#I really tried to not make this depressing but this story is sort of inherently depressing

[silvermoon424]

There's a weird, weird, weird criticism of PMMM that revolves around the girls being pitted against each other and how Madoka's wish in the finale somehow is a statement on the "model woman."

Like... I get that pop culture too often has girls going at each other in a vibe that amounts to, "girls, amirite?" but Madoka Magica felt like it treated any of the sort with nuance and an in-universe reason.

If they knew how much the Incubators were screwing them over and the info Kyubey often withholds, they'd team up and fight the power hands down.

Would Kyoko and Sakura not put aside their differences if all we know of Kyubey now was known by them while the former was still stable enough? Would Mami not have tried to gun down Kyubey along with Homura if she learned the truth (preferable not after having to kill Sayaka as a witch)?

I know, that's such a dumb criticism. It's explicitly shown in the series that, unlike most magical girl series where everyone is best friends, the girls don't get the chance to do that because the very nature of the magical girl system in PMMM makes them compete for limited resources.

They're not catty girls fighting over shoes and boys, they're literally fighting for their survival and unfortunately making friends can get in the way of that. I think it's actually a really good critique on systems that divide us like capitalism and white supremacy; we could all be friends and help each other, but there are oppressive systems and structures in place that make us compete with each other.

Moreover, the effect this competitiveness has on the magical girls is shown in great detail with Mami (especially in The Different Story manga). She's desperate, lonely, and depressed because she doesn't have anyone to confide in.

It's no wonder that, when resources aren't as much of an issue, magical girls tend to band together. We see this in Magia Record, where lone magical girls are the rare exception and not the rule thanks to the purification barrier. In fact, a few events showcase non-Kamihama magical girls trying to infiltrate and stir up discord among the Kamihama magical girls only to fail because they're all on good terms with each other, if not straight-up friends and teammates. In Madoka's new universe, magical girls also fight together on teams because they're not competing over limited Grief Seeds.

So yeah, the lack of teamwork in the main series basically boils down to "oppressive systems inherently work to divide the people to keep them from banding together and unlocking their full potential." Man, I really need to write an analysis on the socialist implications of PMMM lol

[unhingedselfships]

5, 10, 13 :)

This got stupidly long. Sorry?

5. Does their existence make any major changes to the 'canon' story? Minor ones?

She inherently causes small tweaks simply by existing. You're throwing a whole new character, how ever minor, into the story.

With Daigo, its pretty consistent she keeps Mine alive.

Majima, I tend to default to the Y0 version, and she makes some changes here and there, not really altering things in a significant way, but making the road just a little smoother.

With Akiyama, honestly we probably see the fewest changes, but thats subject to change.

Kiryu, she honestly doesn't do much for him specifically, but she provides a much stronger support to the kids and Haruka, and absolutely goes over Kiryu's head when it comes to the orphanage.

When she flies solo, the options are nigh endless, from doing nothing but adding fun substory hijinks, to completely rewriting storylines in ways that make exactly no sense. (so yanno, perf for RGG lmlfao)

10. Who do they get along with? How close are they?

Her most notable non-romantic connections off the top of my head :

Nishikiyama : Makes the least sense from a narrative stand point, so I just ignore that part. She does the "talk-no-jutsu" in her own clunky way, and its basically just a big ol' rant about how he's been treated and it turns out basic respect and decency go a long way with him. She has no fear, she can get catty and snippy with him. And it works. She treats him like a person, an equal. They're "bitchy besties".

Saejima : She just kinda dubs him "bro" and refuses to let go. He accepts it. Ends up fairly protective of her. There might be some "lost a sibling" trauma bonding happening here.

Hana : It starts with Kimi just being generally helpful in ways Aki slacks on. Despite being just as lazy (read ; depressed) she feels bad about Hana's work load, so picks up where she can. Particularly in sorting and organization. The build a bond over time and "girls days out" become routine. (on Aki's dime ofc)

Mine : I love how complicated these two are. Calling them frenemies usually works. He loves and hates her in equal measure for her connection to Daigo. Hates that its her and not him, but Daigo is happy, and he can't hate that. When she isn't with Daigo romantically, they estabilish a friendship relatively similar to the one she has with Nishiki.

