#also something not being written or paced particularly well =/= retconning

[sleepymrshmllow]

"grrr stolas keeps getting woobified in the show 😡😡😡"

baby that's just character development

[mayatawi]

(whoops this got loooong I have OPINIONS. If you wanna skip the leadup, my main point is in the paragraph after the tiny text.)

So I honestly thought the biggest make-or-break issue for whether or not I’d watch rnm s3 would be whether Michael and Alex get together or at least seem to be working toward that, and also the character dynamics in general. I am a character-focused consumer of media. Plot is generally secondary for me; mostly I care about the people.

But as it turns out, the plotting and overall narrative structure of s3 are offending me on, like, a deep spiritual level.

Other people have done a better job than I could pointing out the pacing issues, but in general it comes off like someone writing a WIP without any kind of plan and getting brand new plot ideas every chapter and running with them without bothering to revise anything that came before. I don’t know enough BTS stuff to say whether that’s likely due to time pressures or to Hollier being new to show running (has he done it before?) or to something else entirely, but SO MUCH about this season makes NO SENSE.

What the hell was the sequence of events during Kyle’s kidnapping, and why do none of the accounts given line up? Was anything actually changing in the vision? Was it even about Kyle, and if so, was that the case all along? Why is the audience just left to wonder whether that’s been resolved, or even whether the characters think it’s been resolved?

How the fuck did Liz drive from California to Roswell and then back and then back again in what, three days? And still have time to do literally anything else?

And on a thematic level! Why set up a “Kyle is underappreciated” thread at the beginning and then show nobody worrying about him being missing? What was even the point of the Wyatt storyline, and is that just done now, or is it coming back at some point in the 4 episodes remaining? Why bother bringing Greg back if they were going to retcon his previous characterization and only let him talk to Alex once so far? Why set up a throughline of “characters being called out for their flaws/mistakes” and then exclude Maria from that while inexplicably centering her in the whole season so far?

(And side note, speaking of Maria and flaws, I was trying to think last night—does she even have flaws that the show is willing to acknowledge? Like Liz has her science ethics issues, Max can be heavy-handed and self-righteous, Isobel has her alpha bitch tendencies, Michael is an emotional fucking disaster, Alex is closed off and controlling, Rosa has her addiction issues (and, you know, that whole impulsive teenager thing), Kyle… is a goddamn delight but i think still struggles with his high school self, and also is too easily led by Liz at times. What’s Maria’s flaw? The closest I can think of is being too singleminded about the vision thing early in the season, to the point of risking her own health and Max’s life, but was she ever even shown to be wrong about that? I can’t tell how the show expects us to feel about it! And then that was dropped along with the rest of that storyline, and now she’s the one telling Isobel that she’s too singleminded, which could have been some nice character development if that particular flaw of hers was addressed instead of just completely ignored. Like, I am checking myself, I don’t particularly like her character and I am examining whether it’s a race thing or a “but muh ship!” thing or what, and the thing I keep coming back to is that she is never allowed to be wrong according to the narrative, even when her actions as shown might raise some eyebrows. And flawless characters are boring, but flawed characters who are uncritically presented as flawless are infuriating. And making such a character so prominent in the season’s overall storyline is… A Choice. (Am I forgetting something? Can someone tell me what her narratively acknowledged flaw is supposed to be? And I mean an actual flaw, not a job interview “cares too much”/“works too hard” kind of flaw.))

And that’s not even my main point, just a tangent. My biggest issue with s3 is a corollary to the “characters are written characters, not real people” post I’ve seen going around—the narrative is a written narrative, not real events that happen and a camera just happens to be around to capture some of them. But they’re doing this thing where important events and character moments keep happening offscreen and the audience is just supposed to assume they happened. Why wasn’t Kyle or Max waking up shown onscreen? Why didn’t Rosa even mention her brother when he was missing? Why haven’t Michael and Alex even mentioned Forrest, if only to clear up that Alex isn’t still dating him? What did Michael even do between finding the Deep Sky building at the end of 3x06 and whatever he did the next episode? Did Alex ever tell the others where Kyle was, and that’s why nobody seemed worried? And I’m sure there are other things I’m not thinking of because, again, I’m not actually watching s3, just spoiling the shit out of myself. But from everything I’ve read, this season just has zero sense of narrative and thematic structure. Even malex FINALLY getting together falls somewhat flat in the overall context of the season, because it just… happens. I mean I’m glad it happens, and maybe it’s realistic for these two characters to just say “fuck it, we’ve wasted too much time, let’s do it,” but then we’re back with the issue that these aren’t real people or real events, they’re written characters in a written narrative. And from a storytelling perspective, you don’t spend two and a half seasons setting up an emotional arc just to resolve it with “fuck it.”

And… okay, let’s be real, all of the above is probably still not going to keep me from watching (though I will wait for the season finale at least). But it offends me. They have this amazingly diverse and (mostly) well-developed cast of characters, they have a surprisingly compelling overall storyline, they do such a good job establishing a distinct sense of place, but the one thread that’s supposed to tie everything together—the narrative structure—is a goddamn mess.

I love this crack show. But it could be SO MUCH BETTER.

(edit: in retrospect the tiny text should probably be its own post [hence the tiny text] but fuck it, I’m running with it. Not entirely unlike the s3 writers hey-o!)

[whistlewhileiblogit]

Thoughts on TLoU Part 2....Again

Yeah, I am back with another vent, rant, thoughts on...thing. I wanted to wait a long time after writing my initial reaction to the game, because I figured I’d get more clarity or something. Anyway, so here are my unedited and unfiltered thoughts...8 months later. So as always, this is going to be rambly, and I’ll probably just bold parts of note in case anyone wants to jump around. So here we go!

Oh and, SPOILERS AHEAD

Things I liked: These pretty much haven’t changed. The game is obviously beautiful, the gameplay itself I enjoyed immensely (when mentally separating it from the plot), the Joel and Ellie flashbacks. They were fantastic, and made me feel very reminiscent of the first game. Jesse and Dina were cool, but I found them underutilised, which is a massive shame because they were cool characters.

Yara and Lev were also great, and again, Yara was another completely wasted character potential. But love them nonetheless.

So yeah...that’s pretty much it, I think?

Now for the things I didn’t like...

The writing is the biggest sin in the game to me, as it creates so many structural issues. The pacing is wild and jarring, we aren’t given enough time to bond with certain characters before they are killed off, the narrative itself manages to be incredible simple yet complex simultaneously, but it is a total mess.

Let me explain. The end of the game essentially comes down to “revenge bad”, no matter how you look at it. Sure, you can also include other aspects like, “do good deeds”, but they seem sort of tacked on, considering what happens throughout the game. Ellie goes through the entire story with vengeance for Joel being basically the only thing on her mind (or at least, at the forefront of it), and then just...doesn’t go through with it at the end.

Honestly, the game felt by that point that she HAD to go through with it, after all, how would she learn her lesson? Yet she learns her lesson, without actually getting revenge? So what was the point? Some have said that she learnt in that final fight with Abby to forgive Joel, but this makes no sense. Ellie had already started to forgive Joel before his death. Obviously, she wasn’t over it yet, but she clearly wanted to make amends with her father figure. Besides, she’s fighting Abby, after all. And she certainly didn’t forgive her.

I think a lot of people took Ellie letting Abby go as forgiveness, but in reality, it was in complete grief. There was no point in killing her anymore.

But again, THIS MAKES NO SENSE. Given every. Single. Thing Ellie went through the game, all to find and kill Abby. Losing others she loved and cared for, her family, her fingers (and her ability to play guitar which was the only thing she had left connecting her to Joel)...all of that and she just let Abby go?

It would have made so much more sense had she gone through with killing Abby, only THEN to realise it didn’t make her feel better in the long run. That she was still conflicted in her feelings for Joel. Why bother having Ellie go through every point in the game, only to have her back out at the last second and STILL lose everything? What is that saying? If you do the “right” thing, you’ll still get shit anyway? Ugh.

So speaking of Abby...I thought hey, maybe after all this time, I’ll be able to grow to like her! Yeah, nope. She is just as unlikable as always. Abby is a deuteragonist that we are meant to grow to care for, like we do Ellie. But here’s the thing; Ellie has an ENTIRE GAME beforehand PLUS a freaking DLC game that gives us so much time to love her. So you would think that the writers must think, we’ll make Abby super likeable! NOPE.

Throughout the game, Abby is stoic (which isn’t a bad thing on its own), serious, and just flat-out boring. Sorry Naughty Dog, but I don’t find a character who collects coins as her biggest personality trait interesting. She isn’t funny, or kind or particularly clever. She has her strength, and that doesn’t count as a personality. She’s also a shitty friend, and person, and gets called out for that in the game by Dr Preggers (still don’t remember her name).

Even Abby’s flashbacks do little to make me like her. Oh wow, she has a magical, amazing, super perfect animal-helping papa? And? I just can’t latch onto her character and story. Even if she were really well written and interesting, I wonder if I could have after the game presents her as a total fucking barbaric monster in the first two hours of gameplay.

No, I’m still not over Joel’s death. And despite what some people try and say, it isn’t BECAUSE he died. I went into the game fully expecting Joel to die (I was lucky enough to see no spoilers prior to playing), because I felt like that would be the next step narratively that ND would go. This was a terrible decision on ND’s behalf, but I’ll get into that later.

Joel’s death as the way it plays out, does not only Joel a great disservice- but Abby as well. If ND wanted us all to like Abby so much, they easily could have just made her show some remorse, or conflict, or even just a quick, somewhat merciful death to Joel. But instead, we get ~torture porn~, which becomes the first scene of many of these in the game. This scene is so fucking brutal and sickening, I personally cannot watch it. I have seen it ONCE, and after that I have avoided having to watch it again. And I am not a person with a weak stomach.

Instead of having a death scene worthy of Joel’s character, like having him save Ellie somehow or going out in a blaze of glory, as many have suggested...we got an incredibly beloved character being treated as merely a plot device.

Imagine if the roles were reversed, and Ellie had been killed in Part 2, not Joel. I doubt those saying they’d be cool with it really would be. Especially in such a disgusting, horrific manner.

And one of my biggest grievances with the game- the retconning. I’ve had some people argue with me, that the game doesn’t retcon anything. Those people are fooling themselves or just being wilfully ignorant. Part 2 completely contradicts facts from Part 1. Including:

- Joel didn’t completely lie to Ellie. He half lied. If Joel finds all of the recorders in the hospital, it is revealed that the fireflies DID find dozens of immune people. And killed all of them trying to make a cure...and it didn’t work. This is literal in-game proof that the fireflies never would have succeeded in their quest, had Joel let them kill Ellie.

