#and its even more interesting during some sort of plotline where they have to stick together

[puhpandas]

the sense that cassie would knock into tony

[hellsbellschime]

Ok, so I’ve always noticed some of the racism on TVD , most notably the treatment of Marcel and Emily, and the founders day parade episode (which, as a Virginian I have to say that the episode made me low-key ashamed when I re-watched it years later). But it took me a while to catch onto the racism on Bonnie‘s character. I was wondering if you have done a meta about it and could link me to it, or if you could do one?

Well it only took me like a year but here ya go!

Despite the fact that The Vampire Diaries is a show that was ostensibly created for girls and young women, the show undeniably seems to lack a certain level of respect or basic interest in its female characters. And while every single significant female character demonstrates that misogynistic point of view in one way or another, one of the most unique, distinct, and apparent instances of The Vampire Diaries' sexism is on peak display with one of it's leading female characters, Bonnie Bennett.

Bonnie obviously occupies a particularly interesting role in the series because she's the only black leading character, and it's also hard to miss that The Vampire Diaries universe has a pretty apparent issue with it's non-white characters as well.

The race problem on TVD expresses itself in a few different, extremely blatant ways. The most obvious issue with people of color on The Vampire Diaries is that those who are actually PoC within the narrative itself are typically pushed to the sidelines and relegated to supporting players at best, but there is also an issue with presenting PoC performers who are white-passing as white characters.

None of the PoC characters in The Vampire Diaries get very good treatment, but the series seems to be exceptionally problematic when it comes to its presentation of black characters. While black people arguably get more representation than any other non-white characters in this fictional world, they are almost all outrageously attractive, extremely light-skinned, and conveniently lacking in any emotional needs or inner life that needs to be addressed within the narrative, seemingly designed to show up, perform whatever service is necessary, and once again fade into the background if not just be killed off entirely.

This is an issue with every black character in the series, but given that Bonnie is the most significant and prominent in the series, it comes as no surprise that she was affected the most intensely by these biases. It's one thing to be a black character, it's one thing to be a female character, but being a black female character in the TVD universe is exceptionally crippling. But how exactly did the misogynoir of The Vampire Diaries completely neutralize Bonnie Bennett as a character?

Bonnie was mistreated, dismissed, and outright ignored in many big and small ways throughout the course of the show. But, a lot of that treatment can be pretty easily sorted into a few categorizations. The Vampire Diaries went through a pretty seismic shift from the start of the show to the end, but it has always been a series that falls primarily into two genres, the supernatural thriller genre and the romance genre.

The show pretty clearly transformed from a show that was firstly a supernatural story with a romantic subgenre into an almost entirely romantic story with a supernatural backdrop, but it's safe to say that the vast majority of the plotlines were either focused on magic or love. And, it's not particularly difficult to see how Bonnie was forcibly excluded from a predominant storyline in each genre, even when it made absolutely no sense.

Bonnie was a completely inexperienced witch at the start of TVD, so her cluelessness and powerlessness made a certain amount of sense at that point. But by the end of season 2 at the very latest, it seems fully established that she is one of the most powerful living witches in the world, and for the bulk of the series it is plainly acknowledged that she is one of the most powerful witches who ever lived. Which is exactly why Bonnie's position in the narrative is baffling.

In quite a few instances, Bonnie's magical abilities seem to be somewhat inconsistent, at least in the sense that, if she can solve some of the biggest problems that the Mystic Falls gang is confronted with, then it's very odd that she can't solve the others. And while plenty of characters in TVD are occasionally used as plot devices rather than characters, Bonnie seems to be the one who is specifically designed to show up, fix what needs fixing, and then become set dressing once she's no longer necessary as the mystical solution to every unsolvable issue.

And this is actually a significant problem with the witches at large, but of course is most recognizable with Bonnie because she is the most prominent witch. While not all witches are women of color, it seems like they are far more represented in that faction of the magical world than in any other. So then, it's interesting that the witches are presented as servants of nature who are meant to selflessly restore order to the world without actually using their abilities for their own personal gain.

Of course there are plenty of witches who appear to use their powers for themselves, but still, it's incredibly meaningful that the lone black main character in the series is constantly sacrificing herself for the sake of the otherwise entirely white cast of characters. It's even more meaningful that she seems to willingly put herself in the line of fire every time, and it's also extremely telling that she suffers and even dies without complaint for the sake of other people.

And while TVD has never been the kind of show to linger on emotional moments for too long, Bonnie seems to stick out like a sore thumb in this circumstance as well. Most of the main and even supporting characters have moments where their pain is acknowledged and at least has a second to breathe, but there are quite a few situations where Bonnie should be upset but isn't, or where her emotional journey as a character literally takes place off screen.

This lack of acknowledgment and nearly complete omission of an internal emotional life that doesn't involve sacrificing herself for her friends only further makes Bonnie feel like a plot device instead of a character. And, while no character needs a romantic relationship to make their character complete, it is incredibly relevant that, on a series that was built largely on a foundation of romance and arguably became a completely romantically driven show by its end, only one of the female leads was pretty much never presented as a viable love interest.

Nearly every character is either threatened or charmed into doing what someone else wants them to at some point during The Vampire Diaries, however, Bonnie's charm-to-threaten ratio seems to lean very heavily in favor of threatening. That in itself wouldn't necessarily be a huge issue, but it seems to punish Bonnie in a way that is so severe that it's completely illogical.

Trying to intimidate Elena or Caroline, people who at best have the strength of a baby vampire and at worst are as powerful as a normal human, makes sense. But trying to strongarm the most powerful witch in the world instead of just convincing her to do what you ask seems like an incredibly dangerous and completely baffling decision.

And yet, that is how Bonnie is forced to do nearly everything that she doesn't want to do in eight seasons of the series. By the end of season 2, TVD has canonically confirmed that Bonnie is powerful enough to destroy Klaus Mikaelson, and yet people like Klaus, Katherine, and even vampires as young as Damon get Bonnie to do things by simply bullying or even assaulting her into doing it. And what does Bonnie typically do in response? Absolutely nothing.

At a certain point, the consistent contrast between Bonnie's mystical strength and the way that people treat her in order to use that strength becomes a pretty gaping plot hole. And while it's not unheard of for someone to try to sweet talk Bonnie into joining their team, it is almost always done by a character who is far less powerful than she is and who is completely irrelevant to the narrative at large.

In contrast to characters like Elena and Caroline, the distinction between them becomes even more obvious. Perhaps a thin argument could be made that because Elena is a doppelganger that makes her a tad more unique, but when one of the most powerful creatures on the planet was wrapped around Caroline's finger, it really begs the question, why wasn't anyone ever as invested or even obsessed with Bonnie as they were with the other two female leads on the series?

After all, Elena's love was consistently treated as if it was the greatest prize that anyone could possibly win, and the two male leads were completely obsessed with her and willing to do anything they could to try to win her over. And despite the fact that Elena was at the center of the love triangle that was a significant driving force behind the story for the entire series, she still managed to score a few love interests that weren't Salvatores throughout the show's eight seasons as well.

And, while Caroline was actually treated as more of the reject love interest in comparison to the unattainable Elena, her record with romance is also incredibly varied. Even though she was portrayed at best as the consolation prize and at worst the abuse victim, she did have some sort of romantic relationship with the two male leads in the show. Or at least, that is how The Vampire Diaries chose to portray it.

In addition to her horrorshow with Damon and her incredibly brief marriage with Stefan, Caroline is also a love interest for Klaus, Matt, Tyler, and disgustingly, Alaric. Arguably the only main male character who doesn't serve as Caroline's love interest or potential love interest at any point is Jeremy.

Although this laundry list of love interests can be partially excused by the fact that Caroline is characterized as someone who wants to date a lot, the contrast bet0ween characters like Caroline and Elena and characters like Bonnie is astonishing.

Over a nearly decade-long run, Bonnie's only legitimate leading men are Jeremy, Elena's kid brother who Bonnie will willingly die for but who also prefers a literal dead person over her at one point, and Enzo, her epic love romance that comes about at the very end of the series in a relationship that almost entirely develops off-screen.

Of course, female characters do not need love interests to validate their characterization or very existence, however in an environment where every single barely significant supporting character seems to get at least two love interests, it's incredibly telling that Bonnie Bennett gets two important love stories in eight seasons of storytelling.

It seems even more relevant that the show seemingly went out of its way to sidestep almost any and all opportunities for romance in Bonnie's character arc. Whether it was Kol, Kai, or Damon Salvatore, there were quite a few instances where there was a clear and easy route to develop a love interest for Bonnie in a way that made sense and had a pretty solid amount of audience support, and yet the series always went out of its way to avoid it.

In stark contrast, Caroline is still seen as a viable option for a burgeoning love story when she's pregnant, and Elena is an acceptable love interest when she's literally unconscious. And yet, in a series that began with romance as its secondary genre and that evolved into a romance series with a supernatural backdrop, Bonnie is supposedly not as appealing of a love interest as Elena and Caroline regardless of any circumstances, no matter how insane.

If these issues existed in a vacuum then they might be excusable, but considering how poorly The Vampire Diaries treated its female characters and black characters, it's pretty much impossible to avoid the reality that Bonnie Bennett's entire character arc was likely hamstrung by the fact that she was a black girl.

In any reasonable circumstances, Bonnie would have arguably been at the center of every single supernatural storyline, and she logically would have been a far more appealing love interest to any powerful characters in the series. But instead she spent the vast majority of her screentime with her inner characterization ignored, her personal development unexplored, and serving as little more than a glorified deus ex machina who didn't even want her friends to bother mourning her when she literally sacrificed her life for them.

Representation was always an issue in The Vampire Diaries universe, and unfortunately it seems like Bonnie was the definition of their token black character. Although the series had eight entire years to course correct and had many seasons where they were desperate for new ideas and decent character development, the racism and misogyny of the series seemingly prevented them from ever tapping into the enormous untapped potential of someone who should have been one of their flagship lead characters.

[nickrobinsondaily]

Nick Robinson Was Done Playing High School, Until He Met A Teacher

The actor opened up about voicing his opinions online, his celebrity crush, and shooting sex scenes with Kate Mara. By Isabel Jones

You could be forgiven for assuming Nick Robinson is years younger than his true age of 25. The actor has been playing high school students for a full decade, beginning with a four-season run on ABC Family sitcom Melissa & Joey and concluding (or so he hopes) with FX on Hulu miniseries A Teacher. 

In fact, Robinson vowed to end his journey as a perpetual teen after playing the eponymous Simon Spier in coming-of-age film Love, Simon. “I’ve graduated, hopefully,” he told Ellen DeGeneres in a 2018 interview, “and won’t be going back.”

Well, it wasn’t long before A Teacher nullified Robinson’s promise, returning him to the world of pep rallies and study sessions. 

“I hoped that no one would watch that interview where I said that I would never play high school again,” he tells me over Zoom with a laugh, looking rugged and definitely over-18 in an unpretentious 66˚North beanie and flannel shirt. “I'd made that ultimatum, and then I read the scripts for the series, and I met with [creator Hannah Fidell] and Kate [Mara], and I kind of went, ‘Shit, one more.’”

Robinson joins our call from British Columbia, where he’s currently filming miniseries Maid opposite Margaret Qualley. We delay the interview for 15 minutes so he can get a COVID-19 test — a process he must undergo three times a week while in production. He tells me he had a mild case of the virus earlier this year, back when he was living in Williamsburg and “doing a play.”

That ever-so-casually-noted “play” happens to be Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway, aka the “highest-grossing American play ever.” Judging by our 40 minutes together, 2,500 miles and a computer screen apart, Robinson doesn’t strike me as the type of actor who eagerly name-drops his prestigious projects or A-list co-stars. He greets me by name when he comes on screen — a simple act of courtesy that feels largely forgotten in a year marked by hate crimes and awkward interactions made from beneath face coverings. From his unfussy style to his nearly-dormant Instagram account, Robinson seems like an actor committed to just that: acting (and also maybe being a pleasant and approachable person). He takes questions and answers seriously (even when they’re about bagel toppings), pausing to find the perfect articulation for the words in his head. The celebrity of it all doesn’t appear to be on his radar.

On the rare occasions when he has updated his 1.5 million Instagram followers over the past few months, it’s been to encourage them to vote. 

“If there's a time to say something, it's now,” he tells me, his passion for the topic evident in the minutes-long monologue of sorts that follows. “To be honest, I feel like I should be doing more. There have been a million times where my finger has kind of hovered over ‘post’ or ‘share’ and not done it because there is this thing where people would be like, ‘Oh, just stick to acting, we don't need to hear your opinions,’ but fuck that.” 

With A Teacher, Robinson is able to participate in a project that not only highlights his acting skill, but furthers a conversation. He plays Eric, a high school student who has an affair with his teacher, Claire (Mara). Unlike many of the predecessors who have tread this same cinematic territory, the series is as dedicated to drawing the viewer into the illicit relationship as it is to immersing them in the brutal and enduring aftermath.

“The show does a little bit of a bait-and-switch on the audience, which is intentional,” Robinson explains. “It makes them complicit in Eric and Claire's relationship.” 

Ultimately, though, A Teacher’s stance on its subject matter is clear. “Everyone involved in this production took this story very seriously. It wasn't to make light of these kinds of relationships. It wasn't to glorify them. It really was to make a character study on what happens to these people after the headlines,” he says. “There are a lot of headlines, a lot of clickbait, and there’s not a lot of follow-up.” 

The role of Eric wasn’t an easy one to play, and the emotional toll was heavy. “That's something that I'm trying to get better at,” Robinson said of shrugging his character off at the end of the day. But this particular journey compelled him.  

“I was really interested in exploring how male survivors internalized this kind of trauma,” he says. “And oftentimes it's really suppressed for years.”

“The relationship is often used as a kind of social currency for the survivors. They're given high-fives and told ‘you're the man’ and all that. So, the push and pull of that, of wanting that to be true, but also dealing with some very complicated emotions internally, I think was what a lot of the second half of the show is about: Eric grappling with the reaction of his peers versus what he's actually feeling inside.” 

That said, Robinson’s research would be for naught if he and Mara didn’t have chemistry. Luckily, their connection was instant. 

Robinson extolled Mara’s “wicked sense of humor,” which came in handy during some of their more “intimate” scenes.

“You kind of have to laugh at some of those scenes when you're doing it,” he told me. “If you did a macro view it would just be two people with a bunch of burly grips around and camera operators and lights on you. So it's not actually an intimate experience.” 

Though Robinson’s still playing high school, the rules have changed. The laugh-tracks have fallen away and the happy endings once found at, say, the top of a ferris wheel, are just out of reach. His performance in A Teacher is a departure from a body of work that tends to skew “teen,” but it’s a defining one. 

Read on below as Robinson tells us his favorite “long and bad” joke, recounts his first kiss, and names his favorite Robert. 

What's the last thing you do before you fall asleep? 

Honestly, especially recently, the last thing before I do before I fall asleep is check the news and check social media. Probably not healthy. 

