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vidreview · 2 months ago

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VIDREV: "Short Seasons Are Killing TV" by Captain Midnight.

[originally posted august 29th 2024]

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Captain Midnight is one of those creators i don't really follow because the vast majority of their work (mostly Big Corporate IP analysis) doesn't interest me, but every once in a while they'll come out with something that's EXTREMELY relevant to my interests. this one caught my eye because i've been on that "the streaming model is really bad for television" grind since 2018, and i'm always curious to see how mainstream perspectives on this stuff are evolving.

i'll just say at the start that this is a pretty good video. most everything i've watched by Captain Midnight has felt at the very least on the right track, if not always entirely on point, and the lack of cutesy overly familiar Content Creator-isms are a godsend from this type of channel. it makes for a bit of an odd duck for a full VIDREV, because i'm not here to discuss the shortcomings of what was said, but rather to take a closer look at what wasn't said.

in short, this is a video about how the now-standard 8 to 10 episode TV season in a post-streaming world has strangled much of what makes the medium unique, and he points to how many of the top-rated streaming shows are older titles with a hundred or more episodes as evidence (though he leaves out that streaming rights to shows like The Office have been the subject of contentious bidding wars in the past, a fact that would only strengthen his argument). he hits a lot of my personal favorite talking points: streaming tv is worse at good individual episodes, the idea of "filler" doesn't really make sense when applied to american television, the serial episodic structure lets you get to know characters better over time. near the end he pulls out the Netflix Marvel shows Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, each of which had a 14 episode first season that felt somehow overlong, despite their characters being literally tailor-made to support serialized week-to-week stories. these, he says, were an important early example of how the prestige streaming model encourages movie-like storytelling instead of TV-like storytelling. these are a good points, many of which i've made myself across my recent informal series of video essays about modern television writing practices.

but on the other side of all that analysis, Midnight's conclusion leaves something to be desired. here's the closing paragraph that jumped out at me, with my own added emphasis: "I love serialization on TV and I always have, I just think it can often be used better within the scaffolding of episodic stories. and for a while there it felt like TV was getting better and better at melding the two together into something truly interesting and special. but somewhere along the way that progress got lost, and many in the industry ended up thinking that serialization and short seasons were the shortcut to quality." take a good, long look at those bolded statements, and consider how important they are to Midnight's argument. after 17 minutes of wide-ranging and generally pretty good analysis of specific shows and recent trends, these three generalizations quietly paper over a gargantuan blind spot in order to get the script over the finish line.

first, "for a while there." for a while there refers to the internecine years between the dawn of the Netflix streaming era in 2011 and the eventual Wall Street-ification of all the media companies by 2018-19, when there was a big shift away from purely serialized television towards the more expensive "prestige" model we're so accustomed to now. what were the causes of this shift? what was actually going on "for a while there"? well, the 2007 writer's strike increased the writer's royalty take from home video sales, and gave them more bargaining power with networks. for this and a million other reasons, a lot of post-2007 shows saw a diminished episode-per-season count from 23 to 16-18. this was a huge boon to writers who now had more time to work on fewer episodes, meaning the quality of each individual episode shot through the roof. it helped that everyone coming into showrunning capacity at this period had years of experience working in the sitcom/cop-drama mines, developing a hunger for a show that could tell a continuous narrative within an episodic framework. with this new higher-quality television spreading away from cable-only networks into broadcast, suddenly everyone was talking about "the golden age of tv" and hyping up the medium as a place for nuanced, artful storytelling. Netflix saw where the wind was blowing and invested heavily into this trend, selling the idea that on streaming, there's no need for a set episode-per-season count for every show, no need for every episode to come in at a set length, no need to avoid more controversial adult topics for advertisers. of course, they very quickly reneged on that promise and have since become everything they promised not to be, but whatever. as Netflix succeeded, other networks decided they wanted to eat the streamer's lunch and develop their own services, making big deals with established names that made for great marketing. this meant a wave of well-publicized high-profile investment that pulled triple duty with audiences hungry for more mature media, creators hungry to make more mature media, and investors with dollar signs in their eyes. perhaps you can guess whose interests are the ones that actually matter in this equation.

but then after all that investment and quality increase, Midnight says, "somewhere along the way" the trend shifted, and "many in the industry" adopted the streaming model as the artistic ideal. now, hold on, wait. who in the industry? do you mean writers? directors? producers? executives? these roles each have wildly different relationships to the medium and to the stores of capital which allow it to be produced, and putting them all in a single consensus-bucket together as if they're all the same thing is wildly misjudged. you know what happened "somewhere along the way"? studios and streamers (and their increasingly powerful Wall Street backers) realized that favoring streaming over home video meant they didn't have to pay those costly royalties that were so painstakingly won in the 07 strike. you may recall that apocalyptically low streaming royalties were a major point of contention in the 2023 writer's strike. (the irony of Netflix starting as a DVD rental service is lost on no one.) like every service that emerges out of big tech, streaming was tailor made to break unions and steal profits without looking like that's what they were doing. they sold a big loud exciting bill of goods, got everyone to invest before regulators could catch up, made themselves an essential part of the creative economy, stole absolutely everything that wasn't bolted down while no one was looking, and left all their traditional unionized competitors scrambling to make up the shortfall. if this sounds familiar, that's because it is THE business model of the post-08-recession world. you might call it platform decay, or if you're Cory Doctorow you might call it "enshittification," but i'm gonna cut out the middle man and call it what it is: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. it's the enclosure of the commons in microcosm, the natural process of enclosure and monopolization inherent to an open market. as is always the case with their loud proclamations of innovation, tech has invented nothing new here. it's pretty much just What Capitalism Does.

we do not need bloggers to reinvent Marxism from first principles to understand what's happening. Marx already did that for us.

another key factor for understanding what happened "along the way" comes with the development of Mini-Rooms. instead of creating a crew of staff writers experienced at multiple levels of production who work for months together to write the scripts for a single season of television, streamers like Netflix would assemble small rooms of relatively inexperienced writers paid slightly above intern rates under the guidance of maybe one experienced showrunner that were only given a few weeks to pump out scripts to please investors. this has led to shows that often feel samey, rushed, and terminally inconsistent. now, instead of writers having more time to work on fewer episodes for the same (or greater) pay, they have less time to work on fewer episodes for worse pay and virtually zero royalties. this coincides of course with cost-cutting measures across the board in streaming, with producers desperate to decrease time on set wherever possible and eating the cost of breaking union regulations because Economies Of Scale Are Fucking Absurd, meaning everyone on a production has less time to do their work, which inevitably means that their work is worse. and with TV seasons being so drastically shortened, and the gaps between seasons so drastically widened (not to mention the expectation that few if any shows will make it past season 2 (because union contracts get a pay bump at season 3)), there are fewer opportunities for young filmworkers to gain experience, build connections with fellow filmworkers, and hone their talent pool over a period of years. a show isn't just its writers, directors, and stars after all, it's an entire business operation employing hundreds if not thousands of people. for a filmworker in the 90s or before, getting a gig on a popular show could be life-changing because it was one of the rare Hollywood situations that was relatively dependable for a long stretch of time. those kinds of jobs are increasingly rare, and the alternatives are starting to look more and more like undignified freelance work than a real sustainable career.

all of these factors and so many more have had the downstream effect of making the entire industry less stable, burning out promising young talent instead of developing it, discouraging others from trying to break into the industry in the first place, and lowering the baseline quality of popular media so the viewing public sees it as less valuable. perhaps you can fill in the blanks on the ensuing race to the bottom.

this is not the result of a creative consensus. this is not something that "many in the industry" just sort of randomly changed their minds about "somewhere along the way." this is an economic trend driven by economic forces far beyond the purview of any single working person's decisions. maybe you can find interviews that suggest otherwise, maybe there were lots of writers excitedly extolling the virtues of streaming media over traditional forms-- but those people are no less vulnerable to marketing hype than you are, and why should they have been more educated about the economic realities of streaming than we were? we are, all of us, simply reacting to systems in motion, trying our best to make sense of them, searching for the silver lining that keeps us from going insane at the instability of it all. this is why it's so important to have a materialist framework for your analysis-- without that anchor you're just judging by vibes, trying to divine an explanation from consumer trends and missing the forest for the trees. look not to the words of any given writer or actor or producer, but instead to the money, to the actual flow of material power. look at the victories of organized labor, and the resultant retaliations by organized capital. Midnight's thumbnail loudly states that "WE BROKE TV," but "we" didn't do a damn thing. our consumption habits didn't do this, the creative preferences of writers or directors or showrunners didn't do this-- it was rich people with lots of money who saw an opportunity to make even more money and took it, damn the consequences.

here's my problem with consumer-side criticism. it tends to see a hard dividing line between those who make media and those who consume it, and thus generalizes all of the makers into a single heterogeneous mass that can only be understood in the vaguest possible abstract. without a materialist economic framework for understanding the flow of power in these systems, consumer-side criticism can only go so far before it crashes headlong into a big scary Marx-shaped wall. there's a door to the other side only a few feet away of course, but it's rare for a critic in this mode to walk through it because I guess they see the business side of things as irrelevant or overly complicated. like, we're here to talk about the contents of media in a very layman's death-of-the-author sort of way, to judge trends on their own merits and not rely on outside sources to skew our perspective. this is fine when the scope of your analysis is relatively small, but as soon as you start asking questions like "why isn't [thing] as good as it used to be" your consumer-end framework fails you utterly. i'm not saying Captain Midnight is a uniquely craven paragon of this particular misstep by the way, in fact on the whole i'd say he's better about this than many. this is an extremely widespread problem for a generation of critics brought up after The End Of History, when trickle-down free-market hokum was adopted as Natural Law, leaving them only the empty feelgood individualist babble of neoliberalism to interpret the world. but it's not an insurmountable problem! i've yet to meet a commie my age that didn't start in that bubble and have to work their way out of it. i certainly made my share of embarrassing neoliberal apologia before finding the immortal science! it is the process of a lifetime to unthink these blind spots, and i point them out in all kindness in the hopes that others might avoid such mistakes in future.

and frankly, everyone is asking these "why is [thing] bad now" questions because it's begun to affect every facet of our lives. it's not just movies and television shows, it's basic web services, it's the USPS, it's the healthcare system, it's jobs and housing and education, it's everything. what is it, precisely, that you want to fix? you want to see better movies and tv shows? how do you propose to make that a reality, beyond "i hope that creators/audiences adjust their habits accordingly"? to my mind, this notable tension is a perfect opportunity to point people in the direction of an actual systemic cause, and thus an actual systemic solution. do not stop your analysis at "shorter seasons are bad and i hope they stop doing that" when you could help your audience think about these things in terms of class, labor, and solidarity, by giving them an illustrative example they might apply to their own working life. there is no fix to this macroeconomic trend in reform, no union so strong it can put a lance through the heart of capital's lust for profit. maybe bringing all this up in a video would feel too political for a lot of creators in this space, but the politics are gonna do what they're gonna do regardless and it's gonna be your problem (and your audience's problem!) sooner than later. i'm not saying every video essay should be a dedicated Marxist polemic, that would get old real fast, just that the current liberal individualist framework lets the real perpetrators off the hook and limits our ability to imagine better futures. if you want to feel like your fluffy unimportant media analysis is "justified" at a time of war, genocide, and crushing economic disparity, you might start by using them to normalize a more collective, materially-grounded way of thinking about the world. it's the little things that add up most in the long run, and you'd be surprised how easy it is to make "too political" into "too important to ignore" with a little strategic frog-boiling.

that's my opinion, anyway. this is still a pretty good video essay and i think you should go watch it. i'd also recommend Midnight's review of the Borderlands movie and the interminable nostalgia of modern Marvel movies for a bit of good fun.

[final note: at the start of the video, Midnight mentions that Adam Conover also released a video about the harms of streaming television at the same time, but that it goes in a very different direction. i'm gonna give it a watch and see how it stacks up by comparison. i expect that it will have a more materialist framework (since Conover actually works in the industry) and correctly identify where the problems lay. i also expect that he'll fall flat when it comes time to talk about solutions, because like Cory Doctorow he's invested in the anti-monopoly line, which fundamentally believes that if you just break up the monopolies then capitalism will be fine actually. i guess now i'll put that theory to the test, and if i find anything interesting i may end up writing about it.]

#vidrev #video essay #video essay review #video recommendation #captain midnight #hollywood #streaming #media criticism #enshittification #tv writing #Youtube

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morphogenetic · 7 months ago

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Mediaposting 2024, #6: Dai Gyakuten Saiban 2/The Great Ace Attorney Resolve

Completed: April 21st, 2024 (/i still have to watch the DLC episodes that didn't get released with the official loc, I guess but I'm not playing it any more so ?? lol)

Time spent: 49.5 hours (will be like 50.5 after the DLC stuff)

Rating: 9/10 (more objectively. but a very biased 9.5 in my heart.)

ohhhhh my god alright where do i even start with this. i guess i also have to talk about dgs1 a little bit in this review/mini completion log but I will TRY and keep it to just 2. [editor's note: somehow succeeded with this! lfg]

first, to get the non-spoiler parts of this out of the way:

please for the love of god play this fucking game if you've played the original AA trilogy but not the DGS duology. i can not stress this enough. i would not recommend playing them as your FIRST aa games because a) they will set your bar way too high (and too low simultaneously bc wow dgs1 still has whack as hell pacing) b) there are a few details, especially in this particular game, that will evoke no reaction in you if you haven't played at least the main three games but WILL cause you to start gnawing on drywood if you have Knowledge Of The Future

the whole dgs duology - and specifically as a duology, bc 2 makes no sense without 1 but 1 by itself is not on this level - is absolutely in my top 3/4 AA games now. i admittedly have not replayed the original trilogy in quite a while, buuuuuut T&T/AAI2/DGS1+2 are my new top 3. not necessarily in that order, give me a bit to think about it lol.

im going to be thinking about this game for the rest of my life probably. i can see why my best friend wanted me to play it for uh. seven years. because yeah it really is that good.

i want to cosplay four different designs from it. i have not wanted to cosplay anything new (to me) since neo twewy came out three years ago. take that as you will.

music still slaps. obviously. my favorite new song is absolutely partners (IYKYK) but agh. the new theme(s) that characters get are all so fucking good. clenches fist. the leitmotifs

definitely becomes relevant in retrospect in a few places where capcom obviously cut the hell out of the budget but they saved it for where it matters so i dont care. im also uh. very used to low budget VNs so frankly even 3D models are better than I'm used to LMFAO. i also you know. didn't realize that they did that until after the fact. so. they hid it well

if you havent played this go and play it (after playing the original AA trilogy). please for the love of god im on my hands and knees.

everything below the cut (i.e. below this point) has blatant unfiltered spoilers. you have been warned.

okay so welcome you've presumably played all of dgs2 if you're reading this. i have THOUGHTS. a lot of these will come off as critical/negative but i need to strongly emphasize that these are the only reasons that this game is not a 10/10 for me and otherwise i'm in love with it. it is fucking CLOSE. i am not talking a lot about the things i really love because that is.............................a lot of the game for me and we'd be here all day. the critiques are much more limited in number. but. you know.

dgs2 absolutely has much, Much better pacing than dgs1 does overall. it does not take 3 cases to get past a bunch of tutorial cases. this is a good thing. however..............the first two cases are still very slow. i won't call them pure filler, because a) reminding us about yuujin was a very good idea, b) they contribute to the Themes of the game. and im glad hosonaga was there again and (of all of the side characters we could have had) seeing souseki was good. i like them. but they really didn't need to be there to fulfill the themes of the game. case 2 in particular feels like a filler case, which I do not love given how tight the rest of the plot feels. if anything i feel like they should have done an interim flashback case without susato, as much as I adore susato, because as-is it's canon that ryuu had 3 cases in the span of a week. which feels INSANE

speaking of better pacing: im so glad dgs2 remembered that AA games can take investigation breaks between courtroom shit because running through ALL of the trial after ALL of the investigation in 1-5 was. let's say. taxing. the 'finding their footing' aspect of the first game

i do kind of wish we got One more case with the masked apprentice where susato wasn't there at all for the entire case. if only because then the delay between ryuu Thinking It and susato Knowing it would be even more painful. but i do really appreciate that they don't try to make it a woah big reveal as much as a painful "i know who you are but you don't." really adds a certain je nai se quois or however the fuck you spell that. idr. its 1 am when im typing this

also hey asougi can we fucking unpack how susato (the girl you were raised with to some extent, probably not like your sister but your weird younger cousin) called your name and you didn't remember who you were but you DID remember when you saw a wax reconstruction of your dead dad. can we fucking talk about that for a minute. can w

speaking of asougi. my god. they did such a good job with him. i think i wouldn't have cared nearly as much about him if all we had was the dgs1 stuff but his extreme motivation for the truth almost turning him into a violent attack dog is. aaaaaaaaaah. god. and the parallels between him and his father's followers (read: the von karmas) that one has from playing the mainline AA games. truly brainworm material

speaking of this: i can absolutely tell they did NOT think about writing the professor stuff with this game until they added in the masked apprentice - before he got turned into asougi - even though the reaper was obviously something that was planned. i do not care personally about this, because game dev is weird as hell and it REALLY works with asougi and van zieks' character arcs. in the same way that i don't think [SPOILER CHARACTER] from vlr would have been as good without the knowledge of 999, i think if barok had been foiled against a new character it wouldn't have worked as well. all that said. it sure is obvious they didn't know what they were doing. this makes me even more impressed that that they got it to work at all

the same is true of everything with the hound of the baskervilles but im really glad that they took it in the direction that they did.

