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onebizarrekai · 4 years ago

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v3′s art is comically terrible for a professionally distributed game in a series: a compilation

in this not-essay I will list all of the mistakes and problems I have spotted in v3′s art. don’t worry, it’s entirely for fun and I’m doing this on a whim, so please feel free to not take this seriously but also it’s hilarious and embarrassing how ridiculous this is like what happened did they speedrun the whole production or what

see, there are some things you can take as meta like “they made it bad on purpose to allude to the downfall of tv shows that have been on air for much too long” but I have a very strong feeling this is not the case due to the nature of some of these errors

disclaimer, the more I study this art, the more I fear that the artists were underpaid and underslept, so if this is in fact the case, I am so sorry to all of them but also I’m going to make fun of the art anyway

anyway let’s get started!

if you study this image for longer than 5 seconds, you will see that kaede is the only one fully shaded and keebo is literally just his normal sprite pasted into the image. every other character is just an ordinary ref, hence most of them facing the exact same direction with neutral expressions on their faces. it looks like a bad edit, and is probably one of the worst pieces of art in the game. it kind of gets better from here on, but my roasting will not.

with that out of the way, here’s the problem that officially bothers me the most and clarifies my viewpoint of “this is not meta and an actual lack of company communication”

this freaking cg, which seems normal at a glance, but some wiseass was like “oh, kaede is a girl, so obviously she’s going to be shorter than the Male Protagonist™” ah, that’s funny. because if you look at the character bios, kaede is, in fact, one inch taller than shuichi and not like 6 inches shorter as she is shown here.

also shuichi’s shoulder is disproportionate and horrendous and he looks vaguely like a jojo character, but I wasn’t even thinking about that until right now.

thanks guys, 50% of the fandom who has never bothered to check these bios thinks that kaede is like 5′3 (did the developers really put so little thought into her to the point where drawing her correctly in the game didn’t even matter??)

also I would like to point out that, even though this isn’t related to the art itself, yes, a character kaede’s size being only 117 lbs is unfeasible, but this applies to literally every character in danganronpa ever and it’s not new news that it’s unrealistic

update: someone in the tags informed me that in versions of the game that use centimeters, like the japanese version, kaede is actually shorter than shuichi, which just adds another thing to the list of weird decisions the localization team made for no reason. that said, after confirming this, kaede is 167 cm in the original, while shuichi is 171 cm, which are approximately 5′6 and 5′7 respectively, but one inch is still nowhere near as drastic as it is depicted above. (in spite of this, I would rather depict kaede as slightly taller, so I’m probably going to keep doing that.)

the journey continues!

bro if you want kaede to have shoulder length hair then stick to it to begin with

you can pretend this is at an angle all you want but they definitely committed the shorter kaede sin a second time

wait a goddamn second.

DO YOU SEE THIS

no………… it wasn’t kaede who shrank. it was shuichi who got taller

speaking of which, can we talk about how shady the perspective is in this elevator pic? look at shuichi and kokichi in comparison to kaede. kokichi, who is canonically 7 inches (edit: or 5, if you’re loyal to the original) shorter than kaede, looks taller than kaede. he’s growing too. what steroids are these gays taking

running into the room, electric boogaloo: I don’t think tsumugi is supposed to be the same height as kokichi

gonta… gonta you’re lookin a bit like a jojo character there

I love how kaito’s head looks kind of like it was pasted onto his body. why is he the same size as shuichi? shouldn’t he be high school bully size or something? his torso is teensy

ah yes, white angie.

I love this cg but why is shuichi’s right hand so much bigger than his left hand

I also love how this cg looks like they literally took pictures of trees and pasted them into the background, especially on the left. the shadows are so weird, especially closer to the ceiling, it’s difficult for me to believe they didn’t do exactly that.

return of Enlarged shuichi

puberty update: kokichi is now taller than shuichi in spite of shuichi never missing leg day. what crimes will he commit

I have to mention it, guys. this has to be one of the worst danganronpa cgs. kokichi’s facial proportions look atrocious. look at the way his face sticks out like his jaw is in the wrong place. his scarf is a pasted texture. that’s it. this moment was so iconic but the cg just looks so… so… off. like something is terribly wrong, but you can’t put your finger on it.

you know what? let’s get into that ‘pasted texture’ thing.

let’s imagine you’re an artist working on a professional game. you’re assigned to draw cgs of kokichi ouma, who has a checkered scarf from hell. sure, it will be terrible to draw, but you only have to draw it once at a time! plus, perspective is pretty important, right? can you be bothered? nah, actually. let’s just copy paste a checkered pattern into the cg, because I’m sure nobody will notice. it’ll blend right in with the other cgs that someone actually put effort into drawing his scarf in, right?

no. the answer is no and I very much noticed. this genuinely looks terrible and I would understand taking a shortcut like that in fanart or even an indie game but this is a full price pc and console distributed game

(an addition: look at kokichi’s TINY HANDS in that last one)

meanwhile, they straight up forgot to color in kokichi’s scarf in this cg.

dude. I forgot about whatever the hell this cg was. anyway look at keebo please just look at him

lovin kaito’s baby arms

real talk, maybe you could argue that he’s missing muscle because he’s deathly sick, but most of his cgs don’t line up with this, and his arms just look disproportionate to his torso size (granted this is a consistent problem across all danganronpa games and a lot of characters have this weird problem, like hajime, but also kaito is bigger than hajime so I kind of have higher expectations of him) maybe it’s his stupid goatee and the way he reminds me of yasuhiro?? it creates this illusion that he’s older than he is and so I keep expecting him to look more like an adult

oh, also rantaro is missing some of his accessories in that video he made–you know the one–but I don’t wanna go back and screenshot it

also you may have noticed that I’m skipping all of the monokub cgs because I literally do not care about them and I’m not even bothering to check and see if they have artistic mistakes in them

JIMMY NEUTRON???

hey um uh kaito you seem to be missing your neck

hey guys do you like my pregame fanart

so, that done, the sprites are also pretty terrible at times. they’re not as interesting to go through, however, and downloading the full sprite sets for every character and studying every single one of them will drive me insane, so I’ll just sum some of the ones I noticed up. I made things for kaede and shuichi before deciding I wasn’t going to get into it, so here are these.

that said, other mistakes include kokichi missing his purple highlights in all of the sprites encompassing a specific pose, stray pixels all over the place on everyone, and everyone also has heavily inconsistent shading, but literally all I think about is how pregame shuichi is unshaded and two of kaede’s pregame sprites have glaring outfit change mistakes in them

anyway, thank you for taking the time to read my ridiculous ramble. in all seriousness, there’s this looming presence of some lack of communication in the development team, like with all the art and design inconsistencies, pieces and sprites that look rushed, stray pixels, and missing basic proportional stuff. these are the kinds of things that you supposedly have to pretty much have in the bag in order to get jobs in professional businesses, so it’s really weird to me that this game suffers from so many of these problems. it’s like they tried to make the art so much more crisp than the other games, but it fell on its face as they realized it was going to take longer to draw everything and they started to rush. it’s weird, because the coloring itself looks normal–it’s just sloppily drawn, and the proportions are a mess once put into the context of perspective. many of the cgs look like they were drawn by different people, and I’m still not over the fact that half of kokichi’s cgs have his scarf pasted in as a texture.

the moral of the story is that if you’re selling a game at full price that also happens to be in a series that has had 3 very good games in it already the stakes should probably be higher than this. v3 has been out for more than 3 years and it’s still $40 (did it cost more than that before? I sure hope not), and the overarching quality of the game is just not as high as the other games. I’m not saying that the other games don’t have any problems with their art at all, they’re just not as glaringly obvious and every artistic choice in those games feels intentional.

regardless, I had a blast roasting the art at 2am, so maybe you got a kick out of all this chaos.

#god I keep telling myself I'm gonna stop rambling about v3 #v3 spoilers #drv3 spoilers #ndrv3 #random stuff #but making this… it sounded so fun #danganronpa

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sokkalore · 3 years ago

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You're probably tired of people whining about this to you but I HAVE to get it off my chest, I've finally found my people. My God, I was starting to feel like I was insane for not liking the manhua (like at all). I genuinely feel bad when I'm in the minority, I feel like there's something wrong with me. I've felt like this for months and I really tried to force myself to change the way I felt towards the art because it's everywhere and I can't even interact with the fandom without it hitting me in the face constantly. There's this other BL manhua "Here U Are" and I remember literally being addicted to the way it was drawn for some reason but the TGCF manhua makes me feel weirdly overwhelmed (by all the colors and the detailed backgrounds, it's perfect for separate art pieces but when it's supposed to be a comic it's like... where do I even look) and extremely uncomfortable (with the faces especially and the ooc stuff) and I know how dramatic this sounds but it's the truth and I feel like it has even affected my perception of the story and Hualian and kinda ruined them in my eyes. It's more about the way the fandom treats their manhua version I guess, it's canon after all but like... How do you not notice the inconsistencies and the ooc stuff? And why do they have to treat the donghua like that "donghua hc is crying rn/could never" "manhua x would wipe the floor with donghua x" and so on. (this bothers me because it's a large majority of people saying this). It's especially frustrating to me because I love the donghua and the way it potrays xl and hc and just the whole story. And I'm sorry but hc's manhua potrayal lowkey disgusts me. Also no I don't hate starember but they're literally the official manhua artist... And look, I don't care if a gay ship consists of a super feminine shy petite guy who only bottoms and tall sexy dominant guy who only tops, as long as these are their canon characters then fine. It's not a bad thing, people like this exist irl. But my god when you change the way characters are/behave canonically to fit this criteria it's just like... Uhh. And I still can't get that post from STARember with the glasses and "the top should be a top and the bottom should be a bottom" (or instead of "should be" it was "look like a" something along these lines, they used the chinese slang for it the numbers 1 and 0). Dude... Is this all these characters are good for? For real? Anyway this is long as fuck, I can say even more things but whatever, I'm just tired

sorry this is from the other day and i just got to it but like yeah seeing how people are reacting to my tweets about the new art, there are a lot of people it seems who don’t like starember and are uncomfortable with their art but don’t say anything because it feels like the majority of fandom will dogpile them which sucks a lot..

however in that vein, me talking about it on twitter led to a lot of people also talking about how they were uncomfortable but didn’t know how to/were scared to say it and even people who praised it earlier and are now like …….. oh wait what the fuck (not excusing the latter i think it’s kind of pathetic to have to be Told something blatantly racist is… in fact racist but the point being here that i guess people are capable of listening if people point it out). idk i’m not gonna shut up about it if it has Any effect at all in making the fandom aware of starembers blatant colorism/racism bc rn… it’s not. not openly at least

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armageddon-generation · 4 years ago

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Articulating Why His Dark Materials is Badly Written

A long essay-thing with lots of specific examples and explanations of why I feel this way. Hopefully I’ve kept fanboy bitching to a minimum.

This isn’t an attack on fans of the show, nor a personal attack on Jack Thorne. I’m not looking to ruin anyone’s enjoyment of the show, I just needed to properly articulate, with examples, why I struggle with it. I read and love the books and that colours my view, but I believe that HDM isn’t just a clumsy, at-best-functional, sometimes incompetent adaptation, it’s a bad TV show separate from its source material. The show is the blandest, least interesting and least engaging version of itself it could be.

His Dark Materials has gorgeous production design and phenomenal visual effects. It's well-acted. The score is great. But my god is it badly written. Jack Thorne writing the entire first season damned the show. There was no-one to balance out his flaws and biases. Thorne is checking off a list of plot-points, so concerned with manoeuvring the audience through the story he forgets to invest us in it. The scripts are mechanical, empty, flat.

Watching HDM feels like an impassioned fan earnestly lecturing you on why the books are so good- (Look! It's got other worlds and religious allegory and this character Lyra is really, really important I swear. Isn't Mrs Coulter crazy? The Gyptians are my favourites.) rather than someone telling the story naturally.

My problems fall into 5 main categories:

Exposition- An unwillingness to meaningfully expand the source material for a visual medium means Thorne tells and doesn't show crucial plot-points. He then repeats the same thing multiple times because he doesn't trust his audience

Pacing- By stretching out the books and not trusting his audience Thorne dedicates entire scenes to one piece of information and repeats himself constantly (see: the Witches' repetition of the prophecy in S2).

Narrative priorities- Thorne prioritises human drama over fantasy. This makes sense budgetarily, but leads to barely-present Daemons, the Gyptians taking up too much screentime, rushed/badly written Witches (superpowers, exposition) and Bears (armourless bear fight), and a Lyra more focused on familial angst than the joy of discovery

Tension and Mystery- because HDM is in such a hurry to set up its endgame it gives you the answers to S1's biggest mysteries immediately- other worlds, Lyra's parents, what happens to the kids etc. This makes the show less engaging and feel like it's playing catch-up to the audience, not the other way around.

Tonal Inconsistency- HDM tries to be a slow-paced, grounded, adult drama, but its blunt, simplistic dialogue and storytelling methods treat the audience like children that need to be lectured.

MYSTERY, SUSPENSE AND INTRIGUE

The show undercuts all the books’ biggest mysteries. Mrs Coulter is set up as a villain before we meet her, other worlds are revealed in 1x2, Lyra's parents by 1x3, what the Magesterium do to kids is spelled out long before Lyra finds Billy (1x2). I understand not wanting to lose new viewers, but neutering every mystery kills momentum and makes the show much less engaging.

This extends to worldbuilding. The text before 1x1 explains both Daemons and Lyra's destiny before we meet her. Instead of encouraging us to engage with the world and ask questions, we're given all the answers up front and told to sit back and let ourselves be spoon-fed. The viewer is never an active participant, never encouraged to theorise or wonder

Intrigue motivated you to engage with Pullman's philosophical themes and concepts. Without it, HDM feels like a lecture, a theme park ride and not a journey.

The only one of S1's mysteries left undiminished is 'what is Dust?', which won't be properly answered until S3, and that answer is super conceptual and therefore hard to make dramatically satisfying

TONAL INCONSISTENCY

HDM billed itself as a HBO-level drama, and was advertised as a GoT inheritor. It takes itself very seriously- the few attempts at humour are stilted and out of place

The production design is deliberately subdued, most notably choosing a mid-twentieth century aesthetic for Lyra’s world over the late-Victorian of the books or steampunk of the movie. The colour grading would be appropriate for a serious adult drama.

Reviewers have said this stops the show feeling as fantastical as it should. It also makes Lyra’s world less distinct from our own.

Most importantly, minimising the wondrous fantasy of S1 neuters its contrast with the escalating thematic darkness of the finale (from 1x5 onwards), and the impact of Roger’s death. Pullman's books are an adult story told through the eyes of a child. Lyra’s innocence and naivety in the first book is the most important journey of the trilogy. Instead, the show starts serious and thematically heavy (we’re told Lyra has world-saving importance before we even meet her) and stays that way.

Contrasting the serious tone, grounded design and poe-faced characters, the dialogue is written to cater to children. It’s horrendously blunt and pulls you out of scenes. Subtext is obliterated at every opportunity. Even in the most recent episode, 2x7, Pan asks Lyra ‘do you think you’re changing because of Will?’

I cannot understate how on the nose this line is, and how much it undercuts the themes of the final book. Instead of even a meaningful shot of Lyra looking at Will, the show treats the audience like complete idiots.

So, HDM looks and advertises itself like an adult drama and is desperate to be taken seriously by wearing its big themes on its sleeve from the start instead of letting them evolve naturally out of subtext like the books, and dedicating lots of scenes to Mrs Coulter's self-abuse

At the same time its dialogue and character writing is comparable to the Star Wars prequels, more childish than media aimed at a similar audience - Harry Potter, Doctor Who, Avatar the Last Airbender etc

DAEMONS

The show gives itself a safety net by explaining Daemons in an opening text-crawl, and so spends less time showing the mechanics of the Daemon-human bond. On the HDM subreddit, I’ve seen multiple people get to 1x5 or 6, and then come to reddit asking basic questions like ‘why do only some people have Daemons?’ or ‘Why are Daemons so important?’.

