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itsclydebitches · 4 years ago

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None of them liked Ironwoods growingly tyrannical actions, it's the whole reason Ruby lies to him, he looked shady as hell. They are shown very clearly uncomfortable with what he's turned Atlas into in the First episode. It's just that at the end of Volime 7 he crossed the line.

The key words there are “first episode.” I’ve mentioned on other posts that if the plot had simply continued the forward momentum of the group being disgusted with Ironwood’s choices and working against him (hiding out in the city, gathering like-minded allies, etc.) then we would have been golden. Ironwood is Volume 7’s antagonist. There, done. The problem is what starts in the second episode. Our basic events are as follows:

The group (and audience) learn that Ironwood has arguably justified reasons for everything “shady as hell” that he’s done. The embargo? They are at war with Salem and people have been stealing resources since our introductory trailers (Blake). Soldiers in the streets? That first episode showed that grimm are attacking defenseless civilians and, if the soldiers hadn’t been there to fend the grimm off prior to Penny’s arrival, they likely would have died. Taking resources? That’s to re-establish global communications and enact a plan to stop Salem for good, freeing the world from the danger she presents.

However, they’re still morally gray choices which our group could have opposed… but they didn’t. They join Ironwood as public allies (standing with Clover and Penny against Robyn), as Inner Circle allies (they learn all of Ironwood’s plans—and we learn that he never lied to them), as huntsmen (it’s his power as general that gives them their licenses), and as fellow soldiers (they are indistinguishable from the Ace Ops in the missions they conduct). Now toss in a bunch of other connections like living in his academy, taking his weapon upgrades, and carrying the Relic. They might not like his actions, but they’re certainly doing everything possible to support and reap the benefits of them.

Ruby does lie to him… which two in the group oppose (however lackluster that was). Yang and Oscar both question the wisdom of doing the very thing they punished Ozpin for. Ren also develops a strong (if quiet) alliance with Ironwood that will carry into Volume 8... until his semblance changed and he forgot about it.

During all this there are efforts—mostly through Nora—to condemn Ironwood for his choices. How can you continue to hurt the people like this? Same answer as above: because he believes a short-term struggle is worth the long-term victory. Nora doesn’t agree… but Ruby, the leader, does. She pushes Ironwood to finish Amity somehow.

Which is an incredibly strange stance to take considering she knows that amassing a world-wide army will not defeat Salem. If the group wants Ironwood to stop hurting Mantle, all they have to do is tell him that Salem is immortal… but they don’t. They let him continue under this false belief, despite having more information about this war than he does and despite that information being the key to stopping the harm he’s enacting.

The arc of the volume is not the group choosing to trust Ironwood and then realizing he actually isn’t trustworthy, it’s the group (or rather, Ruby) deciding not to trust Ironwood and then realizing he is trustworthy. We get that climactic scene of Ruby and Oscar simultaneously realizing they should tell him about Salem and Oscar apologizing for keeping that secret in the first place.

Note that this occurs after they’ve talked him into telling Mantle about her. So not only is the group not made up of mindless subordinates being ordered about by a powerful general—it’s their advice Ironwood listens to—but now they’ve put an entire city in the position they were in during Volume 6. We’re told, via Ozpin’s arc, that telling people about Salem without including the issue of her immortality is a horrific thing to do. Those like Qrow have supposedly “wasted” their lives fighting an impossible war and the fandom has argued strongly that Ozpin has manipulated everyone involved in this fight by not giving them the full picture. Yet now, the group has spent months keeping that information from Ironwood when his questionable choices are based on that ignorance, and they’ve talked him into telling half his population that Salem exists and they should rise up to fight her… but not the pesky detail that she’s immortal. They did to Ironwood and all of Mantle exactly what Ozpin did to them.

Immediately after hearing that they’ve kept this secret from him the entire time they’ve been here (which he takes very well) Ironwood captures one of their main villains, loses his arm in the process, learns that two in the group have outright betrayed him to a political enemy, learns that despite all their best efforts Cinder has just waltzed into his office, learns that Salem herself is on her way and their defenses are already gone, knows that everyone is exhausted from a major battle… so when he decides to take all of Atlas, the majority of Mantle, and the Relics/Maiden they have to try and get out of Salem’s reach… Ruby says no. What’s her plan? She doesn’t have one. You’re just not allowed to leave.

The problem with the writing is it wants us to believe two contradictory things at once. Looking back, Ironwood is meant to be seen as an unambiguously bad guy in Volume 7, which we know because of scenes like Winter’s fight wherein she condemns him for everything he did in Volume 7, not just Volume 8 stuff like threatening to bomb Mantle. Yet at the same time, we’re simultaneously meant to believe that the group is made up of unambiguously good people who function as direct contrasts to Ironwood. Given what we got, these two things cannot coexist! Either Ironwood was a good man who the heroes backed for an entire volume and there’s no acknowledgment of that, or Ironwood was a bad man… who the heroes backed for an entire volume and there’s no acknowledgment of that either. If the group’s defense is, “We knew he was shady as hell. We knew what he was doing was wrong. We knew he was the bad guy here… but we still helped him maintain power, forward his plans, and reap the benefits of the flawed system for months on end”… that’s really bad. “I supported, assisted, and benefited from the guy who was shady as hell, but that’s fine because I felt uncomfortable about it the whole time” is not the hot take the fandom wants it to be. We cannot make these broad, sweeping statements about how the Atlas military—merged with its huntsmen—is an Evil Thing and then show scenes like, say, Jaune using his military grade huntsmen license to convince a bunch of civilians to follow his evacuation plan. The heroes cannot be Good and Pure while supporting the supposed villains and their systems; or, the villains cannot be purely Bad and Evil if they’re supported by the heroes.

The reality is that RWBY is badly written and this sort of simplistic, inconsistent writing doesn’t lend itself to a topic as complex as this one. To be frank, we don’t even know enough to make informed decisions about these actions because the world building is nearly nonexistent. What are these “resources” and how are the resources to patch a hole in the wall the same as the resources used to make Amity Tower into a world-wide communication device? How much power does Ironwood actually have and what other decisions has he made that impact Mantle? We never hear about any policies to explain things like the poor conditions, or the slum areas with the faunus. Why are the civilians so against the soldiers patrolling when we don’t see them abusing the public in any way, but we do see the grimm threatening them on the regular? Why does Ruby want Amity built so badly—willing to hurt Mantle to do it—when she knows a bigger army isn’t the answer/that telling people about Salem has almost always led to panic and betrayal? Is there really any difference between huntsmen and soldiers here? And if the answer is, “Yes. Huntsmen aren’t beholden to any power. That’s a good thing because following orders is Bad. They do what they think is best” than what are we supposed to make of someone like Rhodes who, apparently, did what he thought was best? If he’d been beholden to some superior there might have been a system in place to help Cinder. As it was, he was left to his own devices and a lot of fans are furious with the solution he, as one flawed individual, came up with. We simply don’t have a good picture of this world and when we do, things constantly contradict. It’s good for huntsmen to make their own choices, but only when Ruby does it, not Rhodes. It’s bad for heroes to keep the Salem secret and tell lies to their allies, but only when Ozpin does it, not Ruby. It’s bad for someone to try and save who they’ve got, but only when Ironwood does it, not Ruby, who apparently left Atlas after failing to create portals for her Uncle, Robyn, the Ace Ops, Pietro, Maria, and an entire army.

The way that the fandom gets around these problems—because too few are willing to just acknowledge that they are problems and RWBY is shoddily written—is by simplistically comparing RWBY’s military to a real world one. I cannot tell you how many posts I’ve come across that amount to, “Imagine thinking the teenage girls are the bad guys when a military general is right there, being a military general 😒 ” Those posts imply that fans like me are too stupid (too brainwashed, too close to “bootlickers”) to be critical of the military, but I assure you, that’s as far from true as can be. Those posts are trying to conflate real life politics with a fantasy story whose world looks nothing like our own. The is not a question of being critical of the military, it’s a question of being critical of RWBY as that fictional text… and that fiction never established any of the military problems we deal with in the real world. It might have (very easily), but it didn’t. Is Ironwood leveraging his people to conquer others or go after wealth? No, his world has literal, unambiguously evil monsters to fight. Does he amass power out of a desire to control the people? No, he lays out his exact thoughts on how these measures will help protect against those monsters and a witch. Does the military abandon its soldiers after war, leaving them with few resources and fewer prospects? No, we never see anyone struggling in that manner and one of the most prominent tragedies—Yang losing a limb—is answered by Ironwood personally sending a replacement to her home. Is the military at least built around propaganda, painting civilians an inaccurate picture of Freedom and Glory to convince them to fight? No, we see no propaganda, Ironwood—since Volume 2—has been focused on replacing people with robots and our entire story is built around one child’s desire to fight the exact same battle. Why do you want to be a huntress, Ruby? Because I want to help people! And that goal is never painted as a naïve outlook that Ruby becomes disillusioned with. Posts like the one mentioned above bank 100% on the reader mapping real life military criticism onto RWBY… rather than actually looking at the world RWBY built, what choices the characters make, the amount of information we’re given (little), and whether that in any way reflects our current, political problems. It doesn’t.

I’m never going to pretend there weren’t problems with Ironwood’s decisions. In fact, I love that this was actually a conflict in Volume 3 that gave both sides a fair shake: is it better to scare people and have an army at the ready to defend them, or is it better to keep them in the dark and potentially be defenseless? Ironwood’s kind heart bumping up against extreme measures is what made him compelling, especially when the story was having him grow in the “right” direction (AKA, listening to Ozpin). His treatment of Penny is another big issue, creating a whole ass person to serve as a military defense tool. That’s horrifying! So he’s absolutely had his problems long before the writing had him turn into a trigger-happy murderer, but part of the issue here is that the writing doesn’t acknowledge those problems in other characters. If Ironwood is “shady as hell” for forwarding a military agenda and using military resources… then so is Ruby, the leader who backed that for months. If Ironwood is “shady as hell” for funding the creation of a person to defend his kingdom… then so is Pietro, the scientist who not only built Penny, but came up with the idea in the first place. He’s not some defenseless victim who was forced by the evil Ironwood to create something morally reprehensible, he suggested it! The same way Winter wasn’t some defenseless victim who was forced by the evil Ironwood to go along with these plans. She supported them, agreed to be his Maiden, and was the first to suggest martial law! Yet Ruby, Pietro, Winter and their like are all presented as unambiguously Good People, whereas Ironwood is presented as the unambiguous Bad Guy—and when a lot of fans went, “But you’re not writing him like a Bad Guy? Especially when we compare him to the heroes?” we got his sudden, OOC murder streak in Volume 8. But it doesn’t work. Either the group is made up of morally gray/bad people because they did the things our antagonist Ironwood did, or Ironwood is not the morally gray/bad person the show insists he is (prior to Volume 8) because he did the same things as our heroes. You cannot give us that plot, those choices, that agency and insist on both at once. This problem has existed ever since we got an entire volume about how simplistically evil Ozpin is for keeping this secret… only for Ruby to immediately turn around and keep it herself, with no acknowledgement that either a) Ozpin wasn’t the bad guy then or b) Ruby is as bad as he is. But the show wants Ruby to be the Good Person in every situation, no matter how much she models her behavior after those she deems her enemies, and Ironwood’s arc only increased that problem tenfold.

#rwby #mymetas #tempoaryblogformightyjensblog

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star-going-supernova · 4 years ago

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So. Madison Russell. Godzilla vs Kong. Welcome to my ted talk.

From a writing perspective, they totally wasted her character. She, Josh, and Bernie were almost exclusively used just as a method of showing the audience what was happening "behind the scenes" at Apex. Pouring the whiskey on the computer was about the only thing of note they did, and even that didn't do much. Mechagodzilla was only slightly hindered by it, and if they'd just written Kong and Godzilla differently in the fight scene, they could have skipped the whiskey part entirely. They could have done so much with having people "on the inside" but Monarch as a greater organization barely had any presence at all, which negated the need to have people on the inside.

Maddie's steadfast insistence that Godzilla wasn't a bad guy at the beginning had so much potential, but it became the conspiracy thing instead. It felt less like she wanted to prove Godzilla wasn't turning against humans, and more like she and her new conspiracy friend wanted to crack open a shady organization, which was frustrating. If they wanted to depict her as someone who was forced to become competent at a young age, which was part of the serious, intense vibe I got from her, instead of the inexplicable personality shift, they should have showed her doing something to help. Getting in contact with her dad/Monarch, giving them evidence to begin a city wide evacuation outside the Apex Hong Kong HQ, messing something up or making it harder for the Apex people to get Mechagodzilla up and running—just, anything.

The fact is, we had Maddie being very proactive in KotM. Stealing the ORCA was the game changer. Instead of taking that to the next level in GvK and giving her an opportunity to continue that aspect of her character—that is, being someone who refuses to sit by when she can do something to help, even if it’s dangerous—they rendered her obsolete.

The movie wouldn't have significantly changed if you took her character out. If Bernie went by himself and ended up in Hong Kong, nothing would have changed, because Maddie didn't do anything of personal importance. She went from being an active character in KotM to being a passive one here, which are a pet peeve of mine. If you saw my post about what I liked and didn’t like about Godzilla (2014), that might sound very familiar.

It would also have made so much more sense if she developed a love for studying Titans instead of focusing on conspiracy theories. Plot-wise, it would have given her claim to her dad that Godzilla was being provoked more credence, and could’ve opened an interesting dialogue between them to reinforce that she knows what she’s talking about. Monarch was obviously still a big part of their lives, given that Mark had rejoined, so it would’ve been the perfect opportunity for Maddie to pursue a Titan-related future.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I loved Jia, and wouldn’t want to take her out of the movie or even diminish her presence in it. In fact, I think they should have focused on Jia, and only on Jia.

Hear me out: Godzilla vs Kong should’ve been split in two. A Part 1 and Part 2 situation.

For Part 1, we keep a lot of the GvK canon, especially the Kong-centric stuff. Include even more scenes showing us that he’s protective of Jia, don’t just have Dr. Andrews say that he is. Have him defend her from something dangerous, maybe even from some humans. Include their backstory, how he saved her during the storm. And start it even earlier, before Godzilla attacks Apex the first time. Keep the whole Hollow Earth plot, keep the fight scene in the ocean, keep the discovery of the temple and the axe.

And on the Godzilla side of things, start earlier on that as well. Keep the other Titans in, have humanity tentatively believing that a time of great peace is upon them. Their mere presence is restoring the planet. There was an emphasis of nature, particularly in relation to the Titans, in KotM that I really think they should have included more of in GvK to better tie the two movies together, if only they hadn’t swept all the other Titans under the rug. They wanted a movie about a fight, not about the Titans. So, undo that. Show us a little of what Mark does, do a sweep of the other KotM cast (cameos at the very least) to show how they and Monarch are working to uphold that peace post-Boston. I’d also have loved to see Boston itself, too, five years later.

Instead of giving us a Generic High School scene, show Maddie learning about the Titans alongside the experts. Bring back the wonder and amazement she had when she saw Mothra for the first time, when she reached out and touched her. She’s second generation Monarch, make that mean something. When Maddie took the ORCA to Boston, she had a conviction. She couldn’t not have. She was there in part to lure Ghidorah in, but I can’t even pretend to believe her plan ended with that. She knew Godzilla would come.

That sort of belief is hard to kill, and if death via Ghidorah wasn’t enough to scare her off, no way anything else in those five years afterwards did. Her belief that Godzilla is good survived to GvK, and should’ve been a main focal point of her character. Godzilla attacks Apex—she and every other Monarch person who has spent years studying the Titans knows something is up.

Keep Mark’s character development regarding his opinions on Godzilla. He believes Maddie when she says something has to be wrong, not just because he trusts his daughter, but because he looked into Godzilla’s eyes and saw more than just an animal.

They’re in Part 1 only minimally, just to establish their presence and how they feel about Godzilla destroying Apex. The focus is clearly on Jia and Kong’s side of events.

Sorry, but I’m leaving Josh out and seriously dialing back Bernie’s role. Instead, the character we follow inside Apex is Ren Serizawa. We see his motivations, his ambitions, and he becomes a character with more than just a few lines. Does he resent Godzilla? Or does he resent his father, too? Serizawa’s sacrifice was willing, after all. He was no accidental casualty.

Part 1 ends in the Hollow Earth, with Ghidorah taking control of Mechagodzilla on the surface. Alter the timeline just enough so that Godzilla has only just arrived to Hong Kong, and Kong’s still in the Hollow Earth. The final scene is Mechagodzilla emerging into the city as the sun rises. The post-credits scene is our KotM cast in the Argo, location unknown, watching a screen with Mechagodzilla on it.

Part 2 begins with a reveal: Ren Serizawa isn’t dead.

Backtrack. This part focuses more on the Godzilla side, and Monarch. It’ll have flashback scenes from the five years between KotM and now, showing exactly why Monarch as a whole firmly believes Godzilla is reacting to something instead of being anti-human all of a sudden. The Titans are not inherently malicious; destruction is a side effect of their size, no more, no less. He earned his title of King in KotM—make it mean more than just trying to make Kong “bow.” Make him a protector, a guardian. He’s nature’s balance. By definition, he must protect humans as well.

What Monarch needs to figure out is this: what is he trying to protect them from?

They investigate Apex in search of the answer, but knowing from past experience the sort of things Godzilla gets proactive about—the MUTOs, Ghidorah—Monarch mobilizes. They prepare for another fight, at Mark’s instructions. He witnessed both San Francisco and Boston firsthand, even if the former was from a civilian standpoint.

Godzilla has more hunt scenes. He targets a second Apex lab after his ocean fight with Kong, telling Monarch that they’re on the right track.

Maddie, being a minor and not dragged into the thick of things (yet), has to stay home. Remembering the podcast she sometimes listened to, when the topic was focused on the Titans, she tracks Bernie down, and he tells her about what he saw: the eye.

The two of them go to the ruined Apex building and discover the eye is gone before getting caught. With Monarch currently breathing down their necks, they recognize Maddie to be Mark’s daughter and take her to Hong Kong. Sorry, Bernie, but that’s mostly as far as you’re involved. Timeline-wise, this is roughly when Kong puts the axe in the temple floor and Godzilla blasts a hole to the center of the earth. Monarch is following Godzilla, but they’re behind a bit thanks to the tunnel shortcuts. They’re still unaware that Maddie has been kidnapped and is en route to Hong Kong.

