#and i think magic handedness is a fun concept

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

mmmm thinking about... every element having a variety of expressions. thinking about an aesthetic of handedness, w/ certain expressions of each element being sinister and others being dexter, while the "root" of it can be used with either. this is also me thinking abt the aesthetics of mages having physical signs of their magic use, that grow and deepen as they become more proficient in casting. marks on their hands and arms. this would probably be agnostic to the mage's usual dominant hand, or maybe it's even that a right-handed mage who focuses mostly on sinister magic will become left-handed over time. ambidexterity is almost as rare in magic as it is irl, since it's usually difficult to be truly equally good at both kinds.

this is working backwards from the typical positioning of the twins wrt each other but i think dexter magic tends to be predominantly active, easily weaponized, very direct. conversely sinister magic is gentler, more easily used subtly for healing or manipulation. or possibly it's the other way round! i'm thinking of it as them casting with their 'free' hand since emmet seems to generally stand to ingo's right, but the thing is they do quite a lot, maybe even most? of their gesturing with the hand closest to the other, so it might be the inverse.

i also do really like the "one giant adventuring party" idea i pitched a lil while ago bc i think that's fun. with protag as the sort of nominal party leader, who is in a sort of weird position of being a very powerful mage who has no idea how to do magic. it's immediately visible from looking at them bc both arms are covered in glowing rainbow swirls, suggesting near-perfect ambidexterity in apparently every magical class, but every time they cast a new spell they're just as surprised by it as everyone else. and their giant party of mostly mages and then 1 or 2 physical fighters (someone pls help me balance teamcomp my squad is dying) is also there trying to help them learn how to actually. do magic not by accident.

[egot1stical]

okay been a few days: finale thoughts.

first: i liked it. it wasn’t BAD. it was mid but it wasn’t Bad. I think my ranking of 6.7/10 is still pretty accurate lol. I enjoyed it. But now I complain

Pacing was crazy. I don’t know why we spent like, half of Simon’s runtime 1000 years in the future. And then the other half of Fionna’s world (which I cared a lot less about) was focused on like. 3 separate scarab fight scenes LOL.

Casper and Nova are fun concepts, but they’re not really. Accurate? They’re so heavy handed with their message of “petrigrof is unhealthy” that they kind of just. Get the dynamic wrong on how. Which is weird. Especially after we just had a whole Simon and Betty episode. It kind of paints Simon as some pushy guy responsible for all the hardships in the relationship. Like, uh, Simon wasn’t making all the choices in the relationship, guys? His problem was pretty much the opposite; he didn’t *make* any solid choices. Betty was the one that did whatever. Jerry literally establishes that Betty was incredibly impulsive about love and such. They’re still unhealthy; there’s still the thing where Betty ended up living her life around Simon because of the curse. But like. I don’t know why they portrayed Simon like that.

Also, they don’t even acknowledge in their heavy handedness that they’re literally like, doomed in every universe. That’s what this series has been building up to right? Simon doesn’t find the crown? They die in the mushroom war. The star universe plays out. Ooo is wiped out at the hands of vampires and they eventually starve too. But then they show Simon getting on the bus with Betty as The Right Thing To Do which is kind of crazy.

Missed opportunities for the whole show: Having F&C cast and AT cast interact aside from Simon. Simon and Ice King interaction. More Simon and Betty interaction. Crying Simon. Using the decade long animation error of Simon having white eyes before the crown as a plot device rather than just pretending it was on purpose (like what they did with the second crown in Crossover.) SIMON. AND. MARCY. INTERACTION. WHY SET IT UP IF YOURE NOT GONNA KNOCK IT DOWN. IT WASNT EVEN IN THE FUCKING MONTA

I did like the rest of it though.

The Simon and Betty moments were good, just wish they were more substantial. And just. More. The no regrets scene was really good. Also, seeing Fionna and Simon's friendship. They're really cute.

I'm a little mixed on Fionna's world becoming magical, but I feel like it works because it's just Slightly. She still learned to appreciate her life as is, but Cake gets to be herself - Especially important when you see the connections between Cake and Simon. (Cake robbed of her mind due to the lack of magic, desperately trying to find a way to get it back or communicate.)

I feel that it should've been way more emotional though. The closest we got was the "too much" scene, which I REALLY liked, but I kind of find it hard to believe Simon "I don't want to move on" Petrikov just Got Better after seeing his fiancée die and then being told that everything was his fault. But yeah, I wish we had More closure on like, his Panic Attacks or depression. He also just kind of. Learns his life matters out of nowhere. Like, good for him, but boy where did you get that from. Tell me in words. Also he should’ve thrown up upon seeing Golbetty (half joke, but more reaction please.)