If nothing else, can we please just end this to change the news cycle? Because it's crazy-making. The whole thing is just, it's constant turnovers. I'd just like some peace and quiet.

The plotline of 2020 is really insane and implausible. It jumped the shark a long time ago.

Who’s your favorite villain?

Don Draper.

You see him as a villain?

I do. But that's the best part — most of the really good villains have some humanity and are maybe slightly ambiguous, but I think ultimately, yeah, he's a villain.

What was the first album you ever owned?

“Who Let the Dogs Out” is one of the first songs I really remember having playing, in like kindergarten, so I didn't buy it. But I had a portable CD player, which was really cool. And I had a Roy Orbison Greatest Hits CD that I liked a lot.

Do you still listen to that?

Sometimes. Yeah. I was also a big Elvis fan growing up. A lot of the oldies. And I do still listen to that, but there are  newer folks now that I prefer, I guess.

What's your favorite cheesy pickup line?

Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?

A classic.

It's a classic. It's really the first one that popped into my head.

I'm going to assume you've never used it in real life?

Never.

If you ran for office, what would your slogan be?

I don't think I would ever run for office. It's not something that appeals to me, but I did see a good hat the other day that said “Make Orwell Fiction Again,” that I thought was kind of funny.

Name one place you've never been but have always wanted to go.

Vietnam, I would say, or Thailand. Southeast Asia generally. Egypt ... I'd like to go to North Africa as well sometime. A friend of mine shot a movie in Vietnam and fell in love with the country and it's been on my to-do list for a while.

Read the rest of the interview on Instyle

[iamnotawomanimagod]

The 100 for the indepth ask thing!

Thank you, my friend!! Always happy to hear from you 🥰

Top 5 favourite characters:

1. Octavia

2. Murphy

3. Emori

4. Echo

5. Jasper

Other characters you like:

I will always have a lot of love in my heart for Monty, Raven, Lincoln, and Lexa. 

Least favourite characters:

Clarke, Bellamy, Kane, and Abby.  

OTPs: 

Linctavia and Memori 

NoTPs: 

Bellarke, Kabby, a handful of others that are more “meh” than outright “no.” 

Favourite friendships:

Jasper and Monty; Raven and Emori; Monty and Bellamy; Octavia, Jasper, and Monty; Indra and Octavia; Clarke and Roan; Raven and Echo. 

Favourite family: 

Spacekru! Forever! Although the Diyoza-Blakes give them a run for their money.

Favourite episodes: 

I’m a sucker for good standalones, even when the rest of the season sucks, or the episodes don’t make much thematic sense in context of the season/show. Fair warning. That being said: 

1x05, 1x08, 2x08, 2x12, 3x04, 4x07, 4x08, 4x10, 4x13*, 5x02, 5x11, and uhhh that’s when the show ended right**??

*For someone who hates s4, I sure do like a lot of individual episodes from it.

**There were storylines and moments I liked in s6 and s7, but no one episode stands out for me in either season.

Favourite season/book/movie:

Probably s2 or s5.

Favourite quotes:

Pretty much all the Trigedasleng lol.

“Yu gonplei ste odon.”

“Gomon gon oson.”

“Jus drein, jus daun.”

What a fun and silly conlang. 

Best musical moment:

I really love this moment, where Raven takes The Chip, and “Thousand Eyes” by Of Mouse and Men plays. Lindsey does such an incredible job portraying Raven’s sorrow, pain, and desperation. It’s so chilling when the music picks up and gets louder, and Raven slowly realizes that her pain is gone, and she looks up and sees ALIE for the first time. We as an audience realize how dangerous Raven will be, on ALIE’s side, but all Raven feels is wonder and relief. I think the song really captures that feeling so well, and the lyrics reflect Raven’s motivation: “I lie awake, and watch it all/it feels like a thousand eyes.” She’s under so much pressure, mostly internal, but also external, to help her friends and make sure people she cares about survives. I love this song and I’ll always associate it with this moment.

Moment that made you fangirl/boy the hardest:

 “You are wonkru, or you are the enemy of wonkru. Choose.”

Roan versus Lexa

Royal Memori Saving Everyone

When it really disappointed you:

Season 6. With the exceptions of Memori and my affection for Josephine, the season was a total flop for me. Season 7 just continued the downward spiral at an even faster rate. A few bright spots, but overall, just garbage. 

Saddest moment:

Woof. There’s several.

1. Lexa’s death, obvi

2. Jasper’s death

3. Lincoln’s death

4. Monty and Harper’s farewell videos

5. Emori’s death (only so low on the list because she came back) 

Most well done character death:

I got a lot of satisfaction out of Cage Wallace’s death. Lincoln deserved that vengeance.

In terms of emotional impact, I do think Jasper and Lexa’s death scenes were very well-done.

I know it’s messed up and I’m probably wrong, but god if I don’t love seeing Pike get run through with that sword.

Favourite guest star:

Alycia Debnam Carey put this show on the fucking map, and no one can truly argue otherwise. Without her, I doubt this show would’ve gone on for as long as it did. The show was carried by appearances and mentions of her right up until the very end. She even got the last word. Tell me of a more iconic guest star?? 

Favourite cast member:

I definitely really like Richard Harmon and Luisa d’Oliveria. I think they have the greatest chances of having truly successful careers out of everyone. 

Character you wish was still alive:

Jasper. :( 

One thing you hope really happens:

Well, it’s over. So nothing is going to happen again. I like the idea of some other pocket of humanity that decided not to transcend stumbling upon the Beachkru several years post-canon. And the aliens conveniently forget to actually make that sterile thing real. Humanity lives in, cultures continue to develop and grow, and there are lots of new generations to come! AKA the thing I wanted all along and really hoped they’d do, but they just kept destroying every society they met!!

Most shocking twist:

Finn’s death was really, truly so shocking to me. For one, Lexa’s death so greatly overshadowed it in fandom (at the time) that I managed to see it completely unspoiled. I also wasn’t into the BTS stuff at the time, so I didn’t know about any drama. It took me fully by surprise - I never expected the show to really kill another lead like that. 

When did you start watching/reading?:

It took me several tries to start this show. Getting through those first four episodes was a tough ask for me. By the time I finished what was available, s3 was over. So I technically joined fandom during the hiatus between s3 and s4.  

Best animal/creature:

God the animals in this show were silly. I liked those weird panther things.

Favourite location:

The dropship, Memori’s palace, Becca’s lab. 

Trope you wish they would stop using:

Listen. I loved the callbacks at first. I fucking ate them up. But at some point, this show became so self-referential that new plotlines ceased to exist. It became almost comical. How many times did these characters need to learn these lessons??

One thing this show/book/film does better than others:

The early camaraderie of The Hundred, and the way they worked sort of against the Establishment/Adults, was a lot of fun. Other shows have done it, but I think The 100 does it very well.

Funniest moments:

Unintentionally or intentionally, lmao?? Idk, there were a lot of quippy moments. Most of what Murphy said was hilarious.

Couple you would like to see:

I always wanted them to give Niytavia a shot, but they were cowards. 

Actor/Actress you want to join the cast:

I’m not super attached to any actors or actresses that would fit on this show. 

Favourite outfit:

Blodreina’s red cape, Emori’s royal Naming Day ‘fit, Murphy’s sleek black formal looks, Clarke’s soda can tab jacket, Raven’s red bomber jacket.

Favourite item:

When Clarke picks up a piece of Lexa’s throne and uses it as a walking stick when she’s alone post Praimfaya 2.0

Do you own anything related to this show/book/film?:

Nah.

What house/team/group/friendship group/family/race etc would you be in?:

I mean, I feel like Spacekru is the most obvious choice.

Most boring plotline:

When they spent several episodes rescuing Clarke from Josephine. Most of s4. The back half of s3. Most of s7.

Most laughably bad moment:

When Bellamy brought Clarke back to life by repeatedly punching her in the chest, and inside of her mind, Clarke threw an axe at Josephine’s face and Josie exploded into a bunch of shards of light.

When Clarke shot Bellamy over Madi’s sketchbook and left the sketchbook behind.

When Clarke and Bellamy took turns tying each other up and putting the people most important to one another in horrible situations and it was treated like a cute little bump in their timeless friendship. 

Best flashback/flashfoward if any:

I really love the Spacewalker reveal.

Most layered character:

Murphy came so far, and had so much development. I think Richard did a great job giving him a lot of depth and dimension. 

Most one dimensional character:

Clarke’s entire personality and arc didn’t change at all after the s2 finale. She was a loose cannon hell-bent on saving the people she loved, no matter what the cost. The most interesting things that happened to her were almost dying and actually dying, and the main reason for that is because it gave other characters and storylines more time to shine.

Scariest moment:

That fucking creepy cage creature on Nakara that attacked Raven’s face. Seeing it through the helmet was so terrifying. Another one is that scene in s2 when Lincoln is a reaper, and Octavia and Bellamy are trying to lure him into a trap in an old parking garage.

Grossest moment:

This show was remarkably gory for its network and time slot. I can think of several. I’d rather not dwell on them. 

Best looking male:

Lincoln is a babe.

Best looking female:

Gotta hand this one to Lexa

Who you’re crushing on (if any):

I mean, most of them. Half of why I watched was pure thirst. Emori, Murphy, Lexa, and Octavia all come to mind. Diyoza, too.

Favourite cast moment:

Idk I’m always partial to blooper reels.

Favourite transportation:

HELIOS. The most beautiful badass horse in the world. 

Most beautiful scene (scenery/shot wise):

I mean, most of the overhead shots are really pretty, but it’s also the same five locations in Vancouver, and that really starts to show at some point.

Unanswered question/continuity issue/plot error that bugs you:

I genuinely think we don’t have time for this. I have way too many to count. 

Best promo:

Nothing really comes to mind.

At what point did you fall in love with this show/book:

I was convinced to stick it out and see it through by 1x05. I truly thought it was something special by 2x08. I’ve gone up and down about it ever since.

Thanks again, Meghan!

Send Me a Fandom and I’ll Answer Some In-Depth Questions!

[gascon-en-exil]

But What If You Want to Come Out on Vers Bottom?: A “Coming Out on Top” Review (Part 1)

A review quoted on this game’s website describes it as “the Citizen Kane of ripped, naked big-dicked dudes in love.” Incredibly narrow superlative notwithstanding, that’s some high praise. Does Coming Out on Top earn it?

(I also solemnly swear not to make a relevant innuendo involving rosebuds, because there’s enough dirty wordplay here without my input.)

It’s been a bit unusual for me to return to CooT, having played it when it first released in late 2014 and then only on and off since then as the game was regularly updated. I believe it’s actually the first proper dating sim I ever played - no, Fire Emblem’s Avatar romances do not count as far as I’m concerned - and it set a very high bar for quality that has unfortunately never quite been surpassed by other (gay) titles in the genre.

This is perhaps all the more remarkable in that the premise here is not the most original thing in the world: Mark Matthews (you can change his name at the start, but I’ll be going with this default masterwork of blandness) has just come out of the closet to his two roommates Penny and Ian at the start of his final semester at university, and the story plays out from there as he meets, dates, and potentially falls in love with a wide assortment of men while also balancing his studies and his relationships with the aforementioned roommates who also double as his friend group. That’s...basically it, and apart from the romance plotlines the rest of the game’s content feels fairly extraneous. Mark can’t flunk out before the end of the story no matter how much you neglect his grades (although his job prospects in the ending will improve if you do work on them), and for the most part whatever money he amasses or friendship bonding moments he has during his free time on the weekends only plays into whether you get friendship endings with Penny and/or Ian. Unlike Chess of Blades survival is usually a given in CooT, and while there are quite a few death endings sprinkled throughout the game’s content almost all of them are played for laughs (and sometimes Steam achievements, because why not).

No, there are three major selling points here independent of the excuse plot. First and perhaps most noticeably, the writing never takes itself too seriously and incorporates everything from silly banter to fourth wall-breaking (refuse to come out at the start of the game, for an early example) to the sort of understated pun work that makes Dream Daddy’s script apparently living off corny dad jokes all the more egregious by comparison. There’s even a fair amount of self-aware meta humor, in a game released several years before the likes of Doki Doki Literature Club! made that par for the course for dating sims.

Then there’s the sheer diversity of options on display in terms of storylines and how certain scenarios play out, including the third point which is, well...the raw, uncensored gay sex. Despite the innuendo of CooT’s title Mark is not a total top, and most of the game’s myriad sex scenes can go down in a variety of different ways depending on what Mark/the player expresses a preference for - including situations involving various types of kinks. There’s also a very limited degree of body customization available; in the options menu there are toggles for Mark and all of his (primary) sexual partners that give you the option to add facial and/or body hair to their portraits and CGs. The hair options aren’t gamebreaking by any means - for Mark it only allows him to switch between twunk and otter, and while there is some diversity in race, age, and body type among his love interests and hookups there’s still a notable number of muscled 20-somethings. Still, I do appreciate that the toggles are there. You’ll notice my own preferences for the guys in my screenshots.

Back to that other kind of variety though. With six primary love interests and numerous divergent paths for each of them - some good, some bad, and some hilariously strange - there’s a ton of content to work through in CooT. The pathing is set up so that you get the opportunity to meet almost all of the love interests before you’re asked to commit to one of their stories, something the game heavily telegraphs so you’ll never feel like you’ve been unknowingly pushed past a point of no return. These introductions are generally on the SFW side, but there are two chances for some rauchy fun even before you commit so let it not be said that this game has strictly enforced monogamy at all times. On that note, there’s also Brofinder.

Penny comically missing the point aside, Brofinder is an in-universe Grindr equivalent. It can be accessed if you decline to pursue any of the love interests, or more conveniently from the main menu independent of the story. Fittingly for the type of app it’s lampooning, Brofinder dates are disconnected vignettes that all, if done correctly, end in some hot NSA action but impact nothing else after you’ve completed them. There are ten of these, all added via progressive updates following the game’s initial release, and taken together they add substantially to the many ways in which Mark can get laid.

I should also mention the secret seventh joke “love interest,” but as that one has become a bit of a minor meme and will probably come up if you Google blindly about this game I’ll leave it at that.

...Yeah. Leaving it right there.

There are some places where the presentation of CooT falters, but nothing on the scale of the dodgy voice acting found in some of the other gay dating sims I’ve discussed - mostly because there is no voice acting. Aside from the CGs and the character portraits the artwork can be rather workmanlike and forgettable, and similarly almost all of the soundtrack I would liken to elevator music which might have inspired one of the Brofinder dates now that I think about it. The supporting cast on the whole also doesn’t get much opportunity to shine aside from Mark’s roommates, because the love interests’ stories are all unrelated to each other and as such the people around them can only be involved in one of the game’s plots. I’m tempted to sum this all up as weak worldbuilding, but let’s be honest here - all this game needs is the suggestion of a generic American university and surrounding town peopled mostly with archetypes (at times comedically memorable ones, granted) to give it sufficient background. Most actual porn gets away with far less than that.