It’s not that the show didn’t answer these questions; it was in the opening text-crawl. It’s just the show thinks telling you is enough and never shows evidence to back that up. Watching a TV show you remember what you’re shown much easier than what you’re told

The emotional core of Northern Lights is the relationship between Lyra and Pan. The emotional core of HDM S1 is the relationship between Lyra and Mrs Coulter. This wouldn't be bad- it's a fascinating dynamic Ruth plays wonderfully- if it didn't override the Daemons

Daemons are only onscreen when they serve a narrative purpose. Thorne justifies this because the books only describe Daemons when they tell us about their human. On the page your brain fills the Daemons in. This doesn't work on-screen; you cannot suspend your disbelief when their absence is staring you in the face

Thorne clarified the number of Daemons as not just budgetary, but a conscious creative choice to avoid onscreen clutter. This improved in S2 after vocal criticism.

Mrs Coulter/the Golden Monkey and Lee/Hester have well-drawn relationships in S1, but Pan and Lyra hug more in the 2-hour Golden Compass movie than they do in the 8-hour S1 of HDM. There's barely any physical contact with Daemons at all.

They even cut Pan and Lyra's hug after escaping the Cut in Bolvangar. In the book they can't let go of each other. The show skips it completely because Thorne wants to focus on Mrs Coulter and Lyra.

They cut Pan and Lyra testing how far apart they can be. They cut Lyra freeing the Cut Daemons in Bolvangar with the help of Kaisa. We spent extra time with both Roger and Billy Costa, but didn't develop their bonds with their Daemons- the perfect way to make the Cut more impactful

I don't need every single book scene in the show, but notice that all these cut scenes reinforced how important Daemons are. For how plodding the show is. you'd think they could spare time for these moments instead of inventing new conversations that tell us the information they show

Daemons are treated as separate beings and thus come across more like talking pets than part of a character

The show sets the rules of Daemons up poorly. In 1x2, Lyra is terrified by the Monkey being so far from Coulter, but the viewer has nothing to compare it to. We’re retroactively told in that this is unnatural when the show has yet to establish what ‘natural’ is.

The guillotine blueprint in 1x2 (‘Is that a human and his Daemon, Pan? It looks like it.’ / ‘A blade. To cut what?’) is idiotic. It deflates S1’s main mystery and makes the characters look stupid for not figuring out what they aren’t allowed to until they did in the source material, it also interferes with how the audience sees Daemons. In the book, Cutting isn’t revealed until two-thirds of the way in (1x5). By then we’ve spent a lot of time with Daemons, they’ve become a background part of the world, their ‘rules’ have been established, and we’re endeared to them.

By showing the Guillotine and putting Daemons under threat in the second episode, the show never lets us grow attached. This, combined with their selective presence in scenes, draws attention to Daemons as a plot gimmick and not a natural extension of characters. Like Lyra, the show tells us why Daemons are important before we understand them.

Billy Costa's fate falls flat. It's missing the dried fish/ fake Daemon Tony Markos clings to in the book. Thorne said this 'didn't work' on the day, but it worked in the film. Everyone yelling about Billy not having a Daemon is laughable when most of the background extras in the same scene don't have Daemons themselves

WITCHES

The Witches are the most common complaint about the show. Thorne changed Serafina Pekkala in clever, logical ways (her short hair, wrist-knives and cloud pine in the skin)

The problem is how Serafina is written. The Witches are purely exposition machines. We get no impression of their culture, their deep connection to nature, their understanding of the world. We are told it. It is never shown, never incorporated into the dramatic action of the show.

Thorne emphasises Serafina's warrior side, most obviously changing Kaisa from a goose into a gyrfalcon (apparently a goose didn't work on-screen)

Serafina single-handedly slaughtering the Tartars is bad in a few ways. It paints her as bloodthirsty and ruthless. Overpowering the Witches weakens the logic of the world (If they can do that, why do they let the Magesterium bomb them unchallenged in 2x2?). It strips the Witches of their subtlety and ambiguity for the sake of cinematic action.

A side-effect of Serafina not being with her clan at Bolvangar is limiting our exposure to the Witches. Serafina is the only one invested in the main plot, we only hear about them from what she tells us. This poor set-up weakens the Witch subplot in S2

Lyra doesn’t speak to Serafina until 2x6. She laid eyes on her once in S1.

The dialogue in the S2’s Witch subplot is comparable to the Courasant section of The Phantom Menace.

Two named characters, neither with any depth (Serafina and Coram's dead son developed him far more than her). The costumes look ostentatious and hokey- the opposite of what the Witches should be. They do nothing but repeat the same exposition at each other, even in 2x7.

We feel nothing when the Witches are bombed because the show never invests us in what is being destroyed- with the amount of time wasted on long establishing shots, there’s not one when Lee Scoresby is talking to the Council.

BEARS

Like the Witches; Thorne misunderstands and rushes the fantasy elements of the story. The 2007 movie executed both Iofur's character and the Bear Fight much better than the show- bloodless jaw-swipe and all

Iofur's court was not the parody of human court in the books. He didn't have his fake-Daemon (hi, Billy)

An armourless bear fight is like not including Pan in the cutting scene. After equating Iorek's armour to a Daemon (Lee does this- we don’t even learn how important it is from Iorek himself, and the comparison meant less because of how badly the show set up Daemons) the show then cuts the plotpoint that makes the armour plot-relevant. This diminishes all of Bear society. Like Daemons, we're told Iorek's armour is important but it's never shown to be more than a cool accessory

GYPTIANS

Gyptians suffer from Hermoine syndrome. Harry Potter screenwriter Steve Kloves' favourite character was Hermione, and so Film!Hermoine lost most of Book!Hermoine's flaws and gained several of Book!Ron's best moments. The Gyptians are Jack Thorne's favourite group in HDM and so they got the extra screentime and development that the more complicated groups/concepts like Witches, Bears, and Daemons (which, unlike the Gyptians, carry over to other seasons amd are more important to the overall story) needed

At the same time, he changes them from a private people into an Isle of Misfit Toys. TV!Ma Costa promises they'll ‘make a Gyptian woman out of Lyra yet’, but in the book Ma specifically calls Lyra out for pretending to be Gyptian, and reminds her she never can be.

This small moment indicates how, while trying to make the show more grounded and 'adult', Thorne simultaneously made it more saccharine and sentimental. He neuters the tragedy of the Cut kids when Ma Costa says they’ll become Gyptians. Pullman's books feel like an adult story told through the eyes of a child. The TV show feels like a child's story masquerading as a serious drama.

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA

Let me preface this by saying I genuinely really enjoy the performances in the show. It was shot in the foot by The Golden Compass' perfect casting.

The most contentious/'miscast' actor among readers is LMM. Thorne ditched the books' wise Texan for a budget Han Solo. LMM isn't a great dramatic actor (even in Hamilton he was the weak link performance-wise) but he makes up for it in marketability- lots of people tried the show because of him

Readers dislike that LMM's Lee is a thief and a scoundrel, when book-Lee is so moral he and Hester argue about stealing. Personally, I like the change in concept. Book!Lee's parental love for Lyra just appears. It's sweet, but not tied to a character arc. Done right, Lyra out-hustling Lee at his own game and giving him a noble cause to fight for (thus inspiring the moral compass of the books) is a more compelling arc.

DAFNE KEENE AND LYRA

I thought Dafne would be perfect casting. Her feral energy in Logan seemed a match made in heaven. Then Jack Thorne gave her little to do with it.

Compare how The Golden Compass introduced Lyra, playing Kids and Gobblers with a group of Gyptian kids, including Billy Costa. Lyra and Roger are chased to Jordan by the Gyptians and she makes up a lie about a curse to scare the Gyptians away.

In one scene the movie set up: 1) the Gobblers (the first we hear of them in the show is in retrospect, Roger worrying AFTER Billy is taken) 2) Lyra’s pre-existing relationship with the Gyptians (not in the show), 3) Friendship with Billy Costa (not in the book or show) 4) Lyra’s ability to befriend and lead groups of people, especially kids, and 5) Lyra’s ability to lie impressively

By comparison, it takes until midway through 1x2 for TV!Lyra to tell her first lie, and even then it’s a paper-thin attempt.

The show made Roger Lyra’s only friend. This artificially heightens the impact of Roger's death, but strips Lyra of her leadership qualities and ability to befriend anyone.

Harry Potter fans talk about how Book!Harry is funnier and smarter than Film!Harry. They cut his best lines ('There's no need to call me sir, Professor') and made him blander and more passive. The same happened to Lyra.

Most importantly, Lyra is not allowed to lie for fun. She can't do anything 'naughty' without being scolded. This colours the few times Lyra does lie (e.g. to Mrs Coulter in 1x2) negatively and thus makes Lyra out to be more of a brat than a hero.

This is a problem with telling Northern Lights from an outside, 'adult' perspective- to most adults Lyra is a brat. Because we’re introduced to her from inside her head, we think she's great. It's only when we meet her through Will's eyes in The Subtle Knife and she's filthy, rude and half-starved that we realise Lyra bluffs her way through life and is actually pretty non-functional

Thorne prioritises grounded human drama over fantasy, and so his Lyra has her love of bears and witches swapped for familial angst. (and, in S2. angst over Roger). By exposing Mrs Coulter as her mother early, Thorne distracts TV!Lyra from Book!Lyra’s love of the North. The contrast between wonder and reality made NL's ending a definitive threshold between innocence and knowledge. Thorne showed his hand too early.

Similarly, TV!Lyra doesn’t have anywhere near as strong an admiration for Lord Asriel. She calls him out in 1x8 (‘call yourself a Father’), which Book!Lyra never would because she’s proud to be his child. From her perspective, at this point Asriel is the good parent.

TV!Lyra’s critique of Asriel feels like Thorne using her as a mouthpiece to voice his own, adult perspective on the situation. Because Lyra is already disappointed in Asriel, his betrayal in the finale isn’t as effective. Pullman saves the ‘you’re a terrible Father’ call-out for the 3rd book for a reason; Lyra’s naive hero-worship of Asriel in Northern Lights makes the fall from Innocence into Knowledge that Roger’s death represents more effective.

So, on TV Lyra is tamer, angstier, more introverted, less intelligent, less fun and more serious. We're just constantly told she's important, even before we meet her.

MRS COULTER (AND LORD ASRIEL)

Mrs Coulter is the main character of the show. Not Lyra. Mrs Coulter was cast first, and Lyra was cast based on a chemistry test with Ruth Wilson. Coulter’s character is given lots of extra development, where the show actively strips Lyra of her layers.

To be clear, I have no problem with developing Mrs Coulter. She is a great character Ruth Wilson plays phenomenally. I do have a problem with the show fixating on her at the expense of other characters.

Lyra's feral-ness is given to her parents. Wilson and McAvoy are more passionate than in the books. This is fun to watch, but strips them of subtlety- you never get Book!Coulter's hypnotic allure from Wilson, she's openly nasty, even to random strangers (in 2x3 her dismissal of the woman at the hotel desk felt like a Disney villain).

Compare how The Golden Compass (2007) introduced Mrs Coulter through Lyra’s eyes, with light, twinkling music and a sparkling dress. By contrast, before the show introduces Coulter it tells us she’s associated with the evil Magisterium plotting Asriel’s death- “Not a word to any of our mutual friends. Including her.” Then she’s introduced striding down a corridor to imposing ‘Bad Guy’ strings.

Making Mrs Coulter’s villainy so obvious so early makes Lyra look dumber for falling for it. It also wastes an interesting phase of her character arc. Coulter is rushed into being a ’conflicted evil mother’ in 2 episodes, and stays in that phase for the rest of the show so far. Character progression is minimised because she circles the same place.

It makes her one-note. It's a good note (so much of the positive online chatter is saphiccs worshiping Ruth Wilson) but the show also worships her to the point of hindrance- e.g. take a shot every time Coulter walks slow-motion down a corridor in 2x2

The problem isn’t the performances, but how prematurely they give the game away. Just like the mysteries around Bolvangar and Lyra’s parentage. Neither Coulter or Asriel have much chance to use their 'public' faces.

This is part of a bigger pacing problem- instead of rolling plot points out gradually, Thorne will stick the solution in front of you early and then stall for time until it becomes relevant. Instead of building tension this builds frustration and makes the show feel like it's catching up to the audience. This also makes the characters less engaging. You've already shown Mrs Coulter is evil/Boreal is in our world/Asriel wants Roger. Why are you taking so long getting to the point?

PACING AND EDITING

This show takes forever to make its point badly.

Scenes in HDM tend to operate on one level- either 'Character Building,' 'Exposition,' or 'Plot Progression'.

E.g. Mary's introduction in 2x2. Book!Mary only listens to Lyra because she’s sleep and caffeine-deprived and desperate because her funding is being cut. But the show stripped that subtext out and created an extra scene of a colleague talking to Mary about funding. They removed emotional subtext to focus on exposition, and so the scene felt empty and flat.

In later episodes characters Mary’s sister and colleagues do treat her like a sleep-deprived wreck. But, just like Lyra’s lying, the show doesn’t establish these characteristics in her debut episode. It waits until later to retroactively tell us they were there. Mary’s colleague saying ‘What we’re dealing with here is the fact that you haven’t slept in weeks’ is as flimsy as Pan joking not lying to Mary will be hard for Lyra.

Rarely does a scene work on multiple levels, and if it does it's clunky- see the exposition dump about Daemon Separation in the middle of 2x2's Witch Trial.

He also splits plot progression into tiny doses, which destroys pacing. It's more satisfying to focus on one subplot advancing multiple stages than all of them shuffling forward half a step each episode.

Subplots would be more effective if all the scenes played in sequence. As it is, plotlines can’t build momentum and literal minutes are wasted using the same establishing shots every time we switch location.

The best-structured episodes of S1 are 1x4, 1x6, and 1x8. This is because they have the fewest subplots (incidentally these episodes have least Boreal in them) and so the main plot isn’t diluted by constantly cutting away to Mrs Coulter sniffing Lyra’s coat or Will watching a man in a car through his window, before cutting back again.

The best-written episode so far is 2x5. The Scholar. Tellingly, it’s the only episode Thorne doesn’t have even a co-writing credit on. 2x5 is well-paced, its dialogue is more naturalistic, it’s more focused, it even has time for moments of whimsy (Monkey with a seatbelt, Mrs Coulter with jeans, Lyra and Will whispering) that don’t detract from the story.

Structurally, 2x5 works because A) it benches Lee’s plotline. B) The Witches and Magisterium are relegated to a scene each. And C) the Coulter/Boreal and Lyra/Will subplots move towards the same goal. Not only that, but when we check in on Mary’s subplot it’s through Mrs Coulter’s eyes and directly dovetails into the main action of the episode.

2x5 has a lovely sense of narrative cohesion because it has the confidence to sit with one set of characters for longer than two scenes at a time.

HDM also does this thing where it will have a scene with plot A where characters do or talk about something, cut away to plot B for a scene, then cut back to plot A where the characters talk about what happened in their last scene and painstakingly explain how they feel about it and why

Example: Pan talking to Will in 2x7 while Lyra pretends to be asleep. This scene is from the 3rd book, and is left to breathe for many chapters before Lyra brings it up. In the show after the Will/Pan scene they cut away to another scene, then cut back and Lyra instantly talks about it.

There’s the same problem in 2x5: After escaping Mrs Coulter, Lyra spells out how she feels about acting like her

The show never leaves room for implication, never lets us draw our own conclusions before explaining what it meant and how the characters feel about it immediately afterwards. The audience are made passive in their engagement with the characters as well as the world

LORD BOREAL, JOHN PARRY AND DIMINISHING RETURNS

At first, Boreal’s subplot in S1 felt bold and inspired. The twist of his identity in The Subtle Knife would've been hard to pull off onscreen anyway. As a kid I struggled to get past Will's opening chapter of TSK and I have friends who were the same. Introducing Will in S1 and developing him alongside Lyra was a great idea.

I loved developing Elaine Parry and Boreal into present, active characters. But the subplot was introduced too early and moved too slowly, bogging down the season.

In 1x2 Boreal crosses. In 1x3 we learn who he's looking for. In 1x5 we meet Will. In 1x7 the burglary. 1 episode worth of plot is chopped up and fed to us piecemeal across many. Boreal literally stalls for two episodes before the burglary- there are random 30 second shots of him sitting in a car watching John Parry on YouTube (videos we’d already seen) completely isolated from any other scenes in the episode

By the time we get to S2 we've had 2 seasons of extended material building up Boreal, so when he just dies like in the books it's anticlimactic. The show frontloads his subplot with meaning without expanding on its payoff, so the whole thing fizzles out.

