#WILL FOREVER BE MAD ABOUT IT

[seoafin]

omg a fellow bachira stan!! <333 !!!! also i cant help but think that bachira and violinist!mc could be besties if they met before blue lock happen,, sth sth abt the mutual understanding of the loneliness when chasing after the hobby/ passion that u may be the only one to understand the full extent of your love for it bc when telling other ppl they'll go was it that serious? unless u meet someone who gets it, like bachisagi

will we get more info on the person who won 1st place in the future chapters tho? if the person and violinist!mc are in the same prefecture until the end of their highschool years, wont they run into each other during competition season?

nagi and gojo...190 cm men with white hair and a lil deranged...if one more guy with this criteria exist and u happen to dislike him well hfgfbkfhbvkf

also i saw that you're catching up to sakamoto days?!?!?! i'm so!!!!! the sakamoto, nagumo, rion + uzuki group makes me so aughhh wdyt even happen for uzuki to just flipped and why rion is [redacted] - 🐱

no bc bachira and violinmc would actually get along so well change my mind!!!! bachira would definitely help her loosen up lmfao she's way too wound up tightly (pun intended). i actually think barou and violin!mc would get along wayyy too well for nagi's liking (barou appreciates classical music. i know this. he listens to classical music while he works out and he understands #the grind)

as for the person who won first place i actually envisioned that he actually got bored of playing and quit LMAO but who's to say he won't make an appearance later <333

HELP I DON'T HATE NAGI!!!! 😭😭😭 but...the similarities....are there (bad breakup included help).....also nagi being over 190cm is actually sending me though like why is he so tall he's like a tree 😭 he doesn't even look it bc he's slouching half the time too LMAO

spoilers for sakamoto days below!

i definitely think uzuki had something to do with rion's death like they were paired up together for a reason during their mission and i think it was more than just to show their conflicting ideologies revolving around taking a life!!!! i just think it's surprising how sakamoto didn't recognize uzuki!!! but then again idt hs sakamoto was rlly in the business of really caring since it's shown that he's much more apathetic than the current sakamoto we know (character development we love to see it) but also im so fucking mad rion is the one the mangaka chose to kill off. she's such a bad bitch the narrative couldn't handle her. but also misogyny. like what the hell 😭

[angel-fruitcake]

[xxplastic-cubexx]

personal happiness or what the fuck ever

bonus:

[mimimar]

i've been completely charmed by witch hat atelier♡

(art prints)

[httpiastri]

i'm actually so pissed that i don't even know where to start..... i've been trying to ignore this for hours but i just can't ☹️

dear everyone on f1blr, i kindly ask you to take franco's name out of your mouth if you don't know him. do not talk about his story if you don't know it. do not call him a pay driver, do not compare him to drivers whose dads are the owners of an f1 team. do not talk shit about him if it's all going to be made-up rumors.

you may hate james vowles as much as you wish to, i don't give a fuck. williams are doing some real random and stupid shit. but is any of this franco's fault? no!! if you'd actually seen him and taken more than 5 minutes trying to learn about him, you'd see how sweet of a person he is and how much he deserves this opportunity, so don't go around spreading lies about it.

[karvviie]

(opening my 10k word document of mainewash AU content) welcome to my twisted mind…

[blueskittlesart]

not to bring up arcane again but i’m beginning to get deeply annoyed by jayvik not because it’s bad but because it’s actually that good. this was not supposed to be your fucking show

[spop-romanticizes-abuse]

bro. he had MAIN CHARACTER energy. not saying he had to be the main character but it's absurd how the writers made such an insanely skilled character with a powerset that is so insanely versatile and expansive (you're saying he can make ANY kind of illusions, look into a person's worst memories and also torture them by forcing them to relive their worst memories??) and then were like "nah he's the black best friend, he's just there for emotional support ?? like ???

[justvea18]

Wip that I don't like so take it off my hands

[seasononesam]

Fandom always takes Sam talking about Stanford as him being an elitist class traitor snob but tbh if I only got to college after zero encouragement from my father, studying for the SAT in the back of a moving vehicle, moving high schools 40 times and then when I got a full ride was immediately kicked out bc my dad is obsessed with revenge on a demon I would also be annoying about school. I would probably be even worse.

[mamawasatesttube]

the timkon fans who shit on bart are annoying, the konbart fans who shit on tim are annoying, and i don't actually know if there are timbart fans who shit on kon, but i sure hope not, because they'd be annoying. the three of them are a set!!! do NOT separate. red tornado literally assigned them one shared brain cell. what is not clickign

[tarysande]

Mass Effect 2: The Case for the Heroine's Journey

I have a theory. And I think it's something others--especially other storytellers--might find interesting. It explains why some people absolutely adore Mass Effect 2 while others (not as many, in my experience!) think dealing with all the companions and their personal quests is boring or irrelevant.