This is also when Mechagodzilla gains a life of its own. Walter Simmons is killed and Ren Serizawa becomes trapped in the link to Mechagodzilla, serving as the bridge between the robot and Ghidorah’s mind. Ghidorah is essentially controlling MG by controlling Ren, who is controlling MG. Make sense? He’s the puppeteer’s puppeteer.

We reverse some things. Godzilla fights MG first, gets beat around but not as much as in GvK because he isn’t fresh out of a different fight. Kong returns to the surface through the tunnel Godzilla created, having carried the one remaining HEAV out himself, because Nathan Lind has never flown one before and doesn’t know how they work. Kong wants to protect Jia, and Ilene Andrews and Nathan Lind are very lucky that Jia likes them.

Mechagodzilla sees Kong and takes off, and Kong decides now would be a great time to fight Godzilla, who’s having a pretty bad day. Monarch arrives, and half of them split off to follow MG while the rest stay to try and deescalate the situation. Other than Godzilla faring slightly less well, the fight goes mostly the same as in the movie, except for one big difference: one of the Monarch crafts pick up Jia and Co, and she’s able to get Kong’s attention from the back of an Osprey well enough to tell him to stop fighting. There’s a bigger threat out there, and Godzilla definitely needs to be okay enough to fight it. Either they work together, or they reschedule.

She’s very stern about it, and though no one’s really sure what the two Titans decide on, they stop fighting. They leave together to go after Mechagodzilla, who is currently being slowed down by Mothra, because she deserves to be in this movie. The other Titans basically hinder Mechagodzilla as much as possible as it rampages, telling Godzilla where it is. Monarch finally figures out that it’s heading for the nearest entrance to the Hollow Earth, right around when they also figure out that Ghidorah is involved. With Dr. Andrews and Nathan Lind’s input, they theorize it intends to take more of the power source down there to further strengthen it.

They do their best to clear the cities in its path, evacuating as many people as possible. It’s all they can do. As in the past, they must trust Godzilla to do the heavy lifting. Around the same time, an assistant tells Mark that some guy named Bernie called and is asking for him. This is how he finds out Maddie was taken to Apex’s Hong Kong location.

Meanwhile, the Apex guards and Maddie finally arrive to find the facility abandoned and damaged, MG gone, and Simmons dead. The guards more or less split, leaving her there alone. Maddie, being Maddie, goes deeper until she finally discovers Ghidorah’s skull and Ren Serizawa inside, trapped in his own head with Ghidorah. It’s killing him.

He’s aware enough to have a conversation with her. They argue about the Titans. He wants Godzilla destroyed out of anger over his father’s preference for Titans, rather than his own son.

(“You’re not the only one with ghosts!” she yells at him. “You’re not the only one who resents a parent for putting Titans ahead of you when you needed them!” He chokes out, “I do not resent my father—” “Coulda fooled me. Why else would you be spitting on his sacrifice like this? Who are you trying to help, huh? All the other kids out there who are losing their moms and dads because you let Ghidorah out? Sorry, mister, but the last time someone did that, your dad paid the price.”)

Ren is getting worse. He’s going to die if he stays in the link much longer, but he can’t disconnect. Maddie, looking around, gets to work on something. The camera slowly pans around to show that there’s a second pilot seat, back-to-back with Ren’s. It would allow for seamless switching between pilots without MG ever not having someone at the controls.

Even with the other Titans’ help, Godzilla and Kong are unable to stop MG from going through the tunnel and into the Hollow Earth. Monarch is unable to follow, because of the gravity issue. They’re both tired from the journey and their fight, especially Godzilla. This is their last chance. If Mechagodzilla reaches the power source, it’s all over.

The fight doesn’t go in their favor. They’re both bad at working together, so their attacks are uncoordinated at best, actively hindering each other at worst. Kong gets flung off a mountain and MG pins Godzilla. Even thought he caught himself, Kong isn’t going to make it up in time to help him.

Maddie puts on an identical pilot setup, and with Ren’s instructions, switches the link over to herself, freeing Ren. He collapses forward, immediately falling unconscious from the release of the strain. Fighting past the pain and overwhelming presence suddenly in her head, Maddie does what she does best: she causes Ghidorah problems.

She screams, and it echoes like a roar through his skull.

In the Hollow Earth, Mechagodzilla stumbles.

It’s the beginning of the end. She can’t control it or even really stop Ghidorah, but she gets in his way as much as possible, giving Godzilla and Kong the edge they need to finally get their act together and use some teamwork to take Mechagodzilla down. They destroy it and return to the surface before parting on amicable terms.

After too long, Mark arrives at Apex with a whole team of people. Ren Serizawa is found comatose but alive, and he’s quickly removed for medical attention. Though Maddie’s also alive, there’s something else clearly wrong. She’s still wired into the piloting gear, stiff and unseeing, as if she’s frozen. Her eyes are open but distant, pupils virtually gone from how constricted they are, and her jaw hangs open slightly. Despite how tense her body is, she’s limp. Nothing they do wakes her up, even after getting her out of the skull.

They wheel her out on a gurney to where a handful of Ospreys landed, but as they leave the building and step out onto the roof, they find Godzilla has returned. He watches them, and he’s exactly as aware as Mark remembers.

(“She tried to help you,” Mark calls out to him. No one knows exactly what happened in the Hollow Earth, during the fight, but the scene in Ghidorah’s skull was telling. “No, she—she did help you!” For the second time in her life, Maddie put herself in Ghidorah’s path and, ultimately, won. Only this time, her victory came with a price.)

Godzilla snorts before leaning over the roof’s railing, moving toward the gurney. The humans all back away, even Mark, though he doesn’t go far. Spines humming, eyes flaring blue, Godzilla rumbles deeply.

On the gurney, Maddie stirs.

Later, much later, after Maddie and Jia have met—heaven help everyone else, honestly—they sit together on the edge of a pier over the ocean, Jia leaning comfortably against Maddie. It’s quiet. They’re alone, watching the sunset. A heavy footfall behind them, the feel of the vibration trembling through the wood, makes them turn around. Half concealed in the brush at the edge of the island’s foliage, Kong stands, facing them.

They both wave before standing. They sign goodbye to each other, then part ways. As Maddie walks away to a waiting Osprey, we see behind her as Kong crouches to allow Jia to climb into his palm before vanishing into the forest.

The Osprey takes off over the calm ocean. It has a different design than most, with a large door set in the side instead of at the back, more like an ordinary helicopter. It’s open as they go, Maddie secure inside as she stares out. A smile spreads across her face as jagged spines slowly breach the ocean’s surface, easily keeping pace with the Osprey, which lowers to be closer to the water.

For just a moment, in the fading light, Maddie’s eyes almost shine blue. The screen goes black to the sound of Godzilla’s roar.

#GvK Spoilers #whoops this got long #long post #Star's Stories #kinda #Star's Thoughts about Stuff #life and times of star

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syndianites · 3 years ago

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A Queen Serves and Protects

Chapter Five

First Chapter –> Last Chapter –> Current –> Next Chapter Summary:

Post-Style Queen, Pre-Queen Wasp.

Chloe finds the Bee Miraculous, but instead of finding an obliging, subservient Kwami, she finds the Kwami of Order and Subjugation, and Pollen is not about to let herself be used like Nooroo was.

Granted, the only danger in a teenage girl is the damage she poses to herself. Can Pollen shape Chloe into a hero? Or will she stubbornly refuse to change and remain the bitter, harsh person the city has long since known?

[My take on how Chloe’s character could have developed] ——————————————————————————————

“Okay,” Pollen brought her paws together. “Let’s get this study session started.”

After the debacle of Chloe’s mother walking out on her again, Pollen insisted she get some food and relax for a bit. The two watched some cute cartoons- which Pollen was happily enraptured by- and sat together in pleasant silence.

That hadn’t stopped Pollen from plotting her next move, however.

Floating over Chloe’s tablet, which Pollen had asked her to hook up to the TV, she picked up the tablet pen and began drawing a simple figure. Adding a blonde ponytail, Pollen wrote ‘You’ over the top of the drawing.

“Let’s start with the basics. Emotions!” Pollen wrote out the word. “This is the thing that motivates people the most. Someone spills water on you? You’re angry. You are given a nice gift? Happy. So on and so forth.”

Chloe rolled her eyes. Even she knew this stuff. What was the point of this?

Tapping the pen on the drawing of Chloe, Pollen asked, “Now, what makes you a bad person?”

“What!” Chloe interrupted, “I am not a bad person!”

Pollen put her paws up. “I’m sorry, that was out of line. Let me try again: What makes people not like you?”

Chloe huffed. “I’m better than them and they know it.”

Instead of writing what Chloe said, Pollen wrote ‘you see yourself as above others.’

“Ugh, is this just an excuse to make fun of me? I’m so out.” Chloe made to stand up but was stopped by Pollen.

“Patience, Chloe. Right now, you're doing well. You working with me is a good start..” Pollen beamed at Chloe and she had to look away, lest the warmth blossoming in her chest got any bigger.

“What else makes people not like you?” Pollen asked.

Chloe hummed, trying not to make a sarcastic comment. “They don’t agree with my opinions, even when I’m right.”

Shaking her head, Pollen wrote down ‘You say things that upset people.’

Chloe crossed her arms and muttered, “It’s not my fault that they are upset by the truth.”

Ignoring her, Pollen continued, “Do you have any other ideas?”

Pollen received a head shake in reply. Which was fine, of course. She could work with this.

Making a new page, Pollen re-wrote ‘You see yourself as above others.’

“So,” Pollen delicately sat on a pillow she had prepared next to the tablet, “Why do you see yourself as above others?”

Chloe scoffed. “That’s easy, it’s because my father is-”

“I said why do you see yourself as better than others, not why your dad is above others,” Pollen interrupted, fighting back an eye roll.

“Fine then, it’s because my mo- I mean,” Chloe gave a light cough as Pollen raised an eyebrow at her. “It’s because I’m rich and they aren’t.”

Pollen, sighing, wrote down ‘lives luxuriously.’

Chloe frowned. “Doesn’t that just mean I’m rich?”

“No, Chloe. Technically, you aren’t rich. Your parents are. You just live in a very comfortable, very nice place that is paid for and maintained by your parents and their employees. Is that something that makes you better than someone else?”

“Uh, yes?”

“No!”

Pollen took a deep breath.

Today was going to be a long day.

“Consider this Chloe.”

“I’m considering it.”

“Consider this, Chloe. Would you still be better than others if you didn’t live in this hotel? If you lived in a three bedroom apartment with your father?”

“Of course.”

“But what separates you from others if you live just like them?”

“Um.” Chloe was at a loss for words. If she was just like the others, how would she be better? “I just am, Pollen.”

“No.”

“Because I’m rich?”

“What if you weren’t?”

“Then it’s because I’m smarter than them?”

“Who is the smartest person in your class?”

“Ugh, fine, it’s because I know better than them.”

“Are you sure? You’ve been misguided before.”

“I’m more talented than them!”

“What are your talents?”

“Shopping, obviously.”

Pollen fought to not scream. Like talking to a brick wall. Well, if Chloe wanted to be a brick wall…

“I’ll ask one more time Chloe, what makes you better than others?”

“I’m-”

Pollen cut her off by drawing an arrow beneath where she wrote ‘You see yourself as above others’ and wrote, with a deadpan look, ‘Nothing.’

Standing up furiously, Chloe waved her arms about. “What do you mean nothing! Of course I’m above others, that's just how it is! My family has more money, so we get better things, so I have a better upbringing, which means I’m better overall.”

“How often are your parents around?” Pollen stared Chloe down.

“I-, um, sometimes?”

“How often is your father around?”

“He always picks up when I call.”

“How often is he physically around you, seeing what you do and spending time with you?”

Chloe sat back down. “We eat meals together. He greets me in the morning. And sometimes he brings me gifts. And, and! I sometimes go with him on his campaign stuff.”

Pollen rubbed her eyes in frustration. No wonder this girl had so many problems.

“Alright then, let’s start again. You are not better than others and here is why…”

//////////////

Monday was her first test. Pollen had insisted on making her work on how she talked to people first and foremost. According to her, ‘It will be easier to see others as equals if you treat them as such. The first step in that is to talk to them politely.’

That’s all she had to do. Be polite.

So when Sabrina greeted her as she arrived at school, instead of giving her a curt nod and waltzing past her, expecting her to keep up, Chloe grit out a “Good Morning.”

Sabrina, on her part, took the greeting in stride. “You seem to be in a good mood today, Chloe!”

Ready to walk forward without a response, Chloe almost groaned at the nudge she felt from her inner jacket pocket. “It is a nice day, Sabrina.”

Pollen, from inside the pocket, rolled her eyes. At least it was a response.

The duo walked into school, ignoring the chatter amongst the other students, and made their way to their classroom.

Ms. Bustier kindly greeted Chloe and Sabrina as they walked in and- after a nudge from Pollen- both Sabrina and Chloe greeted her back. Already Chloe was growing tired of this. Is this what people had to do every day? Ridiculous.

Class was the easiest part. Ms. Bustier, as nice as she was, was strict in her classroom. Even Chloe respected her. So the students behaved. All Chloe had to do was not make any biting comments.

‘Just because you say something you think is true,’ Pollen had told her in one of their many ‘Let’s Bee Nice’ sessions, ‘Doesn’t mean it isn’t hurtful. A good hero always thinks about how they affect others with their words.’

That is when someone decided to start shit. Of course.

In the brief period where they had a quiz- nothing serious, just a check to see how well they were keeping up with the subject so far- and had to go up to Ms. Bustier’s desk to turn it in, Lila happened.

Lovely, lying Lila.

Chloe had taken her paper up, all on her own to Sabrina’s shock, and had been walking back to her seat when she saw Lila pull a quick sleight of hand. From inside her sleeve she dropped a simple, but nice, white hair clip just close enough to Marinette’s stuff to look like she knew it was there. Normally, Chloe would have shrugged and ignored it. But she knew Lila would disrupt the class over some little hair clip.

Did she know Lila had been messing with Marinette for a while now? Yes. Did she care that some of Lila’s stories were far-fetched? No. As Chloe saw it, Lila was just another girl trying to be popular and feel exceptional at school. Compared to Chloe, she would never be exceptional.

She pinched herself. Sitting back down at her desk, she reminded herself of the lesson Pollen had taken to drilling into her head everytime she talked down about someone.

‘What makes you better than others?’

Chloe, each time, had groaned before repeating, ‘Nothing. Everyone is unique in their own right but just as good as someone else.’

Did Chloe believe that? No! Some people were just better than others. All that sweet talk about how everyone was unique? That was just Pollen seeing the best in people. Chloe wouldn’t strain herself looking for something that wasn’t there. Some people just weren’t exceptional.

‘The only exceptional thing about you is your mother.’

Still, Chloe DID like Pollen a whole lot, and what was her speech about how people give other people power? If Chloe thought Pollen’s word was worth something, then clearly it was.

In any case, Chloe decided to keep an eye out for Lila’s next move. She wouldn’t let her cause chaos in Ms. Bustier’s class. She was the best teacher in the school, after all. And that had nothing to do with how nice she was to Chloe. Not at all.

It didn’t take long for Lila to act. As she was returning from Ms. Bustier’s desk, she gasped. “Marinette! Where did you find that hair clip?”

Marinette, unsurprisingly, was confused. “Find what?”

“That clip right there,” Lila pointed it out. “That’s the clip I lost this morning! My dear old grandmother had given it to me as a gift years ago, before she passed it’s-” She teared up a bit then, bringing a hand to her mouth. “It’s one of the last things I have from her.”

Chloe eyed the exchange with disinterest. Lila putting on the waterworks? Check. Marinette having no clue what was happening? Check. The whole class trying to pretend they weren’t listening in on the conversation? Check.

“I didn’t find it anywhere. I hadn’t even seen it until now,” Marinette said, bewildered.

Taking that as her chance, Lila gasped again. “Marinette… did you steal it? Oh my gosh, no wonder I couldn’t find it! I had looked all over for it after I left my bag here to go get a quick breakfast. My poor mother was too busy this morning to get me anything, but left money for me to get food after wishing me a good day. Did you take it from my bag?”

For a moment Marinette’s eye twitched. Clearly, she didn’t believe the whole tale Lila had just spun. Chloe didn’t care. Lila loved to color her words with as much grandeur as she could. It was like a child coloring in a coloring book- just because the art was good didn’t mean the colors weren’t messy and didn’t clash horribly.

Belatedly, Marinette realized the whole class was listening in on the conversation. “I, uh, I-”

Lila turned to the rest of the class with misty eyes. Immediately, they jumped to her defense.

“Marinette, did you take it?”

“What do you mean you have no idea how that got there? It’s at your desk!”

“It couldn’t have just appeared.”

“It’s highly unlikely for the hair clip to have just made its way to Marinette’s desk on its own.”

Tired of the overlapping voices, Chloe audibly scoffed. “Puh-lease.” The class turned to her. Good. “Dupain-Cheng probably just found it on the floor and picked it up thinking it was lost garbage or something. Knowing Miss Goody-Two-Shoes over there, she was going to give it to Ms. Bustier or lost and found until she remembered that her clumsy, scatter-brained self was about to be late for class.”

There. All Marinette had to do was say, ‘Yes, Chloe! That’s exactly it! Thank you so much.’

Instead, she stared at Chloe just as dumbfounded as before. Lila, realizing she wasn’t going to get anywhere with this anymore, turned back to Marinette happily. “Thank you so much! I don’t know what I would have done if I had truly lost it.”

“Uh, yeah, you’re welcome?” Marinette gave an awkward smile, eyes moving between Lila and Chloe rapidly.

“Although, I do wonder if you would have done that if you knew it was mine…” Lila wilted dramatically, before sending Marinette a pained smile and walking back to her desk. Leave it to the girl to find a way to still make Marinette a bad person.

Chloe rolled her eyes. Whatever. Now that the class had settled back down, Ms. Bustier could keep teaching and they could go back to making Chloe’s life of being a ‘better person’ easy.

Maybe this nice thing wasn’t so hard.

Pollen, meanwhile, was counting the nice comments versus the mean comments to see if she could count that towards Chloe’s niceness score.