Giving Boreal, the secondary villain in literally every episode, the same death as a background character in about 5 scenes in the novels feels cheap. It doesn’t help that, after 2x5 built the tension between Coulter and Boreal so well, as soon as Thorne is passed the baton in 2x6 he does little to maintain that momentum. Again, because the subplot is crosscut with everything else the characters hang in limbo until Coulter decides to kill him.

I’ve been watching non-book readers react to the show, and several were underwhelmed by Boreal’s quick, unceremonious end.

Similarly, the show builds up John Parry from 1x3 instead of just the second book. Book!John’s death is an anticlimax but feels narratively justified. In the show, we’ve spent so much extra time talking about him and then being with him (without developing his character beyond what’s in the novels- Pullman even outlined John’s backstory in The Subtle Knife’s appendix. How hard would it be to add a flashback or two?) that when John does nothing in the show and then dies (he doesn’t even heal Will’s fingers like in the book- only tell him to find Asriel, which the angels Baruch and Balthamos do anyway) it doesn’t feel like a clever, tragic subversion of our expectations, it feels like a waste that actively cheapens the audience’s investment.

TL;DR giving supporting characters way more screentime than they need only, to give their deaths the same weight the books did after far less build up makes huge chunks of the show feel less important than they were presented to be.

FRUSTRATINGLY LIMITED EXPANSION AND NOVELLISTIC STORYTELLING

Thorne is unwilling to meaningfully develop or expand characters and subplots to fit a visual medium. He introduces a plot-point, invents unnecessary padding around it, circles it for an hour, then moves on.

Pullman’s books are driven by internal monologue and big, complex theological concepts like Daemons and Dust. Instead of finding engaging, dynamic ways to dramatise these concepts through the actions of characters or additions to the plot, Thorne turns Pullman’s internal monologue into dialogue and has the characters explain them to the audience

The novels’ perspective on its characters is narrow, first because Northern Lights is told only from Lyra’s POV, and second because Pullman’s writing is plot-driven, not character-driven. Characters are vessels for the plot and themes he wants to explore.

This is a fine way of writing novels. When adapting the books into a longform drama, Thorne decentralised Lyra’s perspective from the start, and HDM S1 uses the same multi-perspective structure that The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass do, following not only Lyra but the Gyptians, Mrs Coulter, Boreal, Will and Elaine etc

However, these other perspectives are limited. We never get any impression of backstory or motivation beyond the present moment. Many times I’ve seen non-book readers confused or frustrated by vague or non-existent character motivations.

For example, S1 spends a lot of time focused on Ma Costa’s grief over Billy’s disappearance, but we never see why she’s sad, because we never saw her interact with Billy.

Compare this to another show about a frantic mother and older brother looking for a missing boy. Stranger Things uses only two flashbacks to show us Will Byers’ relationships with his family: 1) When Joyce Byers looks in his Fort she remembers visiting Will there. 2) The Clash playing on the radio reminds Jonathan Byers of introducing Will to the song.

In His Dark Materials we never see the Costas as a happy family- 1x1’s Gyptian ceremony focuses on Tony and Daemon-exposition. Billy never speaks to his mum or brother in the show

Instead we have Ma Costa’s empty grief. The audience has to do the work (the bad kind) imagining what she’s lost. Instead of seeing Billy, it’s just repeated again and again that they will get the children back.

If we’re being derivative, HDM had the chance to segway into a Billy flashback when John Faa brings one of his belongings back from a Gobbler safehouse in 1x2. This is a perfect The Clash/Fort Byers-type trigger. It doesn’t have to be long- the Clash flashback lasted 1:27, the Fort Byers one 55 seconds. Just do something.

1x3 beats into us that Mrs Coulter is nuts without explaining why. Lots of build-up for a single plot-point. Then we're told Mrs Coulter's origin, not shown. This is a TV show. Swap Boreal's scenes for flashbacks of Coulter and Asriel's affair. Then, when Ma Costa tells Lyra the truth, show the fight between Edward Coulter and Asriel.

To be clear, Thorne's additions aren’t fundamentally bad. For example, Will boxing sets up his struggle with violence. But it's wasted. The burglary/murder in 1x7 fell flat because of bad editing, but the show never uses its visual medium to show Will's 'violent side'- no change in camera angle, focus, or sound design, nothing. It’s just a thing that’s there, unsupported by the visual language of the show

The Magisterium scenes in 2x2 were interesting. We just didn't need 5 of them; their point could be made far more succinctly.

In 2x6 there is a minute-long scene of Mary reading the I Ching. Later, there is another scene of Angelica watching Mary sitting somewhere different, doing the SAME THING, and she sees an Angel. Why split these up? It’s not like either the I Ching or the Angels are being introduced here. Give the scene multiple layers.

Thorne either takes good character moments from the books (Lyra/Will in 2x1) or uses heavy-handed exposition that reiterates the same point multiple times. This hobbles the Witches (their dialogue in 2x1, 2 and 3 literally rephrases the same sentiment about protecting Lyra without doing anything). Even character development- see Lee monologuing his and Mrs Coulter's childhood trauma in specific detail in 2x3

This is another example of Thorne adding something, but instead of integrating it into the dramatic action and showing us, it’s just talked about. What’s the point of adding big plot points if you don’t dramatise them in your dramatic, visual medium? In 2x8, Lee offhandedly mentions playing Alamo Gulch as a kid.

I’m literally screaming, Jack, why the flying fuck wasn’t there a flashback of young Lee and Hester playing Alamo Gulch and being stopped by his abusive dad? It’s not like you care about pacing with the amount of dead air in these episodes, even when S2’s run 10 minutes shorter than S1’s. Lee was even asleep at the beginning of 2x3, Jack! He could’ve woken from a nightmare about his childhood! It’s a little lazy, but better than nothing.

There’s a similar missed opportunity making Dr Lanselius a Witchling. If this idea had been introduced with the character in 1x4, it would’ve opened up so many storytelling possibilities. Linking to Fader Coram’s own dead witchling son. It could’ve given us that much-needed perspective on Witch culture. Imagine Lanselius’ bittersweet meeting with his ageless mother, who gave him up when he reached manhood. Then, when the Magisterium bombs the Witches in 2x2, Lanselius’ mother dies so it means something.

Instead it’s only used to facilitate an awkward exposition dump in the middle of a trial.

The point of this fanfic-y ramble is to illustrate my frustration with the additions; If Thorne had committed and meaningfully expanded and interwoven them with the source material, they could’ve strengthened its weakest aspect (the characters). But instead he stays committed to novelistic storytelling techniques of monologue and two people standing in a room talking at each other

(Seriously, count the number of scenes that are just two people standing in a room or corridor talking to each other. No interesting staging, the characters aren’t doing anything else while talking. They. Just. Stand.)

SEASON 2 IMPROVEMENTS

S2 improved some things- Lyra's characterisation was more book-accurate, her dynamic with Will was wonderful. Citigazze looked incredible. LMM won lots of book fans over as Lee. Mary was brilliantly cast. Now there are less Daemons, they're better characterised- Pan gets way more to do now and Hester had some lovely moments.

I genuinely believe 2x1, 2x3, 2x4 and 2x5 are the best HDM has been.

But new problems arose. The Subtle Knife lost the central, easy to understand drive of Northern Lights (finding the missing kids) for lots of smaller quests. As a result, everyone spends the first two episodes of S2 waiting for the plot to arrive. The big inciting incident of Lyra’s plotline is the theft of the alethiometer, which doesn’t happen until 2x3. Similarly, Lee doesn’t search for John until 2x3. Mrs Coulter doesn’t go looking for Lyra until 2x3.

On top of missing a unifying dramatic drive, the characters now being split across 3 worlds, instead of the 1+a bit of ours in S1, means the pacing/crosscutting problems (long establishing shots, repetition of information, undercutting momentum) are even worse. The narrative feels scattered and incohesive.

These flaws are inherent to the source material and are not the show’s fault, but neither does it do much to counterbalance or address them, and the flaws of the show combine with the difficulties of TSK as source material and make each other worse.

A lot of this has been entitled fanboy bitching, but you can't deny the show is in a bad place ratings-wise. It’s gone from the most watched new British show in 5 years to the S2 premiere having a smaller audience than the lowest-rated episode of Doctor Who Series 12. For comparison, DW's current cast and showrunner are the most unpopular since the 80s, some are actively boycotting it, it took a year-long break between series 11 and 12, had its second-worst average ratings since 2005, and costs a fifth of what HDM does to make. And it's still being watched by more people.

Critical consensus fluctuates wildly. Most laymen call the show slow and boring. The show is simultaneously too niche and self-absorbed to attract a wide audience and gets just enough wrong to aggravate lots of fans.

I’m honestly unsure if S3 will get the same budget. I want it to, if only because of my investment in the books. Considering S2 started filming immediately after S1 aired, I think they've had a lot more time to process and apply critique for S3. On the plus side, there's so much plot in The Amber Spyglass it would be hard to have the same pacing problems. But also so many new concepts that I dread the exposition dumps.

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violetvenom · 4 years ago

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What’s wrong with Quackerjack in DT17 in my opinion.

I don’t make a secret about it how much I dislike the DT17 style and hey, it’s okay if you disagree and the majority likes it. It’s a preference after all.

But I already saw how fans got attacked by other fans for simply not liking DT17. This is childish and pathetic behavior...I won’t accept that. Be better than that.

Now for all those who are curious why I think so, let me pin it down a bit.

When my bestie showed me the newest screens of the appearance of the F4 I didn’t know what to think first. Now after I literally stared at the one with Quackerjack long enough I think can explain what on that style..on him... bothers me so damn much.

I totally understand how all the fans are hyped and trust me, I would love to join that hype...DWD get’s some love after all those years and this is great....but I simply can’t. I look at the show...I look at screencaps... and I only can find mistakes after mistakes which not only bothers me but make me very sad and hurt my lil’ fan-heart. :(

Just look at this:

I circled the main things which I can’t wrap my head around.

Why did they not fill in the fool’s cap between his eyes?

It’s clearly something the changed on his design since the white gap is visible in every sneak-peak of him. But that’s not how his -or any other fool’s cap which covers the eyes- work...

Also what is going on with the edgy emo eyeliner? I thought we left this behind in the 00s? And eyebrows OVER the fool’s cap?

And do the animators actually know how a ruff works? It looks like Quackerjack has some kind of plate around his neck and not something out of fabric.

Look at the difference in the DWD cartoon:

That thing is made out of fabric and MOVES with the shoulders. Depending on the fabric it moves more or less, but it would never behave like a plate!

Back then they sure made their homework about such details. Those details make cartoons lively in the first place. That’s why I think DT17 looks overall very stiff. And that everything is so angular sadly doesn’t help with it.

And speaking about details...why are the folds in his pants missing in the first place? That’s also not how his pants work.

Also that pose in the robot (Why does it even look like him? His robots ALWAYS were toy inspired. He is not that narcistic!) is so bad I‘m not even sure how to redline this mess. I tried..I really tried but...I can’t! How does Quackerjack need to break his arms or dislocate his shoulders to make that work? It seems a part of his upper right arm is even missing!? Where is his elbow...where is the rest of his upper arm? And since the ruff behaves like a massive plate and Quackerjack’s left arm is coming from behind..it looks like his arm is way much longer than the right one and seems to grow out of his back!? @_@

And while I wrote this I noticed the screenshot of his first cameo isn’t that better. What are those arms? Why does he have the stature of Bernd das Brot?

Also why is his (and of the other F4 members) design in the art style so inconsistent? The most notable change is the beak. You can see without a second glance it got changed. I can’t even say it changed for the better or got worse since I overall think the beaks are drawn ugly in DT17.

I mean, changes can be good and sometimes are needed but usually you create a character sheet long before the cartoon is even created and then all animators stick to it. I just can wonder how consistent it will be between the scenes if the special comes out.

I can’t even really compare it to the old cartoon since back in the days a lot more studios were needed to draw and animate a cartoon. So don’t get me wrong. I’m totally aware that stuff like this happened back then:

Same characters, different episodes but same studio.

Yes, even the same studio couldn’t be consistent between the episodes, but they managed to somewhat be it in the episode itself.

So why does this bother me with DT17 so much, when even back then they couldn’t get their shit together and be consistent? Easy..it’s because back then everything was drawn and animated by hand. It was a lot more effort. Back then they couldn’t just use paste and copy. There was no eyedropper tool to get the right color quickly. There were no programs who can break down a model to seperate their parts so you can animate their limbs easily. There were no programs for simulating facial animation or lip-syncing. Everything was much more complicated. I don’t say animation became easier but it became different. That’s why it’s hard to compare old cartoons with new ones in some aspects.

But since cartoons nowadays are most solely made on computers...why are color mistakes still happening?

I want to believe this is a ref to the purple hand recolor mistake Quackerjack also had in the original next to several others because that would be hilarious. But seeing stuff like this

destroys that belief.

One would assume that such mistakes get reduced with all that modern computer programs, but it doesn’t seem so. Tbh color mistakes and wrong layering is something which I can forgive easily, but not breaking a characters whole anatomy and change his overall appareance to such a degree you just can wonder how this is supposed to be the same character. I look at DT17 Quackerjack and see Quackerjack but also do not see Quackerjack at the same time. It’s like my brain full on goes “this is Quackerjack...wait no...this is more a manic Quackerjack imposter with dwarfism but not the real deal.” and this each single time I look at him. The way he is shown to be portrayed actually makes it worse.

@raeloganthesonic06fangirl jokingly made a post how he got his spine finally fixed, but isn’t that terrible posture one detail why we loved that dork in the first place? :(

Also his facial expression. He already had a major character shift once.

...sure there were reasons but the comics were another can of worms I won’t open in this post here now. And pls don’t get me started on how ridiculous it is how Silvani draws his beak.

I just can hope DT17 will at least get his character right but...

This

looks more like

than

😟

#darkwing duck #ducktales 2017 #quackerjack #dt17 #this post took me too many days to finish because of my broken wrist -.-

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sakuraalexia · 4 years ago

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So, 2021 actual plans, for both writing and drawing, at least the ones I have for now. Drawing first:

One thing I had meant to do but couldn’t because I felt sick, it was a picture that was Christmas related, besides Snom, but I had that done a week before the holidays. If you read this story you might get an idea of what it was. But still it counts.

I have two draw this in your style challenges to do, one ends in a few days and the other the end of this month, and I wanna do them both.

This year though I really want to focus on improving things, last year I looked for a way to start drawing digitally without having to sketch manually first, because I wanted to be less limited, and I could do so. And now I also have a new tablet, with a screen, so I think I can improve even more once I get more used to it.

So now I want to try and do bigger and more complicated things, such as better backgrounds, instead of leaving them blank or just put some random colors. Also because I wish to show more of the world I am creating, for my Pokemon region. I’ll still be drawing the characters too, I haven’t finished drawing my OCs like I said I would mostly because I got sick of doing the same thing, but also because I was using a style I was trying out, and that I felt didn’t stick with me too well, style that I changed in the drawings after and that I feel much more comfortable with, so, my OCs will come again, and drawn even better.

I really care about this project I created with a friend 5 years ago, but that we had sort of abandoned because we didn’t hear from one another as often, he’s very busy, but I took it on my hands last year again, and I mean to give it more life at some point. Even writing wise, because all I did so far has been drawn, the writing phase hasn’t started yet, at least when it comes to the story itself, the planning and setting is pretty much done, I need to finish up the plot, because its very long.

Other than this I mean to try and use less references for posing, because I feel like I am still weak in that regard, and anatomy, so I mean to study that better. I don’t mean to get rid of them completely at the start but to be less dependent from them.

I mean to also try to refrain myself from rushing to the finish, as when a drawing of mine starts to come together I tend to rush to finish and post it, and I want to work on being more patient, because after I post I always notice there’s something I haven’t done well or that could have been corrected, that, if I took my time I could have fixed. I’m a rather weird person, I can never get around starting something, but when I do I can’t stop and even rush to finish.

Writing wise:

Being part of a forum we made, starting last year, a “challenge”, which is essentially take a writing project, new or old doesn’t matter, and work on it and try to finish it during the year. Last year I did with my Pokemon region, and that actually got me doing more stuff than I ever did the previous years, and I’d still work on it in the background. I had gotten distracted from writing Beyond the Reality, which was fine though, as it was the first long fic I wrote and finished in years.

However the main project of this year is yet another Borderlands fic, it will be called Sing to the Moon. I had thought at this when it was around Halloween where I drew the Sirens as wolves and it became an idea for an actual AU.

