

- Josh"

"Thanks for the kind words, Josh. As regards the first four films, with Wilson and Maddock as the writers, we were very much on the same page. 5,6, and 7 were a bit different, because there was a 13-year hiatus between 4 and 5, and we had to refresh our memories while "reinventing" the franchise for a new audience. I will give you one example: in an early draft of Shrieker Island, a new writer wrote a draft where Burt threatened to shoot one of the bad dudes, and I had to tell him—this is true—"Burt never intentionally points his gun at another human being."

And his own thoughts on Burt's "death" and how to bring it all back together again.

Universal and the director [came] to me with this idea, and they said, 'This could be emotionally very powerful, if we have to say goodbye to this man after 30 years. And I hemmed and hawed, and I thought about it a little bit. And I said, 'You're absolutely right about the emotional gut punch this can be.' And I said, 'You're going to hurt a lot of people's feelings.' And I said, 'But I thought this franchise was over after four. So I could certainly live with it being over after seven.'

"What we negotiated -- well, it wasn't really a negotiation, we all agreed on this -- is that we kind of left the door open. >!Because although Burt is gone, we never see a corpse. We never see his remains. Everybody assumes he's gone. Is he buried somewhere? Is he unconscious somewhere? We never see Burt dead. We see Burt gone. We see Burt not returning. What does that mean? Has he been knocked out? Does he have amnesia somewhere? Does he wander off? Is he in a kind of coma? So yes, the way it ends is pretty profound."

"As regards to the end of Tremors 7, let me just say that while people ASSUME Burt is gone, we never see his remains, do we? Just sayin.'

"The only reason he has become the main character is that everyone else in the original cast moved on to other things. I NEVER thought of him as the central figure, but it just worked out that Michael Gross, like Burt Gummer, was a "survivor." :0) "

"No one would like to see it more than I!!! One of my greatest regrets is that so many other cast members fell away over time. Reba was on to other things, Kevin said no to a second, Fred said no to a third. I would LOVE one last go with all of them, but it is not up to me. :0( "

"There are no guarantees, but for those who wonder aloud if this is the final film, I will say what I have said before: SALES drive sequels, Show biz is 5% show and 95% business, so if this latest addition to the Tremors franchise, sells well, [Universal] will follow the money, and Universal Pictures Home Entertainment may will be back for more."

/u/ActorMichaelGross, the bell has been rung and the song sung. Get the producers on this ASAP!!

I was also the first person to discover the symbolic foreshadowing of Stumpy's end with Earl's sleeping bag in the original movie.

Let's just say, I really *really* love these movies. So if anyone knows anyone, hook me up to the producers of this series and I'll Justin Lin in the Fast and Furious out of this shit.

Since I don't think it's good to critique without proposing either, I say we can make up for this fuck up with the next movie. We'll call it Tremors 8: Ouroboros. After the snake which eats its own tail.

We find out Burt faked his death to get the Proudfoot Corporation to let down their guard and when everyone from the previous series comes back for Burt's fake funeral they give him ever loving shit for being such a paranoid whack-job that he would fake his death to fool a government agency. Why would he do this? He found an old photo of Hiram Gummer with a Graboid warning on the back and asks himself why this valley, why these things, why allways me? And we find out, it's not Burt. It's that lifestyles of extremes will end up in places of extremes. Burt and the Graboids are survivors of different species. Sure the Proudfoot Corporation IS using Mixmaster to combine Graboids, Shriekers, and Ass-Blasters into one super creature for the military but it pales in comparison to Burt looking at his life and wondering in shame how many ancient giants like himself he has killed. And with that, he actually dies, and we keep the ball rolling with the rest of the characters trying to stop what they allways thought was just another one of Burt's crazy conspiracies.

That's why it's Ouroboros. Everything comes back around. We could end/start the movie with Grady, Earl, and Jodi opening a Monster World in Perfection Valley a la Desert Jack's Graboid Adventure. I don't know. I'm fucking trying harder than the people they paid to do this already.

It ain't perfect but I'm building on sand here so changes are gonna get made.

Like if the makers of Tremors notice this,

Then DM me because fucking A you guys need some help.

[tthael]

Dude your writing is so stunning. I was gonna ask if you took any creative writing courses or something and saw you majored in literature so like no wonder lol. I wish to write as good as you but as someone who wants to drop out of college I dont see that happening. Anyway you're awesome and I hope you have a good day 💙💙

 I am going to tell you a secret.

I did not learn how to write like this in college.