- Part 2 would have you believe that the fireflies were doing well with their groups and their research. Part 2 shows a beautiful, modern-day looking hospital. But the fact is, as shown in Part 1, the fireflies were on their last legs, and killing Ellie to try and find a cure was their last-ditch attempt to find meaning in their cause. It never was going to work. The hospital is shown to be filthy, and barely up to scratch by all standards. The fireflies were struggling, despite what part 2 tells us.

- The character design changes. We have all seen the comparison pictures of the doctor in part 1 vs part 2. They tried to make Jerry (?) look so wholesome and kind, begging for humanities sake. That isn’t how it went down, and he isn’t the same person. They just wanted Joel to look like a total villain.

I also want to mention what a disservice the marketing was to this game. I know Naughty Dog is very anti-spoiler, for obvious reasons, but they went above and beyond hiding spoilers that they straight up falsely advertised the game. And no, I will not forgive them for that.

The game completely undoes what made the first game special. It was a story about two people, struggling to survive, and somehow through it all, finding a familial love and trust within each other, and fighting to keep it, no matter what.

Ellie and Joel ARE The Last of Us, and Part 2 literally kills of half of what made the first game so incredibly special. As soon as Joel was killed, I wondered how the game would remedy those moments, and aside from the few Joel flashbacks, there really isn’t anything comparable to these scenes. Ellie is alone, so she doesn’t get to develop, or show her personality. And even when she is partnered up for short periods of time, she is too miserable (for good reason), to be the joking, lovable character we knew from the first game.

Final thoughts...

All in all, I would say my opinions have stayed pretty much the same for Part 2. I will forever love Part 1 (played it not long ago for the millionth time), and it is always going to be special to me.

But part 2, as it is, is nonredeemable to me. It really could have been something truly special, like part 1, but I guess that’s just what made The Last of Us so special.

[kinetic-elaboration]

December 29: The Wrath of Khan

Today’s movie watching was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

My overall impression versus TMP is that this is clearly a smoother and more consistently entertaining film. It has a definite story with very little filler, good pacing, a lot of great little dialogue and character moments, and a strong conflict at its center.

But its sci fi bona fides are much weaker. Like by a lot.

Mom and I are talking a bit about Genesis and the more we talk, the weaker it appears to me. First, it’s not really as believable, imo, as a lot of Star Trek. Maybe it’s because it’s not alien based, but I just have a harder time suspending disbelief to think this is possible. Second, it’s not clear why anyone thought this was a good idea. I mean, as McCoy immediately pointed out, it just seems so CLEARLY dangerous: an object meant to foster creation that could so easily be the worst weapon the universe has ever known--nothing could go awry there! Third, the reason for creating such a device isn’t obvious at all. Carol mentions the “growing population” and “food scarcity” but nothing we’ve ever seen of the Federation implies they’re running out of space. Or, frankly (Tarsus IV aside), food. And fourth, there really isn’t any point to Genesis in all its particulars in this film. Like, obviously, its actual purpose is a plot device to resurrect Spock. Within just this film, it doesn’t do anything. Khan wants it, for some reason I’ve already forgotten even though I just saw the film, and he gets it, but I didn’t even notice that happening, because it was so unimportant. His REAL mission is his single minded revenge fantasy on Kirk. Genesis is just a McGuffin/space filler/plot device for the next film.

And honestly that’s not such a big deal, except that when you compare it to TMP, ,and its central idea of a human made probe that gained so much knowledge, doing what we taught it to do, that it became sentient and then started searching for the meaning of life, and how this relates to the search for meaning experienced by the main alien lead, and how his search, in that film and throughout the series, is a mirror for humans and OUR need for purpose... well it just seems really weak. “We made this really dangerous and unrealistic thing for no reason whoops!”

Mom is now criticizing Kirk for being too slow on the uptake when he first encounters the Reliant, which is fair. That’s pretty OOC of him. The idea that he’s too old for space is both one that I must personally disregard, and one that the film would have you discard, since we’ve already heard from TWO characters, the people who know him best, that his best destiny is as a starship captain, and command is his proper role. And that he might be a little rusty is also not a great explanation imo, because the rust was supposed to have come off in TMP. So, plot hole probably.

We were trying to do some math--TMP is at least 2 years post 5YM and TWOK is at least 10 years post TMP, so at least 8 years post TMP. I can understand more rust growing but like... he was already an Admiral in TMP and the idea that he was out of practice with actual command was a big part of his arc there. So it doesn’t seem warranted to do that again.

Also, the way he was commanding poorly in TMP was very IC: he was pushing too hard, trying too much, caring too much about the mission and not enough about...the laws of physics. That’s very Kirk. Being slow on the uptake, caught with his britches down--that’s not Kirk. Plus, with no one to call him out on it, like Decker did in TMP, his poor command doesn’t seem like a big character obstacle to overcome but just like...sloppiness all around.

I thought Khan was over all... just not that interesting. I guess I’m just not into the obsession/revenge plot. Also...idk man he didn’t seem that super to me. He outsmarted Kirk, like, once, and Kirk outsmarted him like 4 times. He tortured some people--but regular humans can do that. He used those sandworm thingies, which is also something humans could do. Overall, he didn’t seem to have any particularly special skills. The only time he really seemed like a worthy adversary for Kirk was when Kirk wasn’t really being IC himself.

I’m also not into the fridging of his wife. Think how much cooler it would have been if she’d still been alive! The only non-super human in the bunch and she’s still there! Ex-Starfleet and bitter!

The K/S in this film is very soothing. Imo they are clearly together here, and the whole film is better if you assume they’re boyfriends and everyone knows. That Vulcan convo that Spock and Saavik have? Waaaaay funnier if you think she’s talking about his boyfriend (”not what I expected....very human” “Well no one’s perfect”). Every time they call each other ‘friend’ like ““friend”“? All the Looks? The birthday gift?

Also the “I have been and always shall be your [friend]” scene is a wedding I will not be taking criticism on this opinion. Could it have been written more like a vow? I think not. It’s not quite This Simple Feeling but it’s the best this film has in that regard.

I liked Saavik and I do think she’s one of the better later-movie additions (though I only like her, as far as I can remember, when played by Kirstie Alley). She didn’t necessarily strike me as super alien, though, at least not at first... But I appreciated how persistent she was about the stupid test, and her regulation quoting. I enjoyed her. I also liked how she was obviously Spock’s protege, which makes her Kirk’s step-protege, and they had just a little bit of that awkward dynamic going on. (”Did you change your hair?”)

The Bones and Kirk relationship was great in this film. You can really feel their friendship and their history with each other. Bones knows him so well and can be honest with him, just when Kirk needs it most.

I also love how Kirk has the SAME conversation with both Bones and Spock (re: being a captain again) but with Spock it’s sooooo much flirtier. In case you weren’t sure what the difference in these two relationships is.

Bonus: this bit of dialogue: Spock: “Be careful, Jim.” / Bones: “WE will.” Lol Spock people who aren’t your boyfriend do exist.

Obviously, I cried during THAT scene. Honestly AOS should have taken note about how to do emotional scenes like that: they come after the main action is over and the villain is defeated. Then they hit at the right time and to the right degree. Kirk just slumping down after Spock dies....like he’s boneless...like he doesn’t know what to do... I CANNOT.

I feel so bad for him that I’ll even forgive him that awful eulogy. Spock died for Genesis? Uh, no, he died for the Enterprise, and for YOU. Spock is the “most human”? You shut your whoreson mouth

I remember hating both Carol and David but I actually hated them less this time, Carol especially. My mom is being really harsh about her, though, which makes me feel less confident in my assessment. I mean first off, she’s the inventor of Genesis, which is a pretty big strike against her. Second...pretty lame to keep Kirk from David. Although I did some vague math and Kirk would only have been about 21, still in the Academy, when David was born, so you can see how that would work out. Also, she distinctly says “Were we together?” which means they were not--this was a fuck buddy arrangement for sure. More complicated. But it still feels weird to retcon that, like, he’s known THIS WHOLE TIME that he’s a dad and we’re only learning about it now, as an audience.

Anyway I’m getting off track. Carol. What to make of her? Is she unstable? Is she still mad at Kirk? My mom points out that she just decided on her own that David would want to join Starfleet if he knew Kirk was his father--whereas what seems to have happened instead is he didn’t just become a civilian scientist like his mom but became her specific protege--working on a project where everyone was probably handpicked by her? I would assume? Also..he hates Starfleet. Not to put everything on the mom, but how did that happen?

Also...going down the rabbit hole of this and feeling awkward about it... but David KNEW Kirk. As “that guy you hung around with.” That means Kirk was in his life for quite a while, long enough for him to have memories, and long enough for those memories to still be with him even into his 20s. But he was never allowed to know who Kirk was. That means Carol’s rule must have been “You can see your son but you can’t tell him who you are” which in some way seems meaner to me than just “please don’t contact us again.” If he was already on his way into space, that could even make sense--”I know you’re not going to be able to be a family with us, so let’s not pretend, let’s make a clean break now.” But that wasn’t what happened!

Anyway whatever not to be HAICG!Kirk about this or anything lol

David is mostly annoying because he’s so anti-Kirk lol. I found him least annoying when he came around to Kirk at the end. Another big strike against him: he wore his sweater tied over his shoulders in such a Preppy manner. I honestly don’t see what about him is supposed to be reminiscent of Kirk.

David/Saavik was definitely happening lol. I wish I could have heard that conversation. It sounds like she told him a lot!!! Not sure why she attached herself to this particular annoying human so fast but I guess she did.

....I think that might be all. The uniforms and general styling were much better than TMP (though less funny/entertaining), and it was certainly an enjoyable overall yarn. A lot to pick apart and critique but in a fun way. Will probably watch The Search for Spock soon.

[writingonjorvik]

Soul Riders: Jorvik Calling - A Book Review

Ok, so I want to do a quick review of this book. I am going to talk about some spoilers to cite some things in it, so if you want to go in completely blind, I give it a score at the very bottom. Other than that, let’s dive in.

I don’t know how to feel about this book. Don’t get that statement wrong, it is a good book, but I also have a lot of thoughts on it as a writer. And I don’t want to sit here and be like “I could have done this better” but I think I feel the problems I feel with it because of mostly because those are the things I have been praised on as a writer and so I notice it more I guess when someone does it poorly. This is a great intro. Let’s get into it.

Premise - ★★★★★

This is the first in the retellings of the Starshine Legacy games. So far there has been a lot less retconning than I anticipated and I appreciate that. The premise is interesting. It’s a novelization of the SSL games and that’s interesting to me. This book seems to focus on the founding of the characters and their gifts and that’s a cool premise I like to see redone in the current SSO direction.

Plot - ★★★☆☆

I’m separating these because the concept around a story and the story itself can be different things. Like, I can like the premise of something overall, but the bits of getting there can be different. And that’s kinda how I felt about the actual plot of this book. 

