#also whatever the fuck happened in that one scene in i think end of evangelion? i havent watched it yet

[reverentwormpriest]

its also hilarious having a fandom with such a huge number of dudebros in it cuz ppl are rlly on reddit debating if homotron 5000 (kaworu) and bisexual disaster (shinji) are gay while they hold hands in a shower as one blushes and the other straight up says he loves him. Ookay translation error..

[weirdcat1213]

volume 12 already? damn that went fast. just yesterday we were crying about vash drinking in a church

anyway :D volume 12 thoughts time

chap 1:

-chronicaaaaaaaaa :3

-AW NO MY BABY

-these quiet panels are the fucking best/worst thing that have ever happened to me

-too many memories :c

-YES LINA IS THERE THANK GOD (at the same time this is heartbreaking as fuck)

-all the enemies after all the people he has ever loved/helped

-HIS MOM AND HIS BF

-THATS IT THATS THE ONE THATS THE PANEL OH GOD WE ARE *HERE*

-im gonna go cry now

-i wonder what "anti plant" entails...is it a special material?

-ok fine, chronica can call knives a terrorist. she gets a pass

-oh sweet geesus

-eh?

-oohhhhhh.....ok fuck

-nothing can stop the hatred of this man. kinda admirable but as the song says "your misery and hate will kill us all"

chap 2:

-"corrosive thunder", love the title

-OH SHIT DOMINA NO, pls dont let him get to you

-DOMINA NOOOOOO

-the plants kinda look in pain there....

-MY GIRLSSSSSSSSSS

-for pain purposes, i choose to believe that when they resonate they hum like vash did in stampede

-aaand shes gone

-oh god, the end of evangelion flashbacks

-OH NIGHTOW YOU SON OF A BISCUIT- THOSE EYES IN THE BACKGROUND-

-tbh everything in your ship just being consumed by someone else so quickly must be scary af. nothing belongs to them anymore and soon, chronica could even loose herself

chap 3:

-oh shit oh fuck oh shit

-oh shit not thors hammer

-omg look! the laws of physics!

-noooo :c we dont get to know domina too much but its still sad

-OH?

-MAGIC BULLETS TIME BABYYYYYYYYYYY

-ohhhhhhh okok i get it

chap 4:

-THATS MY BOIIIIIIIIIII

-AH SHIT IVE JUST NOTICED THE HAIR

-ALSO PLS DONT SMILE LIKE THAT-

-childish is a good word for it cuz knives just doesnt want to accept hes wrong and scared

-THE POWER OF LOVE AND PEACE BITCH

-is vash pausing cuz even though his plan was to kill knives hes kinda sad that knives wants to kill him? i may never know

-let him use his fucking gun ok? hes an expert. also i like to think he uses it to stay grounded. like to stay with the people hes fighting with. hes not superior or anything

-TO YOUR KNEES BITCH TO YOUR FUCKING KNEES

-THATS MY FUCKING GUNMAN THATS MY SON RIGHT THERE

chap 5:

-FLASHBACK TIME LETS GO

-omg right it hated this. hes just a baby :c

-so vash left with a stranger? i forgot about that

-honey just be glad YOU ARE ALIVE

-BECAUSE HES VASH THE STAMPEDE- i should rewatch that episode huh

-GEESUS BRO

-tbh vash, you should have. then and now

-YEAH TELL HIM VASH >:D YOU ARENT NAIVE

-tbh i would also think thats enough to break the chain. hmm

-"stay with me" vash pls i cant jump into the void rn

-GEESUS CHRIST, the cleanest cut in the west

-also you think vash made that face cuz the last time he made someone bleed was rem-

-THE CLOSEUP TO THE MOUTHS AHHHHHHHHHHH

-"we dont belong in the future of this planet" dont fucking say that

chap 6:

-actually wanting to humans to talk with plants is a great step for improving their relationship but sure knives, whatever

-THATS SO TRUE VASH LETS GO, LET THE PLANTS HAVE A SAY IN IT

-ive said this before but as someone who was mocked by wanting context before judging people, vash is so...reassuring. like it wasnt wrong of me to want to know all the sides of one story. im glad

-also i completely forgot about that town and radiation. how tf radiation happens in that planet, what am i missing

-oh nvm, thanks nightow

-HES NOT EXCUSING, HES EXPLAINING OMFG YOU IDIOT

-YEAH FUCKING TELL HIM >:D POP OFF VASH >:D

-WHY IS IT THEN? HUH KNIVES?- oh shit what

-yknow what, ill give knives the fact that humans are ignorant and we are repeating history etc etc, but im done. finish him vash

-for some reason this reminds me to that scene with the soldiers in ep 12. my man really cant catch a break

-YEAH THE GIRLSSSSSSSSSSSS :D

-"you've been abandoned" maybe by some but not by everyone. and thats the whole point

-YEAH YOU ARENT BABY ILY

-HOLD UP IS THAT HER FACE?????

-awww :c

chap 7:

-IS IT LIVIO TIME????

-YO WTF, WHO SHOT MY GIRL

-ofc the military would be like this

-i literally cant say whos bleeding

-ah fuck ok

-ugh no...pls dont tell me hes fucking bleeding through his eyes...pls dont (if i see stampede vash bleeding like that i will eat my pc piece by piece)

-chronica :c

-LIVIOOOOOOOOO :0

-OMG YES, YES, IM SO HAPPY. quoting 98 "and i know in my heart he would have done the same"

-MR. VASH, MR. LIVIO AWWW :3

-OH HES SPINNING THOSE FUCKERS :D

-oh well thats not fair, hes too cool

-wait why is knives not wanting to kill vash bad?

chap 8:

-considering the blockers chronica has, entering a fused entity must be scary but also exciting

-ngl i dont get the spikes on the screen thing

-geesus

-WTF YOU DID TO HIM???

-wait no i want to see whats happening with vash- and its livio time

-oh hes alive thank god (this is my 2nd read why am i surprised)

-OH NO ITS THAT MOMENT OH NNONONONO STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME

-i hate seeing his eyes like that if im being honest, its scary

-ESO MAMONAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA GET UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP

-LIVIOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

-OH SHIT its my wife

-OH WAIT MY OTHER WIFE IS HERE TOO

-VASH WHY ARE YOU MAKING THAT FACE

-OH GOD NOT LEGATO AND THE RUSSIAN DOLL

-CAN SHIT STOP HAPPENING FOR A MINUTE

-THERES TOO MANY PEOPLE HERE CAN YALL CALM THE FUCK DOWN

chap 9:

-omg its the legato episode

-what is happening, what am i looking at

-oh oh shit

-RIGHT IN HIS MF EYE

-what is happening?

-ok flashback time

-yeap. its that time. shit

-geesus fucking christ. tbh ofc legato would think knives is right. there was nothing to prove him wrong

-yeap. i would do the same actually. stomp on his head

-oh honey...honey thats gay-

-is that why he has short hair...cuz knives gave him a name AND A HAIR STYLE??

-damn son

-also i may be wrong but where do people get the idea he inserted metal in his own brain to have those powers?/gen

[zer0status]

I recently got around to watching neon genesis and what really got me to finish it was this one quote I'd heard floating around, "Get in the robot Shinji." Now, I didn't know much about the show going into it, but what I did know can be summed up as:

Depressed teenager fights giant monsters in big robot

His dad's an asshole

There are some behind the scenes conspiracy's going on.

After watching the first episode, I thought the quote was gonna be used by dear old dad as a way to bully Shinji into the EVA. I now know this is not the case. Fast forward about a year and I kinda stopped watching the show, but a crossover in the battle cats got me kinda hyped for it again and I decided to give it another go. By this point I'd discovered that looking up fly me to the moon on youtube would inevitably lead me to neon genesis. I never did watch the evangelion cover as I thought it would be the track that played in some final confrontation or ending as both the intro (cruel angels thesis) and the outro were not it (I was watching on Netflix.) I also got some impressions from descriptions of units in the battle cats such as:

Ikari and his right hand man scientist dude I cannot remember the name of being in space suits with the description of them being ready to enact their ultimate plan with complete trust in eachother.

Kaworu, a mysterious pilot with a strange smile.

The various angels and a some that I haven't seen that looked like evas

All of this led me to a sort of expectation of "Get in the robot Shinji." being used as a grand finale to show that Ikari really didn't care about Shinji and was resorting to ordering him into an eva (presumably as the final step in his grand plan.) Maybe it'd be supported by having his assistant dude point a gun at Shinji, or have the other pilots/Misato restrained by Nerv agents in the back. I was expecting something big.

Needless to say I was pretty fucking confused when the show finished, and not just from the shows ending. WHERE WAS THE BADASS ULTIMATE BETRAYAL LINE?????? WHERE WAS THE AMAZING MOOD SETTER FINALE SONG? After some "calm" research I discovered that the badass betrayal line was actually just a throwaway line in what is basically a shitpost. Fly me to the moon actually was the ED but Netflix is incompetent. I was VERY displeased. (Spoiler ahead) Just think about how cool it would have been if instead of Ikari getting killed by Rei off in some clone chamber he instead was the one to make Shinji get in the fucking robot to fight the mass produced models! Imagine if there was a beautiful rendition of fly me to the moon as Shinji made his final choice between whatever the fuck was happening and self improvement or whatever it was! Anyways that was my experience with evangelion: anticipation, anticipation, excitement, confusion and still confused disappointment. Thank you for attending my Ted talk.

[deltaengineering]

Thought on Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 ??

This is going to ruffle some feathers (it seems to be beloved pretty much across the board), but I hated it. It's ultra long, extremely tedious and requires a level of interest in Shinji's sads that I simply can't muster anymore in the 2020s. Ironically that is also the reason that I'm fine with the one thing that's somewhat contentious, the ending, because who cares that Shinji ends up with Mari or whatever. Or what Mari is or whatever. It's all very whatever, but hardly the worst part.

It may be relevant that I'm not an OG Eva superfan. I think it's an important and interesting show and honestly quite good all in all, but it also has a ton of issues, one of which is that you really need to empathize with a couple of fucked up teens to get the most out of it. I didn't do that fully even in the 90s, and then Rebuild started coming out and I thought "well this is unnecessary", and then it took almost a decade and a half to complete and I thought "get to the point already", and then it got to the point and I thought "well, that was pointless". These movies are not different enough to add much of substance (the tons of fanservice that make up the bulk of them are not substantive), and the slight adjustments in overall direction are something I'm not a fan enough to appreciate. In the end it was mostly just Eva again, but worse. I'm also not much of a continuity wanker, so as far as I'm concerned the Rebuild characters are just different characters altogether which makes me care about them even less.

I mean, these movies do look good, but that's not enough to save the tedium of 5 fucking minutes of launch sequence because Eva is the show with long, technobabbly startup sequences I guess, or near catatonic Shinji hanging around in a village while Rei does a bunch of generic "what is hoo-man" type stuff and then tragically turns into Tang (at least that was a genuine laugh). The quiet stuff is technically fine, but there's just way too much of it. In fact, if 4 at least had more eyecandy action I wouldn't be bored – I do think the best part of the movie is the dumb pointless action setpiece in Paris, but hey, at least something happens there. If "Eva-like things with a budget" is what you're here for, the Rebuild movies do deliver, but 4 is not the best there because there just isn't much action and what there is is spinning CG robots on a red background. 2 and even 3 are better on that front, and my favorite scene in Rebuild is from 1 (the Ramiel fight).

And then there's the lore, which is also just a bunch of vague shit. Not that that's new to Eva, but in the glitzy remake it ends up feeling a lot less genuine and more like "please imagine something good here and then write it down on a fan wiki". That was a huge issue with the ending of 3 and it doesn't improve in 4.

So overall, my opinion of 4 is that I was annoyed with Rebuild going in and then it expected me to take Rebuild more seriously than ever. That could not go well under any circumstances and in fact it went particularly poorly. If this movie was a crisp 90 minutes I could have gone with "not my thing, but they tried", but at 2 1/2 hours all good will is gone eventually.

[akimmito]

Heroes are made by the path they choose

Previous | AO3 | Next

___________

Chapter 7

Marinette returns to battle having merged Longg and Plagg. She confronts the Akuma, whose name is unknown, and invokes the power of the Lightning Dragon, the AT field is activated again, but manages to crack enough so that she, using the sword, pierces the shield (perhaps she used a bit magic to enhance the impact force). Chloe jumps behind her and the two fall on the Akuma, just then the chirp sounds again and more mist appears, this time surrounding them all.

They hear voices, they can't see anything and, although for some it's almost heartbreaking to hear, they can't be distracted. Paris depends on them, they may not all be useful at the time, but they never know what could happen.

"Cataclysm!"Marinette wastes no time and, accustomed to Talia's voice, does not stop from her main mission.

Soon, the bark cracks and begins to light up as it seems to expand... there is no butterfly anywhere.

By the time he realizes it, the crust has exploded, staining everything twenty kilometers away from a liquid that looks like blood.

And where the golden diamond was, now there is a kind of worm floating above the Luxembourg Palace.

____________

Just Robert @PoorButterflies

What the fuck?

#WTFParis

Ladybug come back @ LadybugHero_89

PEOPLE! THE ANGEL EXPLODED! It was quite a scene from NGE, will the heroes be okay?

Little Little Sun @ ErasmusLS_564

My sister sent me a video of the exact moment the Akuma exploded, how shocking.

[Attached Video]

#AngelInParis #WTFParis

_____________

Felix feels numb, the scarlet liquid completely covering them. The big problem is that due to the strong smell of metal, he knows it's blood, but that is only part of the matter, what makes him annoying is that it was hot and it's making him sick, not in the sense of feeling disgusted, it's as if the blood was poisonous.

"Guys?"He barely recognizes Luka's voice before falling to his knee as he tries to make his limbs listen to him.

It's a moment of stupor, but the next thing he registers is that a whiplash sends him and Red Fox flying from the building where he was (destroying the construction on the way). It crashes into one of the statues at the University of Paris, La Sorbonne, and then falls to the ground. Nathaniel suffers the same fate, but ends up knocking down the spire of the dome and falling to the other end, within the grounds of the university.

He feels stupid, if he had anticipated it, he could have put the shell on at least the two of them and not seem like a pathetic hero attempt. It feels like an amateur, it's a shame. How could anyone think it would explode?

"If it wasn't so terrible, I'd be excited to fight an angel. Luka, the second chance. "

Return.

Felix watches Marinette and Chloe jump over the Akuma when the AT field falls. At those times, communications sound.

"Kagami, go to Felix's side, now. Felix, put on a shell! The Akuma is going to explode. "Kagami obeys immediately trusting Luka's words, he must have used the second chance. As soon as the girl is by her side, he activate the shell, just in time.

"Cataclysm!"

And the Akuma, in effect, explodes bathing everything in a blood red liquid, inside the shell it's seen how it seems to boil and evaporate, but Felix notes that it considerably weakened the protection of his shield. If they had been hit directly by the liquid, it would have caused a lot of damage.

He look in the direction of the Akuma, there is no longer the rhombus, there are no signs of Chloe or Marinette either, but he doubts that they have exploded, perhaps they were only thrown away. Take note of the Akuma's new look and the interesting metal plate on what he imagines is the head. Not that he finds much shape in what looks like a giant silver-colored noodle, although he understands that it may be a worm.

"He will attack in your direction, separate."

Felix deactivates the shield and the three jump in different directions, just in time to avoid a whiplash from the Akuma's tail.

"Rakkīgāru, we will cover you. "Nathaniel speaks the moment he activates his power. "Mirage. "

Kagami pulls away a little, allowing the two boys to fight. Between the three of them they should be able to take down Akuma, correct?

"Lucky Charm!"  When activating her power, a tight suit with a very curious design falls into her hands, she has no idea how a suit would help them defeat the Akuma. What would Marinette do? She turns to battle, ready to cope. They must reach the alleged akumatized object.

"A suit? "Felix questions, looking at him curiously. Is it really a suit will give them victory?"

"It's a Plug suit... what? I didn't watch the series, but I do know about the suits because I wore them for inspiration. "Red Fox jumps as the illusion fades and the Akuma's tail slams in his direction. "Well, the illusions don't seem to work much. "

"Anything to mention about the suit?" Felix leaps at the worm and hurls the shield directly at the metal plate, only to find another AT field. "Really? "He growls annoyed when he sees his shield bounce off and it's lost in the sea of fog.

"Those suits have instruments for monitoring the health condition, and it also allows for increased synchronization with the Eva... which we don't have. "

"Well, let's be creative."What else can that suit do?"

"I think it can inflate, I saw that it looked round in an image of a red-haired girl."

Felix only listens to them without really understanding. The whole situation is simply disastrous.

____________

Héctor de Troya @EpicAdveturerHector

Hello? Can someone explain what is happening at the Luxembourg Palace? There is a giant worm!