When I did my review of Chess of Blades I was able to discuss each of its love interests in a single follow-up post, but CooT simply has too much going on for that. Therefore this review will have three additional parts: two covering the six primary love interests, and a third going more quickly over the Brofinder dates. At time of writing I don’t think I’m also going to be grading the sex scenes of how realistic they are like I did with CoB, because there are too many of them and nothing sticks out as egregiously as it does in that game. There will however be as much description for them as I can manage; that is the main selling point here, after all.

[amazingorangedangantrash]

The only ending everyone seems to ignore is v3 because it’s just... it’s just a mess.

How do feel about this game survivors? And do you think that everyone woke up from the simulator or tv show like sdr2 or only the survivors?

Hoo boy...

Honestly nonny, having only finished the dang thing yesterday I... don't know.

(I kinda went off into a spiel, so feel free to skip to the part where I talk about survivors and what I think happens next)

I understand the mixed response a LOT. I mean- I see what they were going for. The 4th wall break was cool, and the (sorta?) reappearance of past characters was pretty damn awesome. I like that the creators are definitely self aware- and there's a kind of 'learn to laugh at yourself' sort of thing.

On the other hand it can almost seem a little too mocking?

I get the whole yaknow. 'Fictional characters are aware they're fictional and rebel against their creators' thing but- like-?

As I mentioned before, thing is, Tsumugi is not us? We aren't exactly intentionally cruel? There's a BIG difference between the kind of fiction in our world and in their world.

What does Tsumugi call it? "Real fiction"?. Yeah- thing is- we don't have that. We don't have the technology for it, and I certainly hope we wouldn't abandon ethics for it either!!! We can't have 'real' fiction, because in our world, all fiction is fake! The closest you have is fiction about real people, perhaps, but- that's not even remotely the same thing?

So it does come across as a little... um- preachy.

We're supposed to represent the audience but... like- the audience fucking suck! What was that they said during the argument armament? "This guy should have died instead of Kaede!" Like- fucking hell. Imagine saying that to someone, who can HEAR you say it, and who's MURDER you could potentially watch unfold before your very eyes as a result of YOUR actions. I mean- look how empathetic some of us are to ACTUAL fictional characters. Could you imagine if we were in a similar situation to the outside world in V3???

Maybe it's because I keep imagining the v3 cast as like- sentient AI, instead of "just fiction". Because I can't imagine anyone being so sadistic or apathetic otherwise.

So uh- yeah. I don't... know how I feel about that. It's not- very satisfying?

With sdr2, the whole "none of this is real, the killing game is all a lie, you're in a fake world!" felt like a relief ! Whereas here it's more like- "what?? It's all fake? What the hell was the point then?!"

"Nothing matters!" vs "nothing matters..."

The whole HOPE VS DESPAIR, FUTURE VS PAST thing worked, because, well, it's something we can all understand. We have all felt hope and we have all felt despair. We've all, at some point in our lives, felt stuck in the past, unable to or scared to move on.

(Hey- some of us still feel like that now, even).

The first game was very simple- hope and despair. Still relatable, but fairly basic- effective to set up the foundation for the follow up.

The second game made things a little more complicated. Sometimes it's more complicated then just- choosing between Hope and Despair. We refuse to fall into Despair, but we can't just blindly have Hope.

So we choose the Future. We can't promise it'll be a good one OR a bad one. But whatever happens- we need to move on. The only way we can make things change is by making that choice, to create our OWN future.

V3 felt very... complex. It started to get kind of... uh... philosophical? And- don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with that. It just... it kind of shifted from TRUTH VS LIE to FICTION VS REALITY. And whilst the latter definitely sounds interesting- I don't really know if I liked the direction they took with it-? I wish they'd kept the focus on TRUTH VS LIE a lot more.

(Fiction and Reality are like extensions of Lie and Truth but- only to a certain extent? Really?)

It's kind of harder to get into the final fight in V3 because... what are you fighting? The outside world? I mean- I can't speak for the rest of you, but as far as I'm aware I'm not a fictional character.

(If I am- then wow someone's a reallly bad writer huh?)

I can relate to Hope. I can relate to Future.

I can't relate to Fiction.

I THOUGHT maybe the message was a warning of the dangers of escapism ('please dont go as far as to erase your own personality just to be a part of a type of fiction you like' definitely seems fitting for this fandom)- but the message "fiction has the power to change the world!" kinda contradicts that. I mean- I do like that message, but- I don't like the idea of a series about killing games being heavily influential-!

The whole problem was that people grew so obsessed with the series that they threw away their lives! Is that not the point you should be focusing on-!!!!

The outside world in this universe fucking sucks. So they changed their mind, big DEAL! that's not comforting knowing they let this shit continue for 53 seasons-! I mean, maybe Makoto and Hajime were all 100% fictional, but at some point they started putting real people into these games, and everyone was ok with that!

I just-

I'm glad Shuichi got through to them at last but...

Someone said something which resonated with me- "in a vacuum, this is good". Like... on it's own, I thought the ending was great! It was entertaining, for sure. And the whole concept and stuff was unexpected and interesting. You gotta give em points for originality.

The problem comes with it being the 3rd game in a series. (Ignoring UDG I mean-). When a series becomes a Trilogy, you gotta make it good. This is presumably the last game in the (main) series too. And- after the UTTER NARRATIVE DISAPPOINTMENT of dr3- can you blame people for wanting more? People fell in love for THH and SDR2 (and UDG even if its not part of the main series) for a reason- and, for me at least, a biiiig part of that reason was the continued storyline. The last chapter of sdr2 was the hypest shit EVER. when you see glimpses of the previous game bleed into this one, only for it to turn into what's like- a full crossover???? The previous game isn't just mentioned, it's a straight up sequel!!!! I had absolutely no idea Makoto and co would return (i thought the games were separate) so when i saw that they'd be interacting with the new cast- yoooooooooooooooo-!

Hell, even seeing alter ego again made me go WILD.

V3 plays upon these expectations, and subverts them, but... not necessarily in a good way? You- kind of feel cheated? (Idk if you're an avengers fan, but- it's like expecting *Endgame* and instead getting...

Well- Endgame).

The ending isn't bad persay it's just- not quite what one would expect? I can definitely understand why people are disappointed. The problem is, instead of standing alone, you can't help but consider it as part of the series. Individually, I don't think the ending was that weak or bad, but in comparison to the series as a whole?

Meh.

SURVIVORS

(Oh my- I really got off track, oh dear. I'll- get back to what you asked now.)

KEEBO

W H Y

They rllly gonna rub salt in the wound huh?

(Whilst i dont dislike the other survivors, there are a LOT of people i really really wanted to see make it to the end, and it's just the final god damn nail in the coffin to kill off the last of the few characters I came even close to liking the most-)

Killing keebo was dumb

Maki- I liked Maki quite a bit! She's a bit cold, yeah, but I warmed up to her after hearing her backstory.

I found it annoying (if understandable) that no one trusted her at first. I thought it was sweet that her, Kaito and Shuichi had this friendship trio. They really trusted each other- it was very refreshing. I also love me a strong girl. Her romance thing with Kaito was a little... forced. I'd have found it more meaningful if they kept it more subtle/ambiguous (though i suppose they needed smth to use against her in the final trial sooo-).

Himiko-

I-

*sigh*

Ok I'm going to say this once, and once only.

Someoneonthedrteamhasabigthingforlolis

OK! I SAID IT- AND IM NEVER SAYING IT AGAIN

No judgement here of course. Just. Uh. Y-yeah-

(I'm mainly kidding of course, idek if Himiko counts as a loli but-)

I mean... I'm not... the fondest of very small, childish girl characters (Saionji intensifies). I like a bit of childishness in a character but- i mean- it depends.

(I'll never recover from the "seductive whisper" thing from the love suite event

Never.

Never ever.)

Himiko comes across as like An Actual Child at times and at the start it was VERY annoying. Surprisingly, I warmed up to her eventually. I knew in advance she'd be a survivor so i kinda thought "well she's gonna stick around so might as well try to like her". I do appreciate that she underwent a character arc too, and it was sweet to see how she became a more active, determined person. I wish it hadn't taken Tenko's death for her to finally start changing but whatever. She is quite a cute character and after a while became more endearing then annoying.... (for the most part).

Was she in my top 3 picks for a survivor? No.

The top 10 even?

N-no-

I'm glad she's still alive though. SOMEONE damn well needs to be.

Tsumugi- ah. She's not a survivor, is she? I knew well in advance she was the mastermind so I didn't really warm up to her all that much during the final chapters, for obvious reasons.

Shuichi- if shuichi hadn't survived I think that would have been the breaking point for me, honestly.

Overall- uh... they aren't... the ideal picks. Shuichi is the only one I really wanted to see survive, I was neutral towards the others. Tbh I was just happy anyone was alive by the end of that.

Waking up- for the sake of my sanity, I like to think that after the survivors wake up, they threaten to sue and/or maim the shit out of the dr team if they don't start on reanimating their 'dead' friends right fucking now. Surely they gotta keep their consciousness' somewhere in those memories banks right? I mean- what if they ever wanted a "surprise return from the dead" plotline? Surely they gotta keep em somewhere? Right?

Whether or not they reawaken as their in-game or pre-game selves, who knows. Whichever you prefer, I guess. Maybe a mixture of both.

[gumnut-logic]

Fanfic Asks 5

This one is for @louthestarspeaker who asked for D U X, @misssquidtracy who asked for H M O and @janetm74 who asked for W. Thank you for your kind questions ::hugs you all so much::

-o-o-o-

D. Do you prefer gen or romance?

If you asked me this two years ago, I would have said gen. Now…I see value in both. There is something just nice about having a couple who know each other so well that they can just fall into each other’s arms at the end of the day.

But I’ve always been a fan of bromance, two guys who will do anything for each other whether they are related or not. I’m a child of eighties TV and grew up on those kinds of relationships. Kirk and Spock are a prime example (yeah, I know they are from the 60s, but I didn’t exist then and the most of the movies came out in the eighties) .

Which leads onto the question of slash. I do read slash, but not so much in this fandom beyond a little Virgil/Brains. My heart truly lives in the friendship or family department. Even my ship could be considered monogamous happily ever after. This is not because I have any objections to one night stands or flings or whatever anyone enjoys, more of a case of I enjoy it (and Virgil’s character calls for it).

I’m a long term fanfic reader and have stumbled across a lot in my time in fandom. I just choose to read what I like and let everyone have their fun their way. I like a little whump, comfort and loyal and devoted friends. I guess I love the idea that people can stick together through anything.

As for writing, I like a challenge and will step outside my comfort zone time to time just to see if I can do it. However, you will always find a brother hanging around when Virg gets injured :D

 U. Do you prefer AUs or canon compliant fics?

I’m pretty open to all sorts of things…except for character breaking. If the character isn’t in character then it is no longer the character.

::chews nails worrying if I’ve broken Virgil’s character beyond redemption::

If it is well-written and hooks me, I’ll read pretty much anything (within my limits).

Writing…AUs require a lot of world building. My AUs tend to be branches off canon that diverge away, taking the built world with them. Things like coffee-shop AUs are a bit beyond my interest level (especially since I don’t drink coffee).

Marks & Wings is my first completely AU fic series. I did have to do some world building, but they are basically the Tracy bros with wings (except for Gordo, he is considerably different). To be honest, I use that universe as a place to write when I’m completely stuffed. The writing is more sensory than my other fics and I can just get arty farty and play with words.

But, as always, whatever I feel like at the time is what gets written.

 X. What fandom have you written the most fics for?

That would be Thunderbirds fandom. According to Ao3, I’m at 132 Thunderbirds fics with 750,000 words. Reactions plus a few other fics/chapters are yet to be posted.

That is over twice my combined other fandoms, heading toward three times. In two years.

You guys have just inspired me so much. Look what you’ve done! ::hugs you all like crazy::

 H. What is the longest fic you’ve written?

Written in 2003, The Asgard Sequence at 80,000 words (I thought it was shorter at 75,000 ::frowns at FF.net::) was my third Stargate SG-1 fanfic. Full of cliffhangers, it basically whumps Jack O’Neill within an inch of his life while exploring the Asgard people. Lots of plot written by the seat of my pants and nowhere at the quality I’m achieving today, but it remains my most popular fic on FF.net and I still get the occasional comment even 17 years after it was published. It was a landmark fic for me.

The question is…is there enough plotline left in the Kermadec Fic to overtake it? I don’t know. Possibly not, but we’ll see. I do have the tendency to ramble nowadays :D

 M. How do you come up with titles?

Write fic first and work out what to call it when at least partly written. I usually look for something short that sums up what the fic is about combined with an inkling of interest that might help draw the reader in. Sometimes I structure the fic (if I’m planning it) in a certain way that leads to the title.

Here are some working titles versus the final titles just for a little fun (the file names are all that remains – first name first, final name second):

Scott and Jeff – Suits

Riguadagnare – Il Mago

Virg and Gordo – A Good Day

The Visitor – Sky Candy

One of the brothers being ticklish – His Part

Marry Me – The Proposal

Hold Still – Lucky Shot

Gentle Showers – Gentle Rain

The Glacier – Access Denied

Tired Virgil – Tick Tock

Tropical rain is warm – Warm Rain

Veggie’s shower fic – To Hurt Us

Just a few from my computer. I still have several that don’t have titles at all.

 O. Is there any fandom you’ve been into that you haven’t written fic for? Why not?

Definitely. I’ve read:

Farscape

Avengers

How to Train Your Dragon

Arrow

Stargate Atlantis (did start a fic, haven’t finished it – also roleplayed a bit as Rodney McKay)

Sherlock

All the Next Gen Star Trek series (did dabble a little, but never finished anything, my heart lies in TOS)

There are probably more that I can’t think of at the moment. With the exception of Farscape and the Trek series, all of the above were read in the last ten years. They were simply relief from motherhood really. I love fanfic in general, hardly read anything else nowadays, but I wasn’t in the right place to write during my forays into the above fandoms. I was also very focussed on my professional art business.

TAG hit me at a point where I was struggling, in desperate need and I went down like a ton of bricks.

 W. Have you ever written anything that you are embarrassed by today?

Considering the thirty years since I started, sure, there are some fics that are a bit crappy. Heh, I still write crappy stuff from time to time ::eyes Reactions and kicks it with a toe::

But embarrassed? I may have been when I was younger. Especially outside of fandom. But now…I’m a perfectionist who has come to terms (mostly) that my stuff is never going to be perfect. All my stuff has had its purpose and is a step up the learning curve – that goes for everything.

Having said that, I do find myself hesitating to mention the one or two slash fics I have written in the past in other fandoms.

Mentioning that I wrote for Knight Rider gets the oddest looks. I wrote two slash fics in that fandom, but they are close to what I write here in content and plotlines.

I have also written a few explicit scenes in this fandom (of varying quality ::rolls eyes:: ).