#miraculous ladybug #miraculous tales of ladybug and chat noir #ml #ml fanfic #ml fanfiction #chloe bourgeois #chloe bourgeois redemption #pollen #pollen (ladybug)#pollen the kwami #bee miraculous #kwami of the bee miraculous #im honestly so tired of typing out tags #should i keep going to reach a wider audience? yes #do i care?#not enough

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beckydoesthings · 4 years ago

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I spend far too much time on AO3 to let it all go to waste, so here’s a collection of ABO fics that I thoroughly enjoy. These are all hxl unless specified otherwise. I tried to condense my total list into one post, but I very quickly realized it would be waaaaay too long, so I split it up.

*will continue to update this. also if i mistagged an author, i deeply apologize, i do not know how to tumblr*

sleeping on our problems

E | 67k | @falsegoodnight

I’m in love with you, Louis thinks. He feels empty, weighed down by his sadness and the loss of Harry inside him just moments ago before his knot finally went down. There’s moments where he’s sure Harry feels the same. Like now, when he’s gazing down at Louis with so much adoration and tenderness. It’s like they’re both on the cusp of something more, but neither of them ever say a word. His confession is on the tip of his tongue ready to slide out like honey, and yet he remains silent. They both do, looking at each other and recognizing the reluctance mirrored in each other’s eyes. It’s then that Louis realizes they’re both scared. - Or Louis sleeps with Harry and they have more than just catching feelings to worry about.

this is everything i’ve ever wanted in an ABO fic and i’m genuinely in love with this. i think i cried reading this lol and i’m not ashamed of it. also the smut!

A Distant Hazy Light

E | 198k | @greenfeelings

Life’s pretty ordinary for Harry. He lives with his best friend, got into university just like he’s planned, and manages to support himself just fine for an unbonded omega. If he sustains that lifestyle by getting paid to help alphas through their rut every now and then, that’s nothing to be hung up on. Until he’s hired by an alpha that turns everything upside down.

Or, Harry’s working on taking Louis’ walls down, until he builds his own up.

this is part one of a three part ABO series that also probably made me cry at some point. chock full of angst and heartbreak with an (eventual) happy ending. also the side ziam is just *chef’s kiss*.

pray for some sweet simplicity

E | 237k | @eeveelou

Louis is the only omega to ever make it in the cut-throat world of competitive motorcycle racing—that is, he would be if anyone actually knew about his identity. Now, his sights are set towards competing in—and winning—the European Grand Prix, the biggest and most difficult race of the entire year, so he can disappear underground for good. He’s close enough, too, until an alpha sports journalist is assigned to follow Louis’s every move as he prepares for the event of his career.

Or, an AU where motorcycle racing is the biggest sport in a heavily divided world, Louis is trying to take control of his own destiny, and Harry is in for more than he bargained for.

it’s just so beautiful. their relationship development was soooo good and i adored reading this piece. i never thought i could enjoy a motorcycle racing story so much!

A Sea Without Water, A Compass Without Direction

T | 84k

”Tell me, Louis,” Captain Styles said, leaning forward a little. ”D’you think I’m an idiot?”

”I—what?” Louis asked, surprised by the blunt question. He had expected something different, something along the lines of how he learned music, or how he ended up as a prisoner on the other ship.

”Do you think I’m an idiot?” The captain repeated, putting emphasis on each word as though Louis couldn’t understand him otherwise.

”Of course not,” Louis said, shaking his head. He’d be a fool for thinking such a thing, and an even bigger fool for saying it out loud. ”Captain.”

Captain Styles nodded slowly, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands in his lap. ”Then why did you lie to me?”

”L-Lie?”

”Out on the deck. You lied to me,” he said. He held up his hand, three fingers up. ”Three lies total. I hate liars.”

i think i’ve read this like a dozen times and it’s still. so. good. probably the first pirate fic i read and i love it so much! the dynamic between them is awesome to read.

Seeing Blind

E | 46k | @that-idiot-overthere

Louis finally turns his head in Liam’s direction, knows his face is showing the longing he’s been aching with ever since it took root in his chest. “What the fuck do I do, Liam? He wouldn’t want me like that, but I want-” his voice cracks, and he turns his face back downwards. “What do you do when you’re not perfect for the person who’s perfect for you?”

OR the one where Harry’s an independent omega who likes to have his fun and Louis is the blind alpha that changes Harry’s priorities.

the smut in this fic is absolutely filthy and i love it ;). but watching the two boys be idiots in love made this fic for me.

The Space Between

E | 40k | @alltheselights

Harry Styles is the alpha rockstar who can’t sleep and doesn’t know why.

Louis Tomlinson is the omega PhD student who helps him figure it out.

i wanted to smack harry the entire time i was reading this, but in a cool way obviously. it’s quite fluffy but it’s got enough angst to make it suspenseful.

Face Your Fears

E | 92k | @sadaveniren

Harry is a single father, pretending to be a beta after his alpha mated him and left him. He’s getting by just fine raising the twins when Louis walks into his bakery. Too bad him and Louis will never be a thing.

this fic is a rollercoaster of emotions from beginning to end and it’s amazing to read. i’m not sure what i love more, the fact that harry’s a baker or half the plot being based around wikipedia being false.

The Compulsion to Find Love

E | 140k | @toomanydreamers

The most prestigious English third-level institution, Candling University, accepts omega students for the first time and Louis Tomlinson applies with bright eyes and brighter ambitions. There he encounters personal obstacles, traditional mindsets and a beautiful boy who inverts every prejudice Louis has ever known.

it is quite a lengthy story but totally worth it. i adore louis’ fierce determination in this!

We Both Got Nothing to Hide

E | 43k

“Talk to me, Lou.”

“I can’t,” Louis mumbled, knowing he genuinely couldn’t say it. He couldn’t admit to what he was doing. “Don’t ask me to say it, because I can’t.”

“Then… I’ll try and guess. You’ve… got some stuff of Harry’s. Something of his to make it smell like him?”

Louis just nodded, eyes fixated on the floor. This was humiliating, but he knew Zayn wouldn’t stop until he found out what was going on.

“Okay. Like… a blanket, or a comforter or something?”

“Kind of…”

Omega Louis has a secret nest. Alpha Harry keeps losing his clothes.

personal favorite because i have a soft spot for nesting. but i love the relationship between the two and it’s. so. fluffy i could melt.

lemon eyes

E | 50k

It's not proper for omegas to mess around with alphas before finding their bondmate. But Harry doesn't give a damn what's proper and fully intends on getting as much experience as he can before even trying to find one. As far as he's concerned, the right alpha won't care, and he'll have some fun on the way.

And who better to start with than Louis Tomlinson, the alpha with the worst reputation on campus?

ah yes a fic where Louis is an alpha and both are versatile?? wack. anyways, the smut in this is awesome and harry’s an idiot. what’s new?? (jkjk)

A Taste of Desire

E | 104k | @casuallyhl

“As forward as I have been with you this evening, I am also aware this dinner party isn’t the place to conduct business.” Mr. Tomlinson chuckles quietly to himself, shooting a subtle glance across the table towards their hostess. “And besides, I am sure our hostess would be horribly disappointed to learn that we went away this evening with a business agreement and not a mating one.”

Harry, who had been sipping his wine, coughs harshly at this. He splutters, unaccustomed to such blatant statements about mating.

Mr. Tomlinson continues to laugh quietly, clearly pleased at Harry’s reaction.

“Mrs. Humphreys promised that there was an alpha attending the dinner tonight that I would certainly get on well with,” Mr. Tomlinson continues, voice teasing. “She assured me that we would have much in common since we both work with mills.” Mr. Tomlinson glances at Harry, eyes flashing with mirth. “Little did she know that would be where our mutual interests began and ended.”

Or, a Victorian ABO where Harry is the owner of the most successful cotton mill in Manchester, and Louis is an opinionated social activist about to disrupt Harry’s world.

one of my favorite historical AUs! i love how strong and opinionated Louis is and how Harry comes round to follow.

Canyon Moon

E | 40k | @eeveelou

For as long as Louis has remembered, he has been promised to be mated to Harry, his best friend and the future pack alpha. But Louis’s heart belonged to the forest and to the hunt more than he could ever imagine it belonging to Harry.

Then Harry’s father dies in a violent accident, and Louis’s future alpha disappears on the wind.

An A/B/O Lion King AU

disney AUs are the shit! i’ve got a small love for werewolf fics and this is one of my favorites. love how this takes the story of lion king for a spin.

Quiet People Have the Loudest Minds

M | 38k | @2tiedships2

Broadway shows were one of the few things that could keep Louis’ attention for a full two hours without needing to move about. But not tonight.

The alpha next to him was both infuriating him and practically turning him on at the same time. He needed to leave. The alpha, that is. Louis was staying.

Or the one where Louis is a nonverbal omega who has accepted the fact that he will never find an alpha that will treat him as an equal. On the other hand, he’s never met anyone like Harry.

i love how just sappy and sweet this is, like there are just hearts pouring out of my eyes as i read this. also broadway!

*updated 2/15/21*

#fic recs #ao3 #in no particular order #abo fics #hl

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maxwell-grant · 3 years ago

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So that ask about a Doc Savage/The Shadow crossover (which as an aside, I agree that Doc is probably the worst of the archetype he is functionally the Ur-Example of that isn’t an intentional deconstruction focusing on his worst eugenicist/borderline-fascist aspects to create a villain) has me thinking: what exactly would be the boundaries for a good, well-written crossover between the Shadow and different genres or eras of what we all collectively call pulp? Could someone do a crossover between the Shadow and Indiana Jones that didn’t rely on one or the other being little more than a glorified cameo in a small portion of what was essentially the other’s story, or reducing the former to his lamest two-dimensional “gun-toting homicidal maniac” interpretations? Could the Shadow ever functionally exist in a universe shared with a space opera setting like the Lensman series? It seems like one could theoretically do a crossover between the Shadow and a character of the same era like Nero Wolfe or Sam Spade, but would it strain credulity to attempt it with characters from an updated form of the private detective archetype like Thomas Magnum’s Hawaiian noir or Rick Deckard’s cyberpunk dystopia? Obviously not expecting answers to each of these hypotheticals specifically, just as examples of the kind of thing I’m wondering now.

I will be going through some of your hypotheticals though, you clearly gave a lot of thought to this and it's only fair I respond in turn. I am always eager to respond anyone who wants to ask specifics about writing The Shadow, because much of what I strive to do through this blog is to just inform people about the many, many things that made The Shadow great, the things that have been neglected, and to provide paths anyone who wishes to write the character may take. I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to write The Shadow someday, but the least I can do is spread knowledge as I work my way there. I'd like to think I've done allright so far.

It's a fairly big question though so we're gonna through it by pieces...

...not THAT way

what exactly would be the boundaries for a good, well-written crossover between the Shadow and different genres or eras of what we all collectively call pulp?

Part of the reason why I did a post yesterday on The Shadow's influences is because looking at them, looking at a character's influences and history, I think are always essential to the prospect of tackling them. And in that regard, The Shadow doesn't actually have much, if any, boundaries stopping him from crossing over with just about anything. The most that's stopping the pulp heroes currently is, besides legal issues, their time periods and obscurity, but The Shadow is the most famous of them all, and a lot of stories have already worked with the idea that he's immortal (which I have my misgivings with, but for better or worse is clearly not going anywhere, and it's not a unworkable concept).

Right from the start, The Shadow was designed to be a long-running, versatile character that could partake in whatever adventures they felt like telling, and part of this is due not just to an incredibly strong personality not afforded to most pulp heroes or characters in general, even those who tried imitating him, but also the fact that he often takes a narrative backseat to the agents and proxy heroes, which means he doesn't have to carry a narrative by his own (and is in fact best suited not to), can blend in to just about anyone's story, and still stand out and be the center of sprawling mysteries. Actually, I'm gonna let Walter Gibson answer this one for you:

While his major missions were to stamp out mobs or smash spy rings, he often tabled such routines in order to find a missing heir, uncover buried treasure, banish a ghost from a haunted house or oust a dictator from a mythical republic.

There was no limitation to the story themes as long as they came within the standards of credibility--which proved easy, since The Shadow was such an incredible character in his own right that almost anything he encountered was accepted by his ardent followers.

Widespread surveys taken while the magazine was appearing monthly showed that a large majority of newsstands sold nearly all their copies within the first two weeks of issue. While other character magazines might show an early flurry, their sales were either spread evenly over the entire period or gained their impetus about the middle of the mouth and sometimes not until the third or even the fourth week.

From the writing standpoint, this made it advisable to adhere more closely to the Cranston guise and to emphasize the parts played by The Shadow's well-established agents, since regular readers evidently liked them. Also, it meant "keeping ahead" of those regulars, with new surprises, double twists in "whodunit" plots, and most exacting of all a succession of villains who necessarily grew mightier and more monstrous as The Shadow disposed of their predecessors.

Always, his traits and purposes were defined through the observations and reactions of persons with whom he came in contact, which meant that the reader formed his opinion from theirs.

This gave The Shadow a marked advantage over mystery characters forced to maintain fixed patterns and made it easy to write about him. There was never need for lengthy debate regarding what The Shadow should do next, or what course he should follow to keep in character. He could meet any exigency on the spur of the moment, and if he suddenly acted in a manner opposed to his usual custom, it could always be explained later.

The Shadow’s very versatility opened a vast vista of story prospects from the start of the series onward. In the earlier stories, he was described as a “phantom,” an “avenger,”, and a “superman,” so he could play any such parts and still be quite in character. In fact, all three of those terms were borrowed by other writers to serve as titles for other characters.

Almost any situation involving crime could be adapted to The Shadow’s purposes

The final rule was this: put The Shadow anywhere, in any locale, among friends or associates, even in a place of absolute security, and almost immediately crime, menace or mystery would begin to swirl about him, either threatening him personally or gathering him in its vortex to carry him off to fields where antagonists awaited.

That was his forte throughout all his adventures. Always, his escapes were worked out beforehand, so that they would never exceed the bounds of plausibility when detailed in narrative form. And that was the great secret of The Shadow.”

In some regards, The Shadow is a mirror. He presents himself to people the way that's best suited to them, the way they'd like him to be, the way he needs to be to affect them. They want money, he has it. They want honor, glory and purpose, he gives them that. They want to fight and turn around social systems for the better, he funds their dreams. Gangsters want the underworld's greatest hitman on their side, he becomes that and lets it be their doom. The story calls for a rich aristocrat who can rub elbows with politicians and kings and presidents, he can do that as long as it suits him. Kent Allard can be a world famous celebrity in one story and a disfigured, broke and faceless nobody in the next. You want a kind janitor with unexpected fighting skill to spy on police and assist the homeless, he has a little someone named Fritz for the occasion. You want an evil monster to be defeated, bring out Ying Ko. Hell, James Patterson's upcoming Shadow novel, which by all reviews seems to be pretty lousy, apparently features The Shadow transforming into a cat. Why? Screw you, that's why! But you'd never see James Bond or Batman spontaneously transforming into a cat without outside interference. He's The Shadow, he's got a face for everything.

(Okay to be clear I don't actually want the Shadow to literally transform into animals, at least not without a good explanation which the book clearly doesn't provide, but I do think it illustrates my point about how generally weird he is)

He is a shapeshifter who can be just about any character in any given narrative who only reveals himself when it's time to materialize into a cloaked terror or a familiar face (whether it's Cranston or Allard or Arnaud and so on). War stories, romance stories, sci-fi stories, globetrotting stories, parody stories, he's done all of them and then some. He doesn't need to be the protagonist of a story, he doesn't need to be invincible, and he doesn't really have any set rules regarding powerset. Gibson stressed credibility a lot, but for over 70 years now, that's clearly gone by the window of the character's writing. By design, he was always meant to be able to smoothly integrate into any existing narrative. Frankly, the only thing that's really holding him back (or saving him, depending on how you look at it) is the fact that he's not public domain (yet).

I think for a start, it's not so much boundaries, because in make believe land boundaries are just things to be overcome on the way to telling a story, so much as it's a good working knowledge of the character and of how far you are willing to stretch your storytelling limitations to include him, because he can account for just about all of them. Now, obviously there's stuff that works for the character better than others, a lot of Shadow fans don't like it when they take the character too much into fantasy, there's debates on how superpowered should he be if at all, and so forth. I have my own preferences, but one of the bigger tests of long-running characters is how can they succeed and thrive when placed outside of their element, and The Shadow can do that.

Could someone do a crossover between the Shadow and Indiana Jones that didn’t rely on one or the other being little more than a glorified cameo in a small portion of what was essentially the other’s story, or reducing the former to his lamest two-dimensional “gun-toting homicidal maniac” interpretations?

would it strain credulity to attempt it with characters from an updated form of the private detective archetype like Thomas Magnum’s Hawaiian noir

Well regarding the first question, the latter portion I think is very easy to do. Just, don't write him like that. Just be aware of why that's a mischaracterization, why the character doesn't need that to work, why he works better without it, and so on. It shouldn't be that hard.

Regarding Indiana Jones and Thomas Magnum, I think these two actually lend themselves very easily to crossovers with The Shadow. On Indy's case, he already is a Pulp Hero operating in the same time period, who's got a heavily contrasting niche and personality to build a fun dynamic around. Indy is more story-driven, in the sense that the Indiana Jones moves are all centered around his experiences and point of view and growth as a person, compared to The Shadow's stories, which are not really about "his" story as much as they are about the stories of the people he comes in contact with. Indy is a blockbuster superstar while The Shadow lurks and slithers through the edges and cracks of a story until it's time to strike. But if anything that just makes even more of a case as to why they could team up without issue, since there's a further built-in complimentary contrast to work with.

I have never watched Magnum P.I so there's definitely stuff I might be missing, but looking him up, past the necessary explanation as to why The Shadow's hanging around the 80s, it wouldn't strain credulity at all for the two to team up. The Shadow has had Caribbean/beach-themed adventures and one unrecorded adventure in Honolulu, he has a beach bum secret identity called Portuguese Joe that he could use for this occasion, and Magnum seems like exactly the kind of character who could star as the proxy hero of a Shadow novel. He's lively and friendly and can look after himself, he has a job that leads him to trouble and puts him on contact with criminals as well as victims, he's got secrets and a dark past and a laundry list of character flaws, he's perfectly capable of carrying a story by himself but can be out of his depth in the schemes that he gets caught up in.

