#and the symbolism. can't forget about the symbolism

[mosslingg]

I think people tend to forget that Superman is a symbol of hope, something that i think Zack Snyder failed to portray properly.

What James Gunn is doing is portraying Superman as a normal guy that got put in a superhero suit not because he wanted, but because what else could he do? And it shows in the way both Clark Kent and Superman act. From this tiny bit we got to see in the teaser we got to see so much.

First, the movie is colorful, a refreshing sight in superhero movie genre. The colors that are the brightest are red, blue and yellow, which obviously is Superman's color scheme, showing his importance and (that's just my assumption) put it into focus that even when Clark is Clark, he'll always be Superman too.

Then there's Clark's physique. He's not portrayed as a super buff guy. Even in costume, unlike Snyder's portrayal, his muscles aren't super defined. Gunn's Superman looks friendly. I'd totally trust that guy with my safety and I love that. Because Clark doesn't want to perceived as a god, he just happens to have superpowers that he uses for good but on the inside he's a midwestern guy with a passion for journalism.

As Superman, you can see how much he cares about the people of Metropolis. The little detail of Clark holding down the little girl's head so the shockwave doesn't break her neck? It was, in my opinion, perfect. It's such a small thing but it shows how much Clark actually cares. Then there's the scene of the citizens being mad at him, presumably after a battle of some sorts. Clark doesn't hide. He walks calmly through the crowd and while they can't hurt him physically, mentally that must be quite a punch in the gut, to suddenly be so hated. But he takes it. Because no matter what they think of him he's still there for them.

Let's not forget Clark Kent in his civilian life. They did so well with capturing the clumsy Daily Planet reporter and if I didn't know better, I'd genuinely doubt he's Superman. Hell, It probably wouldn't have crossed my mind at all! The way he carries himself is so unlike what we expect of Superman. Clark is a tall guy, yet his suit isn't his size at all. He stumbles a lot. Even his posture doesn't seem to be perfect. Clark Kent and Superman seem so detached, so different from each other in this movie and it's so refreshing to see!

Anyways it's all mostly my interpretation from the little snippets they gave us and I'm super excited for this movie and I genuinely can't understand the hate for it that I've seen around different social media

[sealrock]

..... and what if I rename achille to lancelot, what then

[swampybogg]

[flowerakatsuka]

Osomatsu-san ~Le bourgeon~ & ~Fleurir~ Hikokuji (2019)

[calypsolemon]

don't really understand ppl who think the Point of Belos dying was supposed to be some like... big middle finger to "undeserved" redemption arcs, or that it was making some sort of statement about how some ppl are truly evil or can't be saved. I just think belos is like. A Symbol of a colonialist mindset and his death after thousands of years of life already extended beyond its time is similarly symbolic.

[multishipper-baby]

I still have wing brainrot so... Some very simplistic concepts with Rayray. Featuring the colors of the animal he was based on, and both of his dad's colors.

[eduobsessed]

i know this is very unimportant considering all the other issues with the finale but ed still in his leathers while choosing to abandon piracy is a weird symbolism that either im not getting or just wasn't properly thought out

[sskk-manifesto]

What a good episode. Maaaaaan

[transingthoseformers]

But tfp Megatron changing back to being "Megatronus" post war

But the symbolism of him taking on his old colors and name though

But the symbolism of him regretting walking away from the council meeting

But the angst and eventual hurt/comfort

[faebriel]

hgs brainrot has returned due to tbosas .. speaking of hgs here’s an ask abt the hgs au: if things were totally different, and Wilbur were to be a 12 victor, what do you think a possible mentor-tribute dynamic would look like between him & Niki? I feel like it would be similar to Snow & Lucy in the way that he’s just going out of his way to cheat n help her

anon u have in fact struck jackpot because this is a concept i was spinning some thoughts abt before bee mentioned avoxes and we went OOOOH at that!!! so yes i have considered rainduo as a mentor-tribute dynamic and would love to talk about that concept too :]

so for this concept i think wilbur and niki would be close friends throughout childhood from 12, and then in their teens wilbur is reaped and, well, no one has particularly high hopes (he's a writer and a musician at heart, not a fighter) but through sheer trickery and dumb luck, he makes it to the end of the games. wilbur pulled some pretty fucked up tricks to win - when you can't use brute force, you have to use your brain - and partly due to the trauma of the games, partly due to his shame and survivor's guilt, he sinks into the capitol and relishes a new life there as a socialite. to him, the old wilbur died in the games and the new one has taken his place - to niki, and to his other friends in 12, whatever the games did to him made him into every vapid heartless capitol victor there is.

