#I should stop thinking so hard

[thelediz]

Sonic Underground Episode 20: When in Rome

I’m watching Sonic Underground in search of inspiration to finish a fic I’ve been writing forever. It’s a sad state of affairs. See the recap of the first three episodes here, if you're interested!

The plot (for want of a better word): The Oracle of Delphius sends the triplets to another world under the control of an evil Roman emperor. But this time, the Sonic Underground has to save the day without their powers! Can they find their inner strength to save this other world, and learn something about themselves while they’re at it?

Not gonna lie, I mostly picked the image above because it embodies my general feeling about this episode, unfortunately. Manic speaks to my soul.

So this episode does not open with Aleena’s voice over, and does remind us that as much as they complain, Sonia and Manic do kind of expect Sonic to handle everything in an emergency because they’re not only insisting he get them through a ‘forty-foot' thick door, but also run them away from the bad guys when they’re surrounded. This is all fine in the moment, but it does make me raise my eyebrow when they complain about him in other episodes.

Apparently this is the third mission that’s failed recently. It leads to Sonic having a well-deserved vent session about how they’re not getting anywhere. Sonia, who is apparently the optimistic one this episode, suggests they go see the Oracle.

The omniscient oracle doesn’t know why they’re here though. I don’t actually mind the Oracle, mostly because I think he’s screwing around with everyone for funsies and/or fate, but you do have to roll your eyes at him.

The triplets rightfully ask him to, you know, help out. He offers to share some of his knowledge if they go help some people in another world. He does not tell them they have to do this without their medallions.

NOW. Here’s the thing about this episode. They leave their medallions behind, sure, but they also lose all their powers, including Sonic’s speed, which has never before and will never again be implied to have anything to do with his medallion. I make too much of this in my head. In universe, we just accept and move on.

Manic is in the new world for less than a minute before he runs afoul of this world’s Dingo and gets himself arrested. He does it for heroic reasons, but still.

Sonia also manages about the same amount of time (in her defence, she got dropped in the middle of the highly restricted palace), but this is also where we discover the triplets have lost their powers because Sonia can’t defend herself (Manic never can, remember, so his capture is less shocking).

Meanwhile, Sonic is on the outskirts of the city, and trips over himself when he tries to run. Because apparently his actual power is coordination, not speed. But the point is that he can’t get away when he’s approached and is asked for papers. So they’re all immediately captured.

The Song: Where there’s a will (there’s a way), which is just so ridiculously 90s, with the rap, and the funky ‘whoa’ and the bass, and the appropriate music video cuts and camera angles and yep. Yep, it’s… circa ’93, if I had to place it.

 And we meet this episode’s version of Sleet, who is some kind of Caligula or Roman Prince John or something, who knows what they’re actually going for. The point is he’s all for raising taxes and anti-music and who knows what else. The world building is not great this episode.

As punishment for playing music, Sonic is sent to serve as a gladiator who were the first celebrities, Manic is made a jester which was actually quite a high station and Sonia is made the emperor’s hand maiden which was a role only filled by minor nobles in medieval society and has always been a high serving role. This allows them to use all their personal skills to escape. Which are, in order, Sonic’s silver tongue (by teaching the guy threatening him how to pick up girls), Manic’s sleight of hand, and Sonia’s (irrational) political savvy.

Side note, Sonic, you have not shown any romantic or sexual interest in this entire series and you never will, do not pretend like you are good at picking up. You aren’t. Girls like you because you are sweet and comforting, guys become obsessed with you because you’re heroic and have a nice smile. It is NOTHING to do with you being slick.

Manic, on the other hand, really likes this world’s princess Lydia. This will not be a thing, it’s just a blink-and-you-miss it Manic-has-feelings reminder while we introduce this world’s real imperial family.