Nishida : Kimi just low key adores this dude. He's so reliable and he ends up something of a 'neutral party confidant' for her. She tries to make his life dealing with Maji easier where she can. Usually by distracting the man in question.

13. Do they have a fave 'mini game' activity?

There are so many mini games in this franchise. Lets get into a few more.

Poker/Black Jack/Roulette/Etc She doesn't hate card games, but they bore her fairly quickly and she's not very good at them.

Batting Cages She gets hit with the ball more often than she hits it. She tries but after a few bruises whoever she's with hauls her out.

Mahjong and Shogi Will try, and then get completely lost when people try to explain either one. "I'm too dumb for this, sorry"

Bowling, Pool/Billiards, and Table Tennis She is absolutely atrocious at both of these, however unlike the other games she's bad at, she has a ton of fun with them.

Pocket Circut She likes it, and she likes the tinkering, but she doesn't get super into it. She prefers to support someone else doing it, rather than participate herself.

Dancing/Disco Kimi can keep a beat pretty well, she has rhythm, but she's uncordinated as hell. She sticks to swaying happily off to the side. (she gets wigglier the drunker she is)

Darts She has piss poor hand-eye coordination, which makes her being pretty good at darts a surprise. She enjoys it, and gets smug when she does well.

Fishing Is the most tedious boring thing, and she hates it. (loves fishing mini games in video games though!)

MesuKing She finds it silly, and doesn't really play, but enjoys collecting things so she has a huge collection of cards just sitting around.

Karaoke She can actually sing pretty well. If she could stop crying. She has crippling stage fright and performance anxiety so its a no-go. She does enjoy tagging along to cheer people on though.

[ultward]

Since you've been asked about your fic's take on vampirism, what's your take on werewolves in your fic universe? (I know you already talked about them in your vampire ask... But I wanna know more lore. So go as in-depth as you want!)

Also what was up with Leah's weird mood swings in that one scene with Bella? Did that have anything to do with her werewolf genes awakening?

since i've been slacking on my asks i actually have another anon asking this exact same question lol

to answer your 2nd question first, yes! that was nothing new or transformative, i was just emulating the jacob scene from canon to signal that the same thing was happening. that being said, stephenie's weird "werewolf temper" thing is pretty racist, and it's not something i wanted to use in the long run. rather, i just see that initial transformation process as being a sort of "second puberty", and there are probably some hormonal things going on that make people moody (it would be interesting to explore this in other ways, like getting really sad instead of angry. i may retroactively say that seth's werewolf puberty was a little depressing for him? it would make sense)

my werewolf lore is never fully explained in the fic because it's overly complicated and honestly may never be relevant to the story i'm telling. i would have to write an awkward exposition dump, so it's just been left unsaid

my goal was to get rid of the racist elements and also just to have the shifters make more sense in the broader context of the supernatural world. here are the main points:

as it is in canon, there are 2 types of "werewolves" - the children of the moon, and the wolf shifters

my shifters are an offshoot of the original children of the moon

i have not bothered to come up with origins for the vampires or werewolves (i think this sort of ruins the magic of it all), but they've just always been around as long as humans have existed

both vampirism and lycanthropy function sort of like a "disease", though it's pretty inherently magical and not at all scientific. the 2 conditions are naturally at odds with each other

my children of the moon are the same as canon lore - they are big wolfmen with little to no control over their actions that shift during a full moon

at some point during human evolution, people decided that lycanthropy was actually useful because it gave them a defense against vampires (as twilight vampires are nigh invincible killing machines). some early humans tried to "train" children of the moon to work like attack/guard dogs and began intentionally infecting people with lycanthropy to try and produce defenders for their villages

through "experimentation", this form of lycanthropy eventually turned into a genetic trait, and over time it became the wolf shifter form we know today, where people can turn into giant wolves at will and have complete control over themselves

so wolf shifting is still a genetic trait, BUT it is not exclusive to the quileute people - ANYONE in the entire world can be a shifter if they have the family history. as a result, there are actually several existing packs around the globe that operate in a similar manner, defending their territories from vampires