or. niki has her doubts. they all saw how horrible the games were, but surely there is some part of him left, some part that's hurting, even if it's buried deep?

anyway.

like og spin of the au, niki is reaped and this sucks - this time she does expect wilbur as her mentor on the train, and she expects some kind of warm welcome (maybe even an apology for leaving them so suddenly and silently? an explanation?) but she gets jack shit. wilbur is jaded and cruel and unrecognisable and niki entirely hates it. this is the part where i REALLY WISH we got some time of those two beefing with each other directly in canon (or at least interactions while niki was So Mad at him) but it's okay we fly blind. niki feels abandoned, lonely, thrown off of her kilter - she expected an ally in this place, but she doesn't recognise the person wilbur has become. she doesn't recognise his shallowness (...much), his ruthless advice for the arena, the way he doesn't seem to care for anything. she's scared and now she's lonely and it pisses her off - their mentorship is fraught. here are some thoughts from discord on that:

i tend to think of niki as a bit naïve before l'manberg or even doomsday - i think this is an au where this streak would come out real strong, and niki is stubborn that she can get through the games without losing herself. stubborn that she can stop things, that she can protect people. i don't think wilbur is cold enough (or, really, can bear to say aloud) to say that her odds in the arena are slim enough as it is, but he definitely tells her that she's making enemies and that her odds of survival dwindle with the more trouble she causes.

beyond that... hm. niki's trust in wilbur is almost unshakeable until nov 16, even when she outright says she doesn't recognise him anymore. i think she'd reluctantly listen re: don't burn down any buildings, but she would grow bolder each day she had to stay in the capitol. she gets more honest in front of the cameras. she makes more friends in training, and not the ones wilbur recommends. she throws barbs at him every time he makes one of those callous, cold-hearted comments about other tributes and rankings and odds. and besides, she's going in the arena this time, not him. she needs to practice her bravery.

it's like... she hasn't given up on him. she thinks the old wilbur is in there somewhere. (she is wrong. that is not how trauma works.) but she won't hold her tongue just because she

for extra angst points could definitely play up the whole 'feeling abandoned' angle between them as niki goes into the arena - probably due to how fraught their friendship gets leading up to the games. niki wants to focus on them and their friendship, wilbur has stringently cut off (almost) everything from 12 and refuses to let her in; he tells her to behave for the cameras, she tells him she never will. i think the last point in that screenshot would also make for a super tasty argument where niki feels wilbur has gone astray, that he's abandoned 12, and that he'll probably do nothing but sit on his ass and watch her die and he can't even bring himself to care about her anymore, can he? just more fodder for the arena. and honestly, i think wilbur would passively agree with most of that - he values niki's opinion, after all, even now, and if she says he's rapidly descending into a lost cause then she must be right. and it's niki, so she will be fine, and he goes to his bedroom that night and tries to pretend he is sleeping perfectly fine instead of feeling paralysed with fear.

okay now onto the games - YES HE SO WOULD. or at least i think he would go out of his way to help. as for cheating - he's a recent victor for 12 and i think he would value tommy (no doubt a link to him... i think they'd be in touch in this au also) too much to risk the punishment falling onto him as well. i get the vibes this is a games closer to 74th than 10th, so there are far fewer opportunities to cheat and the consequences of getting caught are higher. but schmoozing up sponsors? making stupid ass radio interviews or whatever to talk up niki's odds? sharing anecdotes from their childhood - some real, some entirely fabricated - across capitol airwaves to stoke their sympathy? 100%. with less to lose in this au, i think niki would be far less inclined to play nice for the cameras - i hope you starve, she spits at one of them, and wilbur appears on a talkshow two days later as she scrambles for survival in the arena to talk up how she always saved loaves from the bakery for the poorest mothers and children in 12. he borrows and begs and swindles to the point where it feels like cheating. but hey, this new wilbur is capitol-branded. he knows how to play the game.