also man it is so obvious that they probably wanted to have this be a proper trilogy like the original trilogy but then budget happened. because 2-3 through 2-5 all slap but they feel so fucking weird next to 2-1 and 2-2. like i dont feel that theres anything missing per se but a little more time for character growth would have been nice. hell even adding in an extra case (and/or editing 2-2....)

the only writing thing, aside from. 2-2 being like that. and the other weird pacing issues..that extensively is off to me is the whole assassin trading plot. i do think it is Very stupid and that they clearly wrote themselves into a corner with 1-5 on how to deal with it because they just...proceed to not deal with it until 2-4 and 2-5. however. even with that said. i actually kind of like that it is so stupid. because stronghart definitely feels SO obsessed with his version of justice that he wouldn't think through the potential downsides of having two free-roaming assassins running around and maybe coming to get his ass. obvious flaw that would not occur to him because of his insane ass behavior

its still dumb. but it's ace attorney dumb. so i can excuse it a little bit

stronghart being a damon gant expy was funny but goddamnit was it predictable. making him be so obssessed with justice that he talks to ryuu about it for 4 hours was funny as hell though and absolutely adds to him as a character. still dont like him that much Personally but hes definitely a character

his breakdown was peak. by the way. top 3 breakdowns in the series

jigoku being like that kills me. also. the way he just let genshin

g. genshin impact (sorry)

i dont care that sherlock's bullshit was a deus ex machina bc honestly.....electricity was real at that point. its fine

also. holy shit i love ryuunosuke in this game even more. 'i'm not doing this for you, kazuma. i'm doing it for the truth.' BANGER!!!!!!!!!!!! his growth across these two games is really good but especially in this one he shines so brightly

however..........this game made the glaring lack of ryuu's parents even more obvious. its not like i Need it or anything but considering how he very literally refers to yuujin/susato/sherlock/iris as his family in 2-4.....where are your parents!!!! what was your childhood like!!!!!! I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS THAT I WISH COULD BE ANSWERED!!!!!!!!!

and asougi. i could write an essay on asougi alone i think. but i adore how both he and ryuu are like 'you've changed' at each other and neither of them are wrong but then by the end they're like 'wow you're the same as before.' theyre so fucking gay. anyway

and sherlock (WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU WHY DO YOU LIE FOR FUN LIKE THIS????????)

and yuujin (partners ~ game is afoot starts playing and i start crying). obsessed with how they only had to write the dynamic for a single case and you can believe all of it because they can just go. lol. ACD canon. anyway

and susato

and, most surprisingly of all for me.....fucking barok van zieks. i would not call myself a Fan of him in the way i am a Fan of asougi and ryuu, but i am obsessed with him. he did so many things wrong but realizes he genuinely fucked up and wants to atone for it. he gets genuinely upset in prison when he can't join the red-headed league. he's a professional alcoholic. he has bats in his office (???). what is wrong with him. (i know the answer is 'literally everything that could be wrong with a person.' but still

i love every single character in this game (or i hate them but because they were written to be hated)??? how did they manage this again. dgs1 helps so much here because the character growth.

argh. the character parallels with everyone realizing their parent / mentor figure was fucked up and/or hiding shit from them in some way. thinking emoji rotating in a circle goes here

wow that magically became way less critical as i was writing it. i thought it was going to be a lot stronger of a critique. its still weird pacing stuff basically that bothers me but i have very minor complaints that im forgetting aside from this

UHHHHHHHHHHHHHH YEAH HI GUYS IM BRAIN ROTTING NOW FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SORRY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! this has had almost the same brain impact on me (as evidenced by the 1 million words about it) as raging loop i think and thats never a good sign since i still think about raging loop at least once a week despite the fact that i played it 3 goddamn years ago

#dgs thought spiral #< if you're wondering. how much personal hell i am in because of this game. i made a tag for it. lmao.#mediaposting #junpei.txt #finished writing this at 1 am my time but im queueing it for the morning so people can read this like the fucking morning paper. you know.#long post

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heyclickadee · 2 years ago

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Thoughts on “Faster”

1. THAT’S MY BOY!! THAT’S MY BOY!! MY BEAUTIFUL NERDY BOY!!! 2. I love that Echo and Hunter were out delivering space door dash. I joked about that with my sister once; I didn’t think it would actually be canon.

3. Even though I missed seeing Hunter and Echo (and Crosshair), I don’t think this episode would have worked with them in it. I’m not sure Hunter would have agreed to going with Cid in the first place, and even if he had, there’s no way he would have let Tech on that race track. They would absolutely shut down the shenanigans. I’d pay cash money to see his face when they all get back.

4. I know a lot of people are calling this one filler, and while I don’t agree seeing as how there was plot development or at least set up for plot development as well as some lovely character development for Tech, I’m glad this one was a bit more lighthearted than the first three. You can only delve so far into the angst before the audience becomes numb to it. You need to let them (and the characters) breathe a little before going any farther with it. I’m genuinely glad they just got to have a good (albeit dangerous) time.

5. Tech, seeing riot racing for the first time: It would appear that anything goes out there.

Tech internally: If I do not get out on that track within one standard hour I will perish. 6. I LOVE how, in contrast to the first season, which highlighted the batch as a team and what their roles on the team were, this season is focusing more on the batch as individuals. It’s less about what the team will do and more about what each member of the team might want. For Tech, that seems to mean opening his eyes to the possibility of life outside of war and combat, not just for himself but to the idea that there’s so much of the galaxy that existed before and outside of the war that he’s never thought about, as well as presenting him with the idea that he’s good for something besides fighting. And given the conflict between Hunter and Echo (who ultimately want the same thing but are looking to get there in different ways), I’d say that’s going to be really important later on down the line.

7. Along those same lines, I’m adoring the throughline between Crosshair’s desperation to stay relevant using the only skills he thinks he has, Echo’s determination to fight back using the only skillset (being a soldier) he thinks he has, and Tech’s frustration with Cid wasting their skills on things like space door dash. They were designed to do one specific thing, and the republic they were designed to do it for no longer exists. They’re all floundering and struggling to find their own sense of purpose, the same way Hunter seemed to find his back in season one.

8. TAY-0 was. Oh boy.

9. Obnoxious. Eminently punchable. The irony of casting Sonic the Hedgehog as the blue racing robot was not lost on me, but besides the “Gotta go fast,” aspect of that, casting Ben Schwartz as an egotistical, aggressively dramatic theater kid always works. He always plays that part well.

10. You could feel Tech was exactly 0.35 seconds from punching TAY-0 in his stupid metal face from pretty much the moment they met. That deadpan glare when TAY-0 told Tech to stop fixing him the wrong way? I felt that in my bones. The way Tech sighed and shook his head when TAY-0 said that Tech didn’t have strategy or skill? Dude was pissed and it’s almost like he’s had to mask his whole life. The, “Don’t try me right now, I’m done and I’m doing what I want,” look when Tech said he was going to be the one to race? Yes. Good.

11. The way that Tech clearly didn’t know how to respond to the crowd chanting his name because he’s not used to that kind of recognition, so he gave that little awkward half salute is going to live rent free in my head for a while. As is the fact that Tech did listen to everyone giving him advice but ultimately trusted his own judgement.

12. “Tech, you have to be in front to win!” “I know what I’m doing. It’s called strategy.” “No, it’s called losing!” I’m dying. I’m literally dead.

13. So...Tech doesn’t trust Cid. Which, he shouldn’t, of course. Besides Millegi’s warning at the end, the way Cid was acting all the way through this episode makes me think she’s definitely got something shady in store for the boys. And the thing is, I don’t think it’s something she’s planning on doing--I think it’s something she’s already done. I suspect she actually sold them out to some extent way back, maybe back in season one, in a way that’s going to get them in big trouble this season, and that she’s maybe starting to regret it because a part of her actually likes them.

14. Wrecker and Omega playing chess at the beginning of the episode! Omega putting things on the line to help Cid! Wrecker and Omega being so happy when Tech won! Tech with his hand on Omega’s shoulder and Wrecker doing that affectionate shoulder punch! I love them!

15. The poor guy who got shot at during the race at the beginning of the episode. I know this was a much lighter episode than the last few, but dang. That’s...kinda dark.

16. I cracked up when the announcer lampshaded how odd clone names are in-universe, especially when they don’t have the “they’re a clone” context.

#the bad batch #the bad batch season two #tbb spoilers #tbbspoilers #the bad batch spoilers #tech!#i love him!#semi-coherent thoughts? on my blog? it's more likely than you think #tbb tech #this season is perfect so far actually

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phantom-of-the-501st · 2 years ago

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Season 2 Episode 5 Thoughts

Spoilers for TBB Season 2

Phee!!!

I'm glad we're getting to see more of her character.

Wrecker taking Omega out on scrap hunting missions is adorable. 🥰

Tech looking at what Omega brought and being like "this is useless". 😭

Hunter, Tech and Echo in their civilian clothing! Happy to see the outfits changing up a bit more frequently this season. At least they're getting chances to relax.

Hunter and Echo are so the parents. 😭

They way they are constantly looking at each other like "🙄 oh well, should probably tag along and make sure they don't get killed". 🤣 (Edit: added "don't" in because I missed it out. Oops. 😭)

"To what?"

I swear, the more I watch this, the more I realise how much like Echo I am. 😭

Wanted Gonky, got Mel.

And while we're on the topic, R.I.P, Mel. ☹️

Although the moment they left her outside I felt like something was going to happen to her. And I was right.

Ngl, I think this has been my least favourite episode so far. It wouldn't say it was bad, I just wasn't as invested as other eps. 😕

The Batch feel very much like side characters in their own story this episode and I don't love it.

But I am happy that we got more Phee!

And Omega getting excited over treasure hunting is adorable. 🥰

Them getting split up was... kinda pointless. 🙁

Oh no, they were split up! What's going to happen?!

Nothing. The other three just walk around the side with practically no issue whatsoever, so... yeah.

Although Hunter, mate. If you could stop falling off of things that would be great. 🤨😂

Hopping back to an earlier scene, Hunter running over to check on Wrecker after Phee pushed him out the way was sweet.

So that's what the giant metal thing was.

Was hoping it would have more of a role this season, ngl.

Looked cool but was kinda underused.

Legitimately thought the Maruader was a goner though. 😥

I thought this episode was gonna be a 2 parter with the amount of stuff happening in the last few minutes. I guess the ending felt a little sudden but the episodes are short, so that's bound to happen.

Hunter is so exasperated, omg. 🤣

I DID NOT SIGN UP TO SEE ECHO KNOCKED OUT THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

Poor Wrecker took a bit of a beating as well. 😭

Wrecker throwing the monster thing out the window! 😭🤣

I know loads of people were calling the last episode pointless and filler, but I actually feel like this episode was less relevant.

Probably gonna need to sit on it a bit and pick it apart to see where it really starts to tie in to the main story.

Oh, and we got to see a little hint of Hunter's enhancement coming through! Liked that little touch. 🥰

Was really excited to see Echo again and he was there! But he was very much giving S1 Echo.

And by that, I mean he was there but he wasn't really doing anything. 😕

Echo and Hunter feel particularly grumpy atm, though. Something to do with the nugget delivery? Something to do with finding out what the others had been up to last episode? Tensions causing problems? 🤔

That's what I'm more interested in. The changing character dynamics in the Batch. We seem to have put that on the back burner atm.

Isn't always a bad thing (look at last ep for example) but I hope we go back to exploring the conflict soon.

Turns out I was wrong about the Tech and Omega stuck in a cave thing. Wonder when that is going to turn up. 🤔

Overall thoughts about this episode is that it was alright. I didn't dislike it, but it just didn't click with me the same way every other episode has.

Seeing more Phee was great, but the Batch felt like side characters in their own story, which I don't always love. Omega had a little bit of time to shine, though, which I appreciate.

Little bit annoyed by the lack of decent Echo content this episode. Was hoping with him being gone for 2 eps he'd have more time this episode and he didn't. He was just kinda there. But hopefully we'll get more of him next ep. We know that he's with Omega and Gungi at some point and I feel like it would make sense for that to come up soon.

We did get some Hunter content, though! Very much giving off tired parent vibes. But he's letting Omega do her thing and I love that. 🥰

But yeah, overall I thought it was fine. Not desperate to rewatch it like I was with the other eps but I'll definitely sit on it. Hopefully, if I mull on it and go back over the ep I'll get more into it.

Once again hoping for more Echo content soon. ☹️

Also, where is Gonky at???

Edit: Thanks @eriexplosion for pointing out the missing word! "Make sure they get killed". Ffs, how did I miss that? 😭🤣

#the bad batch season 2 spoilers #the bad batch spoilers #tbb spoilers #the bad batch season 2 #the bad batch #phee genoa #omega #hunter #wrecker #tech #echo #star wars

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charmixpower · 2 years ago

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Season 5 wrap up. Season 5 and 4 comparison

As you all probably know by now I like s5 more than s4, for pretty obvious reasons if you've read my s4 thoughts

Things season 5 did better than season 4:

Sirenix and Harmonix make more logical sense than Believix. Forms from outside sources have not been done before and having be given by a higher power makes more sense than suddenly forms can be influenced by how much people on a particular planet believe in magic. It makes even more sense once you remember that Earth is in the Magical fucking Dimension and that Earth not having magic is a fluke

No seriously who the fuck discovered Believix in the magical dimension and HOW?

Lack of love and pet and other stupid jobs

The romance drama was less stupid. Like yes it's VERY stupid and I hate it, but Stella being mad because she thought Brandon was insulting her fashion design makes marginally more sense than what ever the fuck was going on with Mitzi. It's like that for all of them except Skloom, like it's marginally less stupid and brain numbing

Musa is snarky again!!!! God bless!!!! And Riven is acting like a natural continuation of his s2 self, extreme stupidity and inability to read social ques and all!! My babies are back!

Completely irrelevant plot central characters did not happen. At least fucking Krystal tried to heal Sky, that more that I can say about Andy's bitch ass

Does Roy count? I can remember like three scenes he was in, he is a minor character

Tritannus has an actual personality and with some minor tweaks could be genuinely compelling, I cannot say the same for the Wizards of no personality

No secondary antagonists that are objectively better than the main ones and make me want to tear my hair out because I want to see more of them, but it does forget that Diana exists during the lilo so there's that

The civilian outfits were better. There still bad but there not s4's civilian outfits sooo

The Selkies are plot relevant unlike some pets I can't be bothered to remember

The tone of the season was FAR more consistent. Like s4 fucking was so childish than nose dived into Nabu's death, but everything in s5 didn't feel like tonal whiplash

Less transformations. Two is still annoying but it's BETTER THAN FUCKING THREE

At least they had to fucking earn the extra transformations and there's no hand out faries

All the girls got something to do in s5, they all at least got one plotline or big moment. Name either of those things for s4 Flora. You can't because they don't exist

Is not still on fucking earth. Yes very earth centered but we get to see a bunch of fun new locations

The girls and specialists do not act like units with hiveminds

Season 5 actually expanded on how magic on earth would look and that's neat

Tritannus's powers are stupid but at least there explained

The relationship between Tritannus and Icy is more believable than anything between the Wizards of the Black circle, I'm so sorry

Actually let's the next form come without shitting on the previous one

Things season 4 did better than season 5:

NO YOU SONS OF BITCHES LET THEM BE ADULTS!!!!