BUT it can't be passed from person to person through any other means, as the "disease" aspect of it was lost. it's entirely genetic, and anyone who inherits the gene can have it triggered and become a shifter. some people might live their entire lives as carriers and never become a wolf because they never had extended, close contact with vampires

meanwhile, the children of the moon still exist in a very limited capacity, as i stuck with canon on them - caius did have a rough encounter with a werewolf that caused him to have them hunted to near extinction. there are a few out there, but they don't spread like they used to and they're heavily policed by the volturi

i haven't decided if this is "canon" to my fanon or not, but i did toy around with the idea of there being some sort of werewolf artifact that acts as a beacon for the children of the moon, and the volturi have it locked up to prevent a werewolf epidemic or something lmao

and that's werewolves! they work the same way they do in canon, but their origins are totally different AND there are way more of them in the world! i think it's just way more interesting if there are more wolf shifters out there, as it gives the volturi something else to worry about lol

[longitudinalwaveme]

There are some villains where I could maybe see characters coming to the conclusion that they're lame jokes.

Rainbow Raider, the Trickster, Captain Boomerang....all of those guys have powersets that don't seem inherently dangerous on the surface. The Flashes should know better, obviously, since they've fought them enough times, but I could see the uninitiated not taking them seriously.

Weather Wizard is not one of those guys. He can control the weather. That's a terrifying powerset to have. Sure, he used to suck at using that powerset sometimes (particularly when he visited other characters' books....he has a hilariously embarrassing history of losing to guys he really should be able to beat), but it still seems like he should be the one Rogue that everyone takes seriously right from the word go. A moron who can control the weather can still control the weather, after all.

Is everyone operating off of the terrible logic that these cops displayed in the "Hell to Pay" arc?

Or off of that "HUMONGOUS LOSER" dossier on him that Jared Morillo had?

The police officers in Central City/Keystone City are worryingly unconcerned by the threat potential of a guy who can throw tornadoes around.

The other thing that's weird about this is that Weather Wizard has been treated like a legitimate threat for a long time now. The story the panel above is from, "Birthright", is from the Johns era, and it was arguably the most important story in terms of really ramping up Weather Wizard's competency and threat level. It was also published around twenty-three years ago (which strangely makes me feel old even though I am also twenty-three), so it's not exactly like him being intimidating is a recent development.

On the other hand, while he's not been explicitly portrayed as a joke for a very long time, he's also been kind of a nonentity for at least ten years now. Ever since the New 52, he's had one story to himself, which renamed him Marco, established that he and his family are from Guatemala (this is actually interesting, and wouldn't contradict anything we know about them since we know so little about the Mardons as it is), that the family ran a drug cartel (this is less great, not only because of the stereotypes but because it upends a lot of the apparent original dynamic between Mark/Marco and Clyde/Claudio), that Clyde/Claudio was murdered in a hit carried out by his wife, Elsa, and then showed Mark/Marco in Guatemala with his sister-in-law when the Flash showed up for reasons that were mostly unrelated to Mark/Marco specifically and were more related to the fact that Elsa and the cartel had kidnapped Patty Spivot. The two of them fought, and at some point Mark/Marco learned that Elsa had murdered Clyde/Claudio and tried to do a murder-suicide via lightning bolt. Elsa died; Mark/Marco survived.

The early New 52 also established that using the Wand negatively impacts Mark/Marco's mental health---making it rain can induce depression, lightning causes rage, etc.

And then nobody did anything with any of this ever again. Williamson brought up Mark/Marco's backstory once, very briefly, during the Year of the Villain arc (the same arc where Mark/Marco had a weather ax and briefly stopped wearing pants), and also briefly gave him a weird sort of environmentalist theme even though that's not something he was ever shown as being particularly concerned about before. Other than that, he's basically just been "one of the Rogues", and hasn't had any real focus or development. It kind of feels like writers are more interested in using him as the showy splash page guy than as an actual character.