I’m glad he's moving house though. I’m alright with this as an ending. (And even better with it as a season ending.) But also, get that man away from the bar.

[lefthanded-sans]

A concept: Left Handed Mordin!

Bless. Those five words are magic.

And I admit: I’ve always displayed my Mordin action figure with his gun in his left hand. Intentionally. Because Mordin’s my fave, I’m a lefty, I have left-handed needs, and I can do that.

It’s not that I have a canonical base for it, but it’s that I like the concept.

First: Mass Effect games fail to show squadmates as distinct in their handedness preferences. I probably don’t need to get into this, but fuck it, I will because I can.

I’ve noticed that no character in the Mass Effect games displays left-handedness, beyond the fact Ryder can change weapon positioning from right to left hands. Now. I haven’t peered intently at everyone. I haven’t documented every cutscene and screencapped each time someone picks something up left-handed. There’s a chance I’m missing something. There’s always that chance. Buuuuut. I tend to notice people being left-handed in 0.005 seconds, I haven’t seen anyone else in the ME fandom talk about canonical instances of handedness, and I know how media depiction of left-handedness tends to go: they forget about it. 

And the way the game is programmed shows strong right handed bias, and it blankets every squadmate in the series.

We can’t determine handedness in many cutscenes because squadmates are meant to be interchangeable. Sure, there are some dialogue and action differences depending who you pick for your party, but the games aren’t going to customize everything. Squadmates’ positions and movements will be mostly the same, whether you took Kaidan and Ashley, or Tali and Wrex. And because everyone’s going to be interchangeable like that, that means that how they’re positioned and animated - hand preference choices - don’t get individualized.

To take the example of one scene - the start of Jack’s dossier mission - the variation that you see is characters with two-handed weapons facing more forward than to the side, and Jacob getting a special crouching animation if you take him. But the characters with one handed weapons always have the same position, and characters with two handed weapons always have the same position, and it’s clear that people weren’t given individual attention. Most peoples’ reactions are generic, and then there’s a squadmate who’s more likely to be in the scene - Jacob, since he’s a starter - with an occasional special “something.”

The very nature of these cutscenes means a character won’t get attention to being differently handed. Makes sense. I get the logistics of that. But we could try to look at special cutscenes for each character, and how the squadmate holds their weapon in game, to see if there’s handedness “variation” elsewhere.

We don’t have that, as far as I’ve noticed. Every squadmate in gameplay, when they draw their weapons, holds their firearm with the right hand. 

Individual cutscenes show the same right handed gun wielding.

Everyone puts their omnitools on their left arm so they can access it with their right.

Characters are almost always animated holding items in their right hand, or gesturing with a preference to their right, even for their special cutscenes. And there haven’t been standout instances of characters doing things with left hands. Like, the most we can say with Mordin is… his thinking pose is sometimes with his right hand propping up the left. And like, that doesn’t overrule how he’s animated throughout the franchise, and every individual has some mixed lateralization traits.

Even in the comics, I see lots and lots and lots and lots of right handed actions in every species. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Paragon Lost, but I’d eat that DVD disc myself if there was a clearly left-handed character in that.

I think it’s safe enough to suggest everyone was animated with a right handed bias, and that’s why Shepard and all her squadmates appear to be right hand dominant. I’m not here to talk about how simple it is to program someone with different handedness in a video game, I’m just observing… everyone’s depicted as righties in the Mass Effect world.

Which has frankly always tickled me, because we’re dealing with aliens and robots and humans in all their diversity.

I know there’s scientific discussion on lateralization of limb usage from evoluationary perspectives, how most individuals using the same dominant hand could play into cooperative benefits within a population. Or, there’s preference arising from prior brain lateralization of tasks. Yada yada yada. All this means, potentially, is that some alien species in the ME universe could display the same phenomenon humans do: most individuals having the same hand dominant. But this is also aliens we are talking about, from different planets. There’s infinite possibilities! Their brains will be organized differently, for crying out loud; if they have a hand dominance, there’s nothing saying it has to be the right hand, and on and on and on. I don’t need to talk about all the handedness and evolutionary possibilities because there’s so many of them, and I’m sure you can creatively generate enough ideas on your own without me saying anything more.

Point is: there’s no good reason for every individual of every species in Mass Effect to be right hand dominant. I’m someone who’s extremely stickler to canon. I’ll acknowledge a character for everything down to the canonical hand dominance they display on screen. But from a realism perspective? From a perspective of ignoring game mechanics that plop people into a righty template? Chances are Shep’s got some lefties or ambidextrous babes on board.

