#Like they spent so much time and plot introducing her and having El build up a relationship with her and then she was just gone?

[snootchie-bootchies]

Random Stranger Things thought this morning:

Why wasn't Kali ever brought back?

[419jhat]

Russian Steve AU

Another plot bunny I've been unable to get out of my head...

What if Steve's parents were Russian spies and connected to the mall? What if Steve had powers? What if these were combined into two and turned into a Steddie thing?

I love the idea of Steve being like El but the Russian version, where his parents are spies and he's an experiment they willingly handed over to the government but still got to raise. They all go to the US to build the mall and Steve's trying desperately to be a normal American boy but Eddie Munson, King of Abnormality (which drives Steve absolutely crazy because who would want to stand out??) gets in the way and completely wrecks his whole situation.

TW: Dead Bodies

Steven Anthony Harrington died in 1979, sometime around midnight on the third of January. He had two parents, also lying dead in the master bedroom, a dog collapsed on the kitchen floor, and that was it. They were a reclusive bunch with an unlucky family tree filled with people that tended to die early anyway. So maybe it was fate. As the New Steve looked down at the still face of the boy he was going to replace, he thought that it's probably just the circle of life. People die, people live, and the world keeps spinning. It doesn’t have to mean much beyond that.

Old Steve felt cold. It wasn't the first time New Steve had touched or felt a dead person, but for some reason this one is different. This time, it’s his fault. He felt the body go cold and numb as it happened. He watched the emotions seep out of the body as the boy's dream ended without him waking up. His father made him watch, so he understood the sacrifice taken so he could do his job.

The weight of it makes it hard to breathe.

It was a bloodless death, caused by carbon monoxide poisoning. Painless and simple. While the house airs out, Old Steve, his dog, and his parents are quickly disposed of. There is no evidence left behind. On January fourth, sometime in the evening, the new Harrington family sat on a couch they didn’t buy, in a living room they didn’t choose, and drank a cup of hot tea, considering the moment of peace before the start of their journey.

They move without a word to the neighbors, who the Old Harringtons were never friends with anyway. Nobody knows, or cares where they are. There’s a money trail if someone bothers to look, but it doesn’t expose anything more than a house hunting vacation. Then, just before the start of the school year, they use Richard’s savings to buy a home in a sleepy little town called Hawkins, Indiana. And their new lives begin.

New Steve thought that the new home was too big. Every little noise echoed and bounced across the walls, making him jump and look around as if he’d find people hiding in them, watching their every move. When they’d arrived, he and his parents laid down on the soft, carpeted floor and stared at the pure white ceiling in silence, taking in the new world around them. They hadn’t said anything, but they didn’t need to. He knew things would be different from then on.

He spent that first week with his parents. Every morning like clockwork, they sat before the TV and repeated everything said out loud, practicing their accents and furthering their understanding of the strange phrases Americans liked to use, like, “take a rain check,” and “lipstick on a pig.” New Steve found he hated movies, where he couldn’t see people’s feelings like he could in person. They reminded him of Old Steve’s frozen body, huddled up in blankets as if he was just sleeping. Like soulless meat puppets waiting to be buried and never found again.

In the evenings, he and his mother worked through a cookbook she’d been gifted, perfecting American dishes like casseroles and meatloaf. On the second day, he helped her deliver a pie to their neighbor, and she introduced him as her shy little boy who never had much to say. It wasn’t true. He still had a hard time with the ‘th’ sound that so many English words used, so they’d decided that until he got it right, that’s who he’d be.

With his dad, during the day when nobody would question it, they cut open the wall in his office and installed a gun safe. Apparently, it was legal for normal people in America to own guns. Steve was too young to have an opinion on that, but his dad muttered in English about how it was the kind of irresponsible nonsense that made his job easier. So, maybe it was a good thing. Either way, they covered the safe with a wall once again, so they were truly out of sight.

When his parents weren’t home, New Steve quietly snuck out to dip his toes in the pool. He’d never seen a pool before. He didn’t even know how to swim. In the spot close to the deep end, where neighbors wouldn’t see him unless they stuck their heads over the fence to pry, New Steve would find the perfect stick- thin and light with no leaves, and drag it across the surface of the water, watching the ripples as they rolled across the heated surface. And that was how he found peace with his new house.

It took him a while to settle into the role of Steve, and even longer for him to climb the mantle of King Steve. But that was his job, so it’s what he did. King Steve was good at sports. Captain of the swim team, co-captain of the basketball team. Handsome, fond of parties, rich with mysterious parents who traveled often. Charming, just enough for people to wonder how he stayed out of trouble despite everything he got up to.

But secretly, Steve, just Steve, also known in his heart as Stepan, was terrified. He never let it show on his face, even more terrified that his parents would lose faith in his skills and dump him somewhere while they returned to Russia as heroes without him. He spent most of his time fueled with fear, balancing the careful images he’d built for himself as the perfect All-American Boy that his parents were relying on. Unfortunately for Steve, he hadn’t anticipated what would happen to his precious double image when he fell in love.

[inspector-montoya-fox]

here’s why Thieves in Time is a bad game

before y’all try it, i just want to say that i’ll be as unapologetically petty and sarcastic as i want and fucking rip this game to shreds. yes, this is how i’ve spent my days since Thieves in Time came out. sitting alone in my room, staring at the wall, crying and complaining. because it has since been my life’s aim and dream to think about it every day, state the negative things about it, and become an evil essay witch on this half-dead website. *evil laugh*

Story:

References: i want to start with the smallest problem, but one that annoys me to this day. in the original trilogy, there weren’t a lot of references but the ones that were included were meticulously researched and well thought-out (i’m specifically referring to that Neil Diamond Carmelita vinyl gag, but can’t find the original post). the references in Thieves in Time however, were obviously just the creators’ interests. Turning Japanese, Clan of the Cave Bear and Bentley’s “hacksona” presented as Rambo just scream 1980s (which i’m assuming is the decade the creators grew up in), and Of Mice and Men is classic literature about the Great Depression, which subsequently started being taught in school in the US during the 1980s. it feels like the creators just went ‘let’s discuss what our lives had in common during our teen years and put that in’ instead of researching it first. and, here’s the thing: when you’re adding references, in order to make them funny or interesting, they have to fit in with the property or the character that’s connected to them in some way. Don Octavio was an opera aficionado so his episode’s title card pays homage to the Phantom of the Opera, young Muggshot was influenced by the movie “The Dogfather” because he’s a gangster, etc. these were funny because they were so spot-on with these characters. if every character in the Sly Cooper universe references the same type of stuff (from the 1980s) and shares the same interests, it’s just claustrophobic and uninteresting. i’m pretty sure i’m not the only one who had to look up these ultra-hetero, scrotum references when the game came out. that’s because they were specifically tailored to be funny to them, and not their target demographic which were kids in 2013.

Narrative: now that we got that out of the way, let’s look at the narrative. at the end of Sly 3, Bentley says he’s building a time machine. Sanzaru took that joke and decided to run with it as the premise for their game. ok, not the best idea, but i get it - you’re literally picking up where the last game left off. since all the storylines were wrapped up, they could’ve done something different like Sly’s kids or Bentley and Murray’s families, but this isn’t an essay about suggestions so...... time travel (i want to say that it’s, again, an 80s reference but whatever) was pretty ‘out there’ in 2013. i mean, even Plants vs Zombies 2, which was released that year, had to do with time travel (yes, i’m referencing an app). but Sanzaru had the advantage of applying this premise onto already established mythos and lore. the story had definite potential: someone is threatening Sly’s lineage so he has to travel back in time to save the day. the player would get to explore new locations and iconic eras in history, and, of course, the main selling point: playable ancestors. how could you screw that up? welp.... let’s think about the plot holes here for a sec. Bentley’s device would take the gang back in time when given an item from the specific era. stop. this right here is called ‘over-complicating’. how did they know the items would take them directly to the point where the specific ancestor was in danger? the Feudal Japan period lasted for 700 years: how did the machine know when and where to drop them off? and if the gang could return to the present at any time, why didn’t they do so when they were in trouble? oh right, the machine was broken. so how did they return the baddies to the present after they defeated them? i mean, why did they use the Grizz’s crown to travel to Medieval England if they went back to the present to drop him off to Interpol first? and on that note, how did they drop the baddies off to jail without getting caught and without Carmelita being around? i can already hear you thinking but these are total details that aren’t important, you jerk! well, yea, they truly are details and i truly am overthinking it. and yes, i truly am a jerk. but let me tell you something: when Sanzaru chose to make a new Sly game, did they not think ‘oh we’ll have to follow up Sly 2 and Sly 3′s stories’ which were well thought-out narratives with depth and various themes and didn’t have huge plot holes (as seen by my analysis through the episode project) ???? and did they also not think that their game would come out eight years after the last one, having expectations at an all-time high???? yea, that’s what i thought.

Characters: i’ll make a different section for Sucker Punch’s characters, so this is for Sanzaru’s original ones. name one iconic original character from Thieves in Time. i’ll wait... nope. not one. that’s because all of them were absolute shit. and here’s where i want to touch upon Sanzaru’s over-reliance on the trilogy. Ms Decibel (perhaps the most obvious copy) is a mix between Don Octavio, Miz Ruby, and the Contessa. El Jefe is Rajan if he went to the gym. Toothpick has Sir Raleigh’s temper and tendency to grow in size. and the Grizz is... whatever the fuck he is. (don’t worry i didn’t forget Le Paradox and Bob). there’s a difference between studying & creating similar characters and blatantly plagiarizing older characters because you lack the creativity. oh, boo-hoo this evil jerk’s telling it how it is. this set of villains is so lacklustre, i don’t even know where to begin. El Jefe is a tiger, even though we’ve already had two major tiger villains and one tiger flashlight guard. ok. Rajan could summon lightning because of the Clockwerk heart but El Jefe can do the same, how exactly? Toothpick is an armadillo (good) from Russia (better) with an obsession with the West (excellent) who can also grow huge (very bad). it’s never explained how or why. why?????? just tell me why. i want to know. i really want to know. Ms Decibel is an elephant who got into a tragic accident which left her with the power of hypnosis. music and hypnosis have already been done, but ok, i’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. so how do we use this character? spend the entirety of her screen time making jokes about... wait for it... her weight !!! this is top-notch comedy... really? like... really? the creators’ humor is a crime, at best. fart jokes and fat jokes all around. oh, and then there’s the Grizz. what the fuck where they thinking? just, what the fuck. i guess the guys at Sanzaru thought black people speak in rap? is that it? apart from it being extremely offensive, it’s also a blatant copy of Dimitri’s backstory. like, his introductory cutscene even has his paintings thrown at him and into the trash, like the intro cutscene for The Black Chateau. honestly, all of these villains caused me several types of pain, but not as much as...

Bob & Le Paradox: the absolute worst. i can just imagine the meeting going something like this: Sly’s ancestors are awesome! i wish we could fit them all in the game... here’s an amazing idea! what if we use one of the game’s few levels to introduce a brand new ancestor! yea! let’s make him dumb as fuck, strip him of any athletic prowess, and retcon the entire lineage by having him be the first Cooper ever! the kids will love a prehistoric level! ..... could you kindly point out where and when did ANYONE ask for this? i remember @ironicsnap​ saying something like the game is good until Bob. no, it was already bad - Bob just lowered the standard. like, a lot. people love Murray and his gameplay is neat, but no one ever thought ‘oh i wish we had a Cooper character with Murray’s game style’. why would they waste the opportunity to bring in Henriette, Thaddeus, Otto, literally any ancestor? why??? but they went ahead and created their own Cooper, and that wasn’t even the end of it. they had to make him dumb. they had to make him unbearable. they had to ruin the Cooper ancestry by adding this mess to the lineage. Sucker Punch made sure that all the ancestors were unique, but at the same time made all of them suave and funny and slick and you wish you could be them! well, fuck that. also, his name is Bob. Bob Cooper. it’s been 7 fucking years and i still can’t wrap my head around it.... so now, let’s talk about Le Paradox. i don’t have to mention the previous main villains, but i will. Clockwerk killed Sly’s ancestors and father, and was seemingly an eternal threat. Neyla was a psychopath who fooled everyone on her journey to becoming immortal by resurrecting Clockwerk. Dr M opened up the possibility for Sly’s dad to be a jerk instead of a hero, and died trying to unlock the Coopers’ legacy. how does Le Paradox compare? well, he’s a sleazebag skunk who was mad because of his dad’s downfall to the Coopers. that’s it. no twist, no depth, no clever dialogue. nothing. there’s nothing there. this is a new character, unfamiliar to everyone, who was hyped up for 5 levels and defeated in the conclusion. why was he a match for Sly? i don’t know. how did he fight for his life and ultimately tricked Sly into helping him? i don’t know. how the hell did he kidnap Carmelita? i don’t know. was it the power of persuasion? no, he’s revolting. so i literally don’t know. there’s no backstory, no fleshing-out the character, nothing. all we’re given to work with is a brief info-dump about his dad and how he escaped prison. i don’t know what else to say apart from how big a humiliation this was for Sanzaru and their team of writers. you had 8 years to work on something and this is what you came up with? anything would be better. anything would best this utter cliché of a villain, a distasteful misogynist, crybaby, idiot with an accent. literally anything.

Arcs & Themes: let’s take a look at the formulaic subplots for the gang’s members. apart from dealing with Le Paradox, everyone had a small arc. Sly had to deal with his break-up with Carmelita. Bentley had to deal with his break-up with Penelope. Murray had to deal with playing second fiddle to Bob. Carmelita was a damsel in distress and sex bait for the ancestors. the ancestors had their own mini storylines along with reacting to Sly’s presence. there you have it. i summarised it all for you, nice and neatly. are there any themes like in the previous games? nope. i promise you i’m not lying when i say that i tried hard to come up with something, even some speck of a detail i could use to over-analyse the story and come up with some ideas on themes. nothing. there are no themes. the subplots are character-driven and the player gives it 0 emotional investment. there is nothing to analyse, nothing to talk about. maybe even a theme for each level, like a spooky level or something? nope. the levels are dependent on eras and historical periods. the variation here is ok. Feudal Japan, Wild West, Prehistoric Australia, Medieval England and Ancient Arabia  - pretty good selection. i’ll give them credit for it. but that’s it. due to the absence of themes, the hubs feel empty. there’s no replayability factor. after you collect the bottles and masks and treasures, there’s nothing. i would spend hours revisiting the trilogy’s hubs, just roaming around. the hubs here are huge and empty. there’s nothing to reminisce about. nothing to recall. oh that’s where this mission went down. no, nothing like that. the aforementioned subplots are resolved during mission cutscenes and then they’re gone. you don’t have to explore spooky Prague alone as Bentley to have him overcome his fears, you don’t have to find out miners abducted Murray’s beloved Guru and search the Australian outback for him, you don’t have to hold back your tears when you’ve reached the end of the Cooper Vault and Sly asks his dad for help. nothing.

Gameplay:

Controls: as soon as i laid my hands on the controller the first time i played the game, that fateful afternoon, i knew something was up. Sly would respond 1 second late after you pushed something on the controller. it felt clunky, is what i’m trying to say or, as my sister put it, it felt heavy. and she was right. the controls were clunky and heavy and didn’t feel light, like playing as a thief should feel. i don’t know shit about game mechanics but this definitely didn’t feel right. the hubs are also chunky in design, the cliffs are huge and so cyclical or hexagonal, that when you parachute your way to them and are just an inch close, Sly will automatically just drop because he can’t grab onto them. running as Sly doesn’t feel fast, silently obliterating guards from behind feels slow, and swinging, grabbing, pickpocketting, and hanging aren’t fun anymore. presentation-wise, @designraccoon​ goes into detail here, in an absolute gem of a post. in short, the gameplay animations make Sly look less sneaky. Sanzaru didn’t even consider a thief’s movements.

