#a mothERFUCKING B???

[gotta-bail-my-quails]

the curse of confidence strikes again

[write-it-motherfuckers]

Person A: "How can you not know that you're dating a fucking deity?!"

Person B: "...I mean, to be fair, before the accident they never really acted like a deity around me. Our life together had been mostly domestic and sappy up until that point."

Person A: "And now?"

Person B: "...Honestly, it's still pretty domestic and sappy, they just don't bother hiding their inhuman nature around me anymore."

[mel-kusanagi]

n side

inspired by this genius tweet

part two of this post

[amethyst-halo]

hey bruce? the mermaid is back

[black-eco-sage]

~~Judgement >:/ ~~

WIP feat. Dark Giant!Jak

[recurring-polynya]

a cool thing about writing bleach fanfic is that i have read certain parts of the canon so many times that i feel like i know it really well and then i'll realize there's something i have absolutely no clue about. today's example: in the wake of Ichigo storming Soul Society, how widespread was the knowledge that Urahara had been assisting him?

Aizen knew, obvs, for Aizen reasons, but some of the stuff he mentions, like Urahara's known base of operations being in West Rukongai-> the involvement of known Urahara associates Shiba Kuukaku and Shihouin Yoruichi and other clues probably had a number of characters such as Yamamoto, Ukitake, Kyouraku, Unohana suspicious. I feel like Soi Fon and Kurotsuchi could easily have put it together as well, but I did not get that vibe from them so either they didn't or they were just too distracted or in Kurotsuchi's case, he probably did put it together and just didn't care (or pretended not to care)

When the captains finally show up in Hueco Mundo, we learn that Urahara had been working with the Gotei for some time so obviously his involvement has been known at some high enough level of security clearance.

Did Byakuya ever officially report the fact that Ichigo Hollowified right in front of him, which may not have meant much to him, but probably would have been a big tip-off to Yams. On one hand, it does not feel very Byakuya of him to leave something like that out of a report, but on the other hand, I really feel like he just kept it to himself.

Would Rukia have mentioned Urahara in her debriefings after she was arrested? On one hand, I do not think she understood who Urahara was and would not have thought much of mentioning him. On the other hand, Rukia is a "snitches get stitches" type to the marrow of her bones and I feel like she would have intentionally wiped any mention of him from her narrative 99% on principle and 1% for the purposes of protecting Ichigo

If I were banished from Soul Society and hiding out in the Living World, I would use an assumed name, probably all the time, but AT VERY LEAST for the case of interacting with active-duty shinigami. The only person who actually did this was Isshin and I honestly believe he just changed his name for wife-guy reasons.

Ichigo did, very much, straight up tell Ikkaku that Urahara taught him to fight and it was quite clear that Ikkaku was fully aware of who Urahara was. Did Ikkaku tell anyone this or otherwise do anything with this information? I feel like he did not.

Does Ikkaku have a security clearance???????

I would not give Ikkaku a security clearance

If I were going 100% by the manga, I would assume that Yoruichi ghosted after they failed to arrest Aizen, given that she's still very much banished, but in Honey Dish Rhapsody, she apparently hung around with Soi Fon for a while. Is it possible that she had some meetings with the Gotei higher ups in the interests of re-establishing a relationship/working on getting the banishment reversed? My heart wants to say no, but Yoruichi often makes herself freely available to the Gotei in filler arcs, so who knows?

When the Advance Team first goes to the Living World, Renji goes to stay at Urahara's in the interest of "asking" Urahara why he put the hogyoku in Rukia (I assume "asking" is a euphemism for breaking his nose). I feel like this could be the natural follow-on to the idea that Renji just got handed a file of classified info related to this mission and is freshly Hot Mad at this dude he didn't know existed up until now.

Presumably, Rukia also could have given Renji a more detailed version of her time in Karakura in a non-official capacity

Presumably also, the Karakura kids could have gone around telling anyone who would listen about their Mysterious Shop Keeper Friend

I think the answer I'm leaning towards is that the Gotei higher-ups knew about Urahara's involvement and re-established communication with him, possibly in an obfuscated way so as not to run into trouble with Central 46 (fairly easy to do, since they were dead at the time). It's a pretty poorly kept secret, but on the other hand, Gotei op-sec seems to lean pretty heavily on the assumption that people who accidentally learn state secrets don't know what they are looking at and will most likely forget it in a day or two anyway.

[eavangeek]

AYYYYYYYYY I finally finished it

[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.