At least s4 had the decency to say Nabu was just sleeping

No fairy on fairy violence :'((, those girlies in the rainbow mantel ep didn't even get to transform

The earth faries were majorly compelling and have a really interesting motivation, none of the s5 villains are like that

Icy has less stage presence than the FUCKING WIZARDS OF THE BLACK CIRCLE THIS IS FUCKING CRIME

Oh dear god why is Diaspro here why is the continuity in FLAMES

Convergence can do anything, part 2, but worst this time

Letting magical women be queens, Nereus < Tressa

The pendant thing is objectively stupider Sky's Andy drama in s4, it's less stupid than Rivusa nonsense in s4 tho

Diaspro was fucking ridiculous tho

I fully believe that s4 would give mutant main characters different character models

Why does s5 have so many filler episodes. The lilo AND a magic Christmas are you kidding me??

Flora's "no don't hurt it!" Thing has gotten so much worse

They literally made Stella a child I'm so furious

There are more completely meaningless side plots

Things they both fucked up on:

THEY MENTION THE ROXY BLOOM PARALLEL FUCKING AGAIN AND STILL DO JACK SHIT WITH IT

More mind control??? Really????? Really???? Are we being serious????

Extremely childish compared to previous seasons

Soft boy Helia

#winx club #winx season 4 #winx season 5 #rus chatters

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baltears · 4 months ago

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thots on finishing my second full rewatch of crazy ex girlfriend

god if only my identity issues and lack of career goals could be miraculously resolved by just noticing an intense passion ive always had bubbling under the surface but that it just never occurred to me to pursue for some reason. sarah marshall voice MUST BE NICE.

this is an amazing and incredible show for a lot of reasons one of which is its very firm adherence to thesis but there are also times where it feels like the writing cant get out of its own way because of this. e.g. actively sabotaging nathaniel as a love interest in ways that dont totally make sense given his past characterization because its important for story reasons that he not outpace greg or josh in terms of personal growth or attachment/importance to rebecca. like as early as mid-season 3 hes clearly already undergoing a lot of the changes that would make him a more kindhearted and respectful person but then in season 4 he just kind of. forgets them temporarily so that rebecca will break up with him and make him learn a lesson that he appeared to have halfway already learned. idk it feels like a bit of a nitpicky problem because there really is no easy fix for this writing-wise but i did notice it

valencia being team greg does not make sense to me. it just does not. valencia and greg never really had a dynamic that differentiated itself from her dynamic with the rest of josh's friends, and she had no response to greg and rebecca being together when that happened because her character wasnt relevant to that plotline at the time so her rooting for them to get back together just seems to be based totally on secondhand knowledge of what their relationship was like that we don't even see her get. i understand that heather picked nathaniel because they had their little bonding moment in 4x06 and paula picked josh because she was og team josh and likewise because they also bonded a bit in the same episode but i personally feel valencia-josh heather-greg paula-nathaniel would have made more sense. valencia really cooled on josh after their breakup (to a degree i honestly found to be a bit much, she basically treats him like hector whom she actively disliked until 4x10 and its like. hello???) but she did sincerely love him at one point and tbh i think they should have had a little reconciliation arc and she should have been rooting for joshbecca, heather likewise dated greg and knows him really well and saw firsthand how much he loves rebecca, and paula is close to nathaniel because they work together and she saw his personal growth from collaborating with him on the pro bono cases. idk. i like 4x06 but i also feel like there wasnt really a need for heather to learn to like nathaniel because they werent clearly shown in the past to have a negative dynamic based on dislike or disrespect and likewise with paula and josh. it made sense kind of but it could have made more sense.

season 4 in general is a total mess and i think it just comes down to the season having way too many episodes and not enough to fill them. all the greg and rebecca stuff is good, the nathaniel dream sequence episode is great use of filler, i love the development of josh and rebecca becoming friends again and then catching feelings, and i love the denouement for paula in particular as well as heather and valencia although i think the latter two dont have as much substance and some of the conflict in them feels contrived. but in general everything is stretched out wayyyy too much, the songs feel sparser and weaker (theres like four or five that i would consider really great and would happily listen to on a regular basis but that's out of an entire season's worth of songs after three seasons of almost nonstop bangers) and multiple episodes that just feel like the show spinning its wheels. 4x09 in particular is a weak point and might actually be my least favorite episode, i cant believe they thought anyone was going to get excited about the prospect of rebecca fucking the random tinder dude from 1x04 plus the cats parody songs are such a slog. tbh most of the back half of my personal episode ranking is filled out by episodes from s4. there are some memorable high points here and there but it really takes some endurance to get through the rest of the season

skylar astin greg. what is there left to say about skylar astin greg. hes just a different guy. i already made a post about him so i wont repeat myself too much. idk. hes okay, he does produce a greg-like impression, he has good chemistry with rachel. hes like greg flavored la croix. i definitely dont hate him in the role and in a lot of ways i think he was a great choice for the show (to be honest i think santinos charisma is so intense that it would have just been a bit much to put his greg in a horse race with josh and nathaniel, plus his dynamic with rebecca would have felt completely different and would have lacked that sense of 'hello, nice to meet you' that i do think was necessary for them at that point) but ill always be wistfully wondering what could have been if santino had been able to come back to reprise the character

honestly despite all its flaws in a way almost any criticism of this show feels like nitpicking to me because it's just so fucking great

#show my best friend show i love you show<3 #cxg

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tyrantisterror · 2 years ago

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As has become tradition for the release of my novels, it’s time to do a trivia thread for Wizard School Mysteries Book 2: Tournament of Death (available now at amazon.com!). That’s right, I’m going to make a long, self-indulgent post about all the nerd shit I did while writing this book, for you to gawk at in abject horror.

(Shit, did I not do one of these for No Sympathies? I should correct that, I packed so many references to classic literature in that bad boy. But that’s for another time!)

For now, let’s talk about wizards, tournaments, and the long term side effects of being a child of the 90′s anime boom. Oh, and there will be spoilers, so if you haven’t read the book yet... probably don’t read this until you do? I mean it’s a mystery story, I assume you want to go in blind.

- Wizard School Mysteries as a whole is intentionally patterned after anime and JRPGs. I’ve touched on this before when talking about the series, but when thinking about trivia for this second book it becomes pretty clear that elaborating on this point is warranted. I mean, it’s pretty obvious if you know some of the more prominent influences within that sphere - the a great deal of the series’s overall structure is ripped off from patterned off of the Persona series, for example, particularly the tarot motif (although that’s not exclusive to Persona - a LOT of anime and JRPGs use tarot motifs, from the prominent use of them in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure - which in turn heavily inspired Persona - to the subtle application of it in Fire Emblem Three Houses). You’ve got Serena Takeuchi, whose name is a big homage to Sailor Moon and whose use of a wand and glittery crystal magic should at least visually call back to the Magical Girl trope, I could go on but we should narrow our focus a bit. The two big anime/JRPG elements of this particular book are as follows: The Tournament Arc, and The Filler Episode. Got it? Ok, let’s expand on that in the next two bullet points.

- I wrote a lot in the forward about why I chose a tournament arc as the basic structure of this second book so I’m going to try to keep my thoughts on it here brief. Tournament arcs rule! Obviously they exist outside of anime, and indeed predate the existence of animation itself, but the structure of the tournament arc here is very heavily based on the ones that appeared in shows like Dragon Ball, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh!, which, incidentally, were part of the 90′s/early 2000′s anime boom that I grew up in. The basic setup of heroes fighting a bunch of really weird opponents one after another, each more dangerous and bizarre than the last, while simultaneously trying to unravel a villain’s crazy scheme (ok that didn’t happen in Pokemon’s but it holds true for the other two) is just really fun and compelling, and I had fun trying to capture that magic while showing off the zany powers magic grants you in my fantasy setting. The fight scenes should ideally make you feel like you just got home from school and turned on the TV to catch some weird but fun Japanese cartoon on Toonami.

- Now, Filler Episodes... again, it’s a term that extends to stuff outside of and predating anime, but I want to talk about this idea in the context of anime. A lot of anime is adapted from manga, as you probably already know, and a there have been times where the anime adaptation of a manga runs out of a material to adapt. So, while they wait for the manga to give them more of the “main” plot, they’d make episodes and even entire story lines to fill in the gap. Hence, filler episodes. Filler episodes get a bad rap because, by their nature, they can’t be too relevant to the plot - you can’t kill the big bad in a filler episode, because then you can’t adapt the material from the manga that hasn’t been written yet where the big bad is still alive. A filler episode is, by its nature, expendable.

...that is, if you think the only important part of a story is the plot.

A good writer or writing team, however, can use a filler episode to their advantage. Because as important as plot is to a story, it’s only one core element. Characters, setting, and theme are all just as important, and you can easily use a filler episode to expand on those elements in important and intriguing ways. Like, for example, I spent this weekend watching Revolutionary Girl Utena for the first time, and if you were focused solely on the main plot of Utena dueling people to protect Anthy, then you could cut, like, half of the episodes out and still have a functional story. But some of those episodes are the best episodes! While light on developing the main plot, they do so much to flesh out the characters, setting, and theme, and without those episodes the series would be so much less impactful.

And I feel a well-utilized filler episode can in fact strengthen your main plot. A story that’s focused entirely on its main conflict may neglect to stop and flesh out its characters, and that’s a problem because to care about a conflict, you kind of need to care about the characters involved. If the conflict threatens the world they live in, then you need to care about that setting too. And if you really want that conflict to resonate with your audience, you need it to have well developed themes that make it matter beyond “the hero is fighting the bad guy!”

Now, of course, my book is, well, a book, a novel, and not a TV series, so there aren’t really “episodes” in the TV sense. But there are chapters, and scenes, and subplots, and one of my goals with this series and this book in particular was to make sure there were the equivalent of filler episodes here, moments where the main plot paused just long enough for our characters to catch their breath, and for us to see who they are when they’re not dealing with some murder mystery bullshit. Maybe in one of the next volumes I’ll figure out how to do a beach episode (at the moment I’m unsure of how to get over the hurdle that, in a vaguely medieval fantasy land, most people’s equivalent of a beach trip would be skinny dipping...)

- The first WSM book was focused on introducing our core eight meddling kids, which was a pretty big task in of itself, and as such the setting took a bit of a backseat. I mean, it was still there, obviously, but it wasn’t the focus. While the characters are still very much the focus of book 2 (as they are in all my writing - I’m a character-focused storyteller), I really wanted this one to give the setting more spotlight than the first. Book 2, more so than book 1, is the proper introduction of our setting - of the nations of Midgaheim, of the staff of the AAAM, and indeed, of the nature of that school itself.

Like, in the first book we have four teachers, and as a result of all the stuff that book had to pack in, those teachers end up fitting a simplified sort of Goofus and Gallant dichotomy: Oomlowt’s our good teacher, Gernderf and Alys are different shades of awful, and Mewcosa starts out as bad but eventually makes a turn with some student help. It’s the kind of approach most school stories take to their fictional teaching staff - one good teacher and a sea of dull to actively bad ones around them.

Now, if you know me and the fact that I’ve worked quite a bit in education, you should not be surprised to learn that I dislike this kind of reductive portrayal of teachers. It really couldn’t be helped in book 1, but that was ok, because this is an eight book series, and with this second entry I wanted to complicate our teaching staff. We get Juno Panopte, who is a good teacher with a very different style and approach than Oomlowt’s (enough that it briefly throws our heroes off when they first meet her). We get Lacey Spidergrin, who only has one scene but is hopefully enough of a presence in it to establish her strange but kind personality. We get bombastic Heka Tlancheb and acerbic Prospera Bubos, both of whom clearly hold some differing views but care deeply about their students, and we get a scene of (most of) the teaching staff hanging out together away from the students to show who these people are when they’re not teaching. My aim is that by the end of this book, or barring that then at least by the end of the series, the teaching staff of the AAAM aren’t cookie cutter good and bad teacher stereotypes, but, well, people, you know? There’s not a lot of fiction where teachers get to be people.

- The wizard students descending onto a nearby town and changing it utterly is an exaggeration of my own experience in college at Western Michigan University. Kalamazoo, the city that WMU resides in, can be kind of cleanly divided into the parts that are a more or less normal city, and the parts that are a College Town Filled with College Kids. Of course, college kids being college kids, which is to say, young adults who suddenly have the ability to go wherever the hell they want and do more or less whatever the hell they want with their time, there was nothing stopping you from wandering out of the college part of town into the non-college city parts, and I always found that an interesting experience. And there were a LOT of businesses in both the college and non college parts of Kalamazoo that actively courted (or preyed on, if you want to be more cynical about it) student customers, which I again exaggerated for my own book. The name of the town in WSM, Calampen, is even a play on Kalamazoo. Kalam. Zoo. Zoo = place where you hold animals = pen. Kalam Pen. Calampen. Clever? No, not really, but it makes me smile.

- There are some nods to other stories I’ve worked on and/or have in the works in Calampen market scene. Fans of Offbeat Melody might recognize a certain golden-haired curio seller, for example, and we have more than a few mentions of the dread wizard Vormadon, who you’ll all get to meet when I finish writing Maude and Mordi (it’s high on the docket, don’t worry!)

- Serena and James splitting off together serves two purposes: first, it lets Gretchen and Margot have goofy jealousy antics, which I think is fun. Second, it makes up for a fact that Serena is the only member of the team who didn’t get a solo scene with James in book 1. Poor girl was so left out!

- James Chaucer identifying with snakes is not only an homage to my own love for the scaly beasts AND a fun metaphor for coming out, but also a bit of shade for the Terf Queen’s opus, where the magical boy hates being associated with snakes because he’s a huge loser who hufflepuffs farts or whatever.

- All of the youths have different skills to bring to their detective enterprise, and I like to think Serena’s is her Columbo-esque ability to throw people off by posing a seemingly innocent question. I watched the entire series of Columbo while writing this book, it had to bleed out somewhere.

- Let’s talk about some obscure Tarot shit! Helseng refers to the villain of the previous book as “The Apostle,” and likewise refers to the villains of this book as “The Centurion” and “The Thunderbolt.” Now, if you have a basic grasp of the major arcana, that may seem odd to you, because those aren’t among the twenty two arcana cards. Except they actually are! Sort of! See, there have been a LOT of different tarot decks over the centuries, produced in different countries with different languages in different time periods, and as a result the total number of arcana, the order of the arcana, and yes, the very names of the arcana themselves, have varied a bit. While initially I only mapped out twenty-one main characters to the major arcana of Tarot, as I researched into the history of the game I saw these variations and thought it would be interesting to try and make some of the other supporting characters fit them as well, and the first ones that came to mind were the series’ villains.

The Apostle is an alternate name for The Heirophant, which represents a patriarchal authority figure. Oomlowt Schwaa is our heirophant proper, and showcases the benign elements of that card, taking on a sort of fatherly role with James and the youths as a whole. The Summer Prince from book 1, by contrast, showcases its negative qualities, being conceited, condescending, and oppressive, with the power structure he both leads and represents making him a terrible force in the narrative as a result.

Our villains for this book at the Centurion, which is an alternate name for the Chariot, and the Thunderbolt, which is an alternate name for the Tower. We’ll talk about them a bit more later in this trivia post, but for now I ask you to think about the heroic counterparts here - Margot is a heroic Chariot, and Polybeus is a heroic Tower. God what a weird sentence that is.

- I also wanted there to be some supporting characters who are never directly involved with the plot but still had roles to play in our heroes life, because again, going off of that screed I wrote about filler episodes, the stakes can actually feel higher if you know there’s more to the hero’s life than just the core conflict. So I made some supporting cast members based on alternate arcana names as well - Columbina and Godfrey, for example, are the Juggler and the Magus respectively, which are both alternate names for the Magician. The Magician is a friend and ally to the fool and likes to get into schemes and plans, many of which are too clever by half, and that’s very much what Columbina and Godfrey are, just to a lesser degree than our main Magician, Ivan Muromets. I like to imagine that in an alternate timeline either one of them might have been the Magician to the Fool in the story. But maybe that’s too self indulgent a thought even for this trivia post.

- If the joke of Lord Dhenregirr’s name was too subtle in book one, I’m pretty sure chapter four of book two hits it with a big hammer so it’s impossible to miss. Not-coincidentally, this chapter is all about introducing red herrings - not just Lord Dhenregirr himself, but the many, MANY characters involved in the tournament, from the contestants to bystanders like Prospera Bubos and Grammy Crumblebuttons. Which is the real villain and which are the red herrings? Well, hopefully you heeded my advice and didn’t read this until after reading the book, and thus already know the answer to that question.

