#and like the same isn't established by Jonathan dying

[jonathanbyersphd]

Also like I truly, really, honestly believe in my heart that it's necessary for Jonathan to leave so that Will can fully grow into his own person and finish his coming off age story but like y'all don't wanna hear me you just wanna dance

[syrupsyche]

Chapter 1 of "Even If There Are Monsters" Director's Commentary

I wrote a Dracula AU for @/feathraly a few months ago, and for this spooky season I thought I'd do a lil behind-the-scenes look at what was going on in my head as I wrote the fic in the 2-ish months I had :D I'll be publishing a chapter or so a day until Halloween!

Feel free to read the fic here before/as you read the director's commentary :3

To start off: I knew I wanted the fic to read as close to Dracula as possible, and so I decided to stick with the epistolary format. Marius's entries were tough to write, simply because he and Jonathan are quite different tbh. Marius isn't as spontaneous as Jonathan; in the brick he's constantly paralysed at the idea of having to Make A Choice, and so instead I focused as much as I could on Marius's overwhelming desire for Cosette. I feel like he would have done ANYTHING for her, which is the one thing he has in common with Jonathan, and so hopefully that would have realistically spurred him on.

As I mentioned in the footnotes, I replaced the English Pitman shorthand with the French Duployan shorthand. It was made around the 1860s, so a little later than Pitman but still likely to have been picked up by Marius by 1890. As for changing Whitby, England to Cette, France, I mostly just searched for cities in the south of France, where Enjolras was canonically from, and specifically sea-side cities so that the Demeter would be able to wash up ashore later on. If I were a better writer and researcher, I might find somewhere more geographically similar to Whitby but um...I decided Cette would be fine 😭 apologies to any Sète residents for any incredibly inaccurate descriptions of its location.

Speaking of replacements, I had Enjolras as Lucy mostly for the lols :p. I mean sure they have their physical beauty that remains untouched even in death or wtv, but mostly I just liked whumping Enjolras. Though, a very lovely commentor did point out that both certainly had their own fire, and fought as best they could til their respective ends, so I'm glad their similarities were still present!

Prouvaire as the Van Helsing-figure was inspired by a prompt Feathraly had about him teasing Marius for being afraid of horror. Well, Marius certainly is going through The Horrors now, and Prouvaire is only spooking Cosette a little :') I think Prouvaire's canonical kookiness lends itself well to him being a vampire-expert in the story! He would have enjoyed Dracula the actual Book.

One of the main reasons why I had Grantaire be Enjolras's love interest in this fic (other than the fact Feathraly ships it :3) was because I couldn't fathom the thought of Enjolras dying without Grantaire (as per OFPD). So he was at least going to be the Quincey figure, but then I was like...well I hadn't written any proper romantic exR yet, maybe I should let them be happy in one universe (not for long but still), so I had Grantaire be the Arthur figure too! Maybe in a different Dracula AU, Enjolras would have a different Arthur figure...Courfeyrac maybe? He and Grantaire already share a lot of the suitor trio traits between them.

And speaking of sharing traits, it would have been easy to just pick a few of the Amis to feature and then substitute them in but idk....I didn't like the idea of just rewriting the entire novel with name differences. Though the general plot is still the same, I wanted it to feel like it was The Amis and Cosette having to face the horrors of Dracula, rather than just the OG plot of Dracula w/name changes, which is why there are so many "new" scenes written: to establish how most of them were already good friends, to build up the Enjolras/Grantaire relationship, and of course to infodump about vampires. Hope these changes were good!

Additionally, me not wanting to basically just repeat the entire novel unfortunately means I had to cut out a LOT of scenes and characters too. I basically squashed Jonathan's nightmares at Castle Dracula to just a few days, but hopefully it was still enough to make it terrifying for Marius 😭 I also sped up Enjolras's illness, and the Amis's fear re: Marius' silence, as well as cut out the character of Mrs Westenra. I feel bad for that, mostly bc she informs alot of Lucy's own character in the novel, but Enjolras is a whole other person who wouldn't fit into Lucy's dynamics with her mother, so I removed her completely.

Around the end of this chapter was when I knew I had to make this multi-chapt instead of a long one-shot 😔 otherwise /I/ would have lost track where everything was, and I was the author of it! And so I decided to split it where Marius makes his escape from Castle Dracula, and just before the introduction of a new narrator-figure: Combeferre! Now here's where I have to confess that my only reading of Dracula was via Dracula Daily, so I don't even know where the regular chapter splits are in the OG novel, hence my weird cuts for the rest of the fic. But hey, we got to a Shakespearean five-act structure, somehow!

