#and im allowing to have my opinion about it

[thephantomtheory]

"arcane s2 was rushed" "pacing all over the place" "so many loose ends" oh my god can we stop

i will admit that maybe each episode could have used a bit more breathing room to allow certain plotlines and characters to develop, but it's being nitpicky.

remember house of the dragon? everyone thought s2 was oh so boring, "they're taking too much time, too much character development" "there's not enough fight scenes" i mean shows genuinely can never win no matter what they do. if arcane added 3 more episodes i guarantee you people would still be whining about pacing.

the great thing about arcane is how it doesn't insult its audience. the writers expect us to have some form of media literacy to draw our own conclusions, and to trust the writers to tell us when there is something that we need to know. the writers allow us to fill in some gaps ourselves with the information they've handed to us. "what about the oppression of zaun, did they just forget to address that after the war?" did we watch the same ending? no, obviously not. we saw sevika walk into the council room at the end, clearly as a voice for zaun. it shows a step in the right direction. plus, there's no reason to believe that cait doesn't still hold a position of power. especially being in a relationship with vi, do we really think that piltover will not be held accountable for the damage done to zaun over the years? that they will not try to bring forth change? these are things that we are supposed to infer for ourselves, and the fact that people feel they need to be spoon-fed every detail is frightening.

it has been stated over and over again that although these characters will not be the center of their next projects, there WILL be more series within this world. loose ends are not tied up for a reason. let's allow the mystery to pique our intrigue, and guide us into watching the next shows to search for the answers. although arcane is over, i doubt it's the last we'll hear about piltover & zaun.

i really don't mean to come off angry or sow discord among the fanbase. these are just my personal thoughts and opinions that come from a growing frustration with some of the criticism i've seen about arcane s2. and hey, i can appreciate criticism, but in this case i don't quite think it's deserved. the labor of love in every aspect of this show is the most insane thing to witness and im so grateful to have seen it, and just enjoyed ride.

[captainzigo]

apparently this is dangerously close to an opinion that some lame bronies have so i want to clarify a couple things:

you are super allowed to dislike g4. to want to change things. to want to ignore it and do you own thing. or to simply not care about it. but in that case, why shackle yourself to it at all?

if i make a reboot of a story that’s my own thing, but i spend half the story talking about how it’s a new story that’s doing its own thing, what’s the point? “this isn’t friendship is magic!” i get that. i got it the first time you told me. what is it tho?

i came to this table with zero ties to friendship is magic. it’s g5 that put them there. g5 keeps contextualizing itself as a sequel. so its treatment of g4 as being pointless and stupid is weird as fuck.

and further, if i make a sequel where i tell the exact same story because it explicitly didn’t work the first time around, isn’t that fucking weird? more than just recycling a story, i’m saying that other story was pointless. less than pointless.

the story is worth telling again. by all means do so. but you’ve framed it in a comparative way, and you have nothing to say about the comparison. g5 makes no effort to deal with this bizarre scenario theyve created, so it has to exist at face value.

if you want to say that the stuff in g4 will fade with time, that it didn’t work, or whatever you want to say about it that’s fine. but why? if you’ve got nothing to say about it, then who gives a shit?

i can say right now i think the friendship school was a bad, fascist idea that will ultimately be seen as a massive blunder. but if i turn that statement into a story then im going to add ramifications. im going to say why it’s important to point out.

g5’s treatment of g4 is nihilistic slop. pointless misery. a tedious distraction from the story they wanted to tell. and if you showed me the two shows in a vacuum and told me that g5 was a hit piece, i would belive you. and if you showed me just g5 in a vacuum, i would fast forward through the g4 parts.

what was the point of making G5 a sequel? who was asking for this? was it bronies?

i love G5. its fun and cheeky. the absolute worst parts of it by far are the lame nods to G4

if you don’t care about anything they did in g4, any of the themes they had, and of the changes they made to the world, any of the characters they made any of the world they made, any of it at all,,, then why make a sequel? why not a reboot or a remake or starting from scratch or anything else? its not a bigger world with more lore if you disregard litterally all the world and all the lore.

