#I think that's all the prominent characters here

[the-knight-of-the-stars]

Are we gonna talk about how that finale entirely erased any conversation about class divisions or are we too focused on ships?

Are we gonna talk about how Caitlyn for a good chunk of the season willingly enforces violence and opression against the lowest class, no doubt directly causing more deaths and suffering, and she is forgiven by the narrative without any meaningful reflecting?

Her great moment getting together with Vi is right after she JUST had a conversation with Jinx where we see she STILL doesn't recognize any class bias she clearly has, insted making it about HER.

Her and the other enforcers are treated like noble heroes in the final battle, all the blame put on Ambesa. Vi's happy ending is getting into a relationship with the exact type of person who perpetuated all the suffering she endured as a child.

Are we gonna talk about how Jayce never leaves his privilege pedestal, never actually reflects on how he was also enforcing violence to the people of the undercity and living on his bliss of progress at THEIR expense?

Jayce, who got help on every step of the way to get to where he is, who wasn't disabled, who never lived the kind of poverty or class obstacles Viktor did, who never recognized the harm he enabled and was complicit to, HE was the one to tell Viktor "People build their own destiny." and "There is beauty in imperfection" ?????

Not to mention the whole bit where he implies Viktor did all that because he wanted to "eradicate what he thought was weakness"??? Didn't we stablished Viktor wanted to HELP THE PEOPLE FROM THE UNDERCITY TO HAVE BETTER LIFE CONDITIONS?? don't try to gaslight me.

I know this is just a TV show, but I need to remind everyone that what perpetuates opressive, discriminatory and violent systems as long and as deeply as they do is indiference. Is turning your head and enabling others to stay ignorant.

Edit: You guys are misunderstanding me. And I admit it is probably my fault, I wrote this high with emotion I wasn't as eloquent.

Jayce's exact choice of words or his time living in the alternate world is nowhere near my point.

My point is, that the narrative is establishing that the privileged character, is the one that has to show (and is quite literally, textually, always the one to show) the underprivileged character that "he was looking at life the wrong way." Forgetting that Viktor's journey of feeling powerless was greatly influenced by the fact he was poor and from the undercity.

That's what I meant by it erasing the part of the plot about class systems. In the end, the story only requires Jayce to understand Viktor's struggle on a superficial level, but the text never recognizes that it as the product of a deeply rooted SYSTEMIC ISSUE. One Jayce and even Viktor on some level, benefited from and perpetuated.

Understanding Viktor still doesn't give him any moral ground, and nobody ever challenges him on that because the story isn't interested in that anymore.

And the same with Caitlyn. She knows what she did what's wrong, fine, she feels bad. Like I said, she still has a class bias, and no character challenges her on it again because the story derails to magic and fighting and whatnot.

The plot just forgets (or ignores) that layer of the story despite it being so prominent up until now.

And ignoring the class discussion does a disservice to every single character because they were initially built on it. You can see it in how they lose the essence they had on s1.

I know y'all love the characters and want to empathize with all their motivations, okay? But the fundamental issue is that characters also represent things, and more so in a story as political as this one. We also have the right to point out that the show told us they represented something and then abandoned that narrative.

What do I think they could have done differently? If I tell you scene by scene we could be here for an entire year. The gist of it is: I think they should have stuck to the character themes they already had established.

Vi as someone fiercely loyal to the undercity beyond her relationship with Powder/Jinx, and being "cursed" by the role of the older sister. Jayce as someone with good intentions but who is ultimately limited by his blind idealism. Mel as a cunning politician who thinks she is on the right path because she isn't violent like her mother, not realizing she is still perpetuating it. Caitlyn as someone kind and compassionate who realizes the institutions she believed in are fundamentally flawed, and because of the way they are built will never be on the side of kindness. Etc, etc.

None of that gets any meaningful resolution.

I am glad if you liked it, or got something from it, you are entitled to your opinion.

I wanted to say this because I was angry, and still am. Because there was so much incredible potential, and honestly, to me, it feels like the writers chickened out on actually saying something in the end.

That's all I have to say about that.

[maybe-boys-do-love]

Only Friends Dream On trailer proving some of my firmly held beliefs about the original series.