Missions: why the fuck would you remove the player’s option to choose between which mission to do first? why would you do that? the game lays out what goes first, sometimes having only one mission available in the hub. and the missions aren’t even enjoyable. firstly, the loading screens take up to 5 minutes, maybe even 7-8. secondly, there’s hacking every 2 missions. the missions don’t have any dialogue to make them fun, lack in interesting puzzles, what more can i say? they’re overly easy and lack any challenge whatsoever. at least there’s variation in gameplay (hacking, RC car, fishing, costumes, ancestors, turret etc.) but because of the controls, even these get tiresome. the missions are solely there to progress the story and that’s why the operations are merely ‘storm the main baddie’. the trilogy had some pretty interesting missions which made sure to complete jobs required to take down the big bad. e.g. kidnap General Clawfoot to take down the security, hack Contessa’s computer to make sure Carmelita will be freed, steal voices to tempt Neyla, and then take down the Contessa. the missions in Thieves in Time lack substance and variety. and the hacking (all three styles) sucks.

Collectibles: here’s another fantastic idea: have players collect costumes in order to collect bottles in order to collect treasures in order to collect masks in order to unlock funky Sanzaru logo-themed merch! what was the reason for the collectibles? in previous games, collecting all bottles would unlock special abilities. that was it. it’s the same thing here too, but there’s less incentive? i mean when you have to collect 1000 things, what’s the point? the treasures are random and very few are references to the trilogy, so whatever. and the masks unlock... superhero costumes for what reason exactly? oh, and then there’s also the achievements for your Playstation account, like ‘open the map in every single location you visit’. what fun! if the reason for collecting the treasures is to play godawful hacking minigames in order to get masks, what’s the point? decorate your paraglider with the Sanzaru logo? or have Bentley dress up as discount Robocop? i mean including masks in the interior locations was cool, but the bottles were always supposed to be something you could do whenever your soul desired. sometimes i left them last before the operation, sometimes i collected them before the first mission. so i was pissed when i found out that, in some cases, you had to unlock the episode’s costume in order to get the all the bottles. so, fuck off.

Animation: i’ll keep this short. the animation was terrible. do you remember that tumblr blog from a while back, where she dedicated the posts to pointing out the mistakes in the animated cutscenes? yeah. point is, there were lots of them. the animation style was bad, the character design was ugly, the characters’ movements were unnatural. everything about it was shit. looking past the bad decision to drop the trilogy’s comicbook-style animated cutscenes, couldn’t they have hired someone better? someone with more experience? their concept art was awesome. couldn’t they hire that guy and have it be comicbook style if he wasn’t trained in animation?

Legacy:

The Players: let me ask a genuine question: who was this game made for? kids growing up in 2013? maybe so. because it feels like Sanzaru didn’t even consider the fans of the trilogy. actually, it felt like a huge fuck you. Sucker Punch made their trilogy for whoever. there were great stuff for kids, but adults would pick up and appreciate the references, the real-life setting (e.g. tobacco use, existence of nightclubs, spice instead of drugs, etc.). that’s why all three games are timeless classics. judging by Thieves in Time’s humor, the game wasn’t targeted for adults. so, it doesn’t make sense to use an already established property, beloved by its fans, to attract a new audience consisting of nine year-olds who’d laugh at Murray dressing up as a woman. if they really wanted to appeal to the fans of the original, why retcon everything? why change who the first Cooper was? when the gang’s stranded in Saudi Arabia, why have Sly say ‘i couldn't remember a time since we've teamed up that we felt so defeated’? the gang’s been in way deeper shit before. why the ‘Sly’s dad vs Le Paradox’s dad’ deus ex machina? Sly’s dad wasn’t famous because of stealing the world’s largest diamond, what the fuck are you even talking about? do the guys at Sanzaru have such big egos and bravado that they needed to change the original games’ lore? were they so preoccupied with leaving their signature on a property which was never their own? i don’t know who needs to read this, but i’m stating FACTS.

Characters: now let’s talk about Sanzaru’s treatment of the Cooper gang and the ancestors (female characters will get their own section). why would you change the characters like that? if it wasn’t for the voice acting, i’d say this is a completely different Cooper gang. there’s no wise-cracking band of best friends, going on heists and being proud of their brotherhood and bond. all that is replaced with the formulaic story arcs for each member. the trilogy’s cutscenes and dialogues made sure to establish how Sly, Bentley and Murray have lived together since they met at the orphanage, play videogames all day and order chinese food and pizza and whatever. through missions and their adventures, they face obstacles they have to overcome as a gang, and when Sly 3 came around, their friendship was put to the ultimate test when they almost disbanded. Thieves in Time was too lazy to add to this. Sanzaru thought ‘oh the trilogy showed how they’re best friends so we might as well have them focus on their own stories separately’ and if this is truly the case then i ask again: who was this game made for? because new fans would never know how tight the gang was just by playing Thieves in Time. there’s a lack of genuine friendship moments. like, what happened when Sly came back after faking his amnesia? that’s completely ignored. where’s the witty banter? the ‘wizard & sitting duck’ type of jokes? nothing of the sort. what we get is fart jokes and Murray wanting to dress up as a woman. on that note, what was that all about? ok, have him dress up as a geisha to get in. fine. have El Jefe slap his ass, have him perform in a painfully lengthy dance sequence, have him dress like that during the rest of the episode, and then have him be persistent about getting the belly-dancing gig? the hell? Murray was always kinda goofy but this just feels kinda homophobic? it feels dragged out and unfunny. and then there’s the ancestors. i said it once before and i’ll say it again, Sanzaru deprived me of a buff Arab daddy Salim Al Kupar and gave us that elderly shit instead. all jokes aside, the redesigns were uninteresting. why take away Tennessee Kid’s facial hair and give it to Galleth? i legitimately think all the ancestors were boring. i mean, their gameplay was cool, especially Tennessee Kid’s guns, but in terms of character, they were just some dudes. did they believe that Sly was their descendant from the future? maybe. did they care? nope. they all had the same storyline of dealing with Sly’s arrival, flirting with Carmelita and getting their canes stolen. that was it. the fans waited for so long to get even a glimpse of the ancestors in action, and Sanzaru downplayed all of them. they reduced them to useless idiots too occupied with women and food, incapable of getting their canes back from stupid Le Paradox. and they didn’t even stick to the lore. no ma’am. let’s make Rioichi the inventor of sushi !! because that makes total sense and would defo fit in with the character and the property! why. just, why. you were handed the lore !!! you were given all this rich backstory and you threw it all away to replace it with trash !!! complete trash.

Changes & Inconsistency: i want to briefly mention some changes that pissed me off. where’s the laser glide move? it was an important turning point at the end of Sly 3, so why did they get rid of it? Sly is a master thief who’s traveling back in time, so you’d think they’d actually make him a master thief. also, the changes in the binocucom and Bentley’s slideshows in order to modernise them. if Sucker Punch managed to place the mission starting points at locations where the binocucom would show the objective clearly, so could Sanzaru. instead, they chose to have it be a moving camera, floating around the hub. and Bentley’s slideshows were absolute classics, opportunities to include gags and have Bentley show off in his own way. you just had to change it into a tablet, didn’t you. omg you’re still looking at small details like these? yes sweetie, i consider the details because i think they shape the game more than anything. if i didn’t consider the details, then my opinion on the game would be incomplete. when i praise the trilogy i don’t only look at story and gameplay. because i’m unbiased like that. here, i’d also like the mention Dimitri. what a fucking waste. you either include him in the game or you don’t. but don’t give me some half-baked shit on how he’s working for the gang back in present day. Dimitri staying home, waiting on the gang to call him in order for him to give them details on the villains. how does that even slightly resemble anything about Dimitri’s character? they didn’t even include his voice, some greasy sweet Raccoonus Doodus dialogue.

Female Characters: you know it’s all been leading up to this. this is the crux of the Thieves in Time hate. i don’t want to say the game is misogynistic so i’ll call it anti-feminist. why? just answer me. why? why did you have to disrespect Carmelita like that? right off the bat, they swapped the pants for the skirt. in what world does an active inspector who’s always on the scene wear a skirt? Carmelita now wears a skirt because her only role in the game is to be the love interest. Carmelita now wears bright red lipstick and has a new hairstyle, which would be ok if only it wasn’t Carmelita. Carmelita now plays up her inner sassy Latina because she’s pigeonholed into the ‘angry ex girlfriend’ role. they compartmentalised her, tried to sexualise her because she couldn’t possibly be one of the boys. nope. let’s take a respected woman, high in rank and as physically able as Sly, and turn her into a cliché, an angry ex girlfriend for comedic relief, strip her of her abilities and have her be kidnapped twice, have every exchange with her be about how attractive she is, have almost every male character in the game flirt with her, have her boyfriend be jealous of his own ancestors because they’re flirting with her in order to create purposeless love triangles, and then, after all that, dress her up as a belly dancer and distract some guards while the rest of the gang do the heavy lifting. that last one was really the nail on the coffin. did Bentley have other ways to enter that door? absolutely. so, what the fuck? why did i come back for a good Sly game 8 years later and receive a game where you have to shake your controller to have Carmelita shake her ass? why did they have the guards’ eyes pop like that? why did no one stop them? and it isn’t just Carmelita. it’s Penelope too. god forbid we have a female character who doesn’t have a waist smaller than my finger, and a voluptuous physique. why was the redesign so drastic? the story stuff is also nonsensical. why did she leave? wasn’t she happy with Bentley? i watched her speech about turning on the gang about a thousand times and it still doesn’t make any sense. like, i literally don’t understand. what was her motive? and why reverse her story of overcoming the Black Baron persona and the connotations of a meek woman hiding behind a man’s disguise? why repeat it, shamelessly? do the guys at Sanzaru only know women who have recently broken up? why does Carmelita, Penelope and Ms Decibel all go through break-ups during the game? why does Penelope go against Bentley before they even break up? why waste the opportunity to introduce a new, well-written villain and use it to repeat something already done? why???? no woman is safe from Sanzaru because Ms Decibel... boy, did i feel bad for her. apart from continuously reminding us that she’s haha fat!! she’s also presented as a blind lovefool. love? what a silly concept only women believe in! Ms Decibel had a crush on Le Paradox (for some reason i can’t even fathom) and for that she must pay by being utterly humiliated. and what do ALL women do when a guy breaks up with them? they get so angry! yikes, stay clear guys! ....why does Sanzaru hate female characters? i’m genuinely curious. i mean, what forced them to depict women like this? i’m sorry, i can’t take much more of this.

Ending: and how do you end a disappointment that came 8 years late and didn’t even have a sequel guaranteed? yeap, you guessed it! a cliffhanger. but not just any cliffhanger - a total fuck you to anyone and everyone. with a single move Sanzaru instantly screwed over the franchise. the fans, the creators, the characters, anyone looking to continue the series. everyone. WHY would you trap the protagonist in the past? WHY? did you feel defensive about something that wasn’t even yours and went ‘well you can continue the series but the sequel will have to do with time travel’. why did you think it was a good idea? how does it even slightly resemble a good ending? someone fill me in please. because i don’t think i’m being unreasonable, i’m just telling it how it is.

Conclusion:

i did it. i fucking wrote it in all its motherfucking glory. the idiots at Sanzaru could’ve given us an amazing game but instead of working on how to make it better or including extra levels, they wasted their time on deciding what killable baby animal to include in each hub or what the backstory for each treasure should be. how fucking distasteful. and to think i’m an idiot myself for trying to force myself to like it because i was so in denial about how bad it was. i’ve just outlined everything wrong with that cursed game. i’m exhausted.

[willel]

For the people that wanted the whole convo

What would you say where are[sic] Jonathan’s and Lucas’s character arcs in season 3[sic]. They’re side characters. They don’t get big arcs.

Jonathan and Lucas aren't meant to be side characters, that's the point. They are not Bob or Barb or Hopper's officers or Terry or all the other side characters.

Lucas is one of the original 4 boys and Jonathan is Will's brother and one of the original teens.

They are though. They’re not minor characters like the other cops, but they clearly aren’t as important as El or Mike or Hopper or Joyce.

It’s been like this for two of the three seasons. It’s not an accident. The Duffer brothers didn’t just forget about them. They’re just not the focus of the story, and that’s okay.

It's not about being the focus of the story, it's about writing their characters period.

In season 1 and season 2, Jonathan was depicted as a caring family man, going out of his way to support his family even though he's just a teenager. He has trust issues and didn't trust authority figures, but slowly came to trust Hopper to help him protect his family. In season 1 and season 2, they stressed this idea Jonathan regretted not being there for his brother when he needed him.

But guess what? Jonathan and Will didn't even have 1 proper conversation in season 3. They're finally together fighting the evil and yet they don't even have 1 or 2 scenes together like the previous seasons.Two brothers on the same team with not even 1 scene together?? How did Dustin and Steve manage to seem more like brothers than the actual brothers in the show? (the answer is memes about mom Steve)

In season 1, Jonathan and Joyce's relationship was so heartfelt and they were both trying to save their third family member in their own way. Jonathan and Joyce have 1 5 second scene in season 3 where she tries to wipe lipstick off his face. That's it. She doesn't hug him goodbye before breaking into the Russian facility. Jonathan doesn't come rushing up to her at the end to hug her after a deadly situation. Slowly but surely over the course of the seasons, the Duffers are dropping this plot thread as if they aren't mother and son. You don't find that weird, at all?

Then we have Lucas. Lucas is the tried and true loyal friend. They did a good job displaying that this season actually. He was trying to help Mike out with his romantic issues AND he even tried to personally apologize to Will whereas Mike didn't. But in season 1 and in season 2, Lucas had his own mini plot. In season 1, he went off to save Will by himself and was able to connect the dots that they were being followed and spied on by Hawkins Lab. In season 2, he had a MikexEl kind of plot where he slowly introduced Max into the party and gave her the emotional support she was looking for because her family is whack.

Just as we started seeing hints of that in season 3 (Where Lucas was trying to apologize to Will for example), it stopped and we got nothing else. We didn't get the pleasure of seeing Lucas make up with Max whereas in the previous seasons, we definitely would have. I feel like in the previous seasons, Lucas would've continued trying to talk to Will and got through to him and made up properly. (in fact, if you listen hard enough in some cut away scenes, Lucas repeatedly addresses Will and goes out of his way to include him in their conversations) Wouldn't it have been neat to see Lucas and Will setting up the fireworks together or something??

I'm not asking for a fully fleshed out season all about certain characters over others. I want the Duffers to at least keep the few character threads these characters do have going instead of dropping them in favor of others. It's not good writing and feels off. It's not that hard to write in Will and Jonathan talking to each other. It's not that hard to write Joyce caring about her eldest son. It's not that hard to show Max and Lucas having a more serious conversation like last season. And it's definitely not hard to show Lucas trying to straighten out the party after the big blow up that happened instead of pretending like nothing happened.

I just don’t feel that the show needs to repeat itself. We’ve seen Jonathan being a caring brother. Do we need to see it again and again each season as a reminder? I’d much rather see new things, rather than just tick off boxes. That doesn’t make the show “poorly written meme material.”