I think my biggest complaint is that it felt rushed. And I get that this book is short, but I also write novellas about the same length and I know you can write a short book without it feeling like that. This book liked to jump back and forth between really rapidly going through the plot and these slice of life chapters and it felt a little stop and start until Starshine gets kidnapped, or most of the way through the book, and then it was all just fast paced. And it felt kinda like tonally whiplash at times.

That said, the story is still interesting. There wasn’t a point where I wanted to put the book down, but the back and forths between SOMETHING IS HAPPENING and we’re just chilling in the barn I feel like could have been paced better. It also kinda struggles at the end with setting up FOUR different follow up plots, but because I know there are already two more books coming, I’m willing to forgive this.

Characters - ★★☆☆☆

This is the topic that’s the most painful for me, so let’s get it out of the way.

I feel like I only really liked the characters because I knew them from SSO. In the dialogue, I feel like the “Tell” aspects of storytelling were used WAY too heavily. Actions were very repetitive, and constantly being used. Giggling was one of those. The girls always giggled, which I think is a very gendered term to use, but it was also used a lot.

It was particularly in dialogue where it felt like how the characters were feeling were glossed over the most. Like, in the scene where Linda, Alex, and Lisa are watching Sabine. The book just says “Lisa was scared,” which is such a boring line to read. There’s no tingling on Lisa’s neck, no knot in her stomach, goosebumps forming on her arms. We’re just told “Lisa is scared.”

The most offensive of this I feel is Anne. I feel like Anne’s retcon is, while interesting, painfully forced in the narrative. Like, here’s her first real scene, page 45 in the hardback: “‘I’m so sorry!’ the girl exclaimed. Lisa could tell her apology was genuine. She nodded and smiled warmly at the other girl, who rushed through the cafeteria.

‘That was Anne von Blyssen,’ Alex said after they sat down at one of the tables. She made a bit of a face.

‘She’s kind of full of herself sometimes,’ Linda explained.”

I hate this paragraph. It does Anne so dirty. At least in the SSL games we got that Anne was a prep and that she was stuck up with the way she talks. But the first line to Lisa here is Anne being genuinely apologetic and then Linda and Alex turn around and bad mouth her, with no context. We’ve seen nothing to suggest that Anne is full of herself at all (which is worse when the rest of the story continues to NOT support this), but we are directly told how we should feel about her. It’s not supported by the book when everything we see of Anne is a polite if reserved rich kid. She screams student council more than queen bee, but the book wants us to believe it’s both.

It hurts because I love these characters, but I know that half of my read was me projecting what I already knew back on them.

Setting - ★★★★★

Credit where credit is due, Dahlgren nails the setting, both in the location and in the magic. She is incredibly descriptive of the location and actively makes me wish Jorvik was a real place. The way she goes through how all of the ways the girls get their powers and what it feels like to use them, visceral. I loved it. I loved getting to see how colorful Jorvik was and how real the magic was.

I honestly wish SSO would commission Dahlgren to just right slice of life fiction set in Jorvik. I feel like when she got to write those sections, they were the absolute strongest of the whole book, and I would love to see her just mess with the canon in casual stories in Jorvik.

Conclusion

As a fan: ★★★★★

As a general book to pick up: ★★★☆☆

If you’re an SSO fan, this is an SSO book. It’s good, it’s interesting, it’s more of the setting we love. There’s a lot of interesting development and context to magic, as well as worldbuilding and lore and if you next got to play SSL, get this book. You’ll enjoy it.

If you’re not, or if you’re a bit picker about books, maybe pick up the audiobook or borrow it from a library. I can’t say that I don’t recommend it, because I do highly praise Dahlgren’s ability to make scenes come to life as well as the way she handles magic. It is beautiful and I think her ability to write slice of life fiction clearly shows.

However, I think the best way I can summarize my complaints about this book is that it feels written for kids. You know how you see a movie made for kids and know it’s made for kids. Like, it’s the difference between say The Emoji Movie vs. Coco, or The Foxcraft books vs. Harry Potter. You can tell that one is made for kids, while one is made for kids but it’s not pandering. I feel like this book was written for a grade level, and not at a grade level, if that makes sense. That’s at least the impression from the telling aspects of the character development, like it doesn’t trust the reader to come up with the right impression, so it explains it for you.

There is still a lot of strong content in here, and as an SSO fan, I gladly have the hardback and will be getting the hardbacks of the rest of the trilogy, but it’s not the strongest retelling I’ve seen. But I have confidence that the rest of the trilogy could prove me wrong.

[elizabethrobertajones]

Comparing Season 6 and Season 10 - which one do you think makes more sense as a whole, which one better pulls of seeming like what happened/was revealed at the end of the season is what was supposed to happen/was planned all along?

I may be biased, but for me, season 6 by miles. And almost all of that is Edlund desperately cramming everything that had happened so far into something that either made sense or handwaved why it didn’t make sense in an effectively emotional enough episode that by the end of TMWWBK you sort of feel like you’ve actually got your answers and Cas has been completely honest and open with YOU at least, making it that much easier to handle what was going on. 

I think for me season 10 was poorly handled in ways that weren’t particularly well addressed and the only offered explanation ever was “oh it was Amara after all” which in the context of season 11 gives us some more characterisation to begin to pull things together, though without addressing everything. Still if we’re dealing with things as a whole, season 10 doesn’t have an episode that scrapes everything together in the post-Edlund era and what we get only within the confines of season 10 is extremely unsatisfactory, even if later canon eases it a little bit, along with just… not being actively in SPN season 10 as it airs :P 

Going off my memories of being in the fandom at the time, we had a lot of issues with things like 

Dean’s incomplete demon reversal (so far as in 10x02, written by Dabb who invented the cure repeating the correct steps, then in 10x03 Buckleming not following through with them)

“the river ends at the source” “never mind I was screwing with you”

Did Cain still have the Mark after 9x11? lasting drama until 10x14, and still debated afterwards especially by people who had thought he didn’t have the Mark and had passed it entirely to Dean now being very confused  

What the fuck was this about Lucifer having the Mark and how did that last minute addition affect everything? 

the Colette parallel being wildly mis-applied by fandom but also issues with the show’s fear to explore it leading to “we are all the colette” episodes with lasting drama until 10x22, where Charlie, Sam and Cas all variously and persistently seemed to be suggested to be capable of being a team effort to pull Dean out of the darkness. 10x22 also wasn’t enough to stop Dean, and the final confrontation was with Sam, I think a general consensus was - especially again with season 11′s help - that the memory of Mary drew him back/unleashed Amara metaphorically who unleashed Mary literally - it wasn’t a great note to end on without season 11 context (as a whole, so, like, a whole YEAR later) that Sam had “won” the battle to bring Dean back from himself where Cas had failed, and the subtext and show and fandom most of all had made SUCH a huge deal out of Colette, after 9x11 over-told her story instead of retelling Cain & Abel, that it was set up with the expectation that saving Dean was a romantic quest, not a brotherly one. 10x14 sort of helped set things to rights with the list, but the fighting about what it all meant at the time was AWFUL, and though I think I was right and the show bore that out and these days I type it all with confidence, I’m pretty sure there’s a ton of buried wank about it that could be dragged out if we want >.>

the fact there wasn’t really an overarcing Mark of Cain plot except “Dean is suffering” with the only 3 actual plot points they could do with it being demon!Dean, kill Cain, and remove Mark. Because of that, everything else is literally set-dressing to fill the time and add drama in between, but these were played with poorly and there wasn’t any subterfuge we weren’t in on (i.e. sam stealing the book) vs Cas betraying both the Winchesters and US. The only retcon offered in the end was Death’s exposition about the Darkness.

people literally forgetting which order episodes came out in and being very confused about why Amara wasn’t released when Dean was 14 in 10x12 even though he didn’t kill Cain for 2 more episodes (like, within weeks of 10x14 airing, I swear)

the understandable disappearance of Cole but bizarre application of that hunter called Rudy who popped up in his place and featured in 10x23 along with Cas for Dean’s guilt trip. Even if Cole and TAW sucked ass, it’s much easier to understand the emotional impact of what happened to Rudy if you assume he has the exact same backstory as Cole and the same nonsense happened to Dean twice in the same year :P 

Pre-season hype about Rowena made a huge deal out of the Grand Coven, and for a brief moment it seemed like there might be a witch plotline, including new lore dumps about different types of witches in 10x07, characters like Olivette the Hamster, etc, but they squandered her first season and 10x19 was as close as we got to any pay off to her actual storyline

Then Oskaar happened and that was like ??? Okay just introduce him in the second to last episode and throw us into that emotional situation 

the entire cure coming out of nowhere as a random last minute macguffin instead of having been anything they put together over the season - even though the book of the damned thing showed up in 10x11 it changed substantially from the clue Charlie left with (a less than 100 year old book with a library reference number found on an antique rare book website, based on a real book, which we all picked over and were left wondering if the plot was to be about some sort of occultism thing as a result) to a much different lore. Then there were a few episodes dealing with it and the codex, the actual spell had no real struggle, and Crowley delivered all the pieces while Cas stood around scowling and Rowena stood around in chains eye-rolling. Compare season 13′s pacing with Sam and Dean cobbling together what they needed from halfway through the season, and being on the mission to get to the AU from episode 9, with relatively little of the endless sitting around googling and being frustrated of past seasons but ESPECIALLY season 10 where Sam was futilely trawling the results of googling “mark of cain” from mid-late season 9 through to like, 10x18 when an actual brief plot appeared around it directly. 

I think all of it points to a problem of working forwards from where they were instead of backwards to tidy up what was left. In season 6 Edlund took as many loose plot threads, from how Sam lost his soul, what was up with Crowley and Cas, the angel war, explanations for Sam and Samuel working together, why eve happened, everything, and put it all together to explain the elements of the season so far in a new light. Despite how disastrous that season was, PRETENDING you knew like you meant to do it all along glosses over inconsistencies in Samuel’s story or Cas and Crowley’s 6x10 interactions, and makes them relatively inconsequential when most of the details add up. 

The same thing works with the Lucifer as Sam’s vessel storyline, in the sense that while Azazel’s plan is fucking ridiculous in its over-complex bizarre attempt to find a worthy true vessel that Heaven had fated, comparing season 1-2 to season 5 head on is bad, each season explains itself from the last in enough of a way and with enough knowledge of what already happened that really despite vast inconsistencies in the lore, by 5x22 we are pretty much all on board to accept the way it all played out because they use what was previously written to build up Sam’s arc, and little details thrown in towards the end like Brady and then Lucifer revealing ALL of Sam’s closer rando peeps had been demons, tidy up more and more loose ends and there’s left with plausible deniability about a lot of the issues.

In season 10 they kept on introducing elements instead of working with what they had already established, and also discarded what seemed like major plot hooks for Rowena and Cole, one annoyingly, one completely metatextually understandably and fuck TAW, I’m glad the show never brought Cole back as soon as rumours of him groping fans appeared, and it makes me genuinely trust that the SPN set is a safe place. But yeah. 