- Heka Tlancheb’s speech gives us as close to a unifying creation myth for Midgaheim as you will get, given that there are multiple pantheons at play here. It’s basically a nod to the idea of a prototypical monomyth, i.e. the theory that the original humans created a first mythology that evolved with them over time into the many we have today, possibly explaining several odd similarities between otherwise unrelated mythologies, like the prevalence of thunder gods, big floods, etc. The idea that there was some force of chaos that the gods had to kill, dismember, and/or overthrow is a common one, especially in European mythologies, and Heka’s assertion that magic is its breath, and wizard in turn are chaotic by nature for using it, is a nod to the similarly common belief that magic is a dangerous and somewhat sacrilegious force. The second half of her speech, meanwhile, is just an homage to the opening speech of Elden Ring.

- Heka Tlancheb herself is a joke at the expense of my own crush on Cate Blanchett, particularly when she plays gothy witch roles like Hela or Galadriel in that one scene where she makes Frodo shit his pants.

- We get to meet another member of the Claw Gang in this chapter! If you don’t remember them, they were a group of recurring background extras in book one, and if you followed closely you could see the broad strokes of their own mini-adventure running parallel to that of our Meddlesome Youths. I like the idea of stories where the adventure of the heroes is just one of many in the setting, with others clearly happening outside the book’s focus. It makes things feel more full, and I feel that making it so the world doesn’t always revolve around your heroes actually makes it more impactful when the heroes make a stand for that world - because while they may only be a part of it, they care about the whole, you know? Anyway, we’ve named two of the three Claw Gang members in the books so far, and we’ll name the final member in book 3. They may not be important to the central conflict, but they’re important to my heart.

- Oh, speaking of obscure Tarot bullshit again - there’s a card game that’s considered a parody of Tarot called Minchiate, which took the major arcana and then added a whole bunch of extra bullshit to it somewhat haphazardly, including the four elements and the Western Zodiac. So, when I set about making a cast of minor character students for WSM, I decided what the hell, let’s include the Zodiac arcana (along with all the minor arcana, i.e. the number and court cards). Shere Statchel, Andreea Vacaputere, and The Great Nyaa, who appear in this book as contestants in the tournament, are three of those Zodiac characters, being the Scorpio, Taurus, and Leo respectively. Not sure when the others will show up in the later books - they’re all part of a large pile of minor characters I draw from when I need a crowd to be filled, and there’s more than sixty of the fuckers so I can’t guarantee they’ll all have memorable roles, but at least these three got a little spotlight.

- This is Lord Dhenregirr’s only scene in this book, but I made it a juicy one to compensate. Him referring to his skeletons as “children of the dragon’s teeth” is a reference to Jason and the Argonauts - not just the myth, mind you, but specifically the Ray Harryhausen movie, which calls them “children of the hydra’s teeth” verbatim. The fact that they’re skeletons rather than flesh and blood men is another sign this is an homage to the Harryhausen take (in Midgaheim canon, you can use this spell to make either flesh and blood humans or animate skeletons, and Dhenregirr chooses to do the later purely because he’s goth and likes the idea of having skeleton henchmen).

- Structure-wise, I wanted the fight with Dhenregirr to not only be fun, but to refute some of the things other characters have claimed about magic. Earlier in this chapter Miguel Esmerejon chides Ivan for reciting magic words to cast spells, claiming that strong wizards don’t need to do that. We’re also told that most wizards couldn’t make a homunculus in the arena because it would take too much time and power to pull off. Yet here Dhenregirr both manages to pull off that very feat, and does so with a big long poetic chant no less! And while he may have some personality quirks that soften the threat he poses, the fact is that Dhenregirr is a very skilled and deadly wizard when he has his head in the game. In this chapter we get to see a glimpse of Dhenregirr’s other purpose in the narrative, beyond being a red herring joke villain: he’s the counterpoint to the dean’s philosophy of education, right down to being the one who (possibly accidentally, possibly on purpose) encourages James to try all four elements of magic where Gernderf had tried to make him stick with one. Gernderf and Dhenregirr aren’t just hated rivals, you see - they’re foils.

- This is also where Dhenregirr, like Polybeus before him, takes a radically different direction than the Henry Pansley Herbie Porber Harry Potter character he’s a loose analogue of. Harry and Voldemort begin the narrative hating each other and just increase in that hatred as the story goes along. Here, James and Dhenregirr come to an understanding of sorts, and while they’re still on opposing sides, it’s clear their relationship from here on out isn’t going to be as clear cut as hero vs. villain anymore.

- I first thought up the specifics of Lord Dhenregirr’s fight scene while listening to Man on the Internet’s Lyrics for the Chaos King song from Deltarune. Music is pretty important to my writing process, especially action scenes, and I always end up making soundtracks for my books to help with the writing and revision process. In this case the song for this scene was so helpful that I gave it a little nod, having Lord Dhenregirr paraphrase its rawest line: “You lost before you picked this fight.”

- Gyrion Clodson, the first victim (though luckily for him, not in a lethal sense) of the villain plot in this book, gets his first name from two different iconic fantasy works. The bulk of his name comes from Tyrion, the (human) dwarf character from A Song of Ice and Fire, aka Game of Thrones. Swapping out one letter of that name to make a new one is itself taken from the naming conventions of the (nonhuman) dwarves in Tolkien’s The Hobbit - you know, Gloin and Moin, Kili and Fili, Dwalin and Balin, etc. There’s no deeper meaning intended here, I just thought it was slightly amusing. I should probably note here that the equivalent of fantasy nonhuman dwarves in my setting are called gnomes specifically to avoid confusion with real life humans with dwarfism - in a similar vein, giants are uniformly called ogres so I can avoid confusing them with, like, the adjective for things that are big.

- Chapter Five’s title is “The Sundown’s Shine” for a couple of reasons. First, a good chunk of it takes place in the afternoon, and it’s a breather chapter - sundown is often when we stop working and catch our breaths. Second and more importantly though, it’s when we introduce Geoffrey Travers, who, in addition to being our Moon Arcana character, is something of an extended reference. See, Wizard School Mysteries is built in part by mixing aspects of college life with high fantasy, and so one of the questions I asked myself when planning it was “What would your average high fantasy uber wizard who’s seen the shape of the universe and has knowledge beyond comprehension be like when he was a college student?” And, perhaps because of the popularity of this movie among college kids, at least in my day, my answer ended up being: The Dude from The Big Lebowski, but in his twenties. So that was my baseline for Geoffrey Travers: he’s The Dude, as a college kid, and also a wizard. Even his name is a play on it - Geoffrey is the dude’s real name, but also, Geoff = Jeff, Travers = Bridges, Jeff Bridges is the actor who played The Dude, you see what I did there? And one of the iconic songs from The Big Lebowski is “I Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),” which contains the lyrics “I woke up this mornin' with the sundown shinin' in...” Eh? Eh? See what I did there?

- Extended Big Lebowski reference aside, Geoffrey plays a vital role of being a peer who opens our heroes’ minds to new ideas. Professors do a lot of teachin in college, don’t get me wrong, but some of the most valuable lessons I got during my college years came from the older kids I met there, who had been what I was going through just a few years prior and kindly decided to give some advice and guidance of their own accord on how to deal with, like, just life stuff in general. Which, again, goes with the idea of “what is the college equivalent of the next level wizard who has seen things you’ve never dreamt of” - it’s the older student who knows how to be a functional and independent adult who gets what they need.

- The game the gargoyles, mudmen, and scarecrow are playing isn’t D&D. It’s Pathfinder, first edition, invented by the great wizard Pie-zo. I included this scene both as a gag and to show that the homunculi of the AAAM aren’t mindless automatons, but rather sapient beings that most wizards treat like mindless automatons because they don’t understand the full scope of what they’ve done in making them. It’s not a big plot point in this book, but it will be later!

- We get a glimpse of Gretchen’s life outside the youths here, namely her rivalry with a fellow nerd, Joan Tatou. Joan is a bit of an in-joke, as she’s an amalgamation of some ideas that I initially wrote down in my series outline only to reject. As I said before, Margot’s name was originally going to be Joan, both as a reference to Joan of Arc and because of my own fondness for the name, but I changed it when I realized people might see it as a reference to the Terf Queen. I also initially planned for the character who would become Gretchen to be Frankish and for the one who would become Margot to be either Ruslovakian or Germanorean, but it seemed a bit too stereotypical for the bookish girl to be from the fantasy equivalent of France and the big buff girl to be from a land of hard consonants - I like the idea of big, intimidating Margot having a soft voice with gentle inflections, while bookish Gretchen has all these fierce harsh consonants when she speaks. So Joan is proto-Gretchen with proto-Margot’s name, which might be why she and Gretchen don’t get on so much - Gretchen stole her part!

- The book Gretchen and Joan fell out over, the Nosfero Ex Mortis, is a combination of some of the less-well-known alternate names for the malevolent grimmoire in The Evil Dead series, which you probably know best as the Necronomicon, in part because that’s what it’s called in the third film, Army of Darkness. Army of Darkness, of course, was the Evil Dead movie that takes place in the middle ages, and involves (among other things) a kingdom led by Henry the Red, and a big fight against Kandarian demons. So in other words, Joan and Gretchen’s feud is over whether or not the events of Army of Darkness are canon in Midgaheim. Listen, I had an Army of Darkness poster in my dorm room and Bruce Campbell was one of the big reasons I chose to attend WMU and make short horror films with my friends during summer vacation in college, I had to pay the Evil Dead series homage in my book series about college.

- The Sanguine Dormitory is the perpetually trashed party dorm, because if you know anything about the four humors, that’s very much what you’d expect from a place with a lot of people who have sanguine temperaments.

- Ok, another stupid joke for you. So, in tv shows and movies that take place in colleges, it’s common for the dorm rooms to be, like, LUDICROUSLY huge, which anyone who’s attended a college knows is fucking ridiculous because real life dorm rooms never get much bigger than a walk-in closet. There’s a reason for this: shooting scenes in a room the size of a walk in closet is a pain in the ass, and if you’re setting your entire story in a college, you kinda need to have those little quiet drama scenes in a location that, you know, isn’t comically cramped and shitty. So in WSM, our heroes start off with realistic cramped shitty dorm rooms, but then, through the power of physics defying magic that makes dreams come true, manage to get a spacious cool dorm room like those that appear in 90% of media set in a college. Because that’s the only way you’d ever get a dorm room that big.

- Chivalric ballads are the equivalent of trashy romance novels and soap operas in WSM - and, also, their equivalent in the real middle ages. The ones Margot lists in chapter 6 are all made up by me, but the different versions of her favorite ballad (and her staunch favoritism of one version over the other based on how the characters were interpreted) is loosely inspired by the way Arthuriana is composed of different authors who clearly have WILDLY different takes on certain characters and deeply despise the takes that came before theirs.

- Margot’s opponent in this chapter, Sarkani Charmil, has a few references mixed into her. Her first name is derived from a dragon in Slavic mythology, Sarkany, which, combined with her status as the heir to a tyrannical monarchy that rules a kingdom called Kastelvania (or, if you prefer, Castlevania) makes her a loose homage to, who else, Vlad “Tepes” Dracula, with her distinctive red armor drawing on the iconic red armor worn by Count Dracula in the beautiful-yet-terribly-written Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula movie. Her last name, Charmil, is a double reference, with Char being the red-clad charismatic antagonist from the original Gundam, while Carmil is a shortened version of Carmilla, the most famous female vampire in literature. Sarkani Charmil, child of dragons, heir to a warlord’s kingdom, possible vampire? Only time and the remaining six books will tell.

- Hey, guess what time it is? It’s Harry Potter rebuttal time! Ok, so, Harry Potter had a tournament arc of sorts too, namely the fourth book, Goblet of Fire. And the structure of the Harry Potter series is that everything has to revolve around, well, Harry Potter. So obviously Harry has to win the tournament, because otherwise this story wouldn’t revolve around him, right? That’s not necessarily a flaw - I mean, there’s tradeoffs here, namely how the tension of “will Harry win?” that the book tries to build falls flat if you think about the structure of things for more than five seconds, but in return for that you have the narrative satisfaction provided by things being focused.

But there’s no reason that tradeoff can’t work the other way, right? Till this chapter in the book, I’ve tried to set you up to think we’re following that same pattern. James Chaucer is our lead character, our first boy, our protagonist. Obviously he’s going to make it to the final round. Obviously he can’t lose his fight, especially not in the second round. He’s the main guy!

Then he does, because this isn’t Harry Potter. This is not a story that revolves around one character. This is the story of the Meddlesome Youths, and while James may be their leader, he’s not the only one that matters, and that means he can lose. And if he, the main guy, can lose, then doesn’t that mean any of our heroes could lose? Yes, we lose some of the focus that the more famous wizard school story has, and with it I risk losing the narrative satisfaction that simpler, more straight-forward structure provides - but the tradeoff is that we have a bit more uncertainty, and uncertainty can make for a very fun mystery.

- Speaking of Goblet of Fire, remember how Cedric Diggory was a big bland nonentity of a character whose death was more or less an afterthought once that book was over. A plot device more than a character, really. Gabriev Zelgad is my attempt to... well, not do that. Again, don’t mistake this for a criticism. Murder mysteries don’t need to flesh out their victims to be effective. A murder mystery victim’s primary job is to establish and/or raise the stakes of the conflict while also providing both clues and questions for the detective figure to notice. If they manage that without having a personality to speak of, the mystery is still functional, and you can compensate with different elements of your story.

But, that said, there is a benefit to giving at least one of your murder mystery victims some sympathy. I mean, fairly obviously, right? The emotional impact of murder and the threat it presents is going to feel far more stark if we actually give a shit about the people who die. You want an emotionally invested audience, and making us care about the victim is a way to get it.

It just also means that you have to juggle elements of your victim character that don’t have to do with their plot-specific role. They have to have dimensions that don’t serve their bare minimum narrative role. You need to be willing to, you know, take a narrative diversion, which is risky. Some people hate “filler,” after all. But I wanted to take that risk. I wanted Gabriev’s death to hurt, and I didn’t want him to be an afterthought. For Polybeus at least, his death has weight, and it’s going to keep having weight well after he’s gone.

- Gabriev’s chivalric code is paraphrased from the chivalric code in Dragonheart. “It was a good [story]! Had a dragon in it.” Dragonheart was one of the first fantasy movies I ever saw and one of the things that cemented my love of this genre, and also that code is fucking badass.

- Gabriev comforting Polybeus by showing him a different form of heroism by way of the medieval concept of chivalry is loosely based on my own experience of reading medieval chivalric ballads and finding them to be very different than the modern masculine heroes I grew up with, and specifically different in ways that resonated with me. For all the violence of medieval tales, chivalric heroes spend a great deal of time crying, pining after pretty women, and talking about their feelings with their friends in great and vulnerable detail, which is a far cry from the stoic murder men society told me to view as Peak Masculinity when I was a kid. This isn’t to say there’s nothing of value in those modern day masculine heroes, or for that matter in the Greco-Roman mythic heroes that are standing in for them in Polybeus’s story, but just that learning there are different forms of heroism and masculinity is, well, freeing.

- I wasn’t sure initially when we were going to properly meet the Justice Arcana, Maxeral the head gargoyle. I had loose plans for him to step into the narrative proper in either book 3 or 4, but in the process of writing this one I realized there was a natural place for him to slip in. Maxeral’s tricky because he’s designed to fill that “friend on the force” role you often get in detective stories, because that role is both narratively useful and a fun character dynamic to explore. But I also wanted him to be, like, firmly not a cop, because I know my audience and I know myself, and we both think ACAB. So I tried to make Maxeral an anti-cop in as many ways as possible, in that the limits to his authority are literally written into his brain, and the fact that he cannot view himself as above the people he protects, but rather as beneath them. He, like all homunculi at the AAAM, is a servant, and while that might be an injustice in itself (we’ll explore it in a later book, don’t worry), the fact remains that Maxeral is incapable of lording his power over his charges. He calls you sir, not the other way around, and as a protector he understands his role is that of a servant, not a master. Maxeral also thinks the boundaries between him and his charges are just, and values people who work outside the scope of his power if they do so for good reasons. So yeah, not a cop, hopefully.