Could the Shadow ever functionally exist in a universe shared with a space opera setting like the Lensman series? Or Rick Deckard’s cyberpunk dystopia?

I'm going to tackle parts of this question more throughly when I answer one in my query that's asking me "How would you do The Shadow in modern day?", which I still haven't gotten around to answering because it's a tricky one. I won't go into the specifics for the two examples you listed because I've never read the Lensman books and googling about them hasn't helped much very much, and Deckard's a fairly standard P.I character mostly elevated by the movie he's in, there's not really much to discuss regarding him specifically interacting with The Shadow. The question you're asking me here seems to generally be: Could The Shadow functionally exist in settings so radically apart from the 30s Depression era he was made for?

My answer for this is a maybe leaning towards yes. Starting with the fact that the concept of The Shadow is more suited for allegorical fantasy along the lines of space operas and cyberpunk, than the gritty realism he's been saddled with for decades, which I'll get into another time. For some reason, a lot of people seem to harp on about how the Shadow's costume is impractical and unworkable for modern times, and said James Patterson novel mentioned above ditched it all together, which as you can guess was a massively unpopular decision. Matt Wagner talked once about how cities don't have shadows and men wearing hats anymore and that's part of why you can't have The Shadow in modern times (as if The Shadow was always supposed to be dressing like an average guy, and not cowboy Dracula). But nobody seems to have a problem with characters dressing up exactly like The Shadow showing up all the time in dystopian future cities with fashion senses where they stick out like a sore thumb (and really, they should stick out, otherwise what's the point of being all weird and dark and mysterious?)

Although The Shadow is specifically suited for urban settings, is conceptually rooted in 1930s America, and there are important facets of his characterization related to history like the Great War, there are not the be-all end-all of The Shadow. It's part of the character. Other parts integral to the character are, as mentioned above, the versatility and metamorphous nature he was always intended to have. His nature as a character who exists to thrive in narratives not about him and not centered around him. His roots on Dracula and King Arthur and Oz and Lupin which are concepts that have had so, so many drastical revisions and turnabouts that still stuck to the basic principles of the icon.

Besides, The Shadow's already been there. He's already been to space, he's already been in alternate dimensions, he's already reawakened in modern/future times several times now (when he doesn't just live to them unchanged). He's been a cyborg twice, and between those, El Sombra, Vendata, X-9, the Shadow-referencing robot henchmen from Bob Morane and Yu-Gi-Oh's Jinzo referencing the movie's bridge scene, it's enough to constitute a weird pattern of The Shadow and Shadow-adjacent characters turning into robots. Perhaps one positive side effect of The Shadow's decades-long submersion in fantasy is that it's opened the character for just about anything, and I think this could be a good thing if it was married to an adherence to the things that made him such a juggernaut of an icon in the 30s and 40s.

Really, The Shadow partially works on Predator rules. And by that I mean, the big secret of the Predator that filmmakers don't seem to get is that the best way to make a Predator film is to just put the Predator somewhere he's not supposed to be, and let that play out. Because the Predator is, by design, a trespasser who invades narratives and turns the power dynamics around, and that works for any narrative you put it into.

The first movie is all about setting you up for a jungle action movie with Schwarzenegger's Sexual Tyrannosaurus Crew as the biggest baddest death squad around, only for the Predator to appear, turn the tables on these shitheads and pick them off one by one until Arnie scrapes a victory by beating it at it's own game. The 2nd movie is about a drug war between cops and gangs in L.A, until the Predator shows up and suddenly he's the big problem again that's gotta be put down. All the other movies fail because they try to be "about" the Predator, but the Predator doesn't work that way. He's a ugly motherfucker who's here to fight and kill things in cool ways for the sake of it's warrior game, who already has a specific structure to how his story's meant to play out, and that's all he needs to be. What you do is just take that character, take the structure he carries around, and throw it somewhere that works by different rules, and let the contrast play out the story.

Obviously there's a lot more to The Shadow than this, I write a billion essays on the guy after all, but much of what makes The Shadow work, much of what made The Shadow such an icon at the decade of his debut and such an interesting character to revolve any kinds of stories around, was because of the great contrast he posed to everything surrounding him, and the ways he can both be at the forefront as well as the backseat of any story.

Going back to what Gibson said:

Almost any situation involving crime could be adapted to The Shadow’s purposes. He could meet any exigency on the spur of the moment, and if he suddenly acted in a manner opposed to his usual custom, it could always be explained later.

The Shadow was such an incredible character in his own right that almost anything he encountered was accepted by his ardent followers.

advisable to emphasize the parts played by The Shadow's well-established agents, since regular readers evidently liked them.

The keyword here isn't that the Shadow should be realistic, frankly that's always been a lost cause. He was never really that realistic, and it's unfair to expect writers to keep pace with Gibson who had lifelong experience with the in and outs of magic and daring escapes and whatnot. The keywords I want to stress here is "accepted by his ardent followers".

Make a good explanation, an explanation that fits the character, an explanation that works, and the rest will follow. And if you can't, make us like the character. Make us accept that he can do and be all these things. Give us something to be invested in. And if that can't be The Shadow himself because he has to stay at arms length constantly to be mysterious, Gibson cracked the code almost a century ago through the agents. Make us invested in them, and through them, we will become invested in The Shadow.

The pulp Shadow would get tired, get injured, need rescuing, need to stop and rest and catch his breath, would need to think and plan and make split decisions on the spot and sometimes would make the wrong ones only to reverse them in the nick of time, and it made the fact that he was achieving all these things all the more impressive. The pulp Shadow was a creature of fantasy grounded in the history of the world he was a part of.

If you can make people care about The Shadow, be truly, genuinely invested in him and his world and the people he comes in contact with, be as invested in those as audiences were back then, you can and maybe should put him anywhere, doing anything, as long as you know what you're doing. As long as you understand what makes The Shadow tick, what makes him work and what doesn't, and whatnot.

Which is a lot of words for "do whatever you want, just don't fuck it up"

#replies tag #pulp heroes #pulp fiction #the shadow #lamont cranston #kent allard #the predator #indiana jones #thomas magnum

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popculturebuffet · 4 years ago

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Star Vs Tom Luictor Retrospective Detour: Skooled!

Dedicated to Jessica Walter 1941- 2021

Welcome back all you still mourning people to Prince of Wishful Thinking, my Tom Lucitor Retrospective... or at least a detour from it as I need to cover the Meteora arc to cover Divide/Conquer properly. When we last left off with Star she and Tom were going closer, but both are taking a break this time. We’ll get back to them in April... oh will we get back to them in april. For now we’re back to Meteora who I forgot was ABSENT for a while. not forever, but while her parantege, the cover up related to her and all of that has been vitally important, Meteora herself vanished after Monster Party and hasn’t been seen till now. But i’ts a good storytelling engine.. it ratchets up tension for her inevitable return, and gives us time to find out what happened with her and let that sink in.. granted i’td also be the last time it sunk in but I can dunk on the series decline later... I still have season 4 episodes to cover after all. So join me under the cut as we get the welcomed Return of Henious, an unexpected hero.. and Ponyhead because this series clearly hasn’t hurt me enough. And as usual for my Star Vs Reviews, i’d like to thank one of my Best Friends @jess-the-vampire for her insight on this episode. It’s always welcome and she always manages to find something I didn’t think of .

So we open at Saint O’s with Ponyhead returning to the school, having previously run it post rebellion before leaving because.. I don’t know. She probably got tired of being a leader, and out of universe they needed her to be around star more. Look the series has far more important things it never explained and never will, not explaining why a recklessly irresponsible asshole left a position of authority and responsibility I can let slide.

She’s come for brunch but things have changed... the school is still a warm, free environment for princesses to better themselves and party hardy, no longer an oppressive brainwashing gulag run by someone who as it turned out was horribly brainwashed herself.. it’s just now it actually has rules and structure.

It now also has an actual leader, Princess Patty Arms who showed up in the school’s previous appearance this season here and.. that’s it. I think she showed up in the background of the original st o’s episode. And it’s a shame because she’s a really fascinating character. No really she’s calm, dosen’t take Pony’s shit, and while a brunch exam SEEMS like a waste of time... it really isn’t. A good meal can loosen up a dignitary and some rulers have sticks up their keisters about things like this, so being able to do it just right can win them over. It’s still a touch ridiculous but given the world of star is a touch ridiculous to start with, it works.

Pony naturally leaves in a rage over this especially when no one backs her up.. but soon the School has bigger issues and we get to why we’re actually here: Meteora is back. And while she has changed, now having grown larger and stronger, easily scaling the wall, she still wants payback and we get a damn fine battle sequence as the princesses all unite against their former tormentor. It’s also sad in hindsight.. because as Jess pointed out to me almost NONE of these characters show up again. And I only added the almost because Penelope is in there. They all seem interesting, the setting of ST O’s itself is interesting, and the idea of a school for princesses of various types is a cool idea. I’ts something the show could’ve come back to to see how they bounce back from this attack.. but like most cool background elements in the show they forget about it. It was intresting to see the schools slow evolution from horrible nightmare to princess ran utopia and like many things coming up it feels like a lost opportunity.

That being said the fight is awesome, with Meteora proving to be a juggernaut in strength and outplanning her enimies, having brought an overide switch for the robots (Patty reprogrammed them to work for the school) and having them throw their hearts/ power sources as bombs. It’s a damn fine sequence as she finds way after way to keep going, with a now restored rasticore helping them simply portal in.

Pony meanwhile.. is hiding , as Patty find sout when she finds her, and Pony assumes this is about her... though for once i’ts not JUST ego.. but because she was one of the two who started the uprising at the school in the first place and THE person who tossed her out. We also get a nice character moment as while Pony tells patti she still hates her.. she puts the princess behind her when Meteora approaches. She may be a selfish twit whose massively unlikeable.. but she has a good heart.. and not just the one she keeps in a jar she got from one of her boyfriends.

But Meteora has more important buisness and finds her way to the depths of St. O’s.. where we meet the Schools namesake and her adopted mother a robot played by tress macneile.. another thing the series never bothered to care about as where did these robots come from and why?

Turns out Meteora came to find out her own personal history, with the remote from before used to find the real dirt.. and what we find .. is heartbreaking as we slowly journey back through Meteora’s childhoods as Henious.. and it’s fucking heart breaking with Tress voicing her younger versions, hence why I didn’t use this as the jessica tribute as while walter’s good in the episode, she isn’t given much.

We see her as a teen, forced to hide her tail and insulted over it by her mother.. and it only gets worse as when her cheeks glow as a kid St. O tries to wash them off and we get the poor child desperately begging that “she can be better”

We do finally get the answers Meteora saught as we see Shastacan dropping off the baby meteora, calling her “Henious”.. which St. O took as her name. Proving the spiderbites minus penelope’s dickishness is indeed genetic and why I have no sympathy for the prick getting eaten later... and hopefully globgor will do an encor with penepople’s parents. Here’s hoping.

So Meteora now knows she’s the rightful queen, and decides to go take it back.. though Pony does try to stand up for her friends... and while we don’t see it hte next episode confirms she got her horn ripped the fuck off. And this horribly traumatic injury.. is magically fixed via 3d printing next time we see her after an episode grappling iwth it instead of having pony deal with not having a horn, or her prostetic not giving her magic powers again. Because this show again really likes to leave good ideas out to rot in the sun like that package of hamburger I left out in the sun yesterday. And I actually had a reason there: I need a lot of Racoons for an elaborate scheme involving a map to tex cruz’s house, a used apache helicopter and a bulk order of tiny parachutes.

We do get some payoff to things though, as Henious comes on to rasticore who not so politely rejects her for being nuts.. before it’s revealed Gemini, her loyal servant is also a robot and she uses his heart to blow up rasticore and take the arm with her... which is ALSO never brought up again. Seriously this episode is so full of loose ends i’m suprised it just dosen’t end with Zuko asking his dad about his mother. Gemini’s death is genuinely tragic as his last words are “If you wanted my heart.. all you had to do.. was assssskkkkk”. God damn. So with that Meteora heads out to reclaim her birthright.. no matter the cost.

Final Thoughts on Skooled!: This one is decent.. but like the last episode I covered, the lack of payoff off for almost anything here, excluding the Meteora plotline and the Pony thing which instead got a BAD payoff, is really starting to rear it’s ugly head as the series greatest weakness. Yes bigger than the romance plot. And given that romance plot after this season can be best discribed as...

youtube

The show just.. forgets a good chunk of things happened to keeep things chugging along. It sets UP plots, what happens to st o’s from here, buff frog and a small caravan of monsters leaving forever, the message from shastacan, who built the st o’s robots, and on and on.. but it never PAYS them off. It dosen’t care to. It just does things so the plot can move but never bothers to think about the fucking consequences. It just gets more and more irrtating to think about as other shows throughly DO: Amphibia has the fact the characters get into shenanigans become a commented on running gag and something they grow past, and everything that happens matters. Every episode of Owl House builds on the foundation of the previous episodes. OK Ko dosen’t forget one episode had the characters not be able to turn back into humans and implies their wearing human costumes for the rest of the series. Which is fucking weird, but it was their memory. My point is other shows around the same time or right after didn’t magically forget things happened for convience sake. While it’s OKAY to loose some things in the shuffle, it happens to the best of us, it’s not okay to do it SO fucking often and with no clear care for the audiences desire for payoff. The show just ignores what plot points, like the huge cliffhanger of Star telling marco how she felt at the end of season 2, it dosen’t care about till it needs them and ignores the ones it never does. You can’t just.. bring shit up like it’s important and then try and forget it ever happened. People remember stuff, we are NOT stupid. KIDS are not stupid. When I was younger I REMEMBERED things that happened on KND, Danny Phantom, Xiaolin Showdown, TMNT 2003, because those shows, which are from decades ago, knew I would and trusted even if I missed something and was thrown off i’d tune in for the quality.

And in an age of streaming and more story based tv you can’t just.. ask kids to act like something they saw didn’t happen because your fucking lazy and frankly YOU never should have. Kids deserve better, my niblings deserve better and frankly the adults your clearly also writing for.. deserve better. This episode is eh, but the problems it represents are so fucking worse.

Next time on tom. If you thought I got angry towards the end of this one, just you wait. Next time i’ts Booth Buddies. Yeah.. yeah that one. Stay tuned.

#star vs the forces of evil #skooled #lilica ponyhead #meteora butterfly #gemini #rasticore #patty arms #rat princess #penelope spiderbite #saint olga #saint olgas #disney xd #disney plus #disney channel

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cardboxshelter · 3 years ago

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I posted 7.030 times in 2021

64 posts created (1%)

6966 posts reblogged (99%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 108.8 posts.

I added 2.970 tags in 2021

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Longest Tag: 139 characters

#also in belém there is that building that went famous for planning a pool for each apartment but didn't take into account the weight of the

My Top Posts in 2021

I think people are getting the set up for the traitor reveal wrong

Like, yeah, Hagakure is the traitor, there were some people who already got clues of this loooooong ago, it has been set up and all...

But remember aoyama? The hints were not leading into him being the traitor but knowing the traitor and trying to get the message across

He was most likely being watched and maybe even forced into being an unwilling companion to the traitor. Others have already noticed that he was recently hiding his face during the end of the villain hunt arc, some atypical behaviour to a character that was always breaking the fourth wall. He clearly was aware but couldn't do anything about it, so the whole class was manipulated.

And he is the one who bonded with Izuku, and who tried to reach for him. It is going to be revealed his link to the traitor actions and Izuku will be devastated for not helping or noticing sooner since he always makes a point of saving everyone. His friend was asking for help and he straight up ignored it and looked past. That is the emotional impact that is being set up: guilt and not pure shock.

10 notes • Posted 2021-11-25 14:26:09 GMT

Uncharitable a bit but I feel like I can finally put into words why it is becoming a bit hard for me to become invested in the todoroki family plot point: it feels too self contained in itself, almost detached from the bigger plot points

Like, what was the emotional reward and consequences of watching it be revealed to the whole world that the current number one hero commited an immense taboo to the rules imposed on the hero society? a few surprised faces and stuff being thrown at him while he tries to work, no longer having the respect from the public and all that

But I feel like such a reveal should have bigger reflexes on its world, specially since he achieved such a place as the number one hero. Just on his own family it would be interesting to see reflexes from his actions, like the family of Natsuo'sgirlfriend forbidding their relationship to prevent her being used like Rei, or maybe Fuyumi losing her job because people wouldn't trust her taking care of kids because she failed to save her own younger brother even as a kid, or to see the Himura family failing into the public scrutiny for being willing to let such things happen, or maybe even people stop seeing Shouto as a hero and seeing him as a victim. Heck, maybe even the villains deciding to take a page from the number one hero actions and reviving the quirk marriages, to show why it is dangerous to commit such a tabboo.

This plot point hardly feels alive because it has no effect on its world. Dabi weaponizing it to the public had a promising prospect but it hardly went anywhere. Now we know he is planning to commit something bigger and we have no clue as to what but Shouto is at least invested into saving and stopping him,and while it has thematic relevant now that it is being discussed the whole topic of saving Villains, it doesn't seem like it will have any effect on the world around him, beyond having an a effect on Dabi himself(and maybe his future victims)

It has become the equivalent to trying to see if a domino piece will make the other fall too, but it never happening or falling to a shorter line than you expected.

12 notes • Posted 2021-09-12 14:02:12 GMT

I am low-key glad it wasn't bkg, it would be depressing if all emotional high points in the manga were all concentrated only in his character

24 notes • Posted 2021-07-29 11:32:17 GMT

I feel sorry for the poor people trying to search color theory to improve their skills and are only finding a bunch of pictures of bloody walls and references to children's hospitals

39 notes • Posted 2021-09-30 21:31:13 GMT

Tagged by @mettywiththenotes \o/😁

Three favorite songs at the moment:

- Torn - Groove - Rude - Eternal Youth

- Linkin Park - Castle of Glass

Tagging:@dualfuel@habemus-sea@tailgxted@dualfuel@brazilianhotmess-onmain who wants to join in

140 notes • Posted 2021-10-18 13:55:26 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

#my 2021 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #I'm wheezing at my longest tag tbh #It wasn't enough for me to describe the architecture mess I have seen #Lmao #Damn I post a lot

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rocket-bear · 4 years ago

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shinsena ghost fic outline

SO. on my last list of shinsena fic ideas I had written "shinsena ghost AU (yes, like the patrick swayze movie) but with an actually happy ending". I have decided that I'm not actually going to write this fic because 1) it would take forever and I have other ones that are bigger priorities for me and 2) the inspiration for it was really the MOUNTAIN of IT fix-it fics I was reading in early 2020 because I was Going Through It where I then shunted that inspiration over into a fandom I was actually comfortable writing for, and at this point I have moved past that stage and no longer need the catharsis,

BUT! I do really like the bits that I did already write for it, and I still love the idea, so I'm just going to go ahead and post the WIP bits that I did get finished, and then flesh out what the rest of my plan was after!