Mentioning fanfic outside of fandom has its challenges and when it comes to the above mentions, these are likely not the ones I’d highlight to my workmates (though they all know I write fanfic). I had to stop myself from posting a link to Gentle Rain on Facebook a while back because while I’m happy with its novelish length and content, it does have that one scene…

So, yeah, maybe a little wary of what other people might think of things content-wise. Writing-wise, I’m fairly confident, except when I get the wibblies ::eyes floppy Virg and John…just John…no other Tracy gives me as much strife as Johnny::

-o-o-o-

Thank you to all the wonderful peeps who asked me all these questions. I hope I haven’t bored you silly with my answers (or scared you off with the last one ::chews nails:: ).

I also hope I haven’t missed anyone. Poke me if I have and I will apologise profusely and answer asap.

::eyes word count on questions:: Well, I’ve written 3,500 words about myself ::gulp::

And it is heading toward 1.30am with work tomorrow.

Nutty

(saluting off)

[mimzy-writing-online]

Writing Blind Characters Falling in Love, an Advice post

Okay, let’s get down to business (to defeat the huns...)

Last May I wrote a long and intensive guide on how to write a blind character. The masterpost of that guide is here: https://mimzy-writing-online.tumblr.com/post/185122795699/writing-a-blind-or-visually-impaired-character

[Yes, I know I never finished part four, I feel bad about that]

Since writing that guide I’ve had a few of you wonderful writers contact me asking for more situational advice on writing your characters. Which I love doing. I love seeing people making a serious effort to get it right. 

Last night someone asked me how to write a blind character falling in love...

...and I thought, wow, how did I forget to write about love and blindness. Especially since I had such an intense experience of falling in love for the first time while losing vision.

There’s a lot of thoughts I have on this subject, so it’ll take a bit to get through. In this guide we’ll talk about:

1) Is dating different when you’re disabled?

2) Are there problems with dating when you’re disabled?

3) How your characters meet

4) First things in a new relationship when you’re blind

5) The joy of falling and being in love while blind

Disclaimer: I am a visually impaired writer and blogger. I have been living with vision loss for two years now. I also fell in love during those two years, even if she and I are not together anymore. I also write blind characters of my own, including Ulric, from my current wip A Witch’s Memory

Is dating different when you’re disabled?

Well, yes. But also no. It’s a romance that involves a few more challenges than a romance between able bodied people, but at it’s heart it’s still a romance. Love is still the focus. 

While planning and writing your book/story, you need to be aware of how much space you allow for a romance plot and how that space compares to other plotlines. If you’re writing an action story and your romance is only a subplot, then the space you have to establish your characters’ more intimate interactions is smaller. If the romance is one half of the plot, or most of the plot, it gets more space to work with.

In that time you need to establish how your characters meet and how they connected emotionally. Those are two separate things. How do they meet the first time, and what makes them want to keep meeting up. Meet-cutes are adorable and I’ve read a bunch, but your characters need something about them that makes them emotionally connect and want to see more of each other. Thinking they’re cute and jumping from first exchanged words to an offer for a date in two pages isn’t realistic and it’s too fast paced if you’re working with something serious.

Also a blind character won’t likely recognize if the character is cute, not unless their vision allows for it. What a blind character will latch onto is conversation and how they felt in the moment. 

When writing a romance plot, the emotional connection is worth its weight in gold. You need to establish it, kindle it, and let it grow.

What will make a blind character (or anyone really) connect to someone new?

Here are your three basics for establishing a connection.

Conversation

Respect

Common Ground

You start with conversation to get to know each other, you establish if this is a person who will respect you as a person for being disabled or for being any other minority you are. Then you establish if you have common ground.

Respect is usually the thing that gets in the way of dating when you’re disabled.

Conversation: What connects people is their first conversation. This is where your character’s make their first impression with each other. If conversation comes easily, or if there’s a lot of humor, people will connect. It’s a lot easier to leave a stilted conversation than a flowing, easy conversation. Your characters also pick up clues about who that person is in the conversation, what their interests are, what their life is like, how they feel, what they think.

If your blind character is someone who misses a lot of facial expression and body language, they will be relying heavily on word choice and tone when determining someone else’s mood. 

Respect is something you usually determine after the conversation has developed. Unless someone was off the bat rude to you the second they met you, or discriminated against you instantly, it will take a little longer to see how much respect someone has for both you and for a minority group.

Disrespect for the Disabled Comes in Multiple Forms

Discrimination: this is quicker for someone who is not disabled to identify. It’s garden variety discrimination. They don’t care that you’re blind and need help finding a door or elevator. They make jokes about your disability both in front of you and behind your back. They say they would never ever date someone with a disability, as if you’re a burden

(note: I’m not saying anyone has to date anyone, abled or not. But maybe don’t say to someone point blank that you could never date or be attracted to someone with a disability, because it’s just rude. Also these people were rarely asked)

Backwards Disrespect: “Oh, you’re so pretty, I would have never known you were blind” “You’re too pretty to be blind” “Wow, you’re so ambitious/hard-working for someone with a disability” “You talk really well for a deaf person, you sound almost normal”

If they sound like compliments to you, guess again. To be honest, I’m hoping you’re all reading those “compliments” and wondering what sort of person would think to compliment someone like that. But here’s the thing, those are all real things that have been said to countless people with disabilities.

My Personal Favorite, from my at-the-time class crush: “But you’re so sweet and nice, you don’t deserve to be blind. You poor thing.”

But people still think these are good compliments to say to someone with a disability, even though it thoroughly insults everyone else with that same disability as being of a lesser standard.

Savior Complex/Infantalize: This is where you see your savior complexes come out, and there’s a huge real-life reality that people with savior complexes seek out the disabled to help them, and that includes romance. It’s also where I fear many of you writers may accidentally venture into without meaning too.

Granted there is a lot of care giving involved when you are a close family member, close friend, or a romantic partner to someone with a disability. In a fresh relationship, a romantic partner would not be involved much/at all in caregiving because they don’t live with this person or have any experience with their disability.

Care giving for a loved one is great. What’s not great is if your blind character’s romantic interest starts babying them. Talking to them as though they are a child. Limiting that person’s activity or freedom on the basis of protecting them from harm because they can’t see what they’re doing. If your blind character’s romantic interest starts acting like an overbearing mother in a YA novel, you have some serious problems with that romantic interest and your character needs to get out of the relationship.

But this is a reality of being disabled and dating. Sometimes people stop seeing you as an independent person capable of making decisions, and start seeing you as an adorable, tall child who needs to be protected. It sucks. Never date someone like that.

Ignore: I’m referring to a very specific type of disrespect and I’m not sure what a better word for it would be. Here’s a straight forward example.

Your blind character says they don’t feel comfortable going to a club with their new date because they feel vulnerable in a dark, loud environment already filled with risks for danger. Your character’s romantic interest ignores that, thinking if they just try it out anyway, they’ll love it. And if your character decides they love being coerced or forced out of their clearly marked comfort zone to do this dangerous activity that scares them, you fucked up. Because nobody should be coerced or forced out of their comfort zone, they should be able to leave their comfort zone on their specific terms. Your characters love interest needs to respect that. Your character established a boundary/concern because of their disability, and they need to be listened to.

Or, on the other side.

Your blind character expresses what they can do on their own without help, and your character’s love interest ignores that. Bad. That goes back into the infantizing aspect, but in truth they’re two sides of the same coin.

There’s like five million other ways to discriminate against the disabled, but there’s your top four in social/relationship settings.

Common Ground I feel should be self explanatory. It’s things that connect your characters beyond looks or small talk. Their shared interests, shared humor, shared personality traits, shared life experiences, shared religion or culture, anything like that.

What are the dangers of dating when you’re disabled and how do you avoid them?

There’s a lot of danger to being disabled, to being an easy target in the eyes of others. It’s even worse when you’re a woman. Even worse when you’re blind or deaf. 

[Note: please don’t use this as an excuse to include rape plots or domestic violence, those are actual triggers for many people, including myself. There’s already too many stories out there with rape scenes used to further plot when literally anything could have been done instead]

What are the dangers of dating when disabled?

Part of it is how you meet someone. For this reason a lot of people with disabilities might opt to only date people they’ve met in person before, sticking to people they know well. This means they won’t date online. That’s not a universal choice, but it is a reality. I have tried online dating since vision loss and I won’t mention I’m blind in my profile? Why?

There are people who would pick me specifically because I’m blind. Those people are: 1. People with savior complexes 2. People who want someone weaker than them to abuse, who they think won’t fight back or will be less likely to leave 3. People with a disability fetish. I’ve experienced 2 out of 3 personally.

So I’d prefer to date someone I met through school or through a friend group. Not been so lucky there, but that’s life.

How Your Characters Meet

Given the above, your character is not likely to go on a date with an online stranger. Though there are exceptions and they are taken with the precaution of having someone sitting in the corner of the coffee shop you’re meeting at, or something like that. Your character is also not likely to go on a blind date.

A note on blind dates: If your blind character is going on a blind date, you did it, you jumped into a cliche/trope. It’s not that you can’t write it, but it’s over-done and anyone who is blind will probably stop reading your story, or maybe never even start. Also, I’m not sure blind dates exist as a social practice after 2010, so there’s also that...

Your character, like most people, will find someone they want to date in the crowd of people they already know. I’m not saying they have to be a friends to lovers thing (although that is my fave trope) but they probably know their love interest in passing before things really get started. A coffee shop regular, a classmate they’ve only talked to a little bit, a friend of a friend.

The First Things

Over the course of dating your characters will have a series of conversations about disability that happen and are mixed in with other normal dating life.

Things your characters should establish on the first date:

-Your blind character will explain to their date how much they can and can’t see. You should be a little in depth if you can, because that’s honestly just a real thing about dating when blind. This might involve mentioning a diagnosis, but your character might choose to shy away from telling the full story if it was an emotional one

-Your character should establish their boundaries, what they can do without help or with minimal help, and what they can’t do. (and their date should respect that)

-The date should happen like most normal dates. They should still talk about all the things two able-bodied people would talk about on a first date. Interests, family, childhood, etc

In following dates:

Your blind character should be able to tell their date when they’re not okay with them doing something (making a blind joke, or trying to talk for them/over them to sighted people without permission, like “oh no, they don’t need a menu/straw/map/shopping bag/etc)

Like all couples, your characters should discuss physical boundaries. That means sex, physical affection, verbal affection, PDA, not touching personal possessions (such as cane, guide dog, or phone). This doesn’t necessarily have to happen on page, but it’s something all dating people should just have in the beginning of their relationship.

Your blind character will talk about small daily struggles with blindness and their date should listen, just listen. Listening is one of the biggest ways to help someone with a disability. Listen to what they say they feel, without telling them they’re overreacting. Listen to their struggles without trying to fix it all right away and without their permission. Listen to how they ask to be treated.

Your blind character will get comfortable with this relationship, and eventually rely on their partner a little more for small things.

The Joy of Being and Falling in Love while Blind

Falling in love with someone when you live with a disability has a unique aspect to it. You’re so used to struggling to do things yourself that now having someone who helps even a little is life changing.

Your partner (with your permission) will speak up for you when you face discrimination for your disability. It will feel fucking amazing to have someone tell others off on your behalf.

They help with small daily tasks. For example, I hate taking trash out to the bins because my outside vision is very bad, so I always prefer for someone else to do it. Or running an errand to the store is 10x less stressful because there’s someone sighted to help.

Your partner becomes someone you feel safe traveling with, and you’ll go on more adventures because now they’re by your side. I tried lots of new things while in my last relationship that I didn’t try with previous ones where I was sighted. I went to new places, tried new foods and new restaurants, saw movies that I’d never heard of. She and I even took a drive through rich neighborhoods in December to see all the decked out Christmas decorations.

There’s someone who makes you feel loved and cherished. Someone who makes this ablest world feel a little less rotten. A little more beautiful.

I think that’s what I have for now. This is a bit of a monster of a post, so I’m impressed if you got this far. If you have more questions about writing a blind character, feel free to message me or send me an ask. Feel free to interact with me in general, I love you all.

This is going to be linked into my master post as well. Like this and all my other posts on the subject, any post involving advice for writing a blind character will be tagged #blindcharacter

Follow me for writing advice, updates on my wip A Witch’s Memory, and writing memes or relatable posts.

[aion-rsa]

Star Trek Discovery Season 4: What to Expect

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Yes, we’re already looking forward to Star Trek: Discovery Season 4. Season 3 saw the show go where no Star Trek has gone before – literally. Flung almost a thousand years into the future after saving all sentient life as we know it, Michael Burnham and her crewmates had to navigate a new and alien reality that bore little resemblance to the one they left behind.

Yet, the decision to send Discovery to the future is possibly the best decision the series has ever made, giving the show a much-needed narrative reset that cut ties to things like Klingon wars and The Original Series legacy characters and sends it off to blaze its own path, unencumbered by the strings of existing canon. But now that Discovery is firmly established in the 32nd century, what can we expect from Star Trek: Discovery‘s upcoming Season 4? We have a few educated guesses…

Michael Burnham Finds Her Feet as Captain

Despite her colorful history as an officer – replete with mutiny, insubordination, and general recklessness – it’s been obvious for a long time that Michael Burnham was destined for the Discovery captain’s chair. The only question was a matter of when. But now that she’s there – what kind of captain will she be?

She could very easily turn out to be one of the Starfleet greats. Despite her flaws, Michael has proven time again that she is smart, capable, and brave. A risk-taker who always comes through in the clutch, she has saved her crew more times than most of us can count and she is a shining example of someone who absolutely believes in the mission of the Federation and the good it can do.

But she’s also often rash and impulsive, and just a few short episodes ago wasn’t even all that certain that she belonged in Starfleet anymore. Granted, many successful male Starfleet captains (cough cough James Kirk cough) are remembered as great precisely because they weren’t huge fans of following the rules, either, so there’s certainly precedent that generally refusing to play things safe is a workable leadership strategy.

Yet, Michael has always found her greatest success as a character when she has an authority figure or structure that is set in opposition to her, so it will be interesting to see how she evolves now that she is the authority she once pushed back against.

What’s Next for Saru?

At the conclusion of “That Hope Is You, Part 2,” Saru took a leave of absence from the Starfleet to go with the young Kelpian refugee Su’Kal back to their home planet of Kaminar. What’s next for him is unclear, but there’s no way Discovery’s planning on writing off this character completely – or losing the talents of actor Doug Jones.

So what’s next for Saru? If he does return to the Discovery, what role can he fulfill now that he’s no longer captain? Does his future lie in the Federation hierarchy somehow, possibly working for Admiral Vance or serving as some sort of ambassador to his people?

A third option could involve Saru taking on an entirely different kind of mission, one that looks a lot like fatherhood of a sort. Ever since his arrival in the 32nd century, Saru has longed to reconnect with his people. Perhaps showing young Su’Kal the stars he’s missed out on all his life is something that might allow him to do just that on a smaller, more intimate scale. (And indulge his dorky dad vibes at the same time.)

Gray Will Return Somehow

During Adira’s trip to the dilithium planet to ferry medicine to Saru and Culber, we learned that the holodeck program on the abandoned Kelpian ship could extrapolate Gray’s consciousness and give him a holographic form. This allowed him to be seen by the other Discovery crew members present, which means that the technology clearly exists which can bring Gray back to life again. Sort of, anyway.