If I'm being fair, this was kind of a problem for him in Johns' run too--a lot of Johns' Weather Wizard involved him sort of standing around looking intimidating (or broody) until the story needed him to do a big cool visual effect like making a tornado to destroy a building or striking someone with lightning---but at least with Johns I have a general sense of who and what he wanted the character to be like. Johns' Mark wants to be seen as powerful, confident/arrogant, and well-read, and to some extent he is, but he's also clearly overcompensating really, really, REALLY hard to deal with the guilt over his brother's death and his sense that he's nothing without the wand. In other words, he's not nearly as scary or sophisticated (particularly the latter---"unlike Len and Piper, I'm pretty good with the ladies") as he wants everyone else to think he is.

I can't say with any certainty what most of the post-New 52 writers think of Mark/Marco as a character, or where they intended for him to go. Williamson gives him the least focus out of his Rogues by far (even Sam, who's also been kind of a nonentity ever since the New 52, got some characterization and focus in the Year of the Villain arc), and he really only appeared once in Adams' run, where he was again portrayed as one of "the Rogues" rather than as a distinct character in his own right.

So maybe this "he's a loser" thing is stemming less from the fact that he's been portrayed as kind of incompetent and more from the fact that he hasn't really gotten to be a character in any meaningful sense over the past decade.

It's the only thing that really makes sense to me, because with the exception of the black hole that was the Flash: the Fastest Man Alive/Salvation Run/Countdown period, Weather Wizard has at least been portrayed as a competent threat for the past two decades.

Most of Mark's more impressive feats of idiocy---the ones that really do make him look like an incompetent doofus---come from much earlier than that.

Behold---the Weather Wizard getting defeated by guys who probably shouldn't be able to counter his powers:

This one's not canon, but it's hilarious, so I'll post it anyway:

Yes, the Weather Wizard really did accidentally strike himself with lightning and lose to a cartoon rabbit.

But you'll note that all of these appearances, although hilarious, came from outside the Flash comic, which usually treated him as a bigger threat.

And they're all at least forty years old, and therefore outside most people's frame of reference for the character.

So I have no idea why modern Mark is being written as a loser.

Pictures courtesy of @gorogues.

Spoilers for Flash #14!

You can see the preview pages here.

So I'm not sure why everyone in this issue thinks Marco's a joke -- Wally, the new warden of Iron Heights, Irey -- but for some reason everyone finds him completely laughable and is making fun of him. They do know what he's capable of, right..? No wonder he's off to a new land where he finally gets some respect and is apparently considered an all-powerful sorceror. There's no word on whose voice he heard to lead him there, but it seems like Godspeed might be hearing it too.

Another development is that a lot of the prisoners in Iron Heights have had changes to their powers after the events in "Absolute Power", so we might be seeing somewhat altered Rogues and other Flash villains in the future…that might play out in interesting ways if the writers are creative about it. August has apparently lost his duplication ability and maybe his speed, and Wally may have gained that duplication power because he's seen in Skartaris and the Watchtower at the same time. It's never been clear to me whether Marco still has metahuman powers or not, but if he does that could explain why he's different now.

(Barry has lost his powers completely and claims to be very happy with that, but after Wally leaves he indicates that he may be less okay than he's been letting on. He's definitely over-compensating in the "I'm happy!" department.)

Anyway, it turns out that the West family trip to Skartaris is not a ridiculous flight of fancy on Wally's part; he organized a trip there to deal with Marco without telling them until Jai rightfully shames his dad for keeping it a secret from Linda and the kids. Also, Red Tornado was a dick about Wally taking a family vacation during a time of stress, so that undoubtedly didn't help with the decisions Wally made. He's experiencing competing pressures (family and the Justice League) on at least two fronts.

One wonders what Warden Wolfe's up to now that he's been gone for a surprisingly long time, but that isn't Wally's problem until/unless it finally becomes one. It's interesting that his absence is specifically mentioned, though.

Hopefully this arc garners Marco some respect in-universe, but it really does seem weird that he had very little before it. It reminds me of James Jesse and Iris deeming Roscoe 'the least of the Rogues' back in the Waid era; it's just inexplicable that such powerful villains get dismissed as complete losers and non-threats by seemingly everyone around them. Presumably it's to pump them up for ThEIr bIG STorY arC as sudden scary badasses, but it comes across as very lazy writing when the writer could establish them as reaching previously untapped potential but not pretending they were formerly a joke. I dunno, this approach leaves me rather sour, but we'll see what happens in the rest of the arc.