So while Sonic’s trying to teach the gladiator centaur-minotaur-thing swag, Sonia and Manic have been thrown to the lions. With spears. One could make too much of this. Sonia is not concerned, however, because she’s convinced that if the crowd that have come to watch her die a gory death via lions will see their rightful ruler, they will rebel. Because divine right or something. The world building is not great in this episode.

After some implication that his ability to pick any kind of lock is part of his medallion’s power (yes I make too much of this), Manic gets them out of the lion pit, they meet up with Sonic and the centaur-minotaur-thing, and they run to save Lydia’s father.

For some reason, Sonia’s divine right theory is proven correct. And the centaur-minotaur-thing is actually the Oracle of Delphius in disguise, and declares them announcing the emperor’s return as the right outcome. He returns their magic, and Sonia immediately uses it to get rid of emperor Sleet.

We end on a new prophecy: “You will rejoin Queen Aleena and become the Council of Four: destined to defeat Robotnik, if you are true to yourselves and your powers. And if your hearts never lose faith.” And an image of a multi-tiered… building... thing… that will supposedly be a sign of where they need to go.

I give the whole episode some serious side-eye, because this was clearly supposed to be An Important Episode, narratively (and it’s even the half-way point!), but it… mostly was a mess.

So appropriate to the Trashfire then!

Okay, so… I don’t like the idea of rewriting things to improve them, but I’ll give you a quick rundown of how I think the same story could have been told more effectively. The point was that the triplets aren’t the rightful rulers because they have magic medallions, it’s because they have inner abilities that make them good leaders. And granted, when you have three main characters, that is very difficult to SHOW in 20 minutes, let alone with 90 seconds spent on a musical number. But still. Let’s outline the things that actually make them good royalty:

Sonic (underneath his impatience and attitude) is heroic and kind

Sonia is politically and business savvy

Manic… has not actually shown any good leadership traits in the series so far, but he’s implied to be the most emotional, honest, and caring of the three.

So in theory, these should have been the things highlighted in this episode through an act of self-sacrifice by Sonic, some emotional connection with people by Manic, and some manipulation of Sleet by Sonia. Lydia could have been trapped in the dungeon with them, Manic could have sung her a song about not giving up hope. The centaur-thing could have been in the dungeon and Sonic could have told everyone to run while he fends off certain death alone. Sonia could have demanded to speak to Sleet and found some legal loophole that meant he never should have become emperor, or that Sleet had used underhanded means to dethrone the old one, or some actual and legitimate reason for the people to stop backing him.

As it was, it was just a weird sort of… ‘yeah, you’re going to get the throne back because you’re supposed to be the ruling class’ thing and it’s… it’s weird. Awkward and weird and…

Anyway. Anyway… we move on.

[inkskinned]

the thing about art is that it was always supposed to be about us, about the human-ness of us, the impossible and beautiful reality that we (for centuries) have stood still, transfixed by music. that we can close our eyes and cry about the same book passage; the events of which aren't real and never happened. theatre in shakespeare's time was as real as it is now; we all laugh at the same cue (pursued by bear), separated hundreds of years apart.

three years ago my housemates were jamming outdoors, just messing around with their instruments, mostly just making noise. our neighbors - shy, cautious, a little sheepish - sat down and started playing. i don't really know how it happened; i was somehow in charge of dancing, barefoot and laughing - but i looked up, and our yard was full of people. kids stacked on the shoulders of parents. old couples holding hands. someone had brought sidewalk chalk; our front walk became a riot of color. someone ran in with a flute and played the most astounding solo i've ever heard in my life, upright and wiggling, skipping as she did so. she only paused because the violin player was kicking his heels up and she was laughing too hard to continue.