Things they set up and could have worked with, were the Cas’s grace arc, which was resolved to a small personal satisfaction to Cas without any major plot impact except we could stop worrying about when Cas would get sick and die from bad grace, or steal more. 

The demon!Dean issue was bad writing from Buckleming re: was he still a demon or not, but given Dean was supposed to be struggling with succumbing to darkness the season actually kept him almost completely level without any significant relapses, even after killing Cain. The sense of needing a functional Dean Winchester to keep hunting monsters and prop up the show as both the carrier of the mytharc, the emotional core, and the go-between between Sam and Cas even when the show was trying to figure out if Sam and Cas could function without Dean, it was all still so much about Dean that in 10x21 when they’re doing the cringeworthy “for Dean” thing and Rowena rolls her eyes like “I barely know the man”, I was actually applauding Buckleming snark thinking they maybe briefly had a handle on how ridiculous Dean’s position in the narrative was. (Listen, this was the last 10 minutes of my innocence about how awful Buckleming could be, leave past!me alone. She’s sweet and precious and not bitter :P) In any case, a more effective season would have utilised him more to slip and slide between light and dark and explore it in much deeper detail, but balancing that with a procedural formula doesn’t work as well and they were lacking enough philosophers on staff. I think the Dabb era writing team could handle it, because Yockey, Perez, and Glynn especially, who seems to have a psychology background based on her writing, all have a sharp attention to the exact things in emotional arcs that would have made it work better, even just as it was. Since this was a weaker writing team where Robbie, Bobo and Dabb episodes were little islands of excellence and the motw were fun but more shallow even with strong foreshadowing themes, it just didn’t pay off. 

I think the biggest waste of time was “the river ends at the source” which was either Buckleming trying to introduce a concept and hoping someone else dealt with it, or an agreed plot hook which never materialised, or Metatron literally spoke the truth, that the line had only ever been written to mess with us. However 10x23 could have actually included more of a “river ends at the source” sort of slant and had Death confirm it in so many words because Amara really did sort of seem to be the answer to the question. In 10x10 it seemed like they knew where the season was going, but by 10x17 it was obvious they DIDN’T, and it was during 10x18 that the plot actually got hashed out and Robbie was handed heavy revisions to make to change the Stynes to end of season villains and the Book of the Damned was going to be used how it was. I think this is really weak plotting, as someone who always puts in fun lines and then attempts like crazy to pay off on them. My first novel has the line “you can’t talk to me yet” and I play through that the whole book until they CAN talk and make it a major motif, goal and in the end try to explain it as best I can about how it’s all plot relevant and why using that for tension to put off the explanations and such was a valid thing to throw at my main character, and then the springboard to more adventure when she was ready for it. I literally do not understand putting a portentous line into your story, and not becoming desperately eager to answer it or twist something into revealing how it all fits at the end, if not basing your entire story off of it. Sam and Dean seemed wildly uncurious about how to apply that or what it means. 

In season 6 one of the more frustrating things is the “it’s all about the souls” line because Dean fails to investigate until someone or other rolls their eyes and makes it all clear to him. But we get a few more reminders in Cas’s presence, until we find out his plan, and Crowley repeats that line in 6x20 when making his sales pitch to Cas, if I’m remembering rightly (I hope so :/) and so despite Dean’s infuriating lack of investigation (not that he had a great deal of leads, but still - you could build a plot around it by GIVING him a lead, he’s the fictional character and you’re the writer :P) at the very least they repeat the motif in at least 6x17 and 6x20 to my memory, before the souls thing becomes a lot more obvious about Cas taking the purgatory souls and we’re allowed to actually discuss what he’s up to instead of the vague hints Atropos and Rachel give that they know his plans. 6x07 also hints early on that Purgatory is full of monster souls if you add it all up - the writers knew they were doing SOMETHING with this even if it took to the end of the season for it to all come together. (And that’s something that’s clearly and overarcing plot that Gamble oversaw because she wrote 6x11 and the line then appears in multiple episodes around the place, so that’s not just something Edlund tidied up but an actual effort to write the season well.)

Throwing aside the “river ends at the source” line is wildly frustrating because it wouldn’t have been too hard to apply it thematically and even keep Metatron being a douche while giving the viewer a pay off anyway for our own satisfaction, by showing it had been a theme all along anyway. You CAN squint at season 10 and analyse it through that lens but it’s exhausting when the show doesn’t give us the themes on a platter. It also shows that the plotting is careless and they’re experimenting, and rather than working with what they have, this is in a path of episodes where they’re discarding some plotlines, and we’re beginning to have end of season plotlines hastily pasted onto the end of the season, but they make very little of any of the work already done to build up the season as we’d seen it so far.

Add onto that Charlie being murdered for manpain to motivate some things into action and all the random elements being used, and the sense that Crowley, Cas and Rowena all abruptly ran out of a plotline that had been intended to utilise them and put on a side character duty away from Sam and Dean, the season is extremely messily and carelessly written, and without any real attention to detail to its own themes and characters and plotlines. Even if they’d gone into the season not particularly expecting where to go, they brought a lot to the table early on but then quickly wiped a lot of it off, and brought a lot more stuff to the table instead, which makes season 10 a really wonky, unfinished feeling product as a thing on its own, and the overall story is scrappy and carelessly plotted.

And that is speaking just about the easy plot stuff without getting into the absolute mess of speculation from the Destiel side of fandom wondering wtf was going on with the seeming build up to crypt scenes, colette, the grace cure, etc, that made up the bulk of the speculation but makes actually analysing expectations vs presented product completely impossible to evaluate on that side of things because as always Destiel speculation really overshoots what is expected and was really running wild at that point. I mean, not being judgemental because that was the year I was right in the thick of it. 3 years clear of it now, some of it seems really silly, but those 3 things all seemed clearly built up to our eyes, and we got the reverse crypt scene we’d been expecting since before the season started, and we got the Colette reference which slotted Cas firmly into place as a reminder of how Cain’s peeps lined up against Dean’s, as well as Cas asking Dean to stop, which satisfied the terms and conditions of Dean resisting walking in Cain’s footsteps with the overall set up of the scene. With the way Cas got his grace back and then some other rando cure popped up where Rowena of all people made the sacrifice, I really can’t help feeling like the conspiracy theorist who knows they were right but with the way it all shook out, only people who knew the conspiracy would understand how it didn’t happen and it’s very hard for me to look at that and say that some non-Cas-related cure was coming all along, given the conspicuous dropping of one plotline sort of day of picking up the next >.> But I’ll cede that from my position I might be a bit compromised on that one. 

Anyways. To me season 10 is a disaster that only season 11 really justifies, while season 6 has some truly low points but in the end the actual writing skill hauls it through so that it creates the illusion that there was consistency, if you ignore everything outside of the text suggesting it may have been as poorly planned as season 10. Planning isn’t everything - it’s what you do when confronted with the unplanned wire tangle in front of you that really marks how well they were written, and just shoving it under the table and putting a new wire tangle down vs actually unpicking it and making them as neat as possible? Gamble slam dunks Carver :P

[thenightling]

The new Books of Magic (Vertigo Comics)

Since March (back when the new Sandman Universe comics were announced) I had certain unspoken reservations about the new Books of Magic.  I didn’t speak of them before because I really wanted to give the new comics a chance.

As it stands I am very disappointed in The Dreaming.   House of Whispers isn’t terrible but it has very slow pacing, so much so that parts of the synapsis given back in March have not yet happened in-story and likely will not happen for months to come.  As it stands, Lucifer, (to my surprise) is my favorite of those three new comics.  And now we come to The Books of Magic...

The continuity in these Sandman Universe comics tends to be a bit confusing.  The only universal truth is that Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman has happened. This is a universally accepted canon.  However, some of the spin-offs or connected comics have been retconned.   

With The Dreaming we are made to realize (very quickly) the late 90s / early 2000s version of The Dreaming is not canon anymore.  There is no sign of Echo.   Nuala (at least the concept art) is not re-glamoured (Thankfully) and Matthew is very much alive (Thank God!)  This is easy to accept but if this new Dreaming is going to be better than that flaming train-wreck - that has yet to be seen.   I have no love for The Dreaming’s older incarnation but the new version is starting to rub me the wrong way, particularly with what it did with Mevyn with the not-so-subtle immigration and Trump supporter allegories and Lucien uncreating Merv’s friends on the steps of the castle. That is inexcusable even with Lucien’s weird brain deterioration subplot.  And the obnoxious reappearance of Judge Gallows...  No, I’m not happy with The Dreaming right now. 

House of Whispers is a new spin-off and does not require any sort of retconning or retro-fitting.   This makes it a little more relaxed and free from constraint and yet curiously it’s more reserved than I expected.  It’s pacing is very slow.  I get that the author is trying to build the atmosphere and wants us to get to know the characters and normally I’d be very open to this. But I have become impatient, especially in knowing (from the Sandman Universe summaries) events that haven’t even unfolded yet and likely won’t for some time... So here my biggest complaint is pacing.  I can nitpick a few things but they’re petty and minor- like noticing The House of Secrets looks unusually cramped.  When did Goldie come back and how? He was missing at the start of The Sandman Universe special. And not really caring for the look of the venetian blinds in The House of Secrets.  As I said... Petty.

With Lucifer the Mike Carey comics are apparently still canon (I think?) but the 2016 Lucifer comics are retconned. Those 2016 Lucifer comics used lore established in the now defunct version of The Dreaming, such as claiming Matthew is dead, so there is a practical reason why that version of Lucifer is retconned, besides the weird and surreal story of The Presence essentially going mad and turning into a giant insect-thing...

Lucifer has me the most intrigued.  It doesn’t talk down to the reader. There are references to The Weird Sisters from MacBeth and to characters from The Tempest.  And the very first page reminds us of who Lucifer is and his connection with The Lord of Dreams.  This one feels... right.   

Now for The Books of Magic.   The books of magic have me the most troubled because they don’t retcon something written by a wet-behind-the-ears, Newbie, spin-off writer of the late 90s or during New 52.   No.  Instead they literally retcon something written by Neil Gaiman, himself.  That’s like retconning Alan Moore out of Swamp Thing (which I have heard they tried to do but can’t bear to investigate deeply...)  

What bothers me most about this (besides what I just said) is besides undoing the original Books of Magic, this chips away and the precious and already finite original lore of Morpheus- the original Sandman AKA Dream of The Endless.   Morpheus, Death, and Destiny, along with Cain and Abel, made guest appearances in the original Books of Magic. 

I do not like the idea of any new Sandman Universe comic internally undoing anything of the established lore written during the original Sandman run.   It feels like if DC / Vertigo is willing to do this to The Books of Magic that no aspect of the original Sandman is safe from being decanonized.  This could lead to Morpheus being erased from canon in a way more insidious than New 52...         