The fic takes place in Sena's second year of college! It's a ghostfic so, y'know, warning for major character death and copious discussion of grief, haha, but it gets better!!! Also, in addition to ShinSena there's BG mentions of HiruMamo in both the fic excerpts and bulletpoints for the rest of the planned plot. Text below the cut is about 6k words!

---------

"Aw, beans," is the first thing Sena hears after he dies.

He doesn't really process it in the moment, too busy blinking up at the bright, unclouded sun and distantly noticing that it doesn't hurt his eyes. He sits up, running through the last few moments in his mind-- a bouncy ball dotted with pink flowers, skipping merrily over the sidewalk into the street, a girl in her school smock tottering on chubby legs after it, a car unavoidably close, his view of everything blurring as he throws himself forward without even thinking about it--

Oh.

"EHHHH," he shrieks, and scrambles away from his body, and it doesn't come with him.

"I'm going to be in ;so much trouble," that voice says again, and Sena whips around because it's the only thing he can actually hear clearly, even though he's pretty sure he should be able to hear-- the other people around him, looking at his body without looking at him, everyone unharmed but most of them in tears, and he doesn't want to think about that.

So he looks, and sees-- something. It almost looks like an afterimage, at first, the kind of light-dark luminescent spots your eyes put up when you look away from a light you've been staring at too long, but it stays put as Sena stares at it, a kind of void of shifting light just stamped in the way of his view of the bushes lining the sidewalk.

"Um," he says, and the Thing kind of goes more dark-light than light-dark for a moment as it… sighs?

"Yeah, sorry, you're not getting me at my best, this wasn't supposed to happen," it says, and Sena feels like he would be hyperventilating if he had lungs, but he doesn't anymore.

"No, listen," the Thing says, and it starts to get bigger, which Sena belatedly realizes is because it's moved closer to him. With the way it doesn't actually seem to take up space, it's hard to tell. "Let's move away from here, okay? It's going to be hard for you to listen with all this going on."

And, well-- Sena casts a glance back behind him, to the people with their hands over their mouths and tears in their eyes and the pointless things they're doing to his body to try to bring him back to it, and he scrambles up to his feet and follows the thing.

"Okay, here goes," the Thing says as they move further away from the-- the scene, and then its voice changes. "Fear not, mortal, for your time on this plane has elapsed, and you have accomplished all that you were intended for. Your current form--"

"Wait," Sena says, fighting against the mesmerizing effect of the Thing's shifting lights in combination with its new, multilayered voice, high and low at once but somehow soothing. "I thought you said this wasn't supposed to happen??"

"Well, okay, yeah," the Thing says, its voice reedy and thin once more. "Your time actually isn't supposed to be up, but-- okay, did you know you're like, really fast? Like crazy fast. I was just supposed to nudge the driver once they stopped the car in time, you know, typical near-death experience stuff, but you jumped right through me before I was in place."

"You kill people by touching them?!" Sena skitters away from the Thing, and gets the distinct impression that the silvery flush it pulses in response is decidedly unimpressed.

"I can't kill you again," it says. "And we don't kill things, anyway. We just… mark them as finished. I got you out of the oven too soon, that's all."

That sounds a lot like it was only different from killing things in terms of word choice to Sena, but he doesn't say so.

"C-can-- can we fix it?" He asks instead, the first shards of ice-cold realization sinking in at last. He's dead. He's dead?

The Thing flares sigh-dark, and says, "You know this kind of thing has only happened like, four times before? Ever! Since the dawn of humanity! It's been like 20,000 years since the last time! I don't know off the top of my head, kid, I'm gonna have to look it up."

"Then-- there's a chance? How long will that take? What if-- I mean-- they're gonna take me to the hospital--"

The ice shards sink further into his body, but the Thing's voice is dismissive.

"If there's a way, that's not the body you're going to be coming back to; there's no way we're gonna be able to do this without rolling back the clock. So don't worry about the morgue, okay?"

Which-- was a relief, but Sena feels an empty sensation at the word "morgue" that he's pretty sure would have been nausea if he had a working stomach left to experience it.

Some of that must show on his face because the Thing comes to an abrupt stop, and its voice is more gentle as it says, "Okay, gameplan. If there's a way to get you back, it's gonna have something to do with the energy left over from your presence among the living. So go see your friends and family and see what you can figure out. Right now, you're a ghost, so there's got to be some way to tap into that energy."

Sena nods a little numbly at first, working on auto-pilot, and then nods more firmly as he actually processes the Thing's words. A plan! That means-- there's something he can actually do, while the Thing goes to-- "look it up." That's good! A plan!

And then, the Thing goes yellowish, and its tone turns apologetic.

"And… Speaking of ghost stuff, I didn't get to finish this part before. Your current form will let you move around this plane to visit your loved ones and grant yourself any closure you desire, but you won't be able to interact with the living world, and if we're not able to fix this in time-- when the time comes, you'll have to make a choice. Move on completely to the next plane, or stay here with your loved ones until there are none left who remember you."

Sena blinks, going still, and the Thing glows even more yellow.

"So we've got about [a month] to figure this thing out. I'll do what I can, kid. You hang tight."

And then it's gone, and Sena is left alone on the sidewalk.

He does all that he can do, and goes to find Mamori.

------

He doesn't think through the consequences of that until he gets to her apartment and finds her in tears and Hiruma on the phone, calling them an escort to the hospital. Every awful minute of that first day feels like nothing more than a smear in Sena's memory by the time his funeral comes around. He spends the time in-between trying his best to do something, anything, that will let his friends and parents know that he's still there. He does his absolute best to go full Hollywood Haunting on everyone he knows, trying to knock over pictures or rattle windows or flick lights on and off, but nothing works. Every once in a while, when he's flopped beside Mamori on the floor as she goes through photo albums, he almost thinks she hears him as he talks about the photos she's flipping through-- but it always just ends up being a fresh round of quiet tears that brings Hiruma over to her side.

The funeral seems to be no different. He'd hoped, somehow, that maybe having so many loved ones gathered in one place to think about him would somehow give him the energy to make himself solid-- and there are so many people there, not just Sena's family and closest friends, but people from nearly every team in the Tokyo American football community, some of them who he only ever remembered seeing across the field.

All of the original Devil Bats are there, of course. Kurita sobs his way through the service. The Ha-Ha Brothers stand stony-faced, and Juumonji scrubs a rough hand across his eyes, but Sena never sees any tears. Suzuna clings to Monta's arm as they both cry openly with Riku in the row behind Sena's parents, Mamori, and Hiruma.

His parents cry. Mamori seems too exhausted to, just sitting quietly and taking in the service with bruised red eyes. Hiruma puts his arm around her shoulder at one point, and Sena finds himself surprised by how much tenderness he's seen between them in the last few days. Hiruma had handled almost all of the arrangements, actually-- Mamori and Sena's parents making the decisions, and Hiruma diligently rising from each discussion to make the appropriate phone calls.

In the middle rows, Sena finds himself looking at Shin and Sakuraba. He shouldn't have been surprised to see them-- and he really wasn't, not really, he knew he would be devastated and would definitely show up if the situation was reversed-- but something on Shin's face startles him into looking again.

He looks tired. Sena doesn't think he's ever seen Shin tired, before, not even after playing full-out through an entire game, not even after the most intensive of training. But Shin's face is undeniably drawn, and the skin underneath his eyes is bruise-dark.

Sakuraba tears up, and Shin doesn't, but it's Sakuraba who lays a comforting hand on Shin's shoulder. [UNFINISHED SCENE-- also I had intended to go back and make this scene more accurately reflect Japanese (vs Western) funeral traditions but have not done that since, I'm not finishing the fic]

----------

He finds himself seeking out one of his and Shin's old training routes from high school, when they lived close enough that it made sense to share. It's been years since he ran this route, but it makes sense, he figures, that he would be revisiting old memories like this. It was a good route, anyway-- at one point it ran alongside the river, and Sena remembers reaching it on hot summer days, and noticing that even Shin tipped his face into the breeze when the sun was really beating down.

He walks along the path at first, but before long finds himself jogging, the force of memory and habit alike drawing him into those quick strides. It doesn't feel the same without the sensation of the wind on his face, or the heat of the sun on his body, or even the sweat beading up stickily between his skin and his clothes, but it's something.

Without fatigue or fear of obstacles to keep him vigilant, Sena finds himself startled before too long by the sound of steady footfalls coming up behind him. He automatically shifts his path to make way-- though it doesn't matter much now, he thinks with a frown-- and looks up as the lone jogger makes to pass him.

It's Shin.

Sena's not-heart squeezes painfully at seeing him unexpectedly, and Sena gapes.

"Shin-san--" He gasps, and of course Shin doesn't respond or look his way. Sena swallows the painful reminder and adjusts his pace to match Shin's.

They run together, and of course it's quiet, because Shin doesn't know that he has company. Not that companionable silence was atypical for their runs together before-- running was for focusing on technique, including breathing, so they would save the chatting for before and after.

Sena wonders if Shin had kept to running this path all along-- he was so sure that they'd both abandoned it when they'd made their way to university. Or at least, Shin had apologetically told him so, when he'd moved on to Oujou University and Sena was still in his third year at Deimon.

Maybe Shin's feeling nostalgic too, Sena thinks, and then shakes his head. He doesn't want to be sad, and it's nice to have Shin at his side, even if Shin doesn't know he's there.

He tries to sink into the feeling of running. It's still hard-- he can't feel much of anything, after all-- but with Shin there, it's a little easier to fall into old memories and let those guide him. He can pretend-- to feel the gentle breeze off the river cooling the sweat on his face, to feel the push of the sidewalk under his feet launching him into his next step, to feel how the sun is hotter on his back and shoulders than anywhere else as it crawls its way up the sky.

It almost feels like normal, finding that rhythm alongside Shin that has their steps striking the pavement in tandem, Sena's extra stride to make up for their heights a little accented half-note; that peaceful, focused haze that has them inhaling and exhaling in synch. It's so perfectly familiar that Sena can almost imagine a lump rising in his throat and the sting of tears in his eyes, nearly overcome with the twin sensations of having and loss--

--when Shin startles hard beside him and skids to a stop, with a gasp that has Sena's blood running cold before he even looks back for him, the image of the oncoming truck flashing through his mind.

But there's no truck here, of course. They're on a running trail, on a totally separate level than the road, but it's obvious enough what drew that terrifying, uncharacteristic noise from Shin's lungs when Sena looks back, and his eyes meet Shin's.

Shin sees him.

[UNFINISHED SCENE, this is the last of the actual fic that I wrote!]

---------

FROM THERE here was the plan:

- Shin being able to see him only lasts a split second. Shin's super shaken and keeps looking around and rubbing his eyes for a couple moments, and then he turns around and walks back to the train, and Sena-- thinking, like, "holy shit, Shin never skips training"-- follows him back, because even though it's super heart-breaking seeing Shin so shaken up it's also the closest he's gotten to making any progress the whole time

- Shin gets back to his dorm and just like. sits down at his table with his head in his hands. Sena's motivation to keep trying to get his attention kind of dries up so he pokes around Shin's dorm room instead and notices, like. a bunch of half-eaten meals/snacks in the trash, "Practice" scratched out on his calendar for the next few weeks, unmade bed, evidence that Shin's only really gotten dressed to go out jogging over the last few days and is only wearing his pajamas otherwise-- he's just not doing good.

- Just as Sena's like, really starting to grasp this, Sakuraba shows up at the door-- Shin gets up to answer the door with his back to Sena and like, whatever Sakuraba sees on Shin's face just stops him in his tracks and he immediately pulls Shin into a hug, which Sena is kind of shocked to see that Shin totally sinks into

- Sakuraba sits down with Shin at the table and they talk. Shin admits that he thought he saw Sena while he was jogging, and both of them are just brushing it off as like, a grief-induced sensory memory, stuff like that happens, etc. Sakuraba comforts him and encourages Shin to take it easy, it's okay to take time off of even his own personal training, it's okay if he needs more time, and also like fusses about Shin not getting enough to eat especially if he IS going to keep training

- Sena meanwhile is like, feeling awful with guilt but also just kind of overwhelmed with the realization of how important he was to Shin, and this is where I would've like, laid the groundwork for how they'd gotten closer during the rest of high school/early college but Sena still never rrreally understood how much Shin cared about him because 1) he's got self-esteem issues baybee, and 2) Shin is not exactly, like, super forthright about his feelings,

- but, while Sena DOES feel awful about how much Shin was shaken up about seeing him, it's the only thread he can think of to pull on to try and bring himself back, and he ALSO feels guilty about having to watch everyone grieve for him, so, well,

- he starts haunting Shin!! Shin does not listen to his good and helpful friend Sakuraba and goes jogging again the next day, but it's obvious that he's still feeling Off and he's having a hard time getting into a rhythm, and Sena isn't able to tap into ~whatever it was~ that made him visible the previous time and is feeling super defeated about it, UNTIL,

- Shin takes a break at the midpoint of his normal route, which is a thing Sena knows he does not generally do from their own training together, and is basically just slumped over on a bench with his head in his hands again and Sena's also feeling awful and helpless and does the same thing,

- and then Shin tenses up beside him, his breath getting shallow, and Sena notices and tentatively calls out to him. Shin slowly, slowly looks up, and they make eye contact for just a second again, before Sena can tell he's not visible anymore because Shin's eyes kind of unfocus and he looks away, and just gets up and goes home.

- This kind of refreshes Sena's determination, and over the next few days (IT WAS GONNA DEPEND ON HOW LONG I WANTED TO TORTURE SHIN) they repeat the same pattern, with Sena going on Shin's jogs with him and occasionally achieving small flashes of visibility(/audibility, though Sena isn't ever able to get out anything helpful before the universe mutes him again) which Shin seems to be determined to just brush off as grief illusions even as he gets more and more tense each time

- Until finally as they're jogging, Shin sort of tersely asks "Are you there?" and instead of saying anything Sena just tries to barrel into him for a hug because clearly auditory-visual haunting only isn't WORKING and we've gotta get some TACTILE FEEDBACK in here,

- and it works. He knocks Shin off of his stride, and Shin grabs for him in turn, and there's a moment where they both stare at each other in total shock and relief before Sena starts trying to frantically tell Shin the whole story and disappears out of his arms like, three words in.

- Shin has a little tiny mental breakdown in the middle of the sidewalk where he cycles from devastation at Sena disappearing again to trying to pull himself together like, "okay if this is real then this isn't my last chance because it's happened a lot over the past few days" to a kind of giddy catharsis because it's real Sena's really here to kind of shutting down over the idea that maybe it's STILL not real and he's just going REALLY crazy to actually pulling himself back together and going to find a bench to sit down on, and just like,

- talking things out, out loud, in hopes that Sena can hear him. He can only see Sena when they're running, which is something they used to do together, so maybe recreating old memories is what triggers it. He's noticed that even when running, he usually sees Sena in moments when he's feeling least conflicted/emotionally complex-- either pure grief or pure nostalgia or pure just-zoning-out-running, not as much when he's really struggling to process and has a lot going on internally at once. Maybe the stability of the emotion is part of it.

- Sena meanwhile is having his own meltdown from sheer overwhelming relief over FINALLY FINALLY making contact and Shin FINALLY FINALLY believing he's there and also just like making hearteyes at Shin for immediately going into full methodical Ghost Scientist mode after getting his own meltdown over and done with

- speaking of going full Ghost Scientist, Shin announces his intention to do exactly that by saying he's heading back to his and Sena's old running trail to test out the "recreating memories" theory right that second, and they head over.

- They jog, and Shin talks out some of his memories with Sena from his own perspective, which is a surprise for Sena because he doesn't even remember some of the things that Shin does and also it lets him actually understand what Shin was thinking in those moments.

- And most importantly: it works. It's not constant, but the longer they practice, the longer they're able to keep Sena in view for longer stretches of time, more of an unsteady flicker than the total off-or-on that it was before. They stay out for a long time (and in the process discover that other people still can't see Sena when Shin can as he continually gets weird looks for talking to thin air) and Shin actually eats a real meal when he finally goes home.

- Sena and Shin keep practicing over the next few days, which makes Sakuraba SUPER concerned because Shin spending hours and hours jogging every day looks like Shin further depression-spiralling from his perspective, but he's somewhat mollified by the fact that Shin's actually getting back to eating and getting dressed etc. normally, even though he's still not going to practice.

- During this time, Sena and Shin bond when they're actually able to communicate. Sena notices that Shin's parents haven't checked in on him even once despite the fact that he just lost a friend, and Shin confirms in one conversation that he basically doesn't have a relationship or emotional connection with his parents at all. (But watch, hang in there, I'm gonna fix it,)

- In the meantime, Shinigami-san tracks Sena back down and they both share what they've learned. Shinigami-san says that Sena has to gather energy from as many of the people he's formed bonds with as possible to chain himself more strongly to life, and gives him a pendant to wear around his neck that will store the energy. When Sena talks about his and Shin's experiments, It says that it makes sense that being emotionally and physically in-sync would help bolster the connection between them to the point where other people would be able to see him, and that if they practice enough they might even be able to just use one or the other (emotional sync or physical sync) without needing both.

- After Sena laboriously relays this to him through flickers, Shin gets a metronome and they both practice tapping their fingers to the rhythm, and they're finally able to see each other at Shin's dorm room vs having to be on a run and actively reminiscing together. They develop a system where when Shin wants/needs to see him, he'll tap his finger against the side of his leg and Sena will do the same thing so they can actually talk.