- You might have noticed that Maxeral is unique among the gargoyles we’ve seen beyond his size and rank. He’s far more serious, for one (in fact his dynamic with his underlings is patterned on the stoic and stuffy version of Ultra Magnus from the comic Transformers: More than Meets the Eye), a bit better at his job, and lives in very spartan quarters. While you could claim the bare nature of his room is a result of him being a homunculi that was designed to have no interests beyond the purpose he was written with, remember how we saw gargoyles playing D&D earlier. Is there more to homunculi than even Maxeral is aware of? Probably not a question you considered since it’s not relevant to this particular book, but remember this is an eight book series...

- Ivan’s conversation with Polybeus builds on/responds to the one Gabriev had with Polybeus earlier, albeit unintentionally on Ivan’s part. If Gabriev vocalized my own revelation at reading about chivalric heroes, then Ivan likewise illustrates what I learned about modern heroes when I looked at them with older eyes. As a kid, the hero narratives sold to me seemed pretty unappealing - superheroes like Batman and Superman were fit, conventionally attractive jocks who beat up ugly out of shape guys who liked snakes and dressing in dark clothes. There was more of my bullies in the heroes sold to me, and more of me in the villains they tormented. But when I grew up and revisited those stories, and the comics they were based on for that matter, I realized there was more to them than the initial shallow impression I got as a kid. As tormented by the normative masculine heroic ideal as I was as a kid, an adult me could see nuances and interpretations where I could fit. It wasn’t necessarily the fault of the heroes of my time, but with the way those heroes had been sold to me, if that makes sense.

And I think the Greco-Roman mythic heroes are a good stand-in for that. Shallow, simplified modern versions of their myths will reduce them to Good Heroes Who Slay Ugly Monsters, and that can feel alienating if you relate to the monsters more. But if you explore their roots and see all the different versions of them, you can see they are complex, nuanced, and more than just a simple ideal. Just because the stories now make them stoic manly men doesn’t mean that’s all they’ve ever been, or all they could be. They can cry, they can love, they can feel, they can be human. It just depends on how you want to look at them, and what version of them you want to see. And sometimes the thing you need to appreciate a story you’ve heard a million times before is to see it through the eyes of someone else who’s fresh to it - sometimes a Polybeus needs an Ivan.

- As I said, I’m a character-focused storyteller. The first thing I tried to hash out in outlining this series, before even figuring out how many books it would be, was what the personal arcs of our eight main kids would be. I wanted them each to have a hook of their own outside the main conflict and we’d examine and resolve them throughout the eight books. Some haven’t been fully exposed yet (either because I’m rethinking them or have decided they can just wait a bit), while others are already pretty prominent.

Margot’s was the first I figured out, and her duel with Alys here was the first scene I outlined in detail for this series. So to say I REALLY wanted to get to this chapter is an understatement. There are several other big moments I planned for this series that I’m excited to get to, and we got to one of them before this (James Chaucer tricking the Summer Prince into buying his dead name), but man, I am happy to have this moment out there for your perusal.

- When figuring out how the eight Meddlesome Youths differed as spellcasters, I thought about them partly in JRPG terms, and partly in anime archetypes. When it came to Margot, the muscle of the group, I felt there was one style that fit better than most: she fights like a DBZ villain, to the point where her ultimate attack is basically Freeza’s Death Ball. In final fantasy terms, she’s the Black Mage, i.e. the character who is almost exclusively limited to offensive magic, though after this battle she’s on the path to diversifying her magic portfolio.

- There’s a moment in this book and in the previous where the idea of teachers being taught by their students is brought up in a pithy way, but I’d like to note that this is actually a true phenomenon. One of the best ways to learn something - that is, to reinforce your knowledge of it and deepen your understanding of it - is to teach it to someone else, and an interaction with students can illuminate things for teachers just as much as it can for their pupils. Education is by its nature a communication process (the education philosopher John Dewey has whole books that explain this better than I could), and communication is by it’s nature a two-way street. So while these moments function as little jokes - “the teachers need to be taught” - I also feel there’s a truth to it, and a lesson to learn, I guess. Education’s a lot more complicated than fiction often makes it seem.

- Yes, our wizards kids hit the bar, like college kids are wont to do. I tried to make them responsible about it without getting into after-school PSA territory, because I want this story to feel authentic (as much as a fantasy story filled with dragons and magic can) while not glamorizing dangerous behavior to any theoretical young people who might read this. Did I succeed? Who can say.

- Hey, another stupid joke! So the story of Achilles and Patroclus is very clearly one of two men romantically loving each other, but over the centuries writers have tried to patch that out because of, well, homophobia, with many versions saying their affection was because they were cousins. You know what other story that happened to? Sailor Moon, albeit with two girls who loved each other rather than two guys. So in Midgaheim’s version of history, the real historical figures of Achilles and Patroclus had their romance covered up in one version of their tale by a writer named Forr Kydd. Four Kids, as you may know, dubbed various anime, and while they didn’t dub Sailor Moon, they were notorious for bowdlerizing the anime they dubbed to make it more child-friendly, and also to remove references to Japanese culture that Americans might not understand. Hence we have Forr Kydd, the translator who tried to de-gay the story of Achilles and Patroclus.

- Charlotte expects to get drunk off caffeine because spiders in real life are intoxicated by it, spining really shitty webs when under the influence. Poor girl had no reason to suspect her human body would react so differently.

- I tried to work in a MLM romance into ATOM volume 2, but it quickly became clear to me there wasn’t room for it with all the other stuff going on in my story. So I decided that the first canon consummated romance of WSM would be MLM to compensate. Rodrigo and Ivan’s romance is the first one to be hinted at in book 1, and they’re the first couple to get together as of book 2.

- While most of the ballads listed in this book are made up by me, Tam Lin is real, being one of the famous Childe Ballads, and a personal favorite of mine thanks to the awesome version of it the Fairport Convention did.

- Geoffrey Travers teaches James Chaucer about using magic for passive buffs, a thing I have to constantly remind myself to do when playing RPGs (left to my own devices, I just spam attacks).

- Chungo Maximo’s knack for turning into animals homages a number of ogre folk tales, but primarily Puss in Boots.

- If Margot is a black mage, then Serena is a blue mage - a less well known Final Fantasy class, which draws its power by absorbing magic from others and reflecting it back at them. I mean, she’s not just that, she can attack on her own just fine, but I thought it’d be a fun way to customize her battle set, and play off the idea of crystals being able to magically story energy and channel it back to the user.

- Ivan’s fears about his sillylusions not being worthy in the eyes of a teacher who’s taught him a lot about realism echoes some of my own academic anxieties, as I had many great teachers who taught me about serious non-genre fiction texts, and were very supportive and encouraging of me as I analyzed them without knowing that what I really wanted to use their lessons for was to get better at writing silly stories about fire-breathing dinosaurs and magical wizards. Like Ivan, I accidentally had this side of me exposed to one of my respected mentors when I submitted a short story I had written to the campus’s english studies congress (not even of my own volition, I was encouraged to do so by a pretty older girl on campus I liked), got it in, and then found one of my professors in the audience. He loved it, though, and asked me a lot of questions, and a couple years later, when I got an award from the English department for my five years of work, he presented it and talked not only about my achievements in class, but about how I had also written fiction on the side of it all. It was a scary but ultimately gratifying experience. Ivan’s fears about his sillylusions lacking value because of their non-realistic nature also mirrors anxieties I had about my art back then - I strived for realism for a while, but ultimately found stylization worked better for me, even if it meant my art would never be taken as seriously as stuff that’s, you know, more detailed or whatever.

- Clowns being a variety of half-demon sprang about from me wanting clowns to be a gothic horror monster on par with vampires or werewolves in my setting, and since we’ve got at least one clown-themed demon in this universe anyway, it seemed like a natural choice.

- Of course Gernderf ponders orbs. He’s a wizard.

- Godfrey and Columbina filling the dean’s office with ballons is inspired by a similar prank my friends pulled on our RA during my freshman year of college. We liked our RA, though, she was cool, and she took the prank in good humor.

- The fun thing about creating and publishing your own fiction is that you don’t have people above you who can slap your hands and tell you “No that’s stupid” when you want to do something silly like make a war with mimes a canon part of your in-universe lore. A bad part of creating and publishing your own fiction is that there’s no one who can stop you from doing something stupid like making a war with mimes a canon part of your in-universe lore.

- Though he doesn’t know it, Eruz Tobael is a nephilim, i.e. a half-angel. His appearance and spell of choice give you a hint to what kind of angel his mother was. I like the idea that angels and demons are an outside-of-context problem in this setting - all these pagan wizards are running around with their pantheons of gods and wildernesses of magic monsters, and every now and then a Biblical beastie pops up to throw everything they know on its head. We’ll get more of that in the next book.

- Aldonza Dulcinea was originally going to be one of our major arcana characters! Originally Charlotte would have been the Hanged Man in her place, but in the planning stages one of my friends suggested I should do a parody of Voldemort to match the Dumbledore parody I made with Gernderf, and the more I thought about the idea the more I felt he had to be a major character, and, if that was the case, he’d have to be the Hanged Man. Because who’s a better rival to The Judgement than the card that faced it and inexplicably survived? That left Charlotte in need of an arcana, so Aldonza got the boot and Charlotte got the Star. To make up for it, I establish Aldonza as the hero of her own story here - albeit one we’ll only ever see glimpses of. Her name comes from the love interest of Don Quixote - Dulcinea is what Don Quixote calls her, while Aldonza is her actual name.

- Having Polybeus meet Gabriev’s mom to discuss his death SEVERAL chapters after it happened was another attempt on my part to avert the Cedric Diggory situation here. He might not have had a big role, but it’s going to leave a mark - and now Polybeus has a helmet to forever remind him of the man he only knew for one of the most important moments in his life.

- So, our two villains! Richard Rainsford, the Centurion, is named for King Richard III (specifically Shakespeare’s take on the nasty fucker) and Sanger Rainsford, the protagonist of The Most Dangerous Game. Richard III (as written by Shakespeare) is a tormented and haunted man who has chosen to become a villain because of his daddy issues and anxieties about never living up to what his family expects of him, and excels at putting on a kind and friendly persona while plotting to stab people in the back. Sanger Rainsford, meanwhile, is a great hunter who prides himself on bringing down dangerous prey who unexpectedly finds himself getting a taste of his own medicine. In short, Richard is well named. The Centurion is an alternate name for the Chariot, a card that represents moving forward and victory, among other things. Richard shows how the desire to constantly win and excel can be poisonous.

Miguel is the Thunderbolt, an alternate name for the Tower. The Tower has a LOT of negative connotations, representing chaos, destruction, and sudden & violent change that disrupts all around it, which is very much what Miguel has achieved by setting the sabotage plot in motion.

- Polybeus claiming that “This time, the disaster will be theirs!” is a little nod to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, where, after several different moments where the Phantom screwed things up for the opera, including creating a lethal accident, the heroes finally decided to set a trap for him in turn. The way Raoul says the line is deliciously hammy, at least on the original London cast’s soundtrack, so it felt like a fun line to give Polybeus.

- Serena’s second costume transformation and powerup is a reference to a pretty common trope in Magical girl anime. Often such powerups come from the hero realizing how much they’re loved and/or how much their friends love them, which is kinda true here to, albeit in a more mundane way, where it’s Margot’s friendly act of sharing her magic that gives Serena her well-needed boost. I like the idea of the heroes winning because they’re friends while the villains lose because they’re squabbling selfish assholes.

- As of this book, Margot has said two of the four one-liners her friends offered her in book one. I don’t know if she’ll ever say “magic, shmagic” or “abra-ca-fuck you.” Probably not that last one, since I’m trying to avoid using direct profanity as much as possible with this series, but who knows. (abra-ca-fuck you is, of course, a reference to The Adventure Zone).

- Richard declaring he is the wizard slayer is an homage of sorts to Admiral Zhao in ATLA, who similarly shouted “I AM ZHOU THE MOONSLAYER!” in the height of his villainous hubris, shortly before being taken down a peg.

- If you’re horrified at Gernderf sucking our two villains into an amulet, good, run with that feeling as we go into the next six books please.

And that’s it for this trivia round! I hope you enjoyed, and thank you for reading all my self indulgent waffle!

#Wizard School Mysteries #Tournament of Death

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astro-break · 1 year ago

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Thoughts on the 7th ep of Hypmic Rhyme Anima+. Spoilers beware

Season 1 | Ep.1 | Ep.2 | Ep.3 | Ep.4 | Ep. 5 | Ep. 6

I love the mindgames that these two factions plays its fun to see both of them bend over backwards to get the upper hands wwww

Rei knows more than he lets onnnnn though we all expected that www

bro just siad nah you'll play our games www check and mate assholes

i love how hifumi threatens TBH with a rose lmao thats so camp

damn we got our first onscreen death lmfao

Im so happy that jyushi makes sure that amanda is safe, thats so cute.

LMAO of course you gotta put some manzai in to this. ripp we almost got three deaths in one episode I love DotsuHon's comedic potential

is it the once is physical and one is memory? Eyyyy thanks kuko for saying that just as i was typing it www Thank you one piece for giving me that useless piece of trivia

I wonder if there really is any relevance to the small fillers they put in like gentaro fixing his coat and hifumi falling. or if its just silly character interactions. i feel like gentaro would have more weight/importance

genuinely how the hell are they doing this?? like the hovering the magical aspects?? is is just one mass hallucination? I'm so curious

LETS GO MAD COMIC DIALOGUEEEE NAUGHTY BUSTERSSSS I love how they're all separate into old times

I appreciate that all of them getting more or less equal spotlight but it does mean that animation is much more limited. I'm not mad but I do wish they got more budget to do more animation

not the selfiee lmfaooosdjkflha he's still on vacation

I love that they're spelling it out for us so clearly www

oh damn they're brainwashed too! and there's a overall big bad too. i guess not even TBH is the final boss

Ah. it is a mass hallucination it seems. or at least some sort of simulation

LETS GO NAUGHTY BUSTERSSSSSSSSSSSSS I adore this combi and miss their stupid boys will be boys dynamic. just frat boys being boys

LMFAO CHUUNI

Again slightly choppy animation animation but I'm not too mad

Waterpolo ripp i hated that sport so much as a kid www I also love how they only animated three members of the team with actual faces to save some budget

YO DUO SONG????? I AM IN AWE HOLY SHIT

Hm, don't like this song quite as much which is a shame. The animation quality is also going down a bit in relation to the other songs but the tiger and dragon imagery for ichiro and kuko respectively is cool

overall the mix of BB and BAT aesthetics in the animation is cool but the their song styles meshing just isn't my kind of music.

Damn its the BAT ending which does kinda mean to me that BAT won't get much of a time to shine in comparison to BB. Fair enough I guess since BB is more popular in general

Lots of hell imagery in the titles tho which is interesting I wonder if they'll go anywhere with that

#hypmic #hypnosis microphone #Hypnosis Mic: Division Rap Battle: Rhyme Anima+#hypnosis mic rhyme anima #hypmic spoilers

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waynes-multiverse · 2 years ago

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OH MY GOD! I’m positively obsessed with this story! I love it!!! If this were legit a book, it would be one of those I wouldn’t be able to put down, you know? The one you read and read and read and don’t care about food and sleep, and then suddenly it’s three days later, and your stomach rumbles and your eyes are red, reminding you that you do need to eat and sleep. But yeah, it’s that kind of story! 😍👏💚

More swooning below! 👇

Honestly, I know you said at the end that this part was sort of a filler, but I would read thirty pages of purely this. I love the manhunt and her hanging out with the boys and Annie and Kimiko. I could read way more chapters of this and not get bored, seriously. It’s that good! Gimme as much cat and mouse as possible. I thoroughly enjoyed this!

First of all, you nailed all the characters perfectly. Annie, Frenchie, Butcher, Hughie & M.M.! I laughed every time the latter mothered her or was anal about shit. Hilarious and so accurate! Five stars for a job well done! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

No, you weren’t former SAS, like Butcher. You weren’t CIA, or any other military alphabet soup.

Loved that line! Genuinely made me laugh 😂

I also pretty much laughed at every line Butcher threw out. From “granny fucker” to “not enough hugs,” it was hard to contain myself. And I love her character, her skill set, and how damn smart she is! To me, this girl is Liam Neeson in Taken. God forbid someone dares to kidnap her sweet sister. Butcher better respect her!

Everything is relevant, always. Even if it isn’t.