was it for brand recognition? you can literally use the same characters tho. literally put twilight in there as just a new character with the same name and then tell a different story. that’s what all the other generations of mlp did. old fans will like seeing twilight again even if she is deferent. and new fans will get a new character made for them that has a bigger presence if and only if they want to see it.

the way g5 presents g4 actually just feels like a fuck you to g4. the characters you love? they died and nothing they did ever mattered. the togetherness they created with other creatures? gone. completely gone. the togetherness the litterally made with the three pony tribes? nonsense. even just their legacy? undone. the litteral cities they built? ash. no crystal empire. no ponyville. it’s all gone and it never made a difference. ponies still hate eachother. they still lack any shared identity. they don’t even remember a time when they did. there’s no yaks. dragons are reclusive and feared. no griffons. no changelings.

yeah sure there’s one girl who remembers, and she can like talk to twilight posthumously, but they don’t seem to want to do anything with that. and that kind of grand save-the-world plot doesn’t really fit the genre they seem to be going for

it really feels like they hate g4. the whole thing reads like a bitter mockery of it. if i saw their treatment of G4 by itself, i would assume it was like a hit piece. or atleast some edgy brony nonsense. G5 to me is a fun silly and sometimes exciting cartoon because i choose to just ignore all the G4 stuff. that twilight sparkle? no relation. big coincidence.

i’m not even trying to glorify g4 id just like to say. it really wanted to be something grander than the cartoon it was and it pulled it off to very mixed results. it had a lot of major flops, and some very questionable decisions. like their full time commitment to a colonialist fantasy in the last few seasons? but i still love it. and im not really interested in watching a sequel that hates it. hence my cognitive dissonance

[stevethehairington]

god damn people get SOOO butthurt about people not liking 11's era

[bonefall]

i found a god awful doc about this one person (who, too, is a god awful being) trying to reason why mudClaw would be a bad leader. I'ma try to find the doc but meanwhile I'll submit this because someone could have the link, I'll need your honest thought about it bcs why are we defending oneWhiker now

Anon, buddy, I'm gonna have to sit you down and gently discourage you from casually calling random human people "god awful beings" in my inbox like this. Not when you're just talking about relatively basic media analysis. That isn't ok or normal.

I hope that when I speak harshly, it's coming from a place of condemning hurtful actions and the tangible harm that they cause. I don't appreciate people trying to get me to directly beef with other people directly by requesting I break down their individual posts or analysis documents (when I ask for people to share links, it's so I can see and prepare to counter the ideas because they usually "float downstream" if they get popular); but in a second ask, you linked this document and there's nothing harmful in it. In fact, it's got a far more neutral tone than I'd take if I was writing an analysis about Mudclaw.

If you couldn't tell the difference between a document like this and one that contains active abuse apologia rhetoric, I would be filled with concern. But I don't think you read it. I think you maybe skimmed it and stopped reading, or just heard the title.

Because this document literally says this;

and your takeaway, something you felt so strongly about that you came to me hoping I'd validate it, was "Why Are We Defending Onewhisker Now."

Art is a tool we can use to explore our own biases, and teach us something about ourselves. That overwhelming sense of anger and disgust that you probably felt when you saw "Mudclaw Would Be A Bad Leader" made you jump to an emotional conclusion and you assumed something that was not said. I know the feeling. You might have had a reactionary impulse.

You are not a bad person for doing that-- you're human. You can grow.

Why did it upset you this much, though? Is there something very personal about this that set you off? ...are you spending a lot of time in spaces online that keep you angry? These are questions for you to reflect with.

I do not know the owner of this document or "what they've done," if anything, so I will not link it, because their Discord is at the bottom of the doc. If they are truly a "god awful being", please do not engage, just block and move on. Nothing is accomplished by following around 'A Bad Guy' and boosting their cat takes.