The narrative and writers didn't hate or punish Boston. His friends did. Monogamous cultural standards did. His father's prominent political position did. But the narrative never did. When a story's ending is thronged by a character's absence, to lift a phrase from Marilynne Robinson's final sentence in Housekeeping, the absence was not signifying condemnation. Interesting that the Dream On trailer uses Romeo and Juliet, because I had just been thinking about that play as an example to parallel with Only Friends where the characters deaths and absence at the end signify the wrong-headedness of everyone else. All this is to say, the bitch is back! Neo's appearance as Boston in the trailer tells us that yes it's gonna be messy but also that Boston is beloved (Jojo has stated as much explictly).

Only Friends was a commentary on the BL genre in relation to queer media genres. I won't go into the particulars of my theory about the allegories here, but Dream On is diving deeper into the commentary by being directly about the drama behind the scenes of BL dramas lol.

Only Friends did not depict or view committed partnership as a happily ever after. Dream On is about to give us a bunch of couples in messy established relationships rather than the original series arcs around coming together *wink wink*. The EarthMix casting is beyond exceptional, since they are the most highly rumored to be an actual couple. Then we get Ohm Pawat and Gawin who both have sorted through BL partners like few others in the business, and Ohm's especially have been associated with scandal and mess. If you think the ending of Only Friends with the three established couples opening their business was the writers' idea of a happy ending, the Dream On trailer is here to tell you that you're sorely mistaken. The mess continues well beyond saying let's be exclusive.

The writers of Only Friends did not see monogamy as the perfect answer or sustainable for everyone, and Dream On is about to show us how wonderful and messy that can be.

[clonerightsagenda]

Kat's "I could fix her" Arcane season 2 post Part 1:

Yeah we're skipping straight past the recap/reflections on what this show actually was into my 'just let me into the writers room' post because I'm currently tormented by, ironically, what could have been

What's funny is the characters didn't even end up doomed by the narrative because of their League of Legends fates!! They killed a whole bunch of champions! They just Did All That anyway.

As I was saying in previous posts, the season was overstuffed. I genuinely liked some of the music video portions lol, but there was just so much going on.

I still would put Mel in a Magic Coma for the entire season and spin out her Black Rose plot for a third season or new spinoff (it seems like there will be one anyway). Her storyline as is felt like an afterthought and wasn't fully explained. Am I supposed to know the Black Rose lady? I don't. Being crammed in does her a disservice; I'd rather give her room to breathe. This would create a stronger absent mother/absent daughter bond between Ambessa and Caitlyn, and Caitlyn could see Ambessa claiming to do things for her daughter's sake even though it's obviously stuff Mel would never approve of, and that could force Caitlyn to reflect on how her mother wouldn't approve of the actions she's taking allegedly for her sake. That could sell Caitlyn's immediately re-siding with Vi better.

This may be a very hot take, but I didn't really like the werewolf Vander plotline. My understanding is he's a LoL champion, but he felt particularly cartoonish even in an increasingly cartoonish season, and just kept retreading the same ground. Vander's dead. :( He's alive! :) He's dead again. :( Obviously the cycles are part of the point, and he represents how Vander's death is this monstrous always dying never at rest force between the sisters tying them together and strangling them at the same time, but I'd cut it. Have Vi seek Jinx out after the prison break because she can't believe her sister did that, have Jinx admit she only did it to save one girl, and they reflect on how Vander also did stuff just for kids versus ideals. Make Vi reflect on how her little jaunt with Jayce killed a kid, and here Jinx is saving one, and people are complicated. Still not clear on how Jinx has no negative effects from Shimmer, so give her a few and that can be their new reason for going to Viktor's commune. Ambessa can hear about his new weird magitech without needing a werewolf to pique her interest.

Obviously this raises of the question of what Vi and Jinx are doing in the finale, and while I don't think every character needs a big damn fight scene, they can back up Caitlyn versus Ambessa since Mel won't be there, which also forces them to deal with the Vi-Caitlyn-Jinx tension. IDK if there's a way to have Jinx ambiguously blow herself up in that scenario but here's a thought, maybe the most prominently disabled characters don't all need to die and/or commit suicide? More on that later. Ambessa is subdued, not dead, though, so she and Mel can talk later.