So true! And no matter what you think about Soldier Boy and his general attitude before he got kidnapped by the commies, forty years of torture certainly changes a person. He at least deserves a second chance to prove he might have changed, although he’s still pretty “macho.” But c’mon! The guy is over a hundred years old and missed out on tons of progress! How is he supposed to know any better if no one teaches him? Just knowing what he went through in Russia always breaks my heart. The guy needs a genuine hug and some understanding, not Novichok and a bullet, much less be turned back into a popsicle... 😔

In other news, I’m a fan of Soldier Boy’s South America tour so far. First Brazil where I’m sure he learned what a g-string and a Brazilian wax is before he moved on to goddamn Columbia (of course he did). Did he already find out about Netflix and catch up on Narcos? Either way, I bet the cartels are happy to host him, even though he might snort the whole country 😂

Her big blue eyes were vacant, her blonde hair caked with blood from a head shot.

No! Not Bette Davis Eyes! 😭 I love how caring reader was, though. She’s got a good heart in that chest of hers.

“I like it when they’re cocky,” you replied.

Me too, girlie, me too... 😆

[...] he seemed to be taking an extended vacation surrounding strip clubs, casinos, and other likely destinations for sex, drugs, and money.

As crazy as it may be, I genuinely love this guy 💚 Also love the fact that he robbed banks. Way to go, my hero!

“Whoever you’re looking for that isn’t me,” he said, injecting a fair bit of charm into his voice.

Wow. Antonio is becoming annoying quickly. And handsy. ADIOS ASSHOLE! A small part of me hoped whoever is watching her (SB?) might swoop in and save her all hero-like. *sighs* A girl can only dream... But good for her! She saved herself! Who needs men anyway? My little Liam Neeson surely doesn’t ❤️

“He had tenacity,” Frenchie remarked.

But of course, the French guy appreciates the Latino fire 😂

You didn’t want to go in, but you wouldn’t put it past Soldier Boy to get caught up in a mass orgy.

No, we really shouldn’t... 😅

Focusing on the far wall, you saw a leather chair by the window, with a still smoking cigar laid to rest in an ash tray on a small table.

Okay, seriously, this should not turn me on as much as it does. I’ve never gone for the douchey cigar smoker, but all I want is for Soldier Boy to slap my rear and order me to refill his drink. What the fuck is wrong with me?

Butcher, you’ll die first. Then the cum-guzzler.

DEAD!!! This one little note killed me. KILLED ME!!! I laughed so hard! Poor Hughie. He always gets the worst end of the stick 🤣🤣🤣 I bow to your feet and heavily applaud you for this one! 👏 (This is exactly why I could read endless chapters of this manhunt and this story. Hunt him around the globe. I’ll pay for the whole ride!)

“Maybe then you’ll—and let me not shock you here—meet someone,” Louisa said. “And finally put an end to that goddamn dry spell. What’s it been, like three years?”

I love her little sister 😏🖤

But mere feet above you, if you had only looked up to the roof, you would’ve seen a hunter lazily eyeing his prey.

DUDE! That ending!!! Glorious! Is it SB? Someone from his entourage? No, I bet it’s him. She caught his green eyes in that sexy af leather dress, didn’t she? I need help 😂🙈

I want more! MORE! If this had legit 10k words, I would’ve devoured it all the same 😍👏 Amazing, amazing job, love! Can you tell I’m obsessed yet? Sorry for that ultra long ramble. And that little sneak peek... 👀 Is it Wednesday yet? When is the next part dropping? GAH! 💚

Break Me Down - Part 1

Pairing: Soldier Boy/Ben x Female Reader

Summary: You’re a private investigator by trade, but now you happily sit at a desk — leading a surveillance team at Supe Affairs. After managing to end Homelander in New York, Soldier Boy escapes custody. You are recruited for the manhunt, joining Butcher’s team.

Truly, you joined the S.A. for the right reasons. But after you become his accidental hostage, Soldier Boy will break down every single one of them…

**To start from the Prologue.

Word Count: 5,200 Warnings: Some male skeeviness lol.

Part 1: The Game Begins

Two months ago…

You and M.M. continued to pour over all the records that the CIA had been able to pull on Soldier Boy.

This had been your life for the past month: locked in one hotel room after the next, up to your eyeballs in research. Or pounding the pavement in the sweltering summer of Brazil, on any whisper of Soldier Boy.

Right now it was the former. You all were piled into M.M.’s room, as it was the only one with a kitchen.

You smiled at Frenchie and thanked him when he offered you a steaming mug. At least you would finally get to experience Brazilian coffee.

You hiked a foot on the table where you and M.M. were working and sipped carefully; the mug was filled to the brim. Your companion eyed your pajama-clad leg, which only encroached an inch or two into his space.

“Excuse the fuck outta me,” said M.M. “Can you not?”

You briefly looked up from the (completely fabricated) biopic you were reading on Soldier Boy. “Hmm?”

M.M. gestured to your bare foot on the table. “Hello? What, were you raised in a fucking barn?”

With an amused smile, you lowered your leg. “I’m cramping up. We’ve been at this for six hours.”

“And counting,” Hughie said with a tired sigh. He and Annie had just come from scoping the local tourist spots and dive bars in the city. But it wasn’t for pleasure. You all had arrived in Brazil last night on a rumor that Soldier Boy had been spotted at a club a couple of days ago.

Annie heaved a sigh as she dropped into the seat next to you. She stole your paper fan on the table and tried to dry the sweat on her face and neck. You smiled and passed her your bottled water as well.

You and Annie had been “work friendly” at Supe Affairs. But now you felt like she had accepted you the most readily into the group. She seemed genuinely interested in who you were as a person as well.

Though you tried not to give too many personal details about your life, she had a way of disarming you, getting you to open up with her genuine willingness to listen.

You were friendly enough with Hughie and Kimiko as well, and you could also admit, you liked M.M. He was a straightforward man (and fun to tease with his anal idiosyncrasies). You got the most done with M.M. by your side. And watching him with Frenchie was pure entertainment.

Overall, you felt respected by them, even if you knew you weren’t as close as the rest of them seemed to be. You just hadn’t been on the team long enough.

The only one who mostly ignored you was Billy Butcher.

Butcher didn’t want you on the team. He’d made that pretty clear from the beginning.

What had his words been? Oh, yeah.

She’s a fucking amateur. Won’t last thirty seconds if, heavens for-fuckin’-bid, she encounters an A-lister like Soldier Boy.

You knew he considered you dead weight. But as Grace had told him, her track record speaks for itself.

No, you weren’t former SAS, like Butcher. You weren’t CIA, or any other military alphabet soup. But if there was one thing you knew how to do, it was tracking people down.

You were currently flitting through Soldier Boy’s sham career: the shitty music videos, the starlets, the ticker tape parades, and what precious little there was about his beginnings: about “Ben.”

You did find out that his family was from Hartford, Connecticut, and stupidly rich too. You found his parents’ names to go along with that.

And then it was a hop, skip, and a jump to him being unveiled as Soldier Boy.

“That is curious,” you murmured.

“Curious about the world’s most infamous granny fucker?” Butcher remarked. You slid him a wry look.

The fact that he tried to erase his past is interesting,” you said. “The details that aren’t here are just as important as the ones that are.”

Butcher hesitated a second, an ice-cold beer poised to his lips. He tipped it toward you in acknowledgement. “On that, we actually agree.”

“What do we know about his real life? Before he became Soldier Boy,” you asked.

Butcher sat down across from you and shaded in the details he knew, mostly about a disappointed father.

“Didn’t get enough hugs as a lad,” he surmised.

You suspected he was understating the truth. If there weren’t that many recorded accounts, pictures, or footage of Soldier Boy’s parents and home life, then he didn’t want people to know.

Interesting, you thought. Eventually Butcher got up to run down another lead that came in via text from Grace. Frenchie came back from the kitchen and saw how intently you were staring at your computer screen, eyes rapidly scanning.

“Ah,” Frenchie said, gesturing between you and the departed Butcher with a hand that held three alfajores cookies. “I see the same anal tenacity that fuels Monsieur Charcutier.”

You raised a brow. “My tenacity is for the case, not Soldier Boy.”

This wasn’t a vendetta for you. This was just business.

“For money,” M.M. correctly guessed, but his eyes held no judgment. “Been there.”

You sighed, smiling a little. Yes, you were doing this for money. They didn’t need to know anything more than that.

You liked this team well enough, but this was a job. The way you protected your family, and yourself, was by not talking about them.

That night, Frenchie’s ordered “package” arrived, courtesy of Grace. It was a healthy dose of Novichok gas—perhaps one of the only substances on Earth that could put Soldier Boy into a peaceful sleep.

Well, you didn’t know if it was peaceful, exactly. But he’d be asleep. That was all any of you cared about.

“At least it’s in proper containment this time,” M.M. said, examining the large cannister. Annie peered at it over his shoulder.

“I don’t know. My shitty perfume case seemed to hold it just fine,” she quipped.

You smiled from your usual seat at your computer. Annie came over with a sandwich for both of you. It was from the café down the street, and you’d been meaning to try it. Every time you stood out on your hotel room’s balcony, you could smell fresh bread and smoked meats coming from the café.

“Oh, yeah. How’s your sister?” Annie asked around a mouthful of sandwich. “She’s in college now, right?”

She had a good memory. Annie had heard you on the phone with your sister before you all left last month. You’d said one last goodbye, knowing it wouldn’t be safe to talk once you were locked into this mission.

While you were reluctant to answer Annie’s question, the others seemed distracted in the kitchen, fighting over who ordered chorizo and who ordered steak on their sandwich.

Still, you lowered your voice, even as a proud smile graced your lips. “She got into Julliard.”

Annie grinned and set her food down to give a little clap.

“She starts in the fall, so a few months,” you added.

“Aww, you’re glowing with pride,” Annie teased. And you laughed, but it was true. You wouldn’t hide that you were very proud of your little sister’s accomplishments.

“She’s worked hard, and she deserves it,” you said. Though your eyes dimmed. “I just wish I could help her celebrate…she’s on my case for taking this job.”

Quite simply, she worried about you. You were good at your job, but you were still human. She’d seen you come home banged up and bruised more often than you cared to admit…

Annie gave you a knowing look. “If you don’t want to be here, you don’t have to. I’m sure you can get other jobs—”

“Getting into school is just the beginning,” you said. “She’s got four years to go. Then her master’s. Hell, her doctorate if she wants.”

“There are scholarships…”

“It’s not enough,” you said with a sigh. It’s never enough.

“All right, lads,” Butcher said. He wiped his mouth with a napkin as he read off his phone. “The new Strongest Cunt in the World has been spotted. Suit up.”

“Where’re we going?” you asked, closing up your laptop.

Butcher shot you a wink. “Columbia.”

While on the private plane, you were the only one still awake as you continued to watch the archival footage with your Airpods in. Reel after motherfucking reel of Soldier Boy.

You really were starting to get sick of his smug face. He was clearly a good actor, if nothing else.

But then you came across the Russia files.

Part of you didn’t want to watch. You knew exactly what they were, and you didn’t want to see anything that would make you sympathize with him in your mind…

But your father’s training was ingrained in you—like fingerprints on your skin. Like a vice grip around your throat.

Everything is relevant, always. Even if it isn’t.

…That, and maybe your own insatiable curiosity won out.

So you steeled yourself with a breath, and you hit the play button.

Gradually, your eyes widened.

You had seen awful things—as a private investigator at your father’s firm, and at Vought.

You had filled your quota of blood and death. And you had already seen the footage of Soldier Boy blasting a tower full of people in New York with the nuclear power now housed in his chest.

You also knew what he did to M.M.’s family. But after watching several minutes of Soldier Boy's torture, hearing his struggle, his outbursts of rage, the ragged gasps for breath, the clawing, traumatized sounds...

It was like stereo between your ears, and it was...too familiar. Too much.

So you finally turned it off, closing your laptop with an unsettled breath of your own.

And you were unable to sleep that night.

When you all finally arrived in Columbia, you and the team surveyed the wreckage in the casino.

It was a fucking blood bath.

As you stepped carefully through the wreckage of bodies and gambling chips, you looked for clues. Anything that might tell you about what Soldier Boy was doing here (though you could guess), and however unlikely, where he might go next.

You were disheartened to find the body of a young woman. Her big blue eyes were vacant, her blonde hair caked with blood from a head shot. On further inspection, you found a small room key in her hand.

With a sigh and a gloved hand, you took the key. But you also closed the girl’s eyes.

You kept looking while the others had fanned out in the opposite direction. When you came across a small table that wasn’t turned over or splintered into fragments, you raised a brow. There was a napkin pinned to the top with a steak knife.

You yanked it out and examined the flimsy napkin. Noticing that you’d found something, Butcher came over to your side. He was much taller than you, fairly looming over your shoulder. You angled the note toward him.

Try harder.

S.B.

It was more than just a taunt.

It was the beginning of a game. And it made you smile.

“What the hell’re you smiling about?” Butcher asked.

“I like it when they’re cocky,” you replied. Butcher shot you a sideways glance, one that said you were maybe more deranged than even him.

“All supes are cocky bastards.”

You eyed him with a teasing grin. “On that, we actually agree.”

True to Grace’s word, she provided you all with the full extent of the CIA’s resources. While Butcher tracked down the hotel of the room key you found, you and M.M. were able to tap into any and all local street cameras and map out the likely points Soldier Boy had hit in this city—and where he could be going next.

According to the hotel manager, Soldier Boy had paid for a month’s stay, but hadn’t checked out after coming back for some of his belongings. The security cameras had caught him leaving his hotel room with a few men—armed ex-military types, and possibly his new entourage.

But the trail ended there.

Over the next two months, Soldier Boy continued to be one step ahead of you in the chase.

Though his movements were calculated (disappearing like a coil of smoke whenever you caught his scent), he seemed to be taking an extended vacation surrounding strip clubs, casinos, and other likely destinations for sex, drugs, and money.

And he’d evaded capture after hitting at least three banks on his way out of the U.S. alone.

At the current crap motel of the week, you shared the couch with Kimiko and Hughie while you surveyed traffic cameras.

“What’s the likelihood that he’s even still in Columbia? In South America, even?” Hughie asked. It was a good goddamn question.

“We have agents covering every major port and air hanger,” M.M. said. “If he wants to escape the continent, he’s gonna have to fight his way out, or rent a dingy and float his motherfuckin’ ass across the Atlantic.”

“I wouldn’t put anything past him,” you remarked. “What connections does he have?”

It wasn’t the first time you’d asked that question, but it was the first time you got a straightforward answer.

“Who knows,” said M.M. “He’s an ancient fuck.”

“Who killed all his old friends,” Hughie supplied.

“Well, his team, to be fair. I don’t think he ever had friends,” Annie said. “...Plus his old girlfriend.”

“What a spectacular bonfire that was,” Butcher dryly quipped.

Nice, you thought, heavy on the sarcasm.

You sighed. Clearly, you all would have to be prepared for anything.

When you weren’t pouring through surveillance, you took to the streets with Annie, playing the part of American tourists.

“Soldier Boy don’t know who the fuck you are,” Butcher had reasoned. He’d then pointed at Annie.

“Her fame as Starlight can get you two into whatever bar, club, or fuckhole that might’ve let him in. She’ll park it at a table, attracting attention. Meanwhile, you’ll circle around and look for him.”

It was actually a sound plan, and you could be a decent actor yourself. This wasn’t the first time you’d adopted a role to find your target, and on this mission, it probably wouldn’t be the last.

Well, a week later, the plan worked. You and Annie encountered a woman at a bar who waited tables at a nearby club, in Medellin. She’d served Soldier Boy just last night.

Medellin was considered the party city of Columbia, and for good reason.

Butcher had cleverly found your “disguise” for tonight, though you hadn’t liked the smirk on his bearded face when he gave you the shopping bag.

It turned out to be a semi-legal black leather dress, along with thigh-high boots possessing a sharp heel. Annie’s dress was just as short, and gold. With her blonde hair and shimmering makeup contrasting your black dress and smokey makeup, the two of you looked like night and day. Light and dark.

While Hughie manned surveillance in a rented van, parked outside the club, the rest of the team had found strategic points to cover in the club: M.M. was at the bar. Frenchie and Kimiko had found a table to watch the area in front of the stage, while Butcher was somewhere clinging to the shadows.

You followed Annie into the club. Once they’d recognized her as Starlight, they’d let her right in, and you by association. You didn’t envy her fame, but you could admit, it had some perks.