So why not Grunt? Why not Garrus? Why not Javik? Why not Mordin? Why not 86% of the salarian species and 54% of the asari? I reject the game’s implicitly suggested canon of handedness and substitute it with my own.

Left-handed Mordin ALL the way! Give me ALL the lefty Mordin!!! It’s a little thing, but I feel like it adds more… flavor… as it were?

I don’t want to analyze Mordin’s personality and abilities as to whether he’s more stereotypically “righty” or “lefty”. That’d be applicable if we were talking human characters. But again: aliens are going to be wired differently, so I don’t feel there’s a need to sit back and say, “Lefties are usually pegged as more creative - does this apply to Mordin?”

It’s fun enough to accept Mordin, as he is, without any thought, and just scream, “Lefty Mordin!” Fly with that. Draw him like that. Pose his action figure like that. And be content.

If I had my way with handedness headcanons completely ignoring canon implications, I think I’d pick… [contemplates]

Righties: Kaidan Alenko, Suvi Anwar, Gil Brodie, EDI (just to mimic humans), Kasumi Goto, Cora Harper, Jack, Kallo Jath, Nyreen Kandros, Liam Kosta, Miranda Lawson, Jeff Moreau, Samara, Shepard, Jacob Taylor, Aria T’Loak, Liara T’Soni, Urdnot Grunt, Garrus Vakarian, Ashley Wilson

Ambidextrous: Thane Krios (born left at birth but has since trained to be indistinguishable - he’s a fucking assassin guys), Legion (a fucking inorganic, guys, why would inorganics have hand dominance?), Tali’Zorah vas Normandy (let’s just declare quarians are non-hand-dominant because why not?)

Lefties: Pelessaria B’Sayle, Nakmor Drack, Jaal Ama Darav (I feel like his species are lefty-heavy), Javik, Zaeed Massani, Morinth, Vetra Nyx, Ryder (come on she’s the closest we’ve got), Mordin Solus, Urdnot Wrex, James Vega, Reyes Vidal

People with italics are individuals I’m fairly sold on them being that handedness, for whatever reason. Others I might rethink. I haven’t headcanoned deeply for everyone!

[theconservativebrief]

Feel that chill in the air? That’s the temperature dropping — or maybe it’s just all of the fall TV shows getting spookier!!!

It’s hard to say why this might be happening, here in late October, because it’s not as if there’s a holiday celebrating everything scary and creepy coming up soon or anything like that. But in the next few days, TV will bear the debuts of Legacies, the latest show to join The CW’s Vampire Diaries universe; Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Netflix’s revamped spin on Sabrina the Teenage Witch; and the latest season of Syfy’s underrated horror anthology Channel Zero.

Oh, also, Sundance has a new season of its fabulously frenetic German series Deutschland 86, and Netflix has imported the British series Bodyguard, the biggest drama hit the BBC has aired in ages. Amazing!

Few of these shows are truly great, and as critics, we often have limited information on whether they’ll get better. (It’s rare to unprecedented for broadcast networks, especially, to send out many episodes for review beyond the first couple.) But there’s something in all of them worth checking out, especially if you’re a particular fan of their genres.

(A note: We typically only give ratings to shows where we feel we’ve seen enough episodes to judge how successful they will be in the long term. But this week, that’s most of them, as we’ve seen full seasons of Bodyguard and Channel Zero and the bulk of Deutschland.)

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After Bodyguard premiered on the BBC in August, it quickly became the channel’s biggest drama of the year — as well as one of the biggest dramas of the last decade. As writer and director Jed Mercurio’s latest work makes the jump across the pond via Netflix, it’s clear to see why the program did so well. Despite an ultra-serious premise, the show is fun.

Richard Madden, best known as Robb Stark from Game of Thrones, stars as Sgt. David Budd, a British Army veteran assigned to protect Home Secretary Julia Montague (Keeley Hawes) after impressing his bosses by foiling a suicide bomber threat. Hawes is terrific, fleshing out a role that could have been just a caricature of a career woman, and so is the rest of the cast (including The Terror standout Paul Ready). But the series is ultimately Madden’s, who handily proves he’s capable of much, much more than brooding as King in the North.

The stresses of Budd’s job and his past are tangible in his performance, as is the fact that Budd is more than a little unstable. When he obsessively replays a tape of Julia, in which she stands by her support of the war in Afghanistan, he looks more like a villain than the hero of the story. But Bodyguard doesn’t discount the ups and downs of his emotions; unlike most male protagonists, Budd is allowed to cry, to break down, without any shades of judgment cast by the camera’s gaze.