Adrien A. @AdrienAgreste

We were arriving home from the airport when the police owed us to an Akuma shelter just as it explodes. Since when is the butterfly active?

Shinji @AllOrNothing_

@AdrienAgreste The new Hawkmoth seems to hate fashion, he almost didn't send his first Akuma at the opening of fashion week.

Just me @LonelyA_loveless

Apocalyptic scene, blood littered the entrance to the Akuma refuge in Saint-Sulpice. Let's hope the heroes finish quickly.

____________

Miraculously, as they talk about the properties of the suit while avoiding attacks and watch the Akuma destroy the Luxembourg Garden, they come up with a plan to traverse the new AT field. That includes distracting him with the blissful ball-shaped suit (they figured out how to turn it into that) while Ateliade uses her powers to drive the Akuma's powers insane, hopefully, being something so harmless, he doesn't consider it a threat, especially since monkey powers are not such a common knowledge.

Ateliade falls onto one of the shattered ceilings with her already summoned power, her evil smile only telling her that she's excited to join saving all of their butts. Normally the strategies are made by Marinette, but the Akuma had very specific abilities from a very specific program that only Pegase had seen.

However, this has given them a much clearer idea that this new butterfly user is much more committed to destroying them. In addition to their victims not shouting that they want the prodigies, they seem willing to tear them apart and then take the jewelry. If Felix is honest with himself, he only talks a lot about how his uncle like villain was so nefarious

If this works out, Felix will pay everyone's drinks and give Damian a Great Dane, all because he has no faith in the blissful plan, but it's the only thing they could think of where they could wear the suit.

Five minutes later, the suit by itself would have been a fiasco, but Nathaniel decides to use his power again (thus activating the timer) to simulate that the suit was one of them, that generated the perfect distraction for Ateliade to launch what it seems a plush bunny that, without being a real surprise, collides with the AT field, but, by the nature of the monkey's powers, it makes the shield go crazy.

Now, they have to really figure out how to get through that without being cut in half by the crazy AT field.

Atelaide is crazy enough to do it, using her stick to propel herself using the craziness of the shield. She manages to fall on the worm's head and, while he twists to get rid of she, she summons her power again (the previous one fell into the mist), this time it looks like a plush ball and only drops it.

This time the Akuma writhes, the butterfly mask appears as the worm crashes into the Luxembourg Palace. After several more movements and leaving the building reduced to heaps of rubble, a purple butterfly flutters out.

Felix takes that as a sign that as soon as everything is fixed he will order the best liqueurs and distribute them to everyone on the team. Now where can he get a Great Dane?

___________

Shinji @AllOrNothing_

He threw a stuffed animal at him and the AT field went crazy! What the hell with her powers? It's great!

#EpicVictory

Rayn @TheGreatestWorld

Oh lord, bless the Lord. The cure was launched.

Ladybug come back @ LadybugHero_89

Everything is fine, the heroes are leaving. I don't blame them, they managed to defeat the Akuma who was a fucking Angel from Evangelion. Have you seen the series? Not? Whatever, fucking Akuma.

____________

Luka is not feeling well, not until Marinette is on the MT and the first thing he does is hug her. He also hugs Chloe, although the blonde is more reluctant to accept the show of affection. Knowing they were left in the bloody blast twice, leaves him messed up.

"We are fine, thanks to you." Marinette smiles at her best friend, Luka became her support and, when she decided to form the MT, she already knew that she wanted him back in the team with Kagami. They were the first ones he sought out and began to explain the plan.

"Mother." Damian approaches her, is not wearing the mask and has removed his gloves. He's confused, he woke up a few moments ago, but until he heard voices he didn't move.

"Damian!" He's not prepared for the strong hug in which his mother catches him, but he accepts it stunned. All the others leave the room immediately, especially when they see that the child seems about to break.

Damian leans against her after overcoming his initial surprise, letting her hug him as much as she wants. He closes his eyes and just lets himself feel strange when he perceives his face getting wet. She releases him, but keeps him by the shoulders; she also sheds a few tears.

Marinette was aware that the cure would heal him, but seeing him barely alive was shocking, worse still when she heard Talia's voice again.

"I'm happy that you're fine." She smiles and wipes the tears that are running down her son's cheeks. This time, he embraces her again and leans against her to take him in her arms, h'es no longer of age, but he doesn't want to get away to her.

"Let's go home, mother."

"We will, I just have to talk to Felix." She adjusts him in her arms, adjusting him to look for Felix.

She doesn't have to walk much, Félix is returning to the room. They both had the same idea, he smirks.

"It seems that we resume activities tomorrow, may I suggest you take one of the computers of here? That way you don't have to come every day, you can focus on your work. "

"Marc to stay in charge of communications while the others divide the work. I trust you… And thank you, Felix. ”She places a hand on his shoulder and then goes looking for Max to return them home.

Felix only sees her disappear down the hall making a little eye contact with the boy, noting the disturbance in his eyes.

__________________

Chloe B. @BourgeoisQueen

Two Akuma in one week, do you want a medal, butterfly gross?

Marc @MarcAC_twt

Can Hideaki Anno please sue our villain?

Alix @TheLostHeroBunnix

@MarcAC_twt He must take responsibility for art theft!

Marie @MarieLenoir

I hope everyone caught up in the fog will be encouraged to receive mental health care, anyone who comes to @AgapeClinicParis will have a free consultation and if you decide to follow regular sessions I will pay for the first three months.

Polaris Vermilion @Elgato_Solaris

Did you see Paris will soon be @MarieLenoir. Trembles @BruceWayneOfficial, you have competition!

Dick Grayson @TheFlyingGrayson

Who is @MarieLenoir and why is she mentioned so much with B?

Tim Drake @TimDrakeW_

@TheFlyingGrayson You damn heathen, how can you not know when I mention she three times a day?

Dick Grayson @TheFlyingGrayson

@TimDrakeW_ Isn't what you mention Lady Black?

Roy @RoyHarperQ

@TheFlyingGrayson @TimDrakeW_ She's the owner. Marie Lenoir, Oliver has two of his exclusive outfits. He says they mention them a lot together because last year she adopted a nine-year-old boy and racks up philanthropic projects at the same rate as Bruce.

Tim Drake @TimDrakeW_

@TheFlyingGrayson @RoyHarperQ And she has black hair and blue eyes, I wouldn't be surprised if the kid had any of those characteristics.

Roy @RoyHarperQ

@TheFlyingGrayson @TimDrakeW_ Rumors say that his eyes are green.

Jason @IAmYisus_XD

@TheFlyingGrayson @TimDrakeW_ @RoyHarperQ Gossipers.

[takerfoxx]

Coming to Terms with Homura Akemi, My (Formerly) Least Favorite PMMM Character

Or, How I Learned to Stop Whinging and Love the Emo Meguca!

I have a…complicated history with my favorite anime’s main character (and yes, Homura is the main character. Madoka might be the title character and the show’s POV protagonist, but like most things in this series, that was a clever ruse, and it’s really more about Homura’s journey than Madoka’s). The first time I watched the show, I walked away feeling kind of ambivalent toward her, even mildly hostile. And that’s weird, right? I mean, just look at her! Look how her character arc plays out! She was practically grown in a lab to be my favorite! And you know what? In pretty much any other series she would have been my favorite, no doubt. She would have been a first pick Fav of the Day, the starring character in whatever fanfic I wrote about it, etc. But since the show she premiered in is anything but traditional, the way I eventually came to love each character turned out to be a little…unorthodox.

Now, I’ve gone over most of this before, so sing along if you know the words. My first time watching Puella Magi Madoka Magica went a little something like this:

Episode 1: Blue funny, Pink cute, Yellow badass, Purple mysterious.

Episode 2: Blue favorite, Pink alright, Yellow probably evil, Purple mysterious.

Episode 3: Yellow’s not evil after all, and now is the dead. My bad.

Episode 4: Pink getting all fucked up, SOMEONE SAVE BLUE!

Episode 5: Hate Red for attacking Blue. Kick her ass, Purple!

Episode 6: Still hate Red.

Episode 7: FUCK YOU, BUNNYCAT! Red’s not so bad after all. But someone save Blue!

Episode 8: Aw, hell no, Purple! You don’t threaten Blue like that! You go, Red! You’re pretty cool after…oh shit. BLUE, NO!

Episode 9: GO RED! GO PINK! SAVE BLUE! YOU CAN DO IT, I BELIEVE IN…no.

Episode 10-12: Stuff is still happening with the plot, but I no longer care. My heart has been shattered, all light has gone from the world. My babies are gone. If only they had more time together, if only there was someplace they could reunite, really get to know one another, and go on adventures together…huh.

So yeah, that’s the story of how I fully got on board the KyoSaya train. Obviously, writing Resonance Days only solidified that, and coming across A Happy Dream by angel0wonder, AKA the potato lady AKA @smxmuffinpeddling (wazzup?!?!), pretty much cemented it as my top reigning OTP.

Now, obviously I got invested in the whole story as time went by. Subsequent rewatchings of the show, mainly through convincing people to watch it blind so I can laugh at them when they get to certain scenes (don’t hate, y’all did it too!) and taking part in online discussions really got me into the show as a whole instead of just being confined in my little KyoSaya bubble. But coming to love the other characters for their own merits took some time.

Mami was next. I’ll be honest, I just didn’t care all that much for her during my first watching, mainly due to believing that she would turn out to be evil for the first couple of episodes (I blame Disney and their recent trend of turning almost every kindly mentor/confidante figure into the bad guy lately), and me being more surprised that I was wrong when she died instead of being shocked that she was killed. Again, had nothing against her, that was just my reaction the first time around. However, she was included in Resonance Days because it felt like the logical thing to do, and she turned out to be so much fun to write for that I really came to love and care for her character in general, and her relationship with Charlotte ended up becoming one of my favorite parts of that story.

Madoka honestly took more time. I think the main reason I wasn’t all that invested in her is that she was pretty passive in the series proper while my attention was more on the more proactive side characters. And again, this wasn’t a bad thing! In fact, it was a clever bit of deliberate storytelling, as it’s revealed that she originally was a proactive main-character type, only to unintentionally get relegated to her observer role by the butterfly effect caused by Homura’s time loops. But anyway, the thing that made me turn the corner on Madoka actually also ended up being fanfiction, but not one of my own. Specifically, I came across a popular, yet also somewhat controversial, fic called Persephone’s Waltz (and wazzup, @erinptah!), in which Homura decides to just stop beating around the bush and lock Madoka up in a basement until Walpurgisnacht had passed. And as weird as it sounds, making Madoka a prisoner actually gave her more agency, as the fic really went into detail about the psychological effects of being a kidnapping victim, from the strange rituals to the escape attempts to coping strategies to Stockholm Syndrome to bouts of depression and so on and so forth, all the while never deviating from her core character. It really got me rooting for Madoka and, by extension, invested in her character in canon as well.

That just left Homura.

By then, I had gotten over being a little sore at her for trying to kill Sayaka that one time, and I was interested in where her actions would take the plot. I just wasn’t interested in her, per se, as I hadn’t had an icebreaker moment like I had with the other characters.

And then The Rebellion Story happened.

The Rebellion Story: PMMM’s End of Evangelion

Puella Magi Madoka Magica is often compared its nearly two decade-old predecessor, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and not without reason. Like Evangelion, it took a genre mainly known to be fun and kid-friendly (giant mechs for Evangelion and magical girls for PMMM) and turned it on its head, resulting in a brutal and twisted deconstruction that would end up altering the direction that genre would take for years to come. The key difference is that Evangelion’s brilliance was in many ways an accident, with the bizarre places it went being largely informed both by its troubled production and its showrunner’s personal demons staying bottled up through the early part of the show but letting them loose later on, whereas PMMM was meticulously constructed from top to bottom to become the hand-grenade to the genre that it would become. But in the end, the effects were the same. They even both had a follow-up movie that was not originally supposed to happen that ended up being highly divisive among fans due to the shots they took at the fandom that had sprung up around the original series, even if The Rebellion Story wasn’t nearly as spiteful as End of Evangelion was.

Now, I’ve already gone into at length about how PMMM brutally dissects and deconstructs the Magical Girl genre, and it did it so thoroughly that the genre itself was totally wrenched in a new direction, much like Evangelion did to the Giant Mecha genre. But after you’ve completely taken apart the genre in your first season, where exactly do you go? How do you continue when your work is seemingly done?

The answer: deconstruct yourself.

Much as Puella Magi Madoka Magica went after the Magical Girl genre, The Rebellion Story went after the fandom that had sprung up in the original show’s wake. The first third of the movie gives the fans what they claimed they wanted: a traditional Magical Girl reimagining of PMMM where everyone is alive and working together, everyone is mentally and emotionally healthy, the two fan-favorite ships are just a kiss away from being canon, Kyubey is now a cute and silent mascot that helps out instead constantly manipulating everyone around him, and even the most popular witch is back as a benevolent secondary mascot in a happy friendship with the character she had killed. We see Madoka and the Moemura version of Homura being adorable together, we see Kyoko and Sayaka goofing off, we see Mami cuddling with Charlotte with nary a head-chomp in sight, we see everyone being just being friends and protecting the city from weird but essentially non-threatening monsters. It is basically the summation of a hundred fanfics that had been posted between the end of the show and the release of the movie.

But this is still PMMM, and something is not quite right.

We all know what happens next. Homura starts subconsciously noticing that something is off, she gradually becomes Terminator Homura as she investigates the situation and regains her memories, and the perfect happy world is exposed for the farce that it is. Things collapse, and the truth is revealed: Homura had become a witch that had been trapped inside her own soul gem, those close to her had been lured in to complete the illusion, and of course it is all Kyubey’s fault. Because this is PMMM, and Homura doesn’t get to be happy.

But the movie doesn’t stop with that reveal. Once we learn the truth, it changes targets. It stops deconstructing the fans, and instead goes after something else.

It starts to deconstruct Homura Akemi, its own main character.

Despite her promise to continue fighting on in Madoka’s name to protect the slightly more kind world her beloved had created, Homura had found herself unable to cope without Madoka. Her mission had failed, and without that stabilizing force, despair had slowly crept in, corrupting her from within, to the point where (I believe at least) she had been fighting not to honor Madoka, but in hopes that she would fall in battle and be carried off by her goddess. She had been fighting not in hopes of building a better world, but as a way to seek release from her pain. She had been miserable in Madoka’s new world, even moreso than she had been during her time loops.

And because she had been foolish enough to tell the truth to Kyubey, the little rat had taken the opportunity to use her to set a trap. Madoka had been pulled out of Heaven right into the Incubators’ clutches, and it was all her fault.

Is it any wonder that she had been unwilling to accept Madoka’s salvation during the climatic battle? Is it any wonder that her own labyrinth had featured her own familiars dragging her away to her own execution? Homura hated herself. She hated what she had become, she hated what she had allowed to happen, she hated that she had failed so utterly and completely.

In fact, I’d say that this movie shows something about Homura that I don’t think a lot of people will appreciate me pointing out, and that is as much as Homura was single-mindedly devoted to Madoka, she never really came to know her. I mean, how could she? She only knew Madoka over the course of a few of a few infatuated weeks the first time around, which she then repeated over and over and over again, becoming increasingly traumatized over time. I don’t doubt that her devotion to Madoka is real, but The Rebellion Story does seem to suggest that after a while she was fixated on Madoka as an ideal rather than Madoka as an actual person, something to be protected and possessed rather than as a living, breathing person with her own autonomy.

Now, am I saying that Homura is a bad person and that anyone who felt inspired by her resilience and devotion is wrong? Of course not. Am I saying that anyone that ships MadoHomu is bad, promoting toxic relationships, etc.? Hell no! What I’m saying is that due to everything she’s been forced to endure and fight again, she is a very mentally unhealthy individual, one who is in desperate need of help. And if an actual relationship between her and Madoka is going to realistically work, well, first something  drastic will have to happen to upset her new system and give Madoka her power back, but Homura is also going to need tons of therapy.

As I said before, Homura’s decision to rip Madoka out of the Law of Cycles and turn herself into Homucifer has been pretty controversial, with many people claiming that it betrayed her characterization. To those people, I would say that they never really knew the real Homura Akemi. The show set up an idealized version of Homura, and people had that ideal imprinted in their mind. And I can’t really blame them for that. The show ended on a big, optimistic moment with Homura making a big speech about how she was going to keep fighting in Madoka’s name. It’s all very stirring, and I can’t fault anyone who would feel betrayed by their Homura acting against that promise.

But as a sadistic bastard in another dark show that is now also very controversial once said, “If you think this story has a happy ending, then you clearly haven’t been paying attention.”

Homura Akemi Did Everything Wrong, and It’s Okay to Admit That

Even though The Rebellion Story got me interested in seeing where the whole Homucifer vs. Godoka thing would go, I still wasn’t all that invested in Homura as a person. I was entrenched too deep in my KyoSaya world, and everything outside of that was just so much plot. Most of my focus was on Resonance Days, which just didn’t involve her at all.