This should've been Jonathan's opportunity to be there for his brother. We should've gotten a "This time I'm actually here right next to you to protect you." acknowledgement from the show. We have never seen Jonathan and Will acting as a team because Will was missing or out of commission. That is completely new and unseen before.

Will was going through so much emotional turmoil this season and for the last 2 season, we witnessed Jonathan being one of the few people who can get through to Will and make him feel a bit better but we couldn't even get that kind of conversation. This would just be consistent character writing which is GOOD.

Lucas helping set the party straight? Or having his own interactions with Will separate from Mike and Dustin? New. We've never seen Lucas and Will interactions outside of the group. Heck, we haven't gotten to see Will interact with much of anyone at all because of what happened to him so almost any interactions with Will, whether it's Jonathan or Lucas or El or Max, would be brand new and never seen before in full.

The problem I'm seeing with the writing lately is they put more effort into memeable moments than fleshing out plot threads they already started and suddenly dropped.

We spent a good 2 or 3 minutes listening to Suzie and Dustin sing, time that could've been spent on something more valuable because it offers nothing to the story but memes. Ever since S3's release, the Stranger Things twitters post about it meme after meme after meme. (not to mention their mom Steve posts and abundance of other fandom memes).

How about that bit with Lucas advertising New Coke? That time could've been spent elsewhere, an opportunity to build character instead of product placement. Coke, Burger King, Slushies, just everywhere.

The entire plot line with Steve and Dustin. Steve and Dustin were separated from the main crews and got their own little band of peeps because the mom Steve meme is too popular for the writers to ignore. They went full in on the mom Steve meme just like they did for the Justice for Barb meme.

Imo, the show suffers when they do that.

You know what I didn't want? Steve and Dustin spending the majority of the season together because MOM STEVE. You know what I didn't need last season? Nancy and Jonathan separated from most of the cast for most of the season because people wouldn't shut up about Justice for Barb.

Sprinkle a twinkle of comedy in the show and move on. Mix up the cast, place them with new people entirely, that's how the whole Steve and Dustin situation happened. They shuffled and voila, surprise new relationship. The only shuffle that happened this season was El and Max and that's a shame.

They should feel more comfortable shuffling characters up. Lucas and Will. El and Will. Nancy and Mike. Mike and Max. Dustin and Will. Dustin and El. Jonathan and Will. Jonathan and Mike. Jonathan and El. So many other cool interactions could've sprouted this season, but the teams felt more restrictive than usual because they needed their comedy team (Dustin + Steve and the others), the less memeable characters (Jonathan, Lucas, Mike, El, Will, etc etc), and then they shoved unnecessary drama into Joyce and Hopper like some kind of soap opera. And memes.

[sirensbeckon]

hold!  who  goes  there?  why  ,  is  that  𝒆𝒍𝒆𝒏𝒂  𝒕𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒆𝒔𝒊𝒏  the  𝒃𝒂𝒓𝒅  of  𝒕𝒉𝒆  𝒏𝒐𝒓𝒕𝒉𝒍𝒂𝒏𝒅𝒔?  they  do  look  𝒑𝒖𝒄𝒌𝒊𝒔𝒉  for  a  𝒘𝒐𝒎𝒂𝒏  of  𝒕𝒘𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒚  -  𝒕𝒉𝒓𝒆𝒆  years.  don’t  they  call  𝒉𝒆𝒓  the  𝒄𝒍𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓  𝒂𝒏𝒅  𝒑𝒍𝒂𝒚𝒇𝒖𝒍  𝒔𝒊𝒓𝒆𝒏?  i’ve  heard  they’re  also 𝒂𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏  𝒔𝒆𝒆𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈  𝒂𝒏𝒅  𝒈𝒖𝒊𝒍𝒆𝒇𝒖𝒍  though.  don’t  take  my  word  for  it  but  they  do  look  an  awful  lot  like  𝒌𝒓𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒆 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒔𝒆𝒕𝒉.  (  pinterest  /  google  doc  )

BASIC  INFO

NAME  :  elena  taliesin

PRONUNCIATION  :  ah  -  lay  -  na   t  -  ae  -   l  -  eh  -  sin

TITLE  :  bard 

AGE :  twenty  -  three  

PLACE OF ORIGIN  :  a  small  village  in  the  northlands  called  freymore   

FAMILY MEMBERS  :  her  parents  ,  rendon  and  margaret  taliesin  ,  and  maternal  aunt  ,  penelope  ward.  

PHYSICAL  DESCRIPTION

HEIGHT  :  five  foot  three  

HAIIR COLOR  :  light  brown

EYE COLOR  :  pale  blue 

GENDER  :  cis  female  

BUILD  :  petite

DISTINGUISHING FEATURES?  :  beauty  mark  under  her  lips  ,  freckles  on  her  cheeks  ,  a  long  jagged  scar  on  her  hip  from  when  she  was  living  on  her  own.  

ANY HEALTH RELATED ISSUES?  :  not  really  ,  she  does  easily  bruise  though.          

PERSONALITY

there  is  little  elena  can  do  without  a  twinkle  of  mischief  in  her  eyes.  she  has  little  care  in  the  world  ,  or  at  least  she  tries  hard  at  making  it  appear  so.  she  radiates  warmth  to  whoever  dares  to  enter  her  orbit  ,  as  she  does  like  to  think  of  herself  as  the  sun.  arrogance  and  pride  are  not  strangers  to  elena  ,  and  she  often  wears  her  flaws  on  her  sleeves  ,  thinking  them  assets  rather  than  weaknesses.  though  ,  those  who  don’t  consider  elena  a  friend  may  think  otherwise.  she  likes  to  play  games  and  tease  her  friends.  there  truly  is  never  a  dull  moment  when  she’s  involved. 

on  the  flip  side  ,  elena  is  motivated  by  two  things  :  money  and  status.  her  ambition  clouds  her  mind  at  times  to  the  point  where  she  is  throwing  herself  into  situations  that  are  risky  and  sometimes  just  plain  stupid.  she  will  do  anything  to  keep  everyone’s  eyes  on  her.  the  only  time  she  feels  important  is  when  people  are  watching  her  or  talking  about  her  ,  otherwise  she  fears  what  would  happen  if  she  became  obsolete.  rather  than  risk  anonymity  ,  she  pulls  stunts  and  does  all  she  can  to  be  useful  to  others.  

left  alone  ,  elena  can  become  moody  and  melancholy.  she  hates  living  alone  and  sometimes  even  sleeping  alone  since  it  leaves  her  with  little  to  distract  her  from  the  reality  of  life.         

POSITIVE  TRAITS  :  clever  ,  playful  ,  warmhearted  ,  loyal  ,  vivacious  ,  welcoming  ,  protective  ,  ambitious  ,  passionate

NEGATIVE  TRAITS  :  selfish  ,  guileful  ,  manipulative  ,  impatient  ,  frivolous  ,  puckish  ,  attention  seeking  ,  reckless  ,  hedonistic             

ADDITIONAL  INFO

HER  BENEFACTOR  :  this  person  offers  elena  everything  she  desires  :  status  ,  money  and  purpose.  though  they  were  not  her  first  patron  ,  they  are  the  most  important.  they  fund  elena’s  travels  as  well  as  hire  her  consistently  for  events  and  parties  ;  sometimes  they  hire  her  just  for  their  own  listening  pleasure.  they  have  a  mutual  understanding  that  elena  is  using  them  for  their  wealth  and  they  are  using  elena  for  her  company.  pretty  open  ended  plot  that  can  turn  platonic  ,  romantic  ,  or  antagonistic. 

PARTNER  IN  CRIME  :  an  old  friend  she  knew  during  her  time  spent  traveling  solo.  they  lost  touch  but  reconnected  recently  as  if  nothing  has  ever  changed.  they  knew  elena  before  her  rise  to  fame  and  ground  her.  they  have  no  trouble  calling  her  out  when  she’s  acting  out.  this  person  is  also  one  of  the  few  people  elena   is  undoubtedly  loyal  to.  elena  feels  very protective  over  this  person  and  tries  to  help  them  out  in  any  way  she  can. 

ESTRANGED  FAMILY  :  hi  my  name  is  briana  and  i  thrive  off  of  complicated  family  bonds  alfjksldj  (  see  estranged  sibling  in  cecily’s  intro  ).  ANYWAY  elena’s  mother  was  a  member  of  a  minor  noble  house  in  the  northlands  ,  the  wards.  though  elena  typically  would  zero  in  on  any  connection  to  status  she  has  ,  she  is  standoffish  when  it  comes  to  her  distant  family.  she  feels  resentment  towards  them  for  cutting  off  her  mother  ,  as  well  as  not  coming  to  her  aid  when  she  was  left  alone.  perhaps  she  and  her  family  meeting  in  passing  and  they  have  no  idea  it’s  her  or  the  surname  taliesin  does  ring  a  bell  and  remind  them  of  a  disgraced  daughter  or  niece  or  cousin.  elena  surprisingly  wants  nothing  to  do  with  them  ,  but  this  connection  could  think  she  wanted  money  or  gifts  or  status.  angsty  shenanigans  ensues.   

SCORNED  EX  :  a  past  patron  who  elena  used  for  their  fair  amount  of  coin  and  status  as  a  noble.  the  two’s  professional  relationship  had  developed  into  a  romantic  one  ,  but  elena  spent  most  of  that  relationship  lying  about  her  feelings  for  the  other.  she  never  loved  them  but  did  feel  comfortable  ,  especially  since  the  other  was  providing  for  her.  ultimately  ,  elena  left  them  when  a  new  patron  offered  her  something  she  could  not  refuse.  i  imagine  her  ex  would  feel  bitter  towards  elena  and  if  they  were  to  ever  run  into  each  other  it  could  be  tense  or  even  hostile.

HISTORY

with  a  wicked  grin  ,  she  tells  people  she  was  born  from  the  sea  ,  a  daughter  of  a  sea  god  with  a  tale  to  tell.  the  mysterious  siren  ,  a  sought  after  bard  and  a  must  have  addition  to  any  party.  she  likes  the  simplicity  of  a  legendary  beginning  ,  so  farfetched  that  of  course  no  one  in  their  right  mind  would  believe  her.  and  in  the  same  breath  she  can  protect  her  past  and  herself  from  whatever  could  be  used  against  her.  besides  ,  her  past  is  disappointing  ,  ridden  with  boring  reality  and  misfortunes  that  elena  refuses  to  let  weigh  her  down.  

but  for  the  sake  of  transparency  ,  her  true  tale  goes  like  this  :  she  was  born  in  the  northlands  to  a  farmer  and  a  disgraced  noble.  her  village  of  freymore  was  small  and  not  that  important  but  she  loved  it.  she  spent  her  days  helping  her  father  with  the  crops  and  flowers  ,  often  picking  some  to  bring  home  to  her  mother  who  made  money  as  a  scribe  for  the  town.  her  mother  had  left  a  minor  noble  house  for  love  and  all  but  one  of  her  family  members  cut  ties  completely  with  her  —  the  one  being  her  sister  and  elena’s  aunt  ,  lady  penelope  ward.  it  was  her  mother  who  took  on  elena’s  education  ,  reserving  the  late  afternoons  into  evenings  to  teach  her  daughter  reading  and  writing  ,  but  most  importantly  ,  history.  her  mother  had  been  on  the  road  to  becoming  a  well  respected  scholar  in  her  field  before  she  left  her  home  for  rendon  taliesin.  she  did  not  do  it  for  prestige  ,  but  for  the  love  of  it  and  elena  inherited  that  passion  for  history  and  mythology.  

when  her  aunt  managed  to  steal  away  to  visit  she  would  bring  her  lute  and  stacks  upon  stacks  of  sheet music  to  the  taliesin  farmstead.  history  and  religion  lessons  were  postponed  so  that  aunt  penelope  could  teach  elena  music.  elena  took  to  singing  right  away  ,  often  carrying  the  tunes  from  lessons  over  to  work.  her  and  her  father  would  sing  in  the  orchards  as  they  plucked  fruit  from  the  trees.  the  lute  was  a  tougher  trick  to  learn  ,  the  strings  complicated.  by  the  time  she  was  eleven  ,  she  was  handling  it  fairly  well  and  her  aunt  was  thoroughly  impressed  —  mainly  by  her  own  teaching.  i  will  say  ,  elena  did  not  inherit  her  arrogance  from  her  parents.

her  childhood  was  sweet  and  truly  all  elena  could  ask  for  .  .  .  though  the  taliesins  did  struggle  financially.  the  northland  winters  were  cruel  ,  even  in  the  southern  most  part  of  the  kingdom.  it  was  not  an  easy  place  to  farm  ,  even  though  it  was  a  necessary  trade.  loans  were  taken  out  ,  as  many  as  possible  ,  to  get  the  family  through  the  harsh  months.  as  much  as  her  aunt  begged  her  family  to  help  elena  and  her  parents  ,  they  did  not  budge.  it  was  her  mother’s  stories  and  her  father’s  steady  support  that  kept  elena  optimistic  .  .  .  until  the  snow  melted  and�� there  were  debts  to  be  paid.  

there  was  never  enough  money  ,  all  of  it  going  straight  to  the  lenders.  soon  it  became  too  much  for  the  family  —  her  father  was  taken  to  the  cells  underneath  the  ruling  family  of  the  region  for  his  unpaid  debt.  and  her  mother  ,  unable  to  support  elena  on  her  own  ,  begged  her  sister  to  take  her.  penelope  obliged  and  elena  left  her  home  and  family  behind  ,  never  knowing  when  she  would  see  them  again  ,  if  she  would  see  them  again.  

at  thirteen  she  was  living  in  the  northland  capital  with  her  aunt  ,  far  away  from  her  mother’s  family  for  her  own  safety.  her  aunt  continued  elena’s  studies  ,  music  lessons  quickly  becoming  her  favorite  as  the  tales  of  history  and  myth  never  sounded  right  coming  out  of  anyone’s  mouth  but  her  mother’s.  she  knew  a  life  of  comfort  in  mer  sereine  ,  something  she  was  unused  to  and  learned  to  relish.  she  distracted  herself  from  her  grief  with  pretty  things  whether  they  were  dresses  or  songs  or  ,  as  she  grew  older  ,  people.  

because  of  elena’s  gift  of  music  and  storytelling  ,  her  aunt  encouraged  her  to  train  as  a  bard  with  her  ,  as  she  was  a  former  instructor  of  a  bard  college.  she  did  not  have  a  traditional  education  after  agreeing  to  it  ,  instead  she  traveled  vailar  at  her  aunt’s  side  and  performed.  she  was  young  but  she  had  a  natural  talent  for  it  and  was  ready  to  set  out  on  her  own  when  she  turned  nineteen.  

her  first  solo  year  was  not  as  successful  as  elena  imagined  it  to  be.  she  spent  most  of  it  in  shitty  inns  but  when  her  money  ran  out  she  turned  to  a  less  savory  trade  —  stealing.  elena  refused  to  admit  her  failures  to  her  aunt  and  did  what  she  had  to  do  to  survive  while  traveling  ,  saying  that  when  it  would  pick  up  she  could  stop.  a  year  later  she  did  stop  when  she  landed  her  first  regular  patron  who  then  introduced  her  to  another  potential  patron  and  another  after  that.  things  seemed  to  be  falling  into  place  for  elena.  

though  there  were  dips  in  patronage  as  time  went  on  ,  elena  found  herself  becoming  a  fairly  well  known  and  wanted  bard.  as  she  delved  further  into  high  society  she  began  to  make  up  stories  about  her  past  so  to  keep  herself  a  mystery  ;  the  one  that  stuck  was  that  she  was  a  siren  cursed  to  walk  the  land  by  an  evil  sea  witch  (  this  is  not  the  plot  to  little  mermaid  don’t  @  me  alfjsdlkjf ).  

presently  ,  elena  is  entertaining  her  high  class  patrons  still  and  landing  illustrious  jobs  for  events.  she  has  quarters  at  an  inn  in  elysi  but  rarely  frequents  them  as  she  prefers  traveling  to  staying  home  alone.   

the  way  elena  conducts  business  is  .  .  .  interesting  to  say  the  least.  as  she  grows  more  popular  ,  she  becomes  greedier.  she  thrives  off  of  the  fame.  the  only  things  connecting  her  to  her  past  are  the  few  people  who  knew  her  as  she  was  before.  elena  is  attached  to  the  glitz  and  glamor  of  being  a  bard  and  attending  balls  and  galas.  she  has  lost  her  innocent  love  for  the  art.  she’s  not  above  flirting  or  playing  dirty  to  get  what  she  wants.  she’s  been  known  to  manipulate  people  and  use  them  for  their  status  or  wealth :)  she  has  no  boundaries  even  though  she  really  should.                                              

[pass-the-bechdel]

Supergirl season three full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

100% (twenty-three of twenty-three).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

57.23%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

All but one (it was that crappy crossover episode). All but four have casts over 50%.

