#aged badly

[redsrandomrants]

Let Me Tell You Why Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog Has Aged Badly

With the current writing strike going on I remembered how good this was and hoped this strike will produce a sequel but… man, this aged badly. When I was a teenager and I first saw it I loved it, I loved that dichotomy and harmony of My Eyes and I thought Billy was sympathetic and his fall tragic. Um yeah, that’s not the case anymore. 

Billy gives off major incel vibes. He stalks this girl, doesn’t know a thing about her, and the things he finds out he doesn’t like but lies to her and pretends he does literally to get in her pants. He scoffs at the things she's passionate about, creeps on her dates with Hammer, says the actual line “Penny doesn’t seem to care that soon the dark in me is all that will remain” as if it’s Penny’s concern what he does with his life. She doesn’t even know him; she bumped on him on the street once, he was a dismissive ass about her petition, and that’s it. They’ve had ONE conversation that lasted two minutes, and she’s supposed to care about this rude stranger? What I thought as a teen was really cool about their duet I now see as a woman living her best life and some creep trying to claim ownership of her. 

The emotional core of the story is the connection between Penny and Billy, and it’s just done very poorly. Why does he care about her? He doesn’t know her. She looks pretty and that’s it. Penny is the epitome of woman in the fridge trope, just someone who’s there for the men to fight over and dies to further a man’s development. What pushed Billy to murder is not that Hammer was treating Penny badly (he wasn’t) but that he’s gonna have sex with her and “take” what Billy wants. Forget the fact that Penny might want to sleep with the guy, what do the thoughts and feelings of the object matter, am I right. It’s not that Billy is sad Penny has feelings for Hammer and not him, no, no. It’s that she will be claimed by someone else, how dare we think it might be about Penny and what she feels.  In addition to that, the framing of Hammer is that he’s only doing the hero thing about the attention and he doesn’t really care, but does he? Sure he taunts Billy in the laundromat, but he didn’t date Penny just to spite him -- he started dating her before he knew that that they knew each other. Penny is “not his usual, but nice”, he discards the cue cards he could have easily just read from and talks about how Penny is helping him flex “the deltoids of compassion and the abs of being kind”. If we must have a story about a woman being emotional support and making a man better, why can’t it be about a guy who is already doing good for the wrong reasons and she helps him be a more fundamentally compassionate person? Why must it be about the incel who wants anarchy without even knowing what that is? “Anarchy! That I run! It's Dr. Horrible's turn!” — that’s not how that works, Billy.

The music is great, and all the actors are so charming, and I really think the third act works in isolation, but the relationships in the first and second are too toxic to build a good foundation to that. Maybe instead of Billy having a song about how he’s obsessing over a girl he’s never met, it could have been about this girl he does know and what he actually likes about her? Maybe instead of getting mad that Hammer is taking something that “he wants” he gets mad that Hammer is abusing her? Or like just any legit reason to get mad that’s about her and not his own feelings of inadequacy? Maybe instead of him lamenting that “Penny doesn’t seem to care” about a guy she doesn’t know, he laments how she seems to be falling for Hammer’s lies while he, let’s say, checks out other women on their dates? 

I know this was made in 2008 but man. It could really use a rewrite to make the core relationships a little stronger. 

[captainpirateface]

R.I.P. Forever bud.

[lgbtlunaverse]

There's a version of the "don't go grocery shopping while hungry" rule specifically for writers where you should never under any circumstances be allowed to touch your draft within 3 hours of reading a really good story. Because sometimes when you read something great your head goes "fuck this is so much better than my stuff I should make that more like THIS instead!" Look at me. That's the devil talking and you should close the document NOW.

[garsils]

Some Paella shenanigans. Rook was taking the picture

Based on this ancient Spanish meme:

[timethehobo]

Emmy being self-conscious of his age, and maybe even about how he looks. 🥺 Rook loves him anyway.

