#and zeldas corpse being possessed was pretty dark

[dreamsy990]

link needs therapy

you ever consider that link totally has like. all of the survivors guilt?

like my man was part of a group of 6 amazing, strong people, who he almost definitely respected and thought of as friends, and 4 of them died, one of them was trapped in hyrule castle trying to hold back the guy he failed to kill, and he was the only one who made it out okay in the end. 

i think link would believe somehow that his failing to kill ganon lead to everyone elses death, even if it couldnt have been prevented. 

like IMAGINE the survivors guilt this guy is going through. his friends are all dead, and he’s left in a shell of the world he once knew, and his last hope to get back the last remnant of his life is to finish the mission he failed.

and hes going through this all with amnesia, struggling to remember even why he has to do this all in the first place and why these people died. 

like imagine you wake up and have no memory of who you are and how you got here, in a post apocalyptic place, and are told you have to go fight the guy possessing hyrule castle that caused this place to fall apart. and on top of that you keep getting these flashbacks and are piecing together your life, just to realize that even if you kill ganon, it cant bring back the people who meant so much to you.

man.

someone get this guy a therapist.

[breath-of-the-hobbies]

A Return to Darkness Ch. 2

(Chapter 2 of the fan-fic idea I’m playing with. Zelda awakens underground and attempts to find a way out, and Link has a bad day. Chapter 1 here.)

The smell was the first thing to break through Zelda’s unconsciousness. Judging from the acidic yet musty reek and the burning sensation all over her body, she had a bed of malice to thank for cushioning her fall. The darkness was so complete that she had to blink furiously to even be sure that her eyes were open.

She took stock, fumbling at her hip until she found the Sheikah Slate. It lit a soft circle of light at her touch, but the screen fizzed and crackled, displaying only glitched swirls of color. Broken ribs, concussion, sprained knee, she estimated as she maneuvered dizzily to her feet and retrieved her sword from where it lay nearly engulfed in malice some feet away.

“Link?” She whispered, acutely aware of the monsters they had encountered in the past months and unwilling to alert them to her present vulnerability. She swung the slate’s light across the rubble-filled ground, but her companion was nowhere to be seen. Ganon’s corpse was also absent, presumably still lying in the cavern above her.

Recalling her last sight of Link sent a stab of pain through her chest to join the throb of her ribs. The image of his anguished eyes and furrowed brow as he put aside everything to lunge towards her was imprinted indelibly in her mind. Was he still up above? Had the malice— she forced her mind away before she could complete the fatalistic thought. She had watched Link die once already, and the idea of losing him again was enough to make her breath shorten into panicked gasps. Come on Zelda, you held your own against Ganon for one hundred years. You can crawl out of a damn cave. She retrieved and lit her torch, then limped around the perimeter of the hole, leaning heavily on her sword.

It didn’t take long before she was certain that the floor above had collapsed into a nearly exact copy of the one holding Ganon’s body. The geometric carvings on the walls were the same as what she had seen in the moments before everything went wrong, and a single exit led to a path descending away and down. With no clear way up into the abyssal darkness, and no ability to teleport thanks to the malfunctioning slate, she had no choice but to venture into the tunnel, unaware of the eyes observing her retreating form from the darkness beyond her torch’s light.

It was impossible to know exactly how long she spent wandering, but Zelda came to time her rests with the regular shaking of the earth around her. Despite her newfound mistrust of the tunnels’ structural integrity, the walls and ceiling held strong around her. She fell asleep each rumbling with the spirals of the wall etchings spinning behind her eyelids.