It took years, but three things finally cracked me out of that shell. The first was writing Walpurgis Nights, of course. Granted, Homulilly was more of a Moemura than Homucifer, but that story really made me dive deep into her innate insecurities, to explore her struggles with self-loathing and her reliance on Madoka for any kind of validation.

The second was watching through a few blind reactions to the series, seeing how other people reacted to her character and the things that they picked up that I had missed. One thing in particular stood out to me: during Homura and Madoka’s first meeting in episode ten, Homura is actually shocked when Madoka casually addresses her by her first name, as no one ever called her by her first name.

And the third might get me some hate, but it was through coming across this little video:

Now, like many things I’ve discussed in this post, this video has been pretty polarizing, with some people outright hating it and labeling it as slanderous character bashing. The clickbaity title certainly doesn’t help, and I can’t say I agree with all of its points. But the video really isn’t the character-bashing piece that it might seem like. Rather, it’s as much a deconstruction of a character that has been heavily idealized by the fandom, pointing out the many mistakes and, while it certainly was not her fault, how she was driven more by a personal need for validation rather than selfless love.

That’s when it all clicked for me, all the little pieces coming together.

Despite how badass she appears to be, despite how unwavering her adoration for Madoka is, Homura Akemi is someone who was broken from the beginning, who was re-broken again and again, who never seemed to make the right choice, who was never allowed to have what she wanted, who was never allowed to win, until she finally snapped and ripped apart the carefully-laid plans and systems that seemed to be set against her.

Homura Akemi did everything wrong, and that is fascinating!

Consider: when we first meet her, she is a young girl who has known nothing but neglect, who has been shuffled around by an uncaring system her entire life, who is physically weak due to a heart condition, who is terrified by any kind of attention and is genuinely perturbed just by being called by her first name.

Of all the tragic backstories in the series, hers is easily the worst. Mami and Kyoko’s characterizations are both defined by having a single horrific event in their respective pasts that took everything away from them, events that shattered their worlds and which they blamed themselves for. But at the very least they had something before the cruel hand of fate reached into their lives. Homura never had anything! Her family is so completely out of the picture to not even warrant a mention! Her heart condition leaves her constantly balanced on the precipice of death and frequently leaves her weak and in pain. She’s never had a real friend, never had anyone close, never had anything that made her feel good about being herself. So when the Arch of Victory witch ensnares her with suicidal thoughts, it doesn’t really have to try very hard.

And then Madoka came into her life. A cheerful, outgoing girl who showed her kindness, one who called her by her name and said that it was pretty. Someone who came to her during the scariest moment in Homura’s life like a guardian angel and saved her. Someone who was everything Homura had ever wanted: kind, humble, encouraging, non-judgmental, loving, powerful, protecting, and the list goes on.

Is there any wonder that Homura became infatuated with her? Not one bit.

But then something terrible happened. Madoka and Mami were faced with the horror of Walpurgisnacht, and it killed them. Finally Homura had someone in her life that made her feel good about being herself, and that person was stolen from her. She had to watch Madoka fail. She had to watch Madoka die. And she just stood by and did nothing.

And it is then that Homura made her first mistake. Kyubey being the opportunistic manipulator that he is, he took advantage of her vulnerable state in order to add another soul to his quota. And of course Homura accepted; who could blame her?

But consider this: Homura could have wished for Madoka to be resurrected. Walpurgisnacht had been defeated; it was no longer a threat! Then the two of them (or three, had Mami been brought back as well) would have been together, fighting side-by-side! I mean, it would have eventually ended in tears anyway, but Homura had no way of knowing that. As far as she knew, she was in a traditional magical girl story that just so happened to have a bad end, one that she could have fixed.

Instead, she wished to be sent back in time to redo her first meeting with Madoka, only this time as a Puella Magi. That way, she could help Madoka and Mami prepare for Walpurgisnacht! She could protect Madoka!

It wasn’t enough just to have her dearest (and only) friend back in her life. Homura wanted to switch the roles. She wanted to protect Madoka like Madoka had protected her. She wanted a reason to keep existing, a mission, a way to prove her worthiness, because she still hated herself and needed something to validate her existence.

But it wasn’t that kind of show. She didn’t have all the information. How could she have known that Kyubey was being deceptive? How could she have known of the truth about witches? How could she have known that her time-looping would make Walpurgisnacht stronger? How could she have known that each loop would alter the timestream, entangling both Sayaka and Kyoko in its web?

Still, she kept trying. She made herself stronger and stronger in hopes that she would be able to stop Walpurgisnacht in time. She tried to warn everyone about Kyubey and the witches only to be disbelieved. She watched the others die around her again and again. She watched Madoka either die or succumb to despair and become a witch herself.

And then it happened.

That all-important timeline, where everything in her changed.

The one where she and Madoka finally successfully defeated Walpurgisnacht, but lost everything else. The one where they laid side-by-side in the ruins and the rain, as their cracked soul gems grew darker and the darker. The one where Homura resigned herself to becoming a witch.

The one where Madoka sacrificed her final grief seed, Sayaka’s grief seed, in order to save Homura. The one where she made Homura promise to go back and prevent her from making a contract in the first place. And the one where Madoka died again, not in battle against a witch, but by Homura’s own hand.

Something inside Homura broke that day, something that was never repaired and never will be. It was then that Homura shed the last remnants of the frightened, insecure girl she had been and became the Terminator-esque warrior that we were first introduced to. Her missions was clear then: stop Madoka from making a contract and defeat Walpurgisnacht by any means necessary. Nothing else mattered.

But despite all her resets, despite all her preparations, despite (supposedly) finally having all the information, Homura still kept failing! No matter what she did, Madoka always made a contract and became Kriemhild Gretchen. And Walpurgisnacht just seemed to be getting stronger.

Finally, in the timeline that encompasses the show proper, Homura learned the reason why. She was doomed from the start. Her own resetting of time was only building Madoka’s karmic destiny, increasing the power of both Walpurgisnacht and Kriemhild Gretchen. The more she went back, the more the universe itself stacked the deck against her, and now it was all but impossible. And what was worse, she had done it to herself.

Just look at her in that second to last episode, when she’s lying there bloodied and broken, when she’s about to go back yet again but stops herself. Just look at her face as her soul gem darkens as literal years of despair seep out of the defenses she had built up around herself. She knew that it was hopeless, she knew that both she and Madoka were doomed, she knew that she was seconds from finally becoming a witch after all of her efforts were for naught, and it terrified her.

But then, just as all seemed lost, Madoka herself appeared to save her, but did so through the last thing Homura wanted her to do. She took all of that karmic destiny Homura had burdened her with and made a witch that shook the very foundations of reality. Witches were removed from the equation, and Puella Magi who had succumbed to despair were simply allowed to pass peacefully instead of becoming monsters. The contract system and the advancements wasn’t removed, and the girls’ wishes weren’t negated. But the cruelest aspect of it was.

And all it cost was Madoka’s existence.

Yes, Homura was saved. Yes, Madoka was spared of dying or turning into Kriemhild Gretchen. But the person that Homura had devoted her entire existence to protecting was gone, and by her own hand. Only Homura herself was left to remember her.

Can you imagine how that must have felt, to be forced to soldier on while bearing the weight of that knowledge, to know that you had ultimately failed in your mission and had to go on without the only person that had ever meant anything to you? Sure, there was that whole “always be with you in spirit” thing, but that is a poor comfort to someone like Homura. Yes, the show ends on an optimistic note, with Homura promising to fight on in Madoka’s name, but it’s often been said that the only thing that give a story a happy ending is where you end it. And while I’m sure that many fans would have loved to believe that Homura had done just that, had fought the Wraiths to the bitter end until she was welcomed into Madoka’s arms, the sad fact of the matter is that reality is rarely ever so simple.

In The Rebellion Story we learn how true that is. Without her mission, Homura was unable to keep herself together, and despair did finally overtake her. But instead of peacefully disappearing and being taken by her love, she had made the fatal mistake of confessing to Kyubey of all people the truth about the way things were.

Now, why would she do that? Why tell Kyubey about the witches and how Madoka had changed things? Did she not suspect that he might do something with that knowledge?

Personally, I think she did. Maybe not consciously, but I feel that deep down inside, she hated what the world had become, not because the Law of Cycles had removed a significant portion of the pain, but because Madoka had to erase herself in order to create it. Yes, deleting witches was a net positive, but it wasn’t the positive Homura had been fighting to achieve. Madoka had made her promise to keep her from making a wish, and Homura had to execute her right after. So I do think that she told Kyubey the truth because part of her was kind of hoping he would intervene somehow and bring Madoka back.

And he did, and he did so though screwing Homura over. Again.

Within the labyrinth contained within her own soul gem, Homura build the world she had always wanted to exist. The endless loops had been washed away, and she and Madoka were fighting together in a joyful magical girl show. She worked so hard to build a place that would make her happy, but in the end she had been unable to accept even her own gift, in part because she subconsciously knew that something was off, but also because she had conditioned to be suspicious anything that seems like it would be working in her favor.

Learning the truth broke Homura yet again. She had done this. She had been the one to admit the truth to Kyubey, and he had used that knowledge to ensnare Madoka once more. Her love was again trapped by Incubators, and it was all her fault. Is there any wonder that while everyone was fighting to rescue her from herself, she was screaming for them to stop while her own familiars executed her over and over again?

Homura’s decision to rip Madoka out of the Law of Cycles and again rewrite reality is a controversial one, and I get that. But when you put aside the cool, determined badass that she presents herself as and look at the whole of her journey then it only makes sense. She was sick of it all. Sick of being manipulated by the Incubators and their contracts, sick of having her desires denied by the Law of Cycles, sick of being held back by her own inadequacies. She was sick of losing, and that was going to end.

The movie is called The Rebellion Story, and that title couldn’t have been more accurate. Because at the end, Homura rebelled against everything: against the Incubators, against Madoka, against herself, against a world that seemed set against her from the beginning. She forcibly seized control, dominating Kyubey and his ilk, ripping Madoka from the Law of Cycles and reprogramming her to be sweet and docile, and even erasing Madoka and Sayaka’s friendship so that Sayaka wouldn’t interfere. In the end, she finally won.

And she still hated herself. Even after overcoming everything and embracing her status as the world’s new Devil, we see her own familiars throwing trash at her.

And that is the Homura I came to love. The icy, mysterious warrior that she was presented as just didn’t do anything for me. But the broken girl who seemed to have the entire world set against her, that had what little happiness she had stolen from her time and time again, that made mistake after mistake as she tried to fight against the unfairness of everything and constantly made things worse, that finally said “Fuck it” and forced the world to bend under her will but still wasn’t happy at the end it all? Well, just look at the stories I’ve written, the kinds of stories I gush about. That is a story I can sink my teeth into. That is a character worth investing in, because she is just so damned fascinating!

Now, I’m not going to say that she’s my favorite character now, but her story is the one I’m the most interested in. And when we finally get that long-awaited follow-up, I’m definitely going to be swooning over any and all KyoSaya interactions and watching what happens to Mami and Madoka with rapt attention, but the bulk of my investment will be in Homura’s story, because in a very strange way, her story feels the most human.

Now I just wonder how many people I’ve managed to piss off.

[silenthillmutual]

🎥 for nge, 🍀for tma, 💎 for silent hill, ✨ for all 3?

🎥 do you have any favorite scenes from your hyperfixation? Ooo... NGE is just... so cinematic it’s hard to pick one out. A lot of scenes really stick out to me for the amount of emtions filled in them... But I think I’m gonna pick the first time Shinji really lays into an Angel and he’s screaming in his Eva as he attacks it. I know he does this multiple times but the first time he does it really just. It’s impactful.

🍀  do you have any kins or comfort characters from your hyperfixation? I’ve been kinassigned Jon, mostly because my concentration in grad school is archives. I think also potentially just having the same sort of dry humor... Not sure about comfort characters but I do really love both Martin & Tim. I wish we’d gotten more time with Sasha before she got taken by the not!Them because I really liked her too. Oh!!! And Michael Distortion. I don’t know what it is about him but he’s so groovy. I really dig whatever it is the Distortion has going on. I’m still in the process of listening to/reading it, so I have to meet Distortion Helen too, and I’m very looking forward to that.

💎  are there any fun facts or trivia that you would like to share? Well I did once sit down and watch that two-hour long tear into the HD Collection and learned that Konami never actually drew up a contract for the voice actors of Silent Hill 2 or 3, and so they did not have the rights to reuse the voices for the HD Collection (though they were later added in after fans petitioned the original voice actors) and that just... Wow! I mean, I’m impressed at how inept that is. How do you fuck up that badly?! Konami’s utter incompitence is always an amusement tinged with extreme anger. I can’t wait until they inevitably self-implode. If they go bankrupt, well... couldn’t have happened to a nicer company!

✨  what draws you towards your hyperfixation? what is interesting about it? Well, for all of them I initally got into them on the basis of horror! I was told Negon Genesis Evangelion had some sort of psychological horror theme in it, and The Magnus Archives & the Silent Hill are explicitly horror. Horror is my favorite genre, it always has been!

I was also willing to give NGE a try because I knew it was considered a classic and I didn’t really know much about anime at the time... I still don’t know a ton about anime, but that’s why it really stuck with me. The horror aspect, especially with End of Evangelion. I still need to watch the rebuilds. TMA I gave a try in part because it was getting super popular - and I’m always sort of curious about what makes series popular. I don’t really believe in shunning things just because they get (more) popular, I always think it’s worth it to give it a shot and see why people like it, especially if it’s already in a genre that I like.

And Silent Hill. Okay. It was the soundtrack... back in my shameful high school days of being in a certain horrible fandom we do not speak of anymore, I used to be really into checking fan soundtracks for new music I’d never heard before. And the Silent Hill soundtracks kept coming up for a certain character, and the music itself was what really interested me at first! Learning that it was a classic horror game is how I got so fixated on it. It became a special interest from there, and I go in and out of being fixated on it specifically depending largely on the time of the year.

hyperfixation asks!

[arsenicpanda]

Ok, so, tumblr fucking ATE MY ASK, but @hellodinoflower asked for #7, #8, and #37 for the Writer’s Meme like a month ago, so here we go.

7.)  Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

Ok, from chapter 1 of The Looming Fog and Other Strange Happenings:

For the past five years, Jughead Jones had loudly argued that Arkham was haunted. The exact words he had used were “an unholy seat of unknowable, otherworldly horrors,” but “haunted” had been close enough for most of Jughead’s friends, family, and displeased acquaintances. Betty listened to him long enough to drag him off to explore one of the abandoned houses that littered Arkham, but Betty was a better person than most and also very, very into the investigative aspects of it, so he didn’t question it.

But now that a fog loomed over the city, covering it in a pungent yet sweet stench unlike any earthly smell, and every tree bled maple syrup, it was becoming increasingly clear that Jughead was right about Arkham. And no one was happy that Jughead was right about Arkham because it meant Jughead was smug about being right about Arkham. And a smug Jughead Jones was unbearable to everyone except FP, who found it endearing, and Betty, who found it one part annoying, two parts attractive.

(No one was particularly pleased with Betty either, as she had been determinedly arguing on the side of "Arkham is a city of nightmares and eldritch terrors" for a good two months now. She had the grace not to look smug, but she did have a certain “I told you so” air about her that others described as “bordering on insufferable” and Jughead considered “beyond attractive.”)

I’m actually pretty fond of this whole chapter, which definitely has a different vibe from the rest of the fic but whatever, but this is my favorite part.  For one, I called Jughead believing insane things about his town before season 3 even aired.  This was July 2018, baby!  For another, I like describing people who know Jughead but aren’t close to him as “displeased acquaintances”.  But mainly, I like the part where Betty and Jughead are attracted to parts of each other that others would call character flaws.  I just feel it’s very them.

8.)  Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

Ok, from (day)dreams can come true, here’s one of the cleanest parts I could find (I’m quite fond of the whole fic, to the point that I held off on answering this until I could finish and publish it).  It’s kinda long because I wanted to get the whole part, but still, here:

He stumbles back to sit on the bed. “Fuck, I don’t think I’ve ever come that hard.”Fand “Me either,” she says, still panting and reeling from her orgasm.

He looks down at his hands, his left covered in left-over lotion and his right in come. Wiping his left hand off on his leg, he stares at his right while flexing it. “But it was really reckless. I almost came on the window.”

“Mm, I like you reckless,” she says blissfully, and he looks up and smiles at her.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

They’re silent for a while, but as she begins to come down from her high, she realizes everything they just said, and she can’t but blush. Thinking back to his words at the end, she fidgets a bit, trying to build her confidence up to ask, “When I...That is, did you…”

“When you…?”

“When I...came...Did you like it?” she asks, voice small despite herself, and she looks away.