(- There is at least one moment in the development of this that, when Sena successfully appears in front of him, Shin smiles fondly and very softly says, "There you are," and Sena immediately disappears again because he's so shaken to his disaster bisexual core that he can't even handle it.)

- During this process they find out that Sena's pendant glows when Shin is reminiscing or otherwise talking about his feelings (but not the capital-L feeling) about Sena, which lets them know how to go about "gathering energy" from Sena's friends.

- With the clock counting down on Sena's deadline, Shin starts approaching Sena's friends to "check on them," or, to sit down with them and talk about Sena. It's a little awkwardly sweet on both sides, because no one expects Shin of all people to be making sympathy housecalls and Shin's not very good at talking about feelings, but the conversations are surprisingly genuine and cathartic for all parties (including Shin, who is still processing some weird sideways grief even with his new connection to ghostSena, and Sena, whose self-esteem issues have a hard time standing up under a deluge of people talking about how much they cared about and miss him), PARTICULARLY:

- Monta and Suzuna, where the reminiscing works a little too well and they actually see a flicker of Sena sitting at Shin's side during the conversation and freak out. Shin immediately changes tacks and tells them that Sena is there and that he's trying to bring Sena back and he needs their help, and at first this makes them freak out more because what the fuck but by virtue of Shin being… Seijuurou "Overly-Serious-Stoic-Never-Overreacted-In-His-Life" Shin, he convinces them to try the tapping technique to bring Sena back into view.

- Sena has Shin describe a memory involving the three of them while they tap along to Shin's rhythm, and the combination of reminiscing and tapping works well enough that they're able to get frequent enough flickers of Sena to believe Shin. Yes, they do get a least one good long group hug out of the flickers, I'm not a monster.

- Shin still has to do most of the communication for Sena because it would take a lot of practice for the Sena-Monta-Suzuna combo to get enough in-sync to be able to communicate effectively, but he explains the whole situation and all the information they've gotten from Shinigami-san. They decide that it still makes the most sense for Shin to field the energy-gathering housecalls for the same communication-based reasons-- Sena can guide Shin through the conversations by suggesting memories to bring up with his friends-- but all the same, Shin suddenly finds himself with two tiny new best friends who want to hang out with him all the time. (And not even just to talk to Sena! Suzuna and Monta become pretty attached to and curious about Shin after he shows them more of his vulnerable side in the conversation leading up to the point where they actually see Sena themselves.)

- I was going to go through little flashes of Shin's conversations with a lot of Sena's friends across the football world, but the other Big One was going to be Mamori, of course. (And a little bit of Hiruma, who refuses to sit down for an Emotional Conversation with fucking Shin, but will gladly peanut-gallery Mamori's out of his own repressed desire for catharsis and also to make sure with guns loaded that Shin doesn't fuck up the fragile acceptance Mamori's been building since Sena's death.)

- Having learned from the experience with Suzuna and Monta, Sena wisely sits out of view during the conversation because he actually doesn't want to put Mamori through the rollercoaster of seeing him again, especially if his and Shin's efforts fail.

- Shin does not fuck up his conversation with Mamori and so Hiruma doesn't have to murder him! It's actually the most honest-- and healing-- conversation he has with anyone. Mamori finds herself feeling very fond of Shin, who she didn't know was so close with Sena and could be so supportive and empathetic under all that stoic strength, and Shin finds himself immediately adopted by another one of Sena's loved ones.

(- In their conversation, Mamori also mentions that just after Sena passed she kept finding herself thinking she heard Sena's voice, because that seed in the actually-written bit above was in fact foreshadowing ohoho.)

- I was not going to Go Into It because not even I have the strength, but to continue the theme of Shin finding a new family via his bond with Sena, there was going to be a brief scene referencing that Shin's visit with Sena's parents went much the same, with the addition that Shin was surprised Sena's parents already knew so much about him (because as it turns out Sena talked about him FREQUENTLY.)

(- Also within the housecalls there's a comedy scene where Shin makes Sena solid just long enough for Sena to log Shin in on Skype so he can talk to Panther without sacrificing a computer, and they discover that international friendship energy gathering does in fact work.)

- AND THEN: SAKURABA. The fic would switch to Shin's POV from here! In Shin's energy-gathering conversation with Sakuraba, things are going well at first, with Sakuraba reminiscing about Sena and then turning the conversation toward Shin himself to talk about how he's noticed Shin's seeming a lot more steady and like he's been doing some real healing lately. Shin obviously does not explain the ghostSena situation, but does honestly say that his conversations with Sena's other friends have helped him process his feelings a lot. And Sakuraba, being a supportive friend, very gently says that he's proud of Shin for reaching out, and for doing so well when he's going through something so hard, because he can't imagine losing the person he was in love with.

- Shin freezes up, and Sakuraba tries to reassure him that it's okay, he's known for a long time, he's so sorry that Shin never got to actually process those feelings with Sena, and Shin doesn't have to talk about it but if he ever wants to Sakuraba's there for him-- and Shin very stiltedly deflects the whole conversation because he doesn't want to totally shut Sakuraba down when he's just trying to be supportive but also Sena is right there

- After finally, awkwardly shooing Sakuraba out the door, Shin sits back down and tries to Talk About It with Sena, but he's so emotionally frazzled that he's not able to get a stable connection. Since they can't have a two-way conversation, he just launches into apologizing-- he's sorry, he understands if it makes Sena uncomfortable, Sena doesn't need to feel obligated to respond to it and of course Shin is going to help him finish getting what he needs regardless--

- Sena's just RAPIDLY flickering in and out of view, with the time he's not visible getting longer and longer as Shin keeps talking because they are incredibly emotionally out-of-sync, and with Shin only able to tell that Sena looks upset whenever he's able to see him, he makes some Assumptions about Sena's feelings about his accidental confession.

- Things don't get better over the next day or two. They try to do their synchronizing exercises, but even reciting memories doesn't help because Shin is too anxious and ashamed (and sleep-deprived from stress) to connect to them emotionally, which is only compounded because he realizes that Sena's deadline is fast approaching and they won't be able to finish in time if he can't get his shit together but that anxiety Does Not Help with relaxing enough to synchronize when he's spiralling over the thought of losing Sena again because of something that he "did".

- Finally, Sena apparently gets desperate and snatches up the metronome during one of the moments when he's solid for just long enough to do it.

- Shin doesn't see him for a while after that, and assumes (correctly) that Sena has taken the metronome with him to try and sync with Monta and/or Suzuna instead, and also assumes (incorrectly) that this is because Sena is extremely disappointed with him at best and totally hates him at worst, and that either way Sena probably doesn't want much to do with him anymore even if he is able to be brought back.

- He spirals for like, A Day, after which he does in fact break and go to tear up very stoically on Sakuraba about how yes he was (is) in love with Sena and it hurts him that he'll never get to express that properly (now that Sena wants nothing to do with him) and how he feels like he let himself (and Sena) down by not being able to act on that earlier (when it wasn't a literal life-or-death situation) and how maybe he's just not cut out for emotions and connections with other people actually, just look at even his relationship with his parents???

- Sakuraba comforts him and very gently tells him he's being a catastrophizing dingus and shows him, like, a mountain of texts on his phone not ONLY from concerned fellow Oujous, but also from a bunch of the people that Shin's talked to about Sena over the last few weeks, all of them expressing the general sentiment of "wow I was super surprised when Shin came around to talk to me about Sena but I'm so glad he did, it looks like he's doing well, keep an eye on him for me" in varying levels of transparency because after all they are Manly Footballers, but regardless: look at that, Shin is actually perfectly capable of forming relationships with other people, and they like and care about him.

- This results in some decidedly less stoic tears, and Sakuraba and Shin successfully patch things up after their previous awkward discussion about Shin's feelings for Sena. When Shin leaves he immediately heads for Enma to try and find Monta, because even if Sena and his friends don't want to see him he absolutely can't just shrug and sit back and just wait to see if they manage to save him.

- When he's like halfway there, he comes across Monta and Suzuna heading in his direction, and they cut off his questions by just being like NOPE SHUT UP COME WITH US and dragging him over to like, a park gazebo for some semi-privacy.

- Suzuna gets the metronome out of her bag and sets it on the park table and turns it on. Monta pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket and starts reading.

- It turns out that after he left Shin's, Sena ghosted up into Monta's room and just plopped the suddenly-appearing metronome down on Monta's desk, scaring the shit out of him but also giving a very clear signal of WE NEED TO TALK. Monta called up Suzuna and the three of them had spent the last day and a half working on synchronizing non-stop, and while they still aren't nearly as good as Shin and Sena had gotten with weeks' worth of practice, they got far enough along that Sena was able to have them slowly write out some of his memories with Shin, this time from his perspective, through the unsteady connection.

- Suzuna and Monta take turns yanking the paper back and forth between them to read out the description of Sena and Shin's memories, and with Shin tapping along to the metronome, he's able to see Sena more and more clearly over time until he's solid more often than not.

- As it becomes increasingly clear, even to Shin, that these specific memories Sena has chosen to share are a record of him coming to realize his feelings for Shin, Sena is eventually able to take Shin's hands and hold them without disappearing, tapping not needed. He interrupts Suzuna and Monta to try to finish off the confession himself: Shin didn't need to be scared when Sena found out about his feelings, because--

- Absolutely overwhelmed by everything about the last 36 hours and having no ability to process any of it in words ANYMORE but moved by the SPIRIT OF COMMUNICATION regardless, Shin gambles on the pretty sure bet that he and Sena are in-sync about this, and kisses him.

- It connects. (And connects, and connects...) Sena's pendant starts to glow brighter and brighter until he's totally enveloped, and--

- Switch back to Sena's POV! He wakes up on the street in front of the truck again, scraped up but otherwise totally unharmed. So are the little girl, who he successfully pushed out of the way, and the driver of the car, who stopped in time regardless. Shinigami-san is also there, and Sena tells It to leave the driver alone because It owes him one, and Shinigami-san congratulates him and tells him that hey hey that was the plan along!! (The onlookers assume that he's confused from the near-accident when he starts talking to thin air.)

- Sena waves off all the concerned onlookers and runs off to find somewhere to sit where he's not going to be gawked at so he can text literally everyone he knows. By the time he finds a bench, he's already gotten HOLY SHIT WE JUST TIME-TRAVELED ARE YOU OKAY??? texts from Monta and Suzuna, which he responds to and incites a flood of emoji-based cheering. Everyone else he texts is politely puzzled by his "are you okay???" message, including Mamori and his parents to his intense relief, except--

- He gets a call from Sakuraba, who sounds very confused as he tells him that Shin wants to talk to him. Sena reassures Shin that he's okay, and tells him to meet him at the park that they left off at, and also that he loves him because he can't restrain himself after not getting to say it before. Shin says it back, and Sakuraba therefore sounds both confused AND delighted when he gets the phone back from Shin to say goodbye.

- Sena texts Suzuna and Monta to meet him at the same place, since it's about halfway between Enma and Oujou, and starts running.

- Shin and Sena, being… Shin and Sena, get there before the other two, and there's so many tears and so much hugging and so many I Love Yous and also some apologies. Monta and Suzuna eventually arrive and there's another round of tears and hugging and I Love Yous, and when everyone is less punchdrunk off of trauma and catharsis, they sit down and figure out that it's only the people that actually saw Sena as a ghost that remember the other timeline.

- With the group understandably not ready to be separated under the circumstances, but also with Sena desperately wanting to see his parents, Mamori and Riku, he comes up with a thin excuse for an impromptu dinner party at his parents' place later in the day (celebrating passing a tough test? beat the Cupids in a football game? national pancake day?? doesn't matter!!!), clears it with them, and invites Mamori+Hiruma and Riku over as well. (Shin lets Sena arrange takeout for everyone on his dime so that Sena's parents won't have to cook for an unplanned dinner party.)

- Fic ends with the group heading toward Sena's parents' house, Shin and Sena holding hands, with Sena feeling content and confident in his relationships as his phone continuously blows up with people responding to his check-in text, and Shin admitting that he's feeling pretty hopeful about the idea of getting to form connections with Sena's family all over again.

END. Thanks for indulging my "I'm too lazy to write this but NOT too lazy to bulletpoint each plot detail beat-by-beat" post, haha!

#shinsena #eyeshield 21 #my fic #kind of!!!

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transsexualhamlet · 4 years ago

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the many sins of tokyo ghoul :re

or: 13 reasons why :re is fucking terrible not clickbait

Disclaimer: I think no matter how long this post gets I’m missing something, so let’s just outline the worst ones. And I mean to be transparent, the only reason I actually read :re was so I could make this post... (and bc i wanted to see the what, five panels of hide) Well, I couldn’t stand hating it without evidence beyond hearsay and General Vibes. But I knew it was gonna be bad, I knew it was going to ruin me jesus christ. Obviously I’m not hating on people that like it, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with genuinely enjoying it (I do genuinely enjoy parts of it, and by parts i mean chapters 1-50 with exceptions and 75) I think it’s wonderful if you can derive joy from it (lmao) but I can say that through my lens in life, there’s so much fucking wrong with this goddamn fucking piece of shit manga and I feel the need to yell about it because i am ✨autism✨ so let’s get going (this is r e a l l y long just a warning)

tl;dr Ishida stay in your fucking lane

1. Transphobia and Homophobia:

alright here we are first off with the big one and if I had to choose, one of Ishida’s greatest sins here. It’s quite unusual in mangas like these to have any sort of representation for such things in and of itself, and yeah of course that annoys me, but having no represntation at all is like so much better than getting actively harmful representation. Most manga that aren’t specifically about those things shy away from those topics, and it’s tiring but it’s normal. You wouldn’t want a mangaka to try to write about something like that without experience or informed opinions. So I say if you can’t write something correct, just don’t write something like that in at all. Ishida clearly,,, does not get this.

And it’s not just the case of Mutsuki, who, well, gets it bad enough, there are three full fucking trans characters Ishida made like, just to shit on.

Big Madame- god, made like that specifically to perpetuate the predatory trans woman trope jesus christ is Ishida friends with JK fuckface Rowling. Ah yes the ugly, human trafficking, predatory, pedophilic killer that tried to make their male child more feminine? Has a dick. Really? Could you be a single bit more transparent about your fucking agenda here? I really don’t have to say much here.

Kanae von Fuckwald- Technically Ishida says here that basically this bitch was just like??? Pretending to be a guy for years just to what?? I don’t even know?? Get together with Tsukiyama? Cause he’s fucking gay or something? I don’t even get it but like i read this post yesterday and that’s a whole ass thermian argument. It’s like “oh well this is fine because well this person’s not actually trans and therefore the representation thing doesn’t apply”... it’s useless. You created the character that way and you made it intentionally to for whatever way promote this idea that people would “pretend” to be a different gender and that eventually they’ll realize that it’s a “lie” and they never really wanted it. This is what you’re saying about the real people who are,,, actually trans? Jesus christ. Also thinking that a twink like that would be trans? God yeah trans guys can be feminine but buddy that’s clearly not what you’re going for here.

And of course, Mutsuki- There’s just... so much wrong here. I mean like. Before we even get into anything about his character and what they did to him let me just discuss his entire design. Buddy like if you had to choose one person in that show to be trans that’s the least likely one. Ah yes, the feminine one. With the androgynous haircut and the shy disposition and the physical weakness compared to the others. God that’s like, a fujoshi’s take on ao3 of what character should be trans. As much as yeah of course, trans guys can be feminine, they are in no way obligated to be such and you shouldn’t make them more so to be more “believably” so. Ask any actual trans person ever. A character like that is just perpetuating the notion of trans guys being inherently more feminine or trying to pretend to be otherwise.ThEn, of course, there’s the ridiculous sexualization, infantilization and fetishization of this character, going through a thousand plot hurdles to make him constantly stripped, put in girls clothing, chased by perverts, assaulted, ET FUCKING CETERA. Give him a fUCKING BREAK. Creating this character the way he’s portrayed in canon (including so called backstory of murdering parents because of sexual and physical abuse) is perpetuating a notion that someone would be a trans guy because of internalized misogyny and/or trauma instead of because they’re just... a guy. It’s just it’s just it’s just Really bad. Plus taking his character, demonizing him and making him like, supposedly love haise (which i Really hate for a thousand reasons, god that’s like, a parent and child type relationship they have there not romantic,,, god,,,) try to like fucking murder touka and stop seeing sense, and then just... return him to being infantalized. God. Jesus christ fucking goddamn it I love Mutsuki and he deserves better.

Oh yeah and then the homophobia, this one’s smaller because... most of the trans people are here to go “it’s gay... wait it’s not Really gay so it’s ok” but I would like to leave a small note here for all the gay characters who got thrown under the bus not just in re but in the original, like, you know, Nico and shit? I really do not know shit about Nico but all the things about Jason? God if I had a thing for one person that you shouldn’t try to portray as representation it’s Jason. IDK what’s up with him and Naki but god it wasn’t healthy. (i’d like to say here that i love naki and i think naki deserves the world but honey there are better heroes than yamori) Anyway yeah I think that’s also bullshit and Ishida should stay in his fucking lane. (or her i guess, i just feel like it’s probably a guy bc of just... so much sexism)

Ok, now that we have the big one out of the way-

2. The mishandling of portrayals of various mental illnesses:

I’m not an expert on this one like I can say about the gays TM but just like in general, the whole manga’s very messy and portrays a lot of gritty stuff, and Ishida clearly attempts to throw in some mental illness for fun, but god fUcking damn it they’re bad. I couldn’t really even give you examples bc it’s pretty widespread and i’m stupid, but it was really like trump throwing paper towels “and you get a demonization, and you get an infantalization, and you get a butchered character, and you get a fetishization-”

3. Ishida having no fucking clue how science works

This particular factoid led me to have a very hard time reading this manga because it went from being about like, yknow, torture and fights and crying and stuff to weird experimentation bullshit and mutated whatever and everyone’s a hybrid now I guess. When I heard this thing about the quinxes, I thought that made no sense, because I was like “yeah but wait,,, how tf does that work didn’t Ishida say earlier that kagune literally were fueled by human meat isn’t that like the entire point the ccg is against?” and then Ishida’s explanation of how they’re not just exactly like Kaneki is that “oh yeah well there’s like, metal around it, so it’s different.” OH YEAH OK THAT MAKES PERFECT SENSE NOW, THANKS.