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Zero.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Forty-four. Twenty who appeared in more than one episode, five who appeared in at least half the episodes, and two who appeared in every episode.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Thirty-four. Ten who appeared in more than one episode, four who appeared in at least half the episodes, and one who appeared in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

Not bad; a handful of episodes included some sincere effort to make quality statements about social issues, but they were pretty clunky about it and not always successful; certainly never impressive enough to increase the content rating (average rating of 3).

General Season Quality:

Middling. It was full of useless plot threads and wasted time, and much of the content had no real function; consequently, the central story arc lacked stakes, emotional resonance, and heart. That said, most of the episodes are basically solid viewing, and there was infinitely less rage-inducing content than there was in season two. That’s a weak win, but still a win.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

Hey, remember Morgan Edge? He was in four episodes at the beginning of the season, served no real narrative function despite his prominent treatment within those recurrences, and then Lena had him arrested using the most obviously-coerced confession in history? Sure, he was guilty, but he confessed under duress while being actively threatened with death by drone, the evidence of both the tape itself and of the testimony of the many eyewitnesses to the attack would have had him bouncing out of jail like that. The ridiculousness of that plot ‘resolution’ was even worse than the meaninglessness of Edge’s character in the first place. Remember when, briefly, they pretended that Morgan Edge was important?

Edge is a prime example of the fatal flaw in this entire season: pointless plot threads that went nowhere, meant nothing, furthered no characterisation for regular characters, and had no impact on the central arc of the season. Story-wise, the season lurched all over the place, and while it wasn’t without its good elements, ultimately it achieved very little. Sure, the season ended with a number of apparent changes for most of the major characters’ lives (though, conspicuously, not Kara’s) - Alex is now head of the DEO, J’onn is doing...something else, hopefully not something that removes him from the show, Winn has apparently gone to the future, traded out for our new friend ‘Brainy’ (a change I will be happy for if it sticks), and James has publicly revealed himself as Guardian - but the thing is, these changes are mostly last-minute, not things that the season was building toward all along. These changes are mostly not the result of character arcs, they’re just things that are happening now as set-up for next season. This season itself? Not much happened.

We wasted quite a lot of time with Mon-El, AGAIN, which is especially disappointing because it’s the largest time-and-attention-suck of the season, and it is completely irrelevant to everything; at least when we were wasting time with Mon-El last season, it was because he was the centrepiece of the (awful) plot. This time around, he’s just there to draaagg out the fallout from his departure, so that instead of getting over the relationship within the six months between the end of last season and the beginning of this one, Kara can continue to pine ridiculously and then get caught up in ~complicated feelings~ when Mon-El reappears, back from the future and bringing his new wife with him. That’s the closest thing Kara gets to a personal arc this season, actually; having ~complicated feelings~ about Mon-El. So, her story isn’t really about herself, it’s about whatever Mon-El is doing (again!), and then after wasting the entire season on that sorry excuse for a story, they amicably split in the end and he goes back to the future and that’s...it? I sincerely hope that’s it, and that he won’t be appearing again as a regular on the show, but it’s also a super disappointing waste of time. They didn’t have to bring Mon-El back at all, not for some drawn-out version of ‘closure’ for Kara, and not for any of the other nothing that his presence achieved in the meantime. Honestly, having characters show up FROM THE FUTURE and then not doing anything useful or important with it is so weird. We coulda dropped Brainy here and sent Winn away in a short-arc subplot, it’d have been neater and less time consuming, and we wouldn’t have troubled with all the Mon-El and Imra crap. As much as Mon-El kept carrying on about how he would never disrespect Imra, the story itself disrespects her by giving her no other meaningful narrative function than to be a barrier between Mon-El and Kara (which, as the story plays out...didn’t matter anyway). The whole thing amounts to a lot of bluster with no real impact; we end the season with Mon-El gone and Kara having to move on, and that’s EXACTLY HOW WE ENDED LAST TIME.

Meanwhile, back at the actual central arc for the season, shit was still whack, y’all. I wondered what they were gonna do with it after they went and had Reign show up so early in the piece (I thought maybe they were gonna build over the course of the season with Samantha progressively losing more control, but, that woulda required narrative pacing and story building to be in play, and the creators weren’t into that kind of crap this season), and what they went for was a completely pointless side-distraction with two other, lesser world-killers, who appeared out of nowhere, fooled around for a few episodes, and then died, ne’er to trouble the story again. Reign absorbing their powers didn’t have any effect (particularly egregious since the Legion was so worried about Pestilence, only to declare their work done once she was gone because apparently, Reign wasn’t gonna go around using that particular world-killer power anyway, because...reasons), they might as well have never included other world-killers at all, the only reason they were there was so that the plot could tread water for a while after revealing its Big Gun at mid-season and having nowhere left to go. Selena and her fellow witches, likewise, proved utterly pointless, just another distraction that wound up easily dispatched, and meanwhile Reign was killed/separated from Samantha only to return again and then be pretty easily defeated anyway with a combination of shoddy time travel and the last-minute addition of a convenient...magic fountain. Yeah. Even the oft-repeated notion they hammered about saving Samantha by recalling her to herself, using her connection with Ruby, etc, turned out to be a total smokescreen - Samantha and Ruby both proved to be total plot devices rather than characters in their own right, foisted on the pre-existing characters to generate artificial emotional stakes with a friendship that burst forth fully-formed in the space of two episodes, and giving Alex a child to focus her maternal instincts on for a while. Presumably, we’ll now never see them again. 

Oh, and did I mention that Kara finds out that her mother and a whole chunk of Krypton actually survived, but they totally underplay it and she has essentially no emotional reaction to this development at all? Since this seemingly life-altering revelation also has no impact on character or story, they might as well not have bothered, I mean, Kara is more hung up on losing her asshole boyfriend from last season than she is on discovering that a whole piece of her world (friends/family included) is actually still around, so. Who needs logical characterisation, anyway? For all that Kara complains about feeling out of balance living two lives, she also spends almost no time living as Kara Danvers instead of Supergirl in this season (especially the second half); remember when her job as a reporter used to matter to character or story, like, at all? Remember when actually being seen to balance things was a source of narrative conflict and development? Now, if she had discovered that surviving part of Krypton near the BEGINNING of the season instead of in the fourth-last episode, maybe she could have spent the season having, I dunno, a sort of character arc about dealing with it? Selena and the relevant mythology on the world-killers and the ways to kill them/make them/whatever could have all been introduced in earlier parts of the season so that they could BUILD THE FUCKING NARRATIVE instead of just throwing in convenient new plot devices and information at the last second? Maybe the whole story could have been improved by making it actually about the character the series is named after, and analysing her still-developing relationship with her identity and its duality? It’s such a fucking obvious character arc I want to punch something. How, HOW was this not what the whole season was about? How did we end up futzing around with Mon-El and pointless future-visitors and extra antagonists who didn’t matter to the season or its characters at all?

If you forgot that they also had some time-wasting with some fanatical cult crap on Earth that mostly just served to provide Kara with yet another character to drop explainers about things instead of having her learn stuff in some kind of plot-related fashion, I could understand; it was pretty forgettable. Alex and Maggie broke up, which was rather sudden and wasteful, really, but at least it was tied to Alex’s realisation that she wants to have children and that constituted one of the only solid character threads of this messy, wishy-washy season (though it also often kept Alex distracted in other parts of the story and not having those all-important sisterly interactions with Kara which formed the backbone of the show in the first season, so, boo for that). J’onn had his dad around for a while, and that was legitimately pretty good stuff (y’all know I’m weak for Martians), though I really hope it has some strong narrative fallout in season four because otherwise it seems like a plot designed to torture J’onn emotionally, as if his story isn’t already tragic enough. They also wasted James less this season? Unfortunately, they wasted Lena more, and I’m especially suspicious of the way they not only strangled the amount of story she spent with Kara as a friend, they also threw in this awkwardly-executed situation with Lena actively disliking Supergirl and turning Kara’s secret into something which jeopardises their future relationship. Their interactions last season were so strong, and the effort to put space between them in this season feels overt (giving Lena a romance with James and a new/old best friend in Samantha contributes to this); I can’t help but wonder if the Powers That Be were upset that they’d accidentally made a female relationship with more chemistry than the canon-lesbian couple (and at the same time as they were badly failing at giving Kara a believable hetero love interest, no less) and decided that breaking up one of their best character partnerships was preferable to anyone reading the hero of the story as anything other than straight. They’ve made so many hugely questionable decisions about Kara’s personal life at this point, no BTS fuckery would surprise me. Remember season one, when the plot had a shape and the characters generally did things for understandable reasons? Those were the days. We’re closer to getting back to them now than we were after the disaster that was last season, but I’m still not banking on the show ever regaining the focused quality which made the first season work so well. To do that, they have to start telling stories about Kara again, at minimum. That would be a start.

[televisor-reviews]

Everything of note that I have to say about Wakfu season 3:

I get that it’s old news at this point, but I finally got around to watching the new season of Wakfu & I really do have a ton to say about it... in list form!

1. It’s very good.

2. SPOILERS... duh...

3. I think I should’ve watched The Search For The Six Eliatrope Dofus first. I think the characters reference what happens in that a few times & whenever they did, I was like “what the fuck are they talking about?”

4. I don’t know why they changed the English voice cast, but it wasn’t a very good idea. It took me a few episodes to get used to them, & though I did get used to it & they did a fine enough job. Just not as good as the original cast.

5. I think this is why half of the words change pronunciation. Iop & Ruel are pronounced like how they’re spelled, which sounds like a good thing, but I always felt like pronouncing them like “Yop” & “Ruul” sounded more realistic. Adding that extra syllable is creating more work for whoever’s saying it & I think in a world that’s supposed to seem like it’s existed for millenniums, those kinds of words would’ve been shortened down to 1 syllable. I wouldn’t be complaining if that’s not how they were pronounced in the first 2 seasons.

6. Adamai is a surprisingly good villain. Of course, I think he’s much better as a protagonist, but as the antagonist; he’s a menacing figure that every member of the Brotherhood Of The Tofu have a history with, & the animation does a great job at showing the struggles he has when fighting them & vice versa.

7. I fucking hate the Dragon Ball Z-esc design for Adamai! It could just be my general disliking of DBZ, but that design really doesn’t do anything for me.

8. I think they made Adamai a bad guy because Oropo isn’t a very interesting main antagonist. Granted, it’s not like this show is known for its great villains (in fact, Oropo is by far my favorite of the them so far), but he ends up being pretty disappointing. Particularly because the framework is there for a great villain: a connection to the heroes, a memorable plot, a great motivation... it just never comes together for a very interesting villain.

9. I think it’s because most of that stuff isn’t really focused on until the last couple of episodes, making him uninteresting for most of the season & when it’s finally focused on, it’s too little too late.

10. Evangelyne & Percedal are great parents! This really is the natural continuation of their relationship after they had their “happily ever after” at the end of season 2. And whenever they’re on screen together, they have so much romantic chemistry it literally kills me.

11. I fucking love they’re kids too! It’d be so easy to make them one-dimensional slabs to motivate Percedal, but they have just as great & interesting personalities as any other member of the Brotherhood. Of course, I prefer Elely mostly because we spend more time with her, but I also just prefer her character type.

12. I don’t like that they have Eva, probably the most badass protagonist, as the “damsel in distress”. I get that they don’t want a pregnant character out in the front lines of battle, but still.

13. Every season has a fake-out death: S1 had Percedal & that lasted for a few episodes into the next season, S2 had a scene & a half of Ruel faking a heart attack, & S3 had Evangelyne almost die. It was kinda ingenious: for a minute, it genuinely had me worried, wondering if they had the balls to kill off a pregnant main character. Good thing they didn’t, probably for the best.

14. Holy shit, they actually had the balls to show a baby’s birth! I’d imagine they’d have an easier time getting that death past Netflix!

15. I haven’t looked up what the consensus is on this, but I’m willing to bet I have a controversial opinion on this: I actually really like the romance between Amalia & Yugo. It feels very genuine & natural; they have a ton of chemistry between them. Unlike with most romances, where it’s pretty obvious they’ll end up together by the end, I honestly didn’t know if that was the route they were going to take because Yugo still looks 10!

16. Keeping Yugo looking 10 was a great way to add more tension & drama to the already dramatic & tension-filled story.

17. Past seasons have had a good mixture of dramatic & comedic elements, but this season pumped up the drama & backed off of the comedy. I guess this is expected since this is the first season made by Netflix & their shows have been significantly more dramatic than most cable TV animated shows, largely because they’re meant to be binge-watched instead of once a week.

18. Netflix also tends to strip down its shows to the bare minimum for the story it’s telling. This is normally a good thing, but I think Wakfu was one of those shows that utilized filler episodes really well to show more of a connection & backstory of the characters. Basically, I wanted more filler episodes.

19. I don’t know why Ruel was in this. I get that he’s one of the main characters & they try to have him seem like he has a point by throwing in his wife for no real reason. He’s getting too old to fight & he doesn’t throughout most of the season. I’d bet he’d end up staying behind to babysit Eva & Dali’s new baby next season (if there is one).

20. Each of the demigods the Brotherhood fight are interesting & unique in their own right, they all feel like they’ve always existed & were merely waiting to be introduced in the show rather than feel like they were invented in a day for their exact episode.

21. The show in the past has always felt like it was aiming for a pretty young audience (like “Baby’s First Engaging World”), but between the focus on more dramatic elements, all of the couples getting together, & Adamai’s new design; I think the new target audience is closer to older children/young teenagers. Those just old enough to be nostalgic over anime like Dragon Ball Z & Naruto but just young enough to embrace the more childish nature moments of past seasons. A natural evolution of this long-running franchise.