“Betty. Look at me,” he says, and he sounds so gentle, the way he does when he squeezes her shoulder in comfort and wraps her up in his arms. She always feels safe when he uses that voice.

She turns back to him, and his eyes are warm and smiling, she can see it even from here. “It was p��It was better than anything anyone could ever imagine.”

“That’s not what I—”

“I loved it. I love—” and he stumbles over himself here, though she doesn’t know why, “—d it.”

“You were pretty great to see too,” she tells him with renewed confidence.

“Oh, uh, thank, thank you,” he mutters, and now he’s the one to look away red-faced.

They sit in silence again as Betty tries to process everything that just happened, everything they said, if anything is different. It’s comfortable somehow, only slightly awkward despite the lewdness of what they just did.

“Hey, do you...do you want to go to Pop’s?” His voice would sound casual to most people, but she can hear the nervousness mixed with hope and her heart aches for him and oh, this boy.

For context, this is post 1x10 when Jughead is still living with Archi, and Betty and Jughead just had phone sex while staring at each other jerking off through each other’s windows.  For starters, I got to answer “Why does he say she likes him reckless?” and that was fun.  But more than that, I like having them go from the confidence that comes with overwhelming horniness to a certain increased vulnerability in the aftermath.  Betty is increasingly comfortable with her sexuality, but is Jughead comfortable with it?  The answer is hell yes, don’t worry, Betty, and I enjoyed that.  I liked getting to have Jughead almost call her perfect--because hell yeah, that’s a pretty perfect scenario for a horny teenager--just because he knows she hates the word.  Also, the little dumbass almost confessed his love to her, and I find that hilarious.  But ultimately, this is just another part of them, so why not go to Pop’s?  It’s like it’s normal, even though, yeah, no, guys, that’s not a normal thing to do.

Also, this doesn’t fit as dialogue or prose, but I’m going to include it anyway as a bonus because it’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever written.  From wet dreams may come:

But BettyBettyBetty spills from his lips as he spills into his hand.

He stares at the shame coating his fingers and palm. Would she lick it off him, hungry for his cum and with that look of fondness in her eyes as she fingers—

“I’m so fucked up.”

Ok, two things:

1.) I love “spills from his lips as he spills into his hand”.  It’s not quite a zeugma--I couldn’t make it work as one without it being mega awkward, unfortunately--but it’s close!  I just really like the way it sounds.  It kept repeating in my head, very insistent, and it’s one of two things that got me to sit down and write this fic.

2.) Do you know how much I love that I got to include “I’m so fucked up”?  No, of course not, because like five of you watch anime.  Ok, so this is from an (in)famous (and perhaps even iconic) scene in The End of Evangelion, where our protagonist Shinji masturbates to completion over his not-friend/ally/whatever Asuka’s comatose body in the hospital and then feels bad because you’re goddamn right you should.  It’s not an in-universe reference because if Jughead was an anime guy, we would very much know by now because he would be annoying about it.

But I felt it was a very Jughead thing to have that level of dramatic reaction to having some (very) explicit fantasies about Betty--a girl he’s been crazy about for years and only just started dating--because he feels it violates her privacy somehow.  Like, it’s not that he thinks she’s ~pure~, but that he thinks it’s not his place because their relationship isn’t like that yet.  It made sense that that would be his feeling, and I feel the allusion hammers that home.  Bonus: I got to come back to that, to a certain extent, in (day)dreams can come true, where Jughead is having his own interior struggles with what’s ok to do and to say.

37.  Talk about your current wips.

Ok, how are we defining WIPs?  Because the only thing that’s partially published is The Looming Fog and Other Strange Happenings, and I have no idea how to unstick myself from that one.  I want Betty’s chapter to be having an adventure with Kevin in the woods, but I’m not sure what they should be doing there.  Also, ultimately, I’m not a horror writer or even reader, really, so I’ve got some self-consciouness there.  It’s a pity, because I like what bit of her plot I have, and I actually finished Kevin’s chapter, which I very much enjoy.

As for other things in the works, I’ve got two smut and one fluff-ish, the latter of which I summed up here, but who knows if they’ll ever be finished.  I’ll say this about the smut fics though: Bret, Donna, and the sex tape are involved.

[trashayfanfiction]

1. Comfort zone: melancholy. angst. Tears. Suffering physically and emotionally.

2. Trope I want to try my hand at: Angsty highschool AU, but AU is hard for me.

3. Trope I wouldn’t touch with a 10ft pole? A/B/O sorry guys. I have squick for it. Give me all of the horrible rape, sex slaves, power dynamic/breeding kink and whatever, but don’t give me a biological hierarchy as to why it happens. (no kink-shaming if you do like it tho, but not my cup of tea)

4. I am nurturing...... 5 ideas? I”m doing RVBB, still the panic attacks fic, and yet another dead dove (but softer; less rape more angst this time)

5.Strengths: Introspection and internal conflict, portraying mixed feelings.

6. Weaknesses: External physical conflict. I can’t make a cohesive plot of physical things happening: I cannot write “adventure to gather all 7 dragon balls, fights along the way, we did the thing, the end”.

7. My favorite prose I wrote& why: ...I think I suck at prose. But ‘When She was Beautiful” An Ash’s Mother story https://archiveofourown.org/works/16004666

She was young. Fresh out of high school, when she met Jim at a country bar. She had a fake ID. In school they had called her a tramp, a harlot. It wasn’t true, even if she had the figure to put a porn star to shame. She was an attractive amount of tall and thin. Her curves were in all the right places. She’d had this figure since she was twelve.

The first time she did it, she was fourteen. He had asked. She protested. He kept asking. He did it anyways. It hurt. It was degrading. She grew used to it. It wasn’t rape. Eventually she liked that it was degrading; and would seek it out. This is what she was meant for, right?  She was a woman. She bled. This is what people like her were made for.

She was beautiful.

------I liked highlighting how the world saw her shaped how she viewed herself and justified (to her and those around her) what was done to her. I am trying to portray this critically and nuanced.

8. My fave dialogue and why: At Current I like this piece from Ch4 of ‘Fling” (Ash/Shorter)--- (Ash has suddenly ran away due to anxiety in the middle of what was suppose to be fun sex) https://archiveofourown.org/works/15768864/chapters/36680811

Shorter knocked on the locked bathroom door.

“Ah…. do you need a smoke?” He called, hesitantly.

“No! I don’t fucking need a smoke!” A quick response.

“Your pills are in the cabinet in there. You know, your anit-anxiety stuff-!”

“-I’m not sick! I don’t want my pills!!” Anger.

Shorter paused. Anything, anything to help. Anything to get his friend talking, “Do you want a sandwich?!”

A muffled scream of frustration, “I don’t need a fucking sandwich, Shorter! Leave me ALONE! I DON’T FEEL GOOD,”

“You’re not gonna like cut yourself and bleed out in my bathroom, are ya?” Humor, maybe? He hoped he was going for humor, but he was genuinely worried. Sometimes Ash flew off the handle…… Some of his other friends had done similar….

An exasperated exhale, “You know, I don’t fucking do that!” echoed through the door.

---- I like it because I think it portrays the disconnect Ash and Shorter have about what’s going on and lack of communication even though words are technically being spoken. Shorter wants to help, Ash isn’t letting him help and denying that there is a problem at all; thus resulting in more problems.

9. Hardest to write: The fic about Eiji’s reaction to Ash’s panic attacks that is still in production hell is my hardest. I don’t have anxiety, but I do try to help people with it. I want it to be an accurate representation, and attempt to be sensitive.

Also, my first Foxx’ rape fic was emotionally exhausting.

10: Easiest to write: ‘Fling’ I guess, I keep adding more to it because Ash/Shorter want to do more dumb things.

11. Writing is a fun hobby, I suck at writing. Writing is hard. I don’t wanna beta read enough to ever publish original content. Also, I like playing in other people’s sandboxes.

12. Episodes that inspire me: Neon Genesis Evangelion.... all that psycho babble.... yes. I’m here for it.

13. Best writing advice i’ve been given was by a friend who is a poet. Roundabout they told me; “You will never write something ‘good’, you will always write something better. Don’t worry about making it perfect.” They write with their emotions, so it vibes with me.

14. Worst writing advice I’ve come across: ‘Write everyday’ is horrible. It doesn’t work for me. It makes writing seem like a chore. I write when I am inspired. I will write a few sentences on a pre-started project when I am uninspired to help move it along, but ‘write everyday’ just tends to churn out a lot of garbage I didn’t learn from.

15. If I could choose a fic to be filmed? ....well, most of my fics are porn arent’ they. I think ‘Feelings of Loneliness” (Blanca+Ash post ending in the Carribean) would make an interesting art-house short-film. https://archiveofourown.org/works/17144981

16. Write one paring for the rest of my life? Well, I think we all know BF as a whole is what I’ll be writing on an off forever. ....Honestly I’m torn between saying I’d write ash/Eiji or Ash/Shorter. I never shipped Ash/Shorter until the anime fandom, but they might have a more interesting dynamic if I was to write them forever..... OOH, I SHOULD WRITE A FIC ABOUT ASH COPING WITH SHORTER DYING. I HAVEN’T SEEN ONE OF THOSE. oof. the angst

17. Do you write start to finish or do you write sentences out of order? .....I definitely write out of order. I write when scenes come to me, and then I fill in the blanks in-between. It’s difficult to understand my drafts, it’s definitely ADHD storytelling.

18. I do not use tools like worksheets/outlines, I do use a thesaurus because I have garbage vocab, and I’ve gotten into the habit of having beta-readers/feedback before I post. I sometimes look at ‘writing tips’ pages.

19. My muse is also ‘man who lives in his basement’. I am/was one of the punk street kids, and I observe the interactions that go on between them.

20. My perfect writing conditions are: home alone in my room, in my bed, cat not bothering me, new ‘fresh’ music playing that I’m vibin with and haven’t heard before but not so good it takes away from my concentration on a story. Usually after a hard day of work, I write about a story that was brewing in my head all day. Hopefully I don’t get distracted by social media: like right now....

[momestuck]

Let’s read Hiveswap Friendsim... volume 18!

Imagine I edited the final shot of End of Evangelion here to put trolls on it. That’s more effort than I’m actually willing to put in. Imagining it is probably almost as good.

This chapter is fittingly called “Of Endings, Many”.

The opening narration is kind of pointed and sarcastic. It jokes about saying trite things like ‘the circle is complete’... and then goes elsewhere.

“You’ve got enough friends, now you need answers-” - and then it interrupts itself, realising it’s just the intro screen.

I wonder who writes the intro screens?

This time we have... another jadeblood, and also a final pair of purplebloods, the second troll pair.

Lanque

Lanque is written by the mysterious “V”, who previously managed to get us to lick a clown’s armpit and then wrote some interesting things about intertextuality. I have high hopes!

Content warning: Lanque’s story deals explicitly with sex with a man, in a situation of dubious consent on the player character’s part.

Lanque’s theme I’m sure I recognise from Homestuck proper, though I’d have to do some digging to see what it’s reprising. It’s called “yall know i just do the music right” - another James Roach piece.

It begins with us getting a call from Lynera. The narration somewhat uncharitably says “that nutty bitch is exactly the sort of destabilizing influence your life needs right now”. In a positive, not sarcastic way at least.

She wants to start making friends herself...

The narration is really in a hurry this time around. We reprise the party background from the last episode.

I appreciate the kind of breezy enthusiastic chaos in V’s writing.

We’re in a cape, bra and fishnets. A perfect outfit for the final chapter.

Wow the narration just isn’t giving a shit anymore. Final chapter striking hard.

We try to figure out whose hive we’re going to... and oh shit, it’s Ardata’s. First troll we ever met, as well. The party is described as a “frathouse rager” - which, Lynera acknowledges, is not her scene at all.

Is the narrator already drunk? Or is Ardata fucking with our head again?

Ardata declares that it’s a ‘kiiickback’ for all the ‘world’s fiiinest iiinfluencers’... and neither me nor Lynera is invited. Apparently she heard about it from someone called Lanque, who’s also not invited.

What is up with this narration? It’s coming across like a standup performance.

At that point, Ardata drops a... nsfw warning on us.

I didn’t actually realise this volume had an ‘accompanying mature content description’. I think what I’m gonna do is... obviously I’m gonna play the chapter, but I will put specific content warnings before sections of the post that have potentially triggering content, and if there are explicit images, I will pixellise out any explicit bits before I embed them in the post. spoiler alert: this ain’t exactly Ladykiller in a Bind there.

That’s a hell of a warning, huh. Especially given the previous armpit-licking chapter by ‘V’ was about at the absolute limit of sfw horny anyway. Fuck knows what they’re about to inflict on us now.

Also: James Roach’s track name is starting to make sense. Apparently he wants to distance himself from this episode, semi-ironically at any rate? God, what are we in for.

So, presumably the ‘oof, you’re too scared’ link takes us to an abrupt end to the chapter, we’ll check it later. Let’s go on in.

Quick soapbox: as much as I hate the kind of shallow analysis that throws around ‘problematic’ as a summary judgement of a work - nah actually, you can’t just disclaim shit under ‘challenging or controversial material’. By the same token that you can write whatever shit you want in a Homestuck computer game, critics - and random nerds on the internet, which is to say, the entire audience of this game - can discuss it however we find appropriate.

Nevertheless, you haven’t actually done anything worse than make me lick a clown’s armpit so far, and we can approach challenging themes in a way that says something meaningful and important, so let’s see what you have for us, V. To be honest I’m expecting some kind of portrayal of sexual violence given all the disclaimers, but who knows.

The party sounds like hell.

To Lynera, who remains glued to our arm, it’s ‘more than she was expecting’. But before we can leave, Lanque arrives.

I was wrong about what I thought was Lanque’s theme. Lanque’s theme is a slow, mournful saxophone piece. Maybe the music before was Lynera’s theme, and I just forgot how it went?

The narration mentions a ‘curious red stain’ on Lanque’s shirt. They’re obviously going for a whole ‘sexy vampire’ type thing with him. Maybe a Twilight parody, with Lynera in the Bella role? That would be a little dated, though.

I vaguely recall that it was said at some point that the jadebloods were all women. Which makes me suspect that Lanque is a trans guy, and this story is gonna touch on themes of transness and such. That could be something I completely confabulated, though. I’d check the wiki but no doubt it’s been updated by now, and I don’t want to spoil myself on this arc.

He seems to be in a flirty mood. Not sure how old either of these two are supposed to be.

Oh yeah. The knifemeter actually hasn’t shown up in this episode so far. He expresses surprise that Lynera has friends. Or at least, friend.

Eesh, this guy gonna be another Zebruh?

Lanque asks about us and we blather about being an alien, and also general disaster.

It’s really hard to get the sense that this is a loud party where we can barely hear each other over the noise, given both the narration and the soft jazz background.

He says something about not biting unless asked. So if it’s not already obvious... either a genuine rainbow drinker (hey, if Kanaya could do it at age 6 sweeps/13 years, no doubt he could at age... whatever age he is!), or someone who likes pretending to be one.

Anyway, our protag is apparently not overcome by friendship lust at this point, and tries to play wingman and put Lanque’s attention back onto Lynera. This... doesn’t go as well as expected.

(2.43 sweeps, that is - about 5.3 years)

Hmm, why would that be? This could be like, a transphobia thing? Do trolls have that? I’d say of course they fucking do, but apparently they don’t have homophobia, and their gender system... well who the hell knows how troll gender works, having all the signifiers of gender in the real world but none of the material consequences.

Anyway, Lanque calls Lynera a ‘nasty little bitch’. But then immediately says he’s not one to criticise.

So... maybe it’s not a trans thing? We’ll see. Lanque continues being a huge dick, suggesting that Lynera is interested in him because the ordeals are coming, and she wants to take the chance to fuck before they roll around.

Lynera is kind of... not surprisingly pretty hurt.

The narrator challenges Lanque on his rudeness without a choice.

Ah, the classic ‘she deserved it’ defence. Second only to the ‘it didn’t happen, but if it had, they would have deserved it anyway’ defence.

The protag demands to know why Lanque even invited Lynera if it was just to have such a huge go at her like that. Lanque’s explanation is... kind of unclear.

It’s not like she got much of a chance to defend herself there. So far my impression of Lanque is: this guy’s a huge cock. Or possibly a huge nook. Idk what the troll equivalent is.

The narrator decides to ‘Switzerland out of’ this conversation. They say this out loud, of course. Who needs an internal monologue, these days?

Lanque invites us to stay - we’re ‘much more interesting’ anyway. Eesh. I’m inclined to look for a ‘fuck right off where’s my pepper spray’ button, but that’s just me being a lesbian I guess. (Pepper spray is also illegal in the UK. I’m pretty sure.)

Yeah, you said it. He says he’s got ‘less time to waste than most’.

