#JL is a child and probably in shock so he's excused

[poorlittleyaoyao]

POV: You are Lan Xichen. Your sworn brother's wife just abruptly stabbed herself in front of you and is he is currently sobbing over her still-warm body. Either he has just suffered a devastating loss, or this is related to the murder you're investigating and he is somehow responsible. Do you:

A.) Act swiftly to learn more information and ensure justice can be done for this dead woman, or

B.) Provide meaningful solace and support to your lifelong friend in one of the most traumatic moments of his life?

The answer is...

Neither! You unlock secret option C.) Awkwardly offer bland condolences and call it a day!

Me too, Lianfang-zun.

[davidmann95]

How about those JL storyboards?

In case you haven’t heard, Zack Snyder is putting on display the ‘storyboards’ - i.e. a rough plot summary accompanied by some Jim Lee sketches - for what would have been Justice League 2 and 3, or as this puts it 2 and ‘2A’. You can see them here (I imagine better-quality versions will soon be released), and read a transcript here. This is evidently a very early version: this was apparently pitched prior to the release of BvS and Justice League being rewritten in the wake of it, with numerous plot details that now don’t line up with what we know about the Snyder Cut, plus it outright mentions it builds on the originally planned versions of the Batman and Flash movies. But it’s a broad outline of what was gonna go down, and while I initially thought it was Snyder throwing in the towel, the timing - paired with the ambiguity left by the necessity for changes, including that this doesn’t factor whatever that “massive cliffhanger” at the end of the Cut is - says to me he’s hoping this’ll be a force multiplier behind efforts to will sequel/s into existence. He’s probably right.

I’ll be discussing spoilers below, but in short: with this Zack Snyder has finally lived up to Alan Moore, in that like Twilight of the Superheroes I wouldn’t believe this was real as opposed to a shockingly on-point parody if not for direct, irrefutable evidence.

Doing some rapid-fire bullet points for this baby to kick us off:

* Folks who know the subject say a lot of this is a yet further continuation of Snyder doing Arthuriana fanfic with the League reskinned over those major players, and I’ll take their word for it.

* I don’t know whether I love or hate that in Justice League 2 the Justice League are only an extant thing for the first scene, and then it’s Snyder giving everybody their own mini-movies. It’s compressing the entire MCU “loosely interconnected solo stories leading to a single big movie later” strategy into a single movie!

*  Funniest line in the whole thing: "Even Lantern has heard of the Kryptonian, worried that he's under the control of Darkseid. He heard his spirit was unbreakable." Hal what fuckin' Superman movie did YOU watch? Second funniest being “IT WILL GIVE HIM POWER OVER ALL LIVING LIFE”

* 90% of the plot I have nothing to say about, it’s generic stage-setting crap. That to be clear is the ‘shocked it’s Snyder’ element, it feels so crassly commercial in a way I can’t believe is coming from the BvS guy.

* Most of what I have to say is unsurprisingly gonna be about a handful of characters but Cyborg’s happy ending being “he isn’t visibly disabled anymore!” is not great!

* The Goddess of War battle with Superman...never pays off? No clue why it’s there.

* What I’d originally heard was that the Codex in Superman’s blood was the last key to the Anti-Life Equation and that’s why Darkseid was coming to Earth. It’s not like all of this wouldn’t have already been averted by Kal-El’s pod smacking into an asteroid on the way to Earth so it’s not as if this makes it any more Superman’s fault, and it would have at least tied all this back to the beginning of the movies, but I suppose that was either fake or from a later draft.

* I have NO idea how this was reimagined without the ‘love triangle’, it’s the central character thing and the entire climax flows directly out of it!

* Darkseid’s kinda a chump in this, huh

Anonymous said: So: Does Zack Snyder hate Superman?

Look: the hilarity of this when Cuck Kent has been a go-to Snyder cult insult towards ‘inferior’ takes on Superman for years cannot be understated, yet at the same time I can almost wrap my brain around where Snyder’s coming from with that as the end for his take on the character. He talked in that Variety piece on how his interest in Superman is informed by having adopted children himself, and Deborah Snyder is the stepmother to his kids by previous relationships, so I can see where he’d be coming from, and I can even imagine how he’d see this as ‘rhyming’ in the sense of “the series begins with Kal-El being adopted by Earth, it ends with him adopting a child of Earth!” In the same way as MARTHA, I can envision how he would put these pieces together in his head thematically without registering or caring what the end result would actually look like. In this case, Superman raising the kid of the man who beat the shit out of him who Batman had with Clark’s wife, who earlier told Bruce she was staying with Clark because he ‘needed her’, suggesting if inadvertently that this really honest to god was a “she’s only staying with Superman out of pity, she really loved Batman more” thing.