22. The world & universe this show has spent the better part of 2 seasons to build is built up even more throughout the entirety of season 3. It really feels livable, like you could just walk right into your TV & right in this world! This is an element that’s really hard to nail (only done well in the most prestigious of franchises with huge fanbases like Star Wars & Harry Potter... & My Little Pony) & it does so perfectly!

23. This is easily my favorite season of the show so far, building upon the incredible blocks already created by the first 2 seasons.

24. I really hope there’s a 4th season! There’s been word from random websites & blogs by so-called writers saying there will be one either 2019 or 2020. I do think it’s inevitable considering the show is at peak popularity & critical praise & this season ended on a cliffhanger. I just want it before I die of old age!

25. I think Wakfu, though more popular than ever before, is still nowhere near as popular as it deserves to be. I always called it, “that show all your animator friends really like,” & that still rings true. If you have any doubts about whether or not to watch it, just do it! It’s a great show that deserves all the praise it’s gotten from fans & critics (& that’s a lot of praise!).

[x5red]

Supergirl: Where to start reading her older comic series?

With the Melissa Beniost’s Supergirl show about to relaunch for its fourth season, it seems an apt time to revisit the oft asked question: Which of the old Supergirl comicbook series is the best starting point if you’re a fan of the show..?

It’s an interesting question. Many tv fans have some familiarity with Kara’s most recent comicbook adventures -- Sterling Gates, etc. -- but they harbour a desire to explore beyond the most immediate decade, into the murky misty depths of the classic Kara Zor-El and Matrix eras. But where to begin..?

Detailed below, for your rumination and delectation, are the four classic titular Supergirl series -- Supergirl Volumes 1 to 4 -- ranked by merit from best to worst, with particular regard to accessibility by the modern tv/comic audience.

So, without further ado, let’s begin...

1st - Supergirl Vol. 2, aka The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl: (Nov 1982 -- Sep 1984, 23 issues)

The bright micro-chip fuelled optimism of the early 1980s was the backdrop for Supergirl’s second eponymous title. Linda Danvers makes a new home as a mature student studying Psychology in Chicago, where she hopes she can find a balance between her superhero duties and her personal life. She immerses herself into student life, immediately acquiring a collection of enthusiastic friends and a hectic social calendar. It isn’t long, however, before criminal elements in the city require the attention of her alter ego, Supergirl.

Writer Paul Kupperberg gives us a Supergirl for the 1980s, clearly aimed at the more mature audience that was starting to dominate comicbook sales thanks to the direct market of specialist stores. Kupperberg’s Linda Danvers is sassy, intelligent, confident, and witty, while her costumed alter ego is strong but compassionate. For the first time Kara Zor-El is allowed to have a proper boyfriend, and (shock!) actually go to bed with him. The story lines devote equal time to Kara’s heroic and everyday identities, surrounding her with a diverse cast of supporting characters.

The book’s adventures largely constrain themselves to Chicago, with a parade of monsters and supervillians showing up each issue to challenge the Girl of Steel, but there’s still plenty of variation between stories, and some particularly bold ideas towards the latter part of the series’ run.

Pros: Equal prominence is given to Linda Danvers and Supergirl, and the series is all the better for it. Giving Kara a life outside of her Supergirl antics rounds her character, a device used 30 years later by the tv show. Paul Kupperberg’s scripts are intelligent, imaginative, and not afraid to sometimes tackle tough subjects. Industry legend, Carmine Infantino, pencils almost every issue, and captures the 80s fashions well.

Cons: The comic’s witty and headstrong Linda Danvers is a radical departure from Benoist’s often goofy and adorkable portrayal, which may be off-putting to some tv fans.

Conclusion: This is a nice set of uncomplicated stories with a basic structure that has many parallels to the tv show (sans DEO.) Highly recommended.

2nd - Supergirl Vol. 4: (Sep 1996 -- May 2003, 81 issues + 2 annuals)

Peter (Allen) David, usually known in fan circles as PAD, took control of Supergirl after her misguided Matrix run, and immediately morphed the character into something more interesting. In an act of supreme selflessness, the Matrix Supergirl merges with satanic cult member, Linda Danvers, saving Linda’s life by becoming a hybrid made up of Linda’s memories and feelings coupled with Matrix’s protomatter shape-shifting superpowers. Such is the starting point for Supergirl’s fourth volume of adventures.

Early stories deal with Linda haphazard attempts to cope with her new status as superhero, but pretty quickly it becomes apparent that her transformation is part of a bigger tale involving battling satanic and angelic forces. The series mixes superhero action with occult and religious symbolism, playfully referencing Old Testament lore and even writing God in as a supporting character. PAD’s storytelling doesn’t shy away from examining matters of belief head on, with subplots examining how faith can be lost and restored, but also misguided and abused. Other themes include the ethics of free speech, and the power of unintended consequences.

After fifty issues the series was soft-rebooted, with Matrix being un-merged from Linda Danvers and captured by dark satanic forces, and 'God’ teaming Linda up with a reforming demon to help find and rescue her. A second reboot (#75, Dec 2002) saw a youthful Pre-Crisis Supergirl take an unplanned detour into the Post-Crisis universe during her trip from Argo City to Earth.

Overall the series holds to classic old-fashioned good-versus-evil storytelling, told with humour and quirkiness.

Pros: The series has a good balance of humour, drama, and superheroics. The main characters are well defined, often quirky, and immediately likeable, with a healthy mix of darkness and light in the main cast, which leads to some engaging interactions. The spiritual elements are mostly well handled, and never pander or proselytise.

Cons: The heavy use of lore and mythology, plus occasional course-altering soft reboots, make the main plot arcs more than a little convoluted. There’s not much variety in the types of story told: it’s angels versus demons pretty much every issue. The series was initially conceived in a world before 9/11, before The God Delusion, before Catholic priest scandals, before the overt linking of evangelical Christianity with neo-conservatism -- as such its benign treatment of organised religion may seem a little naive and dated to some.

Conclusion: Enthusiastically told and funny, although occasionally a bit of a slog, PAD’s fusing of superheroes and the celestial provides for novel storytelling.

3rd - Supergirl Vol. 1: (Nov 1972 -- Sep 1974, 10 issues)

The early 1970s were an era of student politics and campus sit-ins, so it’s no surprise that Supergirl’s first self-titled series is set in the heart of academia. Linda Danvers heads off to San Francisco to study Drama at Vandyne University, and gets involved in all manner of adventures typically involving college life and romance. Stories vary in style from issue to issue, sometimes spooky supernatural, sometimes B-movie sci-fi, sometimes inner city gang violence -- but there’s invariably a square-jawed hunk involved for Kara to swoon over and rescue.

The initial issue was edited by Dorothy Woolfolk, but issue two saw Robert Kanigher take up editing duties. In the 1950s Kanigher had transformed William Marston’s feminist Wonder Woman into a lovelorn heroine who spent much of her time fretting over Steve Trevor. But thankfully by the early 70s Supergirl’s inevitable romantic adventures are complimented by her exasperation at the male chauvinism all around her. Although affairs of the heart are prominent, the Maid of Might is always shown as being as tough as any male superhero -- this is girl power... just a version of girl power that happens to include lipstick and hot pants.

Pros: The stories are certainly fun, even if they lack depth or complexity. The artwork has a certain quaint charm, and the groovy mod fashions of the time add to the curiosity value.

Cons: There’s a lot of repetition: almost every issue has Linda Danvers falling for a different campus heartthrob, who ultimately requires the help of her super powered alter ego.

Conclusion: Very much of-its-time, innocent and fun, but the heady 1970s mix of pulp romance and cartoon feminism may be way too dated for some modern readers.

4th - Supergirl Vol. 3: (Feb 1994 -- May 1994, 4 issues)

When Supergirl was re-introduced after Crisis on Infinite Earths, she took the form of a shape-shifting protomatter blob named Matrix, originally from a pocket universe. The Lex Luthor of her home universe had been a hero, so when the innocent Matrix encounters the regular Lex Luthor (nemesis of Superman), her confused and child-like mind instinctively trusts him, and she becomes his female companion. Lex, of course, is only interested in learning the secret of his girlfriend’s protomatter powers.

This four part series finally, slowly, sees Matrix wake up to the fact that Lex Luthor has been using her. It’s a slow build towards the final chapter, that meanders through a lot of self-denial before it gets to its inevitable finale. The ending is clearly signposted from the start, but the plot does a decent job of stretching out the journey across four episodes.

Pros: The idea of the hero playing the role of so-called useful idiot is a novelty, as least within the annals of American comicbooks.

Cons: This is a lacklustre story which brings to an end one of the more regrettable periods in Supergirl’s history -- despite often displaying immense courage, the Matrix Supergirl became nothing more than a plaything for Lex Luthor, and a pawn in his game against Superman.

Conclusion: There’s apparently a giant pit out in a desert somewhere filled with unsold Atari E.T. game cartridges -- if we can find it, maybe we can add every issue of the Matrix Supergirl run(?) Avoid!!

[windofderange]

Let’s talk about gender in Stranger Things 2!

So there’s a bunch of stuff happening in my life and I keep meaning to post something about that, but it’s serious and scary and stuff, so instead, I’m going to ramble a while about why I really love some of the subtle gender role reversals in season 2 of Stranger Things!  Like a normal, well-adjusted person!

Also, no major spoilers ahead, but I will talk about things that happened in Season 2, so if you want to come to it totally fresh, please skip this.

So I’m still a little sad that there’s no queer representation in this show.  Yes, I know it takes place in the 80s and queer people hadn’t been invented yet, but still.  (I was SOOO hoping that the big reveal at the dance would be that Dustin was building himself up to ask Will to dance, but I guess that probably would have been genuinely too much for an 80s middle school to handle.)  However, despite that, I was actually really impressed by some of the smaller ways the story undercut traditional gender stereotypes this season, and some of the improvements to how the girl and women characters were written.

That’s not to say that I thought they were poorly written last season - I just thought they were a lot more one-dimensional.  Emotional mother.  Brainy, goody-two-shoes girl exploring her sexuality.  Even Eleven, who was by far the female character with whom we spent the most time, was sort of scattered - the writers clearly couldn’t decide how unaware of the world she should be, and in turn, what things about gender she should care about (ie, she didn’t know what ‘pretty’ meant, but she still wanted to be it), a problem I don’t think they’ve entirely corrected (more on that in a sec).  The male characters were similarly archetypal - the drunk, broken-down town sheriff, the maniacal scientist, the lovesick teen, etc.

This season, I feel like the characters all got a lot more flushed out, but more than that, the way they did so also made some really interesting choices about gender and gender roles.  Also, I’m occasionally going to refer to the characters as sets because that how some of the storylines run - the adults (Joyce, Hopper, and Bob), the teens (Nancy, Jonathan, Steve, and Billy), and the kids (Eleven, Will, Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Max).

1. Joyce and Bob: Okay, so I know I’m apparently the only person in the universe who doesn’t ship Joyce and Hopper, but I loved Joyce and Bob.  Bob is a ‘beta male’ - he’s fat, short, into electronics, likes Kenny Loggins, makes corny jokes, and is too much of a scaredy-cat to watch scary movies.  However, it’s made immediately clear that Joyce isn’t just dating him because she needs a man or in order to fill some hole in her life - the first scene we see of them is the two of them adorably flirting, and then hard-core making out.  Bob is also consistently shown to be the less driven of the pair (a theme that will actually come up a lot in this post).  Joyce is a fighter.  It’s an important aspect of Joyce’s character, one that was established last season, but in the context of her frantically fighting to get her son back.  In the grand tradition of the Aliens franchise and Poltergeist, Stranger Things holds that mothers are the toughest fighters, and this season makes it clear that that’s always been true of Joyce Byers - it wasn’t just the panic of losing Will that drove her; she’s always been like this.  Bob knew her in high school, and makes it clear that he’s always admired her for it.  However, the story doesn’t present Bob as emasculated (a term I hate!) - he’s jazzed as all hell to finally be dating Joyce Byers!  

In setting up their relationship in these terms, the story gives us something we don’t often see - Bob is a boy-gal Friday.  In fact, he’s Joyce’s boy-gal Friday.  He’s competent, with a complementary skill set; he’s valuable, and Joyce clearly values him, and he makes a lot of connections and discoveries on his own, but he’s not capable of turning those connections into actions that drive the plot forward until he turns them over to Joyce.  And he’s perfectly happy in his role - even when he shows up in her house covered in Will’s bizarre tunnel drawing and is told he can’t ask questions, he’s clearly having the time of his life, solving a cool puzzle with a woman he loves.  Like every gal Friday, he can’t conceive of a world in which he could be the protagonist - he’s a superhero, but he’s not the Hero.  That’s Joyce

2. Hopper and Eleven: Off the bat, I have to admit that I think the writers are still doing the worst with Eleven when it comes to writing gender, just because they have the most room to play with and they’re not making use of it.  There’s no reason for Ele to have a concept of gender performance - she’s a lab rat. We know that the mad scientist raised her to think of him as her “Papa” (whether he was biologically or not), but we’re given no evidence that she had any concept of being his “daughter” or a “girl.”  Again, I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but it’s part of the reason I actually really liked the episode with her and Eight (also because I’m a sucker for a coming of age story) because I think pairing her gender development with the punk scene is a potentially brilliant way to play with some of these ideas in a culturally-contemporary way (since gender non-conformity was a big part of punk), and it’s something I really hope the writers come back to next season.

That being said, I did really enjoy the relationship between Ele and Hopper, and in particular, the fact that Hopper is clearly raising a kid, not a girl.  We never see Hopper force any gender norms on Ele (even though he had a daughter of his own and could potentially have those kinds of expectations for her), we see them sharing in not traditionally feminine things (building traps, eating garbage, watching scary movies - all things dads usually do with their sons in movies and TV), and even though it’s clear that Hopper knows about Mike’s and Ele’s feelings for each other, we never get any weird matchmaking or overbearing overprotectiveness from him - his overprotectiveness of Ele is always about keeping her safe from Hawkins, not keeping her away from boys.  He even embraces her “bitchin’” new look, but clearly also helps her get ready for the dance.

3. Mad Max and the AV Club: So I love Max.  I love Max so much.  And I still love the AV Club.  I do get the point of articles like this one that part of the nostalgia of Stranger Things is a nostalgia for nerds who are actually bullied and oppressed, but I think that’s over-simplifying things.  To start with, Lucas is black, and this season they finally managed to engage with that a little, in the same way they managed to engage with Dustin’s disability a little last season.  Also, I think the way that the AV club’s masculinity is presented is important.  This is not the adorkable misogyny of the Big Bang Theory.  They are not traditionally masculine and they are absolutely fighters, and those two things are never presented as being in conflict in any way.  Indeed, the constant references to D&D, including their own nickname for their group as “the party,” sort of reaffirms this - for people who know the game, they know you need a balanced party.  You don’t want all muscles, or all magic, or all rogues.  In many ways, Will becomes the ultimate symbol of this in Season 2 - he is absolutely a soft boy (Hopper even asks if he’s gay in Season 1, to which Joyce rightly replies, “why would that matter?!”), and yet, he is both the major villain AND the one fighting hardest against that villain in this season.  His strength to fight the mind flayer stems from his nontraditional masculinity - from his art, and ultimately, from his empathy, being kept in control of his body by the stories of love and affection from his mother, brother, and best friend.