 Because, of course, Gray is technically dead and his consciousness only exists as part of the Tal symbiont inside of Adira, which raises many questions this subplot will eventually have to answer, including how much agency and sentience post-Burn holograms even have to begin with. (Eli the Federation lie detector hologram certainly seems independent enough.)

Culber has promised both Adira and Gray that he will find a way for him to be seen again. But what that will ultimately look like, we don’t yet know. There is precedent for the idea that one part of a Trill’s symbiont memories can live outside it, but does that mean Gray will become a hologram himself permanently? Or can his consciousness be housed in something that has a more physical form?

What’s Book’s Actual Job Now Anyway?

Now that Cleveland Book – and we’re still waiting for the story behind that name, btw – is officially a part of the Discovery crew, it’s time for the series to define his role in this universe beyond his relationship with Michael. Is he technically part of Starfleet now? Is he an officer on Discovery? Does Grudge get a tiny decorated insignia collar? (Please say yes!)

Much of Book’s role in Season 3 was to support Michael in one way or another, whether that meant to literally help introduce her to the new rules of the 32nd century or to provide emotional and tactical help when needed. And don’t get me wrong, Book and Michael have somehow managed to form one of the most functional, normal relationships in Star Trek history. They’re honestly great together. But David Ajala is a tremendously appealing actor and if he’s going to stick around – which I think we’re all in agreement he should – Book needs a meaningful story of his own.

Tilly’s Promotion

Following Michael’s promotion to the Captain’s chair, it certainly looks like Tilly is getting some sort of command-level promotion in Season 4.

Technically she was still an Ensign when serving as Saru’s Acting First Officer, and while she conducted herself admirably during, well, everything, if she’s going to be Michael’s legitimate First Officer – which that last scene would definitely seem to indicate – she deserves to at least become a lieutenant.

Stamets and Michael Will Have to Work Out Their Issues

One of the lingering unresolved plotlines from Season 3 is the massive rift that formed between Paul Stamets and Michael following her decision to physically jettison him from Discovery while it was under Osyraa’s control. To be fair, her choice was completely the correct one, as he was the only one capable of operating the spore drive, and removing him from the equation meant that the Emerald Chain couldn’t just jump back to the Verubin Nebula and all its dilithium.

But, Stamets basically took that decision to mean that Michael was fine with condemning his family to horrific radiation deaths, and that’s going to be a hard thing for him to get over. If you notice, he’s the only person who doesn’t exactly look thrilled at Captain Burnham’s promotion, and we don’t see the two interact again once the ship is reclaimed.

There’s also the question of the spore drive itself. Stamets has tied his own identity – and his worth as part of the Discovery team – pretty tightly to his ability to communicate with the Mycelial network. Now that Book can do the same thing, how will this change things for him?

We’ll Probably See More Episodic Storytelling

Solving the mystery of The Burn and battling the villainous Emerald Chain were both season-long arcs that helped establish Discovery’s place in the future, and allowed Discovery the show to set up the new rules and players of its universe. But now that both those tasks have been accomplished, don’t be surprised if we see a shift toward more episodic storytelling in Season 4.

After all, with a fresh new supply of dilithium to distribute and the entire future to explore, isn’t it time we spent some time seeing what the 32nd century looks like? Some of the most entertaining moments of this season came when Michael and the rest of the Discovery crew found themselves on new planets or adjusting to changed cultures (including their own). Since Discovery purposefully removed itself from all known Star Trek canon, isn’t it time the show got about really establishing some new ones? The revelation that Vulcan and Romulan reunification has indeed happened feels like it should be just the beginning of the surprises this universe has in store for us. What has happened to other species such as Klingons or the Borg? Wouldn’t it be fun to find out?

The Grudge Content We Deserve

One of the few things Discovery fans of all stripes can agree on: Grudge is amazing. And we deserve to see more of her. Whether that means all our initial speculation turns out to be true and she’s actually the secret god of a planet full of telepathic felines we’ve yet to visit or just that she gets her own bridge-safe cat basket so she can hang out with Book and Michael next season, just give the people what they want.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Can we at least find out how she and Book ended up together? Throw me a bone – or I guess a cat treat – here, show. (Truly, if we don’t at least get a Short Treks episode about Grudge what are we even doing here?)

The post Star Trek Discovery Season 4: What to Expect appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[venus-says]

Yes! Pretty Cure 5 GoGo Episodes 38-48 + Movie

Bloom, flowers of life.

And we reach the end of another season! Wow, it has been a while since I could say this for precure. But we're finally here again.

The GoGo ending was a pretty interesting one, I quite enjoyed it, but before talking about it I wanna comment on the movie of the season because I wanna end this post on a positive note and if I leave this to the end I won't achieve that.

Y!PC5GG: Happy Birthday in the Land of Sweets♪

So, this movie was a choice. I feel like if you're someone who likes Nozomi and Coco you will probably like this movie, but if, like me, you're someone who sees this relationship as problematic then you will probably not care or hate this movie. To be honest, I think that even if you do like this pairing you may not like this movie as much, because even though this movie is very Nozomi focused and a huge part of that focus is on her relationship with Coco, the everything around it isn't much interesting so in the end, it's nothing really special.

I personally didn't enjoy this movie, but it wasn't even because of the Nozomi and Coco stuff. To begin I don't like that they introduced another character that is used to instigate jealousy in both Nozomi and Milk, thankfully they don't do much with that. I don't like how the other cures are useless here, like yeah, Aqua & Rouge and Mint & Lemonade fought against the minions but they didn't really impact the outcome of the movie, and they just forget Milk has powers up until the end where she's beaten down by the villain. And I also don't like how in the call to action scene they start to cheer for Dream only and not for the Precure and I don't know this kinda sounds disrespectful, it makes it look like the only important cure here is Dream and the other ones are just backup dancers, though Shining Dream is a pretty beautiful form, I can't deny that. But the thing I hate the most about this movie is one specific scene, while Coco is being controlled by Mushiban, and he corners Dream against a pillar or a wall and he gets close to her in a very predatory way and he says "Make me feel satisfied" and the way they frame the scene looks like it's something sexual and it's just very gross, and it gets grosser when you think it's a much older man behind Coco saying those words. I get that by the context of the movie he was just talking about turning Nozomi into chocolate and eating her like a snack, but the movie frames it like Coco is going to kiss Nozomi by force and it's not cool to see. I'll probably never watch this movie again.

While I'm still here in this gloomy mood let's talk about what I didn't enjoy in the actual season?

So my fears came true, we had almost like a boss rush in this final quarter which made those defeats a little less impactful, in fact, the first episode of this section we had the defeat of that pair of villains and I can't remember much about it. Mucardia's end was also kinda lame, first because we had a fake-out death and second because he was just killed away by the Director in the blandest way possible and it was pretty lame.

And speaking of lame endings, poor Anacondy. They really went to the "I'm in love with this man route" for her and in the end, she was just used and discarded by the man she loved like if she was the wrapping paper of candy, it was pretty sad. It was impactful, and it made me hate the Director more than I already did, but I wish she could have gone in a glorious way rather than by the hands of a crap man. And since we're talking about him, gosh I hate this dude. He's like those guys that get obsessed with a girl and just can't accept when they say no and instead of looking at themselves to try to find out why they don't want anything to him he just keeps forcing himself like if this is gonna change something. The Director is the concept of thrash man impersonated in a cartoon character. It was very cathartic seeing the cures whoop his ass with that giant rose.

The last thing I didn't like was the resolution for the mystery of Syrup's past. Like, seeing how this was a big thing throughout the whole season you would think his past would be more than just "he was born in the Cure Rose Garden, he was raised by Flora, and he was attacked while he was doing a delivery from Flora to the Director and that's probably what made him lose his memory". I don't know, for the amount of build-up this had I expected them to do something bigger with this. And it feels like that was the plan at some point because in the middle of the season we see Syrup meeting the Director and recognizing him from somewhere, it seemed like there was more to uncover there, but no, we just got some lame past stuff.

Before moving to the positives, I wanna quickly mention the Christmas episode that wasn't anything exceptional, but that there was some cool stuff in it, like Syrup being a fan of Santa since, when you think about it, Santa IS a delivery boy. To be honest, I was just glad they didn't have any sort of world-threatening invasion in this episode, it was very refreshing. XD

In any case, as it's usual for any precure season we get episodes for each cure's closing arc as an integral part of the final quarter. Being completely honest, I feel like Kurumi and Karen got the short-end of the stick here because while they had good episodes it didn't really give me the impression that they were concluding anything for them, different from Urara, Rin, and Komachi who got episodes where the conflicts had conclusions that tied-in more with their future aspirations and the path they've been walking through this season and also the previous one.

I think the reason why Kurumi and Karen's endings didn't feel as conclusive is that other things in their episodes stole my attention more than their conflicts. For example, in Kurumi's case, we see her feeling pressured because of her mission, which is very in tune with her whole thing as a caretaker, but this episode also shared space with working her relationship with Nozomi and that's what I was more focused in rather than Kurumi's personal thing that felt like it was more in the background. In Karen's case, the conflict was she doubting that she had what it takes to follow a career in medicine, but the show was putting more importance in King Montblanc being sick and again Karen's plot was kinda in the background. This is not to say that their endings were bad, it just seems a bit forgettable when you put that in comparison with the other episodes for the other girls.

For example, Urara's final episode was about her doing an audition to get in the same musical her mom performed before she passed, we also have a MOTW plot that works in a way to directly affect her negatively in this audition by making a Little Mermaid plot where Shibiretta steals her singing voice. This is a combination that works with Urara both in her precure life and in her civilian life. It concludes her arc and it feels rewarding to see her finally pass that audition. Kurumi and Karen didn't really have that. Actually, Rin and Komachi didn't have a conclusion that was so well rounded as Urara, but it was more centered on them, they were still in the center and able to shine in their episodes, though I wish Komachi had done more in her episode, it didn't really feel like she had much agency in that episode.

The Nozomi episode is a bit unfair to put in this comparison because while it is an episode that dwelled with her efforts in studying in order to fulfill her dream of becoming a teacher, this episode was more to show the difference of power between them and the Director while Nozomi's conclusion comes around in the end during the final fight and the aftermath of the battle.

And about this finale, this was very enjoyable. I like that we had the final conflict happening through 3~4 episodes but it didn't feel like they were stretching a plotline or maybe dragging the finale for more than it needed to. It was pretty solid, it was well built, and despite the problems, I mentioned it was pretty good. I think my favorite moment of this ending was when Syrup was giving his speech to the petrified cures, and we could see that the things he was talking about was pretty much related to his growth and his development through the whole season and it was pretty moving, I also think it was hella cute when he mentioned that letter the cures sent was the first letter he ever received in his life and that he was really happy about it, and my heart just melted and all I wanted was to hug him and say "you're a good boy, my son T-T" to him.

I also liked that whole seed of life and how seeds have infinite potential discourse at the end, yeah it was a bit of a stretch after all depending on the case seeds are pretty predictable, but it was a good message for the end, it hit the points it had to hit so I count it as a win. I also like how in the end Flora turned into a seed in hopes to bloom into a new life in the future, it was a pretty optimistic and happy way to end the show and it was a good way to wrap-up this pretty good season.

And that's it for Yes! Precure 5! I gotta be honest, I didn't think I'd enjoy this season as much as I did because I wasn't the biggest fan of its predecessor and I didn't have high hopes for the sequel, but I found myself enjoying the show more and more as I would go, even with its flaws and the elements I don't like. It was truly a joy to find a new love for this season, a new love for this world, and a new love for these characters. While the original season is at the bottom of my list of favorites during this series of rewatches, this sequel sits more close to the top, and that makes me very happy. So, what are your thoughts on GoGo? Let me know in the comments down below. Next, we're finally getting to Fresh which is one of my favorite seasons and I'M VERY EXCITED!!! I can't wait to watch this season again. But that's for another day, for now, stay healthy, stay safe, never stop resisting, thank you so much for reading, and until the next time. See-ya~

[inkabelledesigns]

When we were younger roleplayers

So a friend of mine recently uploaded an older comic she did detailing an experience from her youth involving her first time roleplaying. This story really speaks to me, so I’ll link it here for you to see. 

https://twitter.com/WolfenWingsShop/status/1135553476526821377 

You know, this makes me wanna tell some of my own roleplaying stories, because boy do I have a few. ^^’’’ My nutcracker friends Freckle and Pepper hear be joke about ‘The Night of Angst Mountain’ far too much, but that’s only been within the past year. The story I’d like to tell you today come from when I first came online, back when my only account was on YouTube and we roleplayed in the comments sections of our channels. 

Let me tell you the story of dreamerofchaos1 and her first time working as one of the Freedom Fighters.

Let’s set the stage. I was 14 years old, the year was 2011, and I had finally been deemed old enough to get a YouTube account. I’d asked my folks if I could have it for my birthday that year, which is March 29th. On April 2nd, my dad made a YouTube account for himself and then helped me to make mine, just so he could keep an eye on me should I ever need his help, but for the most part he wasn’t watching what I was doing. I had made this account intending to post tribute videos, you know, those fan art slideshows set to a popular song, and that is what I started out doing, but during that summer, I ended up hanging out with a bunch of roleplayers, and sometimes it was hard to distinguish fiction from reality. I’m still not sure how that started or how I ended up meeting these people, but we were an interesting bunch. A lot of this is really fuzzy for me

To start, even though we called ourselves the Freedom Fighters, it wasn’t at all the Freedom Fighters from the Sonic SatAM or Archie comics. We had a Sally, Tails, and Sonic who were barely present, otherwise, it was a lot of fan characters (most of which were recolors of Sonic, Tails, and Amy), along with an emo version of Kirby, Stitch and Angel from the Lilo and Stitch TV series, and a few others that referenced other franchises. We had a lot of fun on fictitious scenarios together, having picnics, fighting the Suppression Squad, it was a good time.

I didn’t stand out a ton among the good guys, but I definitely had my stuff together a little better. I didn’t have a character when I started interacting with everyone, but I developed one around the theme of my username named Dreamer. They were a tanooki that was an imaginary friend abandoned by their creator, a little girl named Ruth, that needed belief from other people in order to exist. Note that I refer to them as a ‘they.’ At that point in time, nobody online knew what my gender was, they all just kind of assumed I was a guy, and I didn’t say anything about it. I specified that my character was genderless, since why would an imaginary friend need to have a gender? But because you basically WERE your character unless you were in YouTube’s Inbox system, everyone thought I was a dude. To be honest...at the point in time, all of my friends outside of the web were dudes with the occasional girl that was super tomboyish. I was the girly one, I could never be “one of the guys,” and more than anything, that’s what I wanted. I’ve grown out of that now as an adult, I’m much happier just being me and not worrying what other people think about my body parts. I never directly lied about my gender, it was more that nobody ever asked, but eventually I did come clean about it. Unfortunately, the minute people found out I was a girl, my PMs (private messages, which are the same as DMs, but there was some amount of respect in actually keeping it private back then) got flooded with boys that wanted cybersex out of me, which was disgusting and utterly embarrassing, but that’s a story for another day.