But Clark is nothing in this. He’s sad and existential because of coming back from the dead I guess, then he’s corrupted, then time’s undone and he woo-rah rallies the collective armies of the world (interesting angle for the ‘anti-military/anti-establishment’ Superman he’s talked up as) as his big heroic moment in the finale, and then he stops being sad because he’s adopting a kid. So his big much-ballyhooed, extremely necessary five-movie character arc towards truly becoming Superman was:

Sad weird kid -> sad weird kid learns he’s an alien, is still weird and sad, maybe he shouldn’t save people because things could go really wrong? -> his dad is so convinced it could go wrong he lets himself die -> ????? -> Clark is saving people anyway -> learns his origin, gets an inspiring speech about being a bridge between worlds and a costume -> becomes superman (not Superman, that’s later) to save the world, albeit a very property-damagey version, rejects his heritage he just learned about and space dad’s bridge idea -> folks hate him being superman and that sucks though at least he’s got a girlfriend now -> things go so wrong he considers not being superman but his ghost dad reminds him shit always goes wrong so he should be good anyway, which sorta feels like it contradicts his previous advice -> immediate renewed goodness is out the window as he’s blackmailed into having to try and kill a dude but the dude happens to coincidentally have some things in common so they don’t kill each other after all -> big monster now but superman keeps supermaning at it because he loves his girlfriend and he dies -> he’s brought back, wears black which apparently means now he likes Krypton again? -> he has work friends now but he’s still sad because he was dead -> evil now! -> wait nevermind time travel -> rallies the troops -> his wife’s having a kid so he’s not sad anymore -> Superman! Who gives way to more Batman.

Do I think Zack Snyder is lying when he says he likes Superman? No. I think he sincerely finds much of the basic conceits and imagery engaging. But I don’t think he meaningfully gives shit about Clark as a character, just a vessel for Big Iconic Beats he wants to hit. Whereas while for instance he’s critical of Batman as an idea (at least up to a point), he’s much more passionately, directly enamored with him as a presence and personality. So while Superman may be the character whose ostensible myth cycle or arc or however it’s spun might be propelling a lot of events here, it’s a distant appreciation - of course the other guy takes over and subsumes him into his own narrative. Of course Batman is the savior, the past and the future (though if he’s supposed to be Batman’s kid raised by Superman there’s no excuse for him not to be Nightwing), the tragic martyr to our potential. Admittedly the implication here is also that Batman can apparently only REALLY with his whole heart be willing to sacrifice his life to save an innocent, for that matter apparently his great love, once said innocent is a receptacle for his Bat-brood, but he and Clark are both already irredeemable pieces of shit by the end of BvS so it’s not like this even registers by comparison.

Anonymous said: That “plan” Snyder had was utter dogshit. Picture proof that DC & WB hate Superman. Also I love how you’re like Jor-El: Every single idealistic take you had about Snyder, his fandom, and BvS was wrong. Snyder’s an edgy hack, his fanbase just wants to jerk off to their edgy self-insert Batgod as he screams FUCK while mowing people down with machine guns, and the idea that BvS said Superman was better than Bats was completely wrong. You know what comes next SuperMann: Either you die or I do.

In the final analysis, beyond that mother of god is there sure no conceivable excuse for the treatment of Lois in this? The temptation is to join that anon and say as I originally tweeted that these were “built entirely to disabuse every single redemptive reading of the previous work and any notion of these movies as nuanced, artistic, self-reflective, or meaningful”.

...

...

...yeah, okay, that’s mostly right. Zack Snyder’s vision really was the vision of an edgelord idiot with bad ideas who was never going to build up to anything that would reframe it all as a sensible whole. He’s a sincere edgelord genuinely trying really hard with his bad ideas who put some of them together quite cleverly! But they’re fucking bad and the endgame was never anything more than ramping up into smashing the action figures together as big as he could, the political overtones and moral sketchiness of BvS while trying to say something in that movie reverberated through the grand scheme of his pentalogy in no way beyond giving his boys a big sad pit to rise out of so when they kicked ass later it’d rule harder, and all the gods among men questions and horror and trappings were only that: trappings. Apparently he’s really pleasant and well-meaning in person, but at his core his art as embodied in a couple weeks in his 4-hour R-rated Justice League movie meant to be seen in black-and-white all comes down to that time he yelled at someone on Twitter that he couldn’t appreciate Snyder’s work because it’s for grown-ups. He made half-clever, occasionally exciting shit cape movies for a bunch of corny pseudo-intellectual douchebags, folks latching onto and justifying blockbusters that at least acknowledge how horrifying the world is right now even if the superheroes are basically useless in the face of it if not outright part of the problem until a convenient alien invasion shows up to justify them, and a handful of non-asshole smart people who vibe with it but...well. ‘Suckered’ is a harsh word, and definitely doesn’t apply to all of them re: what they’ve gotten out of it up to this point and would (somehow) get out of this. But it doesn’t apply to none of them, either.