two weeks ago my friend and i met in the basement of her apartment complex so she could work out a piece of choreography. we have a language barrier - i'm not as good at ASL as i'd like to be (i'm still learning!) so we communicate mostly through the notes app and this strange secret language of dancers - we have the same movement vocabulary. the two of us cracking jokes at each other, giggling. there were kids in the basement too, who had been playing soccer until we took up the far corner of the room. one by one they made their slow way over like feral cats - they laid down, belly-flat against the floor, just watching. my friend and i were not in tutus - we were in slouchy shirts and leggings and socks. nothing fancy. but when i asked the kids would you like to dance too? they were immediately on their feet and spinning. i love when people dance with abandon, the wild and leggy fervor of childhood. i think it is gorgeous.

their adults showed up eventually, and a few of them said hey, let's not bother the nice ladies. but they weren't bothering us, they were just having fun - so. a few of the adults started dancing awkwardly along, and then most of the adults. someone brought down a better sound system. someone opened a watermelon and started handing out slices. it was 8 PM on a tuesday and nothing about that day was particularly special; we might as well party.

one time i hosted a free "paint along party" and about 20 adults worked quietly while i taught them how to paint nessie. one time i taught community dance classes and so many people showed up we had to move the whole thing outside. we used chairs and coatracks to balance. one time i showed up to a random band playing in a random location, and the whole thing got packed so quickly we had to open every door and window in the place.

i don't think i can tell you how much people want to be making art and engaging with art. they want to, desperately. so many people would be stunning artists, but they are lied to and told from a very young age that art only matters if it is planned, purposeful, beautiful. that if you have an idea, you need to be able to express it perfectly. this is not true. you don't get only 1 chance to communicate. you can spend a lifetime trying to display exactly 1 thing you can never quite language. you can just express the "!!??!!!"-ing-ness of being alive; that is something none of us really have a full grasp on creating. and even when we can't make what we want - god, it feels fucking good to try. and even just enjoying other artists - art inherently rewards the act of participating.

i wasn't raised wealthy. whenever i make a post about art, someone inevitably says something along the lines of well some of us aren't that lucky. i am not lucky; i am dedicated. i have a chronic condition, my hands are constantly in pain. i am not neurotypical, nor was i raised safe. i worked 5-7 jobs while some of these memories happened. i chose art because it mattered to me more than anything on this fucking planet - i would work 80 hours a week just so i could afford to write in 3 of them.

and i am still telling you - if you are called to make art, you are called to the part of you that is human. you do not have to be good at it. you do not have to have enormous amounts of privilege. you can just... give yourself permission. you can just say i'm going to make something now and then - go out and make it. raquel it won't be good though that is okay, i don't make good things every time either. besides. who decides what good even is?

you weren't called to make something because you wanted it to be good, you were called to make something because it is a basic instinct. you were taught to judge its worth and over-value perfection. you are doing something impossible. a god's ability: from nothing springs creation.

a few months ago i found a piece of sidewalk chalk and started drawing. within an hour i had somehow collected a small classroom of young children. their adults often brought their own chalk. i looked up and about fifteen families had joined me from around the block. we drew scrangly unicorns and messed up flowers and one girl asked me to draw charizard. i am not good at drawing. i basically drew an orb with wings. you would have thought i drew her the mona lisa. she dragged her mother over and pointed and said look! look what she drew for me and, in the moment, i admit i flinched (sorry, i don't -). but the mother just grinned at me. he's beautiful. and then she sat down and started drawing.

someone took a picture of it. it was in the local newspaper. the summary underneath said joyful and spontaneous artwork from local artists springs up in public gallery. in the picture, a little girl covered in chalk dust has her head thrown back, delighted. laughing.

[makowcy]

jayy

[waitineedaname]

not romantic or platonic but a secret third thing (bonded pair)

[to-boldly-escape]

Data in Gold <3

Expand for higher qualityy

[bacchuschucklefuck]

dreaming abt sophomore year class swap bard!riz

[ashipiko]

ONLY ONE THAT KNOWS YOUR KISS! IT HITS! MY SOUL! ♪

NO-TEXT VER UNDER CUT

[muttmedley]

genuinely can't stress how nice it is to just enjoy yourself and do what feels good instead of being overly worried abt getting each other off

[unexpectedbrickattack]

experimentin w shit heehee

[yellowocaballero]

Continuing the JJK posting: Gojo is such a mystifying character.

