#THE MAN HAS PIPES

[aquamonstra]

Hey uhhhh Is there anyone else out there who's just a massive Robbie Duncan McNeill stan that I can just go full blorbo with? I have come to love this man so much and I need someone to reflect my enthusiasm back at me.

I know the Spiner stan fam is strong, but WHERE IS MY RDM STAN FAM???

[good-advice-ganondorf]

gan0nd0rf d0 y0u have any advice f0r the marching band kids 0ut there

[cremsie]

Deep apologies for commissioners rn because I may be a bit slow this month

If only because literally everything in our apartment is breaking this week and my weekend has just been full of repairmen and figuring things out

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[cantdealwiththisnow]

Part 2, tinyass RID2015 3x25 screenshots continued. because I mean just LOOK at Percy, he's definitely killed a man before

[dykedvonte]

why do you hate Joshua Graham or Honest Hearts so much?

This DLC and character represents a bigger issue with fandom spaces I have but particularly fallout fandom in general.

Fallout tends to tackle a lot of topics controversial and not. The first two games it’s heavy cause they are the most satirical and direct with how anti-war, nationalism and etc… they are. 3 loses this as it’s very clear once you play or learn about all the games that Todd and a bunch of guys at Bethesda just liked the 50s post apocalyptic aesthetic and refuse to actually critique the ideals of the time period like the earlier titles.

New Vegas is the game that really gets back into it a degree it almost seems like it’s taking too much on. There are things done exceedingly well while other things are done horribly wrong . I’ve made posts about it before and plan to make a big series of posts (it’s a lot of writing) but my biggest gripe is with Honest Hearts and all the gross and white savior esque depictions it has of indigenous peoples. The entirety if FNV does not do the injustices faced by indigenous people correctly on any count. My two biggest complaints are with the Khans and the tribes in Zion but I’ll talk about the former on a different post.

Both characters of Daniel and Joshua are the most accurate depiction of white saviors I’ve seen and I hate how the DLC tries to justify and defend them. The DLC treats Joshua like this man who has repented for his past actions when he is just retracing his steps after his cruelty bit him in the ass. He was one of the worst parts of the Legion and it is all but explicitly stated that if you don’t force him to be non-violent he will turn the tribes of Zion into the legion 2.0. The Dead Horses and the Sorrows are horribly infantilized by both Daniel and Joshua who both use them for self serving purposes guised by religious duty. The White Legs are the horrible stereotype of violent and savage indigenous and I personally think a lot of their interlinking with Ulysses, his hair and Ulysses character in general are distasteful and very telling of how BIPOC or POC where involved.

But outside of the game it’s the weird obsession people have with these characters ideologies and trying to make them seem more interesting/philosophical than they are. Tumblr is an echo chamber and many fans of Fallout are not the people on this site. Many people are not educated in the issues these characters convey and how poorly they do or used these characters as a poor introduction for their takes. Contrary to what a lot of people believe in, fallout has a prediomeny white cis male fanbase. More importantly a large portion of the fanbase is white.

You can joke how FNV made you trans or see the numbers on post/fics or diverse headcanons but these are kiddy numbers compared to the millions that consume the franchise and aren’t in those more aware spaces or don’t engage in the spaces the same way someone like me does/has to. Their views shape a lot more than people realize and it’s exhausting to be in a space where people don’t correct the more subtle yet toxic aspects of it but also adopt them into some weird quirky view point on the characters or issues. Some people don’t realize and some people don’t care.

My main issue is just the idolizing of these sort of thing in this fandom space and people try to acts like a game like fallout whose tagline is “War never changes” and has never had a game not revolve around political or militaristic factions issues isn’t that deep or doesn’t relate to real issues. I think it’s mainly caused by how over powered you can become and how you can strong arm your way past these learning moments as majority of people who play this game do play it as a power fantasy where they can do so as they please (which of course, go ahead it’s fun) but never take in parallels or lessons in the story as if it was just another first person shooter.

Also like another personal gripe is Cazadores spawn like hell whenever I’m there and I have not found a mod that works to mod them out so I have to play Indigenous Racism the DLC while getting jumped by giant wasps WHILE helping Mormons. Like I cannot catch a break.

[theletterwsartflap]

... Barf barf barf! I'm a can opener, a lamp, and a shaver! Oh god, I'm a mish-mash!

