#and this episode is the perfect example of that!

[i-got-bad-knees]

The funniest part to me is that when I’d only seen the first few episodes (I got into it in like 2018 and watched pretty slowly) I remember saying to my mum that they seemed to be a pretty cool example of a super close, caring, purely platonic friendship between a single man and woman and it was being presented really well without the necessity of making them a couple

Suffice it to say this opinion didn’t last long BUT I still find the way their relationship first appears and then develops on-screen to be amazingly written and completely seamless and natural in a way most shows cannot achieve. It didn’t fall into any of the kinds of pitfalls I fear from romantic plot lines in “drama” shows (cheating, constant relationship drama, those weird breathing at each other scenes that are supposed to be romantic but are just awkward as hell bc they’d rather hire hot actors than find people w actual chemistry) and didn’t even come close without making their relationship all sunshine and rainbows. All while said romance and it’s various issues were a core element of the show.

I spent the whole thing wondering how they were gonna remove Kim from the situation believably because they’d become so devoted to each other and I could not see Jimmy being Saul if she’d died, it just didn’t make sense to me, and then that was handled perfectly (and extremely heart wrenching in the mundanity of it in the end - discounting the horrific events beforehand obvs).

I even love the open-ended ness of the final scene. They don’t need to talk, they’re right back to being themselves again, and we can all decide how that story ends in our minds. Absolute perfection. 10/10 no yeps

One thing I love about Kim and Jimmys relationship is that from the start they have, like, the opposite of sexual/romantic tension. There’s literally no tension despite the fact they’re definitely not in a relationship, they’re just casually phoning each other late at night for weird robot phone sex that may or may not be a joke and giving each other foot massages and pedicures while venting to one another and getting drunk.

Their first onscreen kiss doesn’t seem at all to be their first actual kiss or their first night together, but it’s also not shown to have been a FWB situation or anything like that. We even see Jimmy on a date with another woman, but mcwexler still just explicitly Is from, like, day one and I like to think and wholeheartedly believe that was the case from when they first met. They just Clicked and didn’t even necessarily feel like they had to Do Anything with it, they were just each others person.

[sunnydalememories]

"One of the other things that I noticed and I think I talked about it last episode with Julie about what was going on with Cordelia dressed constantly in clothes two sizes too small."

"This scene, I'm in a mini skirt - a black kinda sheen/satin skirt, which was super short and then a mid drift, long sleeve shirt and little ankle boots. Personally, I would never dress like that. "

"What is the difference between Cordelia and Charisma - this outfit is a perfect example of 'i would never in a million years wear that."

"And there was another shot, which i realised - and I kinda gasped a little bit because I don't remember this happening. But the camera was on the bottom floor of the bronze shooting up at the staircase and we are coming down the stairs."

"I'm walking down the stairs and the camera is here and this is my booty."

"And I'm like we are not going to see cheek, are we going to see cheek?"

"No cheek was seen or revealed thankfully."

~ Charisma Carpenter The Bitch Is Back Podcast

[agenderduck]

Despite choosing not to use it most of the time, Duck is quite emotionally intelligent. He knows when he needs to loosen up a bit, even if internally it’s not something he wants to do. A great example would be his behavior towards Red in transport. He very clearly doesn’t want to go along with Red’s new plans for the day, but he can recognize that his friend is upset. Both puppets are self serving, and that’s where Duck’s mind is at initially, but once he sees that Red is still in the same state after the song he starts understanding that this is not something that’s going to go away at the snap of his fingers. Even if Red is hiding it well, he’s very clearly in distress and Duck can see that. Duck questions Red at first, trying to get a read on the situation, and he ends up playing along with it wondering if he’ll find another rock. Yes, duck is self serving here because he is uncomfortable with negative emotion and wants it to end, but it’s also because he cares. He trying to find a middle ground. Two things can be true at once. There’s so many little moments like this throughout the episode, like Duck’s little side glance during The Transport Song. He sees how happy Red is in that moment, even if it’s superficial. But Red is facing away from him, Sailing away if you will. they’re on the same boat but miles apart, as they always are. Duck clutches the safety rail, while Red rides with the wind blowing through his hair. Its a perfect visual representation of their relationship. Always close but never together, similar but never on the same page. All Duck can do is steal a few glances, ones Red doesn’t even know are happening.