I have heard rumors that Neil Gaiman’s version of The Books of Magic “Might” still be canon in an alternate universe and will actually have significance to this reboot but that is still unconfirmed and I am still bothered by this.  The dream Timothy Hunter had at the start of this new version might be connected to this.

This discomfort has quietly sat with me since March though I had tried to come to terms with it before reading the new comic.

What are the books of Magic?  If you’re not familiar with The Books of Magic they were a fantasy graphic novel series about a magically incline boy with glasses. The boy attends a boarding school and has the potential to be a great sorcerer- though not necessarily a good one.  He could be extremely good or extremely evil.  And this has made him a living target for those who fear who or what he might grow up to be.  I won’t pretend “even the good guys want to kill him” the way plot summaries have described, because I don’t believe actual good people would leap to that conclusion because of what he “might” become.  If your first thought is “He could be evil, let’s kill him!’ chances are you’re not that good...  

Despite my discomfort about the decanonizing of the original Books of Magic I can pretend that the events of the original Books of magic happened.  The beginning of the new comic almost feels as if it has even if the timelines don’t quite add up.

Still, it IS good to see Mad Hettie again and I can’t pretend this is badly written.  It’s not badly written.  It’s good.  My biggest complaint (besides not liking that scenes of Neil Gaiman’s depiction of Morpheus have been decanonized) is actually that it was over too quickly.   

Also I think the fidget spinner reference stands a risk of dating this thing very quickly.  But that is a nitpick.    

The new Books of magic (issue 1) IS well written though.  I just wish its existence wasn’t at the cost of the original...  

So to keep scare with how I feel about these comics:

Like = Lucifer. Like but have misgivings = Books of Magic Weak pacing = House of Whispers Trying not to hate it... but still curious... = The Dreaming

[lizardguyaaron]

Lizard Reviews: Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters

Hello everyone! Welcome to the first of hopefully many reviews where I talk about various books, movies, comics, video games, and whatever. For my first review, I wanted to talk about one of my favorite Star Wars Legends books of all time. It’s a book that I absolutely adored as a kid, and I recently picked up a reprinted copy of it about a week ago. So without further ado, let’s dive right in.

Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters is an anthology comprised of five short stories, each one detailing one of the infamous bounty hunters that appeared on the bridge of the Executor, Darth Vader’s flagship, in The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Each short story was written by a separate author, so I’m going to be breaking each story down separately in order to give each one the proper attention it deserves.

Therefore I Am: The Tale of IG-88:

This is the first short story in the novel, and as the title suggests, it focuses on the assassin droid bounty hunter IG-88. The story details IG-88′s creation, his escape from Holowan Laboratories, his takeover of the droid manufacturing planet of Mechis III, and finally his attempt at taking over the Death Star II. Written by Kevin J. Anderson, this is definitely one of the stranger stories to start with. Anderson explores the idea of IG-88 achieving sentience and attempting a droid takeover of the galaxy, while using bounty hunting as a front for his activities. Anderson also introduces this idea of IG-88 occupying four different droid bodies, all named A through D. These ideas seem good on paper, but they take a turn for the truly odd when Anderson has IG-88 take over the Death Star II’s central computer. From here, it becomes immediately clear that Anderson has written himself into a corner. The idea of having IG-88 take over the Death Star II is interesting, but it’s ultimately a dead end when you realize that Anderson is constrained by the events of Return of the Jedi (1983). It makes me wonder why he even bothered to go this route in the first place, considering that there’s only one way that the story can now end. I definitely think that this story would have benefited from a different ending, perhaps one that doesn’t feel like Anderson took the easy way out in ending IG-88′s story. As a result of this story decision, I do have to rank this story lower on my list than the others. 

Payback: The Tale of Dengar: 

Written by Dave Wolverton, “Payback” focuses on Dengar, the bandaged human bounty hunter. In this story, Wolverton portrays Dengar as a bounty hunter who is out for revenge against the Imperials who turned him into a killing machine following an accident, as well as Han Solo for causing the accident in the first place. During one of his hunts, Dengar runs into an alien woman named Manaroo, whose species possesses a unique technology that allows them to share their emotions, and the two gradually fall in love during Dengar’s hunt for Han Solo. I will say that this story surprised me in the best way possible. Dengar was a character that I never had a particular interest in, but Wolverton writes the character in such a way that makes the reader empathize with Dengar. After a certain point, you actually start to root for Dengar and hope he succeeds in his hunt despite the fact that we know he loses out to Boba Fett. All in all, I have to say that “Payback” is probably my favorite short story in the novel.

The Prize Pelt: The Tale of Bossk:

If “Payback” made me care about a hunter that I normally have no interest in, then “The Prize Pelt” by Kathy Tyers made me feel like my favorite Star Wars character, Bossk, had been completely wasted in this story. “The Prize Pelt” is a story about how Bossk was foiled in his attempts to catch Han Solo and Chewbacca by a pair of bounty hunters, Chenlambec, a Wookiee, and Tinian I’att, a human. While I think the idea might have been there, it’s Tyers’s execution of the story that bothers me. The biggest problem here is that Bossk, frequently considered to be second only to Boba Fett, is easily outsmarted and outmaneuvered by Tinian I’att, a novice bounty hunter studying under Chenlambec. Not only do I find it hard to believe that a long-time professional bounty hunter like Bossk is outsmarted by a novice, but it’s the fact that Tinian I’att feels like a Mary Sue style character. I don’t like using the term “Mary Sue” as I feel as though it’s become bastardized in recent years (particularly by the Star Wars fanbase), but I do feel it is applicable here. Tinian is an heiress to a weapons manufacturing company, lost her parents, grandparents, and fiance (who is Force-sensitive) to the Empire, but is quite easily able to concoct several plans to outsmart Bossk, who again has been hunting far longer than she has. So we have the tragic backstory component and the ridiculously high skill level component, which are both necessary for a Mary Sue character. All of this seems to come at the cost of dumbing down Bossk, and frankly making him seem like an idiot. While I did honestly enjoy the cat-and-mouse elements of the hunters all trying to outsmart each other, it’s the dumbed down Bossk and overly capable Tinian that really ruin this story for me, and I feel as though there were probably better ideas for a Bossk story. Overall, this was probably my least favorite story in the novel.

Of Possible Futures: The Tale of Zuckuss and 4-LOM:

Written by M. Shayne Bell, “Of Possible Futures” tells the story of why the Gand findsman Zuckuss and protocol-droid-turned-hunter 4-LOM are after the reward on Han Solo and The Millenium Falcon. In a similar vein to the “Payback” story, Bell paints Zuckuss and 4-LOM in a sympathetic light, a stark contrast to the outright villainy we see from IG-88 and Bossk. In this story, Zuckuss and 4-LOM need the reward money in order to afford a new set of lungs for Zuckuss, an ammonia-breathing Gand who accidentally was exposed to oxygen during a hunt gone bad. 4-LOM, on the other hand, stays by Zuckuss’s side in order to learn how to use intuition to determine possible futures that their prey may take. I really like this story, and how it shows us that not all of the bounty hunters are outright villains. We’re given a very real world motivation for why the duo need the money, and needing money for life-saving healthcare is something that a lot people can relate to. Furthermore, I like how Bell ends this story on a hopeful note, with Zuckuss getting the medical care he needs, 4-LOM beginning to learn how to see into the future, and the duo joining the Rebellion to help liberate Han Solo from Jabba’s Palace. While I really do enjoy this story, I think it lands firmly in the middle for me, and that’s due to the pacing. Bell can be a bit slow at points and that sometimes drags down the story. That being said, it’s certainly better than some of the other entries such as “Therefore I Am” and “The Prize Pelt”.

The Last One Standing: The Tale of Boba Fett:

The final story in the novel, written by Daniel Keys Moran, details the origins, fall, and return of the most infamous Star Wars bounty hunter, Boba Fett. I think this story stands out from the others not because it’s simply about Boba Fett, but because the writers of the early EU had some very different ideas about Boba Fett’s origin than what George Lucas ultimately gave us in Attack of the Clones (2002). Instead of being a clone of Jango Fett, Boba Fett in this story was originally a Journeyman Protector of Concord Dawn named Jaster Mereel, who was stripped of his title after committing heinous offenses in the name of his twisted sense of morality. It’s a very stark contrast to what we ultimately got, and it’s interesting to see how these details of Boba Fett’s life were retconned. This story is where we first get the concept that Fett wasn’t a true Mandalorian, but somehow acquired the armor and gear (an idea later canonized but reworked to fit the prequel origin in the Disney-era). What I also like about this story is that Bell made Boba Fett’s infamous escape from the Sarlaac have long-lasting consequences in the character later in the story. As a result of being partially digested, Fett is missing his right leg and has cancer, resulting in him completing hunts with increased difficulty. We also get snippets from Han Solo’s point of view, and things ultimately come to a head when Fett attempts to carry out one last hunt against his nemesis. I like this story for being an early attempt at trying to demystify Boba Fett. While the story is no longer canon, I think it definitely is worth a read if you’re a Boba Fett fan. That being said, I do think this story ranks as my second favorite for two reasons: first, it doesn’t quite hit the emotional highs that “Payback” reached, and second, there’s a scene between Boba Fett and Leia in Jabba’s Palace that I found rather unnecessary. Overall, it’s in a solid second place for me.

Final Thoughts: 

Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters is definitely a fun read. While the stories in it can be pretty hit or miss, it’s certainly a fun novel that offers some unique insight into the bounty hunters that only appeared for a moment in the films. If you’re a fan of bounty hunters like I am, then definitely give this book a shot. If you’re new to Star Wars and want to get into the Legends timeline, this is a decent place to start since it features characters and moments from the movies. The novel certainly holds a special place in my heart. But despite that, the hit or miss nature of the stories is what causes it to lose points for me.

Overall, I give this novel a 3.5 out of 5.

[eighteenbelow]

QUICK GIVE ME YOUR MOST SELF-INDULGENT ROSCOE DILLON + LISCOE HEADCANONS. IT'S FOR SCIENCE.

Oh gee :3  I've had these for years but never written them down, so thanks for the exercise :)

I HC that Roscoe desperately wanted a dog when he was a kid, and his parents wouldn't let him.  Not very self-indulgent, but that one just won't go away.  He was obviously an unhappy and stressed-out kid.  He would have been a better person if he had gotten a pet/companion, and would have developed a better sense of empathy.

Canonically he's only been shown expressing attraction for women, but not many women, and he's not known to have engaged in the Rogues' hookers n' boozing culture (that doesn't mean he didn't participate, though, just that we haven't seen any indication of it).  We also know he's snarked about the other Rogues' obsession with sex and women.  So I've always headcanoned that he's straight but not nearly as sex-obsessed nor as inclined to feel attraction to a lot of women as the other Rogues.  He's not ace, because it's definitely canon that he and Lisa had a very sexual relationship.  So maybe he's demisexual?  Or maybe he just keeps that sort of thing to himself, which is also very possible.