(Still a WIP but at least I'm past the halfway mark now!)

[the-evening-shade]

[empty-blog-for-lurking]

So i finally listened to The Magnus Protocol and uhh holy shit, yall mind if i

[The contents of this post has been deleted]

[elvenchain]

HELLO ??????

[trentcrimminallybeautiful]

trent is the best man at his ex-wife''s wedding and some people are like hang on werent you married to the bride? and hes like yes. and.

[bendysinitiation]

I’ve gotten to a point in the mask sculpting process that, whenever I put it on, I feel a sort of power emanating from it, and an irrational fear that it will posses my body and start using it to go on a killing spree. It means i’m getting somewhere.

[hacash]

To Isaac McAdoo’s ever-growing CV - Footballer, Beloved Captain, Supportive Friend, Mother Hen, Fashion Icon, Classic Movie Buff, Handshake Artist, Hairdresser Extraordinaire, Queer Rights Activist, Feminist Hero, Sexy Santa, Wise And Impartial Judge, Punter Of Many Footballs And Breaker Of Many Windows - we can now add ‘voice of a damn angel’. Also Kola Bokinni if you’re currently single...

[el-yon]

Do you think Ryuuken and Kanae really did loving each other romantically? I mean, Kanae was obviouslu devoted to him, but in your opinion how about Ryuuken? Is it possibly a half-hearted relationship that ended up as a marriage, because Ryuuken was kinda lost in such a painful situation?

"Ryuuken was kinda lost in such a painful situation" pretty much describes him throughout Bleach, doesn't it? Girl he was supposed to marry out of arrangement but he had feelings for gets attacked by a hollow, barely makes it out alive thanks to a bizarre spiritual move, marries a shinigami and then dies. Women he loves and becomes the mother of his child falls into a comma and dies. He tries to keep his kid away from the warring-troubles with the worst approach to it, and his estranged son befriends the shinigami-hollow-quincy-human who happens to be the son of the girl he liked and the shinigami she married, and now they have to join forces to defeat the quincy-king who is responsible for both women's deaths. OOF. Anyway, onto the ask:

I should start by saying that I am not exactly a Ryuuken deep-diver... but this ask does seem like a great opportunity to dive a tiny bit more, so thank you for this ✨-- i had a lot of fun writing this, so brace yourself !

Do I think that he loved Kanae? Yes, and I believe it was a whole-hearted relationship; despite of Ryuuken's terrible emotional aloofness and inability to express himself.

This is something to keep in mind: we know that Ryuuken is not good with expressing/receiving affection, as we have seen from how he handled things with his son. His feelings for Masaki were also ill-expressed; they only manifest in an angst-filled situation when her life is in danger and he resents his powerlessness (even though he was young, Kubo's message about his character seems pretty consistant).

And to make matters worse, we don't have any glimpses on how Ryuuken and Katagiri got together; all we know is that Masaki left the Ishida house, which was (according to Isshin) the decisive move for Ryuuken to detach himsel, and a few years later, Ryuuken and Kanae are married and with child. This may have some angst bittersweet taste to it, but this was actually a good thing. The Ryuuken/Masaki possibility got scrapped during EBTR - letting Masaki go was a post-fact liberating act for everyone involved, so I don’t think that Ryuuken got “stuck” in his feelings for Masaki. They grew up, life went on. 

But let’s dig for his and Kanae’s bond.

The nobility quincy nonsense makes it clear that Katagiri is a servant, but we have these indications that Ryuuken saw their rapport in a different light. When he talks about his mother and Masaki, he seems to confide in her - something that his character would not do if she was, in fact, “just a servant”. On the fateful events, one could say that he told her to follow him when he went after Masaki because it was her duty; but Ryuuken knew Masaki was breaking the rules. It would have been wiser to a) just send someone - Katagiri alone, for instance - but Masaki would suffer the consequences for it, or b) go by himself, that way he would guarantee to be the only one to know about it. Yet he takes Katagiri, and he is certain she will “follow his order” because he is trusting her, and this is my impression of it, but he trusts her in a more intimate manner than just duty-bound procedures. I say this because of *this* reaction:

He could have yelled at her, he could have just trapped her with the arm next to her, but he pins her wrist with his hand against the wall (I mean... come on!!... anyhow, I have come to over focus on hands, blame Kubo for his narrative style)  -- and their clashing eye contact after is really more than a master-servant relationship, methinks. Later that night, Ryuuken may try to deflect it and re-center them around formalities, but Kanae refuses to do so and exposes her feelings. Now, even though his “that’s enough” does seem cold, it seems to me that part of him, the part that tells her “let’s come back home” is actually accepting a) Kanae’s feelings, and b) his own (late) confirmation that this person right there is not just another formality, that the trust he built around her so far was not just based on quincy-duties, but on genuine affection. 