So yes it will be a sort of supernatural AU with humans and werewolves, things are pretty much set as I already fixed the world and its factions and characters, and the plot is almost done too. It might be in 3 arcs as it loosely follows the plot of the BL games, even though not at all faithfully, otherwise I wouldn’t do an AU.

I won’t post this one until its over though, like for Beyond the Reality, because since I have a story with leaving stories unfinished because I tend to lose interest, I’d rather finish them up first then post regularly, without pressure to post a new chapter every now and then, and also I can guarantee constant updates.

In the meantime I’ll just work on whatever I feel like in that precise moment, with writing I tend to go with the flow of things, letting inspiration hit me when it wants to. Inspiration might be anything, a word, a picture, a song, something a friend talked to me.

I’ll still attempt to do challenges too, both writing and drawing, even though with the second one I might be a bit inconsistent, given my condition, for example I can’t do month long challenges anymore or rather, if I do I have to drag them out because my body doesn’t allow me to force myself to draw every single day, but it doesn’t mean I can’t do anything at all.

Anyways, these are my plans, I hope to be able to keep faith to them, and also that games won’t distract me too much heh. I recently got a bunch of new ones haha. ^_^”

#2021 plans #writing #drawing #borderlands #personal projects #ramblings

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random2908 · 4 years ago

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Ok, it's time for my crack Locked Tomb interpretation that I've promised... the two people I've been reading these books with. I will say first, the theory isn't itself a crack theory--in its general form I actually stand by it as a serious prediction. But some of the textual evidence I'm going to use is way out there, so don’t take this too seriously--I certainly don’t. Spoilers for Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth behind the cut. Sorry it’s long.

Ok, first, the theory, simply put: I think Alecto/AL is a Resurrection Beast. Personally, I found this "insight" fairly uncontroversial the moment the thought occurred to me, but one of my two friends who've been reading these books with me disagrees on the basic evidence; the other friend has embraced it wholeheartedly, though. So, ymmv, I guess.

The basic evidence starts with: well, what the hell else could she be? She's not human. The older Lyctors call her a monster. There is a missing Resurrection Beast: nine were born, five were killed, three are loose, and the narrative actually calls attention to this numeric discrepancy while glossing others (e.g. the number of Lyctors, which does eventually get explained). John presumably can't just kill Resurrection Beasts himself, or he would have (maybe?? who the hell even knows what his abilities or grand plan are at this point). There aren't really other monsters that have been presented other than revenants (of which Resurrection Beasts are the biggest) and heralds (which are spiritually part of Resurrection Beasts), and the third book of a trilogy isn't really the time to introduce them. (This, by the way, is also my argument that it wasn't aliens who destroyed the solar system in the first place--even though everyone else seems to have come to that interpretation (where by “everyone” I mean my two friends who have read this book). Being Doylist, it's kind of a cheap, lazy argument on my part, but whatever, I still stand by that as a prediction: no aliens.) And Alecto must be something much more powerful than a human because John is so much more powerful than a Lyctor. Finally, the stoma opens for John, and it only opens for Resurrection Beasts--it opens for him because he holds part of Alecto's soul and she is a Resurrection Beast.

The potential counter-evidence is the older Lyctors are confident they know her origins (but that doesn't necessarily make her not a Resurrection Beast), and the [other] Resurrection Beasts are drawn to her as much as to John according to Mercy (although in that case why haven't they attacked the Tomb? and also, again, that doesn't preclude her being a Resurrection Beast--we don't know their relationships with each other, and anyway, their attraction to her might have something to do with the Lyctorification process).

Ok, all that's fair enough. Let's delve into the crack interpretations now. I'm going to start with an irrelevant introduction, though, to explain my frame of mind when I came up with this. In the Appendices of Gideon the Ninth, Muir mentions that Isaac is named as foreshadowing for Gideon's sacrificial death, as in the Christian interpretation of the Bible, the Biblical Isaac foreshadows Jesus. My copy of the e-book did not have the Appendices, but my best friend's did, and she shared screens with me. It's slightly embarrassing that my best friend and I, reading this together, did not even guess from this, not even as a joke, that Gideon's father might be God. I mean, it's not... generally embarrassing--no one reading this should be embarrassed for themselves--it's only embarrassing if you know the two of us, know how good my best friend is at this sort of thing (she guessed the entire murder mystery in GtN a little more than halfway through, including that Dulcinea was dead and had been replaced by a Lyctor in disguise who had philosophical problems with God and was rebelling), and know what sorts of in-jokes and ridiculous speculation we tend to bandy around with each other--know just how often we, respectively and together, joke that some character or other is Jesus. And here it was right on the page, we read it out loud to each other and discussed it, and we didn't even see it. We were both completely taken in by the Gideon Episode One red[-haired] herring (as was, to be fair, Gideon himself). This speculation that I'm about to present came right on the heels of the two of us debriefing over this, because I was primed to read way the hell in too much into Biblical references.

The key line is something my best friend caught, not me. She wasn't even done with the book yet, but the line was bothering her (I'd completely glossed and then forgotten it--never let it be said that my bad grades in English Lit were undeserved). Page 327 (and I'm so glad to have an ebook so I can do word searches), Teacher is talking to Harrow in the dream bubble...........

To their silence, [Teacher] added: “I believe we are now being punished for what they did. Even the devil bent for God to put a leash around her neck … and the disciples were scared! I cannot blame them! I was terrified! But when the work was done—when I was finished, and so were they, and the new Lyctors found out the price—they bade him kill the saltwater creature before she could do them harm … Oh, but it is a tragedy, to be put in a box and laid to wait for the rest of time.

"Saltwater creature" stuck with my best friend. She had no idea what it meant, other than that nearly every mention of saltwater (or salt water, two words, the text is inconsistent) in Harrow the Ninth is alluding to Alecto in some capacity (we confirmed this by searching--again, I love ebooks for this kind of thing). But I was like... wait, I might know! This is my favorite Bible lore!

Muir is working from the King James Bible (based on the quotation at the end of Gideon the Ninth) which is impenetrable and also is a translation of the Latin Vulgate, which is mostly a translation of the Septuagint, which doesn’t even have an extant Hebrew version, so ugh all around. But for this purpose it’s close enough, so I guess that's what I'll use for my English version. Here is how the KJV starts:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Ok, that word there, "the deep." What it says in the Masoretic text (the Hebrew Bible used by both Jews and Protestants) is "tehom," which is not quite a hapax legomenon, but neither is it a word that shows up very often, and importantly it only shows up in very few contexts that reference each other. It is certainly not the usual Hebrew word for sea, and importantly, in the Hebrew there is no "the"; it actually says "darkness was on the face of Tehom" like it's a proper name [capitalization mine for illustration, since Hebrew doesn’t capitalize]. Notice also how on the second day basically the only thing God accomplishes is cutting this thing, this "Deep" made of water, in half, sending one half up into the sky. This is a quick retelling of the defeat of Tiamat (linguistically cognate with Tehom) in the Enuma Elish. Tiamat, the Goddess of the Saltwater Deeps, Mother of Monsters and Dragons, is justifiably angry with the other gods and sets out to kill them; Marduk, the aspiring new head of the Pantheon, cuts her in half. Half of her he leaves on Earth to create the oceans (or just the Earth itself? been a while since I read it), and half of her he throws up into the air and it becomes the sky.

There is a lot of old Jewish writing, some of it predating Christianity, that just starts to touch on this, without daring to delve too deep (...as it were) and pull on the pan-Middle Eastern polytheistic roots of Judaism. (They had enough problems with people still worshiping Asherah, who in southern Canaanite tradition was the sea-and-mother goddess who was the wife of Yahweh the storm god, and who gets mentioned in the Bible a whole lot, without also bringing Tiamat into it.) The Gnostics really latched on, though. They said that this "deep" obviously in the text there predates God's creation, and used that as the foundation of quite a lot of their theological argument: that God (who they call the Demiurge) didn't create the universe ex nihilo (out of nothing) but rather that there was a being even more powerful that came before. And they named this more powerful, older being Bythos (among other things), which means "depth" in Greek. They changed the gender, but they brought Tehom the saltwater goddess back as the most primordial and powerful of all beings.

Bringing this back to Harrow the Ninth... Insofar as it's Biblical allegory (which isn't much--less than Narnia and even Narnia doesn't strictly adhere to Biblical narrative), I think we should take the Resurrection committed by John to be the Biblical Creation not the Biblical Resurrection. First of all, John becomes God by performing the Resurrection, which is a much better parallel to Genesis than to Isaiah or Revelations or whatever. Second of all, after the Biblical Resurrection, everyone who gets to be resurrected is supposed to live in eternal peace in Eden. In contrast, in Genesis, after the creation, people start out in Eden but are quickly expelled and then bad things happen. This matches the story much better, where the expulsion from Eden is due to Lyctorhood--the Resurrection Beasts come for the Lyctors and they have to leave Eden; in this respect, I guess John is really the snake as much as he's God, lol. (Worth noting that in some parts of Christian tradition--although I can't remember about Catholicism specifically--the snake is supposed to be Satan. This also ties back to Gnosticism where the Demiurge is malevolent; John, insofar as he did not actually create the universe on his own, is a much better match for a demiurge than a true god.)

So, anyway, taking John's act of Resurrecting all those people as the initial Creation rather than the Resurrection (the fact that Augustine doesn't remember his pre-Resurrection self, is effectively a new person, also points to this being effectively an initial Creation), the Resurrection Beasts actually come before Creation. They come from the dying of the planets. They predate John becoming God. Furthermore, Alecto is a “saltwater creature,” and she keeps her body after she's Lyctorified, meaning she's split in some way between John and her old body; she is Tehom. Back to the Gnostic idea, Tehom is a more-powerful being who predates God, and the only creatures predating God in Harrow are the Resurrection Beasts who must be comparable to him in power to create such fear: Alecto, then, must be a Resurection Beast.

The problem with this theory is it's a little Jewish and it's very Gnostic but it isn't Catholic. In the Gideon and Harrow, Muir draws references in her language from practically everywhere. But as far as I can tell she only draws allusions and allegory from two mythologies: Greco-Roman and Roman Catholic. And although Jews and Gnostics are drawing on a lot of the same source text, the understanding is different, and the expansive side stories are different. Although, then again, who am I to say that Muir isn't also drawing on Gnosticism and this isn't our big clue; I've half convinced myself as I wrote this, with the whole John-as-Demiurge thing. It's a fun theory, anyway, and so I thought I'd share it.

(I'm aware that I've completely ignored any connection to Greek mythology, despite her name being Alecto.)

#locked tomb trilogy #locked tomb spoilers #harrow the ninth #harrow the ninth spoilers #harrow spoilers #hopefully that covers the important tags people might be blocking #I learned while writing this that I don't know how to spell 'resurrection'#I tend to put too many letters in #it seems like whenever I make theories about books it's always some weird religious thing #this write-up is SO much more Gnostic than what told my best friend over the phone a few weeks ago #(now that I've done more reading on it)#I knew there was bound to be at least one homestuck reference in these books but I did NOT expect it to be dream bubbles

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aspiestvmusings · 5 years ago

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ZEP: MY ISSUES WITH “ZOEY”

Here’s a new long analysis post for ZEP S1. This one is focused on Zoey, and the things that I have issues with...about the writing & the character:

Just me...dissecting & analyzing the storyline...with focus on Zoey & Team Max. But since the stories are so intertwined, there’s Zoey/dad & Zoey/Simon talk, too. Cause the so-called “love triangle” [the relationships between those three characters that they try to market as a love triangle] is one of my issues with the show.

WARNING: Very long post & possibly full of unpopular opinions.

I HAVE ISSUES...WITH “ZOEY” (READ: WRITING & CONTINUITY...)

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IMO Zoey is “unfair” with both men. She’s in such deep denial & even now that she’s learning empathy & be emotionally more available she’s still running from her feelings, cause she just doesn’t wanna deal with them (the truth). Every time when the three of them interact, she always claims that there’s nothing going on. She tells Simon that there’s nothing between her & Max, and they’re just friends. She tells Max that there’s nothing between her & Simon, and he’s just helping him with grief. She tries to belittle the other man’s part in her life.

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She actually knows how she feels about both. She actually knows it all. (we’ve seen her reveal the truth to her mom & to Mo...in some scenes...so we know that what she tells the men is half-truths..at best) But she is doing everything in her power to deny it, and so she “denies” it also to the two men. But...in doing so she’s been unfair to both men, kinda leading them on. I understand that that’s done intentionally... and is supposed to be one of her “character flaws”. That she was (and still is) emotionally challenged, and the new superpower is here to help her learn empathy & make her understand others (and her own) emotions. But while I know what the intent of the writers is... I get a bit of different impression from the actual storyline...as I watch it. Cause...there is some “inconsistency” here.

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I did not get “Zoey sees Max in a new light, cause unlike Simon, who is stuck in the past, he’s now looking into future, and she needs that kind of “positivity” right now”. Instead I got the feeling that she’s not into him and how he’s become more confident and has a new outlook on life (all started with those peer reviews...), but his position of power. That she’s into the fact that he’s the boss. Cause she’s been fighting against “the universe” this whole time (however many days/months the events between the MRI & the Bad Moon Rising...took in their universe). And suddenly... (and it doesn’t feel like it’s cause she’s started to see the powers as something positive, or because she is accepting her loss, or dealing with her grief...it just feels like she’s being “superficial”) she finds him attractive.

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I mean... in 1x05, when she sees Max shirtless, she can’t stop staring. She wants that body. Then in 1x06, when Max goes after what he wants [this all started with the peer reviews] - the scooter, she finds that ”action” hot. Same in the finale, when he says he enjoyed being the boss, she finds him attractive. Drawn to “power figure, manly man stereotype”. It’s like Zoeys “Button’s moment”. She seems to lean toards the man, who shows...at the time...”confidence” & muscles.

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The other thing that makes her lean towards one of them is...”we’re just friends”. She wants what she can’t have. She wants more than the other person wants/offers. She starts really going after Simon..strong (obsessing over him) when he stays true to it not being ok to be more than friends, cause he’s engaged. After Simon says they should stay friends, she does not like that, and complains (to Mo) that the man doesn’t want to be more than friends. And she goes after him... to the point where she tries to hook up with him. Then when she & Max make up, and agree to start a fresh... and Max is all for friendship, she suddenly wants more, and goes after him... tries to hook up with him. When one of the two says that they should just be friends, she suddenly starts finding them irresistible & wanting more. That’s another sttange (planned or accidental) thing I noticed about S1...

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There is a very clear pattern in her behaviour throughout the season. And these are just a few of the “parallels” & patterns. And while very “human” & “real”, and “believable”...from someone grieving, emotionally challenged & “a mess”, none of this is “healthy behaviour”, or anything she should remain stuck in. Which is why they need to let it go... let the “triangle drama” rest.

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And I’ve kinda started questioning if the girl is just frustrated, and perhaps she just needs some, cause this time she came onto Max (who was all in for the “let’s be just friends for now” thing movie nights and stuff...), and she REALLY could not wait... no more...for him to finish the singing... It kinda made me question if she truly sees him a new light as she says, or is this her “Buttons” moment, and nothing else. I mean..we saw her try to use similar tactic with Simon... on her “anger phase day”. She was trying to use se* as a tool to deal with her anger. And this time it seemed like she was trying to use se* as a tool to deal with loneliness or frustration. However “real” and “human” that is... it’s not “good”. At times I truly think, based on her behaviour, that she just wants to get some...cause she seems to be unable to deal with..anything.. until she’s gotten that out of her system.

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She also does not seem to learn the lessons she gets. I mean.. Mo told her already in 1x04 that “You’ll get better at using your superpower. As long as you see every failure not as defeat, but as a stepping stone on the road to success.”...yet she only got it & admitted it [in her speech to her dad] in the finale, 1x12. And also...she seems to not be so blind, and can help apply the lessons to others (giving Tobin the advice she got from Mo...about hard conversations between friends; helping Mo with Eddie...when her situation with Max is the same...as Mo points out). It does not seem “believable”...even if we apply the “she’s a grieving mess & emotionally challenged & running from her feelings & avoiding her own emotions” filter to her behaviour. It still doesn’t “fit”... she just goes back & forth...too much... and that makes it feel like it’s inconsistency in the writing [artificially created...delays & conflict], instead of it feeling as the writing probably means it to be - that its due to her “being a mess”.