Bryn sees a meta joke about the narrative structure, Bryn clicks the screenshot button.

(Speak of the screenshot button, I had to rebind it to make it easier to paste the screenshots, you see in Ubuntu-- oh, you’re asleep?)

Anyway I kind of expected a choice around about now, but no, we barrel forwards, and end up dancing with Lanque. He takes our hand and leads us to another part of the house.

At that point, Elwurd shows up! I wonder how much of the cast is set to make an appearance in this chapter. If it’s all 35 trolls we’ve encountered so far, this is gonna be a long chapter!

Elwurd seems to be Lanque’s dealer. Not sure what drug she’s selling exactly. Apparently ‘you a drone?’ is the Alternian equivalent of ‘you a cop?’...

Anyway, Lanque buys the drug, and peer pressures us to take it. We’re like, nuh-uh.

We did not, we tell him, ask him to buy drugs for us.

I’m proud of you, protagonist. At the beginning of this story you’d have done anything to get a friend.

At that point, Diemen makes his reappearance. We really are going through the entire cast here, huh.

Yeah. That one’s just too obvious.

Anyway, undrugged, we get to dancing.

God, V, we get it, you want to fuck trolls. The narrator goes with it, though.

I find it kind of interesting how, like... our protagonist in the beginning and ending sketches is pretty much like, a marshmallow, indicating that they represent some kind of AFGNCAAP. But over time, little assumptions leak in. For example, we’re some kind of American nerd - our education system included a ‘high school’, and we had the option to learn Spanish there. We are relatively physically unfit. The wordplay suggests we know English.

Sometimes it’s deliberate - clearly someone made a choice to make it so that our protagonist has opinions about rap and knows a bit about professional wrestling, to suit the themes of the chapters. Those aren’t like, presumed traits assumed of the Homestuck audience, but things that kind of carve out a specific identity

So yeah... we’ve already had the whole ‘cheese person’ thing in Fozzer’s route, and here they’re straight up declaring the protag has pale skin. (Which doesn’t mean they’re white, necessarily, but they are apparently not Black, say.) I think that’s kind of a shame - a wasted opportunity.

Homestuck has already traded a lot on the ambiguity of its characters, which the fandom tends to read as implicitly white, except for like, a relatively small corner. This came to a head at points - most infamously the ‘CAUCASIAN’ controversy during the trickster mode phase, when Hussie ‘jokingly’ declared that his previously ambiguous characters (shaded pure #FFFFFF white, implying a ‘blank slate’) were ‘CAUCASIAN’ in bright flashing letters - at least while in trickster mode. After backlash, the panels were left as-is, but ‘CAUCASIAN’ was replaced with ‘PEACHY’.

Friendsim could have been an opportunity to improve the record a bit, especially as its narrative explicitly addresses many questions of societal oppression and occasionally makes explicit analogues to racism. But... they didn’t do that. Alas.

Anyway, moving on.

Apparently I’m very predictable because the very next panel addresses this exact line of thought.

I feel like this and the ‘not racist’ joke in the previous arc by ‘V’ are kind of... well I don’t know anything about ‘V’, and what they might be intending by these jokes. Here, it’s kind of parodying the whole thing in Homestuck rather explicitly... but whether it’s like, challenging it? There’s definitely a reading that’s like... pointed sarcasm, challenging the source material’s noncommital laziness.

Hey art interpretation is hard lol.

V’s writing is unusually striking, in a way I’m not quite sure how I feel about. I will think more about that once we’ve fully explored this chapter.

Things are getting pretty meta. He comments how we’re paper thin and he can see our blood. We’re like, ok, so you’re a vampire then?

This is the kind of thing! Writing that’s like... on the edge of like, telling a story and just directly talking to the reader, pushing us to engage with ambiguity and metaphor.

To release the tension a bit, the narrator does a ‘sexy dance’.

Anyway, we don’t get to find out what Lanque really thinks of our sexy dancing. Because at that point, Bronya shows up. Lanque decides it’s time to go.

...to a respiteblock, where else. So much for this being a friendsim and pointedly not a dating sim.

We are, it seems, safe. Lanque politely asks if we’d like to kiss. There’s another reminder that this is a very nsfw not for kids scene about to go down in this room right now.

So that’s apparently going to be our decision here. FUCK THE BOY/DO NOT FUCK THE BOY

...no, that’s not our choice. We’re kissing the boy no matter what. This is also portrayed in first person view, because consistency is important!

Apparently our blood tastes ‘sharp and dangerous - like a weapon’.

I feel like this is about to answer a whole fucking lot of fandom questions. At least as far as Hiveswap canon is concerned - arguably a separate entity to Homestuck canon, though obviously, like an expanded universe, designed to be read almost exclusively with intertextuality in mind. An elaboration, I guess.

There’s more like... hey check it out we’re going NSFW. Still nothing like a choice button yet.

One thing I find interesting is like... while this game is packed with lesbians of various stripes, and evidently many of the writers are gay or bi women, all the trolls who get really horny scenes have been boys. (Two of them written by ‘V’, admittedly). Mallek first with his shirtless scene, then much more recently Marvus, and now Lanque.

Also look at these guys. Pretty sure V has a type.

Anyway, the narrator makes the mistake of saying something vaguely derogatory about buckets.

Not sure like... what he finds derogatory there. Mentioning ‘buckets’ vs ‘pails’ (might be a distinction between reproductive and non-reproductive sex?), or saying that he doesn’t seem to have one? He says it’d be his first time.

With an alien, huh. *xenofucker fist bump*

Instead of a sex scene, we get a lore drop.

Once he gets shipped offworld, there will be no more ‘sneaking out of the caverns’. To Lanque, this effectively means his life will be over. This is his last chance to fuck!

A little overdramatic, dude!

Before we can get to it, Bronya interrupts.

So we get interrupted by Bronya. This is finally our choice point. Do we dob Lanque in, or do we fuck?

Regarding ‘problematic’, the main thing I’m seeing is like... Lanque is, at best, barely of age. Since he’s talking about getting shipped offworld soon, I’m guessing he’s close to troll adulthood. In terms of real-world narratives, this is taking on the general tone of ‘college story’ - complete with allusion to a frat party.

I think like... I’m going to read this whole visual novel, and write what I think about it. However, I can also totally understand why you would not want to read this kind of ‘first time’ story. So I’m going to leave that branch to a readmore at the end of the post. Above the cut, to give you all some kind of ending, and we’ll go down the ‘call his mum’ branch. Lol it’s not nearly as nsfw as they make it sound, there’s nothing that really need readmores, nevermind this lol.

Bronya busts the door open and tells him to get dressed immediately.

Lanque gets his mean streak back on, and goes in on Bronya now.

He does love the word ‘bitch’, does Lanque. He tells her she’s not actually his lusus (oh yeah, lusii... it’s been a while since we’ve seen one honestly. The last one was the goat.) She slaps him. He pretends like it was a sex thing.

This is not pretty. Bronya launches into a lecture on Lanque: sneaking out, being an ass to Lynera, and...

Yeah, maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t get further involved.

Apparently he’s not deterred by the fact that we literally called Bronya up to get out of fucking him, and adds us on Chittr before he leaves.

So that’s an ending. Sweet look, protagonist.

But it’s not the ending ending. We get a final screen.

Sure, I want to understand. Is this going to be some kind of direct artist-to-reader commentary on what they were trying to accomplish with that chapter?

The text box turns white, and the font changes. I bet this is Doc Scratch. So no, probably not that. In fact, this segues straight into the epilogue. I think there are different versions of the epilogue depending how you approach the final chapter, or else we were supposed to play the other branch before Lanque, so for the sake of putting the epilogue at the end, I’ll save it for a future post. (I’ve already written it up.)

Now, the other Lanque branches. First of all, refusing at the NSFW notice.

So they poke fun at the reader for like, not accepting the NSFW notice. Uh-huh. You know that Steam doesn’t automatically give a mature content warning if you’ve set up your account that way right? Which I guess is my own fault lol.

Anyway, doing this leads to like... a totally different arc, and a totally different canon. Huh, I genuinely expected they’d like just end the story there.

It’s a cozy party now, apparently.

This version of Lanque is... different.

For one thing, he’s got a flower crown. And instead of soft sexy jazz, we have a pretty piano piece. He says hi to Lynera and me.

Hmm. Not entirely un-hornified, then.

Lynera gushes wildly about us, recapping a whole bunch of plot.

It turns out, rather than taking drugs and having sex and other such risqué things, this party is a chill poetry reading.

So I realise this entire branch is just like, an extended joke at the reader. Look how un-edgy this is. We’re going to support our friends and read poetry.

In this one, instead of asking to kiss us, he asks to hold hands before we read poetry. And he says this is a poem about a past relationship, and it might be a bit raw.

We get Lanque’s poem, in full.

I was going to copy-paste the whole thing in, but it’s quite long, so let’s be uncool and respect copyright or whatever because my fingers were getting tired. It is quite good... addressing loss, and memory, and the lingering influence of a past relationship. It makes me wish I had ever developed the ability to appreciate and comment on poetry, because I feel like I just don’t have the vocabulary to comment on it, or what it might connect to, or anything else. The narration agrees: raw, emotional.

I imagine, though perhaps this is presumptuous, it is reflecting something quite real in the real life of ‘V’.

Lynera also gets the chance to read out a poem. She happens to have one on hand. It’s about Bronya, sure enough, and her loneliness and alienation.

Afterwards, she is self-deprecating.

This version of Lanque is kind and reassuring - the complete opposite of his persona in the sexy branch.

We leave with Lynera after hugging it out. Reading her poem, and being with other trolls in this way, seems to have really helped Lynera. There’s another pointed bit of defensiveness at potential critics.

Soapbox: This is the state of discourse, where the complex feelings we have in relation to fictional works must get flattened out into strict ‘rules’. A character can easily support lesbian and bi interpretations; it can be a relief to bi people and upsetting for lesbians when one of those possibilities is ruled out by having her express interest in a man (not that this, ultimately, rules out lesbian interpretations, since a person can of course be mistaken about their feelings).

To lesbians, it is perhaps likely more salient that many characters they identify with end up expressing attraction to men, and this can seem like yet another instance. To bi women, narratives about picking a ‘side’ are perhaps more likely to be salient, and it can be relief to have an explicitly bi character.

The only conclusion we can draw is that gender is a hellish system of punishment and exploitation, and we should seek to be kind to each other and also abolish it forthwith, write our own stories, and abolish the stranglehold that capital holds on all aspects of our lives including the symbolic media we use to understand the world.

All that said, this repetitive defensiveness about ‘problematic’ writing does kind of annoy me a bit, even if I can understand where it comes from. Let your work speak for itself.

Anyway, that’s enough huge essays (I say, falsely). Let’s finish out the branch.

“...right?”

This branch finishes out with a poke at the whole structure of the game so far - the good endings, bad endings, and so on. We’ve not made a friend, but we have made a stronger connecting with an existing one.

I’m not sure how seriously we should take that given the way ‘valid’ has become pretty much a joke word, if this is still an extended dig at the audience, but there we are.

That was a surprisingly long and rich branch for a first choice, which is kind of nice, actually.

If we click ‘no’ on ‘do you want to understand’...

We just get a game over screen with us sitting in our watchtower looking sad.

So now... it’s time for the nsfw section discussed above. Except... it’s a total fakeout.

First of all, we get an implication that it’s not his first time at all. Anyway, then we get to it. Which is to say, we get a fade to silly anime joke. God, this is like those old 4chan stories where they’d set you up for a sex scene and then rickroll you or something.

We get a ‘dorito faced anime boy’ joke I guess?

Afterwards...

Lol.

Anyway, in this branch, he doesn’t add us on chittr. Lol.

So yeah we die of shame. Welp.

God I can’t believe I thought this would actually go there. Of course it would be a joke at the audience.

Looking back, well, you know, reading the metaphors: he’s a predatory guy and lied through his teeth to get into our pants. Obviously it’s not his first time; obviously he’s not about to bugger off to space and never have sex again T_T, obviously the shit he said was just to get us to fuck; this isn’t just cheesy narrative tropes but within the fiction him playing the protagonist in order to get us to fuck. Complete with the whole attempt to drug us, and make it very unambiguously rape. (Which no doubt Elwurd knew). He got us to explicitly consent before we did anything, but also did enough shady shit so as to make that ‘consent’ kind of questionable when viewed later.

Viewed in that light... what I originally thought was just someone writing a horny fantasy about a hot dominating guy who’s totally into you~ is actually like... a pretty sharp piece of writing about shit pulled by men. There were plenty of warning signs - the ‘objectifying’ way he looks at you, the way he attempts to drug you, etc. I would like to imagine that IRL, rather than taking it as a piece of fiction, I wouldn’t be vulnerable to the same tactics. (Well, obviously I wouldn’t from a guy, at any rate). But it’s kind of a nicely written piece to make you feel stupid and taken advantage of afterwards like... why the fuck did you go along with this.

Though given that this kind of thing is something that people like... actually go through, I feel like they could have warned for it better than ‘challenging and controversial material’. Yes, that might have robbed it of some of its power; but it would also mean that it wouldn’t trigger people who have trauma over this exact kind of thing.

So.

“V”.

Honestly, my strongest feeling about “V” is one of respect. Both their stories have been a weird blend of cheeky, challenging and playful, with some very astute elements and an enormous amount of energy and intensity. They’re prepared to fuck with the reader in ways both silly (lick the troll’s armpit!) and rather more serious (this whole arc), they fuck around with canonicity and narrative structure in creative ways... I wonder what else they’ve written?

There remains only these two clown twins, and the epilogue.

Barzum and Baizli

To finish out the set, we have another pair. The Alternian text says ‘The Soleil Twins’, so I guess that’s their surname. The twins are written by Kieran Miranda, who previously wrote Azdaja, Stelsa and Charun.

The story begins with day nearing, and the protagonist friendless. They get the idea to like... head over to relax with Skylla, but before they can, they run into a house.

A very haunted looking house.

An easy choice for us to begin. ‘No fucking way’ naturally skips this arc, right?

Nope, back at the house. We get another choice: leave left or right. I picked left. I doubt it matters.

Yep, that kind of house. We can’t escape.

After a struggle, we reach the door.

Inside, we immediately pass out with a sense of nausea. Lovely. This can only go well. We hear something like bugs skittering away.

The mansion does at least seem to be explorable. Unfortunately, the door leads to a portrait gallery full of clowns, which is not the most welcome place to end up.

Someone tunes one of the portraits. It turns out to be a TV. Dramatic piano chords come in.

Oh hey it’s some friends.

Their shtick is that the one on the right finishes the one on the left’s sentences, the one on the left speaks in all lower case, and the one on the right speaks in all caps.

They want us to find them. They’re very bored you see, and want to play a game. This is, I understand, an allusion to the Saw series of horror movies, in which I gather a person places people in buildings full of sadistic traps, monitored by various cameras and a small puppet with spiral cheeks. So I guess that’s us now.

We get our first real choice.

I think the door is too obvious. If there’s not another exit, we’ll have to take the door anyway - though that’s likely a different branch, realistically speaking.

We discover a hidden door. Behind it is... a hole in the ground.

I guess we have instant-death options later than usual in this chapter. Our final thought is about the terrible loss of our Chittr profile.

Well, that’s fine. Let’s see what happens if we go straight into the house instead of wandering around.

Approaching the house immediately just skips the wandering around; the text is the same. It was a fake choice. Skipping forward, let’s see what happens if we take the obvious door, not the hidden one.

As we move down the hallway, the lights come on and the walls start bleeding. Lovely. Glorious sense of interior decoration. Tip top.

Beyond the door, we end up in another dark room. Maybe this one will be more of a true CYOA, with death options in every room.

But no. Not immediately, anyway. Ropes come out of the ground and tie us up. The two trolls who were watching us make themselves known.

Carnivalish music kicks in. We finally get a clear view of our captors.

Baizli right (allcaps), Barzum left (lowercase). I’ll try to remember that.

The twins say some predictably sinister stuff about removing our intestines (acid tubes, in trollspeak). The narrator grumbles about once again being reduced to the status of ‘torture muppet’.

When we express a desire to leave, Barzum and Baizli swap both demeanour and capitalisation rule. Now Baizli looks sad, and speaks in lowercase, while Barzum is pissed and speaks in caps.

These two twins, in the tradition of creepy twins, seem to share one mind. Which means they can hardly prank each other! They need someone else.

They rev up a chainsaw and suddenly... we’re back in the same room we started.

Looks like we’ve had another bit of time fuckery from The Powers That Be. Compare Fozzer. The loops kick in, faster and faster. Glued. Buried alive.

Having read the epilogue, all I’ll say is that it seems like someone is trying very hard to push us onto a timeline that ‘works’.

There’s a joke about time loop movies which I don’t get because I haven’t seen very many time loop movies.