Duck doesn’t need to be patient with Red, but he is. Even after Red lands them in an even worse spot than before, Duck doesn’t say anything, in fact he’s uncharacteristically quiet for a moment. He makes a face that hints at the fact that he might want to say some words of comfort, but he doesn’t, instead he turns his head and resumes his visual inventory, just as the episode began. This is representative of a lot of things, partially duck’s inability to resist his compulsions, but also because he too is genuinely upset. The Visual Inventory is Duck’s way of coping, and Red’s is escapism. Once again, Duck is gripping hard onto the safety bars as Red lets his hair blow in the wind, but this time the air is cold and brisk, not warm and inviting (not that it ever was). It’s worth noting that even as the car went up in smoke, Duck still somewhat kept his composure, despite being unable to hide his annoyance. He never predicted that any of this would happen, he simply wanted to help his friend let out his pent up emotions. He assumed they would be gone for just a moment, and that would be the end of it. Instead they found themselves huddled around a dwindling fire, surrounded by junk. It’s such a good scene with so many layers to it. Even though Duck knows they’ll inevitably end up back at home, that they never actually left, there’s still a small part of him that thinks that they might be stuck here forever. So he looks down at his travel clipboard and scans his surroundings, trying to soothe himself, to ensure that they’ll all be safe. He hates vulnerability and knows Red is the same way. Even if they don’t always understand each other, there’s a genuine care there, especially on Duck’s part. He may not know Red as intimately as he wants to, but he knows what makes him tick, and he knows that they have this in common. They’re both avoidant at the end of the day, in drastically different ways, yes but both avoidant nonetheless. As much as a part of duck wants to reach out and comfort Red, a bigger part of him knows that it’s better not to, it’s best to just say nothing at all.

[coldmilkchoices]

i love the new episode of murderbot so much. firstly i loveeee mensah and murderbots relationship so much and theyre doing it so much justice, and i love the juxtaposition of most of the episode being murderbot trying its best to make mensah feel better and showing its personality way more only to kill lebeebee with absolutely no hesitation. they have gotten murderbot perfectly. its a person but it is NOT human and this episode comes at the perfect time to remind PresAux AND the audience of the fact that it is a SecUnit and it named itself murderbot for a reason. im so excited to see how the PresAux team deals with this because in the books PresAux doesn't really have to deal with a lot of the fallout of murderbot being a SecUnit and a murderbot because the books have it more as a personal journey, which is great, but a lot of the humans murderbot interacts with don't understand the reality of it being a SecUnit and what it was created to do and what it has been forced to do in the past. obviously those things aren't all murderbot is but im SOOOO excited that they're putting this front and center right now

[notaaronsroommate]