After one such rest, she awoke with a sudden revelation dredged from the free association of her dreams. It was a memory, something Impa’s grandmother had told them when they were children. She had spoken of an ancient civilization, the Zonai, that had disappeared mysteriously long ago, leaving only ruins and secrets. Link had already mentioned that the carvings appeared Zonai in origin, resembling places he had seen in his travels, but now Zelda remembered Gran’s words. “The Zonai were not simply to be feared for their fierce prowess in arms. They were also brilliant magicians with technical advances rivaling even our best Sheikah technology. Had they not disappeared, our world would be much changed from how it appears today.” Then Gran had pulled a carved stone out of her sleeve and shown it to the children. She ran her finger along its swirls in a series of swoops, and when she finished, the entire thing began to glow an eye-searing turquoise. The young and bright-eyed Zelda had oohed and aahed, but the rather more battered young woman in the present bared her teeth in a wolfish grin and heaved herself stiffly to her feet, sweeping the light from the sad remains of her torch across the patterns that had haunted her for months.

There! she spotted a central swirl, one that all the others in the area seemed to radiate from. It took a few tries to emulate the pattern she had seen over a century ago, and she began to question herself, her mind inevitably returning to familiar paths of self-doubt. When she was almost ready to give up, the spiral lit. With a flash and a smell of ozone, radiance spread outwards, spilling into every line of the carvings until Zelda was blinded.

The earth began to shake more strongly than ever, knocking her to the ground. She curled into a protective ball as chunks of wall and ceiling crumbled around her, her stomach lurching in equal parts fear and motion sickness. After what felt like an eternity, the world calmed. The bedraggled princess pushed herself to a seated position with a groan, blinking purple afterimages from her sight. The lit carvings had settled into a calmer glow, and because of this it took her a moment to realize that a pinprick of natural light now shone at the far end of the tunnel.

Heart leaping, paying no mind to her shrieking knee, Zelda set off at a run towards freedom, her excited thoughts jumbling with ideas of newly collapsed walls forming impromptu exits. She was so quick that only reflexive bracing of her feet and scraping of her hands on the tunnel walls were able to bring her to a gut-wrenching stop as dislodged stones ricocheted over the edge of an impossible precipice.

Wind whipped her hair as she stared in utter disbelief down, down to the familiar landscape of Hyrule far below. She was in the sky.

***

Link had eaten some pretty terrible food in the past year, but after a week of clumsily cleaned mushrooms boiled with rice, he almost preferred his more dubious gastronomical experiments. At least those had some zest to them.

Although his arm was slowly regaining strength, his dexterity was lagging far behind. Stringing a bow was still out of the question, and the one time he encountered a boar in the woods, he had been mown down in humiliating fashion before he could even swing his blade. The mushrooms and occasional carrot were a far less likely source of embarrassment.

The entire loss of his right arm would almost have been easier to cope with than his present state; the energy pouring into the ancient tech and the rot constantly trying to push onwards through his body made even the shortest climb, swim, or even run into an exhausting task. Swinging a blade with his left hand was one thing: getting knocked out after falling out of a tree was another.

Besides the draining tech and the gnawing corruption, there was a third issue with his arm that Link couldn’t quite piece together yet. He had absolute faith in Purah—despite her eccentricities—and when she told him that she had added the Stasis Rune to his arm, he had no reason to doubt her. However, when he activated the rune to halt the fleeing boar in a last-ditch attempt at meat for dinner, it failed to stop it at all. In fact, the animal actually began running backwards, nearly pummeling a dumbfounded Link a second time.

He wasn’t sure how Purah could have made such a glaring mistake, and he honestly couldn’t picture a time when making his opponent move backwards would help him do more than get a second to breathe. Once he had found Zelda, he would have to go back and ask the scientist about it. Full but not happy about it, Link rolled up in a horse blanket and fell into a fitful sleep.

He was awoken by an agonizing buzzing sensation in his right arm, as though it was being continuously electrocuted. The entire limb, from fingertip to shoulder, was shining turquoise like his own personal monster beacon. His horse whinnied and pranced in distress as Link shook his arm like a man possessed. If he hadn’t been so preoccupied, he would have noticed the ground vibrating beneath him, but by the time the glowing light and electric tingling subsided, everything was calm again.