The Suppression Squad was the main group of enemies, hell, the character you saw causing trouble the most was Miles, aka the Anti-Tails from Moebius/Anti-Mobius. That’s where I found two of my closer friends, Venice and Violet. Venice was the Anti-Silver, a fanmade concept as Silver never officially had an Anti version in the comics, using the concept art of Silver from Sonic 06 back when he was Venice the Mink. Violet was a fan character who was his girlfriend. Venice played a lot of different characters though, including a villain named No-Heart that had some Kingdom Hearts inspired elements. Sadly Venice, or rather Wyatt, dropped off the face of the earth, I never saw him again after YouTube changed its channel layout and everyone gave up our games there, but I do hope he’s doing well wherever he is. Same with Violet, or rather Whitney, I saw her a few times on deviantART, but not much. 

There are a few roleplays that stick out to me from that time. No Heart stealing Dreamer’s heart and having them fight for the villains temporarily is one of the finer memories, hell, when I had her betray everyone and join the bad guys for real later on was quite fun. Duking it out with an evil clown and Anti-Guy from Paper Mario was kind of cool too. But the one that really sticks out to me is the one with Albert Wesker. Now, Albert Wesker is a Resident Evil character to my understanding, but I have no idea what his story is, and I wasn’t smart enough to look it up as a kid when this was going down. This guy came out of hecking nowhere, I never did learn who played him in the end. I remember he was going after everyone with needles, and once pricked, they’d be under his control. Dreamer of course had ended up kidnapped and trapped in wherever his domain was. Being the rebellious and narrow-minded child that I was, I had Dreamer go off on a long speech about how Wesker would never win, and good would always prevail over evil, blah blah blah, it had to have sounded so stupid and naive to him. 

And then he killed my character. That had never happened before. Another player ended up godmodding them back to life with a “revival seed,” but like? It was so garbage. I felt so bad about it after the fact, like yeah, we beat the bad guy, but I felt like a dirty cheater, and I was! But it dawned on me why it happened later on in time. There was no formal system to how any of this worked, just a set of unspoken boundaries that were never crossed, and therefore a lot of godmodding happened, where people would be defeated who shouldn’t have been, powers were unfair, etc. But the thing is, I was one of the few who ever bothered to get creative with my attacks and have some sort of strategy, which in turn meant that I was often the one doing most of the fighting. During the Wesker stuff, I was the only one online that actually had any of that going on, the rest were content to play damsels in distress, that’s why my character got revived. I think Wesker showed up one more time after that and there was a fair fight before they disappeared, but dang. It was an interesting experience. I think it was the fact that I was the only one doing anything in battle that I opted to join the bad guys for a while, not to mention the good guys weren’t all that great to me. There was a lot of hugging and saying “you’re one of my best friends” all the time, but no one meant it, it was just fluff. 

I wasn’t there for fluff, I was there for action, to do something, to challenge myself. Yeah, I wanted to make friends, friends with respectable people who were interested in actual plotlines. But I didn’t find that there, I didn’t find that anywhere in an RP community up until recently. Things have changed with my style over the past eight years. I’m a lot slower to jump to combat nowadays, in fact fighting hardly ever comes up, which is nice, even though I do have times where I miss it. I think I’ve realized that I’m happier being in a smaller group, about three people, where we ask each other about the plot and figure out where its going with a mix of improv and planning. One day though, I’d love to run an RP blog where I invite a bunch of people to participate in the chaos, one where I get to run the story and challenge them to survive. That was the idea behind OATS, maybe one day I’ll be able to run it. For now though, I’ve got some bigger fish to fry than roleplays. ^^’’’ Still, it was fun to reminisce on this, I hadn’t thought about this for a while. 

[doedipus]

I finally finished moyashimon

it’s honestly one of my favorite anime/manga that I’ve read in a long, long time. there are definitely some aspects of the work that frustrate me, but it’s not quite enough to sour the work as a whole in my eyes. if you’re in the mood for a really chill slice of life series with a lot of well-developed and respectfully portrayed female and queer characters, definitely give it a shot.

first of all, to anyone who’s only seen the anime adaptation, definitely, definitely, definitely look into the manga. some of the best parts in the series happen after the anime ends, esp. the craft beer adventure in volume 8 and american road trip in volume 10. plus, if you’re like me and are mostly drawn to the work because of kei, her involvement in the story only starts ramping up immediately after the anime ends, and she’s essentially the main character of the last 3 volumes. Plus, ishikawa and his team have a lot of fun with the medium that doesn’t always translate into animation.

All in all, picking up the manga is 100% worth your time if you’re even vaguely intrigued by the premise

more detailed thoughts and a handful of good reaction images under the break

I think overall the beer, france, and america arcs are the high points of the series.

The beer arc sticks out to me mostly because of stuff happening in real life during the time I was reading it. Basically, some of my friends talked me into taking a beer tasting class at uni with them. I’d never really liked beer very much beforehand, but it turns out I was just drinking the wrong kinds of beer. I’ll put my life on the line for a good IPA now that I know what that even is.

The beer section of moyashimon has mutou go through a similar process- she starts out by going on a huge tirade about how craft beer sucks and it’s only appealing to pretentious weirdos, and then over the course of the volume, they go over what different kinds of beer are like, how they’re made, etc. It ended up giving me a good idea of what to look out for in the beer class, and it was fun being able to compare what I was sampling to what the fermentation lab crew talked about.

There’s also a pretty cute gender-affirming moment for kei in there, where the gang gives her a women’s costume for the faux oktoberfest celebration the book culminates in. it’s a small plot point, but I liked it a lot.

The france and america arcs are pretty similar and I like them for basically the same reasons. Essentially it boils down to them tying really dynamic plotlines in with the usual culinary intrigue. There’s a real sense of tension to what’s happening in the story, and the food stuff is more directly related to what’s happening in the story than it usually is. In a lot of the other plotlines, the writers have a tendency to frontload all the technical stuff into one or two extended dialogue scenes, which can be kind of hard to get through in comparison

I also found ishikawa’s assessment of american food pretty fun to read through, and a lot of his comments make me want to try out some western restaurants in japan if I ever end up going there. For instance, he has the characters talk a lot about how burgers and stuff are much sweeter than they’re used to them being in japan, and it’d be neat to have a point of comparison for that.

Also the america arc is where kei and marie probably do gay things, which I am very down for

ultimately, I think upwards of 90% of people who stumble upon this series now, 5 years after the last chapter and last episode were released, are here specifically for kei. she’s the strong bad to sawaki’s homestar: you might not know it yet, but she’s the reason you’re here. if you’re impatient and wanna speedrun straight to the part where she transitions/goes full time/whatever, it’s halfway through volume 4 of the manga and episode 10 of the first season of anime. there’s a lot of fun plotlines that happen before that point that really deserve attention on their own merit, though.

I’m a big fan of kei’s characterization. she’s possibly my favorite trans (or trans-adjacent josou danshi, post-colonialism ho!) character I can think of, and certainly the best I’ve seen written by a cis author. being manga, there’s some dumb missteps that happen, but they seem to be mostly a result of the creators not knowing better rather than them just putting her in to gawk at like a lot of other creative teams tend to do. plus, I think a lot of it boils down to localization error. for instance, the scanslation I read consistently has characters and margin notes refer to her as “he,” but like, japanese doesn’t really use gendered language the way english does, so it’s more representative of the scan team’s biases than the writers’.

One of the things I really like about Kei’s depiction is that the author doesn’t try to make excuses for her behavior. There’s no throwaway line in her backstory about how her parents saw three crows and a capybara on the way home from the hospital and decided to raise her as a girl. She’s clearly attracted to Sawaki, but that’s never framed as her primary motive for transition. She just flatly explains that she thought about it real hard and decided that this was best for her. To me, that’s a much more compelling narrative than one where it’s something either foisted upon the character or something they just sort of haphazardly stumble into.

Another thing that sticks out to me about Kei is that she exists in a series that doesn’t construct its cast as a harem around a singular main character or the reader, which gives her much more room for personal motivations and interests. Like, even though I love Luka from steins;gate to pieces, she and the rest of the female cast in that series really only exist in order to be Okabe’s, and by extension, the viewers’ romantic interests. This ends up sort of limiting their ability for character growth because at the end of the day, they all have to remain available and receptive to Okabe’s advances. As a result, Luka can never really call Okabe out for mistreating her because the writers won’t risk making her route or subplot unappealing. The same goes for plenty of other series trans characters find themselves in, and it shows. So many of them are either smug tricksters there to tease viewers or utterly submissive waifs, and often lack development beyond what’s necessary to get otaku motors running.

Since Moyashimon doesn’t use that kind of restrictive casting structure, the author is able to untie Kei’s sense of self-worth from how Sawaki feels about her and allow the romance subplot to take a back seat while the cast works on their various projects. As a result, she ends up being more independent than most other trans characters and her self-confidence is more genuine. She’s designed from the ground up to be a more complete character, and it makes her inclusion in the main story as well as her subplot with Sawaki feel organic.

on the other hand, as punlich​ pointed out in their post, the series does take a couple passes at introducing characters that seem to be designed with the intent of giving the reader an outlet to vent their sexual frustration around kei, particularly marie and madoka. the former is frequently referenced within the work as being a cis palette swap of kei, and madoka is another of itsuki’s proteges who begins insisting that she’s going to marry sawaki shortly after she’s introduced and receives little characterization beyond that. Marie ends up being a strong character in her own right, but the work probably would’ve been better off if they’d given her basically any other design.

at least in my reading of the work, neither is really taken seriously as a preferable alternative pairing to kei/sawaki, since marie ends up being more into kei than sawaki in the end, and madoka just makes sawaki uncomfortable more often than not. it’s a clear step up from works like steins;gate, re:zero, blend-s, or oregairu, where the trans or GNC character is the one who’s never taken seriously to the point of being a joke inclusion more than anything. still, it’s irritating that the creators would feel the need to include that sort of character, given how they’re usually pretty good about not harem-izing their cast.

uh, and speaking of that, fuck most of volume 11. the central plotline for that section is that the school holds a beauty pageant for the cast, which is, uh, wildly out of character for the series to say the least. it’s to the point where I’m inclined to suspect some form of executive meddling. like maybe they were gonna get dropped due to lack of readership and the brass told the creative team to do a dumb fanservice arc or something. they talk in a sidebar about how they changed editors around the start of this arc, so I have a hunch that has something to do with it?  I guess only they would know, though. it’s not like I can read any interviews or anything lol.

there’s still good content in there, and like I mentioned earlier, it’s when kei starts to really dominate a lot of the screen time, which is a big plus. it’s just dumb and out of place.

I also kind of found the conclusion to kei and sawaki’s “will they, won’t they” subplot really unfulfilling. namely, there really isn’t a conclusion to it at all. at the end, it’s clear that kei’s finally become comfortable with her attraction to sawaki, but sawaki is still kinda hesitant about going anywhere serious with someone he’s been friends with since forever. and like, I can get that, it’s sort of a natural aspect of where that arc would have to go, it’s just a frustrating note to end on. it seems likely that they would get together in the future, at least. (and that’s why you should read my fanfics!)

One thing I really liked about the ending section is sawaki comes up with some proactive uses for his superpower. for most of the series, it’s just a vehicle for ishikawa to exposit about his fascination with microbiology and fermented cuisine, which works great with the lower-key tone the series went for. still, the ways he uses it at the end are pretty clever, and it would’ve been neat to see him go on to use it in other ways. It’s frustrating that one of the uses he comes up with involves doing mouth-to-mouth with madoka, however.

I kind of get the feeling that the series got cut short because a lot of plot threads get addressed and tied up really quickly and sloppily in the last four or five chapters, while a ton of others just sit there. idk if it was a popularity thing, or if ishikawa decided to go all-in on maria the virgin witch, or some other factor, but I guess that’s kind of the nature of serial fiction. it just goes on as long as the creators and publishers are engaged with it, and then it’s over and they all move onto something else.

I’m being pretty hard on the ending portions of the series, but honestly pretty much everything not directly related to the beauty pageant or madoka is really solid. I’m just laying it all out there so nobody gets caught off-guard by the jankiness more than anything.

For one reason or another, moyashimon really struck a chord with me, and it’s kind of hard to put into words why. A big part of it is that kei is a character that I feel a sort of kinship with, which is a rare occurrence as a trans person. She feels like a real person that I’d meet through a message board or discord lobby. The rest of the cast has shades of that as well- the students feel like people I could have met in school, and itsuki harkens back to aspects of professors I’ve had, from his weird sense of humor to his rather alarming past working for the military. It’s easy for me to subconsciously insert myself into their fictional friend group. I guess it’s kind of like how people tend to engage with redlettermedia or ensemble let’s play channels like game grumps or super best friends play. Reading about the gang’s antics confers a sense of belonging that I’m perpetually starving for.

Another aspect of it is that it’s just fun to indulge in someone else’s hyperfixations for a while. It’s why sci-fi authors like heinlein and crichton are so influential, and why internet personalities like cgp grey or jon bois are so engaging: they’re really adept at articulating how utterly captivating some concept or ideology is to them at the moment. Somewhere between most and all of what ishikawa has to say about food and microbiology goes directly over my head, but the passion he has for those topics is readily apparent in every jargon-infested, chart-saturated debate he has his characters get into, and I love it. In that sidebar he goes on about his relationship to his editors, he mentions that the top boy editor chewed him out a couple times for basically trying to sneak a textbook into the magazine. It ends up being compelling based on passion alone, even if I only really internalized a fifth of what he actually had to say.

Is moyashimon for you? Ultimately I don’t think it’s really for anyone besides ishikawa himself. But if you’re at all like me, chances are you’ll fall in love with this bizarre and charming edutainment series anyway. If any of this sounds even remotely interesting to you, I can’t recommend checking it out highly enough.

[chocobutt-trash]

Hiya! You write beautifully and you're probably sick of me saying that by now because I say it all the time and every comment I make on all your fics.. But there's many times when I'm engaging with your writing that I need to pause and just say "wow." So it got me thinking that you've probably read a lot of interesting books and I was wondering if you would share some of your favorite fiction titles. It's almost blasphemy to talk about non fanfiction on tumblr but I am quite curious. Thank u

*waves*Hey there - thanks so much for this ask, it’s something I relish being asked because there’s nothing I like more than talking about my favourite books ;)

First off I’m still super flattered you enjoy my writing so much! I have a long way to go before reaching the calibre of those I look up to, but with more practice, and wider reading, there’s always the chance, haha.

Blasphemy? Never!

So: books and authors I adore.