To give an even further back example, there was a Jackie Gleason gameshow called You're in the Picture. It was a massive flop. The premise was that you stuck your head through a cutout in a blown up life size famous/ contemporary news photo and did a 20 questions to figure out what you were in. there was a band, and other variety show trappings. the contestants played for donations to some charity, that is, whose name stuff got donated in. It was an awkward weird flop. the second episode was a stripped down studio with Jackie Gleason giving a very warm, intimate, self effacing mea culpa for the duration of the show slot trying to examine what went wrong with this idea, how it got passed along. and people talked about this as the worst thing in television history (to that point). A history that was 13 years old. and what's so fascinating about it, and how it relates, I think, to Roy Jay, is that despite our parasocial obsession with celebrities and influencers, there often is an even bigger wall between the viewer and the content. That is, You're in the Picture is bad because yes it's a bad idea, but it's a bad idea that you could kinda spitball out. Like, if you asked a room full of middle americans to come up with a concept for a show, they'd likely produce something like Picture eventually. Because ordinary people who were not fully media trained made that production. They'd worked other jobs, and as you so accurately put it, it wasn't expected to make 2.5 million dollars. Someones going to make tv so we're just gonna put something on it. There's time slots, most of them live, so fuck it, if this was a flop, lets put likeable guy Gleason up there to talk shop about how this went wrong. The barrier to entry and the expectation was so low that this could happen. Similarly, regular ass people became actors and looked like regular ass people on screen. New Deal era programs were the backbone of the character actor through to the 60s. Working stiffs with unglamorous faces and bodies became actors like Gene Hackman or Ernest Borgnine. Tons of ordinary people who had experienced life as something other than suburbanites or actors brought those experiences to their performance, and its why these older films have an ineffable quality to them at times that we can't quite pin now. If you've not seen Bornines turn in Marty, I highly recommend it for this. This is as opposed to now, where every actor is so uncanny and smooth and perfect. Christ i think the last bastion of Regular Schmo actors was The Sopranos. Roy Jay is very similar, in that he LOOKS like an unglamorous schmuck. Like me you and whoever. But he's putting on this goofy outfit and (frankly) being humiliating on stage. In a world like ours that is hyper image conscious and obsessed with perfection, Jay is almost perverse in how vulnerable he is doing this uncomfortable schtick in front of live people. If I could stretch the taffy of this theory even further, I think that's a lot of what is so alluring to zoomers and younger about "analogue horror." The aesthetic that it's trying to capture, the thing that is so "Weird" about so much of public access and local tv that fascinates younger people, is that it's so vulnerable and human that it feels more real. It is more parasocial and a better peek into a human being than mommy vlogs made by someone who grew up with the internet and is (even unconsciously) aware of/ self conscious of an audience. It helps that (to be unfair and crass) Roy Jay seems like a fucking pedophile in those performances. But I think it just as easily could have been some woman that did her own style of interpretive dance on a local channel in the 80s. It could've been a recording of a live performance of some childrens entertainer doing their DC superheroes themed biblical puppet show in the 90s. Those could all be tulpa king in yellow spookem ups because unlike a jimmy fallon or Chris Evans or whoever, these people are really able to let us inside. And it can be scary if all you've ever seen is pod people.

Imagine having a comedy act so weird that 40 years later, people think you are an AI psyop.

I'm not going to say this is funny, because it isn't. But as absurdist comic parody, intentional or not, it definitely has its charm.

Plus, when Little and fucking Large are your competition, you automatically win. 1980s British comedy was a fascinating wasteland.

Here is an article about the actual man, free from all of the ARG / unreality / "trolling to make people think everything is AI because we're 19 yo boys with emotional problems" shit.

And do us all a favor and don't watch any of the YouTube videos by Z-tier channels trying to farm views off of this meme. They are all trying to play a role in some King in Yellow-grade thing, but in reality are just making half-assed videos filled with misinformation.

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

The fandom can't make up its mind on what's supposed to be a joke and what's supposed to be serious because the show can't either half the time. It's a tonally disjointed mess that wants to have absurd over-the-top humor as well as a plot and moments of drama, romance, and angst that demand you see the characters as people and feel for what they're going through. Except you can't do that without also treating the dumb bullshit in a somewhat grounded way. Like, you're still dealing with the same characters. You can't just go "Oh, that? Let's ignore that!" the moment it's no longer convenient to you. You've opened this can of worms and now you have to sleep in it. So, every character flip-flops between two different versions of themselves depending on what the writers need in any particular scene.

This is not to say surreal humor can't be used right alongside characters you're supposed to empathize with, Teen Titans (not Go) did that and it worked. It's just that the absurdity can only come from the setting (Mad Mod, Mother Mae-Eye, pretty much anything Control Freak is in) or from designated joke characters (Date With Destiny). Teen Titans never had the main characters acting in clearly absurd ways as the butt of a joke unless those characters were brainwashed somehow, because the writers knew that would ruin any of the more grounded moments they wanted to write. The writers of Miraculous missed the memo on that one.

I don't disagree. A perfect example is Derision where the show takes all of the bad jokes about Marinette's crush and decides to take them seriously as if you can possible take them seriously without making Marinette come across as unhinged and dangerous. You can't, which brings us to the topic at hand: how do you even begin to understand these characters when the show is constantly making character-breaking choices?

My approach - and the approach I recommend others take if they're going to keep watching the show - is to focus on the characters' cores and reject anything canon does to violate those cores. I don't argue for this stance because I love the characters so much that I only want the good things to count. I take this stance because, if you don't, then the characters fall apart. There is no way to make them work as fully realized characters while embracing every choice canon has made. Miraculous has massive characterization issues that go well beyond the humor.

