#Who is audience?

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

Glinda really had an entire musical number expounding on the theme of "success in life is not about being highly qualified or even competent, but manipulating people's superficial perception of you." and then she went into POLITICS. truly the #girlboss representation the world has earned

[tpwrtrmnky]

hindsight

[ID: A two-panel comic with crudely drawn stick figures.

Panel 1: The lime green person is talking to the leaf green person and the moss green person.

Lime: "I... have a confession to make."

Leaf: "Go ahead."

Lime: "I want to rewatch the Wizard Child movies."

Leaf: "Didn't the wizard author get incredibly chromophobic?"

Lime: "Yeah I just... It's nostalgia you know? They meant a lot to me when I was a kid."

Panel 2: The three are on the couch.

Lime: "All right, let's go."

Leaf: "It's so weird how the wizard author just turned chromophobic though. Like I remember this series being pretty good for its time. It'll be weird seeing their work contrasting with their views now."

Moss: "I'm just glad we got the movies for free through normal and legal means. Heh."

End ID.]

[ID 2: Scenes from three Wizard Child movies.

Wizard Child and the Simplistic Morality: A slightly round child with a propeller hat is talking to a child with no hat.

Round child: "I am so fucking fat and greedy I am textually shown to be fat because I am greedy and also evil."

Hatless child: "You are to infer my moral purity from juxtaposition with this fat child. Woe is me for our shared parent has deprived me of a propeller hat."

Wizard Child and the Goodness of Wealth: An adult wizard is talking to the child, who now has a wizard hat.

Wizard Adult: "Wizard child you are secretly extremely rich."

Wizard Child: "I will form biases regarding the bankers all being triangular for some reason!"

Wizard Adult: "Your wealth is deserved because your true parent was Good and therefore you are also Good."

Wizard Child: "Now we should acquire consumer goods. Buy consumer goods!"

Wizard Child and the Dark Family History: A blue-grey horse person is talking to the wizard child.

Blue-grey: "No, wizard child. You don't understand. I am one of the good ones, because unlike the bad ones I don't try to spread my curse that makes you a blue-grey horselike creature to others!"

Wizard child: "Wow uncle blue-grey you are one of the good ones! I forgive you for being a horse because I am so good I would even forgive horses. I sure hope you don't conspicuously get killed off later in this movie!"

End ID 2.]

[ID 3: Oh hell no there are even more of these.

Wizard Youth and the Tokenistic Relationship Dynamics: A square headed wizard youth is talking to the former wizard child, now a wizard youth.

Square Wizard Youth: "Wizard child, as the only person with a square head in this entire series it is my duty to inform you that you are the savior of all people with square heads, too. Let us build a one-sided relationship that only furthers your character development, after which I will immediately lose all plot relevance."

Wizard Youth: "I will do this because I am a maturing wizard youth and need disposable relationships that don't threaten the endgame!"

Wizard Youth and the Escalation of Stakes: The Dark Wizard, a sort of grey-green person with a cloak, is pointing at Wizard Youth.

Dark Wizard: "Wizard Youth, I have returned!"

Wizard Youth: "Dark Wizard! Why are you green now?"

Dark Wizard: "Evil magic made me green! I am green with envy towards all who are good!"

Wizard Youth: "I will not engage with how you are clearly based on fascist ideologies and yet this narrative plays into fascist aesthetic sensibilities!"

Wizard Youth and the Post-Hoc Revelations: The Wizard Youth is leaning over their Wizard Mentor, who is laying in a pool of blood.

Wizard Youth: "Wizard Mentor no! You can't die!"

Wizard Mentor: "It is fine, wizard youth. My death will further your character development into a wizard adult. Also, I was secretly a very very dark purple this entire time. I never brought it up so I could retain narrative approval.

End ID 3.]

[ID 4: Wizard Adult and the Overdue Conclusion. Three panels. I am sorry.

Panel 1: The dark wizard is dueling the Wizard Adult with magic beams.

Dark Wizard: "Evil green beam!"

Wizard Adult: "Good red beam! Despite the enormous variety of magic in this series this is what our final battle looks like!"

Panel 2: Wizard Adult stands victorious over the dark wizard, who is dying on the ground.

Wizard Adult: "In the end, dark wizard, you were defeated because I am morally superior to you."

Dark Wizard: "I was a product of systemic failures. There will be someone like me again someday!"

Panel 3: Zoom in on wizard adult, who says:

"Not if I can help it. Because I am going to be a wizard cop now. The moral of this story is that all systemic issues can be solved by finding a bad guy to beat."

End ID 4.]