Now thoroughly awake, the perplexed hero broke camp and led his mount back to the trail in the false dawn. It wasn’t much further to the edge of the Great Plateau, the only thing keeping Link from reaching it the night before being his newly abysmal stamina. But as he trudged up the last rise, he was sure he had gotten turned around in the half-light. Nothing looked right. The ground was churned up and littered with boulders the size of houses, and whole landmarks had shifted and changed.

The sun broke over the horizon as Link crested the hill. He was overlooking the very same vista he had first seen without comprehension or recognition after the healing sleep, yet the view could not have been more different. The plains and forests in front of Hyrule Castle were simply...gone. The ground was carved out as though miners had been hollowing the earth for centuries. After taking in this sight, ice water freezing his heart, Link’s eyes followed the progression of destruction to the foot of the castle itself. At first, the reappearance of malice clouds encircling the base obscured the truly bizarre unreality of the situation.

The entire castle was floating several hundred feet above the ground.

Slowly, unbelievingly, almost unwillingly as though fearing what he would see, Link lifted his gaze to the sky. Far above, higher even than Vah Medoh had flown, floated hulking islands of earth.

He sat down hard, gulping back the frustration that closed his throat. His princess was further out of reach than she had ever been.

[ganymedesclock]

I’m aware that a lot of my headcanons for Ganon, Link, and Zelda is rooted in the fact that I love personality powers and there’s something interesting about what all three’s aptitudes say about them in contrast to the roles they’re given by the narrative and what we’re ostensibly told about them.

Buckle in, because this got... very long.

Zelda

In both OoT and BotW Zelda is tied closely to the Sheikah; in the former, she has been raised by one (Impa) and assimilates fully into their culture when it becomes too dangerous to exist as the princess of Hyrule. In BotW, she is fascinated by their culture and technology and wants to study it in detail. The Sheikah clan is established as the motif of a weeping eye- this connection is also implied in Twilight Princess with Impaz and the conspicuous Sheikah eye embroidered on Zelda’s cloak.

There’s a strong implication here of seeing. And Zelda’s powers tend to take two forms: one, perceiving herself or allowing others to perceive- and the other is penetrating the darkness by cutting it down.

A friend of mine aired the idea that the implication of the Sheikah weeping eye may suggest the Sheikah originated as exorcists- because any veteran Zelda player knows that the way to deal with virtually all of the game’s enemies is go for the eye. The implication of the crest would then be that the Sheikah are those who blind Demise’s eyes, preventing the original demon god from continuing to influence the world.

But an eye also sees. The gossip stones are traditionally hailed as a Sheikah invention. Sheik’s specific role in OoT is to guide Link by illuminating, revealing things to them.

Zelda as a character is correlated heavily with light; if we take BotW thematically tying Ganon to the moon as an enduring quality of his character (especially since in Wind Waker, he’s able to halt the movement of the heavens temporarily, over his home fortress and for a period of time over the entire sea, causing perpetual night) then the golden light conflated with Zelda would seem to be the rays of the sun. In Twilight Princess she is able to command the light spirits, and is the only non-twili truly unaffected by the cloud of twilight- a feat that the twili themselves weren’t capable of without seemingly turning their magic heavily unto their own bodies and losing the ability to walk in daylight as a result.

In Wind Waker, she takes possession of the Hero’s Bow and its Light Arrows, which, for anything less powerful than Ganon caught in its crosshairs, they’re pierced and immolated in a beam of light.

Light handily reflects the duality of Zelda’s powers as implied by the Sheikah: light can be blinding, destroying- and light can also be revealing, transmitting, clarifying.

However, taken together, this does not invoke a gracious and gentle maiden. If anything, it would almost suggest that the reason many Zeldas come across passively is because of active effort on her caretakers’ part to clip her wings and prevent her from actualizing. The nature of Zelda as implied by her powers is someone who pierces situations, who challenges and dismantles falsehood; an oracle and an executioner. Of the chosen three, she’s the destroyer- because while Link often wields the light arrows, they’re conflated much more with Zelda than they ever are with him.