if anything he probably sinks into the game a little too much. self-preservation is not his forte. probably wracks up a few heavy debts and favours to owe, but those are not priority until niki is out of the arena, alive. as long as she wins, and as long as the family he has isn't in danger, he will manage. wow it would suck if at some point those two goals became impossible to co-achieve. anyway

i kind of see niki's victory in the arena being similar to the one in the main au - if only because planning out an entire games is hard for meee >-< . she walks in bolder and braver for sure, and with a less strategic pick of allies, but they all get picked off and she spends a few weeks so terrified she can barely sleep and then she ruptures some fuel line and sets the arena alight with a fire that burns brighter and more ravenously than it should. but she wins, and she's airlifted out of a filthy, muddy creek she had resigned herself to die in, and wilbur barges his way through as many peacekeepers so that he can actually see her with her burnt skin and hair and unfocused eyes and trust that what was on the screens wasn't a fluke, and that they made it. and then it's just a matter of surviving the after.

i'm sure there are some other random quirks or tidbits i can think of re: this take on a c!rainduo hunger games au but these are my base thoughts!!

[cherrymoonvol6]

the worst part about flapjack's death is that luz and hunter's friendship died right along with it lmao

[fungi-maestro]

The Question #6 (1987)

[freakingwizards]

As a mathematician, I now get to teach my dad math at the dinner table. Every time I see the slightly glazed over look of dawning horror in his eyes I know that I'm returning balance to the world.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

Neither disappointed Nor surprised with the specification like the antithetical villain here isn't in the "guess i was born antithetical like that, oh well" vein to have to be defeated as [concept incarnate] but rather the "sure, i used to be like you" kind where like a bit of versus (potential) self then in this not meant to be interpreted as peak literal story where then it's about not just getting to answer "how do i be Not That" with "well i guess i was born different, i can't be anything but inherently different from my antagonist villain & just have to physically win a battle" & where like, you're just never gonna get a "could Never be me in even any Ways or Aspects. i'm intrinsically different through & through" character in a joe iconis musical & like certainly not deliberately with some major character who's even meant to be the just like, you know, villain. but which is then also interesting in the lack of Just "oh that villain is Always the opposite of the hero in whatever ways or vice versa" or any other particularly clean & inviolate boundaries between them. both Walking A Road, the musician does just kind of up & go "i Will get my sidekick" & not accept anything else & do another musical homicide. lo cocodrilo doesn't do anything particularly heroesque but while doing all the outright villainy things there's the somewhat more grounded aspects & just expressing emotional range at all & the potentially sympathetic elements there just as that evidence like, not an The Opposite Of You / Was Never Like You / Am Not Even Now Nothing Like You situation, which makes him more relevant to an emotional arc to the whole story rather than just like. the practical obstacles. all that is leadup to me being like what would this backstory musical be like lol imagine. however just now i listened to "never heard nothing" again post bsol like okay like bit of Lo Cocodrilo in there potentially lmao. as per the whole "but that's where you're wrong, junior" "mine is just uglier" I'm Just A Potential Version Of You ocity of it all, which, thank god

[dancingplague]

I think the thing that's so weird about how didactic seasons 3-5 are is that it's not as though the first two seasons were subtle. Season 2 second citadel is basically the butter battle book: don't go blindly fight wars. Don't build bigger scarier weapons. Don't trust what you've been told about who the enemy is. Early Junoverse is a fun combination of "using The Mission to numb out grief will drive you towards death" and "you have to value things and have desires, and dead-eyed pursuit of goals is neither of those things" with "you can't bring back the dead" as a recurring element.

So it's not just that the later seasons have a weird lecture-y tone. Whatever. I can handle some moralizing. But the early seasons established Themes, and the later seasons decided those themes are bad, actually.

You can have a fantasy story where one side of a war is unambiguously The Bad Guys. You can have a science fiction story about how you can bring back the dead but you shouldn't. You can write your earnest PSA about how you shouldn't run away with your boyfriend. But if your first two seasons were the opposite of those things it is not going to be very good.

It kind of seems like somewhere mid season 3 the story became hideously embarrassed of its own early episodes, which is sad because those are the good ones but also because you cannot possibly land a story well while simultaneously attempting to brutally murder all of the elements you set up in the first half.

[sharkylass]

ALRIGHT, I ASKED FOREVER AGO, BUT WHO WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT MY ISA LOOPS AU??