Max is similarly nontraditional - we’re introduced to her by the traditional nerd trope of “girls don’t play video games!,” “girls don’t skateboard!;” however, if we’re really supposed to read the AV club as models for nerd culture, then the important element surely comes in their immediate reversal in meeting Max and seeing that she does indeed play video games and skateboard.  Not only do they not gatekeep or question her love of these things, they are immediately more impressed by her because of them.  They want to be friends with her because she’s a girl who skateboards and plays video games, and it’s clear that this is the root of Dustin’s and Lucas’ attraction to her, as well.  Even Mike’s resistance to bringing her into the party is never presented as her being a girl or a “fake gamer girl” - the show does a good job of showing that he doesn’t like having her around because she can’t know about Ele, and that having her there without knowing means that things are moving on and the others might move on, as well.  As soon as Lucas spills the beans and Max is fully on board, Mike’s resistance disappears.

4. Nancy and Jonathan: So I think the teens’ stories are where Stranger Things does the best with undercutting gender roles because these stories are so ingrained and so formulaic normally.  These are also the ones that I noticed the most while watching it.  Also, full disclosure - I don’t really ship Nancy with anyone, and was sort of disappointed that last season had a teen girl, two love interests, love triangle story line.  However, I do think the lovestory between Nancy and Jonathan has some of the best gender reversals.  To start with, Nancy is absolutely the Protagonist of their story.  Nancy causes everything to happen in their story.  It’s her acts that inadvertently bring them together (by getting drunk), but she decides that they’re going to do something to get justice for Barb, she takes them to find the journalist, she comes up with the plan to blackmail Hawkins.  Even in the scenes of them getting together, we see her sitting up in bed, trying to decide what to do.  She goes to the door, and Jonathan is there.  All of the focus is on her as the decision maker.

This role reversal comes to a head in the final showdown with the mind flayer.  I loved the call back to the last season when Hopper asked Jonathan if he could shoot a gun, and Nancy took it instead - they had already established that she was the better shot, and again, this scene wasn’t presented as her emasculating Jonathan in any way (and Hopper doesn’t hesitate for a second in handing over the riffle) - it’s clearly just that their lives are at stake, and of the pair, she’s the better shot. But the best is the scene in the cabin - this could have so easily been the teary-eyed girlfriend hanging off her stoic boyfriend (which, to be fair, was a lot of how Jonathan was written last season).  Instead, we got Joyce, raging and holding down her son, who was clearly in pain, as Jonathan screamed hysterically and cried, trying to stop her, being held back and finally comforted by Nancy.

Let me be clear - this scene only makes sense this way, given what we know about these characters.  Joyce is driven and direct - she’s going to make a plan and stick to it, come Hell or high water.  Jonathan has already been shown to be way too invested in Will and his well-being, and it seems completely believable by now that he would even fight his mother if he thought Will’s life was in the balance.  Nancy is an outsider - she’s not family, and her concern is mostly for Jonathan.  However, even as exciting as this scene was, I couldn’t help but step out of it a bit as I was watching it and realize how weird it was to see a young man portrayed as hysterical, rallying against a woman with a plan, and then being comforted by another woman, who was relatively calm and unaffected.  It works so much better this way, but there are so many show where this scene would have had Nancy freaking out for no other reason than because women are hysterical.

5. Steve: Oh, Steve. heart eyes  I am so in love with Steve after this season.  Obviously Stranger Things is a show that loves its parallels, and Steve’s stories move increasingly into roles played by women in the original as the season goes on.  The initial story with him and Dustin have parallels to Stand By Me and Gremlins, but by the big showdown with the mind flayer, Steve opens embraces his role as “the babysitter,” a role that actually has some decent echoes in 80s movies - Adventures in Babysitting would be the obvious, but Steve’s role in the group also directly parallels Mary Plimpton’s character in the Goonies, as the third wheel to the big brother and girlfriend (except in this case, those two had buggered off to go do The Omen instead), who also delivers the incredibly quotable line, “I feel like I’m babysitting, only I’m not getting paid.”

However, again, we’re not given any hint that Steve has any problems with his new role.  After the rest of the adults and teens leave, he directly parallels Mr. Mom, the movie the Byers were watching earlier, wearing an apron and slinging a kitchen towel over his shoulder after doing the washing up.  But whereas the entire premise of that movie is how embarrassed Michael Keaton’s character feels to be a stay-at-home dad and how bad he is at household tasks, Steve seems genuinely proud of himself for tidying up the Byers house, and proud to serve as guiding voice to the remaining kids left in his care.  Even his use of a traditionally-masculine sports metaphor to explain why they have to stay put reaffirms how much he’s internalized his role - he clearly means for it to be rally speech, as he’s presumably delivered to his teammates, and he shows his own confusion when it concludes with, “and that’s why we’re on the bench.”

The episode briefly looks as though it’s going to offer Steve a redeemingly masculine role of protector with the arrival of Billy, Max’s big brother.  We get some macho posturing and a fist fight, and although Steve does get to come to Lucas’ rescue, he’s still soundly trounced by Billy. Again, this is completely in keeping with the characters - we’ve already seen that Billy isn’t just up for a fight, but abusive and dangerously violent.  However, it’s Max, the only girl in the room, who puts down Billy, again in a series of gender undercuts - first, she beats him subversively by drugging him (poison being a woman’s weapon and all that), but then, in another reversal, she takes the opportunity as he’s weakened and blacking out to threaten him with Steve’s baseball bat, extracting protection for her and the AV club using the same oath as we’ve seen used previously by Billy’s abusive father.  The rest of the episode is clearly The Goonies, with Steve-as-Mary-Plimpton and the kids running around underground, and Steve reiterating that he’s there because he’ll be held responsible if anything happens to them.

Even in the final denouement at the dance, Steve gets the same final appearance as Joyce and Hopper, the other two caregivers, dropping off his ‘kid’ and driving away.  (Interestingly, of the teens and adults, only Nancy gets a denouement at the dance - Jonathan is also there, but just gets to smile and wave from the sidelines, the same ending as basically every supporting girlfriend from every teen movie, again highlighting that it’s Nancy who is the Protagonist.)

So why do I care about all of this?  Well, one of my biggest frustrations with a lot of TV and films is that I feel like writers still suck at writing women - in particular, women as protagonists.  It seems like way too many writers can’t understand how women can make choices that drive the story forward, and that means way too many stories fall back on traditional tropes where women are the backups and support.  It’s cool to see so many of those tropes not only avoided, but directly reversed, and so effectively.  Bob, Jonathan, Steve, and the AV club are cool, interesting, likable characters.  They’re not diminished by not being the protagonists, or not being traditionally masculine.  Like I said, I would love to see the writers do more with Ele because there is so much opportunity there for a truly agender character, which is something else sorely missing from modern TV, but I also hope they continue to present women who are ambitious and driven, and men who are emotional and empathetic because it’s super cool to finally get those kinds of stories.

[bpoole500]

Long Live the Legion

Legion of Super-Heroes has had a devoted fan base that dates back to the team’s creation in the late ‘50s.

Originally conceived as a one-off for a Superboy story, the Legion grew and expanded over the years, becoming one of DC’s consistently popular features. Encompassing dozens of characters and decades of stories, it still managed to attract new fans as years went by.

The series has seen its ups and downs, with multiple re-boots culminating in a crowd-pleasing un-reboot just before The New 52 hit that restored something akin to the original pre-Crisis concept. But mismanagement during The New 52 led to a cancellation after two years. Since then, fans have waited patiently for a new incarnation. While the characters have popped up here and there, no new ongoing series has been forthcoming.

The advent of Rebirth promised the return of a classic Legion series. More than a year in, fans are still waiting, with DC assuring them that something is in the works. In the meantime, they’ve had to make due with a few appearances from Saturn Girl, stranded in the present day, cooling her heels in Arkham Asylum. Recently, DC announced that another fan favorite, Phantom Girl, would be appearing in a series that riffs on Marvel’s Fantastic Four, also set in the present day.

While waiting for DC to provide some concrete information on the team’s future (the franchise’s 60th anniversary is in 2018), here are a few things creators should keep in mind when tackling a Legion of Super-Heroes book.

Focus on the Favorites

While this might seem obvious, it’s amazing how frequently Legion creators disregard characters that fans love, writing them out, killing them off or just stranding them in the background. To some extent, it might be understandable that a writer or artist who’s spent a lot of time with the series might grow bored with the old standbys. Legion has produced lots of colorful characters in its almost six decades and naturally lends itself to introducing newcomers. It’s tempting to want to explore less developed heroes.

But the fact is that when Legion strays too far from its most loved characters, fan interest tends to stray with it. The ‘00s revival of the team succeeded because the founding trio of Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl and Cosmic Boy was front and center. Creators are prone to writing out or minimizing that trio in favor of newer team members and it never works. Any successful iteration of the team needs Garth, Imra and Rokk at its heart.

But more than the founding trio, Legion has many core characters that fans love. One of the biggest problems of the New 52 era was disregarding established favorites for newcomers. Another disastrous misstep was stranding several fan favorites (Wildfire, Dawnstar, Timberwolf, Tellus, Gates) in an ill-conceived spin-off set in the present day. While the focus on some of the team’s biggest names wasn’t a bad idea, divorcing those characters from the rest of the team weakened the franchise.

Back in the parent book, longstanding fan favorites like Colossal Boy, Blok, Black/White Witch and Sensor Girl were written out, while the likes of Star Boy, Element Lad and Sun Boy were either pushed aside or used as supporting characters to the newbies. And don’t take that as a knock on the new characters. All of them had potential and some were well used, but fans buying a Legion of Super-Heroes book expect to see their favorite characters on a monthly basis. They don’t expect “A Bunch of Newish Young Adult Heroes with Some Legionnaires Around As Tokens.”

Reunite the team and keep the veterans in the mix. Don’t jettison the newcomers, but better calibrate their roles in the book. Fans can take a large cast and the required ups and downs of prominence for various cast members. But they won’t be happy with so many favorites nowhere in sight.

The Bright Future

One of the aspects of Legion of Super-Heroes that always engaged fans was its concept of a positive future civilization. That’s not to say that stories didn’t take dark turns over the years. Some of the most memorable sagas (“Earth War,” “The Great Darkness,” “The Villain War”) went to some especially dark places and rattled the Legion universe. Being functional doesn’t preclude some big challenges.

But in recent years, there’s been too much of an inclination to push Legion into the “dystopian future” mold that, quite frankly, there’s already too much of in futuristic fantasy stories. That set-up is too easy at this point, and feels too derivative of any number of other franchises in the greater fantasy/adventure fiction sphere. Tackling a universe with a basically positive cast is a bigger challenge, to be sure, but it’s also part of what has always set Legion apart.

That’s not to say that Mordru or Universo can’t try to take over the universe, mucking things up quite a bit. Fans expect the Khunds or the Dominators to attack or Legionnaires to wind up marooned on distant, uncivilized planets from time to time. You can do “universe shaking” without pushing the well-trod “dystopia” path. It might be more effort for creators, but it pays off.

Think Big

One of the best features of the Legion concept has always been how versatile it is. It easily encompasses story scopes from major cosmic crises to intimate character sketches. While some of the quieter moments are sentimental favorites for many fans (Wildfire/Dawnstar ‘shippers will still rhapsodize about “A Shared Destiny” more than three decades later), the fact is that Legion is a stage for the kinds of stories that just can’t be done in other books (or at least, not as effectively).

Part of it is the large cast, of both team members and colorful supporting players, and a big stock of memorable villains. Creators can devise combinations that can support just about any kind of plot.

But with a widescreen, epic ethos built into the concept, it gives creators a chance to explore big themes, big ideas and big action. Some of the best stories developed gradually, percolating along as background sub-plots until they ripened into compelling star attractions. Late ‘80s gems like “Who Is Sensor Girl?” or “The Universo Project” were great examples of using the Legion canvas to tell dynamic, complex tales that made effective use of the cast and the franchise’s long history. Shepherding ideas through months of gradual build and then letting them explode into galaxy-spanning drama is almost the book’s mission statement. Creators should come aboard this book for the long haul and have plans of how to make the most of the plethora of assets available. Any creator who expresses a thought along the lines of “I didn’t know what else to do” should probably not be on this book.

Skip the Mayhem

One of the grimmer DC Universe elements that Rebirth seems calculated to address is the whole “darkness for the sake of darkness” trope. And honestly, that’s a relief to many fans. No one takes issue with a dark turn that’s well set-up, executed in a way that engages fans, and has a profound impact that’s thoroughly explored and dramatized on the page.

What fans saw in the most recent iteration of Legion was a lot of senseless death and violence for not very good reasons. Things like the destruction of Saturn Girl’s home planet or the rise of a new Fatal Five could be compelling plot moments, but the dramatic “why” of the developments never seemed to come together.

In short order, fans saw the deaths of characters like Earth Man, Sun Boy and Star Boy, often in grotesque or pointless ways, and the maiming of other favorites, like Mon-El, as well as other kinds of gratuitous abuse visited on any number of characters. To a large extent, a lot of that was undone when the Legion reappeared in Justice League United a couple years back and most fans were only too happy to look the other way with those retcons.

That’s not to say that there can never be a death in the book. Looking back, past character deaths have had significant impact. Think about the legendary sacrifice of Ferro Lad, or Karate Kid’s dramatic swan song. Both were impactful and pushed the series in a number of different ways. Killing off a character just because “that’s what you do” is cheap and tired. People read the book to see their favorites in action, not to see them snuffed out pointlessly.

Be Weird

From the earliest days, creators took advantage of the Legion premise to let their imaginations run riot. A wide array of colorful aliens and worlds have threaded into the narrative over the years. In time, the team’s members began reflecting some non-humanoid diversity (Tellus, Gates). With a universe-spanning concept, incorporating as much oddness as possible has always been a benefit.

But it’s not just the outré looking characters that fans have loved. Wacky concepts like Bouncing Boy, Matter-Eater Lad and the Legion of Substitute Heroes became fan favorites. They were sometimes goofy and often provided a lighter contrast to the more angst-ridden members of the team. Creators need to stretch and have some fun with the series, too. When the creators are enjoying what they’re doing, it shows on the page and the fans can join in, too.

[rudderless-in-an-ocean-of-stars]

in your eyes (i find my salvation), chapter three

Find it on Ao3 here:

http://archiveofourown.org/works/11225808/chapters/25137660

Of all the people who have shown up to her office unannounced, the woman who introduces herself as Lucy Lane is, by far, the most effortlessly intimidating.

“Lane?” Lena echoes, because she’s all-too familiar with the surname she’s seen plastered across the byline of almost every major story out of that damned newspaper in Metropolis, the Daily Planet. “Are you, by any chance, related to Lois Lane?”

“She’s my sister,” she replies tersely, and Lena knows she’s hit a sore spot by the way the other woman’s shoulders tense at the mention of the reporter.

“Ah.” Lena narrows her eyes- Lucy, aside from her petite stature, appears to have little in common with her sibling in terms of looks. Lois is red-haired and paler than milk, while Lucy sports a healthy tan and dark hair to match her cat-like eyes.

“Different mothers,” she explains, having caught on to Lena’s train of thought with the ease of someone used to the weight of an unasked question hanging in the air.

“What can I do for you today, Miss Lane?”

“I’m here about Kara zor-El.” She pauses, and a look of pure, unadulterated anger flashes across her face for a moment before she visibly calms, apparently burying her rage beneath a smooth, business-like demeanor. “And what your mother did to her.”

Lena’s blood runs cold in her veins, ice slowly spreading through her chest, spiraling outward from her heart.

“M-my mother?” She asks this a little thickly, tongue suddenly heavy in her mouth.