After ‘20 or so’ loops, we decide we’ve had enough. But we get a choice of what to do about it.

Let’s try ‘Fuck this.’ first.

This turns out to mean attempting to intimidate the twins instead of begging them to release us.

While they’re baffled by this display, we make a break for an air vent. Surprisingly, we make good our escape. There’s a mention of all our jogging training with Stelsa, which happened in a non-canonical timeline - there was a whole thing about it! - but fair enough. Guess that’s another thing that persists between timelines. Or maybe the protag just thinks they went jogging with Stelsa in this timeline.

We find we’ve missed a bunch of texts from Skylla while we were out, and plan to head over there. But alas... the space loop is still in effect.

We end up back at the house. Unable to escape from the pocket dimension, the branch ends...

So let’s try the other option: ‘remember who you are’.

Come, try to remember...

And that is, of course... FRIENDSHIP. This time, we have something to say to the clowns (after ensuring we haven’t pissed ourselves).

Not killing us is apparently a novel idea for the twins. Or rather, they didn’t plan to kill us - just cut us up a bit, unaware that we wouldn’t heal right back up. The protag corrects the misconception.

So now we’re teaching the creepy clown kids the meaning of friendship. Novel!

The lights come up and they put on a little circus show for us. Apparently this building is not their hive.

They show us various other dangerous-looking circus tricks with the torture/circus equipment. Ah, says the narrator, so risking their lives is these kids’ hobby.

It turns out these kids hatched from the same egg. They tell us they do in fact share a mind entirely - one mind, two bodies.

And at last we end up chilling out and sharing stories.

With this friendship established, we sense a shift of some kind. We take this as a sign that the door might have finally opened.

Not only is the door open, but the ‘pocket dimension’ has dissipated too. The power of friendship! ...or fulfilling some secret design of whoever created the pocket dimension. Mmm.

How touching.

There’s a fakeout victory jingle, which turns out to have been a prank. They explain that... the creepy blood seeping walls and so on were their ‘chucklevoodoos’, but as for the time loop... Not them at all.

“Do you want to understand?” asks the prompt again. Time... for the epilogue.

[thehivemindwrites]

Daria is Good

it Valentine’s Day, generally seen as an opportunity for people like me (aka socially-awkward misanthropes) to trumpet their misanthropy (kind of like people who make SPORTSBALL jokes during the Super Bowl) about holidays centered around romance seems like a great time to talk about how I’ve been watching Daria again.

Which is to say, of course, that the thing I like best about Daria is how its characters avoid being misanthropic stereotypes held up for mockery. Hell, the titular heroine is, for all her displays of superiority and ability to avoid the herd mentality of most of her peers, remarkably normal. It’s part of the joke, I think. Daria doesn’t have her shit together more than those around her, she’s just a little more observant than most. Like her buddy Jane says at one point, the difference between Daria and the rest of the cast is that Daria thinks about stuff more. That doesn’t make her better necessarily, it just puts her outside her peer group. She’s also socially awkward and doesn’t know how to handle feelings (which hey, I can relate to and I’m a grown-ass man).  But really, even her peers are capable of thinking when the situation calls for it (the paintball episode is a great example of this, as the vapid cheerleader Brittany turns into a regular General MacArthur, and in earlier episodes demonstrates an interest in Shakespeare, the quintessential “smart kid” author). 

Really, Daria is just a show about muddling through a world that seems by and large to be absurd - the regular Sick Sad World headlines play just as well now as they did then, and are depressingly prescient at times. It’s about figuring out who you are and what you want to be, which is a process that I am assuming never quite ends. At least I hope it doesn’t because I still don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. Which is, of course, why it’s been so nice to go back to it. 

There’s the obvious nostalgia of course - I would have just been freshly 13 when it started, and at the time had started learning drums, finding out about that whole grunge scene thing which was already basically dead, and beginning to develop a crush on my best friend’s older sister (who was decidedly what got me into the whole flannel and jeans look), while also being an outsider who was most comfortable in the company of fellow outcasts. Gee, I wonder how I could have possibly related to a show about an outsider who was comfortable in the company of outcasts and didn’t fit in to the popular group, and happened to have a crush on her best friend’s older brother. It’s a real goddamn mystery that we may never solve. Puzzling. 

Watching Daria in part is remembering trips to my (much more well-off) relatives where they had cable television and I could flip around a billion (probably actually like 30) channels, one of which was MTV where I stumbled across Daria and was like “oh hey hello there” and then, after figuring out when it was on by reading a TV Guide (which is a thing you used to have to do), plotted ways to be in the presence of a television with cable access as often as I could, with varying levels of success. This went on for years. Eventually I couldn’t be bothered because I was in high school and busy watching Evangelion or Aqua Teen Hunger Force or whatever the hell it was I did in high school. So ironically enough, the point at which I would have probably related more to the show is the point I wasn’t watching anymore. I definitely still caught it here and there, but as it was off the air by my sophomore year I didn’t really see it much. 

Now of course I am appreciating different things about the show - its feminist tone, its message that it’s okay to just fucking go for stuff as long as you don’t mind failing (there’s a conversation between Daria and Trent at one point where she talks about his being in a band as being worth doing even if he fails because he’s at least chasing the dream - again, for a show that uses Trent’s slacker/dropout lifestyle for jokes it is remarkably sincere on this point) or people thinking you’re weird (after all, neither Jane nor Daria really ever budge on who they are or what they want to do - again, there’s a whole episode about their refusal to change an art piece they made on principle). As a dude who is actively in the process of putting together a book that maybe nobody will want or buy, it helps to hear that message now and again. 

It’s also about how messy families can be (both the Lane and Morgendorfer household have their fair share of nonsense) but at the same time they care about each other because, well, they’re family. Both Daria and Quinn help each other out from time to time - not because of bribery, but because *sigh* it’s family and somewhere under everything they care about each other in their own way. I had a far less contentious relationship with my siblings, but we definitely had our fair share of fights. I’d also still probably go to great lengths to help them, even if my older brother has become a giant asshole over the last... decade. I’d just be a little more grumpy about it. 

This had nothing to do with Valentine’s day at all, as it turns out. Though if you want to twist my arm about it, I’m kind of bummed that when they did the whole anniversary thing a few years back and said where the characters would be now Jane and Daria weren’t living together in lesbian bliss. I mean come on.

[galimatios]

sci fi ya au musings from twitter thread mostly nts

maybe i do want to write YA science fiction ya with gay and all my favorite self indulgent tropes and also plugsuits

I HATE MYSELF I IMMEDIATELY HAVE SCENES IN MY HEAD . ITS BEEN TWO GODDAMN SECONDS. I DONT EVEN KNOW WHO THESE CHARACTERS ARE YET tjinking about those rooms in that one ep of black mirror where youcan program jt tk show whatever you want on the walls. maybe projection of virtual reality vs reality as a major motif. simulations and distance... long distance relationships during a war in space action too... have to think about an enemy but maybe we rag on capitalism a littlle maybe some conglomerate is fighting a proxy war using aliens vs the govt the protags are in the military for theme.. war sucks bye but also theres dynamics i want

UM I CAN PUT BIG MECHA INNNNNNNN YEAHHHH anyway i want 2 loyal dog dynamics to juxtapose w eachother + platonic soulmate type protag duo, best friends , one girl one boy, theyre both equally important, some SHIT happens and theyre forced on different sides at some point one loyal dog is treated well, like an equal, will follow x to the end of the world the other is Not treated well. i want to explicitly make that relationship abusive so i can point at it in the text itself and have other loyal dog be like , that's not love. abandoned loyal dog gets adopted by main duo, ends up in a relationship w one of them (whichever one makes it gay), im ship girl with side character who inspires tf out of her, sort of like. theyre competitive and the side character is light years more skilled but girl wants the challenge, wants the chase, is fueled by the prospect of catching up so "wait for me" LAYS DOWN NONE OF THESE CHARACTERS HAVE NAMES OR DESIGNS OR ANYTHING BUT IM ALREADY ATTACHED TO THESE CONNECTIONS mc pair: one techy soft boy nerd who just wants to protect his family so thats why he agreed to help develop/operate tech bc he thinks this is how he can help headstrong pilot ace girl who has no one but wants to prove herself and make a name for herself so she'll be remembered she wants to win glory for herself and comes off as super confident but actually she's just. asuka evangelion except she doesnt crash and burn so bad bc she has the boy who sees thru it, you dont have to try so hard probably happens after a fight where she's reckless hes not one to get mad but this time he's pissed bc she was exceptionally close to dying, yells at her, why do you keep trying so hard to die kinda snaps her back to reality he wants her to rely on him more bc that's what hes here for anyway loyal dog defects from enemy + meets this pair after other loyal dog suggests he joins the crew, tech boy is kind to Everyone but loyal dog FORMERLY AN ASSASSIN ???????? TYPE?? SNIPER?? develops baby crush girl sips her drink :3c

I HAVE TO THINK MORE ABOUT THEM BC OH NO THEYRE CUTE but girl is chasing after some nb femme prodigy who she's rivals with and admires for more than just her skill theyre both emotionally constipated idiots tho so its like. (hand touch) thats enough for 100 years there is. so much tension. and prodigy seems so perfect on the outside but is actually in some kind of super strict fucked up program bc of her skill, and she hated it and is suffering ace pilot is the one to barge in headstrong and fuck everything up and get her out of there girl believes prodigy is amazing. really. incredible. a part of her feels like she'll never catch up . but even so watching prodigy walk into the unknown unflinchingly resolute ... it's both sad in a way bc she's being left behind but also she wouldnt have it any other way bc she thinks forward is the only way prodigy should be facing. its what inspires her. that strength ... h they definitely settle down together in the future tho bc i need ththattt

"when this is all over" said the prodigy, "come find me" this is so self indulgent anyway plotwise once both the govt and the enemy r revealed to be equally bad the main cast defect to a revolutionary group. they will Not win within the span of the novel but theyll have a small victory, very les mis one day more flavored, and even if they did not win they stood for something they believed in, did something to try and tell the truth... also i need more of a cast so i can kill characters off nice now all i have to do is fill all this in with world building and action and stuff and ill have a novel so many sci fi things have done the 2 pilot mind sync emotional thing right so if i do the same thing no one knows if i took it from one franchise or another i need to twist it around a little but i may have ideas haha i can. totally make this a part of my fucking huge sci-fi au really wanna call main girl lane and main boy khemrin . .. i cant unsee the girl as rey flavored so shes ending up w red hair and irish, but boy is SEAsian with a huge family, loyal dog who defects is african, prodigy is asian, other loyal dog feels south american prodigy... astrid is her real name but she may have a codename fsr? idk why i feel it. icarus? assassin defector... something that starts with an o or a d other loyal dog... i need to think but i also need to figure out the personalities of their respective pairs inserts minh as evil one. done. maybe mephis adjacent character for the... no mephis doesnt care abt anyone BUT hed be a great side character OH god what if au jonah and ambrose oh boy. FUCK jonahs probably there for some special task bc hes. attuned to some shit idk

I GUESS IM GONNA DEVELOP AMBROSE MORE ive only written him as a young adult but as a teen hes angry and rebellious and got drafted, ended up being a simple foot soldier but he meets jonah and a lot changes jonah's there on top secret bullshit, same program as astrid definitely has some shit to do With Experiments. astrid has enhanced eyesight/coordination on top of being an ace combat pilot, i think jonah might be able to open up warp gates or limited pocket space mephis is evil scientist who doesnt care abt casualties

I'm thinking about unnamed pilot lesbians and i am. enamored immediately holy shit god they're both so goal oriented and focused but once the fighting is finally over they finally allow themselves to embrace the intensity of their emotions for eachother and i am fucking perishing they were essentially raised as child soldiers so it's this clumsy process of trying to figure things out for the first time, this kind of innocent but intense and blooming love between two hardened soldiers, the years of war coming away when they're together for the first time actually fuck i did name them but i'm still not sure about ace pilot girl? i want to name her lane or something monosyllable, maybe i'll revamp raine and make her this oc instead... either way i'm just. ugh. UGH. FUCK. holy shit they love eachother so much

I"M GETTING REALLY FUCKED UP ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF THE PRODIGY (ASTRID) DYING IN THE LINE OF DUTY or well at least goes missing, presumed dead but raine just... doesn't believe it. astrid can't die. she's too amazing. there's no way fucking. huge disbelief. she refuses? raine going on a near suicidal self-appointed mission against commander's orders to rescue her, khemrin tries to hold her back but he can't, she' fucking gone speeding off on one of the fastest scouting ships she can hijack raine finding her alive but barely conscious in a damaged cockpit floating in space for who knows how long, raine unable to open the hatch and get to her but anchors her ship to hers, NOT EFFECTIVE BUT HER ONLY REAL CHOICE w/o compromising the air seal. makes the journey back astrid barely makes it to the space equivalent of a truck stop (unaffiliated) and raine calls for backup in panic and tries her best to tend to astrid's wounds an feed her and she's fucking PANICKING but trying so hard to keep it together astrid wakes up and raine's crying i don't have anything specific its just really soft and raine never Does this god when they meet again after the war, raine running her fingers over the scar left from astrid's helmet shattering h raine in a tux and astrid dressed like a princess and raine kissing her shoe sorry im gay bye

[knightofbalance-13]

Sexism, Racism and Phobias over Sexual Identities For All!

http://z-raid.tumblr.com/post/164720277610/one-of-the-many-problems-with-rwby-is-that-ruby

One of the many problems with RWBY is that Ruby doesn’t have any arcs dedicated to her at all. You can kinda say that the episodes where team RWBY was formed in vol. 1 was sort of an arc for her, but that’s being really generous considering that was more team-centric than Ruby-centric.

Except you ignore how the ENTIRE SHOW is her arc: She has developed slowly THROUGHOUT her show. She has gone from being childish and naïve to the world like she was in Volume one to accepting that the world is more complex than her fairy tales and understanding how the world works. She still has problems to work through but she has another five or six Volumes left. So she isn't done yet.

If I were to reboot RWBY, one of the easiest way to fix this particular problem is to literally rip the arcs dedicated to Jaune from his generic white male protagonist hands and retool them for Ruby

By that logic we should then rip them from Ruby generic white female protagonists hands and give them to Sun then tear it away from his generic male hands and give it to Illa. When you start making RACE and GENDER an aspect of quality, you are essentially treating these people like objects and incindently end up acting racist and sexist. Not to mention Jaune isn’t even a protagonist, he’s a deturtagonist meaning he is a secondary protagonist thus if he finishes developing before the show is over, it’s nowhere near as big a flaw if RUBY does. And this ignores the fact that Jaune HASN’T gotten any development since Volume 2. Volume 3 gave him nothing and Volume 4 used him as tool for Ruby. But of course, RWDE is so obsessed with white males they will never acknowledge anything that isn’t a white male.

And this WITHOUT the implication that rebooting RWBY means essentially SCRUBBING MONTY OUT OF HIS OWN SHOW.  

In vol. 1, Ruby is let into Beacon two years early. While competent at fighting, Ruby is still wet behind the ears in terms of being a hunter and a team leader and all of this stresses her out. Pyrrha, an internationally famous fighter, finds Ruby’s enthusiasm and naivety refreshing, possibly finding Ruby’s innocence similar to her own when she was younger. She decides to help Ruby out as much as she can in terms of mastering Ruby’s semblance and becoming a competent leader.

And now I’m bored.  Why? because the humor that came from Jaune and Ruby’s interactions and Pyrrha and Jaune’s interactions are gone and replaced with every generic mentor relationship ever. there is no variation or humor, their personalities are not compatible in terms of interesting character development and in fact Ruby and Pyrrha become lesser characters because of it since Jaune added a foil characteristic to both sides. And since Ruby would know who Pyrrha is, that aspect of Pyrrha will never come up and since Jaune is gone Ruby will never have that fellow dorky classmate to make it charming. Congrats, one paragraph in and you’ve fucked up writing. Especially since you are burning up Ruby’s development too fats and thus we get stufk with a  fully developed character halfway through the series anxd now she has nowhere to go but back or be boring.

This would require fight scenes where people aren’t just super mega awesome but at the same time not bad fight scenes for the sake of terrible comedy either (e.g. all the group tournament fights in vol 3). Think Maka and Black Star levels of newb during the first few episodes/chapters of Soul Eater. They’re still competent in fighting, but obviously inexperienced in many other things. So, you know, actual growth and progress can be seen instead of just anime characters doing cool shit all the time. This also requires Pyrrha to be the leader of her team and not Jaune. Pyrrha being Ruby’s mentor will also give more leeway to Pyrrha having more connections to team RWBY. Yang is slightly suspicious of Pyrrha possibly having ulterior motives for wanting to mentor her little sis, Weiss is jealous that the famous Pyrrha wants to spend with Ruby and not her, Blake continues to just be there, etc. It allows Pyrrha to exist as her own person, gives her stronger plot relevance and connection to the main cast outside of being a member of Jaune’s team and the totally-made-up-on-the-spot seasonal maiden, and lets her be more than just a satellite love interest character for Jaune

So you want RWBY to take more from SoulEater, which then means it’s basically ripping it off and losing it’s identity? Good to see the RWDE tag cares so much about originality except when they suggest stuff.