But something VERY bad WOULD be accomplished if I indulged an anon for a situation I know nothing about and unwittingly became part of a harassment campaign. How do I know that you've got good intentions?

I usually just delete unsolicited links to docs and videos that are 'fightbaiting' like this-- trying to get me to beef publicly with a 3rd person. But I've seen more of these than usual lately so I would like to try and cool it down.

[lesbianralzarek]

trying to not complain about the discrepancy between how much content fictional women and poc have vs the white dudes in every fucking fandom im in, because no one owes me fanart/fic and i can make shit myself, but holy fuck can any of you name a woman?

[lupins-hehim-pussy]

I wanna know ur Fontaine msq criticisms 👁️👁️👂I’m all ears

I'm not sure if you wanted me to talk about this secretly or publicly but! Here I go!

The TLDR: Fontaine MSQ aestheticised prison, poverty, child abuse, the justice system/court and didn't properly address any of it.

More:

Focalors/Furina has way too much of a sympathetic angle for a dictator who's lets people drown with her inaction.

Neuvillette feels Bad for sentencing some people to death/prison, but that's it. He's one of the most powerful people in Fontaine. If he felt like there are systemic injustices, I.E sending an abused Child to prison, he should be the first person to DO something about it, not just cry and be sad so the audience can be like aw, that's complex character writing isn't it? No it's not! And guilt doesn't absolve you!!!!!!! (These are stuff we deal with in OTCOJ read my fic now /j)

Meropide has children in it, both Sentenced there (Wriothesley) and BORN THERE (Lanoire), and this is just a quirk of the place. Not only that, Meropide accepts prisoners of all genders and crimes. There are abusers and abuse victims in one place. Do you know how bad that is? How much potential for crimes to happen in a place like that— oh wait, Meropide isn't under Fontaine's jurisdiction. If you are assaulted as an inmate it literally means nothing to the court.

Wriothesley had no qualifications when he took over. Depending on how long he lived on the streets, how old he was when he killed his parents, how old he was when he was first taken in by the orphanage, etc, the man might never have more than 4–5 years of formal education. Sigewinne probably had to teach him how to write reports. And do Meropide's spreadsheets. Edit because I forgot to elaborate on this one: This isn't a point brought up anywhere, which is bad, because when poverty and incarceration robs you of a proper education (and the rights to vote in many places too, too, by the way), it reduces your prospects for jobs, reduces many people's ability to get a home etc etc. Wriothesley was just, narratively, Given his position.

Meropide is an industrialized prison, and they portray this as a good thing. Prisoners are paid in coupons for their labour, and this is also portrayed as a good thing.

The One-Meal-A-Day reform was something Paimon gushed about being so great of a perk, that people might want to go to jail for food (could be interesting and reflective of systemic poverty if MHY had brains, but they don't, so I was just Pissed because essentially all Paimon wanted to say was "Prison isn't so bad, but still don't go to prison guys! Prison labour is really hard!"). By the way, in most real-world prisons they are obligated to feed you three meals a day. Because that's how much food a human needs. MHY went with one meal just so they can say "if you want to eat more, you have to work." And then the welfare meal is a goddamn gacha. So imagine you're a starving child who's too weak to work in the fucking robot assembly line, and you wander up for your first meal in 24 hours, only to luck in with a shit one. I'd kill myself.

They wrote Wriothesley, who's a victim of the system, into a guy who's say shit like "I'm the Duke I can do whatever I want" for a cool moment where he choke-slams an inmate (I know he was a bad guy. But also, in copaganda when cops are violent/disregarding protocols, they are always only portrayed to do that against bad guys, so what does our critical thinking tells us about this one?) They wrote Wriothesley, who was an inmate of a prison so bad, so notorious that it is the literal boogeyman of Fontaine, that has a legal (???) fighting pit, with an administrator who abuses his position to be unreasonable, to willingly stay in the place and become an Administrator who would choke-slam an inmate while saying a cool line about how he has the power to do whatever he wants. They wrote him, the guy who had to be fed on the streets by melusines, to think one-meal-a-day was a good enough reform (while he spends god-knows how much on his boat). This wasn't a victim-turns-into-abuser narrative either, they want all this to be seen as positive character growth.