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What I need from S2: for Zoey to be honest with both men. Stop being in denial, and admit her feelings to herself, and to them. How she feels abut each. Telling Max about her kisses with Simon. Telling Simon about her history with Max. And...unless they all agree that it doesn’t have to be two, but it could be three (polygamy), then she has to make a choice, and stop leading them both on. And I want the men to bond, and “demand” honesty from her....if the show really does intend to keep the “love triangle” going...as they claim in their S2 plans interviews. This is why I like both actors (and based on the finale scenes..both of their characters) take on the whole thing (they’re Team Zoey), and I don’t support what seems to be the showrunners & the networks take on the thing (that it’s a competition between the two & that love triangles are the greatest device in writing...)

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Cause right now the S1 finale actually put that to rest...during the last song (as we saw Simon admit he saw them together, and knows she's into Max, and shook his hand...cause he knows what he did...calling him to let him know about her dad.... and how selfless that was, and we saw how Max was there next to her throughout the last song... just a shoulder to lean on...without any pressure or anything. So...on screen the triangle thing was actually put to rest. (except for Zoey’s last talk with her dad...which happened before the funeral, but still gave them the out to leave things open... to keep the non-existent competition between teams alive...cause network/showrunner love the idea of TS vs TM...to the level that I feel is dloing disservice to the characters and story)

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I’ve said it before... I know what their intent is (cause network TV is easy to read... even the best written shows still follow the same simple formula & rules), but I don’t get that on screen. But most of the “love triangle” thing does not feel to me like it being because Zoey is grieving or because she has low EQ. It just feels like she’s almost intentionally playing with the mens feelings. And I don’t appreciate that. Even if it comes from her only learning to empathize, and not being in touch with her feelings. From her not being able to handle feelings, and hence denying the feelings she has...fighting against feeling... It comes off as like her not just being unfair, but downright playing with Simon’s & Max’s feelings. Cause by now she knows how both of them feel. She has absolute clarity about their feelings...and they have no real clarity about hers.

They both had their moment(s) with her, but she has to have “hard conversations” with both of them...where she is completely honest with them. Yet she keeps telling Simon that there’s no need to be jealous of Max & her (and then goes and kisses him). And she keeps telling Max that she had no idea she had those feelings for Simon (and Max). When we know that there are two people who know...more of the truth... Maggie & Mo. Everyone else gets the tweaked truth.

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So yeah...while the intent most likely was that Zoey was clinging to Simon, and in the process of doing so (holding on to the past... cause she was not ready to let go of her dad, so she tried to keep the status quo by creating that grief bond with Simon), I haven’t truly sensed that from the season as a whole. And even though we & Zoey saw that while Simon was still clinging to the past in 1x10, while she has been slowly starting to let go, he seems to have started to move on, slowly, too, in 1x12 (or has he? Maybe it’s all one of his great pretender tactics...like being too cheery outside on a Tuesday morning...while singing “mad world” inside) . But...he still probably represents the past to Zoey. And Max represents the future. That was most likely their intent with the S1 finale Max and his optimistic outlook.

This all comes back to what Zoey told her mom in 1x04 about her connection with Simon: “He’s the only person who I can talk to about what I’m going through with dad. No one else understands, and I guess I'm worried that if I let it go, or let him go, then I... won’t ever feel this way again.” And interestingly enough for her, Max represents the opposite in the finale (especially). While her outlook so far has been - “how do I live without my dad?”, her best friends speech gave her a new outlook “one can experience failure or something bad happening, but still look forward to what’s to come”. The finales intent was most likely to say that she doesn’t feel like letting her dad go or letting the grief go means she won’t ever feel this way again. She can live without her dad, she will find love again...if she just opens up to the possibilities.

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In S2 I want the two men to bond, and ask her to make a choice. To stop being dishonest with them (and mostly herself). And since we saw the men talk to each other (when Max called Simon), and then saw them shake hands... we can hope that they kinda become “kinda friends”. They should both take a step back, and remove themselves from potential love interest roles...until she’s figured things out. Which can only happen after she’s had time to deal with her grief. Cause I’m not certain she’ll be able to stop playing her games even at this time, when her focus should (finally...after she ran from it all...during the whole time when her dad was still with them) be only on grief & family. I don’t “trust” Zoey, but I believe in the two men. I see them being her friend at this time. But when she has gone through all the grief stages, they should have a talk...the three of them. And either they agree that “it could be three, not two” or they ask her to make a choice, and stop with her games. Finally be honest with herself, and them. Stop avoiding & running from her feelings.

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So... that is what I hope from the future. I mean...we didn’t get enough focus on her grief story, cause so much of the screentime was devoted to her dilemma about the two men that it took away so much focus from dad/daughter, and those stories and dynamics. And that was a shame. That she (the story) didn’t focus so much on how she deals (or doesn’t really deal) with the fact that she’s about to lose No 1 man in her life, her dad... and instead of focusing on herself, and her dad...the story almost seemed to evolve around her “choosing between the two men” (the so-called love triangle storyline)

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In the S1 finale we saw how Zoey saw Simon sing he’s jealous of her & her best friend. And she kept that to herself. Then we saw her come on to her best friend, who was there for thier friends movie night. And all that barely days/weeks after...her fights with both of them (all events between 107 & 111). And then we hear her tell her dad that she likes that her hot new co-worker likes her back, and she’s also proud that at the same time she “hooked up” with her best friend. And how that complicates things. When it’s her who is complicating things...which are really uncomplicated. She still has no clarity. She still hides from her feelings. She is still in denial. She still tries to pursue both. And she needs to stop that. She needs to tell her best friend about her relationship & feelings for the engaged man (tell him about the kisses etc) & she needs to tell the grieving & newly single man about her long history with her best friend, and what (almost) happened... the night the music died. She “owes” it to them.

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We all know what the shows endgame is, and it’s been clear since the start. To everyone...no matter which team you support or root for. And they’ve written the characters and the relationships differently enough to prove the point. Even with the heart song choices. And from the finale alone we see Simon sing that he’s jealous (of her taking her best friend to each cheesequakes...which he thinks is something only they did...that one time), while Max sang that she has all of him. One song puts the feelings of the person first, the other puts the feelings of the person they sing to first. And we’ve seen that throughout the season, when Max’s songs have been love songs to her, while Simon’s songs have been more about his grief and his “inappropriate” (cause he was engaged) feelings for her. The songs alone reveal it all. Max songs and behaviour always put Zoey, his best friend, first (even during the times/episodes...when they were “taking a break”). His actions are selfless, and full of unconditional love. While Simon’s songs are more or less about his feelings, and what he needs from her (should he stay or go...considering he’s engaged; he’s jealous...of the other man who gets her attention..too).

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And I’ve said this before...many times, but it’s worth to repeat: the two men in her lives, and their stories, and her relationship with them are written differently..on purpose. Both represent ...something...to her. I’ve compared Simons & Zoey’s grief before, and said how she is taking the same steps he did, making the same mistake he did, walking the same path..without learning from his mistakes. But..hopefully the s1 finale finally put an end to that. Because it did showcase how he is stuck, and she has been stuck in the same way. By clinging to him, she tried to keep things as they were, but at the same time things were changing... as her dad’d health was chaning..and no matter how much she tried to deny it, avoid it... life happens.

I’ve said how she projects, and she definitely did that with Simon. And...unless they want to have her character stuck, and not have character growth, and be on the path to move on...there is no way they can keep up the love triangle or keep her relationship with Simon the same. Cause that means she’s going backwards, not forwads. And the S1 finale seemed to establish that she’s starting to see the world in new colours. And interstingly enough it took for her best friend, Max, to get through to her (Mo, Maggie, and others have tried...before..but it hasn’t clicked with her...til now), and so I think that they need to continue developing their friendship in S2. His optimistic outlook is what Zoey needs right now. (also... cannot wait for the episode when we hear Max sing “True Colours” to Zoey...oh the parallels...)

Choosing Simon now, after S1 end would mean that Zoey is going down Simon’s path - being stuck in grief, & that’s not what the intention is. To quote Simon from 1x10: “he’s jealous of his mom, cause she was able to move past the pain of loss & grief and she fond the joy...in life...again”. And since Z/S dialogue/story always kinda “parallels” the Z/M storyline, then her words can be applied to herself & Max, too, here. She tells him to go after that joy then...to realize it’s not as far as one might think. If she’d apply that to her own situation with Max, then she’d realize that for her (finding) the joy...again...is to realize it’s not as far as she thinks, cause for her her best friend reprsents that joy.

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So she either chooses Simon (grief, being stuck, past...cause even though they were making Simon start to move past ...all...that), then as a choice he represents clinging to the past for her. Or she chooses Max (joy, moving past the grief, not making the same mistakes again, and choosing to go the other way/seeing things from other perspective from now on). And we saw her admit that shes “going the other way” with her look on her powers...during her speech to her dad. Yet, she still didn’t apply the same logic to her situation with the two men... cause Simon = choosing grief & Max = choosing joy.

But...the love triangle can only remain exising if she’ll choose Simon for now. If she’ll be not taking the advice she has gotten, and if she will “wallow in her grief" instead of focusing on “healing”. So...the only question is...how much in denial is she? How scared of the truth, and her own feelings/emotions is she? Will she cling to the past & we’ll see her repeat every mistake she saw Simon make (and she didn’t like... based on snapping at him “you’re still stuck” in 1x10). So...based on these lines alone (bits of dialogue from 1x10 & 1x12 especially: which way she chooses...like which way she chooses to look at her powers), and the lines each sang during the final number... the road back to joy is choosing Max. And yet that choice would (thankfully) end the so-called love-triangle. And I’m not sure the showrunner wants to choose that options. I think their intent is to focus on the LONG grief process, and milk it to the max. ;)

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What I also need from S2: Seeing Simon really start working on his grief - seeing a therapist, continue on the path we saw starting in 1x11 & 1x12. Seeing Zoey take the time to actually grieve, and take time for herself (what Max told her to do...for now)..before she even starts thinking of dealing with her “complicated love triangle issues”. Seeing her stop being in denial, and admit her feelings to herself, and be honest with each man. And ending this love triangle thing. Instead we need more focus on Mitch impact on Zoey. (via “flashbacks” & “dreams”...where we see her spend time with her dad).

We need to see her relationships with each man, but without any romantic context. And she needs to apologize to both men...for her behaviour...even if they understand it was her grief anger. She really needs to acknowledge her behaviour, and she can do that best if she starts being honest with them. With her speech to her dad she took the first step... and as I predicted it’ll take losing her dad for real for her to start seeing the power as something positive, not negative. (but she also tries to be in a three-person relationship with both men..without admitting this to herself or them...and that’s not good)

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I’m not sure if it’s just the network or does the showrunner himself truly like the love triangle. Because it’s the one aspect of the show that turns me away & makes me dislike the main character...and hence the show. It doesn’t feel “organic” anymore, it doesn’t feel like a growing story...it feels like the storyline is telling us one thing, but then someone comes in and adds a bit that doesn’t fit into the storyline. That’s how the love triangle thing feels by now. It’s like the writer has one idea, but then the network adds notes, and demand they be added...and they don’t fit...THAT’S what I think & feel when they have “Zoey debate between the two”.

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This is why I love the actors (Skylar & John) take so much. They both want to respect the character, and dare I say...they don’t seem to be into the idea of Zooey being “the prize” that their character have to “fight for”. She is not that. They also all seem to acknowledge that each charater still needs to grow individually, and then and only then is Zoey gonna be ready to make her decision (after S & Z have gone through phases of grief, and done some therapy & after Max has figured out his new place in the world...), and I have mad respect for the two men. And I hope the message gets through also to the writers, showrunner & network. That they need to shift the focus, and let Zoey grieve...until they add the “love triangle drama” to the story. Only...unless it’s an actual agreement between all three that they’ll choose poly, there needs to be no actual “love triangle” & she has to choose - does she want the “for now = S.” or does she need the “forever = M.” Will she repeat her past mistakes & go for the overly complicated choice, or do as she planned...and take it slow & go for the right... “forever” guy.

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The other thing that I need from S2 is something I have complained was missing from S1: team work. In the sense that Zoey needs to trust people more, and let them help her & learn to lean on others. This “character flaw” was introduced already in ep 2, when Joan told Zoey: “Listen...as talented as you are, you can't take on these projects all by yourself. It's unsustainable.” The same applies to her personal life/storyline. She needs to trust her team (friends: Max, Mo & family: mom) more. So while S1 was mostly about each characters individual growth...as little as we sadly saw it (amidst the drama-lama), then S2 needs to shift focus on her support system, and show how she has learned to lean on others, and how she doesn’t try to go through it all alone. So..friendship (and romance) with Max, with Simon (I wish he wasn’t in the picture & they’d bring in someone else/new... but I know he’s gonna be there for the grief-bond, so...), with Mo...

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We saw her have moments with Max (the advice he gave to her about going & talking to her dad..at the end on 1x08) & Joan (the advice she gave her in 1x11, when she told her about her own mom & her story). And surprise-surprise... there was no need for the other person to have gone through what she was/has gone through (dad dying) to be able to understand her, talk to her, give good advice, be there for her.

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And I want to see her bond more with others... even if they don’t have the same experience as she does. Because one of the things I don’t understand about the shows claims is... how they seem to claim (the show, the character) that no one else besides the people, who have lost their dad (or are losing the same person..her dad...their husband...) would understand. That one has to have gone through the exact esperience to be able to understand them. This is why I never undrstood what they were trying to tell with Zoey/Simon grief-bond. Because... even if both lost their dads, their experiences are different, so neither can truly understand the others experience...no better than anyone else (who hasn’t had the same loss) would. But...also-...most adults have experienced loss (grandparent, friend, parent...), so to assume that no-one else would understand... is strange to me. Yet...they kept it up til the finale. And in my own exprience the best support system is not the person, who has had the same experience, but the person who is simply there for you, who wants to help. It does not require similar experience for others to understand you/get you. You don’t need a mirror to look at, you need just someone who cares, and is simply present.

I have examples from my own life. I have examples from people I know. For example my childhood friend, who helped her then boyfriend (now husband) though a hard time. They met in HS, and they’ve been together since then (we’re all over 35 now). Her man lost both of his parents very young...with just a few months apart..when they were in Uni & had been together just a few years. And she had not yet been though such close loss yet (by now she is...her dad died before mine did), yet... you could say that she was his rock, and helped him through the time...the most. And they are one of the strongest couples I know. So it has been so strange for me to watch the season & interviews where it’s constantly mentioned that no-one else would understand Zoey...when I don’t think that’s true. When I know, for a fact, that that’s not true.

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Team Max or Team Simon:

Now.. I’ve come to realize that the answer to the question “Team Max or Team Simon” depends on a persons take on certain..things. And sometimes even depending on how peope view the actors that portay the characters. And everyone can have their own opinion on this, and they should. And I know many of us agree (on both sides) that the season should’ve focused more on Team Zoey & that next season needs more focus on each characters growth individually...

But...there is one thing I do not agree with from people who are not Team Max. And those are claims that Max is selfish, and rude towards Zoey. That how he acted after the flash mob rejection...and until they made up at the end of 1x11, was “acting out”....unfairly. That is the one thing I don’t agree with at all.

Yes, just like Zoey (and Simon, and everyone else) Max has his character flaws. And we certainly saw them in S1. But... unlike so many, I don’t think that he was OOC during the middle/end of the season (eps 7-11), which many have mentioned. Even Max fans. I find these POVs...interesting. Cause I interestingly did not find his behaviour such..

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retiquotidianbliss · 5 years ago

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why i liked tae eul’s confession scene (+ the drama’s problem and romantic relationship between tae eul and lee gon) | the king: eternal monarch ep.8

well, it didn’t receive the most positive acclaim...

I will start this note by getting slightly off topic. The King: Eternal Monarch is this kind of drama where you need to rewatch every single episode at least once to fully enjoy it and understand it. Connecting the dots drawn by the writer and director, analysing everything and creating/reading theories are probably my biggest hobbies, thus The King has become my current obsession.