Relating to the last point, I HC that Roscoe and Lisa are very into kink.  I might have been slowly writing ficlets about that over the past year and a half.  Dunno if they'll ever be posted.

Both Roscoe and Lisa are forceful and dominant people who are very naturally bossy, and I think they'd compromise by taking turns domming and subbing.  But to their surprise, both found that they didn't mind subbing at all.

It was canon that Lisa didn't commit any crimes while he was alive, at least until Johns (Johns' first issue showed a flashback of them robbing a bank together, so that's either an art error or a retcon).  I HC that he always gave her a cut of his take after every successful job.  She's known for her love of jewels and shiny things, and I don't think he really cares that much about it.  He probably spent most of his take on her, his technical equipment, and hoarded the rest like a dragon.

It's canon that they had ridiculous cutesy pet names for each other, and the cutesy schmoop very likely extended into the rest of their lives as well.  They probably took dorky photos together and did weird goofy stuff that people would never otherwise guess he'd do.  He was a very different person around Lisa and with everyone else, even in the days when he was friendly and sociable with the Rogues.

I think he probably had manners drummed into him to an almost abusive extent by his excel-at-all-costs-to-make-us-look-good parents.  He's almost always genteel and polite even when acting like a murderous asshole, and has never been shown to swear in canon even as the other Rogues get all their foul language asterisked out.  

I HC that he still has a grudge against violins because they were pushed on him as a child.

We know he went into crime out of anger and frustration at his parents and the expectations they put on him, so I HC that he'd like a lot of fast-paced angry music to burn out the rage sometimes.

He hates being dead, and misses his original body. (He's never indicated how he feels about it in canon.)

He must be a workaholic, because I don't know he'd get everything done otherwise.  In the Bronze Age, he was committing crimes (and going to prison), developing more of his inventions, in a relationship with Lisa, coaching Lisa, and travelling with her when her ice show was on the road.  How did he do all this??

He is an asshole in the modern era, but some of the stuff that the Rogues think he's an asshole about are really just neuroatypical misunderstandings.  Okay, this is more of a personal theory I can support than a HC, but still.

He's one of the younger Silver Age Rogues.  I say this because for some reason the fandom thinks he's one of the older ones and it's a personal pet peeve.  He was literally just a kid when he started in supervillainy, and was one of the last Silver Age Rogues to debut.  I'm not sure why everyone thinks he's older.

I HC that he's an only child.  I mention this because he hints at having a brother in that shitty Waid story, but I think it's just a figure of speech and also that story is garbage.  His backstory makes more sense if he's an only child.  Regarding that same story, I believe that he was born and raised in Central City, and has never lived in Brooklyn.  Have I mentioned yet how terrible and out of character that story is?  

We saw him smoking in his debut issue, but I believe he would become a bit of a health nut soon after becoming a supervillain...he's something of an elite athlete, after all.  He might give up red meat (and only red meat, he's not vegetarian) for health reasons but not ethical ones.  

I HC that he has a fear or at least extreme distrust of doctors due to his truly awful history in the prison and mental health system.  He probably self-medicates a lot.

I've always had the HC that he was atheist, only to die and find out God and everything was all real (he did go to Hell, after all).

And of course I strongly believe he is autistic and written as autistic, even if the writers didn't necessarily know what those symptoms/behaviours meant (particularly in his debut issue, which just screams it).  I HC he has a fair number of sensory issues, and spinning himself and tops almost certainly brings him comfort.  Plus I HC that he has a comfort object that's even apart from his tops...maybe a plush toy of some kind.

I guess a lot of these aren't very exciting, but I tend to not go far into the realm of HC if IMO it divulges far from canon....canon is really important to me.  But hopefully these are somewhat interesting!

[nerobombs]

Insert Story Here: Ishgard

(Want more? Check out my Writing tag!)

I saw a few posts about Ishgard floating about, and I guess I haven’t actually written that many things on this blog yet, so I’m going to compile some of my writings about a subject I love to hate.

Anyone who knows me or reads my forum posts (a lot of of the content of which will be shamelessly copy-pasted here because what is effort) knows of the disdainful loathing I have for Heavensward’s writing. It’s not inherently bad--at worst it’s merely mediocre, filled to the brim with paper-thin plot vehicles and McGuffins--but the potential for a good story was there. 

Indeed, compared to most video game plots and MMO plots especially, the level of coherence it manages to maintain amidst the plague-ridden retcon carcass of World of Warcraft and the slightly suspicious smells being put out by Guild Wars 2 (whose story content used to be totally absurd, but they’ve been getting better) could almost be called admirable.

Almost.

I still don’t like it, though, in the same way that a disapproving father wouldn’t be particularly fond of his rebellious daughter’s boyfriend showing off a condom shaped like the head of a great white shark to his mates at school. It’s not the object itself, but rather the implications.

If you plan on reading further, put some goggles on, because there’s a lot of debris in a train wreck.

There’s also some crude humour and crass analogies ahead too.

First, I’ll preface this by saying that I firmly believe that Heavensward’s writing was restricted by the game design. This forgives certain things. For example, if the design priority is to have the players go to Azys Lla immediately after the Dravanian Hinterlands, then the writing’s job is as simple as coming up with an utterly contrived reason to do so. It’s frustrating, sure, but there’s a reason for it.

That said, I still have several problems.

-

1). There’s no Ishgard any more!

The things that interested me the most about Ishgard were, well, the things that made it Ishgard. It was unique. Ishgard was a despotic militant theocracy waging a genocidal holy war against a superior force amidst a tumultuous climate of political ambition, religious zealotry, and class warfare. There was something fascinating about the dichotomous nature of Ishgard's politics and culture, being ostensibly built around order and a single-minded goal yet also being unstable without the unifying threat of the dragons and built on the foundations of a lie (or at least, a historical misrepresentation), and all of this was put against a tense backdrop formed by the terrifyingly absolute power of the Church and the Inquisition.

Except, all of that is gone now. Poof.

Ishgard’s not a dictatorship any more. No, Ishgard seamlessly transitioned from a dictatorship to a bicameral republic with absolutely no conflict or resistance in the slightest. Part of the problem with this is that Thordan was absolutely batshit and the story handled Thordan horribly, but more on that later.

Ishgard’s not a theocracy any more. Since Ishgard is now a secular government, the Ishgardian Orthodox Church has been rendered impotent. There’s no war and no enemy, so there’s no Inqusition. 

And perhaps most offensively of all, Ishgard’s not militant any more. The Dragonsong War is definitively ended. Yeah, you can try to make some weak justification of “But Nidhogg’s brood”, but if killing Nidhogg didn’t end the war then the stragglers are completely meaningless. The thousand-year  genocidal holy war that formed the entirety of Ishgard’s national identity for a millennia is just gone.

That means that there’s no longer any glory gained from slaying dragons. That means the Order of the Dragoon is now completely meaningless. Commoners could become nobles by applying themselves and slaying dragons, but now even that limited and dangerous social mobility no longer exists.

About the only thing that separates Ishgard from the other city states is that they have snow, now. Where it was once an environment ripe for intrigue, it’s now as deflated and as saccharine as any of the other city states.

2). The ending wasn’t earned by anyone

Ishgard becoming a more peaceful state isn’t an inherently bad thing, though. Honestly, that is kind of small potatoes. The problem is how Ishgard got there.

Heavensward’s story had no struggle and no sacrifice. At least, nothing that was meaningful or represented. Literally, Ishgard achieved its peace completely effortlessly. 

Why does Ishgard transition so smoothly to a republic? Why is it that when Aymeric says “Hey guys, the dragons said it’s our fault and they’re totally right”, everyone accepts it unanimously? Why does Aymeric manage to take on the politics of the House of Lords and House of Commons so easily and effortlessly? How come Lucia has absolutely no qualms whatsoever about Aymeric’s aide-de-camp being discovered as Garlean? How is it that the Temple Knights and most especially the Dragoons--in which having a doomed hometown that was completely incinerated by dragons and having lost everyone you loved is almost a requirement--accept the peace so readily?

The most that anyone ever suffers is that Aymeric gets stabbed with a fruit knife exactly one time, and some crazy lady in Falcon’s Nest gets shot with an arrow.

And no, Haurchefant and Ysayle most emphatically do not count. Haurchefant was a one-dimensional character whose death was padded to the brim with arbitrary, ham-fisted melodrama, and Ysayle died in a context that was completely and totally irrelevant to her character arc to the point where her death may as well have not happened and literally nothing in the story would have changed.

I'm not exactly advocating for Game of Thrones-esque levels of character death. But even in light-hearted, idealistic stories, there are struggles. There is an ordeal for our heroes to conquer, and the resolution is earned. Can you imagine if, in the Lord of the Rings, Frodo and Sam really did take the Eagles to Mordor and just dropped the ring into Mount Doom? Pop, just like that?

Estinien's struggle over Nidhogg and subsequently over his own vengeance, then dying in order to keep both of those things from continuing to hurt people he cares about. That's a struggle and sacrifice. That's a price paid to overcome a meaningful conflict, because overcoming all meaningful conflict requires a great deal of effort, sacrifice, or both. But Estinien is just fine too. Turns out, all he had to do to kill his most hated enemy was get possessed by him. Huh! More people should try that.  

Aymeric could have been a really good avatar for Ishgard’s conflict as a whole. Here we have a military man and bastard son of the Archbishop suddenly become embroiled in politics and trusted to lead the future of his nation. I keep mocking his getting stabbed with a fruit knife in 3.1, but there was some actual drama there: the nobility accused Aymeric of being a patricidal heretic and saw his removing Thordan as a power grab. And the reason why Aymeric seems mostly flat is because the world doesn't give him any consequences to deal with, and even if they do, we never see him deal with this consequences. Ishgard becomes a seamless democracy with no problem. He doesn't care about the Eyes of Nidhogg at all or the implication that Nidhogg might come back as long as they're still intact. Everyone respects and follows him without question. He faces no genuine conflict that reflects upon his character besides "He's a nice guy and does good stuff". Why is Aymeric never overwhelmed by the politics? Why do we never see his frustration from having to juggle the wants and needs of Lords and commoners? Why does he never think about the ramifications of his actions (fucking EYES OF NIDHOGG, ANYONE)? There is a lot of room for serious depth that goes wasted because ultimately, Aymeric is a side character. And the thing is that Lucia can have real depth too besides being Aymeric's arm candy. She's a defected Garlean. We can never tell if her experience as a soldier in the Empire colours her perception of Eorzea or Ishgard. We never see Aymeric really rely on her except as a patsy or a messenger. If Aymeric is busy running the country as Lord Speaker, shouldn't she be in charge of the Temple Knights? Shouldn't Lucia have some apprehensions on being found out as a Garlean and being put in a position of authority? She's devoted to Aymeric and Ishgard, but we never see her be relevant except when she's doing something in Aymeric's stead. Is she ashamed of being Garlean?