[ID 5: Four panels.

Panel 1: Return to the green trio on their couch, watching the TV say "The End." All are are silent.

Panel 2: They are sitting on the couch. Moss is looking at their phone.

Lime: "Yeah so there were maybe a few signs we missed because we were children."

Leaf: "Yeah. A few. Some."

Panel 3: Continue conversation.

Lime: "So what did you think, Moss?"

Panel 4: Zoom in on Moss, who says: "I've been zoned out on my phone since the second movie. They lost me at the magic stuff. Wizards aren't real."

End ID 5.]

Start - Previous - Next

[noperopesaredope]

I wish we had more female characters like Eleanor Shellstrop. One of the most unlikable people you've ever met. Read a Buzzfeed article on most rude things you can do on a daily basis and decided to use that as a list of goals. Makes everyone's day worse just by being there. Dropped a margarita mix on the ground and tried to pick it up, only to get hit by a row of shopping carts which pushed her into the road where she was hit by a boner pill delivery truck, killing her instantly. Cannot keep a romantic partner despite being bisexual. Had a terrible childhood but will die before she gets therapy. Best employee at a scam company. Just the worst but also can't help but root for her to improve.

Absolute loser. Girl-failure. Bad at almost everything. Literally perfect female character.

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[nipuni]

the snake of eden 🥰

[dragonomatopoeia]

i'm always a bit unsettled by disdain for intellectual or creative labor in leftist spaces. there's this commonly held belief that academics are a bunch of rich old white men, rather than a wide variety of people who are barely getting by. most lecturers in universities are adjuncts living paycheck to paycheck. authors make very little money as a general rule. most researchers are overworked and underpaid. and yet there's still this idea that academics are overcompensated to sit around and smoke cigars together while making shit up

[brainrotcharacters]

TW: Wolverine Badonkas

I laughed rewatching because like

[starridge]

doodling sans while on an undertale kick

[corantus]

those feratu ??????

[sparrowlucero]

dr who is (apparently) redesigning this turtle from the classic series to be just a green human elf lady instead and twitter is eating it up because "no one would take the show seriously otherwise" and "the audience isn't able to empathize with something that doesn't look human". another fascinating data point in the psychology of doctor who fans.

[eldritchsquared]

THAT IS ONE OF THE FUNNIEST FUCKING THINGS I’VE EVER SEEN OH MY GODDDDDD

[maxx-the-queer]

Idk how others in the fandom feel about this, but to me, Isabela's presence in Veilguard is frankly bizarre.

Isabela has wildly different endings in DA2, depending on Hawke's decisions and relationship with her. If you didn't form enough of a friendship or rivalry with her, she fucks off with the Tome of Koslun and never comes back. If Hawke decides not to defend her, she gets given up to the Arishok and Qunari. (It is implied she escapes regardless, but that's still a pretty significant thing to brush aside!) If Hawke romances Isabela and follows through on her quests, they stay together at least semi-permanently (barring whatever happens to Hawke in Inquisition).

Except, when you meet her in the Lords of Fortune - she can never mention any of that. She doesn't explain her new philosophy around the finding of cultural artefacts and how her Tome of Koslun debacle shaped that. She can never mention Hawke in any capacity, which is especially weird if your Hawke romanced her.

She does makes comments like "Kirkwall taught me a lot about family 😌" which makes 0 sense if your Isabela absolutely hightailed it out of Kirkwall or got thrown to the Qunari. What was the lesson she learnt, exactly? "I was right the whole time, fuck emotional vulnerability and fuck caring about anyone else?"

She's also one of the few characters who make an appearance other than the Inquisitor and Harding who has a close connection to Varric from previous games. You're telling me she has absolutely nothing to say about his death?

Her return strips her of any complexity and sidelines any of her past relationships because Veilguard just completely refuses to engage meaningfully with the stories before it.

[vulpinesaint]

quiz enjoyers! i am now inviting you to come create something in my workshop❕

[thedreadvampy]

people seriously pretending EEAAO is overrated suddenly bc it swept awards? it swept awards largely because it is very very very good. I cried like someone who's just had a religious revelation BOTH times I watched it bc it touched something raw and real and beautiful but it was also just very, very funny. everyone's performance kills and the concept is creative and interesting and doesn't distract from the emotional core. you guys are just contrarian.

[umblrspectrum]

3 years of this godforsaken show

[hauntoblogical]

I have seen three different "how much of this site is queer" polls this evening poking fun at staff's 1/4 assertion and not a single indication any of them understand statistics. One someone even replied "This might have some sampling bias" what do you mean might what do you mean SOME