Zelda is not presented as the gracious sun that presides over a warm field of wheat. She is not depicted as cruel, but there is an intensity, a veiled frustration, implied by her powers- it suggests that Zelda is someone who yearns to cut through obstructions in her path.

It implies Zelda, the detective, and most certainly, the exorcist. Her powers are for picking a target precisely, evaluating its nature and weaknesses, and, if need be, obliterating it with grace and precision.

Ganon

On the flipside, Ganon, who we’re continuously told is an element of wrath and destruction... has powers geared heavily towards restoration. The most powerful abilities he’s ever shown in terms of scale and effect are his darkening the skies in Wind Waker and, in Breath of the Wild, the rising of the blood moon.

Everything Ganon accomplishes in BotW is a testament not to supernatural resilience but his ability to reconstruct himself and spread that same power to his allies. No wonder in Twilight Princess Zant calls him a god; his command of flesh, blood, and bone is certainly impressive enough that he could be described as someone with power over life and death itself. He’s able to heal the mortal injuries of a huge number of people and creatures with disparate physiology, at range, while his body is overwhelmingly splattered across the countryside.

Hell, that power is so interesting and so strong that if you have Ganon as anything but final boss, you pretty much have to nerf it. It also could afford an interesting context to how in many of the earlier games and stories based on them, a point is made that Ganon can only be injured by certain weapons- holy silver, sacred light, or the Master Sword (which implicitly has a silvered blade; it’d explain that gleaming white blade it has).

It could be not that Ganon’s flesh has some power to repel harm as much as anything else turned against him merely has him regenerate, possibly, depending on how well he’s able to generate Malice in incarnations where his regeneration didn’t get disrupted repeatedly and smashed up in a blender, even colonizing the offending weapon, digesting it, and reconstituting it as part of himself.

Now, Ganon doesn’t have quite so clear and predictable a thesis to his powers; his ability to turn into various creatures and move undetected place to place tend to have different explanations but you can pretty easily rope them under the capabilities of a shapeshifting regenerative blob monster. And given the time he’s had to work with, it makes sense that he would have a much more versatile skill set than Link and Zelda, and enthusiastically dabble in any new form of power he gets his hands on. 

The electricity he wields in ALttP and Thunderblight being the most formidable of the Blights would seem to suggest that’s a favorite of him- not only is electricity the element conflated with the Gerudo in BotW, but Ganon’s teachers and mother figures were Twinrova, who are fire and ice witches. Assuming Ganon’s a lightning user would neatly bracket the pupil in with his mentors and further indicate the land Ganon originally hailed from.

Where Zelda’s abilities are heavily focused in two areas and fit according to a concise thesis, Ganon’s standout power of healing and his implicit favored element of thunder don’t have so clear a notion behind them; only one conflates directly with his lunar motif. But this still suggests things about his character, and you can make a connection here:

While the sun is always the same, the moon continuously changes its face. While all of the Chosen Three are redesigned repeatedly, Ganon is overwhelmingly the same person deep down- so the transformations he goes through are just that. He changes, but a certain core of him remains the same. And as a healer- as someone who basically has an incredibly tenacious grasp to life so much so that when run to his limits in BotW, pieces of his body scatter, separate, and latch onto the landscape itself for survival- it makes sense that he would be the assimilating force of the three of them.

He’s the man with a thousand enemies and who has died something like a hundred times by now- he’s the pariah who lives at the edges of the world, refusing to stay down, refusing to stay in his grave no matter which new king of hyrule thinks they can stake him and put a rock over it. So he uses that changing face and seizes everything he can. Survival at all costs. No wonder his conflated animal motif is a creature once known in the ancient world for running the length of the weapon it was impaled with to kill the person holding it.