It’s an even-handedness that makes the show’s handling of the threat of terrorism feel somewhat strange. Political intrigue abounds, as per Home Secretary Montague’s position in the government, and it only falters when the show stoops to stereotypical portrayals of Muslim people, as TV series that have anything to do with foreign policy, such as Homeland, so often do.

It’s the biggest sore spot in the show, and persistent throughout the entire six-episode season. Just when you think the plot may have finally moved past it, it circles back, and leans into it in a way that ultimately pulls the rug out from under the finale.

The rest of the show, however, is a blast: It boasts terrific performances, unpredictable twists, and a stack of fanfic-favorite tropes (if the series’ title has you thinking of Whitney Houston, you’re frankly on the right track) executed with polish and flair. Though the thread of tension crackling at the show’s center doesn’t quite make it all the way through to the end, the journey is still enough of a roller coaster to make it well worth the ride. —Karen Han

All six episodes of Bodyguard are streaming on Netflix.

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For a few seasons there, The Vampire Diaries was one of TV’s most enthralling shows. It galloped when a walk would do, and it consumed wild plot twists like fire gobbling up oxygen. Like all shows that moved at such a frantic pace, it eventually became too ridiculous, but its central character dynamics were always so compelling that it could at least lean on those.

The same can’t really be said for its spinoff The Originals or, for that matter, for its grandchild, Legacies. Though Legacies is technically an Originals spinoff because it involves a character first introduced there, it is also set in Mystic Falls, the town where The Vampire Diaries was set, and it contains plenty of sexy teenage mayhem, just like The Vampire Diaries used to offer up on the regular.

Unfortunately, the pilot for Legacies feels more like a proof of concept than an exciting introduction to a TV show. Creator Julie Plec (co-creator of The Vampire Diaries and steward of this particular universe) has come up with an idea where Hope (Danielle Rose Russell) — the daughter of two Originals characters whose blood teems with vampire, werewolf, and witch DNA — starts attending a magic school that was set up in the Vampire Diaries finale. And who should work there but Vampire Diaries fan favorite Alaric (Matt Davis)?

That could be a charming premise, especially in the hands of Plec, who never met a dangerous hookup she couldn’t tease. But Legacies spends its first episode mostly racing around, trying to get everything in place for whatever nuttiness might lie ahead. By its end, you’ll have little idea of what the show looks like, beyond the vague sense that attractive 20-somethings playing teenagers will make out a lot.

Granted, there are worse reasons to make a TV show. And I’m not even all that concerned that “angst-ridden magic school” is already the premise of Syfy’s The Magicians, one of TV’s best shows. But Legacies will need a little more time in the oven before it can be as good as its grandparent. Then again, the same was true for The Vampire Diaries, which took about half a season to iron out its kinks. Maybe we should all check back in in March. —Todd VanDerWerff

Legacies debuts Thursday, October 25, at 9 pm Eastern on The CW.

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If you missed Sundance’s Deutschland 83 when it debuted in 2015 — becoming the first German-language series to air on American television — you missed a treat. The ever-so-slightly trippy tale of a young East German man pressed into service as a spy in West Germany, Deutschland made for an enjoyable companion to something like The Americans, brimming with the passions of youth rather than the muted tensions of adulthood.

It also had more action sequences, as well as a more direct portrayal of both sides of the Cold War, with multiple stories set on both sides of the Berlin Wall. The series won a Peabody and an International Emmy, and gained a surprisingly large cult following around the globe.

The follow-up series Deutschland 86 (give yourself a point if you guessed that it’s set in 1986) reunites most of the characters from the initial series, but it has the definite feel of a sequel more than it does a second season, perhaps because three years have gone by, in our reality as well as the show’s.

It’s shifted locations — though Berlin is still important, much of this season’s action takes place across several countries in Africa — as well as deepened its themes of loyalty to country, to family, and to friends. It’s reminiscent of John le Carré’s many books about George Smiley, the veteran spy whose perspective the great novelist used to dissect the end of the Cold War.

Through the first six episodes (Sundance made all 10 available to critics — a great sign of confidence — but I only had time to screen six), 86 sometimes strains to fit every single important issue and idea of the 1980s into its narrative. There’s a storyline about the AIDS crisis that feels a little tacked on, at least so far, and the expansion of the story to more fully involve the CIA similarly feels like the show is grasping for capital-I Importance just a bit.