Onto speculation now, but there is another issue: Katagiri is considered “inferior”. From what we gathered so far about his family, it feels safe to assume his mother and/or other authorities (?) were not fond of the idea of her marrying into the Ishida family. Ryuuken probably went through some trouble to solidify their relationship, and I don’t think he would have done it if his heart wasn’t fully in it. 

Kanae was probably one of the very few bonds (a heart, if you will) that Ryuuken managed to build, and when she is taken from him, he looses it in a very Ryuuken fashion - which traumatizes his son on the process, not only because of the autopsy, but because of the entire aftermath. Ryuuken was probably confirming that her death did happen due to Ywach (and there is a major TYBW spoiler as to what else he finds in there), due to being a Quincy, and as if this wasn’t enough to crush him, it informs him that their son is bound for trouble in the future if he follows down the Quincy road, so Ryuuken closes himself off.

The anime showed a frame of Kanae holding Uryu (thank you SP for the heartbreak, by the way) when Isshin is telling Ichigo about her death, but the original shot was Ryuuken facing the window and a small frame of solo-Kanae. Because of the contrast of Isshin over-the-top picture of Masaki in the living room and him constantly bringing her up, it can be easy to think that Ryuuken and Kanae’s relationship was not as “loving” as Isshin and Masaki. But I don’t think that is true - these are two very different couples. Isshin and Ryuuken are two very different men, and Masaki and Kanae are two very different women, but both of them understand their respective partners and their deflection strategies - humor and aloofness -, embrace their love as they come, and build their own affection spaces, each on their own way. 

Ryuuken’s mind might have been troubled by resentment, anxiety and fears over the course of his life, but as far as his relationship with Kanae is concerned, I like to think that there was a beautiful heart right there, that he did love her as well as his emotionally troubled self could, and that amidst all his angst, he was actually happy -- even if Kubo won’t let us see that. 

[deathoftheamericandream]

In your opinion, what is the American Dream (asked by an Australian)

I'm so sorry it took me a decade to answer this ask, my concept of time is....not great. In apology, have me weirdly over answering a simple question lol

The American Dream is an ever evolving being to me. Being raised in the late 90s/2000s in a military family meant I used to have a very positive view of America.

It was the land of plenty, where anyone could be anything if they just worked hard enough. If you're poor, don't worry, you can just bust your ass and make something of yourself in a comfortable tax bracket. If you've had a bad life, just move away and completely start over to make a better one. Easy peasy, life is what you make of it, no matter what cards you were dealt. After all, we did it, so why can't everyone else?

But as I've gotten older and my eyes have opened more to the world, I've seen that that America isn't here anymore. It's aged with me. Not always positively.

The glimmer of hope and success with perseverance has dulled. The edges of our iron institution are rusting, just like the old cars we abandon on the side of the roads. There isn't as much laughter or love. People are out here fighting to survive, but not being able to claw up the ranks like they used to. The homelessness epidemic is soaring because housing is unaffordable. Hell, minimum wage workers can't even afford the food they're cooking.

So as I see the world in a darker light, the past starts to become a little bit brighter. It still shows the grime that the present does, but it's blanketed by nostalgia in a way that makes the heartache for a time when we were younger and life felt so much easier

We can't go back to those days, but we can honor them as we move forward in trying to fix the mess we have created. So that maybe someday our children, and their children, and all down the line can hopefully experience a better world

So TLDR; to me, the American Dream is a hope. A hope that we can fix the problems currently plaguing our country and become what we were always supposed to be. A place where people could come and be welcomed with open arms and help, no matter who they are or where theyre from

[hecksupremechips]

Time for me to be completely changed as a person! *just watched falsettos*