Oh well, I guess it doesn’t matter. Peace for everyone, yay!

3). The focus of the story was Fucked with a capital F

Maybe it’s just me, but I am not on board with the game's fetish for the Scions of the Seventh Dawn. I get that they're essentially the "main" characters and the vehicle our characters use to travel all over the place and beat up primals, but the characters are flat and completely uninteresting. I don't care! I want to see Ishgard. I want to delve into a conflicted theocracy undergoing rapid, sudden change. I want to see more Aymeric, more Lucia, more Ysayle and Estinien. Hell, I want to see more of those fucking Fortemps brats more than I want to see the Scions.

This is also where I kind of start to get a little mad.

I get that the main conflict is between the Scions and the Ascians regarding the revival of Zodiark. Fine. I just don't think that the pacing of a far more interesting storyline (the Dragonsong war) should have been completely butchered in order to make room for the Scions and Ascians who really don't even do anything besides show up in the background and remind you that things are going to happen. Not that they are happening, but that eventually there'll be some kind of payoff.

The Scions get a ridiculous amount of screen time considering how little they accomplish and how irrelevant they are to Ishgard, and it is astounding how little effort the game puts in to make us care about them. I don't care about Thancred's missing pants. I don't care about Krile being Minfillia in all but name. I stopped caring about Alphinaud when he had the audacity to tell the Warrior of fucking Light to hand out T-shirts to the Crystal Braves because there’s no Eorzean word for “delegation”.

The Scions are the main characters, fine. This wouldn’t be such a problem if any of them had more personality or dimension than a piece of drift wood. We had the perfect opportunity to explore in-depth this new land of Ishgard and Coerthas, and instead it was wasted on...the Scions.

Here's why I don't like any of the writing for the Scions: they do display a measure of depth, consequence, and respond to consequence, but the thing is that their writing is built on more bad writing. Let's take for example Thancred, who actually has some real weight among the Scions. He felt responsible for Minfillia since he got her dad killed and feels guilt over being unable to save her. He's grieved over Minfilia becoming the voice of Hydaelyn and is much less snarky and less of a womaniser, becoming more stoic as a result. There's some actual development there. Except, the subject of his dramas was a cardboard cutout who was more useless than a DVD rewinder (Minfilia), the whole reason for her death was absurd to the point of raving madness (the entire Ul'dah conflict in 2.5 that started Heavensward...jesus shit), and interactions with Thancred are mostly just exposition. Thancred is always an observer and never a subject. Urianger is about the only Scion I actually like because there is actual emotional depth there that is revealed after the death of Moenbryda and the subject of his affections wasn't totally incompetent. Alisaie got a lot of focus in the last patch, but her character is so transparently a blatant plot device that it's hard to take seriously. She appears and disappears as needed. She had a good arc during Binding Coil where she defrosts but in 3.4 she goes totally Scion-brand flat. And in 3.4, her whole drama was that she wasn't willing to kill a kobold kid who might be tempered. Our teenaged heroine might have a problem with killing children? Stop the presses, Square Enix!

Also, think about this: Moenbryda got introduced in one patch and killed in the next, and she was written way better than most of the Scions, and that was with most of her backstory being delivered via exposition dump. Square Enix can do it, they just choose not to.

4). What is pacing? Can you eat it?

Ugh.

Like I said, I don’t find it especially problematic that Ishgard underwent radical change. I do have an especially HUGE problem with how it happened, though.

If they really had to pull off the "Nidhogg comes back to life" plot device, then Heavensward should have ended with Nidhogg's first death followed immediately by Estinien's possession. 3.1 Aymeric acting in direct opposition to Archbishop Thordan in order to secure peace with Hraesvelgr's brood. 3.2 would deal with Aymeric and Co. working towards securing said peace amidst the chaos about the Dragonsong War, and still end with Vidofnir getting shanked just after a tenuous peace had been agreed upon. 3.3, Nidhogg dies. 3.4 would deal with the conflict of Ishgard's reformation and hint at Thordan’s plans to become a primal, and the expansion ends with 3.5 as Thordan become a Primal in a desperate bid to secure the theocracy's power after peace had been achieved with the dragons.

You can completely write this off as me complaining that the story is bad because I didn’t write it, sure, whatever. But let’s examine what actually happened.

Instead, more than half of the initial expansion story and the subsequent 3.1 and 3.2 patches is spent fucking around with the Scions and watching the Ascians and Warriors of Darkness twirl their bad-guy mustaches going "Guys we are totally still relevant to the story". Then Regula van Hydrus shows up to join the mustache twirling by going "Please don’t forget the Garleans, we put a lot of effort into recycling the Judges from Final Fantasy 12", and seeing Square Enix completely fucking bomb any potential that Ul'dah had to be interesting by not going through with killing off the Sultana.

Side note, what in the flying fuck was the point of the Sultana’s poisoning and the whole Ul’dah thing besides making it so Raubahn now has to put magazines on his lap to turn the pages? If you can legitimately answer this question--and no, getting the WoL to Ishgard does not count because the WoL already had a gazillion reasons to go there that weren’t idiotic--then I’ll buy you a Night Pegasus mount.

I’m going to highlight all of my subsequent issues with addressing the train wreck that is Archbishop Thordan “Wasted Opportunity VII”.

Like I said, I somewhat understand that the writing is constrained by the game design. But that doesn’t really excuse the fact that Thordan’s entire character was completely bonkers.

He locks up Aymeric, runs away from Ishgard, ninja loots the key to Azys Lla, goes to Azys Lla and becomes a primal for about twenty minutes before dying. His entire load blown in the span of a couple of days at best.

And part of this problem is how easily the majority of Ishgard accepts responsibility for starting the Dragonsong War. Thordan's response to Aymeric threatening to reveal the truth shouldn't have been to lock Aymeric up, but to say "Who would believe you?" 

The Ishgardians have been the subject of a measured genocidal war that was deliberately transformed into a war of attrition for a thousand years. Are they really such easily manipulated little worms that Aymeric and some foreign wahoo who may or may not have actually killed primals can sway a population from the entirety of their millennia-old tradition and heritage with a couple of speeches?

In addition, the main conflict between Thordan and Aymeric's ideologies in the game is implied to be order versus chaos, except Thordan's idea of "order" is completely batshit and nonsensical.

Thordan's whole deal should have been that Ishgard needs the Dragonsong War, or at least the dragons as enemies, to remain stable and to retain its heritage and national identity. For one thousand years, Ishgard's been throwing themselves at the dragons, and to completely undermine the last thousand years of war would do nothing but sow chaos and breed discontent and destroy the unity that's kept the city together all this time. That is the idea of order that Thordan should have been trying to adhere to: the status quo is god, or ends on favourable terms.

Instead, Thordan for some reason decides that the path to peace is a world of absolute order at the cost of all freedoms and the destruction of anyone who opposes him. He becomes more one dimensional in motivations than Sauron. This is some insane hypocritical thinking since he opens the gates so the Heretics can assault the foundation to fuel the prayers to become King Thordan, and this hypocrisy completely robs him of any legitimacy. There's no escalation. Thordan immediately jumps to fire the nuke that is becoming King Thordan. There's no buildup. And that's most of Heavensward's writing in a nutshell: the pacing is awful, so all these characters either fix things flawlessly in an incredibly short time with no consequences (Aymeric), or immediately become insane (Thordan) to move the plot along.

--

I don’t trust Stormblood’s content to be compelling at all. Anything that was interesting about Ala Mhigo will be resolved with maybe five lines of dialogue,  tops, if Heavensward is any indication. At best, there will be an offscreen resolution that maybe makes sense if you just don’t think about it.

Ala Mhigo has the potential to have a lot of interesting themes and conflict. I just don't trust the writers to actually explore any of that, because who bothers exploring interesting themes and conflict when we can watch Yda be a princess or some shit? Look, Papalymo is hitting someone with Tupsimati! That's interesting, right? Thancred lost his pants again, uh oh! No. The Warriors of Darkness were pretty decent, but the conflict with the Ascians should really be a background thing, a sinister undertone that adds to the gravity of the Warrior of Light going around and saving the world. The instant you shove the mysteries in our face--repeatedly--it stops being a mystery and it takes all the proactivity away from our characters. Here's how we currently handle the Ascians: we sit on our happy asses and wait for them to do something, then react. And maybe we'll save Ishgard on the side if we feel like it. It should be the other way around. We should be proactively going to stop the Dragonsong war as our main motivation. We should be going to liberate Ala Mhigo as our main motivation. I don't think we should be going there with the Scions, waiting for the Ascians, and "Yeah cool the Ascians aren't doing anything, I guess we should liberate Ala Mhigo".

TL;DR i don’t like FFXIV’s story

[amplesalty]

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)

Well, it’s Saturday the 14th now but who’s counting?

It’s been a hot minute since I bad mouthed this franchise but since it was Friday the 13th yesterday, why not dive right back in? I’m still trying to slowly work my through and this marks the halfway point. We do have another Friday the 13th in November but then the next ones aren’t until August 2021 and May 2022 so it might take a while at this pace.

Let’s make no bones about it though, it’s still not good and pretty boring throughout, suffering as Halloween did in its need to do something new that’s exactly the same as it shuns the attempt to make Tommy the new killer and instead brings back Jason from the dead. But that also underlines the saving grace of the film as it pushes slightly into the realm of the absurd which brings some humour and charm to it.

For as much as this movie distances itself from Part V, the opening is very reminiscent of it as two guys go to dig Jason up. Only this time one of them is Tommy Jarvis who is out to exorcise some demons by giving Jason an overdue cremation. I wasn’t sure at first how much retconning was going on, like maybe this was child Jason’s body in the grave but this is adult Jason so presumably this is where they buried his body after Part IV. I don’t know why you would bury him at all though. Later on in the movie, the town sheriff is chewing out Tommy for coming around shouting about how Jason is back from the dead, that the town changed it’s name specifically to move on from the past and the stigma of the Jason killings. So why would you put him in a marked grave? It’s like when they buried Osama Bin Laden at sea to avoid his gravesite becoming some sort of shrine, you just know that every Goth in a 50 mile radius would be coming to hang out at the grave of Jason Vorhees.

Turns out there is a much graver danger attached to having his body laying around though when Tommy digs him up with the intention to burn his body and ‘send him to Hell’. Only, his emotions get the better of him and he starts plunging a metal pole into his body instead. This inadvertently acts as a lightning rod and a sudden freak bolt of lightning serves as the appropriate catalyst to bring Jason back to life like he’s the Frankenstein monster or something. One has to wonder if they had that in mind considering a later scene features the Alice Cooper song ‘Teenage Frankenstein’ that was written for the movie.