Inside, the club was dark and loud, and packed with people and streams of colorful light bouncing off the walls. This isn’t going to be easy.

Both of you scoped the area subtly before joining M.M. at the bar.

Well, you two found your own opening further down. Sitting next to him would be too obvious.

You subtly pressed a finger to the communicator in your ear while Annie ordered drinks.

“It’s gonna be hard to find my own ass in here,” you said to the team. You scanned the place and noticed an entire second and third floor. “This place is huge.”

“Then get crackin’, love,” Butcher’s voice reached you. You resisted the urge to roll your eyes. But you did take the vodka martini Annie offered you.

“Ah, you beat me to it,” a man said, his richly accented voice hovering near your ear. You turned your head and had to lean back a bit. You were met with blue eyes, tan skin, and an attractive smile. The man tipped an imaginary hat, letting his shoulder-length dark hair dip into his eyes.

“Good evening, mi vida,” he said. “I was gonna buy you a drink, but I see you’ve got one. Mind if I finish my beer with you?”

Inwardly you wanted to sigh, but you gave a flirtatious smile to keep up appearances. “Sure.”

“Where are you from?” he asked, and with a more teasing smile. “I’m having a hard time placing your accent.”

You affected a giggle. “Oh, really? You mean I don’t have a massive, neon sign over my head that says, ‘American Tourist?’”

“Well, maybe not neon,” he joked. “I’m Antonio.”

“I’m Jess,” you lied, shaking his hand. He turned it over and pressed a kiss to the back of your hand. Annie raised a brow behind you, but she sipped her drink.

Antonio must’ve been a local. His dark blue buttoned-down shirt, jeans, and boots were more casual than the obvious tourists with their flashing finery. And by his accent, you could guess that he was at least Latino. Columbian, most likely.

You were able to subtly dodge the question of exactly where you were from. And the two of you flirted for a few minutes while you continued to survey the people passing by, scanning the gaps between bodies.

When Antonio finally asked you to dance, you agreed. It would get you further into the club with a better excuse than walking around aimlessly. You turned to Annie.

“Catch you later?” you asked. She tossed you a wink.

“Yeah, girl. Have fun!”

You smiled and let Antonio lead you to the dance floor. But you discreetly used every movement to your advantage, looking beyond your dancing partner to continue your search. If Soldier Boy was here, you would find him.

“He’s not here,” said Antonio. It actually managed to jerk you out of your focus.

“Who?” you asked, feigning confusion.

“Whoever you’re looking for that isn’t me,” he said, injecting a fair bit of charm into his voice.

You actually felt your face warming up at that. The way he was looking at you now, there was very little doubt as to what he wanted. His grip on your hips tightened.

Part of you was getting impatient with this part of the game, but at the very least, he was a good dancer. He pulled you effortlessly through the cumbia, Columbian salsa dancing, even if he was starting to sweat on you.

But now, you could almost swear someone was watching. Though it might’ve been the sweat dripping down your spine, you felt that strange prickle on the back of your neck.

Well, besides Annie. You knew she was keeping an eye on you from the bar, as were Frenchie and Kimiko as they joined a poker game in the far corner, away from the dance floor.

Your gaze continued to flit through every corner of the room between spins and the movements of your feet and your hips.

But when Antonio’s hands started get a bit too familiar with the curve of your ass, you took his hands and used them to spin yourself. He brought you back in tight. A bit too tight.

“Come on, baby…” he whispered in your ear.

And you felt his hand slide up the inside of your thigh. He even had the audacity to try and slip past the lacey front of your underwear.

That’s when your patience snapped.

You grabbed his wrist and “accidentally” drove your heel into his foot. With precision you felt it land between two vertebrae.

The girlish yelp he made brought a flicker of a smile to your lips, but you covered it with a doe-eyed look and many bumbling apologies.

“Oh, I’m so sorry! Are you okay?”

He all but shoved you as he limped away, cursing you in Spanish. You’d taken four years of it in high school, and you still only caught half of it.

Hiding your smile, you walked away and pressed a discreet finger to the comm in your ear.

“The stage front is clear. Scoping the back.”

“Wait for me,” Annie said. She was still sitting at the bar. “I think you broke that guy’s foot.”

“He had tenacity,” Frenchie remarked.

“All balls and no brains, as usual,” you muttered. “Stay there and look shiny, Annie. He’s less likely to recognize me, but he might come out to play if he spots a familiar face at the bar.”

“She’s right,” Butcher said to Annie. “Stay where you are.”

You made your way to the bathroom and scoped the hall. There in the privacy of the shadows, you adjusted the gun holster on your thigh. It was a miracle Antonio hadn’t felt it.

Not that a gun would do much against Soldier Boy, but you didn’t feel right without it.

Then you kept moving and dodged various couples making out (and more) on your way upstairs.

“Going up,” you informed the team quietly. The second floor was a series of rooms, none of which you wanted to pop in on without an invitation. But after you made it to the end of the hall, you turned a corner and noticed a door hung open a crack. Sliding it open, you found a wall of music there to greet you.

But that wasn’t all.

Inside was a room of people drinking and drugging and generally doing things to one another. You didn’t want to go in, but you wouldn’t put it past Soldier Boy to get caught up in a mass orgy.

You walked through the room, only taking in what you needed to with your eyes.

Focusing on the far wall, you saw a leather chair by the window, with a still smoking cigar laid to rest in an ash tray on a small table. Your head tilting with interest, you went over to the table and found another hand-written note.

Once again, you sighed. “He’s not here, guys. He bounced.”

Once you all regrouped with Hughie outside the club, you handed the note to Butcher with a grimace.

“You have a love letter,” you said. And Hughie too.

With a wry brow raise, Butcher looked down at the scrap of paper.

Butcher, you’ll die first. Then the cum-guzzler.

S.B.

That night at the hotel, after you'd showered and peeled off that ridiculous dress, you poured over the Soldier Boy files again.

You hadn’t touched the Russia ones since that first night, but you knew you were missing far too much. In order to anticipate his moves, you needed to understand how he thought.

You couldn’t do that if you didn’t even have the full picture of who he was. And the movies, the silly music videos, even the exploded skyscraper and Homelander’s death—none of it told the full story of Ben.

It didn’t tell you what he wanted. What he cared about. Why he was playing cat and mouse instead of just taking his stand, like his soldier persona would’ve demanded of his pride.

Or maybe that pride's just like everything else: a well-crafted costume.

A knock at your door jolted you out of your thoughts.

You got up to your feet, briefly looking down to make sure you were decently dressed (you supposed pajama shorts, a bra, and a tank top would suffice). You grabbed your gun and checked the peephole before you answered the door with a smile.

It was M.M. with a mug of tea for you. “I knew you’d still be up, killin’ those files. It’s almost morning, you know.”

You accepted the mug with a warmer smile.

“Aw, you do care,” you quipped. He rolled his eyes.

You laughed a little. “Seriously, thank you.”

He pointed at you.

“Go to sleep,” he said. You raised two fingers to your temple in salute.

“Sir. Yes, sir!” you joked. Really, you appreciated his concern. After hearing many a story about his daughter Jennine, and seeing how the rest of the team respected him, you knew that he was a good man.

And thanks to him and Annie, you were actually starting to feel like part of this team.

After you wished him goodnight (or good morning, at this rate), you closed the door to your hotel room, followed closely by your laptop.

You took out your phone, silently contemplating what time it would be in New York right now.

Well, it would still be very early in the morning. But you thought it was worth a try, since you had the time.

You dialed your sister, Luisa. While it rang, you remembered just how thin these hotel walls were. So you stepped out to the rickety balcony. Jeez, hope it holds my weight throughout this call.

When your sister eventually answered, she murmured your name sleepily in confusion.

“Hey, sorry for waking you up,” you said, feeling bad.

“It’s okay.” She yawned. “I should be up soon anyway. Got 8 am classes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”

“Ech. Screw that shit,” you teased.

“You’re the one sweating balls in South America.”

“I’d rather be drowning in my own sweat than listening to some old bag drone on for eight hours,” you volleyed back, and leaned against the balcony’s railing, even as it creaked suspiciously with your weight.

“You, my friend, are uninspired. You mean to tell me mosquitoes and drug cartels are better than Mozart?” your sister asked incredulously. Her sleepy voice was starting to lose some of its gravel as you two fell into familiar bickering.

“Wow, way to type cast. Not all of South America is about drug-running,” you pointed out.

“Aren’t there, like, entire shows about people shoving cocaine up their ass to get from Columbia to Miami?” Luisa asked.

“…Yes, but that’s not the point,” you said with a giggle. “And good guess. I’m actually in Medellin right now.”

“Are you supposed to tell me that?”

“Not really, no. But I don’t think you’ll sell me out to the cartels,” you joked. Or to the Russians, your mind added. That thought made your lips twist sourly.

“Anyway, are you okay? How’s school, really?”

“It’s good, sis. You know I’m good. I’m worried about you,” she countered, and you could hear the concern in her voice.

“You know me. I’m always good,” you replied with good humor. The silence on the other line told you that you hadn’t been quite convincing enough.

“When do you think you’ll come home?” she asked.

For what seemed like the hundredth time that night (or morning), you sighed. “That’s hard to say.”

The answering silence told you even more about your sister’s thoughts, and you felt guilty for it.

“I’m happy just knowing you’re doing so well. With school, starting your adult life, doing your thing,” you added.

“You need to start thinking about yourself,” she told you.

“What do you mean, Lou? I’m fine.”

It was Louisa’s turn to sigh.

“You know, I was so proud of you when you decided to leave Vought," she said. "When you finally got out from under Dad. When you started working at Supe Affairs…you seemed happy, like you were finally proud of yourself too.”

Emotion started to burn behind your eyes. Part of it was probably sleep deprivation, but you heard the sincerity in your sister’s voice.

She just knew you so well. And she wasn’t lying there—what she’d said was all true of you. But after the joke that was Victoria Neuman running Supe Affairs, you didn’t know what you could trust anymore.

Maybe not even your own judgment.

“But I really wish that you’d consider more than just your work,” Luisa said. “Like a hobby. Take a painting class. Go to karaoke, like we used to do in grade school after Choir practice. You have such a beautiful voice! Like Grandma’s was.”

“I’ll leave the performing to you, Lou,” you said with a chuckle. She was serious, however.

“Work isn’t everything,” she reminded you. Now her voice was firm. “You should go out with your friends. Go out with Annie! Rub shoulders with her celebrity friends.”

“Right.” You huffed a laugh. You’d been around plenty of famous supes while at Vought. You’d ran down the leads and tracked down the criminals, just for the supes to swoop in and “save the day.” You did the grunt work, and they claimed the credit.

You’d had enough of “celebrities” to last you a lifetime.

“Maybe then you’ll—and let me not shock you here—meet someone,” Louisa said. “And finally put an end to that goddamn dry spell. What's it been, like three years?”

“All right, all right.” You held up a hand of surrender, even if she couldn’t see it. You were grateful she couldn’t catch you blushing. “That’s enough about my non-life, thanks.”

You shook your head. Embarrassment actually clawed inside your belly.

Yes, it had been a while since you’d actually been with anyone, relationship or otherwise. You just didn’t have time to have a life, you’d reasoned. Working at Vought had been grueling, and your hours at the S.A., while better, were still demanding.

…Still, you could appreciate that your work-life balance left much to be desired. And that was on you.

Case in point, you were on this job.

You tipped your face heavenward, letting the sunrise spill some warmth on your face.

“But…I hear you, okay?” you replied with your eyes closed.

“You do?” she asked suspiciously.

“Yeah. When I get back, I…I’ll work on it, okay?” you said. “But I love you.”

“Love you too, sis. I should probably get going, but…please be safe.”

“Always,” you promised.

After you hung up, you finally opened your eyes.

That prickly feeling was back, almost like you were being watched.

You scanned around, but your human eyes didn’t find anything out of the ordinary in the sunshine pouring in between the rows of buildings.

In fact, you didn’t see a damn thing that wasn’t supposed to be there.

So you clutched your phone to your chest, letting out a deep breath. Then you headed back inside.

But mere feet above you, if you had only looked up to the roof, you would’ve seen a hunter lazily eyeing his prey.

AN: Ok! So a little bit slow in this chapter, but it’s all important setup.

In the next chapter, the reader meets Soldier Boy:

You laid a hand on his chest, fingers spreading between the open buttons, and felt his warm skin.

He glanced up at you with another challenging tilt to his head. What are you gonna do now?

You met that challenge, boldly leaning down to press a kiss against his lips.

Series Masterlist

Main Masterlist

Series Tag List:

Comment below or send me an ask if you'd like to be tagged in this series! And follow me for more Boys fics (and other fandoms). I'm also on Ao3!

@deans-spinster-witch @this-is-me19 @waynes-multiverse @pallographsunspot @samanddeaninatrenchcoat @spalady26 @spnwoman @wirdbeimaufhebengebunden @syrma-sensei @muhahaha303 @123passwort @xoxovienna @magnificentnightmarehadi @lollag0w0 @globetrotter28 @nancymcl @ashbatz @yvonneeeee @fckinel

#fic rec #wayne reads #soldier boy x reader

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rights-for-redshirts · 3 years ago

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What really frustrates me these days.

There's a few "strong" female characters in BNHA, and in fiction in general. And don't get me wrong, I love Uraraka and Momo and Jirou and Mina with all my heart. Fanfiction about them? Love it. Fanart? Comics? Ships? You name it. They are my children and I would die for their happiness.

But ... as characters, I ... can't bring myself to like their concepts. And that's because ... even while they have strong quirks. And usually aren't that bad at fighting. (Ochaco's knife stealing moves are so. Cool.) None of them have any meaningful agency, drive or ambition to change something (and therefore rarely any influence on the actual plot, but that's not even the point here).

Look at the males: we've got

Midoriya, the visionary, who wants to become no.1 to make for a better world as well as save everybody and keeps raising the philosophical question of what it means to be a hero. Meaningful motivation, as well as what drives the show.

We've got Todoroki, who has Daddy IssuesTM and is struggling to find his own purpose away from that. Meaningful struggle.

Bakugou, who is a bundle of complicated volatile emotions wrapped up in nitro and spiky gelled hair, who undergoes a shitton of character development and I don't think I even need to point out how complicated he is under all of that violent behaviour. Motivation: pretty sure those are inferiority complexes caused by your messed up society. Meaningful and terrifying.

We've got Iida, who is more of a side character but stil has this whole responsibility: rules vs morals thing going on as well as his deep relationship with his brother

Now for the females:

Ochako, motivation: Money for her parents. Nice. Cute. Completely irrelevant. Or at least that's how it's treated in the show itself, since I'm pretty sure there are a lot more issues buried beneath that than what we're shown.

Asui, motivation: idk? Saving people, I think? Which would be cool if they actually explored it and dedicated some time to, but ... sure let' just ignore that because it's NEVER FUCKING RELEVANT to the plot. Her internship was cool, I guess.

Yaoyorozu, motivation: ... does that ever actually come up? The most character development I've seen from her was her confidence crisis in the finals, aside from that ... nothing comes to mind. She's really cool and I love her as a person. And she joins on adventures more easily, like the rescue attempt at Kamino. But she doesn't take the initiative either, at least as long as the guys are around (the tracker on the Nomou duringthe training camp was extremely cool, I admit it). In the end, she is more of a commodity for the "leaders" of 1A than an actual player.

So ... all of that has probably been said already, and by someone better with words than me at 1am. But I needed to get this off my chest -

It doesn't matter how strong a female character is. Or how weak, for that matter. What does matter is the impact they're having on the story, and what kind of impact that is. A female Gojo who never impacts the plot is a weak fucking female character. A quirkless female Midoriya throwing a book into the sludge villain's eye full well knowing she has no way to defend herself afterwards, but doing it anyways because it's the right thing to do and saving Bakugous life in the process as well as kickstarting three other events like receiving OFA, is an extremely strong female character; not because she's powerful, but because her actions drive the plot, because she has impact.

And seeing how the girls in BNHA are always, always treated as an afterthought - not when it comes to their own personal little arcs, but how every single one of them ends up being an irrelevant filler in the grand scheme of things - quite honestly, that's ... pretty painful.