[crossdressingdeath]

Okay I’ve had a very long day and people are being super defensive of JC on my dash so uh. I’m gonna talk shit about him for a bit. Because it’ll make me feel better. And I don’t want anyone arguing with me about this so I’ll put it behind a cut and if you don’t want to read someone talking shit about JC in a super unstructured manner then... don’t click read more, I guess? 

So here’s one thing, to start. In The Untamed specifically, I can argue with near-absolute certainty that JC killed WWX. LWJ had him, and that guy is insanely strong; I don’t doubt for a second he could’ve pulled WWX up if he’d been given the chance. Maybe JC didn’t put a blade through WWX’s heart himself, but if he had stayed out of it WWX probably would’ve lived. I don’t know how long he would’ve lived, and I doubt he would’ve thanked LWJ for saving him, but he probably wouldn’t have died on that cliff. Hell, killing him quickly might have been a kindness; I’m not an expert on how far you have to fall to die instantly on impact and I don’t know how high that cliff was, but depending on how he landed and if he bounced off anything on the way down it’s possible (though maybe not likely) that WWX wouldn’t have died right away. If I had to choose between a quick death via a blade through a vital part or a more lasting death via serious internal damage from a very long fall... Yeah, I’d take the stabbing. Obviously I’m not saying that not being able to go through with killing his brother makes JC a bad person; I’m just saying that when his choices were doing nothing (which, reminder, here means letting LWJ pull WWX up (or at least try to)), helping LWJ save his brother, finishing WWX off quickly (JC is trained in combat, I’m sure he knows where to stab for the most merciful death possible under those circumstances), or letting WWX fall to his death... I just find it interesting that JC chose the latter.

Hell, even before that, if JC had done something sooner a whole lot of pain could’ve been avoided. (We’re out of the Untamed-exclusive stuff, by the way.) Now, I get that as a very new sect leader of a sect that was almost obliterated JC’s position is... precarious, to say the least. However! An awkward position doesn’t automatically mean he can pretty much abandon his brother! That is not how familial ties work! Especially when he never takes WWX’s position (which was equally precarious if not more so) into account while talking about how WWX abandoned him.

Put yourself in JC’s shoes for a moment, here. Most of your family is dead. Your brother, you know, was thrown into a hell pit and hasn’t been seen for three months. Then, joy of joys, you find him again! Except now your ever-cheerful, ever-kindhearted brother can raise the dead and, oh yeah, has spent all his time since escaping the hell pit that no one survives torturing people to death with demonic cultivation. What do you do in this situation? I’m fairly sure your answer was not “Throw him on the front lines as your most valuable weapon without giving him so much as a chance to come to terms with all the horrible things that have clearly happened to him”. Yes, yes, they were in the middle of war, but you don’t get to throw your very obviously messed up brother onto the front lines and then be shocked when there are serious consequences for doing that.

Also, going back to positions: People talk a lot about how JC’s position was so difficult, and I’m not saying it wasn’t, but... here’s the thing. WWX’s position was so much worse. JC is the sect leader of an old and powerful sect. The Jiangs might have lost a great deal, but there are still alliances he could call on, favours he could probably cash in, treasures reclaimed from the Wens he could use... He’s not exactly helpless. He has to be careful, but he’s not entirely defenseless. Meanwhile, WWX is the incredibly powerful demonic cultivator with a dangerous weapon everyone wants to get their hands on and a brother he’s known to have a somewhat strained relationship with. We see in canon that the sects are actively hunting for a chance to get their teeth into him after the Sunshot Campaign wraps up. All WWX has is his own power and JC’s support. I keep coming back to what JGY says at the temple, about how JC made WWX an easy target by making it obvious their relationship was rocky, and... he’s right. I doubt JC intended to do it, but he made it very easy for the sects to split WWX off from him. And while JC was still a sect leader and largely untouchable, WWX was infinitely more vulnerable. Again, I doubt he meant to paint a target on his brother’s back, but the fact that he missed it in favour of getting pissy about WWX being better than him yet again says something about him.