What it boils down to is the difference between the Hero's Journey and the Heroine's Journey. There a couple of takes on the Heroine's Journey (ranging from more philosophical and psychoanalytical to more story-based), and I'm going to be pulling hard from the story-based iteration, which author Gail Carriger has written a fabulous book about. I highly recommend it.

One thing I want to mention right off the bat: the gender, sex, or sexuality of your protagonist has nothing to do with whether they're a hero or a heroine.

Everyone and their dog knows the Hero's Journey. A literal ton of writing advice refers to the Hero's Journey as if it's the be-all and end-all of narrative (thanks Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Christopher Vogler); it ain't called the monomyth for nothing.

But if a part of you grits your teeth every time it gets trotted out as The One Right Way to tell a story that sells or a story people love, you may have your mind blown by the concept of the Heroine's Journey. Every single one of you who tingles with excitement at the very thought of found family (or romance, for that matter)? Yeah, strap in, we're going for a ride.

I don't want to go into a lot of detail about the Hero's Journey; it's everywhere. You know it even if you don't realize you know it. So for brevity's sake, I'll give you wikipedia's one-sentence description: a hero goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed. Luke Skywalker. Everyone always talks about Luke Skywalker. And on the surface, Mass Effect could seem like a Hero's Journey, right?

According to Gail, a Hero's Journey boils down to

A repeated pattern of withdrawal and return, and those withdrawals are voluntary, as voluntary withdrawal and increased isolation yields self-reliant strength.

Victory is in isolation and asking for help is bad.

But looking at it (especially ME2) through the lens of the Heroine's Journey is where it gets interesting.

This is the infographic Gail created and supplies on her website:

In her book, Gail notes that not every element has to be present to qualify a story as a Hero/Heroine's Journey and the events don't have to happen specifically in this order.

In the Heroine's Journey

The heroine's withdrawal is involuntary; something is broken and she must abdicate the power she had in order to rebuild, retrieve, or reunite with what was taken or broken.

Victory is a group effort; asking for help is a sign of strength; and the protagonist realizes that while she can't do everything herself, she has surrounded herself with people whose skills she can effectively deploy.

In the Heroine's Journey, the DESCENT is involuntary. Something is done to her or taken from her, and it breaks her familial network.

In ME2, obviously, uh, the thing that's taken from Shepard is her own life. Of course, instead of that being the end of the story, it's the inciting incident that leads to the involuntary withdrawal from her found family on the Normandy, her connection to the Alliance, and her Spectre status. Her home is literally destroyed. And then, kinda hilariously, she wakes up in the literal underworld. You know. Cerberus, dog that guards the gates of Hades?

I play a very Paragon Shepard and haven't played Renegade, so I can't speak to that. However, I can tell you that my Paragon Shep wakes up working for Cerberus and promptly proceeds to gain more Renegade points in the first couple of missions--hell, the first couple of conversations with Miranda, Jacob, and TIM--than she got in all of ME1.

Jacob: Do you trust me, Shepard? Shepard: NO, omg.

I've probably played ME2 five or six times with this Shepard, and she always strikes me as a bit off, a bit manic even, until she sees Tali. And she doesn't really start to settle or feel like herself until Archangel takes off his helmet, believes she is who she says she is, and without hesitation agrees to follow her into hell.

(As the protagonist in his own story, Garrus is also a heroine on a Heroine's Journey, by the by. Shepard's death breaks his network; C-Sec and the Council's denial of the Reapers leads to his abdication of power in the hunt for justice. His underworld is Omega. He puts together a surrogate family to fight injustice; he learns to delegate; he doesn't do it for glory... And then Sidonis's betrayal breaks the new family and sends him on another cycle. My theory, however, is that if you let him kill Sidonis, his journey takes on the revenge aspect of a Hero's Journey instead of the family and reunification structure of a Heroine's Journey.)

In ME2, the arc of recruiting an ally, earning their loyalty, and deploying their suggestions to improve the entire team's chances of survival is repeated over and over; this is the SEARCH of the cycle. And anyone who's ever tried to race their way through ME2 without doing all those loyalty missions or without scanning all those planets for resources finds out pretty quick why they're important.

So, while you potentially could race through ME1 without even recruiting several teammates (did you even know you can play that game without recruiting Garrus???), thereby making it much more of a Hero's Journey of the Strength of the Individual, you really can't do that in ME2 without massive casualties. You need the people around you. You need to build relationships. And you need to learn to delegate well, or things will absolutely fall apart during the end run.

Even the stated mission of ME2 is more Heroine's Journey. You're not fighting for glory; in fact, most of the people who used to be in awe of you now think you're a crazy terrorist. You're fighting to stop what's happening to human colonists.

The end run is so satisfying specifically because it leans in to the Heroine's Journey of information gathering and network building. You cannot beat the game as a solitary soldier. You cannot achieve a good outcome--minimal deaths, etc.--without having spent a lot of time and effort gaining the loyalty of your crew and then knowing how to deploy them to best serve the whole team.

ME2 is a story about finding and building a family after the last one is broken.