Moving on to the issue, the confession scene was faintly off for me while watching it for the first time. Little rewatch session the day after has helped me realize why. I find the plot of The King really thick and quite generous; even if you know what’s going on, frankly saying you do not know what’s going on... There’re loads of stimulants. The want to know what will happen next makes me inattentive and I am missing a lot of details. I am sure it’s not only my problem, though. Also, I noticed it is most likely why a lot of people find the whole story messy, while (imo) it’s not. Maybe I am a little bit too Kim Eun Sook biased, but in my view her story-building is logical and well-organized. At the end, nothing is left. And subjectively, that elaborate plot is one of the drama’s biggest problems. It’s loaded and you always, always need to pay attention. I read this opinion not a long ago: “it’s not the creator’s business that someone isn’t catching up” and I must say this is also my conclusion. Furthermore, the story might be just too big and “fatty” to convey it as a sixteen episodes television drama, but it’s none of your or my concern. That’s why I started this post with an intro like that. Details are essential here.

Let’s get to the main topic. As I wrote previously, seeing this scene for the first time left me with mixed feelings, even when I had understood the character before. Rewatching throw some light on it and helped me in getting the (what I think is) overall message. You see, Tae Eul is slightly different than the other heroines we are used to see. Her and Lee Gon’s roles are reversed. Further, she’s a person who stands on the ground very stably. I deduce that her personality traits are interrelated to her job and Taekwondo skills. All of that lead to her “being a flat earther”. In order to believe, her eyesight comes first. People are confused because of her inconsistent behaviour towards Lee Gon and that’s a completely different subject, or should I say, a theory? The fate and their story might have been repeating, but I won’t continue this thought here as it’s not a thesis of mine and I don’t want to get more off topic. Having this in mind and watching her expressions makes me believe in her feelings. Kim Go Eun does great job here. Everything is written all over her face. The scene with confession is predated by Lee Gon’s call. He hadn’t been serious at all, but she got nervous/scared/uncertain and decided to meet him. And when he finally came (in slow-mo, to add), she probably found this moment crucial. Despite knowing how difficult situation she’s facing, she still stood stably on the ground. She took matters into her own hands as much as she could. Tae Eul tried to be concrete and cool. She didn’t beat around the bush and asked Lee Gon about what was on her mind. The answers she received were necessary to make her sure she has a good perception of what’s going on in her life and to take a chance. That was eye-opening for her. At that time and in future, when she’s saying this:

❝ It took me a long time to realize this. When it’s fate, there are no coincidences. Your fate is determined by the choices you make, but there are times when your fate chooses you. Things that are bound to happen are taking place even at this moment. I was struck with a sad premonition that this will be short-lived, but I decided to love my fate that chose me.❞

I believe that she has a great intuition since the beginning.

Tae Eul started to believe in Lee Gon and the signs that had chosen her. In their relationship, there’s no room for being insincere to themselves and each other, there’s no time to waste. The little something they have may end in a moment, with no return. Their tomorrow seems to be nearly impossible. Everything had to be rushed, for the sake of future. The decision to love her fate (i.e. Lee Gon) was for the sake of future, to not regret anything. Tae Eul is a realist. That was her destiny and she couldn’t ignore that.

Coming back to the overall process of the scene. In between the monologue (which is Tae Eul’s perspective and comes from future) she admitted that they had skipped too many things, necessary when developing a relationship naturally. A lot of viewers have been complaining about bad writing because of the stepped-up and “unromantic” climate of this part. It’s not a bad writing, per se. Characters know about that hastiness too. We, as a watchers, are used to objectively slow development of the romantic plot in dramas. The pair usually has to overcome a lot of obstacles in their relationships. The issue is mostly in their personalities and behaviour. Protagonists tend to create problems by themselves. An individual has to cope with his or her own mind or surroundings in order to be with the other half. They become happy (or not) at the end of the drama and that’s it. Is it often believable? It depends. Of course, there are a lot of exceptions and I’m sorry for generalizing. All of you probably know that ordinary life might be unappealing at times. It made me watch dramas and for sure I’m not alone. Why am I saying all of that? Lee Gon and Tae Eul have no luxury to be ordinary or slow. Ordinariness may be an enemy of every fresh romantic relationship, but in their case… It’s a real release. The moment chosen by Tae Eul was just suitable to them. Of course, she’s not a romantic and we all know that. Yet, her realizing she wants to express her feelings by word, acting like she’s completely cool and unshakable by confessing her love while holding tears was so raw and moving for me. Lee Gon was tender too. They don’t need to legitimate their affection by kissing in the surrounding of cherry blossoms in order to make me believe in them. I love how sincere they are with each other from the very beginning, how they try to just make it work with good partnership, as well as how subtle and mature they are. For me, they’re this kind of couple who might go through a real shit together and still grow even stronger. They’re a team from the start.

I am sure we will receive an explanation to things we don’t understand yet. This scene is one of them. Everything will be justified, in future or past... We are only in a half-way of the story.

It might have been a silence before lightning.

#the king eternal monarch #jung tae eul #lee gon

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thattimdrakeguy · 6 years ago

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I notice you don't have a Damian tag yet going through your posts You have more posts that are about him than Dick or any other of the batkids not named Tim? You claim to be a Tim Blog but i find it disingenuous that you have nearly as many posts about Damian as you do Tim and most of them are you being negative or making errors. If you were genuine you would have a Damian tag instead of hiding your negative content like a coward. It's okay not to like a character but be truthful.

You gave me three asks that are entirely filled on the kind of petty bias that you continued to imply that I have in all three of the asks.

If you think I’m a coward for not wanting to offend Damian fans with my opinions that are negative based on the bad writing the character has suffered,

then quite honestly, I don’t really have anything to say about it.

I can really only say the fact I got told not to tag him in those types of posts, because people in the Damian tag didn’t appreciate it (with understanding reason), and how it was also because the Damian fan base is the only fan base I ever got nasty sounding asks continuously for criticizing his writing. Even in posts where I criticize the writing for all of the Bat-Family members, or at least the male Robins, Damian’s fan base was the only one I ever got nasty asks from. So I learned through experience it wasn’t a good idea to tag him in those posts.

I presume a lot of them assume I hate him worse then what I actually say because I’m a Tim fan and Tim fan-blog, that seems to be the same case for you going off of how you word yourself as well.

Which I typically find a bit odd seeing how in a few of those very same posts (like the latest one I’m assuming you’re upset at me for) I talk about how he was actually one of my favorite characters when I was first getting into the comics, and don’t actually talk any ill-intended speech towards the character.

I only criticize the writing the character has been dealt much the same I did Tim through-out Detective Comics Rebirth.

I am in no way a hypocrite if that’s what you’re believing.

My blog got popular for openly criticizing how so many different writers had difficulty writing Tim in the same away I just did it for Damian.

and only once did I ever get shit from a person for making many posts about how I couldn’t stand Tim’s writing in Detective Comics Rebirth, while also using a much more exaggerated way of speaking because it meant a lot more to me, and that one person is some one who became my friend literally by the end of the day because even though we didn’t agree on anything, I thought they were a really cool person to talk to.

But you don’t seem like that kind of person, you seem like a person that couldn’t read the full posts, and if you did, could only read them through a veil of “Oh another Tim fan hates Damian” without actually paying attention to how I spoke about him, how I said he had potential and how I enjoyed his initial character development, and that I’m only upset that they kept dropping the ball with him.

Like how I complained about Tim in Rebirth, Tim Drake, my favorite character, and blog theme.

I don’t talk about how Damian is a bad character or how I hate him.

I talk about how it upsets me writers continuously can’t write him well.

Like how I do Tim.

So again, don’t imply I’m a hypocrite.

–

In your second ask you talk about how Tim should’ve trusted Damian because he saved him from Jason when Jason tried to kill him, and how Tim fans are the only ones that can’t see how he was a jackass to Damian.

I’m gonna have to assume you used this wording because of how I worded Tomasi’s out of character writing for Tim, as making Tim a jackass just for the sake of making Damian more likable and sympathetic.

I meant saying jackass by how Tomasi wrote Tim to be rude-via-the-mouth to Damian for no good reason, and I considered it out of character because Tim was never like that before. Previously Tim’s behavior towards Damian was untrusting, even in some situations to the point of it being a flaw, much like that time he tackled Damian because Tim believed he was hurting Alfred, something spawned from how Damian previously locked Alfred in a closest.

You don’t seem to recognize that Damian tried to murder Tim, how he belittled Tim, and how he tried to take his adopted dad away from him because he wanted that spot though.

Even how after he saved Tim: Damian belittled Tim some more as Tim was having a mental breakdown.

Counting the score, Tim has more reasons to not trust him then to actually trust him.

Which only got proved more with how Damian reacted when he found out Tim didn’t trust him. By assaulting him and nearly killing him by cutting his zip-line. (Although you could argue if you wanted too that he knew Tim could land well enough to survive, I personally don’t hold an opinion on it because it’s hard to tell, but I’m going to assume he wasn’t going to kill him, or else the whole issue would have even more bad writing in it)

My point is that it was horrendous writing to pretend like Damian couldn’t recognize why Tim didn’t trust him. Especially when he’s on a list (from what I heard) with Superman.

You criticize me for not bringing up Damian saving Tim, but you continue to ignore quite a lot of the things I said in the actual post I’m assuming you’re mad at.

Don’t be a hypocrite, especially when you’re trying to imply I am one.

If I wanted too, I could right now say “Damian fans are the always the ones that are so biased that they can’t realize Damian has continuously done horrendous and creepy stuff like make fun of Stephanie’s boobs and assaulting Tim, and even later Jason”, and going off of your asks (I won’t say you, because I’m assuming I don’t know you),

I think it would apply to your asks.

But I’m smart enough to know not every Damian fan is like that, so don’t claim otherwise. Every fan base has it’s toxic wasteland, but don’t try to lump me into Tim’s toxic wasteland because I don’t agree with you. You’re only making it seem like you’re apart of the Damian toxic wasteland with your behavior.

–

The third ask keeps going on talking about how they personally find no personal problem with characters calling Damian cute, purely because the asker finds Damian cute themselves.

Think about it though, why would they find Damian cute?

He’s violent, mean-spirited, has attacked both Tim and Jason, Dick has witnessed this, has a prison that Jason is aware of, made sexual comments towards Stephanie, and presents himself in a way where he thinks he’s better than everyone and demands respect.

That’s not cute, and that’s how his character was built up to be (not the prison, that’s a recent thing), and so far has continued to be the majority of those things.

He’s not a cute character.

To portray a character like that as cute is disingenuous (stealing the word you used, because I liked it) and piss poor writing because it’s ignoring the obvious reality. It just gets even worse because Damian wasn’t originally ever portrayed as a cute character, it’s something writers later on did because they couldn’t be bothered to write him well. Dropping the ball down the stairs with his character, and letting his character down.

Some artists might draw him cute because they aren’t aware of how a 13 year old looks, or could even keep consistent with how he looked for so long (even some of the ones that’s drawn him before began to draw him differently because they stopped being able to bother or whichever reason they have), and even some writers might write him cute, but if you’re going to bring that up to me, than I genuinely don’t think you read my full post, only furthered by how you’re trying to imply I’m a hypocrite by how I think 90s Tim was cute and tiny (something the asker did in their third ask).

The difference is pretty much the whole point in the grand majority of my posts were I’m critical about any writer on any character: they changed the character, because either they were too lazy, or too un-knowledgeable about who they were writing, and it’s bad writing to do so, since it’s inconsistency.

If you were watching a TV show and all of a sudden they treated a mean-spirited character, who continuously treats the majority of characters like crap, and continues to struggle with not acting on the instincts they was raised to have, as if that was cute when they haven’t done that before, and none of the characters have a reason to call him cute out of no where, it would be considered bad writing, articles would be written about it, and fans would be ticked off about it.

I’m pretty sure the comics only get away with it because it’s comics, and no one really cares about comics anymore to talk about it. I’m just pointing out the bad writing I continuously see on my blog were I talk about comics because I care and I heavily enjoy the medium of comics.

If it bugs you that I do that, you honestly shouldn’t be on my blog, and I’m a little confused how you got here since you seem aware I’ve brought up Damian’s bad writing before.

and if you want me to explain why I freely call Tim tiny, it’s because he is, and that’s been a main-stay of his character since the very beginning, and only changes with bad artists. Meaning that’s how he’s always been (ignoring the bad artists again), so there’s no bad writing involved with it, it’s actually bad work to ignore that. So it doesn’t fall into any bad or lazy writing like with Damian. It’s simply just not the same thing. If anything it’s the exact opposite if you want to compare those two things, like you seem zealous to do.

If you failed to recognize my logic, I’m going to have to assume again that you haven’t read or at least paid attention to things I’ve said, or how I generally try to conduct my points on my posts.

–

Continuously throughout your three asks you try to make points that make no sense.

The main reason I haven’t just blocked you and deleted your asks is because I get the vibe that you aren’t typically a very mean-spirited person, you’re just impulsive and passionate towards a character, and that is fine, but it’s when when you try to put down what someone else has said, when you seem like you haven’t even read the full thing, or have at least tried to fully pay attention to it, that it becomes toxic behavior, and something I have a problem with.

I believe it was just yesterday I got an ask were someone was complaining about the same kind of person that you presented yourself to be to me. So maybe this whole time this was only a joke to get under my skin because someone read that ask and my response and decided to pull a prank.

You may be a child, and so because of how you speak in the asks, mainly the latter two, I chose to just describe them instead of show them because I’m gonna take it that after some years you might look back on this and how weirdly aggressive you were towards people, and be glad that I didn’t show the ones were you try your dang best to point stuff out about me like it’s honest and true, and like you did your research about me, when quite frankly it’s not and you haven’t, even if you were trying to gaslight me, and use some straw man arguments to provoke me.

Also since you may be a child, a lot of Damian fans are since he’s Robin and the most recent one, I’m going to let you know that I’m honestly not mad at you for the asks, just confused, and that I wish you well and hope that I didn’t make you so mad that you’ve been thinking about it all day.

I’m just being critical of a character who I’m disappointed hasn’t had good writing consistently for years.

I’m not attempting to make the character come off like they’ve been bad since the beginning.

So you don’t have to worry about it.

I’m just genuinely upset with his writing, the same way I’m upset with how Tim’s been written before.

If you’re a grown person though, I’m a little more disappointed, but all the same, I hope I didn’t ruin your day, because to let you know, you haven’t ruined mine.

#Discourse

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hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger · 6 years ago

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Spider-Girls #1 Thoughts

FINALLY I’ve gotten to the series I was most anticipating!

Just about the ONLY thing I was remotely interested in Spider-Geddon for was this mini-series.

My hype was strong because even though at the time I’d not finished RYV proper the prospect of seeing Mayday again, in her proper outfit (we’ll talk about that) and interacting with Annie was a fanservice dream, especially after Houser established that in the RYV universe (though this didn’t exactly make sense with the original RYV mini from Secret Wars) that Mayday was miscarried in this universe.

So how did this issue measure up in delivering on that enticing prospect?

Well in short it did a good job.

Let’s get the negatives out of the way.

Mayday’s costume is off model on both the cover and interior of the comic, albeit in different ways. On the cover she has webpits which she never had outside of her redesigned costume from Secret Wars: Spider Island and Web Warriors. In the interior the artist neglects to draw the red on her boots. At first I thought it was just because she was being drawn in motion or a mistake but no the art is consistent. Then I thought maybe in the prior issues of Spider-Geddon she also had no red on her boots but no, she did. So this artist just screwed up.

A nitpick? Perhaps but given how contentious the issue of Mayday wearing her true costume has been ever since Spider-Verse it’s worth talking about.

A more significant problem where Houser, much as I have liked her work in the past, really didn’t do her homework, was presenting Peter a(and arguably MJ) as wholly unaware of the Inheritors.

Why is this a problem. Because this version of Peter Parker literally debuted during Spider-Verse, specifically Spider-Verse #2, an anthology comic which was written with the explicit intention of teasing Renew Your Vows during Secret Wars. So he should absolutely know about the Inheritors. The only way this makes sense is if the RYV Peter of Secret Wars and the one of RYV the ongoing are in fact not one and the same. Which was a theory some held when Conway’s run began because of how much it didn’t line up with the Secret Wars mini-series.

Another little nitpick is the Vulture gang. They were pretty lame although I suppose that may have been the point and it echoes Spider-Geddon #1 where Miles fights the equally lame Vulturions.

A more significant problem which I grant you may be addressed in future issues is that Peter’s reaction to Mayday is simply the initial shock of her reveal and then he seems relatively non-chalant. Mary Jane, in a brief yet heartbreakingly brilliant scene, goes off on her own to be upset, but Peter doesn’t do anything like that or show signs of being that thrown for a loop from seeing his dead daughter alive and well.