So...Ruby working together with Weiss at the end of Volume 3 where they unite to go save Pyrrha contrasting Volume 1 where Ruby and Weiss were fighting each other doesn’t count as development? What about her learning the trials of leadership in the same episode which allows her to mesh more with Weiss? What about Ruby reconciling her motivation of being a Huntress with tebcruelity of the world showing a level of personal strength and adaptability very few people have? Is that not development? 

See, you focus so much on Jaune’s development you become blind to Ruby’s development. And Weiss’ development And Blake’s development. And Yang’s development. Ironically making YOU sexist.

And then we have your excuses for “improvements”: Pyrrha is too passive to be a proper leader and thus wouldn’t be able to rend in her teammates nor does she show any capability to be a leader (being a leader and being a good fighter are two different things), It makes Yang look stupid for suspecting Pyrrha, Weiss look more like a bitch than she really is. Pyrrha’s own person loses most of it’s meaning because Ruby really doesn’t NEED Pyrrha’s mentoring in combat because, surprise, Ruby si a prodigy in fighting and thus someone like Pyrrha doesn’t have enough experience to impart anything pf value onto Ruby (Espeically considering she has QROW as a mentor, someone who has a compatible fighting style and far more power and experience than Pyrrha) whereas Jaune would need Pyrrha’s mentoring, Ruby and Pyrrha fail in many of the same social ways and for similar reasons whereas Jaune does not and gives a companion to Ruby to sympathize with and someone to make Pyrrha’s flaws come to light. And then she loses the romance angle for her in which is a lot of the series heartwarming moments because there is no one else she is compatible with. And then her similarities to a certain inspiring, brave mentor disappear which is a spit in the face to Pyrrha. And that’s all without considering how this would screw up Ruby’s development since her learning to be a leader is shown in Jaune’s own arc but without it, it becomes more flimsy. 

In essence: Everything gets fucked.

Anyway, in vol. 2, the prom can still happen but just trash all the dumb hetero romance bullshit. It’s pointless, a waste of time, and also badly written. Anyway, Ruby is attending the prom and sees that Pyrrha is all alone with no date. They talk, and Ruby learns how lonely Pyrrha is from being so famous and being put on a pedestal or whatever. Ruby feels bad for Pyrrha and also feels guilty of doing the same things others have done that made Pyrrha feel so lonely in the first place. This moment deepens their relationship and they form a genuine friendship.Â

Oh so Heterosexuality is boring? Okay then, guess that makes homosexuality nothing more than a marketing ploy to draw people in and should be treated with no respect and dropped once the novelty wears out in which we will just find new ways to make heterosexuality good again. See how fucking offensive it is when you say this bullcrap. Also, by this logic, Toradora’s romance is shit because it’s hetero and a poorly written, poorly made, rushed, unaware Yaoi fanfic is good. Becuase that’s how heterophob-I mean, logic works.

Alos, giant plothole: WHy would Pyrrha say this to Ruby? She said it to jaune because he treated her differently but Ruby can’t due to having a knowledge f the Huntsman world. And even if there were some way to shoehorn this in: it lsoes most of the impact because it was said that Jaune had helped her out she fell in love but Jaune was too dense to see it. Now it just looks like angst. Great, this person wants to turn RWBY into the next Evangelion.

So, when Pyrrha gets killed off in vol 3., her death will actually have emotional meaning to Ruby and to the audience. She’s not just a love interest for generic white male protagonist that a good chunk of the fandom (me included) hates because he’s such a blackhole whenever it comes to screentime/character focus. Let’s face it, Pyrrha and Ruby are basically strangers to each other in canon and they’re only friends cause the two teams talk to each other semi-frequently. I don’t think they’ve actually even talked directly to each other even once (and if they did, you really can’t blame me for not remembering). Now, Pyrrha is a mentor and friend to Ruby, so witnessing her death will be legitimately more traumatic to her.

Except: No, it wouldn’t. Any emotions around Pyrrha would feel forced because without Jaune, she doesn’t look as good, her despair is cheapened, her love interest and seemingly promising future is gine, she doesn’t look all that impressive because the audience won’t see how a civilian like Jaune fights, her conflict around being the Maiden and dying will feel forced without the discussion with Jaune and it does not work with Ruby due to Ruby having more pressing matters and if she was inserted in, she would be overexposed in her own series, Ruby DOES become an ACTUAL Blakc Hole Sue, the quality of the show tanks and it dies. Congrats you killed RWBY.

And no, Jaune isn’t a Black Hole Sue nor is that the reason why you hate him: You hate him because he’s white, he’s male and he’s heterosexual because you’re racist, sexist and heterophobic. And as you people in RWDE are so keen on saying: Why should RT pander to bigots? See I know this because criticism’s effect actually dials to one way or another on issues: Since this is a radical change that demands something to be removed entirely, I know that thinsg are fine because the thing isn’t being overdone. Also, I know this because her only criticism of Jaune is hes white and male and she keeps acting like heterosexuality is a bad thing.

And ironically, this actually makes them sexist as hell because they cannot see past Pyrrha’s vagina and see her for the person who she is. She is only worth something if she is completely separate from a man, thus forcing her down one path and one path alone. This also shows that they will refuse to see her strength as a character (her actions for doing good despite the damage it will cause her, her conflict about it, her conflict about her feelings with jaune, her sadness, her strength as an actual fighter) I if it has anything to do with a man, thus never seeing past her gender.  Espeiclaly ironic considering the person Pyrrha is most like in anime is Kamina from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, AKA the manliest guy in anime so her gender barely has anything to do with who she is.

And finally: I love how this person completely disregards Penny dying, Roman dying, Ruby being to a pulp by Roman, Ruby seeing her sister maimed and seeing her school, destroyed as if cumulative stress is not a thing. I wouldn’t let this person within ten miles of a depressed person.

Which leads us to vol 4., where Ruby is all kinds of fucked up from all the shit that happened to her. Her sister lost an arm, her team is scattered across the world, she witnessed 3 people die right in front of her (2 of them being her friends), and her dream school and the kingdom of Vale are fucked. All of this shit can lead to a number of possible developments for Ruby that can happen over the rest of the course of the show, including 1.) she becomes bitter and cynical, losing all sense of hope and optimism she had, 2.) despite all this, she still retains her hope and optimism, or 3.) a mixture of both, where Ruby realizes that the world and being a hunter isn’t as idealistic like being a hero in her stories, but she still wants to do what is good.

And this si exactly what happened in Volume 4. Literally, word for word. Pyrrha’s death made literally no impact here now because really nothing really changed. Except wait, nobody cares about pyrrha, Ruby ahs no way of processing her feelings about Pyrrha, their relationship would feel cheap and poorly written, Pyrrha will have either made no progress with RWBY or contrived progress. 

And let’s take a lok at thes ethree options. Number one is out because it’s basically a spit in the face to Monty and his message of keep moving forward and would make just a copy of Volume 4 Jaune. 2. is the same as three which is exactly what happened. Congrats, you have two options, one of which was already done and the other literally disgraces a dead man’s work. Not like RWBY would survive to this point with all the imbalances of removing Jaune does.

This amps up the character focus on Ruby while drastically reducing Jaune’s. Like the boy or not, you have to admit the amount of time and priority spent focusing on Jaune’s emotional and personal conflicts and growth is really fucking bad writing when he is supposed to be a secondary character. The show is called RWBY and Ruby is supposed to be the actual main protagonist. If anyone’s going to get an absurd amount of focus about their growth, it should be her.

A.) he’s a secondary PROTAGONIST AKA DETUROTAGONIST. In fact, he would be teh closest to BEING a protagonist as the main character’s Foil. Yeah, you kind of forgot that aspect of Jaune’s character, like everything else that wasn’t the color of his skin or the contents of his pants. SO no, that doesn’t work.

B.) That’s already done before: With characters like Goku who sucked up all the development from characters like Yamcha and Tien and Chtaotsu and Master Roshi and Bulma and then ended up with nowhere to go in Z and it brought the whole show down because the characters that could be explored had to be left behind. This is a flaw so prevelant all but the most hardcore DBZ fans will admit it. You’d just be the idiot who never got the memo.

C.) Again, you are ignoring Ruby’s own development to harp on about Jaune, once more making you the sexist one here.

Disclaimer: What is described still falls into the many clichéd pitfalls like the mentor dying and the other generic shit that is in RWBY’s writing, but that wasn’t the point of this rant. The point of the above text is to fix the lack of character focus on Ruby with the material given from the show, even if said material have been done to death already. It’s a bandaid for one wound, but the body that is RWBY is still riddled with critical injuries of bad writing.

Because cliches are always bad, right My Hero Academia, the highest rated recent Shounen, One Punch man and Mob Psycho 100, web comics who defied all the odds like RWBy, and Gurren Lagann, Montys favorite anime and one of the main inspirations for RWBY?

Except that you just bring up more clichés that don’t get the variations that RWBY has given the ones it has now just to be sexist, racist and hetero and somehow homophobic. COngrats, you fail writing.

[kendrixtermina]

Baby Reacts to “Voltron Season 3″

SPOILERS

Episode 1

So That's Zarkon without his helmet

It seems that a timeskip has taken place and that everyone has been taking up Shiro's absence with a stiff upper lip

Alluras 1000 yard state

Note how when everyone mentions how important meeting Shiro was to them, Keith again doesn't explain about their earlier meeting

So the BoM guys just jump out. Yep, yep, I can see Keith being related to some of them.

Seems like the Paladins and the BoM are fully allies now, they interact with Kolivan rather casually here

So hunks claw thing can attack defensively, too!

Interesting how we get to see this whole bunch of Galra & their range of features, something of their society

act merciful then reassign him to space siberia. That's one establishing character moment right there.

But one interesting thing here is that while he's sneaky and manipulative he IS a fighter.

Keith is not the world's most diplomatic person but what he's saying IS the truth

Episode 2

I guess a theme of this episode seems to be that the characters are all capable of more than their straightfoward designated 1D roles. 

It's not just lance they were all sorta identified with their niches.

Hunk loving Yellow so much is so adorabs tho

Reminds me of this thing in guilty crown where a once wimpy character was inspired to „become“ a more confident one

Quirky miniboss squad has varied designs.Lotor has such a punchable face

Episode 3

So they go in when they can barely fly... They were fairly ragtag when Shiro took over tho – It wasn't TOOO bad thinking from Keith, he thought of placing the tracer

So Lotor's a genius pilot, too. They even THINK similarly „Don't waste the enemy's time of weakness.“

Again the formation gag

Allura is REALLY not good at this

So there is a „Voltron Feeling“, intersting

I feel ya so much Keith. I can't into group activities either.

Thing is he is actually a good planner he can even bark out orders well but he's used to risking & utilizing only himself with no further consquences.

I just hope the discourse squad isn't gonna hate on him too much, like, he said he wasn't cut out for it he's improvising as best as he can

There's a little Zethrid in all of us

Lance has this complex of not having a special role, but, he's kinda the ~Versatile~ guy, stepping into whatever roles are needed (just like water flows & changes shape)

& right here he's trying hard to be the glue

It's sort of a reversion because usually it's the charismatic guy who's the leader and the prioritize-the-mission guy who is number two (See Kirk & Spock)

Still I would like to stress that what Keith's doing here is his consistent trait of prioritizing the objective

I did not expect Allura to get this deep character moment but it makes sense

I wonder what we can infer from this about lance; Blue remains mysterious

They're all getting into it~

Oh Transformation sequence, how I missed thee

„I'm a leg“ Yeah now we know we've seen Allura without her mask

I must admit I got a mild case of the feels at this point

Opportunity, heh? He's got a plan. Probably capturing it for himself

Ep 4

Well this one cuts to the chase right away. Not much downtime this season.

Again I didn't expect Allura to get the focus this season.

Not having Shiro as a co-leader is srly fraying her nerves & making her feel the burden of her task. From the beginning she was always characterized as somewhere being an ordinary girl put portraying strenght because of the burden of her father's legacy – When you think about it, she is so, so stranded & this possibility is gonna compromise her bigtime

It's kinda like the plot of  „The Doctor's Wife“

There comes another favorite, the negative space wedgie

I like it when the technobabble includes references to how they are actually determining things („Gravity isn't being diverted“ etc. )

Its like a magic Event horizon!

Poor Coran what has he done to deserve this

Aaand the creepy abandoned ship trope! Delightfully Star Trek Esque

Aaand the apocalyptic log trope

Aaand the Paralel Universe! They're sampling all of TOS here

That's it I'm officially christening this episove Vol Trek

Yep, it's the Mirror Universe! Please tell me Mirror Keith has a beard

Im glad I know enough to catch the „Sven“ reference

I did not expect Alternate Realities to actually show up

I wonder, was there some historical crossroads where Alfor makes the deal with the Devil rather than Zarkon? Are we gonna meet Good!Lotor as this 'verses Allura?

And lool the alternate Sentries

Im SO LOVING THIS EPISODE I CANT EVEN

It's not Alfor, it's ALLURA who's alternate Zarkon? That's gonna screw with her head

Her whole Arc in season 2 was growing out of the black & white Mindset that Zarkon's betrayal left her in (ie, realizing the BoM and Keith are good, finding out the evil Haggar is Altean) but this takes „For Want Of A Nail“ even further

Didn't we see that blue haired altean techie in the background in one of the black lion's flashbacks?

Aaaand we're getting more detail on what Voltron even is

A VOIDSHIP now we're doing Doctor who, too?

Are they not evil or is Allura just not getting it? Poor girl she's in for a schock especially since the Galra homeworld was supposedly destroyed – Did Zarkon act out of revenge, too?

Aww Slav has faith in them... kind of.

UGH They are WORSE than Zarkon because they have more advanced technology

OOHHHH THIS IS GOOD THIS IS GOOD THIS IS SO GOOD

Also Mindfuckey

Do they have their own BoM counterpart, too?

I did not expect this how did they do so much in so little time

Aww the Space Mice hugging each other :(

Ah and now Sven is gonna die for a continuity joke

Any moment now, they're gonna say „He was rather like our Mister Spock.“

Iwho knew Slav could be cool?

It's also worth mentioning that Keith kickied lots of butt in this ep

Lotor's plan kind of allmost got his whole universe invaded by brainwashing dimension hoppers tho

So it WAS a trap

Damn Lotor's manipulative. He knew this would get Allura.

Ep 5

A tank? Are we now going Pokemon? Or possibly Evangelion?

This started slow but now it keeps sucker-punching us

SHIRO and he's got Hermit Hair.

OOOH Not AgAIN This must be so retraumatitzing for him

We've gone F.E.A.R. As it would seem.

No, It's fucking LAIN

Ohh I do love symbolic mindfuck sequences

He's supposed to look all ragged but he's so hot with this hair lenght

Everything about the cinematography here is just perfect

So there's Haggar-

Kuwagamon is that you?

Interesting perspective with Lotor's faction & the rest

I just noticed that Lotor does, just slightly, have fangs.

Ohh I see Shiro's PoV is happening in parallel.. they were so close!

Shiro is badass as usual

Ohh Lotor, do I sense daddy issues? Or maybe just a drive to prove himself.

Haggar's right tho, with all his ideas & somewhat obsessive/ singleminded tendencies he's actually a lot more like his father than his demeanor suggests.

Again Paralellism to Allura & Keith trying to fill the shoes of Alfor and Shiro respectively

So in the end Shiro found THEM before they found HIM

Still, a bit anticlimatic; I'd expected more of a finale than just „The lion senses him“ & no explanation for what happened, or will that be filled in later?

Alien Ramen.

So... that didn't contain what I think it would & contained lots of stuff I didn't see coming. In a way it was a huge break from the format, really nonstop plot instead of the previous slower pacing & focus on character interactions.

I would have expected the revelations from season 2 to play more of a role (Keith's origin, Allura's newfound magical capabilities, who or what is Haggar)

I mean it makes sense because it's an exceptional situation with Shiro being gone & Lotor hot on their tails. I wonder what season 4 is gonna be like, thankfully it might be there soon.

It's been a bit since we had a Hunk or Pidge episode & I was looking forward to less utilized interactions such as Shiro with Lance & Hunk or a episode where Pidge & Keith go on a mission together

IDK there's so many dangling plot threads and now there's MORE but even so most of this was  good writing when seen for itself.

There wasn't a lot of Pidge content which isn't that bad given that she got to be showstealingly hypercompetent in the last two seasons but they better give us a Hunk episode in October.