[sgrimp]

stall him huh

[drenched-in-sunlight]

i love the DLC man

[vaguely-concerned]

My two cents on how much of Mind!Varric is Rook’s mind trying to fill the blank space and how much is Solas actively talking through a convenient blood magic paper doll of the mind: I think it's a mix of both, a truly collaborative psychosocial horrorshow if you would, but waaaay more towards the second. It feels too directed and tactical at times to be anything else. Rook's mind is willing to go along with the denial phase as far as it can fucking carry them to not have to face the grief and regret and does its part in papering over details that don’t make any sense, the way brains will strive to create coherent meaning even out of deeply confusing input, but to my understanding it's a collaborateur in how that plays out, not the instigator or control center. Solas is using it as a path to agency and to gather insight into Rook as a person unguarded as he can't count on in his own guise. (That stoic option that leads to him being like 'oh I see you're cautiously denying me access to your inner life. well. at least you still have Varric to talk to. y'know as an outlet :)'. You absolute BITCH Solas! That alone convinced me that he HAS to have an active hand in it on some level.)

My guess is that it takes considerable effort on Solas’ part to make Mind!Varric do anything more involved or complicated than seeming to sit up in bed and give casual commentary, and that’s why he keeps having eerie five minute shallow pep talks with you before he announces he conveniently needs a nap aaanyway good luck kid you got this haha. When he’s just spouting NPC lines from his bedrest, I’m ready to believe that could be Rook’s mind being allowed to improv lines for him more freely because it’s less about Solas trying to get something out of them or working an angle and more ‘Still here! Still totally alive and fine and the mentor figure you know and love and trust :) don’t even worry about it! Thankfully there is no war in Ba Sing Sei, as we all know’ upkeep work lol. Rook’s mind is allowed to set the tone of Varric, the outlines, but not always the content. 

AND, on a (beautifully fucked up) character psychology level, I feel like Solas is indulging in actually getting to be the good supportive mentor figure to Rook with one hand to assuage the guilt he feels about what he's done -- and what he's going to do -- to them with the other. Same internal logic as he uses in Trespasser about the Qun. ‘Almost everyone is going to die from the course of action I’m doggedly pursuing eventually. But at least I can make their last years happier and freer and kinder than they would have been otherwise. and that kind of makes up for it right. a little bit. doesn't it. doesn't that make it better at least. I need that to make it better)'. Did I really take your beloved mentor and friend from you if you don’t know yet that I did? Some philosophers would argue not really! So it’s probably almost ok actually. Isn’t it even a little noble that I’m taking all this grief and guilt on myself and shielding you for now. With undertones that I’m not sure he would realize himself (and might be mortified by if he did) that he is so incredibly lonely, and even a dishonest and indirect emotional connection is more than nothing when you’re that desperate. In this setup he gets idk. Both the control he craves so incredibly badly in relationships and over himself, and the scraps, the fading afterimages, of intimacy and warmth and companionship, even second hand. The one thing Solas and Rook agree on deep deep down is that they really wish Varric weren't gone. They're handshake memeing this in the saddest and most creepy way possible.

I think an important element too is that Solas needs Rook and their team to *succeed* —  up to a certain point. He needs someone to hold the two other elven mean girls off until he can get out of here. Ideally, in a perfect world, even do all the hard work of killing them so he can swoop in at the end and do his thing when both sides are exhausted and out of resources to stop him, and then Bob’s your uncle! Same logic as he was using with Corypheus, and after that worked out so well, too! King of choosing to never learn from a single solitary mistake he’s ever made even though i fully believe he could have the capacity to Fen’Harel <3 The underlying idea isn’t flawed, you see, it was just unforeseen circumstances getting in the way. This time for sure it’ll all work out the way I cleverly imagined it in my head beforehand. Cue By Talos this can’t be happening etc. in the form of a statue almost crushing him like a bug. 

So he's providing guidance and forging Rook into a leader from two angles: one Rook might not trust, and one they probably will. Shaping them into what he needs slowly and carefully. He’s helping you hone your team into their most effective state, as he might have done with his own agents back in the day, setting up his chess pieces even if he has to squint through two glimpsed realities to do it haha. Pincer maneuver of an insidious stealth mentor you never asked for. Also… at one point mind Varric gives you a whole little monologue about how Solas' problem is that he’s always seen his interpersonal connections as flaws and see where it’s landed him, all alone and the worst part? it hasn’t even worked. it’s all been for nothing he’s back where he began with nothing to show for it but his mistakes. Like...that has such strong 'uh okay happy to play your therapist from two rooms away here what the fuck kind of traumadump is this' energy to me, I’m not sure Rook like. Thinks that much about Solas as a private person. So much of Solas' self-loathing and futile insights into his own flaws seem to shine through in Mind!Varric's dialogue all the time — I just can't believe that there's no guiding hand behind it as it were. 