Most of my creative writing classes (and I only took 4) taught me to read. They were all workshops, and collaborative, and I learned how to read a piece of writing and identify what it was about--and that’s very different from identifying what the writer intended to write. It taught me to read a story about an adult whose divorced mother is remarrying and say, “Okay, but I don’t think that this story is about the capitalist recompartmentalization of families the way that the title seems to indicate. I think that the questions posed by the premise are ‘where are my roots? where does my identity come from? what dynamics do I retreat to when I need to feel safe, and what do I do when that refuge is taken away?’“ And identifying what a story is actually about is a very important part of the writing and revision process. Workshops also taught me to take critique without taking it personally, and to assess what was a critique worth taking, and whether the giver knew what they were talking about and what their opinion is worth.

Most of my literature courses taught me to think critically--in the sense of “identify this and examine what it means.” What does it mean, in Parable of the Sower, that empathy can be weaponized and used to incapacitate others? What does it mean, in RENT, that Benny is offering the protagonists jobs in their fields and they’re eschewing in favor of authenticity and integrity? What does Watership Down have to say about the nature-vs.-nurture argument and its limitations?

But I did not learn how to write like this in college. I learned how to write like this from fandom.

Some things came pre-loaded. I like writing dialogue, and I’ve been told I’m good at it, and I think it’s because eventually I worked out that nobody ever manages to say exactly what they mean and communication is frequently less like an arrow aiming for a target and more like a small boat bumping up against a dock while the people onboard try to tie their ropes to secure it. I like characters over action, and that’s reflected in the stories I tell--all very heavy character-driven stories, where the ratio of introspection to actual events is very high.

Z. Z. Packer’s “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” taught me to appreciate the way that characterization leads to action; but I never put that into practice until I went on (forgive me) tumblr and started reading meta. dear-wormwoods is one of my biggest sources of Eddie characterization meta, and that has influenced my fics more than anything else in fandom, though we’ve never spoken. When I was reading bagginshield, I read avelera’s meta for them.

But I’ve also found that many of the best meta writers (that I’ve found anyway) are also the best writers I’ve read. I went straight from avelera’s bagginshield literary analysis to their Pacific Rim fanfiction “the only way out is down” and reading their commentary on how they shaped the work during revision. I read amarguerite’s “Some Friendlier Sky” (Les Miserables fanfiction) and then “An Ever-Fixed Mark” (Pride and Prejudice) and I started asking her questions--”you compare Courfeyrac to a cat, and then Mr. Darcy to a cat, even though they’re very different characters. What’s the thought process there?” and she told me and we talked about it. I read chrononautical’s “A Road from the Garden” (The Hobbit) and went line by line picking out the things I liked in the comment, and I had this sudden epiphany about how Tolkien shows the dwarves as sets of brothers, which means that they are technically a race of brothers in their presentation, so it was GENIUS to play around with the brother dynamic in a work like that and reflect on how frequently an individual will tolerate mistreatment of themselves that they would never permit to happen to someone they loved--like, say, a brother.

I learned the basics of literary criticism and critical analysis from college, and from reading the western canon and trying to pick apart things that were useful to me. But it’s so much easier when everything is written in vernacular instead of faux-detached academic writing, and when everyone involved is genuinely excited about and dedicated to the work instead of being forced to dwell on The Old Man and the Sea yet again, and when there’s space for people to go back and forth analyzing and agreeing or saying “but what if” or rejecting and are just united by this love of the content or the characters or the book or the history.

You can learn to write like--well, you would write like you, not like me, that’s how style is. But you don’t have to go to college to do it. My current style is not the product of the institution that gave me my degree--it’s the product of more recent years’ immersion in fanfiction (and more recently some traditionally published original work) and music and content I get for free online. And you can also get a circle of people who are happy to write together, read each other’s work, comment on each other’s strengths and the things they like, make suggestions as to how to improve things. You don’t have to do that in college. You just have to read and write a lot, and the things that you read will influence what writing you produce, and in identifying what you like about the things you read and how they do the things they do, you will be able to look at your own work critically and shape it more towards your satisfaction.

The work I’m writing for IT is some of the best work of my life. TTHAEL is the first long work I’ve completed to my satisfaction. Indelicate is the first thing I’ve written that I feel is really exemplary of my style. Margot’s Room is the first self-contained short work I’ve completed to my satisfaction--and the first explicit sexual content I’ve written that I’m happy with both level of detail and atmosphere. Even Automatic-Mechanical-Pneumatic--which I wrote and posted in the same day, so it’s more of a draft--I look at it and recognize it has pacing issues (you can tell I was racing a clock to get the words out), some of the symbolism is too overt because the characters are too self-aware of it, at one point I tripped up and referred to a character by the real-world inspiration--but that’s a solid draft and it has good parts.

You don’t have to go to college to learn to write. Writing is a skill, and writing is work. And there are advantages that people in colleges have re: networking and libraries and available resources and professors who are being paid to give you feedback. But no institution is going to put you through a four-year program and at the end you’ll come out a “finished” writer, with no more room to improve. That’s something you have to do on your own.