Now look I’m going to be very harsh. Maybe extremely controversial here. Call me out if I am because I’ve never been through a tragedy like a miscarriage. In such a situation from what little I know, a mother being more upset than the father wouldn’t be unrealistic or unreasonable. Buuuuuuut...unless RYV Peter is way more different than the Peter we know and love from 616 seeing Mayday (let alone finding out her Dad is dead) should get under his skin and we should see that. In 616 after the Clone Saga there was more than one scene depicting Peter being upset about MJ’s miscarriage.

Another problem is that Mayday and Anya comment that it’s nice seeing the city so normal. I didn’t understand that exchange and can only summise that Houser is implying being with the |Web Warriors they haven’t seen a normal (for them) version NYC in awhile. This doesn’t really make sense because the Web Warriors isn’t Mayday’s day job, she still operates in her version of NYC regularly last we checked. Unless this series takes place REALLY soon after Web Warriors and Mayday has changed back to her old outfit and then just helped monitor the Inheritors leading into Spider-Geddon and little else. But that’s not the implication of the prior issues of this event.

Also, though this is more a problem with Spider-Geddon #1-2 I admit but i’m only just realizing it now, where was Anya until now? In Web Warriors she lives on Loomworld with Spidey-UK who is her (most recent) mentor. But she wasn’t around in any of the prior issues of this event until now. And for a girl who just lost her mentor (again) she seems nonchalant. Sure as a someone who at best is lukewarm to her character I don’t care about seeing her reaction. Heck I’d rather she be outright absent from this series and it be all about Annie and Mayday. But from a writing POV she should have a reaction to Billy’s death.

Finally Houser continues to insist Annie’s hyper Spider Sense was something her parents only recently learned of.

That’s about it for the negatives.

Pretty much everything else about the story was GREAT.

Do not mistake my above negatives for me disliking the story.

I didn’t.

I LOVED it.

Where it succeeded it really succeeded.

After the bitter disappointment of the last arc of RYV this was Houser very much back on form.

In a lot of ways this issue feels like RYV #24. But because it isn’t an issue of that series I can’t hold it against the story for again focussing on Annie. In this series Annie, Ayna and Mayday are the leads, Peter and MJ are the supporting characters and there is no pretense of that.

Now for sure, as is typical with most of Houser’s issues, Annie is more centre stage than everyone else, being the only character afforded an inner monologue. Now I’m actually okay with this for now because Spider-Girls seems to be to Spider-Geddon what Scarlet Spiders was to Spider-Verse (ironically including ‘siblings’ one of which sports the Spider-Ben outfit) and in that series every issue gave focus to a different lead. If that is the case then this was simply Annie’s turn and the next two issues will give the focus to Mayday and Anya. If that isn’t the case then...that might be a problem.

That all being said this wasn’t BAD focus for Annie. Throughout Houser’s run the main tension for Annie has been between wanting more independence and adult responsibility vs. her being able to live up to that. Case in point she does need her parents help in this story.

In that sense I suppose this issue was a little repetitive of themes we’ve hit on before. But no one said she finished that arc by RYV #23 nor that it should be over by that point anyway. She’s a kid so for her to get that independence and responsibility within like 10 issues would feel unrealistic and unearned. What’s nice about this issue is that the situation organically confers onto her that sense of independence, trust and responsibility. We just need to see if she’ll be able to handle it now.

We also get more expansion on her ‘unique’ Spider Sense. It’s a little inconsistent in this story because prior to this she got outright visions but the impression given at the start of this issue is that her latest vision is more vague. Now of course Mayday’s spider sense to a lesser extent was capable of seeing the future as was Kaine’s. I don’t mind her borrowing from the latter but given the similarities between Annie and Mayday already it was a problem; having such visions more frequently didn’t help that much. This issue does rectify this issue a little by connecting her more directly to the Web of Life and Destiny giving her Spider Sense a greater root in magic.

Love or hate that it’s certainly more unique. I typically dislike magic in Spider-Man, but given how RYV has ended and this may well be the last hurrah for the RYV characters there ain’t much to lose in going this direction.

On Mayday’s side (yeah heads up Anya is just kinda just there so I have little to say about her) Houser does little but what little she does goes a long way; more is less in this case.

Unlike Slott, Costa or Gage who either wrote Mayday out of character, generically or the way a human being wouoldn’t react, Houser seems to have enough knowledge of basic human emotion to get that you know, seeing her Dad alive and with a daughter who isn’t her would upset Mayday.

Rather than rearing to tear the Inheritors a new one like In Spider-Geddon #2 or Spider-Verse, Mayday here just vents a little too hard on the Vulture gang and is a little more distracted and quiet than she normally would be. It’s subtle. It’s in character. It’s well done.

I also appreciate that Mayday was able to one hit K.O. two Vultures at once. Mayday in that moment became the most bad ass character in the issue. It also created a nice subtle parallel with Annie. At the start of the issue Annie tells and shows off how being a hero for a long time has made her such a competent fighter. Mayday’s prowess in the previously mentioned moment shows that off too. Realistically Annie may well be a more competent and effective fighter than Mayday given how she’s been doing it for longer and has had extensive X-Men training. Although Mayday has had more direct training from Peter, the Avengers (including American Dream), Phil Urich and noticeably Elektra. I’d like for this angle to be explored going forward. Seeing how Mayday sigs where Annie zags is surely one of the most obviously interesting prospects of a series like this.

Apart from the great MJ scene where she is sad by seeing Mayday, the only other positive I have is the art.

Now I was less than thrilled by the post-time skip RYV art to be honest. I felt a lot of the time it felt sketchy, unfinished even.

Here Genolet, whilst not being s slam dunk super star Spidey artist like Ottley or Stegman, delivers smooth, clean, effective artwork that serves the story and has a dash of Phil Noto to it in my eyes.

So yes.

There are problems with this issue but so far it has a lot of greatness to it and I’m very interested to read on!

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moved99999999999 · 5 years ago

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U guys wanna know what I think about that hell hotel show

I feel like twitter’s very tired of seeing ppl talk about Hazbin Hotel, so I putting my opinions on tumblr where they belong. I’m not a “professional critic” by any means, but I’ll try my best given what I know. And don’t worry, I’ll be incredibly nit-picky to suit the internet’s needs.

I’m gonna mainly focus on HH itself instead of Vivzie’s accusations because that's a WHOLE other can of worms to open.

During the time of me writing this, I haven’t watched any YT reviews, but I’ve read a few threads criticising the show, so take that as my social influence bias.

My ted talk is allllll below the cut. Enjoy~

Context:

My first exposure of Vivzie’s work was her “Die Young” animation that I came across around 2016. Instantly I fell in love with how “smooth” and lively her animation was, and especially the fact that it was hand drawn. Animation like that was extremely rare to come by (and still is) and seeing her execute it so well with such complexed characters was amazing to my fetus self.

A few years later and I see the first trailer for HH. I instantly went OH I RECOGNISE THAT STYLE AND THOSE CHARACTER TYPE DESIGNS and was looking forward to what it had to offer.

On “opening day” I watched the pilot ASAP to avoid my opinions from getting warped by all of the key-mash memes and post call-out bitching (literally the extremes of the HH opinion spectrum), and overall.....

I thought it was good.

Not ground breakingly amazing, not horrifically terrible, but charmingly good.

(Ok now it’s actual review time)

Animation Quality:

As a hand drawn animation that has the freedom to get creative with its shots, a lot of effort was clearly put into how everything moves (it definitely didn’t take any lazy flash puppet shortcuts for the main sections of the show) and I can appreciate that. However it tends to be... rather inconsistent, most likely due to the varying skill level of the animators on the project. It’ll be nice and smooth one minute, and then awkward and choppy the next which can make the viewing pretty confusing at times. I’ll be honest I found myself overlooking these inconsistencies due to the characters and backgrounds themselves being very visually engaging, especially considering how over designed some of them can be (which I applaud the team for handling cuz wow that must have been painful). However, the needle thin and exaggerated art style makes some things incredibly hard to look at. While it helps with adding fancy details, it hurts in catching peoples eyes in the right place.

It’s also chalk full of little details, visual gags, and references that are hilarious to look at if you have the luxury of pausing every two seconds (the news segment and Sir Pentious turf war w/ Angel and Cherri are good places to look). But I feel like these lil details were put in at the cost of some some continuity errors (Charlie not wearing her coat in one shot, and having it back on in the next, papers being blank, etc.) and lip-syncing issues which really shouldn’t be happening considering all of the detail they were able to put in. There are also some shots that have just SO MUCH detail put into them, only to be shown for less than a second. I get that’s the cost of animation sometimes, but save the detail for the shots that need it, because at that point you’re just causing the animators to waste their efforts.

However, I was surprised at how professional the soundtrack and editing was. Not one but THREE songs in this single episode was really surprising, and the variation and quality of each was great (as cringy as Charlie’s song is)

But overall, the production quality is surprisingly good for a project like this, the editing, sound effects, and sound track act like a cherry on top. Of course there are some noticeable drops in quality, but given time and a budget, it has enough chops to look like an actual show.

Writing:

As far as overarching plot goes, it seems like it’s going to be one of those procedural shows that tries to be serialised, but it’s a creative twist on hell and has an interesting premise to begin with. You can get really creative with seeing how you’d dive into getting redemption out of all of these seemingly lost causes, and I’m sure there are many people willing to know the backstories our main cast. As a pilot, it did it’s job of launching the plot very well, setting up the premise of the hotel and introducing characters in a very engaging way. I was legit really interested in each segment with who in introduced, and it didn’t feel like I was being overloaded with names to remember (which can be a problem for many medias and introductions). The cohesion between each scene is VERY smooth, and I genuinely enjoyed some of the cliché cuts/gags.

Unfortunately I can’t extend this interest to our main character. Charlie is one of the most generic tropes we’ve ever seen. She’s a boring Disney princess who has a “cute happy positive goal to change her world” and the only thing that would make her more generic is if she wore a dress and cried “I’m tired of being so privileged”.

(Although it’s impossible to tell, I honestly think Viv is just projecting through her, especially considering how horrifically accurate the hotel’s opening mirrors the internet’s reaction to the pilot itself)

I would be more forgiving if she was a supporting character or someone less important, but she’s the freaking protagonist, arguably the character that has to be the most interesting. Angel’s personality seems to be “flirty porn star”, and while that’s just as bad as being a boring Disney princess, at least he gets a few jokes and has a profession more interesting than Charlie’s. Around the end of the pilot he just seems like he’s getting involved because Viv likes giving him attention. If he’s supposed to be leeching off of the hotel, wouldn’t not care if it survives or not?

(There’s that whole stereotype issue that everyone keeps bringing up, but I genuinely think that’s BS because people are blatantly ignoring the fact that Angel is a porn star, Vaggie is portrayed as helpful, and that the show takes place in H E double hokey sticks.)

The transitions may be smooth, but the dialogue pacing can get really awkward at times. This paired with the animation sometimes having awkward quality drops makes some movements incredibly jagged, and has some detailed shots show for incredibly unbalanced screen time as mentioned before.

I don’t have enough to give voice acting it’s own section so I’m just popping it down here:

The voice acting is legitimately better than several big name projects I know. It’s consistent, great at expressing the character’s mood properly, and each voice fits each character perfectly. My only gripes are that Alastor and Sir Pentious tend to grain on you after awhile due to them keeping a single tone for too long.

Character Design: AKA the only thing I have legitimate experience with.

First thing’s first. The characters are WAY too over designed. There are so many markings and accessories that are incredibly unnecessary. I think the mindset for these characters was “the more complicated and attractive the better”, which makes them look like they’re designed by an edgy tumblr artist (heck I fall for this too some times).

Especially if a character is going to be animated, you have to keep in mind the value of simplicity. You absolutely don’t have to fill in your character with markings and trinkets to make them look unique, I mean just look at the gen 1 pokemon starters. Thanks to the limitations of the game, the sprites were forced to be simple, and it was that simplicity that made them such unique and varied creatures. You can tell Blastoise is a bulky water blasting turtle just with a quick glance.

Many of the characters suffer from over complication, but I’ll look at Husk for example. He has these stripes all over him that do not contribute to who he’s supposed to be at all, and only look like they’re added to make him more unique. The markings that DO help are the little card suite marks on his wings, because those at least infer he’s linked to a casino/gambling type of theme. I would say his outfit helps as well, but formal wear and bowties are worn way to often by the main characters, which brings me to another problem.

They may look different, but they feel way too similar. From the same skinny body type, to generic head shapes, to outfits, the focus characters just don’t stand out amongst each other. Even the ones with interesting features still suffer from feeling generic. I’d say Sir Pentious is a good example of this. He has a serpentine/naga body and clever hair style that make his concept really creative, but his skinny body type, complicated eyes all over his tail, and generic “young but supposed to be at least middle aged” face just push him back into obscurity. He’s even wearing the SAME outfit as Alastor (who's an even worse offender of that generic face problem), and unless Viv has some plan to link the two, I’d say the characters need to stop using a dress code.

A successful character design can to tell you who the character is just by looking at them. You should be able to tell if a character’s personality, function, age, the universe they belong in, and if they’re important or not, and that’s a big problem when it comes to the background characters. If you pause on one of the extras for a minute you can see all of the effort put into designing them, and that takes away so much attention from the main cast. Not only that, but they have actual variations in their body types and outfits, which makes them more intriguing than who we’re supposed to be interested in.

Regardless, this pilot has potential, and if they can get someone to comb out the flaws, you can end up with something good. No one can deny a legitimate animation was made here, and the team successfully executed the start of a story, and that’s something anyone can look up to.

TLDR: The pilot is good. It has some major flaws, but it has potential to be a good show.

If you actually read this far epstein didn’t kill himself.

#I'm only doing this cuz i wanna draw angel dust and i feel like I have to justify myself before ppl start calling me mean things #Fan art is coming ;)#hazbin hotel #HH is good yall just have a mob mentality #critique

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doubledeaky · 6 years ago

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See What a Fool I’ve Been - Part Three

Brian May x Female!Reader

Part One | Part Two

A/N: Hey, everyone! I’m sorry for my inconsistent updates of this fic, I’ve been having trouble writing this particular fic but I’m getting there! The next part will be the final part, so please stay tuned! Thank you all so much for the love and support on my last two posts, you guys rock! As always, feedback is very much appreciated! Much love! -m:)

Summary: Being friends with John Deacon meant being friends with his band mates. This blossoming group of best buds seems logical until Brian realizes he may like you more than a friend. Unfortunately, your oblivious nature and Roger’s constant cock-blocking spells trouble for Brian and the romantic feelings he harbors for you. Young love isn’t always as fun as the movies make it seem.

Word Count: 1,327 words (sorry it’s so short!)

Warnings: cursing

Brian audibly groaned as the white streaks of sunlight pouring through his curtains temporarily blinded his tired eyes. He pressed on both eyes with the pads of his thumb and pointer finger, attempting to rub the sleep from them. His feet felt cold, looking down he noticed they were hanging off of the bed uncovered, typical. He threw the duvet from his body and onto the floor which was littered with dirty clothes and books, very out of character for neat freak, Brian May. His long legs felt heavy as he attempted to swing them over the side of his mattress and when he managed to do so, a dull ache reverberated throughout his muscles. He grimaced, sitting up with the assistance of his also very sore arms. Taking a quick glance of the condition of his room, he sighed and buried his face in his hands. The past few weeks had been tough, and Brian’s room was suffering as a result. He hadn’t really tidied since he met you a little over a month ago and the idea of what could be living among the mess caused a shiver to climb Brian’s spine. Nevertheless, he pushed himself from the bed; his legs still screaming in pain. The band had had a gig the night before and while the aches the day after hurt, having to watch Roger continue to butter you up after every gig hurt even more. You’d been to a total of four gigs now, the flames of jealousy in Brian’s chest only growing after each. Roger was determined, and Brian envied his persistence, especially since you’d seemingly shot him down every time he’d hinted to the idea of something more. Whether you were truly rejecting him or obliviously playing along, thinking Roger’s sly remarks were merely compliments, Brian didn’t know. What he did know was that he didn’t like it, at all. He felt a welcome sense of relief wash over him when he remembered there was no gig and he’d be able to exist in peace without the constant reminder that you weren’t his, you’d never be his, and that you would inevitably end up shagging Roger. He opened the door to his room and furrowed his brow when he wasn’t bombarded by the screams and vivacious laughs of his roommates. Instead, they were all sat at various points in the room either eating, reading, or both. Brian gave the three a friendly wave as he wordlessly poured himself a cup of coffee.

