#I'm not gonna say what show or episode

[teaboot]

THE BLORBO SAID MY REAL LIFE LEGAL NAME IN THIS EPISODE AND IT FEELS WEIRD

[rosalie-starfall]

The Not Ready For Prime Time Players

Saturday Night / Saturday Night Live October 11th 1975

[catocappuccino]

Her favourite colour is yello w

[piko-power]

Don't mind me, just making a collection of Sonic and Knuckles being together because I want more of their sibling dynamic and I love them

If anybody is wondering, I took these pictures from YouTube, NOT Paramount+. The first full episode is out for free if you wanna check it out.

Please do not tag as ship.

EDIT: Okay so apparently I can't find the full episode on YouTube anymore lol. Just wanted to put that out there in case anyone didn't know.

[vaggieslefteye]

"Wait, what did I say?"

[x-mensirens]

"Habe keine Angst."

[jq37]

Descendants: The Rise of Red is kind of a bizarre movie to talk about critically because, imo, it almost doesn't make sense to talk about it in the usual terms of good vs bad or enjoyable vs not enjoyable when the way more obvious tension is finished vs unfinished.

Because, more than any other movie I've ever seen, it does *not* read as a full movie. And I don't mean in a "this movie has a cliffhanger" kind of way. The Empire Strikes Back and Across the Spiderverse fit that description. They end on big dramatic cliffhangers that point to a resolution in the third installment.

But Rise of Red just sets all this stuff up and then...ends without concluding anything. It doesn't feel like the first movie in a trilogy (or duology). It feels like the first act of a two-act musical. It very specifically reminds me of the end of the first act of Into the Woods where all the main characters sing the song Ever After about how they all fixed their problems with magic and nothing bad will ever happen to them again and then the narrator ominously says "To be continued" before the curtain drops. But in Into the Woods you know there's a second act and this movie wasn't sold as the first act of a bigger story. Like sure, it has the, "You didn't think this was the end" tag at the end like all the other movies, but those movies were complete, self-contained stories even though they had sequels. This was NOT a full story. It's half of one story.

Like, if we're supposed to take this as a full story, there are so many bizarre choices:

Why did they make sure to mention that Cinderella and Charming fell in love at the ball at the top if it wasn't meant to set up Back to the Future style, "Oh no, I accidentally got my mom banned from the ball so she's not gonna fall in love with Dad and I won't be born" shenanigans?

Why did Maddox very pointedly have that bit about "you could lose your mom completely" if that was never going to come into play? Red never did anything to endanger Bridget or endanger her own birth so it doesn't make sense as a warning in that way.

Why was there all this focus on this Carrie on prom night moment for Bridget if we LITERALLY NEVER SAW CASTLECOMING? Why dance around this moment and talk about it all cloak and dagger with no specificity if they weren't building up to some big reveal that it wasn't as straightforward as it seemed? And like, they leaned in HARD with making Bridget the nicest, sweetest, cotton candy princess as a teen so I need WAY more than, "She got pranked by known bullies she's been enduring with a smile very handily up to this point" to buy that she went from that to "murderous dictator". And even if she did become murderous, I find it insanely hard to believe that she'd include her best and only friend on the list of people she wants to suffer unless there was a betrayal. I find it INSANE that there wasn't a falling out scene at any point in this movie with how thickly they were laying on the admiration and camaraderie.

(Note: And adult Cinderella def has guilty vibes re: the Queen at orientation. Which I know I'm not imagining because it's literally spelled out in the Jr Novelization!)

Before the time travel element of the movie started, I thought they were going for something like they go to the past and realize that Bridget was bullied not by the VKs but by the spoiled royals, and Ella ends up joining in the bullying once she gets with Charming, betraying Bridget and justifying her whole "Love Ain't It" philosophy. Or Ella ditching her at the last minute to be with Charming meaning she has to deal with the monster prank alone and it was the being alone rather than the prank itself that hurt her (though that is NOT a good enough reason to go all off with their heads on your subjects). The fact that, as far as we know right now, it literally was just a relatively mild and reversible prank that caused all of this is just, such flat storytelling, you know?