Finally (for this post) I already expressed my frustration that the key class conflict so present in the first season and first half of the second gets mostly shoved under the rug because there's a new enemy to fight. Yes, that's often used as a distraction irl, but that's not a *good* thing. Sevika's sitting at the councilor's table at the end of the show. Who negotiated that? Caitlyn? If we absolutely must go the direction of a big damn final battle, I want to see that conversation and all of the pain and distrust that must've come up during it.

That's the kid gloves version. If I was being aggressive - and I would be - I'd have the fighting totally destroy Piltover with arcane corruption, and now everyone from Piltover has to live in the Undercity/Zaun as refugees. Forget Sevika sitting down at the Piltover table as the new councilors glare at her. Now the Piltover councilors are having to sit awkwardly down at a table with Sevika and Ekko's number 2. (Or Ekko. What is he doing besides sitting sadly on that roof. Is he involved in governance. Is his tree ok.) Piltover suffocated Zaun for years with their industrial runoff. Now they're choking to death on their own magical industrial waste, and they're going to have to learn to live like everybody else.

I am still parsing the whole Viktor, Jayce, and disability thing since as you know that's one of the elements that fascinates me most about this show (the new improved crunchy ableism even as they genuinely try to explore something interesting) so I will be typing a separate post about that, probably thinking through it as I write. Stay tuned.

[doctor-yoshi-soul]

I'm gonna have to put a disclaimer at the start of this post that says "I understand what happened to these characters is just fridging and it does suck that that happens to two of the characters who are most prominent to the deeper narrative" because I don't want to get accused of ignoring that altogether

Ok now with that out of the way, I think there is something worth looking into in how it's specifically Alma and FianSissel that this happens to.

I'll ask you this, dear reader: how many characters in the game, other than Yomiel, know about his fiancée? How many of them know she died? That she specifically killed herself? It's one of those questions that the game doesn't really acknowledge (which. Kinda comes back to the fridging thing) but I'd be willing to bet the answer is Very Small. I mean really, who would have known enough to care outside of Cabanela, Jowd, and the Pigeon Guy? And do you think any of them at that point in their lives actually cared about the well-being of a suspect's family? Pigeon Guy is a slim maybe and that's about it. He probably had other shit to care about.

In the end, she didn't matter. She didn't matter to anyone other than Yomiel (from the player's biased perspective) and she's gone and no one (again, from the player perspective) notices. One might say it's just like a certain ghost who can't seem to leave a prominent mark on the world anymore, no?

And then Alma? Here's where it gets interesting. Yomiel didn't just kill Alma to get back at Jowd. He killed Alma to make Jowd understand the pain he went through of losing the woman he loved. They're mirrors, in that way.

So, if given the choice, why the hell would Yomiel bother to learn anything more about the woman he intended to kill? Why wouldn't he offer the exact same amount of compassion given to Sissel? Which of course, is none at all.

And since player Sissel is, in a sense, following Yomiel's trail, whether he realizes it or not, he doesn't get to learn more about Alma either. Forgotten and worthless (and yet still carrying the story on their back).

Like I said I'm well aware this is just fridging and it sucks but I think the fact that both of these women end up scorned by the narrative is fun to consider within that narrative sense too.

[jingerpi]

something weird after growing up unable to express your personhood (cult+queerphobia) is learning to understand how to relate to characters. learning that you can really like a character and see some aspect of yourself in them without them being literally you. it's so instinctual to hold characters so close and tightly and feel like they represent you and wash away anything characterizing them differently from you but over time you begin to learn to simply appreciate characters as what they are, as (fictional) people who are often as diverse and unique as real people, if not more so. it's okay to feel a connection to a character and have them be your favoritest even if they're different from you, it's okay, you can let go and acknowledge the things that make them different from you. maybe this is a hyperspecific experience that only applies to me and like 1 other person, but it really does feel like a strangely significant lesson in media and how to relate to it as a real person

[age-of-moonknight]

“Hunter’s Moon,” Vengeance of the Moon Knight, (Vol. 2/2024), #4.

Writer: Jed MacKay; Penciler and Inker: Alessandro Cappuccio; Colorist: Rachelle Rosenberg; Letterer: Cory Petit

[aeb-art]

i was trying to make up side characters for @8um8le's space friends and thought "every show needs a grump"

i'm not gonna finish this though, so y'all can have it now o7

[volfoss]

like i genuinely cannot believe thegall that she has quinn saying that oh they loved being servants... really??