And though it's a whole other can of worms, I actually think the reason why the ending of ME3 was ultimately so unsatisfying for so many (again, not all) is because the majority of the game is once again a Heroine's Journey--team building and information gathering across the galaxy--but the endgame pulls the expected narrative out from under you. Instead of actually using the resources you've so carefully built, you're quite literally beamed up into complete isolation (weakness) and left to make a choice in isolation. It breaks the narrative promise that's been set up since the beginning of the game. And, whether you realize it or not, that's a huge part of why that lonely choice feels so hollow. Instead of a structured reunion and a rebuilt network, it's actually the broken family and involuntary descent that heralds the beginning of a new Heroine's Journey--not the the end of a successful one.

Also, incidentally? It's Heroine's Journeys that usually get satisfying instead of distracting-the-hero-from-his-real-mission romance, banter, fully realized side characters, and humor.

[cowleyes]

👨‍❤️‍💋‍👨

[blenselche]

rewatching furuba. I rly love Akito as this god who prays to her own false idol.

She probably had a fair few SH spells after the ending, it's easy to imagine her trying to scream Tohru out of the hospital room but yk it wouldn't work.

[hoofpeet]

Being transmasc is kinda cool but also the horrors

[drusill-a]

[WWDitS finale spoilers]

Aside from the obvious – the gross shipbaiting and mocking naive viewers who dared to believe an m/m dynamic could be treated as anything other than the butt of the joke – my biggest issue with the WWDitS finale is that it’s an ending that could have made sense… but at most after s2. Back then, we were still watching a story about characters who didn’t share any particular bonds (except for Nadja/Laszlo) and who were entirely static, unaffected by the things they experienced.

The thing is, the creators themselves realized you can’t build a long-running story on that formula – eventually, the characters had to evolve at least a little, and their relationships had to deepen so viewers would have any reason to root for them. And so Guillermo’s position in the group began to change – first, he earned their minimal respect, then a very solid place, until finally, in season 5, all the other characters had reached a point where they didn’t even hide that they genuinely cared about him a lot. The same happened with Colin, who at first was completely left out by the other housemates but gradually earned an equal spot in the group and developed that stupid yet sweet bond with Laszlo (erasing those memories was, imo, one of the writers’ biggest mistakes). Laszlo showed himself capable of empathy, which he proved again in s5 by helping Guillermo, and even Nadja, who used to completely disregard everyone’s feelings, had several moments in later seasons where she openly cared – at least in her own way –  about the others.

And of course, that’s how we got the romantic subtext between Guillermo and Nandor. Over all those seasons – from s3 up until s6 – I was certain it was a classic will they, won’t they dynamic that would end with them getting together. I just couldn’t believe the writers would spend the last 4 seasons making their relationship more equal and showing Nandor’s journey to realizing Guillermo genuinely mattered to him, only to do nothing with it – or worse, regress them back by three seasons. But the late s6 Nandor’s “no homo” attitude has very little in common with the Nandor from seasons 4 and 5, who was openly pining and lusting after Guillermo.

From Guillermo’s perspective, this ending is an absolute tragedy – even the end of the previous episode gave him much more hope. Maybe he’d lost his lifelong dream and still hadn’t found a new purpose, but he had found a family and a place in the world, with a potential chance to build something meaningful with Nandor in the future. I don’t understand why this episode had to undo all of that – to show us that none of his friends really listen to him, that the power dynamic with Nandor will always be uneven, and that ultimately he wasted 16 years, and no one would really care that much if he left. Considering how great Guillermo’s development was, especially in gaining confidence from s4 onward, this ending feels so unfair and insulting to his character.

I feel like the writers’ biggest mistakes have been forcing a return to the status quo after every season. After the breakup in s3, the characters should have stayed apart for at least an episode or two. Colin should have remembered that Laszlo raised him, and they should’ve kept their funny, fucked-up father-son relationship until the end of the show. Guillermo should’ve been a real vampire for at least a full season—or, in my opinion, permanently—because, as it turns out, the writers had absolutely no idea what to do with his character once he lost that goal. Relationships that had evolved shouldn’t be randomly reset by a couple of seasons just because the writers couldn’t be bothered to put in the effort to write anything new for them.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too – if the writers were so dead-set on giving us an  ending that says “nothing in these characters’ lives matters, and nothing will ever change,” they should have made the show half as long and spared viewers the trouble of getting invested in character and relationship arcs that ultimately went nowhere.

This is a comedy show that was supposed to make people feel better. After this finale, I feel mocked by the creators for believing that the queer ship they sold me for 4 seasons had a chance of being treated equally to an m/f ship. I’m also sad because the characters were regressed and left stuck in eternal limbo, and generally I feel ridiculed because the writers openly made fun of us for getting emotionally invested in the story they wrote for us.

And maybe the biggest crime of these last few episodes was that they weren’t even remotely funny—so you can’t even say they prioritized comedy over character development, because it failed on that front too.