“Morning, Bri.” Freddie said behind his newspaper, yawning obnoxiously right after. Brian hummed in acknowledgement, taking a sip of his coffee and appreciating the warmth it brought to his cold limbs. The unfamiliar, but welcome, quiet was interrupted by Roger who saw it appropriate to begin stirring the pot.

“It’s a shame we don’t have a gig this weekend. Was so looking forward to seeing Y/N.” He said, smirking as he doodled with a blue pen onto the back of a napkin. Brian inhaled deeply and rolled his eyes, annoyed Roger found it necessary to get everyone riled up this early in the morning. John peered at Roger from behind a magazine, sneering at him.

“Rog, can you please keep it in your pants? She’s my friend, and I’d appreciate it if you’d stop dropping us hints about how much you’d like to get in her pants.” John said, rolling his own grey eyes and focusing back on that month’s issue of Rolling Stone. Roger laughed but didn’t look up, extremely focused on his drawing of what Brian assumed, from his view, was a dog.

“C’mon, Deaks! I get that she’s your friend and all, but you can’t deny she’s fit.” Roger said smugly, grinning from ear to ear with a cockiness that made Brian nauseous.

“Yeah, Rog. I can see that, I have eyes, but all I’m asking is that you not discuss your sexual fantasies involving her with the lot of us.” John said, huffing out an exasperated breath. Roger sat back, disgustingly smug. He shrugged and crossed one leg over the other.

“Can’t help it. I mean, she’s a total babe. Nice tits, and not to mention her bum. I’ll tell ya, I’d like to- “

“Stop talking about her like that.” Brian hissed from the other side of the room, absolutely seething. Roger turned to him, still smug, and gave him a challenging glare.

“What’s your problem, Bri? Are you mad you haven’t got the gall to try and get into her knickers?” He said, smirking as he tapped his fingers on the arm of the couch. Freddie’s eyes widened, and John was still shocked Brian was brave enough to even attempt to call out Roger. Brian set down his cup of coffee and crossed his arms over his chest, his full weight shifting onto his left leg. He huffed, growing angry and feeling slightly flustered. Roger tilted his head with both eyebrows raised, awaiting his reply.

“No, Rog, it’s not that. Just think you should have some respect. You’re being a proper dick right now.” Brian said simply, furrowing his brows Roger’s way. Roger’s face and chest grew red, his reputation of flying off the handle on the brink of being on full display. He scoffed, shaking his head.

“No, Bri. I just think you’re just chapped because I’m not afraid to go after what I want. You envy me.” Roger spit, shifting in his seat to face Brian. Freddie and John were stunned. Arguments among them were always lighthearted, this seemed malicious. Brian laughed in disbelief, shaking his head, curls bouncing softly.

“Envy you? Sure, Rog, if that helps you sleep at night.” Brian said, dismissively waving a hand as he turned to pour himself more coffee, already wanting this conversation to end. Roger was angry now; he didn't like being shamed, especially from the likes of Brian.

“What the fuck is your problem, May? So, what if I want to shag her? What does it matter to you?”

“Cuz’ I fancy her, alright!” Brian shouted, breathing shaky and fists clenched. The room fell silent and Brian witnessed a rare emotion for Roger cross his face, regret. Only for a moment though, as Roger’s trademark smirk soon returned to its usual position in mere seconds. He leant back on the couch and reached for a cigarette on the stool beside him.

“Well, you’re shit at showing it.” Roger mumbled, lighting the cigarette hung loosely between his lips. Brian’s shoulders relaxed but he grew confused.

“What?” Brian asked, his eyebrows still drawn together. Roger huffed and sat up.

“Brian, you may be an astrophysicist, but you truly are daft. If you would have made an effort to show me you fancied her, I would have backed off. I’m not a complete asshole.” Roger said, puffing on his cigarette.

“News to me.” Freddie mumbled, and John laughed into his hand. Roger promptly flicked him off and all attention was back to Brian, who was still a bit shocked to say the least. Roger sighed frustrated, already reaching for a second cigarette.

“Brian, just grow a pair and go get her. Nothing’s stopping you now.” He said, returning his concentration back to drawing. Brian felt relief flood his chest and a breathy laugh escaped him. He ran to the coat rack, fishing for his jacket and pulling it over his lithe frame. Brian turned to the three men, giving Roger a nod which he returned with a playful eye roll and smile. Brian got to work on the lock of the door, flinging it open. John sat up in his chair, his arms supporting his weight.

“You break her heart and your ass is mine, May!” John called as Brian stumbled out of the door, giving John a thumbs up through the opening before it shut. The remaining three all relaxed in their seats, the previous tension in the room now dissipating.

“This is definitely not how I imagined my morning going.” Freddie stated from his seat and John nodded in solemn agreement, burying his face in a pillow beside him.

tag list: @ourfracturedomens @ladylannisterxo @arrowswithwifi @discoball-deaky @everybodyplaythegame @rogerlad @queenbbarnes @mackers125 @alexfayer @borhapqueen92 @thesecondlastjedi @dashlilymark @joe-mozzarello @goodoldfashionedlovergal @readinghorn @disn3yfreak (this is the official tag list for the fic; if you'd like to be added, please let me know!)

#brian may #brian may x reader #brian may x you #brian may imagine #queen #queen band #queen imagines #roger taylor #john deacon #freddie mercury #bohemian rhapsody #borhap #borhap imagine #breakthrubabywrites

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nicolinocolino · 6 years ago

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thoughts on skamit season 2

(warning: this is long af and a little messy!!) 👇

(warning #2: I do make comparisons to the og; not everything I have to say is sunshine and smiles but I DO have a lot of praise to give as well: if you only want to read that just skip the first part 💛)

Things that made me go ???

Niccolò playing the piano. This just ended up being more disappointing than anything. Why introduce something so unique and special only to never mention it again? This could have easily been the passe på meg scene.

WHICH while we are on the subject, why was there NO PASSE PÅ MEG SCENE?! I do not understand this at all, unless the point of the clip flew right over Ludo’s head. (When did Niccolò notice Martino?? Why did he follow him into the radio booth?? Why did you deprive us of this information Ludovicoooooo)

Oh and: Ludovico Bessegato — I do not trust you and I think you’re a dick but also you’re kind of brilliant. I don’t even know what to think of him, tbh. Ok for real: I’m going to talk about the end of episode 2 for a second and more specifically, his reaction to the responses. Playing the victim? Deleting his Instagram? Not apologizing? He acted like a straight up child, and if he didn’t do that, I think I’d see him in a much brighter light. But instead, we got a glimpse of the person he really is and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. (I am not the kind of person to see things in black and white and I’m also not the kind of person to base my opinion of others on one act — which is why I’m so torn on him. However, helping to develop Martino’s story and making creative choices I could praise forever doesn’t make up for this particular action and it also doesn’t make him a good person.)

AND YET — between all of the brilliant direction choices he DID make... why was the lighting so bad? This is not me being like ~wAh I WaNnA SeE tHeM KisS bEtTeR~ I just want to... see their expressions?? I keep reading in interviews how emotionally tolling the fight scene between the boys was and,,, I can hear it in their voices but damn I wish I could have seen their faces. Would have been nice.

Also: one directing choice I also didn’t quite understand was the lack of focus on Martino’s face in some scenes? Granted, I don’t expect the camera to be on him ALWAYS but there were some key scenes that just didn’t focus on his face at all when I thought it should: in the first episode when the boys are outside and Marti first notices Nico, Marti tells Luca he doesn’t want to hear his nasty clitoris story, to which Gio turns to Marti and tells Luca not to listen to him. And then... did that hurt Marti? Did he laugh? Guess we’ll never know because the camera just ignored him. Gio is his best friend and his opinion matters a lot to Martino, so why didn’t we get to see his expression? He’s the only member of the boy squad not wanting to listen to Luca’s story and he gets shut down. Does he care...? Also: the cabin scene in the morning. Marti introduces Nico and then.... we never get his reaction to the boys sleeping on the floor, to Nico inviting them to breakfast, to Luca hugging Nico... the camera literally forgets his existence after Nico meets the boys. These are just two examples off the top of my head but I know as I watched there were more.

The dialog choices regarding when they did and didn’t follow or deviate from the og. I’ll get more into the characters in the next section but it’s no secret that Martino and Niccolò are not Isak and Even and therefore, when the dialog was close to or a carbon copy of the og, it felt kind of forced into their mouths and rather rushed. My personal least favorite line they kept was the whole “your mom pays me” gag between Marti and Nico in the kitchen of the last clip. Just seems... very out of character for them (given the fact that Nico just got done being in a rather manipulative and controlling [she’s always managed to put me on the spot, to twist things, to make me believe everything she wanted me to believe. <— his own words!!!] relationship). When Marti and Niccolò had their own original banter (some notable examples include chatting about the radio [did you have something better to do?], before the pool kiss [are you dumb, are you stupid?], their entire talk in bed in 5.1, and “studying” together [yeah, that’s the idea]) it really really shined and, of course, felt totally in character. I love the choice to make Marti and Nico so different than Isak and Even (again I’ll get to that in more detail soon) but within that choice, the dialog needs to adapt to fit them and I feel like they either nailed it or totally missed the mark.

HOWEVER — there was one exception to this: I loved loved loved loved loved the coming out scene between Marti and Gio, despite it being almost word for word. I’d go as far to say I liked it more than the one in the og for several reasons: 1. Fede’s acting holy shit. (While this situation always has a lot at stake, the stakes felt very high for Martino here. I could feel how nervous he was not just to reveal a part of himself he’d been keeping hidden for so long, but how nervous he was to potentially lose his friend. It made my heart race!) That little swallow he did? God. I could feel the nerves. 2. Their surroundings and actions were not random. Marti invited Gio to play FIFA for a reason! It’s basically a ritual for them at this point and a very comfortable setting. Marti choosing this as his comfy place to come out to Gio reinforces the idea that he still likes “dude things” and that Marti is still the same guy Gio has played the last 100+ games with. 3. The! Cheering! Of! The! Crowd! In! The! Video! Game! After! Marti! Says! ‘It’s not a girl’!!!!!!!!!! POETIC CINEMAAAA. All in all, again, despite the dialog being just about the same, this scene still felt very in character for both Marti and Gio and was executed flawlessly. A+

The social media was good content wise but that didn’t make up for the inconsistency. Part of the appeal of SKAM and the remakes are how it brings viewers into the deeply personal lives of the characters. We read their text messages for god’s sake — that is so personal! Social media, yes, does make way for some good character development (catch me never being over the selfie of the boys in Bracciano) but mainly, it just humanizes the characters. Teenagers, mind you! Show me a teenager not glued to their phone. I don’t believe for one second Silvia didn’t have like, 7 Instagram stories every day. (Not that I expect that but at least one social post from one of the characters every day would have been MUCH more realistic.) (I’m not even going to get into how the skamit team just... uh, forgot the password to Marti’s original Instagram...? Is that even what happened? Why did they make him a new one lmfao. So messy.)

Things that made me go !!!

The change of characteristics and dynamic as a whole between Martino and Niccolò. A.k.a. the approach to the mood of the story was a genius idea and a brilliant way to “remake” the season. I loved how comfortable they fell into each other — never hesitant or afraid or even nervous. They genuinely enjoy each other’s company and immediately I could tell why they were so drawn to each other. Some people complained about this “lack of tension” but in the end, their dynamic was so important to lead up to La Grotta and make their story theirs: Nico chose Marti and Marti chose Nico. There was no saving each other — that’s Isak’s and Even’s thing!! That works for them and this works for Marti and Nico. Honestly, Isak and Even in every universe deserve something unique to guide their story to the same conclusion, and I’m thankful SKAM Italia did what they did with the characters to make this happen in their own way.

The contrabbandieri and focus on Marti’s friendships as an equally important part of his character as his relationship with Niccolò. All other squads are now held to the standard of the Italian boy squad because!! Wow. Such great chemistry between them all. I truly believe that they are all equally friends within the group as well as individually? Like, of course Marti and Gio have this special ~bond~ but I never got the feeling that if Luca and Marti or Elia and Marti hung out one-on-one it would be awkward. They are all so supportive of each other and while I hate the way they generally treated women, the way they treated each other is peak friendship: affectionate, honest, silly, I could go on forever; and I could watch them grilling coffee/dancing in a kitchen/eating disgusting pizza crusts/wrapping ties around their heads/sucking at table football forever.

On this note, I would also like to say that the inclusion of Niccolò into the boy squad right away in Bracciano was the content we deserved. I loved how this wasn’t random or fan service, either — Nico’s loneliness wasn’t ignored; it’s no secret he’s at a new school with no friends, probably being bullied or at least talked about behind his back by his classmate Marco Covitti, and recently broken up with his girlfriend he feels manipulated by. He needs friends right now and the fact that Marti’s friends are becoming his friends is so wholesome and important. Love love love this.

The introduction and inclusion of Martino’s mom. I thought their relationship was very realistic and instead of being like “oh, in the og Isak moved out so Marti needs to as well...” the skamit team was just like, no. That’s not realistic for a teenager in Italy so we’re just going to have to change some stuff. AND it gave some resolution to Marti and his mom (something I wish we got a little more of in the og) without sugar coating it. There are still problems, of course, but now Marti is stronger and wiser and more empathetic. Things are going to get better but he knows that not everything will always be good. Also, his mom needs someone?? I don’t blame Isak at all for getting out (and let’s be real his mom seemed like maybe she had some more intense issues) but I love the fact that Marti and his mom are working on it.

The last men on earth story / the symbolism of the giraffe and how those details directly intertwined to fit the difficulties and fears in the change of Nico’s mental illness. Once Maddalena said borderline personality disorder I did exactly what Dr. Spera said not to do and went right to google. But really it was only after some lovely people on here with bpd stepped forward to share their stories and enlighten us that I truly understood (to the best of my abilities) the nuances of Nico and his actions. Looking back, all of the details that seemed to change from the og just for drama or angst’s sake (like Nico completely ghosting Marti for example) were actually there for a reason and I think when Ludovico told us “you think you know what’s going to happen but really you have no idea” he was talking about this. Giving Nico’s character a different mental illness did a few positive things for the story: 1) it opened up all of the possibilities for beautiful new symbolism which the skamit team executed flawlessly. This, in turn, gave Marti and Nico their own things and their own story instead of copying the idea of parallel universes and the Romeo and Juliet storyline. 2) It shed awareness for an underrepresented and highly stigmatized mental illness. By showing us Nico the character (who is a lovely, lovely character: silly, talented, extremely thoughtful, loving) before showing us his mental illness, we see him as a human first. So important! Often characters in media with mental illnesses are reduced to their illness and can often fall into the ‘loveable asshole’ trope. We learn to love Nico right alongside Marti first — and while this is all the og’s brilliant idea, we now have this same story for a different mental illness and that’s beautiful.

The music! This was like, Marti’s soundtrack. We even get him explicitly saying he likes “indie and electronic” music — it adds a level of depth into his perspective as if he picked the soundtrack himself. I love this because there is no SKAM Italia music mood, it’s all based on the characters and their POV. (Skam season 3 did this as well, obviously, but more of a mix between Isak and Even with Romeo and Juliet thrown in there as well.)

The cinematography. I think this one goes without saying haha. While less “real” than the og, I’m a sucker for aesthetics and symbolism. And yes yes yes the wide shot in the pool and the open shots of Rome are beautiful BUT: the cinematography in skamit did more than make it beautiful. It helped tell the story. One perfect moment (in my opinion) that beautifully emphasizes this is when Martino and Niccolò are walking around in Milan without a single other person in sight. Was that realistic? No. Did that symbolize the last men on earth reference and heighten the audience’s empathy into Niccolò’s dissociative state? Absolutely.

This one is rather vague but the major (and not so major) changes — everything from swapping kosegruppa and biology class with the radio group to the scene where Martino meets Filippo. Every change was brilliant and is 100% where skamit shined. I’m actually most critical about the things they kept the same, and if skamit ever wanted to create their own original season beyond the 4, I have a lot of faith they’d write a good one. 💛

#skam italia #im probably forgetting stuff tbh #both on the ??? and !!! sides #but this took me like 4 days to write lmfao #i need to do a proper binge rewatch now that the season is over #if you read all of this you are a trooper

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