And, yet. The fact that Ganon is ultimately focused on his own survival isn’t the only application of his healing powers. He’s also someone who heals others. I mentioned that Zant’s reverence in TP makes a lot of sense in the face of BotW- but, we also have a pretty compelling argument why so many disparate groups, time and time again, unite under his banner. It’s not fear- it’s hope.

If Ganon just walked into people’s villages as a warlord and threatened them into fighting for him, that loyalty would wither easily. But we know that even when he’s doing absolutely miserable, Ganon tends to galvanize Hyrule’s “monsters” into a feeding frenzy of growth and development. The average moblin is a lot less likely to forget Ganon or turn their back on him if they have a scar from a mortal injury and know that it was Ganon, their savior, and his moon rising in the sky that personally saved their life and probably dozens of other people they knew.

It’d suggest exactly what Zant’s proselytizing does- that to the people who work for Ganon, he’s viewed in a messianic light, in contrast to his pariah status in the rest of Hyrule’s eyes. And that doesn’t appear to be insincere on Ganon’s part- while TP appears to end with Zant severing his connection with Ganon, it stands that Zant was in a position to do that after Midna killed him- which would tell us that Ganon resurrected Zant again, after a point when Zant was no longer useful to him.

Sure, Ganon’s not exactly an honorable person. There are plenty of accounts in various stories of him lying through his teeth or buttering someone up only to discard their corpse at a key moment. But the fact that Ganon callously throws certain people under the bus while taking pains to heal others is not necessarily contradictory- it just tells us that Ganon is a loyal compassionate person... to certain entities. To others, they can rot, and he won’t give a shit. But his healing power would logically, then, be a gateway to who he’s decided he really wants to live. And many of the entities with him, both sapient and non, would appear to be beneficiaries of his mercy, to the point that the implication of creatures like Helmaroc in Wind Waker is that Ganon could very well have hand-reared and personally trained that behemoth given its very exclusive loyalty and attentiveness to his commands. We see no one else- even in Forsaken Fortress- commanding Helmaroc.

Someone not capable of long-term kindness and patience towards what would have been an incredibly difficult baby to take care of would never have gotten access to a creature like that in the first place. I know Nintendo put Helmaroc there to be a boss monster and didn’t want us to think about it, but the watsonian implications are obvious and damning- Ganon isn’t backstabs mclovesmurder, and he is capable of spending a long time lavishly investing in an animal in a way that leaves it earnestly willing to fight, hunt, and kill on his behalf, and unafraid of him. Thus, Ganon being genuinely cruel to people is something that happens in situations he feels are personally warranted- where he feels he was wronged first. In short, he’s potentially petty, vengeful, and very good at holding grudges- but he doesn’t hate indiscriminately, and that’s a noteworthy distinction.

It’s another angle of that changing face, of that lunar motif- Ganon is not someone who’s easy to figure out, in part because he often actively does not want to be known. In Wind Waker, he appears to have a conversation with Link only to reveal Link was talking to a monstrous puppet while the real Ganon escaped. In ALttP he extinguishes all the lights and hides as a shadow. In TP he goes through multiple layers of hiding himself behind barriers and even inside Zelda’s body. A lesser theme that crops up here is evasion. While Ganon’s certainly not unequipped for a direct fight, he tends to try and avoid it as long as possible, divert attention onto proxies or shields. 

In BotW, “the Calamity” is obviously clever, bringing about catastrophe by dramatically outfoxing the entire royal family and not just negating, but actively weaponizing in his favor things that were used against him in the past, guaranteeing that win or lose, it’ll be a long time before Hyrule is so friendly with the Guardians and Divine Beasts- and int hat time they’ll probably have forgotten about his intelligence again. Yes, Ganon hardly deliberately engineered being dehumanized, but, he’d be long used to it at this point- at this point, he’s probably able to set his watch to someone forgetting he was ever a mortal person, and he can play the role of a mindless beast easily enough. He can swing it in his favor.