The thing is... there’s no way of actually regulating that. You couldn’t move a kagune unless it was attached to your cells, and if it’s attached man, it’s attached and it’s part of you. Also yelling “frame two” won’t like make it any bigger lmao, either you’re gonna have it based on theoretical science in this universe or you’re going to have a dumb supernatural magic pokemon fight deal. The whole thing makes no sense. The science issue isn’t just about this either, it’s also about how the entire thing basically undermines the point of the whole story. When you blur the lines between human and ghoul with little to no real rules or basis in real science, every rule kind of just becomes cheap plot convenience.

So the Quinxes can eat human food unless they use their kagune too much, alright, but Kaneki couldn’t eat human food before he’d even ever used his though the only difference between their bodies was this,,, theoretical metal thing?? And Haise... was never really covered, before he went black hair emo bastard and like vored Eto, did he eat human food like the rest of the CCG? He certainly cooked it. And the squad that lived with him wasn’t aware he was a ghoul until he pulled out the kagune. So I’d assume so, but then how could he have a kagune, how could he survive when his body still was like that?

Is it the RC suppressents? Then couldn’t he just have taken those and lived as a human the entire time? Is that all he fucking needed, is that the only difference between human and ghoul? It doesn’t make sense and the rules are bent so much they don’t function anymore. Ishida like write down your rules somewhere even if they’re bullshit, they shouldn’t contradict each other.

Damn man I’m not even going to go into the dumbass rules of the half humans or the special fast aging thing or the fucking,,, folded up cells deal,,, or the Imagination Kagune, or the fucking,,, Dragon, or the zombie ghoul apocalypse or the “whole new species made of just kagune” i don’t even have the time it is fucking ridiculous and I can’t even with it. Physics. Laws of physics. If not biology, at least follow physics Ishida??? Please???? And if you’re not you need to do that consistently??

4. character glow ups actually being character glow downs

(with the exception of nishiki, he baby now, and akira, i think her development was valid af)

God, this one gets me every time. Touka was cool. Touka was fucking badass, she had a complex character with many motivations and wants, and in the original having her eventually kind of soften bc of Kaneki is valid. But taking her and turning her into like literally nothing but Pretty Housewife Yearning For Husband At War? God, kill me. She’s a strong person. She can like Kaneki without the guy being her only character trait. Also uh, Touka and Kaneki being a couple was valid before this change, now I honestly can’t stomach it. Like they were the kind of “both bisexual” m/f couple that we stan. No longer I guess.

She’s the most egregious example, but I’d also like to point out Juuzou, not everything they changed about him is bad, honestly we fucking stan his knife legs, but he’s kind of like a rip off L now? You got rid of his ~unhinged~, we do not stan. I’m on the fence about him bc i think that kind of is a valid transition to adulthood and I guess he’s grown up, but again, why change his fucking hair color? What is the explanation for this?

Also Hinami. I mean, I don’t really care about her a lot in general, but it’s weird to see her as like an adult when Ayato emo boy looks like exactly the fucking same and they’re like,,, supposedly the same age.

There are definitely more I’m missing here. Honestly, Hide was valid. God him with his fucking burlap sack. With a fucking lenny face on it. I can’t with him. That’s so Hide. But there were some bad ones.

5. one hair color change was my limit, enough said

black white black and white black white more white god bitch get some variety

6. Showing me great new characters and then promptly ruining them

And you can tell this one’s about quinx squad, my favorite bastard children. God, I love them. They’re the only good things about Re other than Hide and Haise and like everything else, Ishida took them and went “what if i *guts*” god why. I love these kids with all my heart. Why. Why. Why did you do that to Mutsuki. Why as soon as Haise isn’t in the room they all get themselves tangled up with pedos. Why they gotta break up the squad. Why make all of them lose all the wholesomeness and lessons they learned from Haise. Why do you ruin them all with weird unreciprocated random crushes on each other when they’re like basically siblings. Why fuckinG KILL SHIRAZU HE IS THE APPOINTED CHIEF DUMBASS OF THE SQUAD WHY HIM. WHY. WITH SO LITTLE IMPACT. YOU COULD FUCKING MISS IT SO EASILY. THAT’S NOT RIGHT. AND KANEKI JUST FUCKING ABANDONS THEM BC HE HAS HIS MEMORIES AGAIN N O ? NO ACTUALLY NO.

7. the casual racism and sexism :)

i just :) can you stop having girls constantly bring themselves down for being female :) and making them be oversexualized, less full characters :) always in some way connected to a guy :) more weak and hurt more often :) my fucking god :) also yeah it’s way less prevalent but there were a few racist caricatures thrown in there for taste if you don’t know how to draw lips just don’t

8. Ishida being too much of a pissbaby for a real death scene

Basically: undermining the impact of “deaths” fom the first series while also randomly and badly killing off new characters. Oh that character that died in the original in a really cinematic way that made you cry and think about the meaning of life and how beautifully tragic this story was? Oh lol they’re not Actually dead. (x10) Doing that with Hide (at least in the manga, not the anime, god root A really did it with him but we’re not talking about that) was valid, seeing as I love him your honor and in the manga one of the lessons that his character hinges on was like in chapter 75 to live on instead of giving up even if it hurts and all that... (this is obviously kind of the opposite from root A where his character was like more about sacrificing for kaneki since kaneki had already done so much, i think both are valid but we’re Talking About The Manga) he was done well. That was right (even though i think they should have done More of it) but there were so many characters this kind of thing was done to without the proper adjustment in the handling of the messages given here.

Like with Koma and Irimi, who,,, honestly should have stayed dead because their entire character arc kinda ended there and showed how they were sorry for their actions and this was how they were making it up. And then they just like... come back. And fight more. Really? This wasn’t the only instance either, same deal with Shinohara (though him coming back made me cry) it like, kind of undermines it if you’re going to have Juuzou derive his character development from that. Either Juuzou gets to keep his unhinged and his dad, or he loses his dad for real and he also grows up. God guys choose. What’s the message you’re playing here. (at least they kept Yoshimura dead, his death made me cry and I would have stabbed something if it wasn’t real, probably Ishida.) And even with Kaneki himself, god, if he can’t die from being stabbed straight through the fucking eye, what COULD kill him? It really diminishes the anxiety you feel about “omg is this person gonna die i want them to be ok” if they basically evade the laws of physics and their own previous character arcs 70 times. I’m definitely forgetting more of the same, Ishida can’t write a good death, he needed the anime writers to do it for him.

9. Kaneki. Just. Kaneki.

God they fucking butchered this man. I could go on about his character is weird and confusing in the manga from the beginning, but we’re focusing on mostly all his weird :re character development, the bad handling of Haise and his memories, and all his iterations.

Before I read :re, what I could glean from fanart and the occasional fic that wasn’t tagged properly was really confusing and kind of a mixed bag. I knew Haise was Kaneki but without his memories, now in the ccg trying to be a pacifist and going :DDDDD a lot yknow. And what I came up with in my own mind for that change was a deal of (this makes more sense with the anime canon tbh, the manga honestly doesn’t do any of this well) like Kaneki after The Shit Went Down With Hide (whichever canon you’d like to interpret that as) he basically realized that he really couldn’t be a ghoul, he didn’t want to be, he didn’t want to hurt people and he wanted to be happy and make other people happy instead of what he thought was right before (trying to fight to protect others on his own etc) because that mentality had gotten people he loved hurt, and well subconsciously I guess that kind of factored into his development into Haise and maybe caused his memory loss (along with the, yknow, shanked eye.) So when I started to read it that kind of checked out, this is what he’s trying so hard to be now. But then this whole bullshit of the whole other like, 37 different versions of kaneki complicated things.

Haise was scared that when he got his memories back he would cease to be, well, Haise, and he would just like revert back to what he was before everything. Which I can understand him being scared of and I think was a good point in the plot for him to worry about that, but I was like “oh honey don’t worry that’s not how it works” and was kind of vying for him to eventually get his memories back, come to terms with the fact that those were his memories, he did do those things, he was half a ghoul, and maybe come back to his original fight of wanting to bring the humans and ghouls together, still caring about his human people in the ccg and all. That development was real, and it wouldn’t just go away if he got his memories back, he learned a lot and grew a lot and he has a different outlook on life now. Right?

Fucking wrong I guess. Dude gets his memories back (very ambiguously, it was really hard to tell when that even happened tbh) and like. Turns into a flaming ass looking like ebony darkness dementia raven way. Haise gone. Fucking completely. No trace left. Doesn’t care about his kids anymore. When he’s done with that and goes white again he’s just Kaneki again and there’s really not enough left of things that like, really wouldn’t go away? He loses the flair? The dumbass? The :D? The Extra? WHY? Why would those things go away? Haise shouldn’t have been right that he would disappear when he got back his memories. That killed me. I love Kaneki and all but H a i s e. He is my b o y. H i m. With his e n e r g y s h o r t s. And his m o m. And his c o o k i n g. And his k i d s, I l o v e him. And Ishida doesn’t seem to realize that they’re... literally the same person. Haise isn’t just some stupid bastard occupying Kaneki’s body, he’s a valid part of Kaneki himself and to be honest, peak Kaneki. Should have stayed that way. Would have been great for Hide tbh. Not just having him pretty much revert to his old self, but basically respond equally to both names and balance the world between human and ghoul. I would have loved that. What happened for real? It doesn’t make sense and it breaks my heart.

Some people on the interwebz try to kind of even that whole deal out by trying to say he like, has DID, which although is obviously a valid thing, like, so does not apply to him. God I’m like so not an expert on this but I feel like it’s not that hard to tell. His 87 little Kanekis in his head aren’t separate personas, they’re metaphorical representations of his past morals, experiences, and ideologies that all conflict. Again Haise here is peak conflict because when he gets his memories back, he has all these different conflicting ideas that were all previously separate. They’re all him. Tortured Kaneki constantly yelling at him in Jason’s chamber is basically again, a metaphor for how he’s denying his ghoulhood and the trauma that he’s been dealt. It’s not that this dude still exists just the way he is ready to show up at any moment lmao. Ishida kind of dealt with that badly too because Haise really said

after his memories happened so I can see why people might, but it’s... not right, and it’s Ishida’s fault about that which is Incorrect

Also just blanket statement, black reaper Kaneki? Fuck him and all he stands for. 0% valid. I can excuse literally every other version of him. But wh y. God he leaves the room and Urie starts misusing his power and getting groomed by a pedo, Saiko is just, left behind and sad, Mutsuki gets captured by a perv and mentally destroyed again, Shirazu dies and the bitch is like like “lol it’s your fault” yeah helpful, die

10. P- the- the porn chapter-

Idk about you but that was so fucking unecessary??? Not even going off of how terribly awkward and weird it was to have it there when the opening was “i’m sad about my best friend who’s gonna get executed what do you do when you’re sad about your best friend” “i simply do not think of him or i might actually just curl up and die” “yo lmao same” “wanna fuck” Like ok um I’m biased bc i’m not straight but I like, really hated that. Even just flipping through the pages as fast as I could to get to the end of it like. God. It’s not a fucking hentai. I’m here for the plot. If you’re not gonna release the director’s cut of kaneki fucking voring hide, i don’t think i need to see 20 pages of straight fucking sex. And if you absolutely must have porn, kaneki is a fucking bottom. That man gets pegged do not try to prove otherwise. You started it out that way god I love how they’re like “oh god wait that looks kind of gay, the woman being dominant, better stop that right now” god Ishida not having a single iota of knowlege about his own characters aND THEN SHE GETS PREGNANT? NO. Excuse me. No. I just. I. Why. This isn’t. A fucking porno. This isn’t tentacle porn i swear oh my god kill me

11. Giving the wrong characters attention

Basically, redeeming characters that should have been redeemed and not going into/discussing characters that should have been redeemed/had more backstory. For example, Tsukiyama can go fucking die. I like, do not even care rich boy. I don’t understand how anyone could think he needed to be redeemed he’s just a gay attention whore who really needs to let this kid get on with his merry fucking life. I don’t care. I literally did not need to read three whole books about his dumbass hangup over eating Kaneki. Kaneki doesn’t fucking want you bitch move on. He didn’t need to be redeemed or seen to be in any way sympathetic, no one wanted it. Same with that bitch ass Furuta, he wasn’t really redeemed but he was given w a y too much time to play out his sob story. God man Rize doesn’t fucking want you. These gross ass simps. I swear.

On the other hand, I kind of liked Eto even though she’s a pile of shit, and I got mad when they didn’t really go into much about her. And you know who could have gotten much more screen time/development? TOUKA. God, I love her and she was just sitting around in the background being straight. Let her have some spicy development. Also obviously, Hide. He was... so underappreciated and underexplained? What happened with him? He didn’t just pick himself off the ground in the sewers and go ‘well i’d better get back to the ccg now’ we have a whole two years which are completely unexplained, most of which he was off mysteriously being involved in things but completely missing the eye of Haise and other major players. Where tf was he? How did he get around? What was he even doing??? I wanna know about that! Not all the characters I hate’s tragic backstories that make me feel 0% more sympathetic towards them :)

12. ARE WE ALL JUST GONNA COLLECTIVELY IGNORE THE WHOLE VORE THING???

Ok like i know i say “the entire reason I read :re was __” but like to be honest this was the turning point, I saw pictures of hide’s vore face and went like

So I was like “god fucking damn it ok, Ishida would you care to explain this to me” *cracks open re*

And then they DIDN’T.

Like. It’s actually laughable how much that entire situation was just glossed over. They gave that maybe like two pages. Like what. I. This manga has more sex scene than no homoing that. They just don’t even bother to. I feel like Ishida had that as a plot point but realized halfway in how it looked (i.e., really fucking gay) and decided that was something that he was just gonna, not deal with. Just act like that’s a completely normal heterosexual bro thing to do. Like of course anywhere would be pretty gay but Kaneki chose his face. His face. Like his face and his wholeass neck and his shoulders and nowhere else. (and assumedly like, his tongue, seeing as how the dude can’t talk... bruh) Dude really said extreme hickey. French kiss to the max. Ishida clearly did realize that generally, you can only get a bitten off face by,,, having your face bitten off, which is just inherently really fucking gay. Like, I’m just at a loss as to how it even makes sense. You wouldn’t think that the skin off his face, and specifically around his mouth, would really be the most nutritious thing to consume? I can get like the shoulders but generally you’d think something like his arm or leg would be 1.less inconvenient, and 2.much more logical and nutritious? But NO, Kaneki was like “you know what i’m gonna do? eat your Face” and hide’s like “lmao sounds cool”

(not to mention, wasn’t there another guy with a vore face somewhere? like that old guy in the ccg with the bigass turtleneck, i wanna know about him) But like... my bro Ishida went “yeah this happened but i’m going to cover it up with speech bubbles and the ends of panels guys they clearly had their socks on” Dude didn’t even TRY to explain otherwise. Like hey man, that’s pretty damn gay, you are kind of at liberty to either tell me why otherwise, or accept those implications and acknowledge them?? It’s really hilarious when you ignore it cause it’s like

kind of

pretty damn

WEAK of you to leave it at that fucking pissbaby

hmmmmmmmmm however could this happen i guess we’ll never know

13. What the fuck was even the plot omg

God I’ve been writing this post for like five hours so like, I’ll keep it short but like it made sense in the original, not to be like an anime fan but the anime made fucking sense (not re i mean like the original) this lore is so fucking stupid god, the horrors of the entire fucking dragon arc bleach my eyes, unresolved plotlines who???? (the whole ‘oh yeah also ur dying of old age’ thing etc, is kaneki like??? still doing that?? or was that randomly resolved with the whole spewing ovary bullshit i’m going to fucking kill myself) and to top it off, good job Ishida at a real fucking cheap ending.

You gave them. Fake human. Really? They just come up with artificial human at the end. Kind of undermines the entire fucking story my guy. Ah yes throw out our whole plot. That was the whole tragedy. You gotta eat human. The ghouls have to eat human and that’s tragic bc they have to kill people or whatever. Or i guess they fucking don’t well fucking ok. God you could have just had them negotiate a kind of peace where the ghouls can get dead humans and such, there are plenty of them and no one has to kill anyone then, there could be a rule system for it, it would be messy but eventually everyone would be ok with it, and I think that would work a lot better than “quick fix i made some hamburger helper human you can eat it fine” guys wtf. It’s like Ishida started plotting out the ending for re approximately 2 hours before his deadline. Anyway yes I hate re and I love yelling about it thank you for coming to my ted talk.

#tokyo ghoul #tokyo ghoul re #essay post #god just fucking kill me #rowan's hyperfixation essays

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duhragonball · 4 years ago

Text

BEGIN: Battle Tendency Liveblog. JJBA Ch. 45-47

🇺🇸🗽🧗‍♂️🧼🪀🌵Part 2, Hell Yeah!🌪️🎈🛩️🌋🚬

I'm pretty friggin' excited for Part 6 anime, and Part 6 is one of my faves, so one could understandably assume that Part 6 is my favorite. And I post a lot of other JoJo stuff on this blog, so it's probably not obvious, but Part 2 is the best.

I got into JoJo in 2017, watching Parts 1-4 in anime version, then reading the scanlations of Parts 5-8 while I waited for the anime to catch up. Then I re-liveblogged the Part 5 manga because there was finally a proper translation available. And technically the Part 8 liveblog never ended, since the manga is still ongoing.

As I developed an appreciation for the manga, I started to feel like I should go back and check out the comic versions of Parts 1 through 4. Where better to start than my personal favorite? But I never got around to it, until now.

There's a few things I want to explore with Part 2. First, I want to go through and work out why exactly I like it so much. It's kind of tough to articulate, but usually I just say that it's fast-paced and something's always happening. Part 1 takes a while to get going, and Parts 3-8 rely on the Stand concept, which means that each of them occasionally fall into the trap of becoming formulaic. Part 2 doesn't have the hassle of introducing all the lore, and it doesn't have the luxury of just doing a gauntlet of Stand Battles to pad out the story. But I think there's more to it than that. Battle Tendency has a charm all it's own, and that's what I want to talk about.