Ep 6

Ahh, Sharpshooter

Let us appreciate Keith's casual massacre skills. He tough

Cool thinking Lance!

So Allura's weapon is a flowy gymnastic ribbons thingy... kinda like a shinier version of that whip Zarkon's so fond of tho

I'm glad we got to see her kick butt with it before handing the Blue Lion back to lance

This fight scene well utilizes the bunch

AH now there's explanations, or at least an aknowledgement of a need for one. And again we see that Keith & Shiro sort of have a special confidence between them. Shiro allows himself to sound audibly distraught here. He looks to weird in such casual clothes, too. We never saw his pajamas in ep 2 so I guess now we know.

At which point during these last few eps did Keith acquire those bags under his eyes? Is it me or does he seem a lot more in control? Or perhaps its just the familiarity.

That moment at the end tho, aww. No one minds saving you, Shiro, because they all LOVE YOU TO BITS, especially Keith.

Ahhh I wanted him to keep the hair. But I guess he is the proper sort/ feel a bit less like a plant when he's clean-shaven. Yes bby tell them how proud you are.

Pidge and Hunk talk engineering why Lance makes a face in the background <3 All the nerd conversations plz

No. No. NOOO LANCE WHAT ARE YOU SAYING

It shows how much both have matured but, NO. I did not see that coming ouch nor did that conondrum occur to me. Hence I see why Shiro coming back was not the final climax

That moment when Shiro & Keith talk at the same time out of habit tho.

What's going on THERE? Sabotage by Haggar?

I didn't think they could wrap much up but it's going fast.

...Keith has always been quick to just pack up & withdraw hasn't he? I guess that quote about Alfor becomes relevant again here.  Aaand another plot twist why do I even bother with the pause button. How's this even gonna continue, is Shiro just gonna do mission control from now on? I'm gonna miss Keith doing Keith stunts if he's gonna be tied up as the boss man.

Even so, the teleport question is still no answered.

Was Shiro Ayanami'd somehow? (replaced by a clone or something)

I was beginning to think they couldn't wrap up THAT much in just 2 episodes but they seem to have taken this as a challenge. T'is a rolacoaster.

Hey isn't that the guy from the first episode? In any case you almost have to sympathize with that random Galra comander.  Poor bastard. Two invading parties. +Is there gonna be a confrontation now? Keith Kogane and the Halfblood Prince. Ohh this buildup of epic music cant be good

the four way battle with the generals was interesting/ pretty cool like theres one for each of them to smash. Are they setting up miss scaultrite thief for a high heel face turne? I hope not that would kind of be trite.Some are saying she might be part of his long-lot family, but wasn’t Keith’s mom supposed to have been with Marmorites instead of the Empire? 

Keith PLUS mission control Shiro would seem to be its wholly new desaster to adjust to. Keith did not ask for nor deserve this you can tell he hates every minute of it.

Ep 7

At this point its srly weird how the opening is still the same, especially after they set up all those elemental associations for everyone's original lions.

So lotors mom WAS altean but it wasn't Haggar herself as far as I can tell.

I'm smelling a gendo ikari type backstory here but i hope theyll be creative about whatever they do. And ooh, allura's parents in the backround her mom looks just like her.

There goes my headcanon that the original green paladin was olkari. But also ooh backstory.

But hey I think Pidge's predecessor was also a girl? And Lance's is... also very obvious. Alchemy!

Oh wait it is Haggar, and that WAS, indeed, the Galra homeworld. Classic „overdid the black magic“ backstory & went bonkers backstory Though Zarkon seemed to be lowkey authoritarian & obsessed with destructive potential well before he went bananas. I suppose the series has stuck to classic tropes.

Interesting choice to top it off with the backstory & let that be the twist/ finale with the character arcs themselves being left dangling – Last we saw of Keith, it seemed like whatever sense he had that he was getting the hang of it had just kinda crumbled away again and he seems so miserable, like, glancing away even at the end of the conversaton with little resembling a resolution.

And we still don't know what actually happened to Shiro. Did we even see how Zarkon got his scar? 

Also, did our Evil Overlord Couple make Lotor before or after they turned into zombies? 

[blairtrabbit]

Thoughts under the cut. Aka Why am I such a fucking downer on this why can’t I just enjoy things. Why must I be a nerd like this.

I have been trying to just let this image go because its an illustration out of context and we have no idea what they will look like rendered and moving in universe but there are a couple things really bothering me about this I have to talk about. 1. Why in the ever loving fuck does Danger Deux have a core reactor? Remember in the first movie when they were making their last stand pulling all the old guys out of retirement and the movie made a point of talking about how the Danger having a Reactor Core made it an obsolete model? The Gipsy Danger ran on nuclear power like the older units Cherno Alpha and Coyote Tango and the big glowy center on its chest is basically like a gigantic cooling unit. Its dangerous and was eventually changed because a. Having human pilots in a nuclear robot is incredibly dangerous if the shielding is faulty or something happens and it overheats during a battle. I recall Stacker suffering some repercussions because of that. b. Nuclear Robots blow up and could potentially hurt the environment or civilians. I vaguely recall the Danger doing something like that at the end of the movie. The Striker and the Typhoon were digitized being newer and better models. Its less dangerous for the pilots and for the area they are fighting in. So one would assume these brand spanking new robots are the latest and greatest models right? Thinner, lighter....so I repeat- Why. THE FUCK. Does Gipsy Danger 2:not-electric bugaloo run on a NUCLEAR CORE? probably because it looks good and no other reason and that pisses me off. 2.THEY DIDN’T JUST GIVE IT ONE CORE THEY GAVE IT TWO I AM DYING INSIDE. Actual conversation in the art department. Artist 1: Guys I am working on Gipsy 2:Back 2 tha Hood and I want it to look like the first one but different. How can I make it the same but..different. Artist 2: Mmm Well the first one had that cool nuclear core right? Artist 1: Yeah? Artist 2: How about. TWO CORES.

3. If they made Dangeresque 2 nuclear because of what happened with Striker and the electric pulse why aren’t all the Jaegers nuclear? So. When Newt drifted he gave the Precursors all this info about the Jaegers and Leatherback was able to use an electronic pulse to knock out the Striker and temporarily disable it. If the PPDC assumes this will happen again then wouldn’t they make all the Jaegers nuclear? Then why does only one have any kind of indication it runs on nuclear power? And why only Gipsy Danger 2:this time its personal? The answer is there is no reason. They just wanted people to be able to tell this robit was Gipsy Danger 2:I still know what you did last summer. I feel like Del Toro thought out almost every detail in the first movie  and worked to make each Jaeger unique. This doesn’t bode well. 4.Why did they have to give these Jaegers almost identical color schemes to the Danger The Typhoon and the Eureka? In fact if you look at them for a few minutes you realize it's just the Danger The Typhoon and the Eureka with less personality. why did they remake three previous Jaegers instead of creating new original ones?  You know why? Because they think we’re stupid. They think we’re stupid and we won’t know these are Jaegers 2 fast 2 furious without some painfully obvious references to the original film. Just like they think we needed Stacker to have a son otherwise we might have wandered into this movie and thought we it was Transformers 12:Age of Fucktron and wandered mindlessly away to see whatever Dreamworks movie is out. Why can’t you give me more credit Hollywood. I don’t need to have Khan to be the villain in my Star Trek movie to know that its a Star Trek movie. I don’t NEED to have a fugitive droid on a desert planet to know I’m watching a Star Wars movie. STOP TREATING ME LIKE I’M FUCKING FIVE YEARS OLD. I DON’T NEED A JAEGER WITH TWO CORE REACTORS. I CAN HANDLE NEW THINGS. 5.Look I know they’re just ripping off Manga/Anime Mech and Kaiju movies to begin with but at least the first time they tried to cover it a little better. The Crimson Typoon had a headlight for a head and three arms. The Cherno looked like a nuclear plant that could walk and even the Gipsy and the Striker had a very thick well thought out and original look. They moved ponderously and with weight. They were made too look like a person could wear them as a suit. Even if these are newer models all I can see is someone  looking at Evangelion’s paper copying chunks of it and presenting it to their teacher expecting an unearned A+.I get it you guys took the original designs and threw some Gundam darts at them. You did your re-runs of Macross homework. I’m just...unimpressed and I bet you anything these things will move like they weigh four pounds. Oh god please let me be wrong on this. This leads me to my next question. 6. Why did all of them go on such dangerous diets? Did the Iphone teach us nothing? Making technology thin doesn’t make necessarily make it BETTER. Striker Eureka 2: The Squeakuel is the worst offender on this front. Its got this top heavy box sitting on top of an itty bitty waist. You know what I would go for if I was a Kaiju? Probably that waist. I mean i know its bikini season Striker 2: Back in the Habit but eat a fucking sandwich. 7. It better be just the illustration that has them looking this goddamn clean. Jaegers get dirty and rusty and covered with battle damage.Even Gipsy who was renovated and rebuilt from top to bottom had patches of paint and scratches and chips in places. These goddamn things look like toys. They look like plastic fresh out of box toys. In the movie they had better look at least slightly weathered even if they are new or I will glare at them the entire two hour running time. I will give them smouldering glares the likes of which has never been seen before or since. God please let the movie be more impressive than this. Also as an aside. Why are all the Jaeger pilots so young? Why is no one drifting with their parents? I feel like i’m seeing behind the scenes of fucking Pacific Rim babies or Pacific Rim High School musical. I have a feeling somebody higher up pressured them about using more of the young people to get those sweet tween dollars. But at least they hired a diverse cast. Are all the previous generation dead? Is Herc going to come back and train any of these people? Seems like a bit of a mess at the ole PPDC.

[knightofbalance-13]

http://dudeblade.tumblr.com/post/159435864121/context-for-the-not-going-to-elaborate-on-side-or#notes

I can’t believe it’s come to this but I must tackle MULTIPLE people at the same time.

Get ready everyone, this is gonna be a rough one.

From the OP, we have the following:

Miles and kerry stated that because of the tumblr fandom disliking the jaune arc they aren’t going to do arcs for other characters. Which when writing a story heavy series and trying to make it sound smart and well written is not an excuse.

Considering the fact that Ren and Nora, Weiss, Blake and Yang all had an arc, I have to assume that was a joke they made that you took out of context. maybe if I had a link or source to see for myself and be proven wrong otherwise but nope, no source I’ll just make my own assumptions.

So jaune a side character got little establishment and barely even stuck to it. (note the “This is all I ever wanted to be.” Yet neglected all study portions) and the actual 4 main characters of team rwby get no arcs cause people complained about jaune.

I saw Jaune slack off once in the entire series. That is it. And in that very same scene, Nora and Pyrrha were slacking off as well so it’s not just jaune. And consider the fact that Jaune in Volume 4 is constantly training as shown in Episode 2 of Volume 4 that is obviously not true that he hasn’t stuck to his character.

Also: Jaune is a main character. It has been confirmed by Monty himself that Jaune and his team are main characters. This is a GOOD thing as this means there is at least two male main characters in a female eccentric show meaning RWBY is officially putting in more effort to actually be progressive than most so called “progressive” shows.

And again: Weiss, Blake and Yang had arcs in this very volume so again, this seems like you’re just ignoring whatever you want to justify your hate to Miles, which puts your entire criticism at risk.

“You wanna elaborate on how ruby’s a tactician?”  Miles: “Nope.”

Midn providing a link? Because otherwise, I can point out that RWBY devised the plan to kill the Nevermore in EPisode 8 so Miles SHOULDN’T need to point out the obvious to you. This isn’t Evangelion where symbolism and insanity runs rampant so there’s no excuse to miss points like this.

Lesser writers of a lower station than RT would be flayed alive if they gave that response.

I highly doubt that. That would just be looked over and ignored: you’re just being ind of nitpicky.

And insert a lazy gif here and that’s it for Sokumo. Result- Poorly made, relying entirely on the rwde audience having  lot of hate for Miles.

Next up we have Sageyanna to tackle. Luckily this is pretty short.

Writers outside RT could be flayed alive because they dont get the Cultish RT Fandom Protection™ that MKG get.

Considering the fact that so many in the rwde tag twist their critics words to make them seem like the bad guys when they aren’t agreeing with them (myself discluded for obvious reasons) and you yourself have said that black people who don’t agree with you are coons as @mageknight14  can attest, your group has a much more cultish attitude than the main fandom which has evolved beyond that.

And that’s it. Result- Hypocritical.

Next up is someone named Xenodweeb...Yeah, the name doesn’t make sense to me either.

Like seriously, if Konami did this shit, you’d get like 10 #FucKonami News bits from Jim Sterling out of it and they’d feel the wrath of a dozen salty communities.

And Konami has about 100x the fanbase of RT so that just tells me that the rwde tag is toxic enough to account for 12 communities.

However, just because Takeshi0′s circle co-opted the fandom, all of this is suddenly above criticism and doing so makes you a “troggled pro-censorship SJW cuck.”

... All this tells me is that you have a personal grudge against @takashi0 and that you don’t understand that the fandom as a whole is pretty accepting of criticism. Also, rwde has had some very strong Radical Social Jsutice views in it to the point that they kind of mirror actual misogyny just in reverse, blaming guys for everything. As in, I hardly hear criticism about females in rwde. so he might have a point there. Dunno what a “cuck” means.

Result- bias accusation and fundamental misunderstanding of fanbase size.

like people already pointed out that jaune’s had too much screentime to miles. it was like during volume 2 or something, and miles and kerry said theyd work on that. lol no work happened and jaune ended up being the “And Knuckles” of the show and now theyre getting pissed because fans dont like it?????? miles and kerry need to hire some different writers

But they have. Jaune was written down to being a support character for Pyrrha in Volume 3 and has been written down as a support character for Ruby in Volume 4. He hasn’t had the focus of Volume 1 or even 2 in a long time.

And considering Miles and Kerry are the ones who made RWBY alomgside Monty and you demand they step down before they’re ready, that’s akin to demanding Burnie step down from RvB before his time: It’ll do nothing but damage.

Result- Ignorance of acknowledged and fixed flaws.

Next up we have Sageyanna in his new URL. Fantastic.

More like RWBY ended up being the &Knuckles. Jaune & RWBY.

In Volume 4, The amount of focus the main characters got are as follows: Ruby, Weiss, Blake, Oscar, Ren and Nora, Yang, Jaune. Jaune, unlike even Yang, had barely any focus on himself: it was all used to develop Ruby, it was all Ruby’s focus using Jaune as a tool. That is fundamentally wrong.

And the problem is that THEY are the writers. And both have high RT positions and several dozens of layers of Cultish RT Fandom Protection.

No, the problem is that all of you have shown yourselves untrustworthy as you bully and harass people without end be it the writers or the fandom. You will call anyone who defends the a cultish, basically demanding everyone change around you instead of changing yourself. If you could just stop insulting Miles and Kerry and the fandom then people will actually listen.

Unless they REALLY fuck up (and I am talking about a literal catastrophe here, because RT have really low standards for this kind of shit), they wont move. Ever. Probably not even get a reprimand.

You said “Jaune is getting too much screentime” they gave him less screentime, you said they ignored you. It’s pretty obvious why they aren’t listening to you: you have proven yourselves unworthy of paying attention. Only I, someone with almost no self worth, listen to you and even tehn it’d to try and cork your hole. All it takes is some respect and restraint to be worthy of listening.

If shit didnt change when Shane’s letter happened, I cant think of a thing that will make RT stop hiding behind their massive apologist cult fandom. Again.

That’s because Shane was depressed and his letter was obviously biased as he wrote up entire pages of things that had no relation to RT outside of getting sympathy. And instead of getting him to the hospitial, people in your community used his depression to attack RT, going as far as to use MONTY against them. Honestly, they’re only as much of a cult as you are. Perhaps try being nicer.

Result- Hypocrisy and name calling.

And finally we have Dudeblade.

I signed on to watch four kickass girls fighting monsters. Not some badly-written attention whore who apparently isn’t morally obligated to send Pyrrha’s stuff to her parents because Creator’s Pet™.

*Lets out a frustrated sigh* If Jaune was a creator’s pet then his entire purprose in Volumes 3 and 4 wouldn’t be building up other characters. His strategies wouldn’t be used as jokes, eh wouldn’t fail at every corner, eh wouldn’t get crocthed shotted, he wouldn’t be outted as the elader of his team to Ruby, he wouldn’t get the rape face from Tyrian, eh wouldn't get glared at by everyone for calling out Qorw, he would attribute what little character development he had to Ruby and his upgrade wouldn’t result in him getting bitchslapped..

Jaune is not the main focus: he never was and he certainly isn’t now. I don’t now why you insist in it so: eventually the writers will give up and actually do it then what will you do? You’re complaints will have actually damamged the show and the writers all because you can’t understand that a female eccentric show can have a strong male cast.

Final Result: Very skewed Perspectives and massive hypocrisy.

Advice: Calm down and think or try being kinder or just stop.