[ID: Text reading:

"“I let them go into the front parlor together, and then I went into the kitchen for lunch, where Jasmine was just telling Big Ramona that they were rich. I hated to break up their happiness with my glum looks and I blamed it all on hunger. Besides, Jasmine had always been rich and so was Big Ramona. They just never wanted to leave Blackwood Manor, everybody knew."/end ID]

[the-judicial-assistants-notebook]

y'know, I've been seeing a lot more posts talking about how fanfic, specifically, puts characters into boxes and takes away the nuance of them, and while I think that's an important discussion to have, I also find it quite perplexing? Like, these posts seem to come from people who don't even, or maybe very rarely, consume fics in the first place, and I say that because, if you do consume fics semi-regularly, you kind of learn? how to gage what the stories and characterisation are going to be like based on the tags and summary? Sometimes, you do have to step into the fic to figure it out, but it hardly takes very long to realise if it gels with you or not. Idk, it's not anything serious or important, but it does give me... "girl, what were you doing at the devil's sacrament" vibes, you know?

[nitetime-moon]

Fighting Art Block Pt 1

[unproduciblesmackdown]

further musings with the ability to consider the overarching series wherein it like as ever, questioning how well anything was questioned when in the end it seems like it's going "okay let's look at these people we think are epic" where ultimately of course it's like oh they might also be shitty they might not get the best endings, b/c they couldn't Change....while characters like wendy who ostensibly did get [better endings, b/c you can change] status spent the whole time Not choosing to change, ends up with a foot in both camps w/axe & chuck, like okay watch me assuming she's just off to more of the same. but what mattered was that billions always considered her Epic. rian's not a character and didn't do anything and ended up clearly only another [just some asshole] employee who'd just like to keep showing up for the usual and stepping on & bullying other employees for ego, and the fact that it was completely believable she just committed to sticking with that forever until then it was like oh okay she's supposed to have only just now for some reason decided it's time to leave b/c she's just too nice? like, that is not convincing, i'm sure she's off to more of the same forever too anyways, but yet again the non plan here seems to have been determined by billions' deciding this character is like, ambiently epic. chuck sr gets alleged heartwarming moments (on his terms) b/c damn if he isn't epic at least, like axe and chuck sufficiently are. winston as a consummate cringe loser nerd couldn't ever be written anything in particular besides being crushed, which he deserves, and is so fun. ben kim on the other hand might be billions' specialest little guy who they Don't think deserves being crushed (as much) (and/or we can at least sympathize with him over it) but he doesn't get much of an ending to speak of or muse on b/c if anything his triumphs were about being a little more Epic but in the end maybe he just wasn't quite Epic enough, whether for a better or worse ending. b/c these other characters might end up either way but again if you're really worth talking about on the show at all you do simply have to have been Inherently Epic in the first place, which will no matter what guarantee you an epic consideration and material devoted to you, versus the inherent losers who will get no such thing no matter what. (wags was useless and an asshole but we Needed his involvement and focus and ending that was just fine thanks)

[dragonowlie]

My internet is back! *holds my downstairs neighbours like a cat that knocked over a potted plant* YOU!

anyway the second I realised my internet was fully back I immediately put on castlevania nocturne and there is so much I could say about it and if I had more energy I might but tldr

BAROQUE MUSIC

[silvvergears]

So I guess I'm going to spend the next four to five business days hyperfocusing on a potential Dishonored au for TOG ft. Hunter as Emily, Eda as Corvo, and Belos as the Royal Spymaster. I've already figured out most of the casting and how the storyline will shift and change (Hunter is older than Emily was and has a much more active role) for both games, and as soon as work is done I'm going to work on some art for it

[dan-crimes]

I don't personally enjoy death in my stories for one because I have no experience with it personally and for two because you can't torture a character anymore once they've died 😇

[thaliagrayce]

do NOT understand why will was complaining about nico's dark edgy powers. the pro to dating the king of all emo kids is that you get to date the king of all emo kids. whats not clicking

[revawake]

bring your bloodlust and your haterade!!! 🩸🧉