In a way, it furthers that sense that Ganon’s not actually mutable at his core- if anything, he’s rather stubborn and brash- but he is very prone to accumulating and utilizing external ‘faces’ to try and stay protected, to stay untouched.

Which brings us to, finally:

Link

Link’s motifs are probably the most interesting because they tend aggressively mutable. Hero of Time, Hero of Winds, Hero of Wild, Hero of Twilight, Hero of the Sky. Unlike Zelda or Ganon, Link lacks an obvious conflation with either day or night. If anything, Link stands out because he tends to have balanced and contradictory associated motifs.

The fearful rabbit and the aggressive wolf, for example.

In Twilight Princess, the light spirit Faron councils Link that in order to defeat Zant, he must match Zant in power- and this starts gathering the Fused Shadows that Midna ultimately uses to destroy Ganon’s barrier around Hyrule Castle.

Zelda is mainly conflated with the harp (shown playing other instruments from time to time, but the harp is the most consistent between Sheik and Skyward Sword’s Zelda), Ganon the rare times he’s shown with an instrument the organ, and certainly Link’s most famous instrument is the ocarina, but he also takes up a huge number of different instruments throughout the games. Likewise, while the Master Sword is his signature weapon, he sometimes spends entire games without it, or using a different sword instead, and every game, without fail, sees him accumulating a large number of different tools and armaments and using all of them.

At a glance, this can seem like proof Link is an everyman hero without personality- an empty vessel for the player’s will. But unlike in, say, Undertale, there is no in-universe acknowledgement the player exists, ever. And Link does plenty of things without player input, or where the player can only choose one of a few options to respond with.

So in-universe, what does it say about someone who is incredibly versatile, but also consistently characterized as the furthest thing from weak-willed?

It suggests that while Zelda might be the sun and Ganon the moon, Link is the interceding force between them; perhaps embodied as the manifold and diverse light of the stars. It suggests a vague, yet powerful sense of self- Link doesn’t need to know who he is or where he comes from, it’s what he chooses to become that defines his fate for him. Which lends significance to how, while Ganon in ALttP was able to take possession of the full triforce, the only one who’s united the triforce inside their body was the first Link in Skyward Sword.

Many games feature Link actively taking qualities from his enemies- in ALBW, his ability to proceed at all is by stealing Yuga’s curse and using it against him. In TP, he very quickly exploits his abilities in his changed form to proceed even before he utilizes Zant’s “help”. In fact outside of ALttP, where he found a way to circumvent it entirely, I can’t think of a single time Link’s gotten cursed where he hasn’t fairly rapidly made peace with it and swung it in his favor.

Hell, it’s worth noting that in BotW Link would even seem to have an indifferent relationship with gender since he’s not particularly concerned wearing traditionally feminine clothes to enter the Gerudo city. (at least, that’s how I’m choosing to interpret that to save myself a lot of frustration,)

It ultimately comes down to a sense that while Zelda might conceal herself, while Ganon might adapt and change his outer layer, Link, out of the chosen, is the one prone to true metamorphosis.

This is the significance to Link always being conflated as an outsider- he doesn’t have a specific biased anchoring to Hyrule or it’s systems. And it’d reflect how, with the help of masks, BotW Link has absolutely no problem partying it up with a bunch of monsters- or, with masks again, Link in Majora’s Mask basically becomes a full-time medium helping the spirits of the dead find peace through his body.

Heck, Skyward Sword’s Skyward Strike, the mechanics of transformation in Twilight Princess, and Link’s unique ability to see Zelda’s ghost outside of her body in Spirit Tracks would seem to point to the idea that Link in general is ghost sensitive / kind of a medium. It’d also reflect on how, while Zelda and Ganon both tend to be established mages, Link lacks magical power until it’s bequeathed by some kind of outside source.