For example, Adrien has multiple moments of terrible behavior that are played in a serious manner such as the moment in the episode Frozer where he tries to start a fight with Ladybug in the middle of an akuma attack because she wouldn't accept a rose from him earlier:

Setup

Ladybug: I can't accept this rose from you. I told you already. I'm in love with someone else. Cat Noir: I know, M'lady. But if he weren't here, would things be different between us? Ladybug: Well, you know, I can't even begin to imagine him not being here. I'm sorry, Cat Noir. I really gotta get going, and you better do the same. (Swings her yo-yo to head back home; Cat Noir is sad, looking downwards, with one petal of the rose falling.)

Payoff

Ladyice: Cat Noir. We need to set up a trap for whoever turned the city into a giant ice rink. (throws yo-yo) Icecat: (bitterly) My feline instincts prefer to track and observe before I attack. You go your way, I'll go mine. Ladyice: Please don't tell me you're mad at me about the rose. Icecat: There may be a certain chill now between us. Ladyice: I get it, but we should really focus on saving Paris right now. Icecat: We don't always have to do everything together, after all. It's not like we're a couple. (skates away)

There's no way to argue this off as a bad joke. While Adrien has every right to feel hurt, those feelings don't excuse him acting like a pouting child in the middle of an akuma fight. It doesn't excuse him acting like this at any point! Ladybug is not a villain for telling him no. She wasn't even mean about it!

I clearly fully agree that Adrien looks awful and selfish here, but I'd still argue that it's not something that should be used to define Adrien's character if your goal is to tell the "ideal" version of Miraculous. "Ideal" being the version that canon seems to be going for based on the overall picture we can sort of make out if we back way, way, way up and look at the extremely abstract picture canon is clumsily painting.

Unless canon is going to do something monumentally stupid, Adrien is Marinette's endgame romantic interest. It's also clear that there is no plan to cut him from the team. He's going to be Chat Noir for the rest of his life or at least well into his adulthood. This means that he is supposed to be a good hero who deserves his miraculous just like he's supposed to be a charming and cute romantic lead. These are the two things I keep in mind when trying to shift through canon to figure out what writing choices I should fully embrace and what writing choices I have to either ignore or treat as true flaws that get an actual character arc. In my book, either approach is fine because most of the characters are deeply flawed at this point and you can't give them all arcs without bloating the story to nonsense levels.

My goal with this approach is never to say, "oh, that moment shouldn't count in terms of how people feel about the character." It's more, "that moment goes so hard against who this character is very clearly supposed to be that I can't take it into account if I want to tell the kind of story that Miraculous is trying (and clearly failing) to tell."

As an example, let's list off Adrien's worst behaviors. The things that make him look terrible:

He sucks at communicating his needs and feelings, leading to multiple moments where he gets mad at Ladybug for things she's totally unaware of

He has quit or considered quitting without warning multiple times and only one of those was because of something he did "wrong" (NYC Special)

He puts his feelings before the safety of Paris on multiple occasions, even going so far to purposely miss akuma fights to see what happens

He is incredibly pushy about his crush, often ignoring Ladybug's feelings on the topic by continuing to bring it up even after she asked him to stop

There have been multiple instances where he almost cataclysmed multiple people in a fit of anger

His love for Ladynette isn't strong enough to let him break free of things like akumas and nightmare dust even when he's looking her in the eyes making him a pretty crappy romantic lead

People will argue that some of this behavior makes sense for his character because of the abuse that canon has technically introduced, but that the writers seem blissfully unaware of. I don't disagree with that argument, but that doesn't change the fact that none of this is acceptable behavior for a hero and Adrien is a hero who keeps doing these things. A sad backstory doesn't give you the right to behave poorly without consequences.

At the same time, if I fully embrace these elements of canon, what I get is an Adrien salt fic where he loses his miraculous for good while Marinette finds her real true love or even just a non-salty fic where Adrien leaves for his own meatal health and gets replaced by someone who can handle being a hero right now. Canon's not writing either of those, so the only way to engage with these flaws while enjoying canon or aiming for the same end goals as canon is to say, "I guess this doesn't count" or "I guess I need to tone this way down and work through it via a character arc" or even "I guess that was just a bad joke maybe?"