Action show where swinging out the gate you introduce a character who is so incredibly powerful you then have to, before every fight, establish why Gojo can't just show up and fix the problem in seconds. His existence weakens the stakes of everything. The rest of the show you are backflipping ridding yourself of him. He jobs two major bad guys off the gate and every subsequent extensive fight with them feels like cleaning up his leftovers. Put him in a box, he's ruining the game balance. So absolutely broken. As a writer it makes your job so difficult, but it's also the entire point of him. "Hey I want to write the single most badass character of all time who can do the most insane shit but I will also engage with that", rock on king.

I think he's most interesting when understood as somebody who is fundamentally alien and removed from ordinary human thought processes. In his world there is absolutely nothing he cannot do, and the thought 'maybe I can't do something' just doesn't occur to him. He is capable of doing whatever he wants and of killing anybody who tries to stop him from doing what he wants. If he is not doing something, it is because he does not want to do it. If he wants to do something (kill all of his superiors) and he's not doing it, it's because he doesn't think it's the most effective route towards what he has decided to do. I think this informs the majority of his actions (and, importantly, what he doesn't do)(murder). I think he's reasoned out that you should have a general reason to do things, and it feels like sheer luck that he places value and meaning in human life, and as such you shouldn't kill them without a strong reason. Watching the flashback arc, if I hadn't seen a) JJK and b) Naruto and you asked me which shitty teen became a law abiding school teacher and which became a mass murderer I would have guessed the wrong ones.

Anyway, the way I like to think of him, he's a raging narcissist with a god complex to match. Horrifically, he's actually a good teacher, but he is also a teacher as an ego/'raising my child army' thing. He would be the kind of mother who is a good mother but lowkey had kids also as an ego/unconditional love/lots of attention/'surely my child will worship me' thing. Gets randomly into new hobbies, obsesses over them, gorges himself on the novelty factor, before dropping them in a week once he gets too good at them. Rinse and repeat. The only hobby that does not eventually grow boring is annoying people, so it's his only hobby. Geto told him age 15 that he'll never have any friends if he keeps on casually reminding people that they live on his sufferance, so he developed another back-up hobby more conducive for friendship of helping people forget that they live on his sufferance. This has convinced him that he's a god of subterfuge, intrigue, and trickery. Does eat women out, but is convinced that this makes him God's gift to women, and is actually pretty terrible in bed because his partner's desires never even occur to him. Is convinced he's as good at sex as he is everything else. Sex is actually the one thing he's bad at, but he's not ready to hear that.

In S1 he overall left me with the general impression that his entire idea of how high school worked was sourced from anime, and as such decided that being a teacher involved nothing but field trips, sports games, beach episodes, sports festivals, etc. Did not know how the classroom component worked so he skips it. Jossed, but also left me convinced that it would be very funny if he was an immortal 150-whatever years old and had founded the high school himself out of, you guessed it, an ego thing, and never once properly learned how high schools worked and just arbitrarily made his own aging students the new principals so he could continue engaging in training the kids who are too Misfit (TM) to get apprenticeships and living his fun slice of life anime life and raising a child army of kids who will worship him any day now. Annnyyyy day now. Any day now.