Most of all. I feel like people underestimate the degree to which Solas is incredibly funny. As in, he has a very consistent and recognizable sense of humour. It’s one of my very favourite things about him. We must remember — it is crucial that we always keep in mind — Orlesian accent and wig Solas from May The Dread Wolf Take You (my beloved, the explanation for why I love this dude even with the. All of the everything else. No one does it quite like him). He is not at all above doing things or adding little flourishes for his own obscure amusement, in fact that seems to me to be one of his most consistent traits. The Randy Dowager Quarterly comment Varric has? The ‘Maybe this is the Dread Wolf’s revenge. Forcing us to house sit for him’ thing? To Me this is 100% Solas amusing himself in his boring Fade jail surrounded by the screaming hellscape of all his regrets. Source: it came to me as divine revelation through pure vibes trust me bro 

If nothing else I find it much more narratively interesting personally if the connection between Rook and Solas really is that defenselessly intimate and entwined (and so unbalanced!), and the sense of violation and invasion and betrayal afterwards consequently all the more nauseatingly intense. Even if you kept him at arm’s length in the open, he’s been under your skin the whole time, looking around, gathering what he needs to destroy you, wearing the face of a friend. Regretfully, probably, but choosing to do it every step of the way anyway. (Sound familiar, Inquisitor? Solas doesn’t have that many tricks when you actually look at it, he keeps returning to old tried and true ones like a dog with a bone haha.) Maybe he even genuinely meant some of it as mercy, which only makes it so much worse. It makes his sin against his own core principles of autonomy and the freedom of all beings in mind, spirit and body so much more juicily grave if it’s something he pursues actively and consistently, rather than it half-falling into his lap as a happy accident mainly orchestrated by Rook’s own subconscious. Solas, too, is at his very lowest point, the closest to giving in and becoming his own antithesis fully that he’s ever been, and it makes the choice of whether you still reach out your hand to him one last time or not all the more impactful and difficult.

[maripolifan]

If MHA was just a little sillier...

The biggest question left in the series unanswered (so far)... 

Who is Hisashi Midoriya? Who IS Izuku's father????

Ik I'm playing Russian roulette rn with how things are going in the manga lmao

Note:

Endeavor is here because Izuku being his secret love child is an actually funny theory (to me)

All Might is here because he's def hitting that

AFO thinks he's the top dog, but he is, at most, a clown

Mystery guy. Ignore him. Maybe he got lost on his way to the restroom?

[wardensantoineandevka]

the way Evka and Antoine immediately look at each other after getting chewed out by the First Warden is one of the funniest things to me

[fangsandfeels]

Playing Veilguard and making it everyone's problem

I am going to rant, and I will rant a lot, and there will be spoilers, so if you're not afraid of them and the game criticism, buckle up.

Elves and their gods

I am absolutely fucking livid about how Veilguard handles the Dalish and elves in general. The events of Trespasser made it clear that the elves started flocking over to Solas, including the elves working for the Inquisition:

After the events at the Winter Palace, elves left the Inquisition under mysterious circumstances, as did elven servants across Thedas. None could say where they went, but those who believed the Inquisitor's story about Fen'Harel wondered just how large the Dread Wolf's forces were... and what the ancient elven rebel had planned.

Solas had multiple spies working for him during Trespasser, and If I remember correctly, there was even a note, left by one of the elves - they were anticipating the great change and the return of the elven glory. Anyways, the established fact is that: elves learned that the stories about their gods were true and one of them now was going to restore the world as it used to be. At least, this is how they interpreted it (maybe, this is the version Solas didn't debunk) and so they started following him.

You might think, the Inquisitor and their allies are going to have a huge problem with breaking it to elves that their chosen leader isn't going to make things better and that their gods don't love them. Especially, if the Inquisitor is a human or anyone who isn't an elf. You'd imagine any attempts will end in failure because of course elves aren't going to listen to outsiders trying to explain their own culture and gods to them. You'd imagine that their trauma caused by centuries of oppression and discrimination will make it impossible for the Inquisitor and anyone else to make them see the truth.