That is the essence of what I mean when I call myself a writing salt, character sugar blog. It comes from looking at canon and seeing that there's simply no way to embrace the worst moments and the best at the same time. We're not dealing with a coherent plot and/or complex characters. We're dealing with a nonsense plot that will warp the characters to bizarre shapes to make random ideas work even if those idea go wildly against canon's end goals.

As an example, Glaciator and Frozer should not exist in the same universe or, at the very least, something should explain why Chat Noir randomly changed his stance on Ladybug's crush from acceptance to pushiness. As is, the pieces don't fit together. The behavior is too contradictory. Remember, this is how Glaciator ends:

Perhaps Ladybug will love me someday. I mean, like, I love her. I have to believe. In the meantime, her friendship is the best gift of all.

Where did this version of Adrien go? Why did he regress in Frozer? There's no in-universe reason. It happened because the writers weren't ready to let the love square date or grow close, but they also wanted the love square to cause drama, so Adrien ends up looking terrible just like Marinette ends up looking terrible when it's her turn to cause love square drama. Her terribleness takes a different flavor so it can be hard to realize that this is a systemic issue, but that's what it is. It's deeply frustrating, but it also clearly stems from cheap writing and not quality characterization.

This is also why my stance is that canon as a whole only supports my Doyalistic core-character analysis style of approach. The writing is too poor quality to do Watsonian analysis where you embrace the full picture and try to put it all together. The closest I'll get to Watsonian analysis is pointing out how much the writing botches a Watsonian take by showing you all the way the writing contradicts itself, twisting into a nonsense pretzel of frustration where the payoffs never satisfy! (See the season four rant for an example or anything where I talked about Chloe's supposed damnation arc.)

There are even characters where canon is such a total mess that you can Doyalistically argue for two separate takes! Gabriel is a perfect example. He is all over the place and his ending was so poorly handled that you can make strong arguments for writing him as a cold-hearted villain or a sympathetic villain without the end result feeling like it spits in the face of canon because both takes maintain his one core element: villain.

That's the big thing I keep in mind when I look at the characters and the lore and the plots and try to come up with versions that the average fan would like. I don't think that there's one true version of any of these things, but I do feel comfortable saying that there are versions that will very clearly only appeal to people who are salty about a specific thing that canon did poorly. That's not who I want to appeal to in my adaptions, so while I'm not going to argue that those takes have no backing in canon, I will argue that those takes are not supported by canon as a whole. Embracing them requires you to take the worst parts of canon at face value while ignoring what canon is clearly trying to do with the overall story.

I get the appeal of that, but it's not fun for me because that approach feels like rolling around in the mud with the pigs. I don't want to sink to canon's level! I want to have fun! That's why I talk about how to make canon into its best self, not its worst self. If you want its worst self, just go watch the actual show. I will be shocked it if disappoints you.

[rings-of-power-realm]

Thank you Robert Aramayo for being a better person than the entire internet. It was a beautiful scene and you and Morfydd handled it perfectly 💚

[amelikos]

Liko and Roy being able to lovingly roast Friede is fun, but I also feel like it shows that they don't blindly idolize him? They admire him for sure, but their perception of him is pretty grounded in a way. They know the person beneath, they are close to him, and they know he is not infallible (he told them about his past and his first meeting with Cap, after all). They are not admiring from a distance, but their admiration for him is rooted in reality (and he's shown them time and time again why he is worth looking up to).

I also feel like this moment shows that Liko, Roy and Dot all focus on different sides of Friede when it comes to their admiration for him, or what they try to emulate? They all know he is a professor, but out of the three, I think Dot is the one who focuses the most on this aspect. She is the one who read his thesis (which was brought up in HZ041), and she still keeps up with his research and respects his work. She even refers to him as "Professor Friede" in this episode, and she knows that his distribution map has been presented at a conference and that it has proper sources. And afterwards, she almost sets a challenge for herself, which is to find any Pokemon that aren't on Friede's map. She wants to be able to do something Friede couldn't do as a researcher, discover something he doesn't know, and find new things herself.