But! All of this makes way more sense if this is meant to be the first act of a single contained story. And I don't wanna be all "Pepe Silvia, secret good 4th episode of Sherlock" about this but I did see this picture:

Which seems to indicate that this was written as a Part One. Which, if so, idk why they wouldn't advertise it that way but whatever. The point is, if that's the case then it means that we're potentially in bad pacing territory rather than straight up bad storytelling territory. Because this isn't a bad place to be halfway through your story:

The heroes, warned that time travel is dangerous, have gone back in time to change the heart of a brutal tyrant before she can stage a coup. They seemingly succeed in their mission and when they come home, everything is great! But then, the side effects of time travel start to catch up with them. Chloe realizes that, in breaking the vase, she prevented her mother from going to the ball and falling in love with her dad (who was conspicuously absent from the final scene btw) which means she's starting to be forgotten and erased from the timeline. And Red realizes that though this new version of her mom is as sweet and kind as the teen she once met, she's a complete stranger to her (fulfilling the Hatter's warning that she could lose her mom completely). So they have to go back in time once more to make sure the Ella and Charming fall in love again, perhaps at the cost of whatever bad thing that happened to Bridget happening again and bringing back the original version of her future self. But, now with more context of how her mom became that way, Red can now talk to her mother and persuade her to give people another chance.

Boom, that gives us time to go back and hit everything we haven't yet hit. We can pay off the time travel tropes that were set up but not explored. We can go to Castlecoming which feels so obviously set up to be the centerpiece of this story (like, come on, Back to the Future literally does the school dance thing. This is Time Travel Storytelling 101). We can actually get info about what the prank was and why it affected Bridget so completely.

(Note: This is a side thing but it really strikes me as so crazy that Bridget would so SUCH a big 180 here. Like, I know the Queen of Hearts is a silly, goofy, campy villain, but she straight up murders people and there's no way to get around that if we're taking her out of the surreal story she comes from and putting her in a (comparatively) grounded story. If I wasn't doing a betrayal plot, I would make the twist that the spell that turned Bridget into a "monster" didn't just have a physical effect, it had a mental effect and it magically twisted her personality to be the way it is now. So they broke the physical half of the curse, but neglected the other half and it's been festering the whole time, turning her as evil as she was sweet. Because like, a simple physical transformation isn't that big of a deal to have such heavy security--Bridget made cupcakes with a transformative effect and that was totally fine. I'm not saying that that's what's gonna be the case. I just think it would be an explanation that makes sense for why she changed so crazy much that makes more sense than a simple prank or even a betrayal. Her mom wasn't even evil! How did she go from zero to murder without even an evil mom to push her onto the path? But I'm super digressing right now.)

(Note #2: OK, one last thing. The trap on the book presumably would have hit the VK's and trapped them in Merlin's office regardless of what Chloe and Red did, right? That's like, net zero influence on the timeline. I genuinely can't tell if that's a straight up plot hole or set up to be like, "Oh no. Actually when she said that she was turned into a monster in front of everyone it was meant in a less literal way." Like she was just made to look bad and that was the real thing that pushed her over the edge. Like idk. It really feels like the only thing they really did that would change the timeline was get Ella banned from the dance and presumably out of the way where she couldn't hurt Bridget. OK NOW I'm done.)

Anyway, my point is that this is not how I would have structured my movie and I think this was a super weird way to go into the second era of Descendants movies, but they can still tell a complete story if that's their plan. I'm genuinely really curious to see if this pans out to be a fairly competently told story that just happens to be split over two movies or a complete fumbling of the narrative bag because it could really be either at this point and it's fascinating to me.

[femmeetart]

Juliette is very good at hide and seek

[swordbending]

I'm over people saying "give the live action a chance before you criticize it" like trailers are mostly a marketing tool to convince ppl to watch smth but they're also there to let viewers decide whether they think smth is worth their time. if people look at trailers & promo and decide they aren't gonna like it based on that that's no one's problem but the marketing team's

[meownotgood]

i have so many thoughts about arcane but I'm so tired because it's 5 in the morning and I'm starving because i didn't eat and my brain is functioning at about 2% and all of my insides feel like mush.