The fact that he says there’s nothing he can do after WWX absconds with the Wen remnants says... something else. Now, I’m terrible with politics; while he definitely should have supported his brother in a perfect world, with a sect to look after and JGS hunting for weak points I genuinely don’t know if he could have at that point. (Again, I really do think he should’ve tried to step in before things got to this point, but... well, he didn’t. No use crying over spilled milk and all that.) So okay, he couldn’t do anything. I’ll take him at his word; if nothing else, I can believe he was too bad with both politics and people and too inexperienced to find a way to step in. But he then takes his brother’s request to remove him from the Jiang sect to avoid any trouble coming to their doorstep and goes off and tells the sects that his brother is a traitor. Let me put that another way. He tells the people who are looking for an excuse to murder his brother and take his writings and inventions for themselves that his brother has betrayed them. I think we have reached the point where malice and stupidity become impossible to tell apart. Honestly, I can only see two possible thought processes for this: Either he actually wants to bring the sects down on WWX’s heads (unlikely) or he’s so terrible at politics that he genuinely didn’t realize what the logical result of his words would be (more likely, but means his parents did a terrible job of teaching him how to be a sect leader). Although, given he apparently spent enough of the 13 years between WWX’s death and resurrection spending so much time torturing demonic cultivators to death because either he thought they might be WWX or they just reminded him of him that most of the citizens in his territory are too scared to go to Lotus Pier for help unless they’re in imminent life-threatening danger I don’t think you can argue he was a good sect leader by any stretch...

Oh! Speaking of parents and teaching: Jin Ling. Now, part of this might be a cultural thing that I’m not familiar with, but JC is an absolutely god-awful guardian. Pretty much all he does is insult JL, belittle him, or threaten him. Yeah, he cares in his own way, but take it from me: When your parents (or uncle, in this case) spend most of their time insulting you but also keep you safe from any external danger and do their best to help you grow, you don’t end up a happy, well-adjusted adult; you end up miserable and confused because you can’t hate or like the person raising you and get stuck between love and resentment. JL is clearly desperate for affection, but he can’t admit that to anyone. It’s no surprise he mourns for JGY so deeply even after everything; the guy was pretty much the only one in the poor kid’s life to treat him with open, honest affection before he met WWX! The comparison between him and Sizhui (as the only other child raised by the main cast) is striking; even though LWJ seems like he should be just as bad a parent, he raises Sizhui with love and kindness, and so did WWX before him. And the result is... so very different. Sizhui is the very goodest of boys and I love him with all my heart. Anyway, it’s no wonder JL gravitates towards WWX and defends him once he’s gotten past his initial reaction of stabbing the guy; WWX is so open and explicit with his affection! Is he a perfect parent? No, probably not. But he focuses more on making it clear to his army of juniors that he loves them and respects them as people and wants them to be happy with where they end up in life than he does on making them fit his image of what they should be. Of course someone who’d be raised with JC copying his mother and constantly getting on their case about not being good enough would gravitate towards someone like that.

Okay, this is getting long. Last point: WWX has to put in so much emotional labour in their relationship even before everything goes tits up? The best example for me is the scene where WWX promises they’ll be together forever, Twin Heroes of Yunmeng, the huge promise that both JC and an annoyingly large portion of the audience think he should’ve kept no matter what. Yeah, out of context it’s very sweet, but in context? WWX has just barely recovered from the fight with the Xuanwu. He’s been conscious for... maybe an hour, at most? He nearly died. And yet he has to drag himself out of bed to chase JC through Lotus Pier to comfort him because JFM was paying more attention to WWX. Who, again, almost died. JC is so busy being pissy about this that he forces his brother, still recovering, to chase him through Lotus Pier to comfort him for something their parents did. Most of the time, JC has a right to be upset that JFM so obviously prefers WWX. Looking in from the outside the situation is clearly more complicated than he paints it, but I don’t blame him for not seeing how bad things are for the rest of the family. ...I know that sounds sarcastic, but I do mean it. His siblings are very good at hiding how badly their family situation has hurt them. Anyway, though, on this one occasion I am entirely on JFM’s side here. WWX threw himself into danger so JC wouldn’t have to go to the indoctrination camp alone even though he didn’t have to, then some time later JC returns alone and informs him that WWX is trapped in a cave with the Xuanwu of Slaughter, then when JFM finally manages to reach him the Xuanwu is dead and WWX is all but dead. I 100% do not blame him for focusing on WWX in this situation! He did something fully-grown cultivators with far more experience failed at and almost died in the process! Given JC must be... what, 16 at the youngest, probably older by this point? I would expect him to grasp that. He’s old enough to have developed empathy. Hell, he should be right there with his father and sister, proud of WWX’s accomplishments and relieved to see him awake and recovering. Instead, WWX has to drag himself through Lotus Pier and swear to stay by JC’s side for the rest of their lives just to get him to stop sulking because WWX was better than him yet again.

...Yeah, as you might have grasped, I don’t think WWX had any obligation to uphold that promise. He shouldn’t have been expected to be tied to Lotus Pier by a vow he made as a teenager to get his brother to cheer up. In fact, a very large part of me wishes he’d broken it sooner. Comparing the way JC treats him to the way the Wens and LWJ treat him (setting aside that those are of course very different kinds of love) I can’t help but think things might have gone infinitely better for him if he’d found a different family a lot earlier.