This is all pre-title by the way. Upon realising the futility of fighting the monster, Tommy makes his escape and leaves Jason to don his mask as the camera zooms in on one of his eyes. Bizarrely, there’s an effect of his pupil dilating as Jason walks in from off screen in profile, before turning to the camera and slashing. Jason Vorhees taking on the role of 007 once Daniel Craig finally hangs up the Martini glass would be an interesting move...

There’s other moments of humour sprinkled throughout that help brighten things up, like Jason hunting down a bunch of paintballers out on some corporate retreat. One of them is especially nerdish with glasses and goggles, complete with his own comedy soundtrack that seems to follow him around wherever he goes. That is until Jason rips his arm off...

Or the two particularly melancholic kids who seem to have accepted their own fragile mortality at their young age, one suggesting that they’re ‘definitely dead meat’ whilst the other asks what he had wanted to be when he grew up.

But other than that, it is what it’s always been; another round of Jason killing another round of camp councillors. I will say though that still having Tommy around lends it a greater sense of continuity and gives you at least one character that you vaguely care about, everyone else might as well be nameless and faceless machete fodder.

They recast him again for this one, Thom Matthews of The Return of the Living Dead fame taking the role. He seems to be the prevailing image of Tommy given that it’s this version that was used in the Friday the 13th game that came out a few years ago. Personally I preferred John Shepherd in Part V as I think his appearance gave a greater sense of that unhinged part of Tommy’s character. It’s something that play up here with the sheriff talking about Tommy’s previous run in with Jason and how he’s meant to be in a psychiatric clinic. He spends the entire movie talking about how dangerous Tommy is and how he’s the one probably committing the murders in order to convince everyone Jason is back. This is my ‘shades of grey’ mindset talking again but that would have been neat to go into more, even if you didn’t want to commit to Tommy being the new killer, you could imply he was and then reveal that Jason was back but you see right from the off that Jason is alive and everything takes place concurrently with Tommy being locked up.

There does seem to be something of a connection between Tommy and Jason though, at the climax Tommy has a plan to rid the world of Jason once and for all and manages to goad him into a final showdown, Jason even abandons killing one girl in order to go after Tommy. It’s pretty obvious at this point that you can’t kill Jason, you can shoot him as much as you want, even point blank with a shotgun but it’s not going to do anything. But incapacitate him? Now that’s the ticket. That’s why Tommy is going to anchor him and let him sink to the bottom of Crystal Lake.

Either that or he’s just taking his boulder for a walk...

Speaking of the Universal Monsters though, this seems to poke at something of a Dracula/Vampire vibe as well with Tommy suggesting he has to lure Jason back to his original resting place. It’s almost bringing things full circle to his origins of drowning in the lake as a kid, an odd sense of symmetry for a series that has already disregarded that it called one of its previous entries ‘The Final Chapter’ and would spend the next few with pseudo reboot subtitles like ‘A New Beginning’, ‘Jason Lives’ and ‘The New Blood’.

But the final image of the movie is one that has been recurring throughout, the eyes of Jason still moving from behind his mask, showing he still has life in him yet as he will no doubt one day rise from his watery grave to wreak havoc on another bunch of teenagers around Crystal Lake. But that’s a story for another day in about 8 months time...

[raywritesthings]

2, 5, 9, 11, 12 for Lost in Translation please?

Should have expected this fic to pop up. Hope you find the answers interesting!

2: What scene did you first put down?Hm, let me think. I know I wrote the whole first chapter/sorta prologue-y thing before any of the others. It might have been that first bit, with Theta and Koschei at the Academy, and Koschei’s telling him how dumb he is and that his mark isn’t anybody in particular’s name and of course he’d screw it up because they’re taking the translation of D-o-n-n-a as “lady” literally, without the cultural context that there are people on Earth named Donna. The whole concept of having his and Donna’s marks be like, totally incomprehensible to themselves (well, less time for the Doctor, but ya know) was what inspired me to write the whole thing, really, because I’d never seen it done like that before. So that whole prologue bit getting them caught up to The Runaway Bride was very quick to come together, but I do think it was that interaction between Theta and Koschei that was written out first.

5: What part was hardest to write?The hilarious thing is, I wasn’t expecting the fic to become this massive thing the way it did. I think the original plan was to have the Doctor find out about her mark after the whole witch fiasco, but as it grew and as so many of you guys reviewed and said how amazing it was, I realized that ending was very anticlimatic, that I needed to do the full season. Which of course meant that I had to come up with yet another Journey’s End fixit. So those final couple chapters were probably the trickiest because I hadn’t actually had a plan for them in mind until I was practically upon them.

9: Were there any alternate versions of this fic?Oh well, I just sort of answered this one above, didn’t I? Whoops! But yeah there was that. There were also a couple of extra trips I had sort of half-planned out for that bit of time between “Midnight” and “Turn Left”. I think they’re sitting somewhere on my Google Drive, but it would have made that chapter way too long, plus I think you all had had about enough of the near-misses at that point, so I cut them. I don’t know if that counts as “alternate versions” but more like “additional material”.

11: What do you like best about this fic?I think just the concept in general. I’ve probably said this before, but I never planned to write a soulmate AU fic. I’ve read a couple here or there, and some of them are quite good. I’m certainly not panning it or the people who write it. But they tend to be oneshots because it’s all sort of just about the two people meeting and realizing their names/marks/first words/seeing colors/timers/etc match up. And then maybe you get a bit of cute interaction, and boom they’re together and have decided they will get married sooner or later, etc. Again, it’s certainly fine enough to read particularly when you just want a bit of uncomplicated fluff, but it didn’t seem that enjoyable to write. It wasn’t until I realized that I could write it in such a way to have Donna and the Doctor meet and neither of them realize that they were, in fact, soulmates despite obviously being so, that I knew I could have some real fun as a writer.

12: What do you like least about this fic?Probably the pacing could have been better. Again, it grew into something much, much bigger than I initially intended partway through, so the first few chapters are much shorter, kind of rush through a bit, whereas the later chapters are longer and devote a lot more time and attention to detail. It probably gives it sort of a lopsided feel if you read the whole thing through at once. I also kind of wish I’d actually written the flashback scene of the Doctor teaching Donna about Emergency Protocol One earlier and had it in the fic earlier rather than sort of retconning it in when I needed to, but that came about because I hadn’t been accounting for needing a Journey’s End plan until rather late in the game. Overall, I’m happy about the fic, but those are probably the weakest points.

Send me one of my fic titles and number(s) from this list!

[katefathers]

Kate Watches: Doctor Who 9x04 & 9x05

“What are you doing now?” asked the giant Odin head in the sky.

“I’m averting my eyes from this episode, O Lord.”

“Well don’t.”

That’s right, it’s time for “The Girl Who Died”.

But first, let’s take a look at “Before the Flood”. It opens with a breaking of the fourth wall, which while interesting I thought ultimately unnecessary. As the first episode ended on a cliffhanger, I would have rather had it immediately resolved than to draw attention to the technique the writers were using. This is another example of how Moffat’s Doctor Who doesn’t trust the audience. After the credits, however, the story recommences, and although it wasn’t quite as well-paced it was still a tense and enjoyable episode. 

Part of this enjoyment was Toby Whithouse’s employment of some storytelling devices that I have always liked in Doctor Who. He name-checks previous companions, as well as Harold Saxon, the episode “Kill the Moon”, and adds some possible foreshadowing with the Minister of War. I always like it when episodes remember that they’re part of a wider universe, that Doctor Who doesn’t only exist in that moment and the character’s actions have broader implications. Whitehouse did this again when he referenced the Doctor’s “survivor’s guilt”, which could be a nod to the time war (and how hilarious is it that Moffat might be the only one who cared for his Time War retcon?), and again when he brought back the very Russell T Davies trope of the paradox. Under Moffat, paradoxes became a minor inconvenience, something bandied about as if they mattered and halfheartedly overcome with “special space magic”. Whithouse isn’t afraid of the complications a paradox presents. He looks at the rules--at the limitations--and uses his imagination to find a way around it. That’s interesting storytelling. That’s absorbing viewing. It’s something I have dearly missed from Doctor Who, and as a writer have found so frustrating with Moffat’s work.

Whithouse’s characters also stand in direct contrast with Moffat’s, particularly his writing of the Doctor and Clara. Whithouse’s characters, of all genders, have agency and opinions. They are angry and frustrated with their situation, but also incredibly kind. Clara, while not as active as I’d like her to be, still does more than wait around for a rescue. And the Doctor isn’t a god, when Whithouse writes him. He isn’t infallible, and he isn’t insulting, and characters don’t bow to his genius. Bennett confronts the Doctor after O’Donnell dies, directly questioning his actions. Cass shows her displeasure at how Clara, and through her the Doctor, treats other people’s lives. Unlike Moffat who often lets the Doctor’s actions go unquestioned, Whithouse forces the Doctor to take ownership of his decisions. To explain himself both to characters and the audience. It’s so wonderful to see that again, and judging from the episodes that come after I wonder if this will become a theme of the series: the Doctor examining how he treats the lives of those around him.

That brings me to “The Girl Who Died”. Written by Jamie Mathieson and Steven Moffat, it picks up at the end of adventure, which I quite enjoyed. Unfortunately, that opening segment was the high point for me, as this episode was fraught with terrible CGI, painfully ridiculous conceits, and frustratingly passive characters. That Odin head in the sky was laughable. “Baby” is not a language; I muted the television when the Doctor was “speaking” it. Clara turned from a negotiator to an observer, waiting for the Doctor to come up with a plan rather than helping him formulate one. Most other characters were pretty passive too. The Doctor was also much more abrasive and rude, which after “Before the Flood” made it clear that this was Moffat’s characterization. The pace was middling, and the story was a little dull, and Ashildr being made “functionally immortal” using technology the Doctor had lying around makes you question past narratives. Why was the Doctor being with Rose such a big deal if he could have easily matched their lifespans? Why has losing companions to time and death such a sadness when he had a solution? True he was uncertain about his decision, but given his past conflict with his being so long-lived, I feel like the Doctor should have had greater reservations. This shouldn’t have been so easy for him to do. There should have been more than a two-minute struggle.

There were things about this episode that I did enjoy. I like the idea of Clara always being a little uncomfortable with the Doctor and the time she spends with him. As a viewer you know that Clara won’t stay forever, and the story is already planting those seeds. This is a break in her daily routine. This is not a lifestyle that she seamlessly slips in to. The awkward thumbs up and hug from the Doctor was also adorable, and Ashildr was interesting, and I did love that we weren’t in Victorian England. However, all these things were marred by the episode’s rather massive flaws. Perhaps if characters were allowed more agency I would feel differently. Or if the revelation of “why the Doctor has this face” had actually been built up properly, rather than mentioned once and then never again. There were good ideas here, but they were poorly executed. 

Here’s hoping the second part is better.