And then, the final kicker is, they gloss over his entire abuse. You can only read about these shit in his profile, which most people don't because they don't Have Him or doesn't care to unlock it/read it online, and they jammed his entire backstory into a flaccid info-dump at the end of his character story quest. This man isn't Allowed to feel abused and neglected and show any reaction to it within the narrative of Fontaine itself, because if they actually Gave Weight to what happened to him, they'd have to confront THE FUCKING JUSTICE SYSTEM they had NO PLANS on criticising. I don't think they ever explicitly said the fucking Crime-Theatre nonsense was Bad either.

I could go on, but this is already so long. But yeah, I hope this gave you an idea.

[oceanwithouthermoon]

ive been unhealthily fixated on kubosai for the past few weeks, i just have no idea how to put it into words. kuboyasu aren and saiki kusuo are in love btw

[sergeifyodorov]

whatever happened to the sanctity of Making Your Own Post

[lucabyte]

🐮

[todayisafridaynight]

sometimes i think about daigo interacting with the mundane and thinking about mine and i throw up a little bit ngl

[wikiangela]

this might be a hot take but buck not dropping everything to be there for everyone (yes, including eddie and chris) and not trying to involve himself and trying to fix things he can't, and learning that he doesn't need to always be useful, is actually healthy and mature and character growth and not at all ooc

like, maybe sometimes we need to put ourselves first and have a nice relaxing evening after a hard day, especially when there's nothing we could really do? or do y'all like him only when he's useful to other characters?

(a reminder that buck almost lost his father figure: maybe he wasn't in a place emotionally to be there for eddie that evening, and weren't eddie's parents still there? why would he be there too when maybe eddie was talking things out with them? like I said before, we've really exaggerated buck's role in chris' life)

actually eddie asking buck to talk to chris about this situation was too much imo bc it's not buck's place (which he recognized and acknowledged and isn't this good for him?!)

eddie's storyline had little to nothing to do with buck, and buck still managed to be there for him like the best friend he is, without overstepping, and while recognizing that he can't really do anything to help aside from being there - and he doesn't need to physically be there 24/7 bc what for? to hold eddie's hand and tell him everything's gonna be okay? bffr rn

idk, some of the takes I see make me wonder if half of this fandom even likes buck

putting tags i wrote before here bc I'm not retyping all this but I decided fuck it, i actually wanna post it lol

[scary-yuri]

I love when I have to block someone bc they describe in vivid detail how they want to hurt my f/o :3 /sar

[blueskittlesart]

also to everyone contacting me about the tiktok--I have seen it, the reposter did not contact me before posting on tiktok but has since contacted me on instagram and they obeyed my repost credit policy so i'm tentatively ok with it!

[storywestistrash]

i am actually so tired of the way westerners treat eastern europeans

[significant-narratives]

i am once again requesting that non-leafs fans be barred from making leafs related posts. you literally don’t even go here!

[arshem]

hello it is me the da2 finisher ✌️

it was good and i enjoyed. it has a few imperfections but nothing that really impeded my enjoyment. merrill good. fenris good. varric is varric (positive). i liked avaline more than i thought i would. um. isabela likers i am sorry but. i hardly knew her before she um. left. umm anders likers how's it going. your life is different than mine but that's okay 🫶 oh i almost forgot about bethany. i have no problems with her but well. she wasnt around much.

anyway like i said before i think the setting is good and i also think that the way the story is told is neat and even if i dont always love it, it does a good job of justifying what feels like... a lack of closure at the end? also that cutscene at the end was. hmm. 2010 ugly 🫶