And that's it for Chapter 1!! If anyone has any other stuff they wanna know, feel free to send an ask; I love talking about this fic!

Check back tomorrow for the director's commentary on Chapter 2 <3

[tadpole-san]

okay, its time for me to break down the season three trailer for titans

leading on bruce "using fear to control everyone" - we see parallels to jonathan crane on that one right away, and we know that he will be one of the Big Bads going in to the season, and I’m guessing the guy who’s calling Bruce a psychopath using fear is (ironically) Jonathan crane himself. Dick goes to him for messed up therapy it looks like????

interestingly enough, this also is a call back to Under the Red Hood - "You wanna rule them by fear, but what do you do with the ones who aren't afraid? I'm doing what you won't, I'm taking them out." Sound familiar?

Seems this isn't the only Under the Red Hood reference we'll be getting. In this shot of Jason that we see of him approaching the crime lords of Gotham, this also parallels with a scene of him doing the exact same thing as in Under the Red Hood. It's starting to look like the Red Hood storyline will be more or less the comic and movie getting live-action adapted

JOKER BEATING JASON TO DEATH CONFIRMED?

Okay hear me out i know this seemed like it would obviously happen, but there were a lot of realistic reasons that it seemed like titans would shy away from this approach - for all that it has established itself as a very adult show, the nuances of displaying such a thing so graphicly (I use that term loosely, because this is still a very vague silhouette, albeit with very clear sound effects) especially when it is involving a character who is supposed to be a teenager on the younger side is VERY tricky and if you watched the trailer, the sound of it alone is very harrowing

Looks like Tim is going to be sort of taking on some of Duke’s backstory, maybe we’ll even see the We Are Robin campaign as it is established I believe that they adjusted his story to make him like a kid from the narrows because for some reason we csnt have a black kid who comes from a rich Gotham family (but that’s a rant for another day)

Bruce is also stepping down from the Batman mantle it looks like? So here’s hoping we follow comics canon and Tim pulls him back from that

Hot take though: we probably won’t see Tim as Robin until next season unless Titans does a strange timeskip (which it also looks like they’ll do). My guesses are either a timeskip between episode one or two, or a timeskip in episode one form the get go after about a quarter of it is spent establishing Gotham’s regression when Jason dies. Logistically, I want to say that at least half a year or even a full year (or more) would pass before he becomes the red hood? So the question is how long the Titans will be in Gotham before that

Dick is set to take the Batman mantle??? Which I’m kinda bummed out about because we barely got Nightwing last season and it would be nicer to see him get comfortable in that persona, rather than have him grapple with the cowl and the idea of being Batman. We saw that enough in the season two flashback episodes

Hawk and dove on their same BS again. Not much to say there

Kory???? ARE YOU OKAY????? Because by the looks of it the fear toxin got our queen kind of good, or it could be Blackfire’s influence on her??? Disappointingly, not much was revealed for the blackfire storyline even though she’s legitimately a bigger threat than the Red Hood

ALSO the “red hood is a biblical brother” like could be a reference to how he and scarecrow teamed up in Arkham Knight (if I’m not mistaken), so there’s a chance that rather than actually “dying”, Jason is just presumed dead bc theyre taking things in a more Arkham Knight direction (I hope they don’t, that was even more brutal than his OG death in the comics)

Or “biblical brother” could be crane talking about Jason’s relationship to dick, who he seems to know somewhat personally. With the red hood vs Nightwing snippet we got, it could be a cain vs Abel situation, and this further implies that crane knows their secret IDs

RAVEN WHITE SUIT!!! Very nostalgic for those Teen Titans watchers back in the day, and it looks like it’s some sort of Amazonian armor too? Like in teen Titans, this could be a signifier that she’s coming to terms with her powers and who she is as her father’s daughter

We didn’t get much Gar content, but by the looks of it our boy is once again saddled with the responsibility when all the adults go to play. With the timeskip it’s likely we won’t see his recovery form the aftermath of Cadmus :/ but at least I hope we get his reaction to Jason’s death? Because they were really tight next season and that’s a friendship that should be explored more

Speaking of teen Titans looks - kory’s eyes glowing full green in the trailer? About time we got over her powers being blocked

No scenes of Kory and dick yet in the trailer, which is atrocious. A lot of dick and babe, and I can’t be the only comic book reader that’s sick of the dick and Kory and Babs love triangle. Let him be with Kory. PLEASE.