And yet both Deutschland seasons are tapestries more than anything else. Where The Americans was intimate, Deutschland loves to lose itself in sprawl. On some level, both of these series are about how little the forces that run the universe — be they capitalist or communist — care about the lives of those living under their thumb. It’s telling that part of 86’s political storyline revolves around various countries’ response to apartheid in South Africa, a state-sanctioned creation of a permanent underclass that ostensibly democratic governments have to be shamed into denouncing.

But in the world of Deutschland, people are always sanctioning the creation of underclasses. It’s just something humans do. The series is at its best when it captures the small, human moments that play out amid these flashes of chaos — stolen kisses and thwarted connections and pitched hand-to-hand battles. It’s not perfect, but if it strove for clean perfection, it wouldn’t be nearly as good. —TV

Deutschland 86 debuts Thursday, October 25, at 11 pm Eastern on Sundance. It will then air two new episodes per week, on Thursdays and Fridays, for three weeks, before airing its remaining four episodes on Thursday, November 15; Friday, November 16; and Saturday, November 17. If that confused you, you’re probably best off just streaming episodes as they appear on Sundance’s website. Deutschland 83 is available on Hulu.

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Syfy’s Channel Zero is one of TV’s hidden treats. Each new season of six episodes adapts a new creepypasta, those supposedly true, terrifying tales that lurk in backwater corners of the internet, like the subreddit r/nosleep. They usually take the basic idea of the story (a bizarre kids’ show, or a staircase appearing in the middle of nowhere), then filtering it through creator Nick Antosca’s sensibility, which means all three seasons of the show so far have indulged in rich ruminations on family relationships, alongside odd creatures lurching about empty suburban backstreets.

The new fourth season, The Dream Door, adapts a story by Charlotte Bywater whose premise is, more or less, “What if, all of a sudden, there was a door in your basement where there wasn’t one before?” Antosca and director E.L. Katz (who directs all six episodes) turn this question into an examination of marriage, of how little you might know about your partner, of what might be hiding behind their magic door that’s not hiding behind yours.

The two are ably assisted by Maria Sten and Brandon Scott as Jill and Tom, the couple at the story’s center, and by a terrifying demonic creation named Pretzel Jack, a contortionist clown drawn from Jill’s dreams and/or nightmares. He flings himself about the screen like a Slinky, knife in hand, all the better to stab anybody who might hurt Jill. And that number could include Tom.

If you’ve watched the other three seasons of Channel Zero, The Dream Door could feel slightly derivative, particularly of the second season, No-End House (still the series’ best). If nothing else, it only underlines how same-y so many creepypastas are. So many of these tales resemble the empty, modern homes they’re often set in, formed by the same cookie cutter but filled with ancient, primal terrors nonetheless, as if acknowledging that the scariest thing about modernity is how it numbs you in a way that distracts you from what you should really be scared of.

The Dream Door sags considerably in its midsection, but it ends well. And any time Pretzel Jack appears on screen, it’s understandable if you feel low-grade terrified. But should Channel Zero be granted more seasons (please, Syfy!), it might do the series well to leave the drab confines of suburbia that both it and creepypastas in general can feel trapped in behind. —TV

Channel Zero: The Dream Door debuts Friday, October 26, at 11 pm Eastern on Syfy. One new episode will air each night at 11 pm through Wednesday, October 31. Hey, that’s Halloween! Stream previous seasons on Shudder.

PBS’s Native America (9 pm Eastern on Tuesdays) is a massive four-part documentary miniseries uncovering the history of Native Americans across the Western Hemisphere. If you have any interest at all in this subject matter, it’s well worth checking out.

Paramount Network’s long-beleaguered TV miniseries adaptation of Heathers will finally air on American television, after several months of delay and the complete removal of one episode that was dubbed “too controversial.” It’s being burned off, two episodes per night, from Thursday, October 25, through Monday, October 29. You can also watch the whole thing on Paramount’s website. We weren’t offered screeners, but the reviews from critics who were aren’t promising.

Netflix’s big launch for the week is its new version of Sabrina the Teenage Witch now entitled Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Friday). Read our full review here.

It’s Christmas movie season on Hallmark again, with the debut of Christmas at Pemberley Manor (8 pm Eastern on Saturday). Hey, we almost made it to Halloween before Christmas movie season started. Almost!

Two brand new late-night talk shows launch on Sunday: E! and Busy Philipps’s Busy Tonight (10 pm Eastern on Sunday) and Netflix’s Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj (Sunday). We’ve seen neither, but we wish Philipps and Minhaj only the best.

Original Source -> This week’s new TV: a Vampire Diaries spinoff and the BBC’s biggest hit in years

via The Conservative Brief