Heads up this contains a lot, and I mean A LOT of spoilers for In Stars And Time. Including: = Act 6 spoilers, including main mystery and secret encounter = Minimal Act 5 stuff = And a bunch of extra stuff that happens through Act 3 and 4. SO BASICALLY ALMOST EVERYTHING, FINISH THIS GAME COMPLETELY BEFORE READING (ESPECIALLY THAT ACT 6 ENCOUNTER, IT WILL LITERALLY BE THE FIRST THING I MENTION UNDER THE CUT)

With all those warnings out of the way-

IN REPETITION AND CHANGE

Initial Concepts:

I feel it's important to show these sketches because they were the first ideas I ever had. I wasn't even entirely sure I wanted to make an AU at this point, I didn't even know how I'd approach it. But I started sketching and it's been on my mind since- SO! Isa is stuck in the timeloop. I know what his wish is and he DOES have a Loop equivalent! The grumpy dandelion guy is Roboro (it/they/he). Their name is a very small play on Ouroboros and they call Isa "Seedling". However, this post is not about them, as I'm gonna talk about it and Isa's dynamic in a separate post. In short, Isa is his normal loud self up until Act 3, right? They beat the King, they reach the end, and whoops, the loop isn't broken. So now, what happens is that Isa starts getting his brains out. He starts thinking more analytically and tries to problem solve.

The more stuck he gets in his head, the less he's able to perceive his friends as real people, and more like them holding him back. Because even if Isa explains that he's smart, that they shouldn't be surprised if he says something, shock of all shocks, reasonable- They'll forget it the next loop.

So Isa is stuck with trying to portray his confident, loud, supportive facade- Which is fine! It wouldn't be the first time! But it progressively gets more and more frustrating, as he tries to find answers and simply looses the energy to pretend to be stupid.

TL;DR: Isa in the timeloop, unlike Siffrin, becomes more distant and cold rather then something more akin to Sif's mania.

NOW, MORE ART!!!

KILL KILL KILL:

I imagine Isa didn't have this encounter the same way that Sif did. Yeah, frankly, Isa is pissed with the sadness- But that's not why he goes through with this.

In this moment, Isa is trying to kill two birds with one stone. He's trying to get through this quickly, as well as reassure Mira that they can do this! If he shows how strong he is, then she'll feel safe right???

Poor Isabeau forgot that whenever he shows that he thinks ahead, he scares people. How could he forget that? How could he forget that he's inherently---

Family Quest:

I still think Odile is the one to call out to him (same with sus quest).

The hangouts I'm still figuring out, cause I don't think they'd too similar to base game- But, fun fact, at the end of this run, everyone agrees to keep travel together!

Isabeau brings it up, can't hurt if you can fix your mistakes right? And everyone agrees. The relief on Siffrin is the most palpable thing Isabeau has ever seen.

In this moment they love you. In this moment they all love you. In this moment---

Death Screen:

He loops back anyways. (This is one of the initial concepts that I ended up animating. This line in particular is when he reaches the end)

Act 5 Tarot Card:

NOW TO SEE MORE OF HIS PASSIVE AGRESSIVE SIDE

Thanks to @the-bitter-ocean for prescribing tarot cards to Isa (THEY ALL FUCK SO HARD) and for the RAW ASS LINE

If interacted with in act 5, predictably, Isa tears it apart. He doesn't need the divine judgement upon him, he's faced everyone's perception his entire life.

However, he tears it methodically. Tears it once in even pieces, twice, three times, and one of the pieces once more. In a way he isn't even getting his emotions out, it's like he's actively trying to tear it apart so it stops nagging him, like he wants to shut it up. Though, the Judgement card symbolizes rebirth, absolution and inner calling. In Act 6 he'd be able to look at it and find comfort and confidence in the card.

Act 5 Mirror:

And lastly, I have the Act 5 mirror picture. I haven't quite figured out how to make the normal ones work yet, however, I couldn't let go of the idea that Isa would not want to be in the picture.

The idea of seeing himself at all makes his head hurt and his stomach squeeze. The memory haunts him as he stands to the side and says the word. He didn't think the mirror would catch him.

AAAAND THAT'S ALL THE ART STUFF FOR NOW!!

I still have quite a bit of it to post, especially about Roboro, but I'm gonna leave it here for now.

I still gotta figure out the hangouts and potentially the dagger equivalent- but I have ideas for Bad Touch, the glass equivalent, and some extra little things that didn't happen in Siffrin's loops.

I needed to yap about this, because I've been slowly stacking up ideas and writing and I needed to share it at some point- If anyone read all this and has questions and stuff I fully welcome 'em!!