Second, now that I've become familiar with Parts 1-7 (and most of 8), I want to go back and see how 2 holds up as part of this mythos. BT sort of gets overlooked, I think, and that's fair, since it doesn't involve Dio, Stands, or the more outlandish costumes of the later installments. A lot of fans write off Parts 1 and 2 for being "boring", but at least Phantom Blood carries the prestige of starting it all, and providing the origin of Dio. Something I think a lot about is whether or not Part 2 "connects" with the later entries in the JoJo series. It forms a trilogy with 1 and 3, and Part 4 features Joseph's legacy in an important way, but what about the later ones? Parts 5 through 8 owe a huge debt to Stardust Crusaders for introducing Stands, and to Phantom Blood for introducing JoJo's, but what does Part 2 give them, if anything?

Third, I'm interested in seeing how BT holds up in isolation. It's a direct sequel to Part 1, and it ends with a prelude to Part 3, so it's clearly designed to function as part of a larger saga. But Parts 4 and 5 really don't operate that way, and that got me thinking that maybe Part 2 is more self-contained than I give it credit for.

But enough about that, let's get this started.

There's two plot threads in these opening chapters. One reintroduces Robert E. O. Speedwagon, now a 70 year old oil tycoon, and Straizo, who has succeeded the late Tonpetti as the Ripple Master. Speedwagon has been using his oil fortune to fund a research organization called the Speedwagon Foundation, and it discovered something major during an archaeological expedition: an engraving of the stone mask, the same one Dio used to turn himself into a vampire 50 years earlier. Note that the mummified corpse lying on the slab with the engraving has vampire fangs. Whoever this guy is, he didn't just know about the masks, he used one personally.

It might get revealed later in the comics, but I'm pretty sure the anime version had Speedwagon explain that he primary purpose of his foundation was to learn more about phenomena like the Stone Mask, which is probably why they were digging up an Aztec temple in Mexico to begin with. As I recall, the Stone Mask was discovered in that part of the world, and taken back to Europe, where it eventually came into the possession of the Joestar family. Speedwagon would know this tale, and so if he wanted to find out more about the mask, he would have known where to start. Fifty years later, he seems to have hit paydirt.

But the mask engraving isn't why he called Straizo all the way in from Tibet. Deeper in the temple, there's a weird looking area that looks like something from out of an H.R. Giger painting. In the center stands this column, or pillar, if you will, and mounted on the pillar is...

...This guy, surrounded by more stone masks. When I first watched this part of the anime, I though the big reveal here was that there were lots and lots of Stone Masks, which would be a big problem, since Part 1 made a big deal out of destroying the one Stone Mask that started all the trouble. And maybe the guy in the pillar was the one who invented the things, I thought, but the bigger problem is that he made so many of them. But no, Speedwagon explains that the "Pillar Man" is not an image carved into the stone, but a living being, in some form of suspended animation. He even has a pulse.

So who is this guy and why did he create the Stone Masks? Speedwagon does not care. He only wants this Pillar Man destroyed before he wakes up, and that's the sole reason he called in Straizo. The two of them were the only survivors of the battle with Dio 50 years ago, and Straizo's Hamon power, also known as the Ripple, can destroy vampires that were created by the Stone Mask. ��So he's desperately hoping Straizo can finish off the Pillar Man the same way. But Straizo doesn't seem as concerned about it, and he asks about Joseph Joestar instead. So I guess I ought to circle back to the other plotline...

Fifty years after Jonathan Joestar sacrificed himself to defeat Dio Brando, his wife Erina and his grandson Joseph have moved to New York City. Joseph tries to buy a Coke, but this kid swipes his wallet. Kind of funny how Joesph's first and last appearances in JJBA are him getting robbed.

But the kid runs afoul of the local corrupt cops, who bludgeon him with their batons and threaten to put him in jail for 20 years unless he agrees to give them a cut of whatever money he makes from pickpocketing. When Joseph catches up to this scene, the cop even says he's going to keep Joseph's wallet "as evidence". I gotta say, not everything from Battle Tendency has aged well, but this police brutality stuff has become incredibly relevant. This could be 2021, except the cop would have had a gun, and he would have shot Smokey, then Joseph because he mistook the Coke bottle for a rocket launcher.

Joseph tries to defuse the situation by claiming he gave the wallet to the kid as a gift, but the cop doesn't believe that story, and he wouldn't care even if he did. He even smears boogers in Joseph's face just to prove that he can say and do whatever he pleases. Up to this point, Joseph looks and seems a lot like Jonathan. Later artwork tries to downplay that resemblance, probably just so it's easier to tell them apart. The anime gave Joseph different color hair, and Hirohiko Araki himself started drawing young Joseph with aviator goggles all the time, even though he doesn't wear them that much in this story. But starting out, the idea was that Joseph is the spitting image of his grandfather, and it almost looks like this is just an clever way to sneak Jonathan back into the story and transport him forward in time, except....

Coming through, coming through, coming through now

Coming through, coming through, coming through

Shake it like it's heat, Overdrive!

Yeah, so Joseph can do Hamon/Ripple tricks just like his grandfather, and all the others guys who could use Hamon back in Part 1. The difference is that when Joseph does it, it looks coooooool. After breaking Officer Hulk Hogan’s trigger finger, Joseph takes a big swig of soda, because it’s awesome.

To Smokey’s surprise, Joseph did all that badass stuff a second ago, but he’s terrified about his grandmother scolding him for it. So Joseph wants to run for it, and that suits Smokey, so they rush off together, beginning a long tradition of JoJo’s running from things. Enemies, consequences, you name it.

Smokey asks Joseph how he learned how to do that trick with the coke bottle, and he says he has no idea, he’s just always been able to do it. He knows his grandfather had the same power, but he’s dead, and so are his mother and father. Curiously, Joseph’s father did not have Hamon powers, so it seems to have skipped a generation.

And that sets up the other side of the plot. Speedwagon wants Straizo to destroy the Pillar Man immediately, but Straizo first asks about Joseph. He had heard some time ago that Joseph had innate Hamon abilities, and he had used them once to rescue Speedwagon from a kidnapping attempt in midair. A flashback shows us this moment, with guys threatening to ransom and kill Speedwagon, but Joseph is just chilling in the back with a Superman comic.

Okay, time out. This panel rules and all, but the Superman comic book didn’t start until 1939, a year after Battle Tendency begins. Superman was featured in the 1938 magazine Action Comics, but this scene on the plane is a flashback to Joseph from his early teens. Also, the earliest DC bullet logo didn’t appear until 1940, so what is this? Some kind of magic, time travelling comic book? I hope someone got fired for this blunder!

Anyway, Joseph was content to ignore the hijackers until one of them struck him, and even that wouldn’t have upset him except he got his own blood on his clothes, which Erina bought him, so that sends him into a rage. Speedwagon was worried that Joseph might clobber the hijackers, but instead he knocks out the pilot, then drags him and Speedwagon out of the plane before it crashes. The main thrust of that story was that Speedwagon was more worried about what Joseph might do than the hijackers who had already threatened to murder him. Joseph is slow to anger, but once you piss him off he’s going to go to war, and he doesn’t always think things through.

But he’s never been trained to use his powers like Straizo’s order. Upon hearing this, Straizo kills his own disciples, and all of the Speedwagon Foundation guys, then knocks Speedwagon himself out. This will anger Joseph when he hears about it, but Straizo is counting on this. As he explains, Hamon power can slow his aging process down considerably. He and Speedwagon are both about 70 here, but he looks much younger. Even so, he’s feeling his age, and he confesses that he always admired Dio for his immortality and power. So now that there’s Stone Masks available, he’s decided to use one on himself, become a vampire, and become “a being that surpasses all”.

And that’s a theme that runs through all of Battle Tendency, along with the rest of the JoJo franchise. The main villains always seek power to position themselves above the rest of humanity. At first, it seems kind of random for one of the men who opposed Dio to suddenly switch allegiences like this, but in truth, it’s human nature to be tempted by this kind of power. Dio succumbed to the lure of the Mask, and now we find that Straizo would have done the same. He just didn’t have the opportunity until now.

But the reason he’s concerned about Joseph is that he’s thinking this through. Dio was defeated after all, so Straizo wants to eliminate anyone who could potentially defeat him. Aside from himself and Speedwagon, the only others who know about the battle with Dio and the Stone Mask are Erina and Joseph. Once he eliminates them, he’ll be free to do as he pleases.

Back to New York, this is a pretty sweet drawing of a car. I’m not a car guy, but even I can get behind this. By now, Smokey has met Erina Joestar, and he finds out some of the backstory from Part 1. Erina’s husband died at sea, and she was pregnant with their son, Joseph’s father, and had a baby girl whom she rescued from the same incident at sea. The two children grew up, married, had Joseph, and died, the father in World War I, and the mother of some unspecified illness. Perhaps out of loneliness, Erina is “unflinchingly kind” even to someone like Smokey Brown, who doesn’t seem to think he’s worthy of her favor.

Anyway, Erina wants to take Smokey out to dinner at this nice Italian restaurant, but this racist mafia guy makes a big stink about a Black person being allowed to eat there. Joseph gets up to kick his ass, but first he has to check with Erina to make sure it’s okay, and she’s like “Yeah, destroy that guy,” because even though she doesn’t approve of Joseph beating up people, she can’t abide disrespect to her friends. This leads to the memorable fight scene where Joseph is like eight steps ahead of his opponent. He goes for his brass knuckles, but can’t find them, and Joseph deduces where they are because of some bloodstains on his shirt. He even suggests what this guy is about to say next because he’s so predictable.

Then he dodges every blow, moving so quickly that this jerk thinks he was hitting Joseph, when in fact he was punching a hat rack behind Joseph, and somehow he didn’t notice that he impaled his hand on broken wood until Joseph explained it to him. And honestly, this feels like the prototype for a lot of Stand Battles down the line. I’ll have more to say on that later.

What puts Battle Tendency over the top is how Joseph not only outwits this big lummox, but the rest of the diners at this restaurant all start applauding him for doing it. They’re just honored to be present in this insane comic book where literally anything can happen. “He made that asshole punch a hat rack! This is awesome!”

Then this dude suddenly speaks up. He’s not only the mafia guy in charge of the first guy, but he’s also heard a hot tip about Speedwagon getting murdered in Mexico by a Tibetan man. He knew Erina would be interested in hearing this, but he’d never met her before. Small world, huh?

How would this guy already know about it, though? I guess Straizo deliberately leaked the story, specifically so Joseph would find out about it sooner, but it seems awfully convenient. But that’s how Battle Tendency rolls. This thing’s only seven volumes long, and we’ve got a lot of ground to cover...

#jojo's bizarre adventure #battle tendency #joseph joestar #smokey brown #erina joestar #robert e o speedwagon #straizo #santana

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camelely · 4 years ago

Text

TFATWS Spoilers under the cut

Literally the following is my thoughts and opinions, and there are probably some unpopular opinions lol. It's kinda really long lol.

Starting with some positives.

I loved how the two leads had storylines that mirrored each other. Sam needed to become Captain America and gain a title and Bucky needed to move on from The Winter Solider and loose a title.

Sam. Just Sam I loved him before but now I love him more.

Sam becoming Cap.

I loved Isaiah and his story.

I loved Sam's family, how they welcomed Bucky and the struggles Sarah had.

I really liked how they spent time with both Sam and Bucky and didn't forget the show was supposed to be about both of them. Often times shows tend to lean into the more popular or fan favorite lead and this show didn't do that. When Sam took center it felt natural and when Bucky took center it felt natural.

The Wakandans were great. I love Ayo and her friendship with Bucky.

Zemo was fine and fun enough.

John Walker was incredibly done. Wyatt Russell did an amazing job and the scene with the blood on the shield will forever be in my memory. Hands down one of the most impactful MCU moments.

I like the genderbend on Karl/Karli and the direction they took her character. People that go from sympathetic ideas to unforgivable means, make good villains. I think her more boring elements come from the lack of development she got.

Now on to the negatives.

This show could have been like two hours shorter and still told the same story with the same impact. Also earlier episodes, (maybe later episodes too I might have just gotten used to it and stopped noticing lol), had some weird ADR moments. IDK what happened behind the scenes but it was noticeable.

I would have loved it if one of the episodes was a flashback episode. The Sharon twist was obvious from the first episode she appeared in but like they thought it was good enough to save confirmation for the mid/end of the finale? Both her and Karli would have been benefited from a flashback episode.

Karli should have fought Bucky while Sam was focused on Walker. Sam could have had a moment where he tells him he will never be forgiven and Walker would responded with something similar to "I do what is right. I don't need forgiveness." Then when he becomes USAgent it lands more like the next progression in an arc rather than the redemption arc this could be interpreted as. I personally think this is a stepping stone and not a redemption but the MCU (and Disney) doesnt have a great track record when it comes to handling anything with nuance and the fans have an even worse track record when handling things that arent black and white. I guess my point is they could have handled the John Walker set up better.

Speaking of set up, this entire show was set up. This is my main and only real problem with this show. Nothing felt like it was resolved at the end. Karli even says she was part of a bigger movement. Killing her didn't change the fact a lot of people felt the un blip ruined their lives. People always shit on Tony for wanting to bring people back five years later instead of going back in time but like it had been five years, while some like Steve and Natasha hadn't moved on, others had. Some had better lives. Assuming everyone wanted to back to the way things used to be would also be a mistake. This has consequences too, as we see in these shows. But ruining the lives of the people who had bettered themselves would have been shitty too. And yea some people who had been bettered were worsened once again when the un blip happened but my point is going back and erasing the five years would have been shitty too. There is not really a right answer here as the right answer would have been to either stop the snap before it happened or to come to terms with the fact that the snap can never be undone. Leaving everyone as dead might have hurt, but it was the best thing for a community that had five years of mourning and moving on and counseling ETC. Ooof that was a tangent lol and I could probably write an essay so going back to my original point about set up. The flag smashers, or at least people who think the way they did still exist, Sharon Carter is the powerbroker but Sam and Bucky dont know and now shes back as agent 13, John Walker went from war hero to committing war crimes and his journey as USAgent is just starting, Sam has taken the Cap mantle and is ready to begin acting as Cap, and Bucky is both coming to terms with and moving on from his past. Nothing is actually resolved in this mini series. I know it's supposed to make you excited for the next movie/show/season whatever but have six episodes of little to no payoff IMO made for a flat show.

Building off the set up problem. This show had too much going on. Sam and Bucky each had their own personal journey (The A and B plot depending on the episode), Sam and Bucky being friends and their shared journey (C), John Walker and the Flag Smashers (the D and E plot depending on the episode), Zemo and the Wakandans (F), The PowerBroker/Sharon (G), The boat and Sarah which could be considered part of Sam's plot but since if you cut it out the only thing that actually effected Sam's journey would be the bank in the first episode and yet it still went on till basically the end I'm calling it it's own plot (H), Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, which might be part of John Walker's story but since it's all set up for her to take a bigger role in the future and his set up could be completed without her I'm counts her separately (I), then you have the big meeting at the end, the senators and policy makers making choices the vote that they keep mentioning and once again more set up... (J). 10 ideas by my count, all needed their own set up, follow through, and payoff. And yes some stuff like Valentina the pay off will come later but still... It's all too many plots! And thats not mentioning side characters that were new to the show that they wanted to spend time with but couldn't.

Even though I think the shows aren't comparable/two different genres WandaVision had two more episodes (and yes some were shorter but I already mentioned I think FATWS could have benefited from that), completed all the main plots and had Wanda's journey (A), Vision's journey (B), Agatha, Pietro/Ralph, and the citizens of the hex (C), Outside the hex Monica (D), Outside the hex everyone else and sure you can separate Darcy, Jimmy and Heyward but none of them were setting up future stories or had their own distinctive plot outside the hex thing like Monica so she is the only one I am separating (E), the kids who could be counted as an extension of the Wanda and Vision plots since they didnt really have their own arc or story (F). 6 total. And some of those could be combined. Like I think we should separate Wanda Vision and the kids but technically they are just an extension of Wanda. And same with Monica, her story was mostly intertwined with Darcy, Jimmy and the outside the hex stuff. I separated her since I think she had enough moments to herself and she set up secret invasion or whatever, but like Valentina being a part of John's story it is arguable. Of these plots only the missing witness Jimmy thing, Wanda's post credits moment a moment seperate from everything else, Monica's mid credits i think? moment another one separate from everything else, and white vision were unresolved. They gave Agatha an opening ending but it was still an ending. And yes Darcy Heyward etc will probably come back but the plot they had here was finished. So arguably they had 2/6 unfinished plots. And if you don't count Jimmy's witness as a plot and just count it as an unanswered question then 1/6. And technically white vision is just half a vision and the other vision got a complete plot so really it's 0.5/6 At best they completed 92(ish)% of the plots and left 8 (ish) % for future stuff.

In contrast FATWS only finished Sam's journey into becoming Cap, Zemo and the Wakandans, and arguably Sam and Bucky's friendship. You might be able to argue that Bucky had a full circle moment with the guy whose son he killed, but that is one guy and Bucky has been carrying around a list of people like that guy. It's not the end of a story it is the start of a journey. And maybe it is possible to say the boat thing had an ending kinda. 2/10 completed. maybe 3/10 if you wanna push it 5/10. IMO at best they completed 50% of plot set up.

Clearly FATWS is meant to be this way and thats why it bothered me. They want you to watch Cap 4 or whatever they decide to call the theatrical movie that will come after this. I guess I was just expecting it to stand on it's own, and other than Sam's journey into becoming Captain America, which was amazing and deserved in every way, nothing this show did felt like it could have stood on its own. I know it's arguable that was the main story and only story that deserved to end. But I've already pointed out all the other running plots this show had, and I think at least two or three of them should have had follow through in the show.

Someone who plans to never seen an MCU movie after these shows could have watched WandaVision and enjoyed it. That is not the case for FATWS. If you don't plan on watching any MCU stuff in the future you won't know how over half the plots of this show will end. THis isn't even how the movies work. They each tell their own story while also setting up other things, so it is clear they know how to do this.

I can see why Disney decided to submit it as a series and not a mini series. Not only do they not want to compete with themselves (nominating WV as a miniseries) but also this isn't a miniseries.

I guess to conclude I'll say I did really enjoy watching this show. It was fun and there were some great moments. It featured amazing character and amazing actors, but I wish it had bothered to finish more of what it started.

Thank you so much for reading till the end of a post that has surely become unintelligible gloop by now. If you disagree I'd love to hear why!

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