#I'm tired and only half coherent #don't judge me #And you're welcome to discuss this; I'm expressing my feelings over some of my fav characters here #It's not like it's a literary analysis #But I needed to get this out sometime #That's all #Bnha #Mha #my hero academia #Momo #momo yaoyozoru #uraraka ochaco #iida tenya #todoroki shoto #midoriya izuku #bakugou katsuki #Tsuyu

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marshmallowgoop · 3 years ago

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Episode 425, Blu-ray Quality, and 10th-Anniversary Quiz Questions

Watched Episode 425 of Detective Conan for the first time recently, and it's a fun ride. Absolutely ridiculous—the FBI is really just taking this child along to stop multiple(!) assassination attempts!—but not without heart. It's got some great character moments (especially with Ai) and emotional drama (loved what we were shown of Kir).

But unlike Episode 345, the big, grand, showstopping 2.5-hour special prior to this one, there's some considerable bloating in regards to pacing here. A story that likely needed only a 2-hour timeslot to tell (at most) is stretched long and thin, with a laughable amount of repetition and recap. Perhaps most outrageously, there's a flashback to James Black's introduction case (specifically the second part, Episode 259) that's dragged out so unnecessarily far that it dawdles all over the screen for nearly a full two minutes.

(The timing of Episode 425 itself also strikes me as pretty funny. 345 has buildup, you know? 329 to 345 is practically straight plot. One hard-hitting, main-story case after another. Pieces are falling into place and threatening to collide constantly. There's a real sense of rising tension that culminates in the bombastic showdown that is the series' first 2.5-hour special.

(And this isn't just any anime. It's the 1,000+-episode, 25+-years-on-the-air, ginormous-barrier-of-entry monstrosity that is Detective Conan. Things proceed at a glacial pace here. The tiniest crumbs of crucial information are dropped at the speed of, like, three seconds every five episodes. Getting so much plot all at once is meaningful, something fitting for hyping up a big event that at least rattles the status quo, and while that Dutch-themed anime-original case in the midst of the 345 buildup (Episode 342) is of course wildly and ludicrously out of place, it's nothing compared to how out of place 425 feels.

(There's practically no setup here. The excessive recap makes it almost embarrassingly blatant that hardly anything main-plot relevant has happened since 345, and the episode prior to 425 is a filler—get this—called "Photo Email from the Clown."

(Yes, really. Only DetCo can build up to its super plot-heavy 2.5-hour special with a case featuring incidental characters we'll never see again and a dead clown. I love this show so much.)

But anyway, 425 is the only episode of the series that I own on Blu-ray, so I did actually appreciate the flashbacks for their visuals, if nothing else. None of the recounted episodes with traditional animation are of remastered quality, but there's definitely a clear difference between the DVD (top) and Blu-ray (bottom); as shown with this cap from Episode 177, the Blu-ray version has cleaner, sharper lines and colors:

And while I don't own a DVD version of 425 to compare how the episode itself looks between the two formats, judging from how much smoother and crispier (crunch) the digitally animated Episode 345 looks when recapped in 425 than it does on DVD, I think it's (probably?) fair to say that the same holds true for the Blu-raying of any digitally animated episode:

Regardless of anything else I could say about Episode 425, the evident jump in quality with the Blu-ray was dazzling, and it got me bummed that only a select handful of episodes have been released in this format! (At least in Japan, from what I know? Maybe other countries have more Blu-ray releases?) Sure the Black Organization and FBI-themed Treasured Selection Blu-rays (and the Akai Family TV Selections later) contain the Big Plot cases, and sure there are remastered versions of Episodes 1 to 123 up on Crunchyroll (in many countries) that do (in my opinion) have more elaborate and stunning HD'ing of traditionally animated episodes than what I see on my Episode 425 Blu-ray, but I'd love to own more high-quality Cone.

I've said in the past that it was a mistake to buy the Japanese DVD volumes individually—it's probably much less expensive in the long run to focus on listings selling entire season(s)—but there's certainly a silver lining here. The Black Organization and FBI 11 Treasured Selection that I purchased instead of Part 14, Volume 10 looks slick in Blu-ray quality, and I kind of want all the Japanese Blu-ray collections now.

But one thing about not having Part 14, Volume 10 is that I'm missing the first question in a 10-question quiz that commemorates the show's and movies' 10th anniversary and, fittingly, is a part of 10 episodes (starting with 425 and ending with 434). These short quiz segments before the openings are nothing out of this world or anything, but they're definitely cute, kinda like those "Who's that Pokemon?" spots. Loose translations are loose, but all the questions I do have are under the cut.

Question 2 says, "52 volumes of the original manga are on sale now! If you stacked all the books horizontally, how tall would the pile be in centimeters?" The three options for answers are だ (da), 70 cm; ぢ (ji), 90 cm; and づ (zu), 110 cm.

Question 3 asks, "How long is the show's opening narration in seconds?" The three options for answers are あ (a), 5 seconds; い (i), 15 seconds; and う (u), 30 seconds.

Question 4 asks, "In the year 2005, how many hours of Conan were broadcast?" The three options for answers are さ (sa), 10.5 hours; し (shi), 15.5 hours; and す (su), 20.5 hours.

Question 5 asks, "What episode number is the current episode?" The three options for answers are か (ka), Episode 379; き (ki), Episode 429; and く (ku), Episode 479.

Question 6 asks, "How many openings and endings has the Conan series had?" The three options for answers are あ (a), 41; い (i), 31; and う (u), 21.

Question 7 asks, "What is Conan not good at?" The three options for answers are ら (ra), soccer; り (ri), karaoke; and る (ru), swimming.

Question 8 asks, "What's Shinichi's favorite food?" The three options for answers are が (ga), lemon pie; ぎ (gi), sweet potato pie; and ぐ (gu), apple pie.

Question 9 asks, "What is the color of Dr. Agasa's car?" The three options for answers are つ (tsu), red; て (te), white; and と (to), yellow.

Question 10 asks, "What is the name of the drug that shrunk Conan?" The three options for answers are あ (a), APTX 1996; い (i), APTX 4896; and う (u), APTX 4869.

How'd you do? Personally, I found it amusing how the questions could range from difficult (for me, anyway!), like the manga-stacking question that is Question 2, to something more obvious, like Question 7 asking about what Conan's bad at.

Question 5 also cracked me up because the answer is super easy if you're watching on DVD, but, you know, on that note... the Japanese DVDs actually tend to not have their episodes ordered completely chronologically. For example, Episode 426 is included as the final episode on Part 14, Volume 9, even though Episode 425 makes up the entirety of Part 14, Volume 10. This is done so as to not split up multi-part cases across different DVDs, but it also means that, say, if I'm watching Episode 424, the next-episode preview at the end will be for Episode 426 (which comes next on DVD), and the episode preview for Episode 425 is included at the end of Episode 426, which chronologically takes place after 425! And let me tell you, so many of my subtitle files don't work for the previews because of this.

The DVDs thus encourage you to watch the episodes not in chronological order but in DVD order, and yet, the second quiz question is still included with Episode 426, not Episode 425, so you should be watching them in chronological order after all?

Ha, I don't know, but the answers, revealed at the end of each episode, are as follows:

2: だ (da), 70 cm

3: い (i), 15 seconds

4: す (su), 20.5 hours

5: き (ki), Episode 429

6: あ (a), 41 (specifically, 17 openings and 24 endings)

7: り (ri), karaoke

8: が (ga), lemon pie

9: と (to), yellow

10: う (u), APTX 4869

(Which, can I just say that Question 8 is cute? When I saw it, I knew that the answer had to be lemon pie because of its significance in Episodes 100-101, but I didn't realize that lemon pie was Shinichi's favorite food! That makes it so much sweeter that he loves Ran's first try at lemon pie so much, aw.)

Conan: Yummy!

And if you put all the hiragana (and katakana) of the answers together...

You get, "Thank you for loving Conan!"

Aww.

#detective conan #case closed #ramblings #shut up goop #detco dvd saga #ish #this probably sounds more negative than i meant but i had a lot of fun with episode 425 haha #it just totally came out of nowhere #also it didn't really fit but i swear i've heard it mentioned that some of the blu-rays #crop the 4:3 aspect ratio to fit into the modern 16:9 ratio?#not the case with 11 here but idk about the other ones #anyway blgh afraid my rent's gonna go up like 200 a month #and i messed up the shipping for one of my detco orders (the clean op/eds!) by using a po box when they don't ship to po boxes #so now reshipment fees are in my future and there goes 3800 yen....#so anyway here's something that's fun (i hope)#i can't believe i like detco so much but it makes me laugh

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britcision · 1 month ago

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Honestly it’s entirely possible it was your post, but there were about 4-6 with similar sentiments that got me to the point of comment, so at least you’re not alone!

(And tbh I’d be so happy to have more of the world building sooner too so I’m also on-side with this one, the timeline I’m talking about was the release timeline cuz I had to go double check that too but I just realized that wasn’t fully clear - the VM timeline is tangentially related but not the point

I’m also pretty sure I saw someone mention Xerxus specifically should have shown up sooner so that will help you work out if it was yours)

Cuz here’s the other thing too - honestly, I think we all know Matt also agrees with you. It’s his baby, and he really is pushing as much into every episode as can fit, and if he could get more world building in, he would

But they only get 12 episodes a season, and about half an hour an episode. So yeah, it’s 3 seasons before we’re learning about this calamity that happened, but it’s only 26 episodes

That was only just one full season of a show in the 90s, but they’ve already had to rescript all of the pacing to hit season-appropriate arcs within that timeline

(RIP flying cows scene you were a filler session but I still loved you)

It seems like it might have been easy to fit one or two more lines in the way you’ve suggested, just to give a little more oomph, because that’s something they have been doing at all possible turns - although in the first two seasons, most of the extra lore info was about our main characters, and the world as it relates to them

And if you put it side by side with other animated shows like She-Ra and Centaurworld (everyone go watch Centaurworld it was amazing), you can see that this is where a pattern comes in:

Now that we’re stuck in short seasons, most shows are pushing back on any world building not directly relevant to what the characters are doing for at least the first season, if not longer

And the reason for this is something I find personally disappointing; the assumption from executives that they have to hook the new audience on characters, not the world. We all know how much streaming services like to randomly cancel past two seasons, and the way the money guys think you’ll succeed is by chonking heavily on the emotional core of character arcs and some attention getting sass

(Both areas VM excelled without effort tbh)

And it’s also important to remember that when they planned out the timeline for season one, they didn’t know they’d get season two, and season two didn’t officially have the green light on three

We know now that we’re getting four and five as well, so I don’t think it’s even remotely a coincidence that Matt yote Xerxus in as hard and as fast as he could!

When every season is having to make an independent argument for why the show should get to continue, exposition in general tends to be kept to a minimum. You don’t want the audience to feel it lags, or is slow, or anything else that might make them flip to another show

You keep it quick and punchy, and in the case of Vox Machina where they already have a very clearly defined timeline of events they want to hit, they also need to make sure they’re hitting all of the beats they want to hit, and putting the focus on the moments they want to really resonate

And for some reason people assume world building will not resonate, or will make a show seem clunky or too complicated or confusing for new watchers

I dunno how true that actually is, but it is a guiding industry standard that the cast had to bear in mind when scripting out the first seasons

Now that we have seasons four and five already lined up to go, I think we are going to see a lot more of the world building this season (and ongoing, especially if they decide to tease set ups of the Nein animated show too - like a cut-away shot of Trent when talking about Delilah’s part in the Cerberus Assembly, a flash of Nicodranas when Artagan talks about going to the prime material plane)

Due to the scale of the conversion (3-hour episodes into 30 minutes), every single line and shot is still gonna be fighting for its life, but even the new audience has now had 2 seasons to get invested in this world and the people living in it; everyone who was gonna be easily discouraged by extra world building has probably left now, and those still here clearly care about this show

And, well, we’ve now had a full season of “there are DRAGONS look how COOL these DRAGONS are, don’t you fucking love our COOL DRAGONS”, so to keep things fresh and new and delicious for the goldfish streaming service execs think we all are, they do need to be doing something different to keep that level of hype up for season three

And cool new world building and Hidden Mysteries And Secrets We Only Saw Hints Of are a pretty good way to do that

A flash in season two to get people’s attention, with the reveal in season three is a little slow and frankly, if we were still in the days of 20-ep seasons, we probably wouldn’t have had to wait that long, but it does build anticipation and curiosity, and gives the new audience time to realize that this really is a fully built out world, with aspects our characters haven’t even begun to see yet

Matt’s finally got some more freedom to push non-event-critical lore into the world and as much as I (and probably he) fully agree that we wish there’d been more sooner… well, I think season three is gonna give us a really good look at just how deep and in depth the next two seasons are gonna be 😁

One and two had to find their legs and get us through the Briarwood arc, then into the Chroma Conclave, while satisfying Amazon execs (the worst and most dangerous of all execs /j) that this show was watchable and binge-able and all those other buzzwords to make them money

It’s a shame it took until three to get us Extra Extra Lore Snacks (since Matt did feed us as much as he physically could), but I think this is gonna be our pace setter for the rest of the series, and if we’re lucky, for the Mighty Nein series too

We’ve proved there’s an audience, we’ve proved we’re interested, and if we all go feral enough we just might one day see animated ExU: Calamity, so yeah. I’m gonna be going Full Feral

Tl;dr: no one agrees more heartily that there shoulda been more lore in the first two seasons than Matthew Mercer himself, but alas we must all labour under the demands and expectations of capitalism

Still genuinely baffled by a comment I saw about Legend of Vox Machina not really dealing with the Calamity in the first 2 seasons

I can only assume it’s from someone who didn’t watch the first campaign, or wasn’t aware of the timeline, because the only thing we knew about the Calamity for most of Vox Machina’s campaign was “well shit that sounded bad, made the divine gate, got cool items tho”

The Raven Queen not being one of the original gods basically didn’t come up until it was Final Boss time, and she was the most present deity in the campaign (it was a real big deal that she threw in for VM and tbh no one appreciated it the way we will now that Downfall is out)

ExU: Calamity didn’t happen until after the first season had already aired

They. Literally couldn’t have referenced it. It didn’t exist.

And given animation schedules, and that there was only about 6 months between ExU: Calamity happening at all and the season release, the scripts were definitely already finalized by the time Brennan picked up the DM screen

They really are bringing it up at the first possible opportunity, and frankly way earlier than Vox Machina really should.

Minor timeline spoilers ahead:

We’re still in the Chroma Conclave arc, the concept of the Vestiges was still brand new and they were pretty focused on how they’d be useful against the Big Fuck Off Dragons Attacking Everything

They didn’t even go to the Hells until after Keyleth finished her DruidQuest, Scanlan didn’t even go it was a Taryon adventure

(Poor Noelle Stevenson had to come back to try and guest again a week later because they got side tracked it was amazing)

(Also anyone who enjoyed the Honey Heists and wondered where Tova came from that’s her they met her in Hell)

Matt had the concept of the Calamity prepared well in advance of the campaign even airing and the reason it didn’t come up much in campaign 1 is the same reason we didn’t get even just hefty lore drops in the first 2 seasons - never mind that they couldn’t possibly have included events from a mini campaign that hadn’t happened:

It wasn’t all that relevant

The animated show isn’t just for Critters who already know all about the world and Vox Machina and they really are squeezing as much extra juice into it for us as they can

But it’s also a starting off point for people who’ve never heard of Critical Role, and has pretty faithfully followed the campaign so far

There’s really not a good place in the Briarwood arc to stop and talk about ancient history older than the gotdang vampire, Vecna has to wait his turn

And then there’s literal dragons everywhere wrecking shop and they have 20 minutes to get through multiple 3-4 hour long episodes

Matt’s wiggling as much in there as fast as he can, pretty sure the first two seasons already had more Calamity lore than the VM campaign

But

Can you even imagine

Animated ExU: Calamity 👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀

#tlovm #legend of vox machina #exu calamity #tlovm spoilers #tlovm season 3 #cuz listen everything you say is so true and i fully also wish there was more #but i am Cursed with Dark Knowledge (lotta friends working in film and animation who bitch about this stuff all the time)#so now y’all are too 🥰#fun fact i actually thought we got calamity in 2023 OR 2021 but definitely not the actual right answer (2022) cuz i am time-blind #they didn’t go in the same bucket in my head so i had no guesses as to when calamity came out in relation to tlovm #i was just pretty sure of ‘after season 1’#matt ran home from exu: calamity and rewrote season 3 scripts all night i swear he did #we didn’t need xerxus now (storywise). there are other times it might make more sense to fold him in (storywise)#but also Holy Shit I Need Him Now And Patia And Laerryn And Nydas And And And Matt Was So Right Add Them At Once

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