[blitherandblather]

CAoS Theory

If I were a religious man, I'm pretty sure I'd have given Satanism a shot. I'm not the kind of person who commits to anything for very long, so it wouldn't be that big a deal. I switch pinball-fashion from one dead-end, minimum wage job to the next on a bi-weekly basis. I just don't have the attention span to make a career of anything. I've already forgotten what I was talking about at the start of this paragraph and now I'm going to have to go all the way back to beginning to find out. It has pros and cons,  short attention span.

Satan, that's it. Or, at least, the Church of Satan. It's hip, it's new and it's utter bullshit. I find most religions to be utter bullshit, but at least this one has a few ideals I can get on board with. For one thing, Stupidity in a cardinal sin in Satanism. In fact, it's sin number one; it's the worst thing you do in the Church, be stupid. I can agree with that, it's my least favourite characteristic in a person too. There's a suspiciously prominent “don't fuck children” rule thrown in there too, as if in direct response to some other religion. Almost as if they were worried priests getting kicked out of other churches might end up theirs, so they just wanted to get the message out there. Come if you want, but, let's just be clear here, absolutely no fucking children. In fact, no children at all. Seriously, we're not letting anyone under the age of 18 through the door. Understand? Good, welcome to the CoS; here's your birthday cake.

Satanists are also atheists, so there's no real worry about being judged in the afterlife, because there isn't one. They also don't really care if you're a Satanist or not. They don't have masses or go knocking door-to-door. There's very little you actually have to do to be a Satanist. Most of it is about self-reflection and embracing nihilism. Oh, and their High Priest has released a bunch of albums you could use as mood setters while playing Dungeons and Dragons. Above all, though, Satanism is a philosophy and a way of thinking as opposed to an actual religion, and, if I were to join any organisation, I think they'd be the ones for me.

All of which has absolutely nothing to do with the Netflix show Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, a new imagining of the Archie Horror comic book of the same name. It's a far darker and grittier look at the character than that taken by Melissa Joan Hart. Like most of Netflix's own shows, this 10-parter has an ongoing arc, split by story-of-the-week episodes. Sabrina is a half-witch, which means youngsters can relate to her, but also that her life is going to be more interesting than yours.

The Dark Lord, the devil, wants Sabrina to join his legion of followers, like her father promised she would before mysteriously dying in a plot point. But Sabrina is half-human, too, and she has a boyfriend and it's all, like, so unfair and stuff. So, a deal is struck between the innocent teenager and the manifestation of all evil, ruler of hell and destroyer of souls. She's allowed to go to her regular, human school, as long as she also attends The Academy of Unseen Arts, which I was positive was where Rincewind got kicked out of. As if this wasn't complicated enough, there is a witch-killer on the loose picking off Satan's followers. Also, there's like, these really mean girls? And, like, this boy? Like, a wizard boy? And he, like, likes Sabrina? But Sabrina's already with this human guy? It's totes drama, you guys.

There are a lot of positives with the show. Kiernan Shipka, playing Sabrina, is very likeable and exudes a confidence which makes us feel like she's been playing the role for years. The certifiably insane Michelle Gomez, perfectly cast as the possessed corpse of Sabrina's (human) High School teacher/(spoilers) Madame Satan herself, has great fun lurking around mischievously in the background of shots, plotting devious deeds and threatening pretty much everyone she happens to bang in to. Richard Coyle, playing the High Priest, hams it up unapologetically as the puritanical and ever-so-slightly-corrupt Father Blackwood. The show rarely panders to the viewer, assuming we already have at least a passing knowledge of the occult, mentioning Morgan le Fay, Lilith of Aradia, the Witch of Endor, Hildegard of Bingen, Marie Laveau, Tituba, Nehman, Badb, Macha, the Virgin of Juno, and the Kindly Ones (not looking forward to spellchecking that sentence). All of that is in one monologue, by the way, powerful stuff although, admittedly, utter gibberish if you don't know your witches. The plot also leans heavily on the Devil and Mr. Webster, with many feel-good moments where the clever half-human beats the devil himself in a game of wits.