You'd assume anyone who tries to find and stop Solas will be sabotaged every step of the way, feeling themselves horrible for having to clash with people desperate for a chance of a life without injustice - even if it means burning the rest of the world down.

You'd imagine that they will only change their mind if/when they see the harm done by Solas' actions and get to witness their gods true intentions by themselves - which would lead to a massive crisis of faith and schisms happening between elven tribes and groups.

You'd imagine will get all this incredible drama in the Veilguard, with elves initially resisting the group's attempts to stop Solas, then trying to pull themselves together after the revelation. You'd assume there will be zealous groups doubting Solas (because the Dreadwolf is a liar and a deceiver) and intending to use him to actually free the elven gods. You'd think this is how actually some of them get out.

But, NOPE. Not only Solas ends up working alone, with none of his followers throwing themselves at Rook and the party to buy him time, but also all elves now hate Solas because...Varric said so?

You meet a group of Veil Jumpers (elves devoted to exploring their ancient culture and history, learning more about their gods and reclaiming their heritage) and their leader instantly calls Solas an asshole. Based on WHAT?

I get it, Varric had met them before and told them that Solas was Fen'Harel...

(needless to say if you expect players to find and read other media in order to make sense of the events in the game, you are doing something wrong)

...but why were they so fucking calm about it, instantly eating up the "yep, he's bad" version? Even if the Dread Wolf is vilified in the Dalish mythology, wouldn't they be curious about what that means? Wouldn't they have gotten tempted or excited by the implication that other gods exist too? They weren't told the full story - why the fuck did they instantly accept the "Solas is an asshole" narrative? Especially when Solas comes with a promise of a world for the elves like it was meant to be?

WHY?

The Veilguard has no response for that. I guess, Dalish never cared about their history and traditions, and city elves were dandy about Alienages and oppression, so they easily believed some randos over a literal god promising a new, better world.

I don't even play Dalish, but I love their plotline and arcs - and I was bracing myself for some downright painful choices and conflicts during the next Dragon Age. But it felt like the writers couldn't be bothered with developing such a nuanced narrative, so they just waved it all down with "Nah, elves are chill now and they never really cared about their gods in the first place".

[lillotte17]

I have been in the solavellan fandom for...A While. (do not count the years, i beg) and everyone has their tropes and themes re: wolves/halla and hunter/prey and the New Herald being worshiped/the Old God nearly forgotten, and tbh I like bits and pieces of all of them, but like...

For me, the most compelling story is that Lavellan is just Some Guy (gn).

They meet Solas and accept that he is like them. He's an elf. One of The People. You are like me. I am like you. We are The Same People. And because of that, I will protect you with whatever power the humans around us have given me, because I know this is not the safest place for either of us.

And it just fucking... gets him, right? Because that's his whole deal. The world is broken because the people aren't People. He's not like them. They're not like him.

I just love the idea that this impossibly old, incredibly powerful sort-of-god, trips into a hole and nearly throws his entire game away because a regular person (albeit one who was thrust into extraordinary circumstances) decided to be kind. Offered him protection and friendship. Asked him to tell them stories. Grieved with him when he lost one of his oldest friends.

He could not deny that they were a person, because they treated him like a person.

I love how ordinary that is. How simple. How devastating.

'You're real, and it means everyone could be real. It changes everything, but it can't.'

[captainpirateface]

Oh boy... 😳

That didn't age well.

[elfcollector]

Don't leave me alone. Please...please take me home... — Okay, Shianni. Okay. Let's go home.

[shittyutmv]

why did he use the dt twice? is he stupid? geno and after by loverofpiggies id below

[ID: a rough drawing of geno sans quoting a tumblr post by @\n1ntendos. "I AM HAUNTED BY A PAST I CANNOT GO BACK TO !!!!!!" he screams, before immediately turning back and saying "anyways." After (the other 8/9ths) is visible in the background saying, "can you stop doing that in public." End ID.]

[timethehobo]

Lost track of time, 4am quick scribbly. He’s just cute. 😩