“Yes. She trespassed onto CatCo property this morning, and made her way into Kara zor-El’s office, where she harassed Miss zor-El until our boss, Cat Grant, intervened.” Lucy’s lips twitch upwards at this, a hint of a smile playing at the edges of her mouth. “Were you aware of this encounter?”

She shakes her head, not trusting her voice enough to speak.

“Well, as Cat Grant’s counsel, I really shouldn’t be meeting with you. After all,” she suddenly smirks, and Lena doesn’t think she’s seen anyone look quite so satisfied outside of a bedroom, “-my employer did leave your mother with quite the bruise. Lillian was trespassing, so we at CatCo aren’t really concerned with the legal ramifications, as I’m sure you understand. After all, Cat was defending her employee from an intruder on company grounds.” Lena swallows with no small measure of difficulty as she moves across the room to fetch herself a glass of something stronger than water.

“If that’s the case, Miss Lane,” she says, after a long sip of scotch, “I have to ask- why are you here?”

“I’m here as Kara’s family,” Lucy snaps, and the ferocity that forms an almost tangible aura of protectiveness around her suddenly makes the family resemblance between the Lane sisters strikingly clear.

“Is she alright?”

“Depends on your definition of the word. Physically, she’s unharmed, of course.”

“Yes, well,” Lena can’t help the small, sad parody of a smile that her mouth twists into as her stomach churns at the thought of what her mother might have said. “Simple violence was never my mother’s favorite method of intimidation.”

The sharpness of Lucy’s glare softens marginally at the implications behind Lena’s words.

“The last time I saw Kara, her hands were shaking so badly that she couldn’t even hold a pen.” Lucy’s hands curl into fists at her sides. “Miss Grant sent her home for the rest of the day after what happened. I came here to tell you to stay away. Kara doesn’t need a reminder of what happened today.”

“Oh.”

It’s the only sound she can coax out of her throat, soft and small and utterly broken.

Something shifts in the other woman’s eyes, and her fierce demeanor melts away like snow under the sun.

“Not forever,” she quickly amends, shifting her weight between her feet like she isn’t sure if she should take a step forward or back. “Just for now. Until Kara’s better.”

Lucy Lane’s two steps past the threshold of her office door when she turns back and gives Lena a look that she can’t quite decipher.

She figures it’s the closest thing to an apology that Lucy will give her, and accepts it with a nod and the closest thing to a genuine smile as she can manage.

“You’re good for her,” she says, just a bit gruffly but loaded with a grudging respect all the same, before spinning back around and resuming her brisk stride down the hall.

You’re good for her.

The phrase echoes in her ears as she presses down on the intercom and summons her secretary into the room.

“Jess, please cancel the rest of today’s appointments and set up a meeting with my mother.”

The secretary’s eyes widen ever so slightly at the request, fully aware of the strained relationship between the C.E.O. and her mother, but she doesn’t hesitate, and Lena makes a mental note to give her a raise.

“Of course, Miss Luthor.” She’s already lifting a hand to activate the Bluetooth earpiece clipped under the fall of her hair as she moves back towards the door. “Thank you, Jess.”

You’re good for her.

Lena desperately hopes she won’t make a liar out of Lucy Lane as she steels herself to see the woman she’s spent years of her life trying to escape.

She makes her way to the couch on wobbly legs, lies back against the plush cushions, and thinks of the words she wished she’d had the time to say to Lucy Lane before she’d slipped out of reach.

‘Good’ is the one thing I’m not.

But for her- for Kara- I’ll try.

Alex Danvers virtually materializes out of thin air in Cat’s office, dressed in an all-black outfit and equipped with her usual trademark glare.

How the other woman manages to move so silently, Cat resigns herself to the probability that she’ll never know.

A lesser person might have screamed at the sight of the federal agent now occupying her office, who cuts a strikingly imposing figure in spite of her doe eyes and tiny build, but Cat only pushes forward the bowl of M&Ms on her desk and gestures for her to take a seat.

“How’s the hand?”

Alex Danvers was never one to beat around the bush- a trait that Cat has developed a fond admiration for over the years.

She smirks at the question, pushes her glasses up to rest on the top of her head, and shrugs. “A little sore, but I know how to throw a punch.”

“Damn straight.” A twinkle of pride glimmers in her brown eyes. “Thank you.”

“How’s Kara?”

“Sleeping, when I left, but that was a few hours ago.”

“Did she- was she-?” Cat’s usually not one to stutter, but her concern for Kara has her tripping over her words.

“She held it together until she got back to our place, then she was down for about half an hour.” Alex tosses a handful of M&Ms into her mouth and bites down so furiously that Cat finds it a miracle she doesn’t choke.

“Drink, Miss Danvers?”

Alex rolls her eyes, and Cat stands to fetch them both a glass of some ridiculously expensive bourbon that some political big-shot had sent her in the hopes of persuading her to use her considerable influence to make him the golden boy of the masses.

She has no intention of using her power to do anything of the sort, but she’s also not the type to turn down the gifts she’s offered by idiots who don’t know better than to try and bribe the queen of all media.

Alex likes Cat Grant.

She never expected to, but she does.

They’ve got enough differences between them to start a civil war, but what little they do have in common triumphs over everything else with ease.

Kara, of course, is the strongest thing that ties them together.

Toss in serious self-esteem issues courtesy of over-bearing mothers and it turns out that she and Cat Grant are much more alike than she’d initially thought.

She doesn’t stay for long- now that her shift’s over and there’s one less alien on the streets plotting world domination, every atom of her being is screaming for her to go home, to see Kara and make sure she’s alright.

So she does, waving away Cat’s offer to have her driven home with a laugh and another roll of her eyes.

It’s cold outside, even colder than it should be now that night has fallen, but Alex doesn’t mind.

Her breath mists out in puffs of white as she breaks into a light jog back to the apartment. It doesn’t take her long to reach the building, but she lingers outside for several moments just to stare up at the stars.

Glittering harmlessly against the vast expanse of inky sky, always out of reach but so rarely out of sight, the stars have always been a minor fascination for Alex Danvers.

She drinks in the sight of their light, faint in comparison to the brilliance of the sun but no less beautiful, no less radiant, and allows herself a small, satisfied smile.

Then she walks into the building lobby, raises a hand to greet the familiar face of the night watchman, and heads upstairs to check on the woman whose smile was like a sun of its own.

Lucy Lane gets herself well and truly hammered before she even considers heading home.

She stumbles through the door and doesn’t give a fuck where her purse lands when she flings it in the direction of the living room.

James is waiting for her in the kitchen, sitting at the island in the middle with an expression that borders on the wrong edge of pity, and it pisses her off.

“What?” She growls out, slinking towards the cabinets to pull out a glass she fills with water from the fridge. “I’m fine.”

“I didn’t say anything, Luce.” His tone is perfectly calm, perfectly even, and the simple practiced neutrality of his gaze makes her veins itch.

“You didn’t have to.”

“Are you going to tell me what’s bothering you or not?” He levels a sharp look in her direction, and she mentally curses him for knowing her so well, for not rising to the bait, for not picking the fight she’s so carefully laying out, for everything, everything-

Especially for being ridiculously patient and forgiving and putting up with her, of all people.

Lucy Lane knows full well just how much she doesn’t deserve James Olsen.

It’s one of the last things her sister had told her, shouted at her, during their last screaming match before Lucy had packed her bags and disappeared, shrouded herself in the weight of words like ‘duty’, ‘honor’, and ‘service’, and emerged after four years of radio silence with shiny-new shrapnel scars and gold leaf insignia on her shoulders.

“Just because he’s your boyfriend’s best friend doesn’t mean you can tell either of us what to do!”

They’re both yelling at this point, and Lois’ cheeks are bright red with exertion as she rages back at her sister. By some stroke of luck, this argument started after-hours, otherwise the employees of the Daily Planet would be getting front-row seats to the latest installment of the Lane sisters’ grudge match.

“Jimmy Olsen is a good man! I don’t want to see him get hurt!”

There it is, the righteous indignation that Lucy’s been choking on her whole life, practically oozing from her sister’s pores. It makes something in the pit of her stomach burn hotter, pouring lighter fluid on a fire that’s already burning viciously.

“His name is James, Lois! He’s not a kid anymore!”

“Neither are you!”

Lucy freezes for a second, a flicker of hurt briefly overtaking the anger in her eyes before a carefully cultivated mask of pure fury slides down over her face, locking away all other emotion somewhere far below the surface, way out of reach for anyone to touch without getting burned by the flames that obscure it from view.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?!”

“You’re going to break his heart and you know it.” Lois shakes her head, a mournful expression crossing her features as she regards Lucy with her pretty, jewel-like eyes. They fairly glow with the same unwavering stare that she uses like knives against warlords in feuding countries and drug kingpins right here in the city. “You don’t deserve someone like him.”

Lucy had ended up taken her sister’s words to heart that night.

She’d stormed home, stuffed the bare essentials into a backpack, and vanished into the familiar rhythm of the army’s inner workings without a word of warning to anyone, least of all James.

He was the last person she expected to see on her doorstep after the end of her latest tour, but he’d still shown up, still looked at her with those warm, dark eyes, still said her name in the same breathless, reverent whisper-

And she’d found herself unable to turn him away.

Like it? Love it? Want to see more?

Let me know! :)

[phillhall]

Review: Stranger Things

(TV mini-series/Netflix)

Slick, nostalgic, pitched almost perfectly and so full of holes it could have been made in 1983...

There has been a buzz recently about a new 8-part Netflix series called Stranger Things, starring Wynona Ryder and some other people. Set in a backwater US town in the mid-1980s, it has a group of pre-teen ‘misfits’, a bunch of pre-college Jocks, an outsider/loner, a confused teenage girl, rogue cop, distraught mother - all the things that made 1980s ‘blockbusters’ from Steven Spielberg to the teen angst of John Hughes. Throw in a decidedly odd mix of Stephen King and Clive Barker and then don’t bother to think things through too much or you’ll end up picking it to pieces.

If you do start picking it pieces you begin to notice that it’s all style over substance and while it either allows or expects the viewer to fill in the necessary missing pieces, it also constitutes very lazy writing when some of the characters are literally just there to facilitate a plot thread.

There have been comparisons - justifiably - to Spielberg’s 80s movies such as ET, CE3K and his co-scripted The Goonies film and the homage flies thick and fast and any film buff worth their salt will be reeling off references faster than a teenager can have a wank and around the third episode I realised this was a production trick - a way of diverting the viewer’s attention away from the glaring lack of credibility and almost total lack of reason.

Plus - bleeding eyes? Really? Hasn’t this been done to death? Plus, why do film makers insist that people would bleed out of their lacrimol caruncle? Do you know what happens if you get a bleed in that part of the eye? Blood - a liquid and the surface of the eye, also a liquid/lubricant - mix and you get red, streaky eyeballs, especially when you blink. In a series that largely used 21st century special effects, this was one of several 1980s special effects they could have done without (but it was used as a plot device...).

The main story begins with the disappearance of an 11-year-old boy, mysteriously in some local woods. This in itself was handled like a baby with a hand grenade. I know this is the 1980s, but I’m fairly sure even the most red-necked and ignorant of US town sheriff’s would a) treated a missing child case with a degree of seriousness and b) done his searching during the day when flashlights were not required. Kid goes missing and townsfolk all do a day’s work before going into the woods with halogen lamps... This wasn’t the first thing in the show that puzzled me (unless it was an X-Files reference and therefore a decade too early) to the point of annoyance.

I’m going to stop being linear here because I’m not just going to spell out the eight-episodes for you. We are also introduced to 11 (played by Millie Bobby Brown) a young girl with closely cropped hair and a hospital-styled smock who is wandering around the countryside; she is met and befriended by the three friends of the boy who has gone missing. She has mysterious powers and doesn’t talk much.  We are then introduced to what I feel is arguably the weakest and the part of the story that prevents the series from actually working...

Matthew Modine plays the head of some weird scientific project based in a building completely cordoned off not too far from the place where the boy went missing. No one, not even the sheriff seems remotely bothered or even knowledgeable about an apparently top secret facility, with armed guards, is situated so close to their town. It would appear this place and its employees might as well be in a completely different country - or dimension - because in a town that is portrayed as being small enough to know everyone else’s business, the top secret facility obviously was doing it’s job well.

Modine appears to be working for the US government and using a telekinetic child to locate and spy on Russian/Soviet officials - all very cloak and dagger and all very superficial. The problem for the girl doing these experiments - 11 - is that to be able to link with whoever her keeper’s want her to, she has to go through a place where monsters live - which she later describes as ‘the upside down’. Using your own powers of deduction, it appears that by using this incredibly powerful girl to spy on people it starts to break down the barriers between dimensions.

We’re then treated to more film and novel homage with nods to Poltergeist, Stephen King novels about dimensional barriers and at times Labyrinth. There is also a tree and this tree is obviously the portal that the creature (or creatures) on the other side of it uses to come to our world and abduct its food. This allows one of the supporting cast to do something totally totally out of character and then allows the series makers to do something almost ridiculously 1920s in its cliffhanger execution. 

It’s the fact that the characters when the series is set up in the first episode don’t really express much after that first episode. We’re introduced to a group of young friends, but we have no real back story for two of them; the general conversation is that Mike the ‘leader’ of this gang of misfits and Will - the missing child - are best of friends and telephone conversations between their mothers’ (Ryder and Cara Buono) suggest the two women are also best of friends, but that never materialised. The thing is - no one talked to each other. It was like the 1980s was this period of time when everyone was just doing their own thing and no one else was remotely aware - maybe it was, but I can’t help thinking if Stephen King has written this - because it fits in with so many of his town-themed novels - it would have been more realistic in its characterisation.

It is so wonderfully crafted, it looks and sounds like it was made in 1986, even down to crowd scenes - the hair and clothes are all spot on. The dialogue, at times, veered into the wrong era - the expression ‘sick’ for something good was a few years away and began in a different part of the USA. Even the government as secret above-the-law agency was handled well, except... it wasn’t at all. The slightly bogus secondary antagonists - Modine’s security detail - were unconvincing and inconsistent - Spielberg did ‘sinister government’ spot on and believable; this lot just looked like a cross between crooks and psychopaths.

However many plot holes and things that were just badly written, it did have some really clever things going for it, there were some really unexpected performances and it fairly rattled along once it got going. Millie Bobby Brown stole the show for me and her tone and way she drifted through the series was possibly the best thing about it. Imagine a girl that has been kept as an experiment all her life, her lack of love and parenting, no nurturing, just used as a weapon and then being released into an unsuspecting world. The mixture of rage and confusion was set very well as was her ability to kill if she felt it was necessary. 

Wynona Ryder was a revelation in the kind of role that Dee Wallace or Melinda Dillon excelled at in the 1980s, but with little or no real back story about her life, looking at her house, compared to her peers, and judging by her general hippy-ish attitude in flashback scenes, you get the impression that histrionics, drama and crisis has never been too far from her door; had this been emphasised a little more clearly, you might have understood why no one seemed that overtly concerned about her son Will’s disappearance. The fact that another town youth also disappears soon after generates about as much interest as an apple-bobbing party at the local church. Ryder plays the in-denial grieving mom very well up to the moment she starts playing with lights, carrying an axe round and smashing walls open because Will was trying to communicate with her. How he was managing to manipulate the electricity in a mobile home in the middle of nowhere from ‘the upside down’ was never explained, not even looked at, it was just thrown in there to emphasise to the viewer that Ryder wasn’t just bonkers.