There is plenty to moan about too, however. The storyline is plodding and, for most of the season, utterly directionless. Minor plot points are brought up to give the show a feel of gravitas it doesn't actually possess; an underdeveloped young girl is bullied by transphobic jocks, her father refers to his gay brother as “an abomination” and Sabrina's ward, Aunt Zelda (she's got a harsh exterior but, shock and horror, there's a heart of gold under there!) has an affair with Father Blackwood, whose wife is too pregnant to satisfy him sexually. To atone for this affair, both participants flagellate themselves, which also brings BDSM in to the mix, completely out of place and tone with the rest of the show.

Lucy Davis, Sabrina's other ward, Aunt Hilda (she's got a soft and squishy exterior but, shock and horror, there's a bellyful of fire under there!) mumbles distractedly in the background, utterly unsure how to play the character and becomes more of a distraction from, as opposed to a part of the story. The love triangle between Sabrina, dishy human Harvey Kinkle (who is given precisely fuck all to do except be dishy) and the dishy warlock Nicholas Scratch (maybe a spoiler alert, this was the devil's name in The Devil and Mr. Webster) feels tacked on and pointless. All YA fiction requires a love triangle, because how else can a young woman figure out who she truly is unless she can figure out which, of two, boys she wants to fuck the most?

Characters motives change on a whim, ranging from mildly irritating – Aunt Hilda warning Sabrina not to cast a particular spell, while simultaneously telling her exactly how to do so – to the fucking baffling – Madame Satan helping Sabrina exorcise a demon out of a human body, then coming back later on to murder the human for no fucking reason.

A plot point is brought up early in which a young, and possibly unaware, warlock is brought in to the morgue. He has definitely been murdered, and the Spellmans worry a Witch Hunter has come to town. They are so sure of it, they bring the news to the attention of Father Blackwood, who tells them to “keep an eye on it”. And it's never mentioned again.

Father Blackwood's position is similarly vague and malleable. In the first episode, the Spellman sisters are so terrified of the man, they're reluctant to even speak to him. In a later episode, when they've got shit going on, they pretty much to tell him to fuck off and let them get on with it. And he agrees. Sabrina constantly interrupts his sermons, pointing out that their religion is a crock of shit and that he, himself, is making up shit as he goes along. She's correct, of course, but he's the head of his particular coven and yet does nothing about her impertinence. On the other hand, when a full witch makes a minor mistake, he threatens to kill her and her two sisters if they ever screw up again. There's absolutely no consistency with his standing in the community, nor what his reaction will be to any given situation. Particularly irritating are the scenes with Blackwood and Madame Satan, during which it's never explained who is whose boss. They bark orders at each other one minute, then cow down the next. It feels like parts of the show are still in their first draft, whereas others have had copious amounts of rewrites, but both have been filmed and edited in to the final product.

Episode five – of ten – is a dream episode! The ultimate failure in any show (Star Trek disguised their dream episodes using a Holodeck instead, but the result was exactly the same), dream episodes are ones in which nothing fucking matters, because it's all a dream. It doesn't matter what happens in the episode, it's wiped out by the end credits. To stick a dream episode halfway through your first season stinks of an underdeveloped script. If there isn't enough plot to fill up ten episodes (and, believe me, there isn't), then don't film ten episodes. Condense it in to nine, or eight. Hell, be British about it and just have two six-part seasons and then never return to the premise ever again. You'll be beloved forever.

Therein lies the major problem with CAOS. There just isn't enough of it, and there's too much of it. The characters are, on the whole, dull, unimaginative and one-dimensional. The plots to each episode are dribbled across an hour plus of screen time, with barely half an hour's worth of material and the overall arc of season one focusses far too much on setting things up for season two, without giving us a reason to want to come back. By the end of episode ten, I was bored more than anything. I cared nothing for any of the characters and any good will I had felt towards the show at the beginning had been long-since spent. To the devil with them all.