[napping-sapphic]

I talk so much about how i want to fall in love for all the things i could do for someone and all the things someone could do for me but deep down, if i’m being honest, i want to fall in love because i just so desperately need to know that love is actually real and that there are people out there capable of truly loving me

[dustykneed]

Hello! Random whipper snipper! Share a WIP of your work!

ooh, with pleasure. six the musical araleyn fanart? in the year 2k24? more likely than you think xDD

i realize this looks finished, but technically i'm still deciding whether to add a background or not lol. still, for the sake of sharing a proper WIP, here's a line or two from an araleyn brainworm WIP that i started reworking yesterday (mild tw for religious guilt and period-typical internalized homophobia from aragon's pov):

She remembers sharing her bed with Anne at Henry's behest, remembers the nights of tossing and turning and trying not to think about Anne asleep next to her-- remembers waking up to dark hair spilling across her pillow and the press of blood-warm bosoms against her own, softer than sin, as hot as the Devil, remembers lying still as death, mouthing prayers into the heat of Anne's neck like an act of penance.

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

Five Ways SentiAdrien is a Retcon

Adrien’s a sentimonster now, but he wasn’t always. Here’s a list of things that wouldn’t have happened if Adrien was a sentimonster:

Chat Blanc

Epehemeral shows us what happens in a world where Gabriel Agreste learns his sentison’s identity. Chat Blanc shows us what happens in a world where Gabriel Agreste learns his human son’s identity. If Adrien was a sentimonster in season 3, then Chat Blanc would have ended with Gabriel winning just like he did in Ephemeral. But it doesn’t because season 3 Adrien was a real boy.

Gorizilla

Nooroo: Master, you don't really think Adrien could be Cat Noir?

Gabriel: I don't know. But he's hiding something for sure. Since his bodyguard has failed to keep an eye on Adrien, there's only one way for us to uncover his secret.

Yeah, put on one of the slave collars and say, “Adrien, tell me what you’re hiding from me?” Problem solved! Except Adrien wasn’t a sentimonster yet, so Gabe had to use an akuma instead.

Felix

As of season 4, Felix and Amilie know that the Agrete’s wedding rings are amoks, so why were they so obsessed with getting their hands on them back in season 3? What were they planning to do with Adrien? Why did Amilie think that was a reasonable request? There’s no way that she’d hand over her son’s ring! Easy answer: the twins cousins weren’t sentimonster yet and the rings weren’t that special. That’s why that plot goes nowhere and why Felix’s actions don’t match his actions after they decided that the boys were sentimonsters.

Origins

Adrien keeps sneaking out of the house to go to school and Gabe just yells at him, never using the slave collars. Plausible, I guess, but still hard to buy given how controlling he is. Why wouldn’t he use one of the rings? He already doesn’t care what Adrien wants and Gabe does not get meaningfully more controlling as the show goes on (it’s part of why season 5 completely fails to make him feel worse in my book).

Miracular

Cataclysms drive Sentimonsters insane, but kill humans, so Chat Noir probably should have gone insane here. Along similar lines, the fact that akuma powers work on him like a normal human is super weird because Adrien isn’t a true human. Can he break his bones? Does he even need to transform to fight? Do all sentimonsters have the ability to use miraculous? I have questions that this show will never answer because the answers don’t exist. That would require competent, well-thought-out lore.

[lollytea]

Huntlow situationship gives me such intense brain termites you don't get it

[itissadbutitsmy-artblog]

it's as done as im going to make it tbh. inconsistent, not perfect, but done :)

i'd say "sorry about this" but if i found a silly three minute wizards city fan animatic id lose my mind so im not sorry in the least

[clegfly]

Getting REAL sick and tired of how omori TikTok views sunny.

Like, they view any scene of him being emotionally vulnerable, affectionate, or even just making an expression outside of just being completely neutral as “mischaracterised”. He’s not some cool, stoic, unwavering badass, he is a traumatised teenager. Don’t cry whenever he dares to give his friend a hug or (god forbid) be SAD about something??? Isn’t like. Part of the point of his development about him allowing himself to break down the repressive walls he built when he shut himself in? And being able to rely on his real friends instead of imaginary versions? And isn’t the game like. Meant to SHOW that he still cares about them despite isolating himself?

It’s really stupid to get mad at a character like that showing emotion or affection personally, especially since he’s not used to expressing it properly after so long. But that’s just me