[welcometogrouchland]

Batman #149 by chip zdarsky is mostly unremarkable, but I'm really fascinated by how it makes a great case for 'good' endings not saving 'bad' stories*. Because there's a lot of interesting concepts in this issue (bruce having to deal with his rapidly aging and decaying clone making him think about his own life, re-establishing a 'nest' so to speak for his family after pushing them away, etc) but bc of the OOC slog that came before it, almost every moment w/ the batfamily comes off as unearned and disingenuous imo.

Like, everything with Damian is the perfect example in this. Because in isolation it's...fine. admittedly it's a missed opportunity to not go deeper into how Damian would feel about a clone of his dad who tried to kill considering Damian's relationships with clones of himself (the heretic rejects and respawn) or with former enemies who wanted him dead but who were manipulated and/or brainwashed (like suren and maya).

Zdarsky doesn't go into any of this but you could maybe excuse it as the issue not being about Damian. However, coupled with the previous bizarre characterizations of Damian in 147 and 148, it ends up not being fine- instead it starts to feel...icky how Damian (who, despite often being drawn and written as white, will never have his connection to the non-white al ghuls forgotten and will always be effected by racism even when not portrayed as a poc) is constantly written as overly violent, uncaring and narrow minded in this run. Coupled w/ trying to recanonize the morrison origin for Damian it's like. OH this is badly written and laden with subtle bigotry, sick**

That's me going into detail on it with Damian but it's applicable to other things in this issue- the way Cass, Steph and Duke have all been ignored or turned into jobbers makes their inclusion in the 'family' here feel hollow instead of satisfying. Bruce proclaiming that Zur was still a part of him and he needs to accept responsibility for his actions (when it means taking in clone son) wrings hollow when just last issue zdarsky was bending over backwards to separate Bruce and Zur bc otherwise the Jason thing would get really awkward. Ends are achieved through means that feel hollow or strange. I'm at my destination but damn why'd the bus have to do all that???

I only really have opinions on this latest arc of zdarskys Batman bc it's the one I've read the closest (bc I'm a hater, masochist and avid follower of even the bad damian storylines) but it's not saying great things.

Bc zdarsky can do one thing good in this book, and it's write Bruce and Tim. And yet this entire story, whether of his own volition or editorial mandate, includes other characters who aren't Bruce and Tim, the fabric starts to unravel in very telling ways.

(p.s, I think pennyworth manor is an interesting idea but I feel like in execution it's just gonna be 'bruce living in a house haunted by the memory of the people he couldn't save' but with a different dead guy this time. Illusion of change and whatnot)

*whether or not the ending is good is up to you ofc, as is your opinion on the proceeding arc! I saw some ppl complain that the ending was too "WFA" for them, which I get even if I dont think it'll literally be the same premise. If anything it's probably a lead into the new tec run. Likewise many ppl who aren't in the weeds of Damian and Jason characterization liked the previous arc! But I have my opinions and rest my case before the bench

**disclaimer, I'm white and portrayals of bigotry in comics are complicated and subjective, but I am basing my point here off what other poc comic fans on socmed have been saying about 149. Also the "sick" is sarcasm incase that wasn't obvious

[leupagus]

A whole day later and I'm still thinking about the person who decided that Dragon Age: The Veilguard is badly written because they found a codex that references the book club that the companions started.

Because they thought it was unrealistic that anyone at the Lighthouse would ever have time to read books, much less have a book club.

ETA all this to say I am in my “block people clogging up the tags with negativity” phase of getting back into Dragon Age fandom.

[alicentsgf]

the most entertaining thing abt house of the dragon is peoples ability to be so mean to each other about a show with absolutely no depth whatsoever. this fanbase is just adults staging a naval battle in a padding pool.

[write-it-motherfuckers]

Person A: "Are you... flirting with me?"

Person B: "Gods no! What on earth gave you that idea?"

Person A: "I mean... Have you heard yourself talk?"

[portraitofalinkonfyre]

Wind watching all these men flirt and fail at it going “???? What is wrong with y’all???? It’s pretty cringe”

This is exactly how I imagined it! Wind is like that the boy from The Princess Bride b/c he just wants to experience an adventure while everyone is collectively losing their braincells (and virginity) to Reader in the background.

[ivy475]

[cringefail-clown]

I think you should make Gamzee the manager but no one knows thats his role until one day Calliope mentions it and they're like "wait what? We have a manager?" because he tends to just be in the back taking care of the pastries/food

that is terrible i love it im doing it

[beatlesforsale]

+†+ When it hits it hits so fucking good .+†+