Right up at the top we have to have Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Mantel’s prose is absolutely exquisite, and she’s one of the most enjoyable authors around. Wolf Hall is the first in a fantastic trilogy covering the rise of Thomas Cromwell to power in Tudor England, but honestly, Mantel could write about de-greasing a kitchen sink and the prose would be so damn delightful I’d read it and weep. Here, we have a hefty tome that is, essentially, a history book, and the most stunning thing is that she’s reconstructed as much as possible of the events and scenery as was at the time of the Tudors. She really got inside Cromwell’s head to write this book, and he’s such an interesting character. We often hear of the Henry VIII story from either Henry’s point of view, or those of his wives (particularly Anne Boleyn). But this, now, this comes from the unexpected track. Born to commonfolk in a small London suburb, Cromwell was never meant to gain entry into the inner circles of the English Court, and yet he ended up influencing the political and religious direction of an entire nation. This is a fantastic character study of a shrewd, down-to-earth, ambitious man, who is at once a man of the people and yet so hard to fathom. Damn, just talking about it makes me want to read it again.

Filth, by Irvine Welsh, is a mainstay of mine. It’s written entirely in Scots dialect, so if you’ve not the background, you may need a translator. But Filth, like all Welsh’s novels, is amazing in its characterisation. It deals with an ordinary policeman in Edinburgh, Bruce Robertson, who, we slowly come to realise over the course of the novel, is completely morally corrupt. And it starts out with little things. Little, ‘oh, he’s probably being a bit of a jerk’ things. Little redeemable things. And since it’s all from his point of view, you’re along with him for the ride. Having a villain as the main character, first-person, and having the rabbit hole be such a subtle slip, does interesting things to your brain, to the point where, as a reader, you almost start waving away some of his actions, and part of it’s due to the sort of language Welsh employs. I love this fact, because you see how easy it is for people who do terrible things to get away with it. To make you want to give them the benefit of the doubt. Just in case they can be redeemed. There is also a hefty dose of psychological horror and existentialism, with a side order of magical realism as the tapeworm that lives in Bruce Robertson’s gut starts talking to him. The further he gets down the rabbit hole, the worse his mental health becomes. And, of course, this is Irvine Welsh we’re talking about, and I don’t think there’s even enough tags on AO3 to warn you of all the horrors this book contains within.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, has been one of the biggest influences on my writing style. McCarthy has an incredibly unique style. It’s bare-bones writing - he need not spell out anything for the reader, and this goes to the point where he doesn’t even use speech marks to delineate conversation. The structure of the writing alone is so flawless that you don’t even need it. It’s an exercise in creating a stark, vivid post-apocalyptic world with the bare minimum of ingredients. Word choice, sentence structure, emotion. His style really isn’t for everyone, but it is so clever and utterly delicious. I read the entire thing on the verge of tears, I was so worried for the kid in the story.

Amrita, by Banana Yoshimoto, is actually not Yoshimoto’s best work in terms of style (her short story collections Sleep and Kitchen are better), but it’s such a work of art that it stands as my favourite of hers. It’s about a young woman who wakes up after being in a coma, having lost certain parts of her memory. There’s a sister who died, a younger brother with problems of the parapsychological variety, and a healthy dose of magical realism. It’s all washed over with this serene sense of nostalgia and anticipation, and on every page I felt like I was on the brink of an entirely other world, that I could just look at the world slightly differently, and it would shift.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami, is an experimental masterpiece. I love the fact that I basically read the entire thing and it was so well-written I didn’t even question the fact that nobody in the novel has names. That’s right, nobody’s name is mentioned even once. And there’s at least a dozen characters. This is an outstanding book that influenced anime creator Yoshitoshi ABe (creator of Serial Experiments Lain, and Haibane Renmei), and it’s utterly fantastical and out there and thought-provoking, which is not what one might necessarily think for a novel that opens with a man musing at great length about what sort of sofa is best to sit upon.

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell (no, not the comedian, the other one), is also experimental in nature, and is sublime in the way it packages up its stories. Mitchell has an immense amount of talent; there are multiple plotlines that spans centuries and he is somehow able to write convincingly well in each genre style, from nineteenth-century colonial memoirs to ‘70′s crime drama to futuristic post-apocalyptic fiction. I read a lot of ship logs from century-old expeditions, and the segment The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing is absolutely spot-on. There’s real beauty in this book, and please, for the love of god, read the book rather than watch the film, because beautiful as the film is, it does not come close to capturing that sense of wonder that the book does.

Dune, by Frank Herbert, has to be up here because not only is Dune a fantastic example of eco-fiction, but Herbert breaks the cardinal rule of not having more than one point of view in a paragraph and somehow I still love him. Conventionally, I prefer sticking to a single point of view in an entire scene, because otherwise the narrative is messy, and not in a fun way, more in a kind of sticks-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth-like-mashed-potato kind of way. Bleh. However, Herbert routinely switches perspective in the same scene, sometimes during the same paragraph, and occasionally during the same sentence. He’s pretty much the only writer I can stand who does this (barring Stephen King on the odd occasion) and it’s mainly because one of the principal themes in Dune is the use of Bene Gesserit magic, which is a glorified way of saying ‘using psychological warfare on others’. Words are a weapon, and it’s imperative to the plot of the story that the reader sees the effect of these words on the characters’ mental states. So yeah, it’s meant to be a sci-fi eco-warrior novel, but it ends up immensely psychological. And that is a very worthwhile read.

I think I’ve covered the main ones that tend to hover up near the top of my mind. Again, thank you so much for this ask, it was great fun to answer.

[brandxspandex]

Thor: Ragnarok review of sorts

So I just went to see Thor: Ragnarok for a second time and I think that I’ve collated my thoughts enough to give an overview of my opinions on it. Under the cut because this got really long…

Firstly, what I didn’t like about it:

I wasn’t crazy about the way they killed off the Warriors Three with so little ceremony, especially Volstagg and Fandral (Hogun’s death was a bit better). Volstagg in particular is a pretty major and beloved character in the Thor mythos so to see him done away with like that was unpleasant. It’s made even worse by the fact that The Dark World implied that MCU Volstagg has a family with a bunch of little children like 616 Volstagg does.

I similarly didn’t like the way they wrote off Thor’s relationship with Jane Foster with the same casual disregard. I didn’t even like the Thor/Jane plotline and kinda wished they’d never taken that particular path in the first place, but it really irks me when a story sets up a particular relationship or character or plotline or whatever as important and something we should be emotionally invested in, and then proceeds to write it off as though it never mattered. It weakens my trust in the narrative, as it makes me wonder why I should get invested in anything else it pushes me to care about, if there’s a chance it’s just gonna act like it was never important later on. Plus, even if I personally may not have particularly cared, it makes me feel bad for people who did. Sure, more often than not people’s ships don’t work out in canon, and you just have to live with it, but it’s a whole other level of insult to have your ship just tossed away as though it never meant anything. Contrast this with how they dealt with Bruce/Natasha in the movie; I don’t really care for that pairing whatsoever, but I’m still glad they acknowledged it in a way that was consistent with the way it was presented in Age of Ultron. Ultimately, while certain relationships don’t do it for me and I personally think they drag down the narrative, I think that if they’re going to be done away with, it should be nonetheless done in a manner that is respectful to way the relationships have been presented up to that point.

While I enjoyed Hela, as I will expand upon a little further on, I couldn’t help but feel somewhat underwhelmed by her character, knowing how much cooler the comic book character she’s based on is. As keen as I was for Hela, I knew that there was no way they were going to manage to make her as interesting as her 616 counterpart, but I nonetheless hoped they’d chuck in some little reference to the clusterfuck of factors that make her so fascinating in the comics, but there wasn’t really anything like that. On that note, I was hoping that there would be some interesting Hela and Loki interaction, given they have such a major relationship in the comics (not to mention the connection between their mythological counterparts), but they barely interacted at all. I was also really hoping that Hela was going to survive in order to act as a substitute for Mistress Death and Thanos’s object of obsession, and whilst that still isn’t completely off the table, it honestly didn’t feel like they were setting that up after all. Still, I can hope.

On a more minor note, I was a bit irked that the after-credits scene from Doctor Strange ended up being a scene in the film. It felt a bit like being retroactively robbed of an after-credits scene since there is no longer any point in watching it on its own at the end of Doctor Strange.

As for the things I was more ambivalent about:

I had mixed feelings about the humour in the film. On one hand, I love comedy and levity, especially when it is mixed with other genres I’m into. In fact, the humour that runs through the MCU is a big part of why I love it so much. On the other hand, when the humour of an established setting is suddenly amped up, particularly when it smacks of a very particular (and new) style of comedy as it did in this film, it can feel rather discombobulating, almost like the rules of that universe have spontaneously shifted to make this string of funny things happen. So while I found the humour in the film to be a lot of fun, I did feel that sense of discombobulation.

On a related note, Thor’s characterisation in particular felt like it shifted quite a bit to fit the style of humour in the film. I enjoyed his characterisation, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was quite the break from how he acted in previous films. I guess I’d have to watch this movie back to back with some of the previous ones to determine whether or not this is a valid feeling. It is something that does seem to happen quite a bit, I find; certain creators have a very particular way of handling characterisation that causes a lot of characters to take on a certain…tone, when they are written by said creator. I got the sense that was going on in this film.

I’m not sure how to feel about the destruction of Mjolnir. On one hand it was a bold move, but on the other it takes away the most iconic thing about Thor.

They didn’t show Thor and Loki hugging at the end, and while I’m sort of outraged, I also have to wonder if cutting away actually made it all the more impactful, but I guess we’ll never know for sure.

Things I thoroughly enjoyed about the film:

While I found Hela’s overall character rather underwhelming, I certainly can’t fault the stunning way she looked or the overwhelming amount of swag she simply radiated; it was glorious. I would have liked to have it wrapped around a more interesting backstory and/or character motivation, but I can at least relish this shining beacon of sassy goth villainy.

It is also good to know that Hela is at least still a dog person in the MCU, and Fenrir was a very fine example a death goddess’s best friend.

How fricking cool was that seemingly ROCKET POWERED DRAGON at the beginning???

I found myself endeared to Valkyrie the moment she drunkenly staggered off the walkway of her spaceship and then proceeded to mow down a gaggle of scavengers with gauntlets that controlled her ship’s turrets. It was a good first impression.

Both the Hulk and Bruce Banner were fabulous, funny inclusions in the movie, and I really enjoyed their interactions with both Thor and Valkyrie. Honestly, if either Bruce or Valkyrie end up romantically involved with anyone, I think I’d most prefer for it to be with one another.

Doctor Strange was also a fun inclusion from start to end.

I also loved how Thor had Mjolnir disguised as an umbrella during those Earth-bound scenes, in reference to the old comics where it would transform into a walking stick. They even had the detail where he taps it against the ground to transform into his Asgardian garb.

The Grandmaster (and his fricking orgy ship) was just a whole lot of fun.

As was that bloody Kiwi space rock (and his ant friend)…but let’s be real, the mere existence of New Zealand is funny in itself.

While the revelations about Odin and the royal family weren’t explored nearly enough for my liking, they certainly provided a goldmine of worldbuilding and fanfiction possibilities for fandom to play with.

Finally, the things about the movie that I loved:

When I first became invested in the MCU one of my favourite things about it was the bond that formed between Bruce Banner and Tony Stark in The Avengers, so I felt a bit bummed by some of the more recent films in which that relationship seemed to fall to the wayside. Therefore, the way Bruce kept mentioning Tony in this film, even if they were little, incidental mentions, made me very, very happy. I really hope this means their relationship hasn’t been forgotten after all.

Personally I was never truly convinced that Loki killed Odin at the end of The Dark World, but I was very glad to have it confirmed that Loki just dumped him on Earth. Loki’s desperate love for Odin was the thing that ultimately won me over to his character in the first place, and I think that would have been ruined for me if it turned out that he had killed him. I think the way the movie dealt with Odin overall was pretty spot on actually; it introduced the darker elements of his character that have been apparent in the comics for some time, but kept his characterisation nonetheless consist with how he was portrayed in the former films. I was quite satisfied with how his arc played out.

Out of all the characters in the movie, I feel like the tone suited Loki the best. After all, it makes sense that a god of mischief would be at home in a bizarro comedy. Whilst I felt that a number of the other characters had shifted their behaviour slightly to suit the film’s comedic tone, Loki’s characterisation felt completely natural to me. Now that I think about it, I think Loki’s been growing progressively funnier over the course of each movie he pops up in, which is great since he absolutely should be funny. Don’t get me wrong, I loved angsty little Loki from the first Thor movie, but he really needs to have a solid dose of mischief served up alongside all that angst. Honestly, what are the more quintessential ingredients of Loki than angst and mischief? I feel as though that scene of Loki masquerading as a suspiciously fruity Odin, building statues of himself and watching dramatic theatre about his life would seem like absurd Flanderization for most other characters, but for Loki it felt as though he was finally becoming the character he was always meant to be.

I furthermore loved the character arc Loki undertook in this film; it felt like a really organic progression from his character growth in The Dark World. What really got me was that scene where Thor tells Loki that although he refuses to change, he could be more, because if that isn’t a Journey into Mystery/Agent of Asgard reference then it’s a hell of a coincidence.

On that note, Thor and Loki’s interactions were wonderful; a fantastic blend of funny and heartfelt, antagonistic and cooperative. Basically their relationship in this film was everything I want to see from their comic counterparts that Marvel keeps refusing to show me goddammit.

I loved the unique aesthetic of the film both visually and aurally; such a cool combination of the high fantasy thing the other two Thor films had going on and the synthy, 80s Kirby-esque sci-fi element that they introduced. Seriously, what other movie looks and sounds like this one does?

Admittedly I’m only really familiar with 616 Skurge from the Walter Simonson 80s run, in which he doesn’t have that many appearances, but of course it does contain his most notable appearance, and I loved the way they adapted that into the film. It might even be my favourite scene in the movie. Skurge’s whole character arc was really the cherry on top of this film for me.

LOOP ZOOP

But fricking seriously how the hell did we get to the third movie in a Thor movie trilogy and only now they’re playing Immigrant Song?

I did not see that twist on the Ragnarok thing coming and honestly I was pretty impressed by it; I especially liked how they subverted expectations in regards to Loki being responsible for instigating Ragnarok by indeed having him directly responsible, but for reasons I never could have anticipated.

While Infinity War is probably gonna screw it all up, I loved the promise presented by set-up at the end with Thor being the Captain King of a starship of homeless space fantasy gods traversing the stars, with Loki by his side. Holy shit I desperately want to watch a sci-fi series spinning off from this premise.