Interestingly enough, no rose in the trailer. Not sure if she’s confirmed to be in the season, but fingers crossed that the toxic romance from last season is put on hold

Overall the season looks really strong, but I’m still going in skeptical that they’ll sideline a lot of POC characters - kory, blackfire, gar, Tim - but it’s shaping up to be one of the best seasons so far for Titans. There’s definitely a lot more to unpack that I might do in a part two or a later post!

[stuckinakillingjar]

31 and 46 for the jjba ask game >:)

OJJHHSHSHDV OK I WAITED FOR THOS ONEBSBJSJSB

31. RANK YOUR ORDER JOJO PARTSSSS

1. LOOK LOOK LOOK. STARDUST CRUSADERS IS THE BEST PART IN MY HUMBLE OPINION. the team dynamic, the characters, the relationships, the VILLAINS, the fights, FUCKINF DIOOO it's literally so good. dude i literally rushed through the anime in like 4 days it was sooo exciting. i know many people criticise part 3 for its repetitiveness but to be honest, i didn't feel like it was repetitive at all, i found it really entertaining and wasn't bored for a single episode. the last fight is inarguably the most iconic jojo fight ever and IT DESERVES THAT PLACE. sc is so fucking good i could talk about it all day long but i don't wanna pick apart every single thing rn 💀 all i wanna say is that we're never going to get another part that feels like stardust crusaders. i watched it in like the middle of march and it's already nostalgic to me 😭 there's just this immediate connection that i formed with the characters that made their deaths even sadder for me

2. golden wind. the team dynamic is really good too in this part. tbh for golden wind i'll talk about anime only because i didn't like the manga as much as the anime, and the main reason for that is that the anime adds a lot more to the characters backstories and relationships imo. do you fucking know how shocked i was when i found out that fugo's backstory and that scene of bucciarati and abbacchio meeting isn't manga canon. like wtf?? also the relationship between trish and bucciarati which literally makes me want to violently throw up and cry myself to sleep is shown way better in the anime. giorno as a jojo isn't exactly my favorite tbh, but the side cast balances it out, they're all very interesting characters. also this part really established the fucking ass pull stands that araki made up they're so funny. cioccolata's stand for example, or melone's like how the fuck do you come up with that. oh since we're talking about the villians, i liked la squadra, they were cool but a bit underused (is that even a word??). it would've been sick as fuck if la squadra and team bucciarati would have collaborated, they basically had the same goal of finding out diavolo's real identity. diavolo is bad villain imo, i already explained why in the last ask. changing the topic real quick i also find it cool how you can see how in this part araki made like, a bigger deal out of the whole fashion thing, i love the character design in gw. also fighting gold is the best jojo op

3. dude i'm slowly losing motivation i'm just gonna punch out the rest. third place goes to battle tendency because caesar is my poor little meow meow and joseph is my favorite dumbass bitch

4. diamond is unbreakable because kira

5. phantom blood mainly because dio is literally the funniest motherfucker in this part and erina and jonathan make my heart bleed

i won't rate part 6, 7 and 8 because i didn't really pay much attention during the stone ocean anime and i'm reading the manga for it right now, and i haven't read 7 and 8 yet

46. moment you wish never happened

tbh narancia's death was lowkey useless to the plot like what was the reason 😭

also the thing with yukako kidnapping koichi? like i still lowkey ship them because of the stuff that happens later in the cinderella arc but like,,, thinking about how crazy yukako really is makes it lowkey weird.

i'm trying to think of more stuff wait. ig kakyoin getting wounded so often in part 3 is kinda sad because he got less screentime because of it and also ABDUL DYING?? TWICE?? omg and the stardust crusaders hiding the fact that abdul was still alive after hol horse shot him from polnareff, it just made me so upset WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT 😭

bruh another part 5 thing; why in god's name is giorno 15 years old PLSSS. this dude deadass became a mafia boss at almost 16 years old. also, why did they make the golden wind timeline so fucking short? the entire plot went on for like what? 4 days?? they could've given them some damn time when you consider that they had to fight like 3 villains a day while mista shot himself like 60 times and everyone had to be healed by giorno over and over again like CHILL

ok this lowkey doesn't have anything to do with the original question anymore so let's just stop at this point 😭

thank you so much for the ask anon!