Meanwhile, Roy mostly focuses on the "battler" aspect of Friede. Just like how Hogator looks up to Lizardon, Roy looks up to Friede and wants to be strong and cool like him (he even imitates his Terastal pose, which speaks to how Roy pays close attention to Friede during battles and can't help but mimic him). As for Liko, I feel like she mostly focuses on how Friede is as a person and a trainer? She wrote her report in HZ035 about Friede and Cap because that's who she thinks about when she is asked about an "ideal bond" (and she had no illusions about their bond since she saw them fight among each other and be stubborn, so she got to see both the good and bad). And her report sums up what stands out to her when it comes to Friede. She talked about how she grows a little stronger when he is around, and how his presence gives courage to those around him. And that part of Friede is precisely what she wants to emulate (and she probably wants her and Nyarote to be like Friede and Cap, as trainer and Pokemon). They all see Friede as someone reliable and reassuring, but they focus on different aspects of him in their own journeys.

(And it's kind of interesting how in the antagonist side, Amethio was also exposed to these three aspects of Friede at different points and somehow influenced by them.. The "battler" aspect, because his style began to change after meeting Friede, and because he imitates him too when he uses Terastal. The "person" aspect, because he actually took into account Friede's comment about not being riled up by words in HZ025, and didn't respond to the Explorers who were making some comments towards him in their meeting in HZ027. So he tried to follow Friede's words, and stopped snapping back when he could. As for the "professor" aspect, he didn't see it as much, but I think the closest to it would be Amethio asking what move Rayquaza used in HZ045, and Friede immediately providing him with an answer. Not knowing something, and learning through someone who actually knows.)

[fairwinds-safetravels]

I started apothecary diaries just on a whim and I'm finding myself invested in the show ahh. I can feel the hyperfixation kicking in slightly, so blacklist apothecary diaries if that's not your thing 😅

[dailyayao]

[thelastspeecher]

watching the Ancient Aliens episode of Buzzfeed Unsolved and pausing every two minutes to rant once they get to the Pyramids of Giza part bc I was one of those Egyptology kids and I will NOT stand for this fucking SLANDER

[talesfromthebandgeekmafia]

True Detective season 1 is an achievement of storytelling and the medium of television. I can’t even praise it by wishing to see it for the first time again because it’s just as enjoyable on the third watch as it is on the first if not more.

[after-nine-at-the-oasis]

the rookie let women make mistakes challenge

[derangedthots]

rewatching hotd clips for inspo and it still drives me insane how whole conversations were happening in the glances btwn jace and daemon on dragonstone. like!! definitely across the painted table when nyra was in labor but the dragonmont especially!!

daemon asking ser lorent+steffon abt whether they acknowledge the true line of succession(him feeling out where their loyalties lie), jace sending him a look when they answer in the affirmative(as if to say "see, they're loyal, this isn't necessary"), but daemon still holds his frown like "hm, maybe, but let us leave no doubt" before leading the conversation to his true goal(steffon+lorent verbally recognizing rhaenyra as queen) and summoning caraxes to quell any remaining doubts the kind of violence daemon has in store for ppl who hurt his family.

also honorable mention for jace shuffling and visibly swallowing but maintaining face, never looking away, when daemon makes them reaffirm their oaths upon pain of caraxes - a moment which i read less of him being afraid of daemon's dragon(even tho this is the blood wyrm™ we're talking abt) but more of as his own acknowledgement of the lesson his stepfather is trying to teach him: viserys, daemon's own brother and jace's grandsire, should've had his vassals recommitting their oaths to his named heir(rhaenyra) in the long years of his reign, but he didn't. with him dead and succession 'unclear', daemon will not suffer that mistake and neither should jace. there can be no room for doubt, for division, with war looming on the horizon.

daemon reestablishes the hierarchy here and teaches jace the kinds of measures he'll have to take as rhaenyra's heir. daemon might be putting on a show of intimidation - i.e. threatening - steffon and lorent but he's not threatening jace.

he's guiding him.

and jace accepts it.

babes!! i'm insane! i'm insane abt this!! the intimacy and experience it takes to be able to communicate with someone else over a distance and IN SILENCE the way daemon and jace do here!! the blacks are a family period end of fucking sentence.

[flabotanum]

feeling emotional about elaina nolastname today

[misfitmiska]

Some authors really be creating individual characters who are SO made for each other (wether platonically or romantically) in every single conceivable way and then just forget to make them interact smh…