SAFE PASSAGE THROUGH THE ANUS

[kareenvorbarra]

alright after thinking about things more and seeing the movie a second time (even though i fell asleep for the last half hour because i went to a late showing and bought a giant dumb movie-themes cocktail at the theater) i am ready to talk about TLJ in more detail. I am still feeling pretty torn about it, there were things i loved and things I hated, so here are some lists:

things i liked

the diversity!!!! TFA did this too and again it was such a joy to watch a Star Wars movie and see all these female and non-white background characters everywhere. heroic female Resistance pilots and gunners, female First Order bridge officers, the fact that a good chunk of the Resistance leadership is apparently made up of middle-aged women, i love it

Paige Tico was great, and I loved that Lt. Connix got some lines, Tallie aka Blue Leader is my new space girlfriend 

Vice Admiral Holdo and her purple hair and flowy clothing and no-nonsense attitude and the way she fucking HYPERSPACED THE FIRST ORDER FLEET IN HALF which was one of the coolest scenes in the whole damn movie

every single scene Leia was in was gold and I love her and miss her and i’m so afraid of what’s going to happen in the next movie, and I miss Carrie so much ;___;

Poe and Leia’s relationship was very very good, the part where she bursts onto the bridge in her hospital gown and just stuns him very lovingly was another one of my favorite scenes 

Snoke dying was v satisfying and good, get rekt you evil motherfucker (though i hope we find out what his deal was eventually because i’m still curious, who is this clown) 

the Luke + R2D2 reunion made me so emotional, i legit cried a little the first time i saw the scene where R2 plays the old recording of Leia ;__; my poor kids

same with Chewie breaking down Luke’s door, and Luke asking about Han, and Luke’s last scene with Leia, and the part where he turns out to have been fucking astral projecting himself from the island

i like the possibility that Rey’s parents are just randos (v Taran from Prydain) and i really hope they stick with that and don’t pull a “psych she’s actually related to someone important” because lbr Kylo doesn’t know shit about her parents, he was just saying that because it was the thing most likely to make her come with him. 

i loved Rose, she’s a real sweetheart and it’s cool to have a major character who would be a random background tech in any other story

Poe fucking crank-calling Hux was absolute comedy gold, also Hux pretty much did nothing in this movie except get dunked on which was incredibly satisfying

things i didn’t like

i uh try not to talk about how much i hate reylo because it wasn’t A Thing onscreen in the first movie and i don’t begrudge people shipping whatever they want to ship even if i don’t get it, but i really hate reylo you guys. i don’t mind them becoming friends or helping each other out but if they date in canon the new trilogy is dead to me, i really won’t be able to handle it.

i’m totally on board with Kylo turning but i still don’t give a damn about him compared to so many other characters. why does this movie treat him like a child when he’s almost 30? i really wish he wasn’t the focus of Rey’s storyline, I want Rey to be the focus of her own storyline. I want her relationships with Finn and Leia to be moved to the forefront. I want her to interact with people who aren’t white men

my one consolation is that Rey didn’t go with Kylo at the end, and she didn’t buy his bullshit about her not being important to anyone but him, because that was a gross thing to say and she has multiple people who care about her for real and aren’t just projecting their trauma and insecurities onto her 

one of the reasons I loved TFA so much was the strength and depth of the relationship between Finn and Rey. That was the emotional heart of the NT for me and i didn’t expect them to interact much in this movie but their relationship was shoved aside way more than it needed to be. i do ship them romantically, but whether they get together or not i want their relationship to continue to be a big part of the story, and whoever wrote this movie clearly didn’t think that was a priority. 

as much as a loved Rose and Kelly Marie Tran’s performance, Finn/Rose makes me sad. after what i personally saw onscreen in TFA, this movie felt like a reylo fanfic where the author pushed one half of my OTP aside and gave him a new love interest to get him out of the way of their OTP.

Finn, who was one of my favorite (if not my favorite) characters in TFA, just didn’t get much depth in this movie. I really enjoyed most of his storyline while I was watching it, but the more i think about it the more disappointed i get. his desertion plotline was the most compelling part of TFA for me and this movie didn’t have any kind of satisfying emotional follow-up to that; his fight with Phasma was cool to watch but ultimately hollow, and i’m not pleased that she died after getting maybe ten minutes total of screentime in the whole series. Where is my stormtrooper uprising? where is Finn continuing to grapple with the trauma of his past? i guess i can hope that ep. 9 gives me some of this, but i’m nervous now. 

This movie left me with a lot of pressing questions, like where the fuck is Jessika Pava? i guess i’m supposed to assume she died somewhere offscreen but that’s super unfair to her as a character, until i get some confirmation i’ll just hope that she was off on a mission somewhere during the First Order attack on the base and will rejoin the Resistance when she can  

and this is getting its own separate list because i have a lot to say about it:

structural/worldbuilding problems i have with the new trilogy that began in TFA and that TLJ only exacerbated

one of my least favorite things in TFA was the part where the First Order blew up the Hosnian System, where the New Republic government was based. Planetary destruction is a potential anxiety trigger for me personally, so i found the fact that it was included in TFA on a larger scale than in ANH both upsetting and derivative. i also didn’t think that movie explored the aftermath of such a massive disaster adequately, and i think it did an even worse job than ANH did exploring Leia’s reaction to the destruction of Alderaan. 

TLJ, rather than taking any time to rectify this problem, gives the viewer no specific information about the destruction of Hosnian Prime and its effects on other Republic worlds. instead we get “The New Republic has fallen and the First Order controls everything.” i’m sorry, what? the New Republic is (presumably) very large, and while the destruction of the Senate must have been a massive blow, what the hell is happening on the Republics hundreds of member planets? did they all just roll over and submit to the First Order without putting up a fight? because that’s sure as hell not what happened after the destruction of the Old Republic. and how is the First Order even ruling anybody? they don’t seem to have set up any kind of new central government (which the Empire did pretty much immediately when it rose to power) and all of the First Order’s top leadership is busy personally pursuing the Resistance. 

The prequel trilogy and the Clone Wars show dedicate hours and hours of time detailing the events that led up to the fall of the Old Republic, a sprawling and complex institution whose members cannot be pacified overnight even by someone as powerful as Palpatine. Surely the New Republic is no less massive and diverse - i understand that it’s not the focus of these new movies but they really can’t give the audience a single detail? afaik there isn’t even much supplemental material where i can go to find this information, and i’m mad about it. 

i also have a million questions about the Jedi and Luke’s school and i don’t know where to find this information in new canon because it sure isn’t in the movies at all. Luke comes out of ROTJ knowing basically nothing about the Jedi’s history and philosophy - does he study them after the war? what does he decide to adopt, and what does he ignore? he’s obviously invested enough in the label to keep calling himself a Jedi, but what does being a Jedi mean to Luke Skywalker? also, what the fuck happened to the students who left with Kylo after he destroyed the school? 

this complaint has a lot to do with the fact that i’m very invested in the Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons, maybe more invested than i am in the movies right now. i don’t expect my favorite cartoon characters to appear in the movies, and i understand the desire to keep the movies highly accessible for people who don’t engage in other Star Wars media. BUT. to me it felt like TLJ went out of its way to severely limit the scope of the kind of stories that could potentially be told outside the movies in the NT era. 

I’m going to make a lot of comparisons here with the OT, because the OT also sticks closely to a few core characters and has a narrower narrative focus than the prequels, but it does so in a way that leaves a lot of room for additional stories. The Rebel Alliance is big and sprawling and has lots of bases and cells and operatives who exist perfectly well alongside the main action even though they never appear onscreen. this openness allowed for later stories like Rebels and Rogue One to exist unhindered. but the world of TLJ has no such openness - we are told that this is the Resistance’s only base, that the 400 people who evacuate and the handful of people who actually survive the movie are all that remains of the organization. there’s some vague talk of allies in the Outer Rim, but we have no idea how closely tied to the Resistance they are and none of them seem willing to respond to an urgent call for help. unlike the Rebel Alliance, the story of the Resistance is a small story that will never be bigger (though i hope to god one of the groups of “Outer Rim allies” is some sort of offshoot of the Free Ryloth movement, because if there’s one thing i know about the Ryloth of the last several decades is that it never fails to resist oppression). 

similarly (and to me, even more distressing) is the way this movie handles the possibility of a Jedi remnant. there are a few lines in the OT about Luke or Yoda or whoever being the last of the Jedi, but that hasn’t stopped Star Wars from telling canon stories about other Order 66 survivors who are engaging with the Force on their own. these people can exist during the Empire’s last days without interfering with Luke’s story - the galaxy is a big place, and with Palpatine in charge it makes sense for them all to be in hiding. but wouldn’t they have come out of hiding during the New Republic and tried to find each other? i don’t want to believe that every possible ex-Jedi or former padawan or hidden Force user secretly developing their talents died before TFA. even if Ahsoka is really dead or ascended to some other plane of existence, even if Kanan dies in the Rebels finale, what about Ezra? are they going to kill him, too? what about surviving Jedi like Jocasta Nu or Quinlan Vos? what about kids who realized they were Force-sensitive during Imperial rule, like Dhara Leonis or Jai Kell? obviously i don’t mind these characters not being included in the movies, but i want a movie-verse that doesn’t make it impossible for them to exist and continue to have stories of their own. i don’t want Luke to be the only person who tried to develop his powers after the Empire fell, or who tried training a new generation of Force users.

[ramajmedia]

10 Storylines From Sense8 That Never Got Resolved | ScreenRant

Like Firefly before it, Sense8 has become one of those shows bemoaned by sci-fi fans for ending too early. After two successful, yet expensive, seasons, Netflix canceled the complex, beautifully-filmed show. Because of this, fans never got to see their favorite storylines resolved. Though Netflix gave the show a finale movie to try to wrap things up, also much like Firefly, there was too much to cover.  The series had a bunch of loose ends that didn't get tied up into any sort of conclusion.

Here are 10 Storylines from Sense8 That Never Got Resolved.

10 The Fate of The Bak Family Company

A big conflict throughout Sense8 involved Sun Bak's family and their company's reputation. When the police catch her brother Joong-Ki for embezzling, Sun takes the fall for him. However, when Joong-Ki has a change of heart, he murders their dad and sends Sun to prison. The end of the series finds Sun confronting her brother for what he'd done and getting him to pay for his crimes. Though the Sun and Joong-Ki plotline gets resolution, there are still several questions hanging in the balance: their family company. What has happened during her brother's run? Who will lead the company? If Sun's jail time is a problem, then who? The Bak enterprise is still in grave danger with no known fate.

9 Capheus' Political Career

A big part of the second season involved Capheus going from easy-going bus driver to serious politician. After the water crisis in his town, he's desperate to make a difference. But when the show got cancelled, Capheus' presidential campaign got sidelined by Whispers and other interpersonal resolutions.

Even though his storyline didn't involve as much active danger or the fate of the other sensates, Capheus was using his abilities to try to make the world a better place. It's tragic that fans will never see his political aspirations play out. Especially since some of the corruption in his home tied into the corruption at Rajan's family business.

8 Lito's Hollywood Transition

Living in homophobic Mexico, Lito always feared coming out to the public. Especially because his career as an actor hinged on them loving him. When he came out, his worst fears came true: no one would hire him, his career started to dry up, and he was suddenly an outcast.

In a bid to keep his career and embrace his sexuality, Lito got in contact with Hollywood executives and auditioned to play a gay man in a movie. After some networking and adventuring, Lito got the part. After all he'd been through, it seemed like the stepping stone towards a new life.

However, past getting the role, his new career in Hollywood never gets anymore screen time. Sure, Sense8 had a lot to cram into its final episodes. Despite that, it would have been nice to actually see Lito's conclusion.

RELATED: 5 TV Shows That Shouldn't Have Been Cancelled (And 5 That Need To Go)

7 The Complex Kalajangang Triad

Throughout the series, the religious scientist Kala struggles between her feelings for fellow sensate Wolfgang, and the marriage she was pressured into. Over time, she learns to love aspects of both relationships. She loves the support Rajan gives her, but she also can't ignore the passion she feels for Wolfgang.

In the series finale movie, she finally has to face this contradiction head on. The group has to find and save Wolfgang, and they pull Rajan into the mix. The interesting conclusion the show has to the love triangle though, is to make them a throuple instead of having Kala pick one guy.

Many fans praised this choice, however the relationships deserved to have more in-depth discussion and exploration of the triad instead of just giving it a "done" stamp.

6 The Lacuna

The Lacuna and the monk that came with them were always a fascinating, mystical group. Unfortunately, the cancellation torpedoed any continued air of mystery about them. In the finale, the group met The Lacuna and got some answers and information about Whispers. Though it's great the August 8th cluster met them, that doesn't give any resolution to who they are. They are a mysterious group of sensates that stay hidden from BPO and Whispers. There was no real explanation to what they are like and what they do in this world.

5 Sensate Science

Sense8 did a pretty good job of explaining how the rules of being a sensate worked. Amidst all the action and drama of the sho, though, the science of it all does still leave a lot without explanation. Giving birth to clusters is still vague at best. What makes a person a sensate remains relatively undefined. The way that other sensates connect to other people not in their cluster is arguably confusing.

It makes sense that the world-building behind the sci-fi concept is a little messy, since the show was suddenly cut short. However, it doesn't replace all the scientific conclusions fans missed out on in learning more about sensate existence.

RELATED: 10 Best Sci-Fi Shows To Stream On Netflix

4 BPO Corruption

Near the end of Sense8, the cluster learns that BPO wasn't always the looming, evil group out to kill sensates. Actually, scientists and sensates formed BPO as an organization to help understand and research them. Over time, corruption and greed infested and took over the company.

With the destruction of Whispers and some higher level BPO folks, the main heroes have taken a big step towards taking back the company for scientists and sensates. However, it's hard to believe that they got rid of all the corruption in BPO. They may have turned the tide, but there's no resolution to why this really happened and how to try to stop it from ever happening again.

3 The Rasal Family and The Religious Tension In Mumbai

A big part of Kala's marriage frustrations stemmed from Rajan's family policies. His father, influential in the political climate of Mumbai, was part of an anti-religious movement. However, Kala and her family are religious. This causes tensions, including an assassination attempt on her father-in-law.

The more Rajan sticks up for Kala, the more his family tries to mediate instead of pioneer the anti-religious end. This leads to them turning on other big governmental influencers. With the religious tensions and the corruption scandal, the Rasal family has some serious machinations going on in Mumbai.

Unfortunately, the writers never resolved those plots and dropped them in favor of heisting BPO for Wolfgang.

RELATED: 10 TV Shows That Were Incredibly Expensive To Make

2 The State of Other Sensates

The biggest threat in the series is BPO and its aggressive obsession with snuffing out sensates. While fans follow the August 8th cluster, they find out there are so many more around the world.

Seeing as the show vaguely insinuates that a lot of clusters get hunted down by Whispers, the main cast don't really know the state of other sensates. They don't know if there are really so few or if many of them are simply in hiding. At the very least, they're all pretty quiet. If there's supposed to be a world filled with possible sensates, it's devastating that there's no resolution to what the rest of their worldly community looks like.

1 Riley and Will's Future

If any couple had the most trouble with BPO, it was Riley Blue and Will Gorski. As the people who came in contact with Whispers in Season 1, Will and Riley went on the run to keep Will (and the cluster) safe from Whispers' infiltration.

Now after BPO's future is re-written and no one is after them, Will and Riley's future is very uncertain. Will lost his job as a police officer and his dad passed away. Riley hasn't been on the DJ scene in months, if not more than a year. Where all the other sensates have a general direction after the movie, these two are left vague. For all the trouble they went through, they deserve some sort of hopeful resolution to their story.

NEXT: 10 Shows To Watch If You Like Sense8

source https://screenrant.com/netflix-sense8-plotholes-storylines-unresolved/