There are some excellent scary bits, but once the suspense is done with and you’re given the idea that 11 and the monster are more than just linked, it might just be the creature of her id (created by the thing she was using to do the government’s bidding) it becomes a bit of a slaughter-fest with 11 and the monster dispatching large numbers of faceless agents. The’upside down’ is a mixture of creepy and Silent Hill and at times it had tremendous atmosphere, but none of the main characters are particularly likeable; even the kids are an odd mix, with the black kid being the most overtly bigoted and the fat toothless idiot as the level-headed one, despite being a (low-grade) buffoon. Spielberg gave you emotional attachment to specific kids inside 2½ hours; this series never manages to really make you care about any of the kids, because they’re all dislikeable in certain ways. Only 11 (or El as the boys called her) seemed exempt from this and not enough time was spent on her ‘re-education’ to life and too much time spent on Modine glowering over her and showering her in fake love.

So much, like a 1980s film, is left to the imagination and that, now, is a problem. Setting it in the 1980s circumvents such irritants as mobile phones, the Internet and transparency, but that doesn’t necessarily add any authenticity to it. Maybe viewed weekly this might have worked better, allowing the viewer to not remember clearly certain bits, thus allowing the imagination to fill in the blanks; but as a box set it just falls down in places.

[news-about-games-blog]

The universe of Injustice. Chronicles of the war super heroes DC

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Injustice: Gods Among Us can not be called an ideal fighting game. The balance in it leaves much to be desired, which is bad for a competitive genre. But, firstly, it does not prevent the game from brilliantly entertaining friends' companies at parties. And secondly, a famously twisted plot became the basis for a new full-fledged universe within the comic books of DC.

Developers from NetherRealm Studios wrote the story together with the leading writers of DC Comics. The task was not an easy one - it was required to explain how the heroes came to life so that they beat the muzzles not only to the villains, but to each other, and at the same time to give the heroes without a superpower a chance to survive in fights with the Titans like Superman. At the same time, it was necessary to "break nothing" in the characters of the heroes loved by millions and make a story worthy of the cult universe from the events of the game. Just.

The publishers' bosses gave Ed Boon and the company a whole parallel reality, where all the events of the game take place, and at the same time released a separate line of comics: she substantiated and supplemented many events of Gods Among Us. The world of Injustice has become truly popular among geeks and gamers, so DC continues to expand it to this day. Now they are releasing the third series on motives.

On the eve of the release of Injustice 2, we will briefly tell you what happened to your favorite superheroes and supervillains in the four years of the parallel universe.

The cover of the first volume of the comic book collection (contains half of Year One).

First year. Change of priorities

Five years before the events of Injustice, the Joker suddenly realized that every time losing Batman is no longer fun, and chose a new goal for his sadistic jokes - Superman. The evil clown kidnapped his pregnant wife Lois Lane and connected to her heart the detonator of the atomic bomb laid in the very center of Metropolis.

When the Steel Man flew in to save his beloved, the Joker used a mixture of a toxin of fear with kryptonite to cause frightening hallucinations. In delirium Superman saw in front of him not Lois, and his sworn enemy, Doomsday, and entered into battle with him.

At the last moment, the Kryptonian realized that before him was not a huge monster, but his own wife, but it was already late - Lois died, and at the same instant a nuclear explosion exploded. Millions of residents of the city, who Superman vowed to protect, died with Clark Kent's beloved woman.

By personally destroying everything that was dear to him, Superman renounced his earthly personality and human moral standards. For the first time in his life he went on a murder - he tore the heart out of the Joker's chest. After that, the last son of Krypton vowed to eradicate crime on Earth, began to build a new world order, and in this he supported the greater part of the Justice League. They overthrew dishonest governments, stopped wars, and Superman sometimes killed someone for the sake of everyone's good.

In between the acts of planting the world around the world, the tyrant, along with Lex Luthor (and he, of course, survived during the undermining of Metropolis) developed a super-tablet on Krypton technology. The average person could take the drug and at the time get super-strength and super-strength Superman. So the former hero planned to create an army that would support a new world order.

As is usual in DC stories, if Superman flies, a dubious honor to solve the problem falls to Batman. So in Injustice. Knight of the night tried to dissuade Superman from radical actions, and when the persuasion did not work, he organized a resistance team. In the detachment there were disagreed with the radical course heroes from the League of Justice and some not the most law-abiding inhabitants of the DC universe.

The conflict erupted swiftly. The first victim was Knighting (Dick Grayson, adopted son of Batman), he was accidentally killed by Robin (Damien Wayne, Batman's own son). In less than a minute Bruce lost both sons - Robin supported Superman to the end in this war.

               A brief history of Damien Wayne by Dr. Harlin Quinzel.

Both sides began to invent ways to ruin each other's lives. Batman kidnapped Orlitz and sent the Martian Hunter in her guise to spy on Superman. He hacked Cyborg and a companion of the Justice League, and stole one of the super-tablets and copied the technology of its production. This allowed the rebels to equalize the chances in battle with super-strong enemies, and the writers - to justify the fact that characters without abilities, like Harley Quinn, can stand more than two seconds against Shazam or Sinestro.

Superman did not lag behind: he revealed the identity of Batman to the whole world, burnt the Martian Hunter alive, killed the Green Arrow, broke the spine of the defender Gotham himself, and in a couple of minutes finished off several thousand invaders from the army of Galactic dictator Darkseid, including his son Kalibak.

The common people at first supported Superman and rejoiced at the sharply subdued crime, but the further, the more people realized that the new ruler of the world was just another tyrant.

Year two. On a dark night ...

Opponents of the new regime were on the brink of defeat. Batman spent most of the year lying with a broken spine in the Faith Tower. The Black Canary was also out of order - not only was Superman killed her husband (Green Arrow), so she would have to raise a newborn son alone.

But there was a small success - the rebels were able to immerse the Wonder Woman for a year in a magical coma, depriving Superman of his main support. And it turned out that Lex Luthor was the secret agent of Batman from the very beginning. It was he who supplied Bruce Wayne with supertablets and gave him information about the plans of the enemy.

As they say, the enemy of my enemy is mine... Well, no, no one in their right mind will call Lex Luthor.

Superman continued to change the world in his own way. The "earthly" stage of the conflict unfolded in Gotham, where the first detachments of people were sent on supertablets. Because of this, Commissioner Gordon and all the police actually lost their jobs (and Gordon also had cancer in the final stage). The former guards of order sided with Batman, received a portion of super-tablets and started a war with the detachments of the new regime.

But the main battle began in space, between Superman and the corps of the Green Lanterns. The Guardians of the Universe (the corps leaders) learned about the illegal actions of Superman and flew to Earth to deal with the problem. But before they were in place was Sinestro. He wore into the confidence of the Kryptonian and frustrated his negotiations with the Guardians. And when the advanced Green Lantern detachment came to Earth to capture Superman for interrogation, Sinestro again intervened and stopped them with the help of the Yellow Lantern Corps.

That there is your "Game of Thrones" - in Injustice cult heroes die like flies.

In response to the aggression of the Sentinels, they organized a full-scale attack on Earth, involving half the corps of the Green Lanterns, the Guardian of the Hanset Universe and even the living planet of Mogo. With a single volley of green energy, Mogo destroyed a quarter of the building of Sinestro, forcing the army of Superman to retreat to Earth. There, the attack was joined by pro-Batman supporters pumped by supertablets. Together, they captured Flash, Cyborg, Robin, and other Superman supporters and hid them in the Faith Tower, but there was a loss. Died Commissioner Gordon - it turned out that the super-tablets dramatically accelerated the development of a cancerous tumor.

Meanwhile, Cinestro earned the achievement "Green Lantern from the Earth? I have not heard. " For a couple of weeks, he reduced the number of Green Lanterns from Earth from four to zero. We bend our fingers: gave Hal Halen the Yellow Ring, as soon as the Sentinels of the Universe stripped him of the Green Ring for supporting the rebellious Superman - once. Kill Kyle Rainer and John Stewart - two and three. He threw Stuart's death on Guy Gardner, and Hal, who had just taken the Yellow Ring in a rage, tore Guy into pieces - four.

In short, Cinestro, as usual, is still a scumbag.

Who wants to personally strangle Cinestro for his meanness - get in line.

Simultaneously with Hal, the Yellow Ring received Superman. This moment was broadcast live on the whole planet. But if the Green rings work on willpower, then the Yellow feed on fear. And the fear of billions of inhabitants of the Earth gave Superman such strength that he destroyed both the living planet of Mogo, the Guardian of the Hanset Universe, and a few hundred Green Lanterns, and the others captured.

The share of the positive in the finale of the "second year", introduced by Dr. Faith. He rescued the Black Canary from the imminent death and transferred it with his newborn son to another alternative universe, where he left on the threshold of the Green Arrow house, whose wife in this universe died several years ago. Though someone has a happy ending.

As if Superman without a ring is not enough scary.

The third year. It's a kind of magic

The battle with the Green Lanterns ended in the complete failure of the "good guys". By the beginning of the third year, the Earth finally passed under the control of Superman. But he did not think to stop. Now the tyrant lived another purpose: to catch and call to account Batman, who with more and more accusations was increasingly blamed for all his troubles.

A miracle woman woke up after an almost year-old coma. Finding Superman in the company of Cinestro and with the Yellow Ring on her finger, she came in such a rage that Cinestro sensibly received on the head, and the Kryptonian without resistance refused the power of the Yellow Lanterns. But, in spite of common features, the Yellow Ring does not look like the Ring of All-Power from another famous universe, so after his loss, Superman did not become kinder.

The last who still dared to challenge Superman were the members of the Batman team. The dark knight cured a broken spine and realized that in the physical world he could not be defeated. So he decided to move the battle into the world of magic, made alliances with Dr. Feith, Entangled, demon Etrigan, John Constantine and other magicians.

Constantine, as usual, did not want to spit for the whole of this world war, and all of that pursued only his own personal goals. In fact, the whole "third year" is a story about how, for the sake of saving a daughter and freeing one's own soul, an English prodhide-man pushed his foreheads against all opposing forces and emerged from the water.

If John Constantine something expensive, then for the sake of it he will sell the whole world to the devil and not even choke with tobacco smoke.

Again there were sacrifices. The Swamp Creature literally dragged itself into hell, the Huntress died and a couple of dozen less well-known characters. Even Dr. Faith briefly left this world. But Constantine, by the corpses reaching his goal, disappeared in an unknown direction, not forgetting to take his daughter with him. Though someone has a happy end 2.0.

When, because of the battles of two powerful demons, the very reality begins to collapse, the heroes have to forget about the enmity and for a while to unite.

Fourth year. OMG what a man!

Superman completely subjugated the Earth, but began to withdraw even from his allies. Batman after the death of so many friends, too, became completely unsociable, retired to the hermits and even promised the dictator that he would no longer fight. And then I made a deal with Ares. Because he's bloody Batman. But Batman does not give up.

Ares cunningly forced the gods of Olympus to invade Earth. Celestials came to this world and put forward an ultimatum: first, Superman should give up power and pass it to Zeus, and secondly, on Earth, the only true religion - of course, the ancient Greek paganism.

The invasion began with an epic fight to the death between the Wonder Woman and Superman (daughter of Zeus she, or who, let her protect the honor of the papule forcibly!). Kryptonets lost. But before Diana could kill him, all the heroes of the Earth and the Old Gods entered the battle. The Earthlings were defeated, and Superman had to dissolve the Justice League and hand over the Earth to Zeus, and he immediately began tyrannizing the earthlings for wrong faith.

When your boss kills Hercules, the demigod and the son of Zeus, in front of the pope...

In the meantime, the characters learned that Ares had organized the invasion not to help Batman, but to arrange general chaos and give Zeus over the head for childish offenses. In addition to the capture of the Earth by the thunderer, the program included: the revolt of Poseidon against Zeus, the war of the Old Gods with the troops of Aquamen, the mutiny of earthly governments with the use of nuclear warheads and the final chord - the advent of the army of Darkseid. Darkside immediately agreed to the conditions of the god of war in exchange for the right to torture forever Superman, who killed his son.

"I also found the god of war."

Ares' plan was almost successful. But Superman knew in advance about the advent of Darkseid, flew to Apokolips and nearly tore off his head. Batman was transferred to the New Genesis and persuaded the Supreme Father of the New Gods to stop Zeus.

As a result, Zeus agreed to leave Earth for good, the Old Gods left, and Superman returned to power. He brutally punished governments who dared not fulfill his disarmament order and used nuclear weapons. In the end, the former hero officially took all power on the planet in his own hands and called himself the Supreme Chancellor of the United Earth.

Year five. And nobody was...

In the last "pre-game" year, Superman finally got stuck on a comprehensive control. He started working with criminals like Bane and Killer Frost and killed two hundred or more people because they shouted anti-regime slogans and called themselves "Joker Resistance".

Then on the Earth was Doomsday (already real, not illusory), but Superman defeated him and with Lex's help "reprogrammed" into his personal toy. After Bizarro appeared, the creation of Lex Luthor, the weak-minded double of the Man of Steel. He was the dictator and dumped the murders of innocent people. But the militia learned the truth, after which even the allies began to openly question their leader.

For Batman, however, it was a very dark time. Most of the resistance either already perished, or refused to openly speak out against Superman. Then (presumably) on the orders of the world ruler, one of the "accidentally" evaders escaped from prison killed Alfred, the butler of the Wayne family. The dark knight realized that it was time to radically change the rules of the game.

Mass executions are necessary to maintain the image of the popular supreme ruler of the planet.

Together with Lex, they decided to bring members of the Justice League from Earth-1 into this universe. With their help, Batman wanted to open a safe with kryptonite weapons, once created by himself in case Superman threatened the Earth. But for the opening of the depository, the genetic data of five members of the Justice League was required. And one of them was already dead, while the others supported the regime.

Batman's plan was a success: Wonder Woman, Hal Jordan, Aquaman and Green Arrow got from Earth-1 into the world of Injustice, taking with them Batman and Joker. The final issues of the "fifth year" are synchronized with the beginning of the game. We were shown the same events that we saw in the first rolls of the story campaign, sometimes - on behalf of other characters.

               Dr. Quinzel, do you want to talk about this?

Even after the circle was closed and the entire history of the civil war between the heroes was told, the publishing house DC did not want to part with the Injustice universe. Almost immediately after the finale of "The Fifth Year", a series of Ground Zero began to appear, where it was told ... Yes about the same. Only from the position of Harley Quinn.

It turns out that as long as the powerful of this world figured out the relationship and arranged for five genocides for the release, the mad comedian understood her feelings for the Joker, and incidentally arranged chaos. As it turned out, the beauty was a witness or a participant in all the key events of the world of Injustice. Nothing critical is not happening in this series, but to get acquainted with the alternative point of view it will be interesting for all the fans of the most romantic couple of Gotham.

Harley Quinn - the last bastion of irony and humor in this serious to the teeth of the grinding world.

A series of comics on the second game is already out. And what is happening in it is intriguing.

The Injustice universe has successfully emerged from the framework of the game series, turning into a full-fledged and popular offshoot of the DC universe. Dramatic plot twists, bold scenarios and bright episodes are not at all what you expect from a by-product, which, it would seem, should only attract the public's attention to the game. We look forward to the development of events and on the pages of comics, and on the screens of monitors.

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