[hua-mo-jin-is-a-cutie]

this is the only social media website where I feel like I can talk about this without getting hated by teenagers with no media literacy, but I watched (pirated) Hazbin Hotel. And while I'm still very critical of Viv herself and the decisions she's made about her staff and her public statements and her past actions, some of which are very gross, for what it's worth, I think Hazbin is alright.

There are things I'd do differently sure, but it's like... aggressively average. The music is hit or miss, with mostly catchy tunes accompanied by lyrics that often made me cringe a little by how they already feel like outdated references to current slang. I also really don't enjoy when they have a big musical number come out of nowhere and have other characters acknowledge that they're singing. It really takes away from the musical numbers themselves. it's like musical writing 101 to NOT do that.

I know this is something people tend to criticize, but I'll be honest I like most of the character designs. They have fairly distinct silhouettes and it's kinda what drew me in enough to watch it in the first place. I'm particularly fond of Nifty. I do think some of them are a bit too complex, too busy to be super appealing, and must be hell to animate. I also think there's not really much cohesion in character designs of the world other than color, and even that's a stretch. I wish we'd at least been given some sort of reason in the show that some demons are furries and others aren't.

The animation is pretty nice, though the camera movement tends to make it a bit hard for my eyes to focus when there's a lot going on.

I've seen a lot of people complain about the pacing and while I agree that things are moving too fast, that we need time to get to know these characters and this world and earn these, what are supposed to be, hard hitting moments. I also acknowledge that I like fast pacing. I want it to slow down, but not astronomically, just a smidge.

I'd say the writing is also hit or miss. Sometimes it's got me fairly entertained, but other times it's making me uncomfortable and not on purpose. Again, slang that will quickly become or already is irrelevant is a major issue for me.

Contrary to what I've seen many people saying, I actually thought episode 4 was handled decently enough. Honestly the pacing is really the only thing holding it back for me. It doesn't feel like it's glorifying or romanticizing sexual abuse or domestic violence. It frames Valentino as the abuser he is when it's most important, even when he is a bumbling idiot in other scenes. Scenes of abuse between angel and Val are taken seriously enough. I wasn't a huge fan of the song Poison, but I also don't think it's romanticizing SA. I mean it literally ends with Angel sobbing on the floor so... I dunno how anyone came to that conclusion. There are times when the show jokes about sexual assault which I do think is distasteful and is one of my gripes with the writing overall, however when it comes to the topic of angel and val, it's handled well enough.

I'm interested in seeing where the plot goes with how episode 6 ended even with it's flaws. It's going in an interesting direction so far and I think the music of that episode was pretty good, calling back to the first episode's song with Adam in a clever way.

So overall I'd give Hazbin like a 6/10. It's fine, but it's got flaws. I'd like to see the kinks ironed out in season 2 and have Viv acknowledge some of her mistakes or at least take criticism well for once.

Anyway, stan Nifty, she's best girl.

[lab-gr0wn-lambs]

[deanpinterester]

i was going to make a post telling yall to stop calling godzilla minus one a low-budget film (because it isn't) but then i remembered disney regularly drops 12 million for ONE EPISODE of their shows without nearly the same cultural impact so. yeah godzilla is low-budget as far as i'm concerned idc

[prettyflyshyguy]

Having a Rough One (tm) and I have NO ART to show you but here's some WIP scraps cause it's wip wednesday (miscellaneous, from the two drastically different things I'm writing right now. I'd say guess which is which but its bluntly obvious)

[greenscreen-dress]

I wish all Precure seasons that attempt to force a reciprocated romance between young teen magical girls and animal-fairy mascots that turn into Ambiguously Adult Hot Guys™ a very Stop That Immediately Dear Gourd Why. 🫠

[gregoftom]

where do i even start