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innuendostudios · 3 years ago

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I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.

I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.

This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??

Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.

I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.

Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.

Brace yourselves.

Some quick prehistory:

In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)

Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.

Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.

We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don’t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.

Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.

The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.

Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.

This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.

Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.

In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.

In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.

Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.

Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.

In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.

After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.

In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.

Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.

Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.

[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]

In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.

It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.

To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.

They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.

A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.

But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.

Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.

(sigh) Let’s take a breath.

Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.

In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.

Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”

Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.

The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.

What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.

This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.

The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.

Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.

In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.�� They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.

Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?

And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.

So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?

The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!

Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,

How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.

What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:

you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.

MEMEIFICATION

So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.

Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.

A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.

You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -

ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.

If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!

If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times

that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?

So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,

this is a rape joke.

I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.

Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.

If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.

Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.

In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”

What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.

Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.

And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.

The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.

In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.

You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.

It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL

A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.

It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.

The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.

They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.

I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.

LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP

One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”

Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.

A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.

Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.

This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”

But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.

AD CAMPAIGN

George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.

GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.

Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING

One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.

Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”

People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.

This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.

This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.

This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.

THE ARGUMENT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO END

Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”

The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They’ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.

This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.

This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.

The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”

And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.

But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.

WHY GAMES?

Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:

why not games?

Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.

This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.

And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.

The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.

And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.

Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.

Sorry this was such a bummer.

Thank you for your time.

#video essay #alt-right playbook #Youtube

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ommsims · 4 years ago

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story process challenge

i was tagged by @xldkx to do this challenge, created by @herpixels , like a month? a month and a half? ago and it’s been sitting half finished in my drafts for nearly as long. *sigh* (regardless, i love stuff like this so even if it takes me forever to get to it, i appreciate the tags! 💕).

i decided to answer all the qs because it took me damn long enough to get to this, so i might as well put some extra elbow grease into it (plus it was fun!). btw it’s all going under a cut b/c it is long. i apologize in advance.

1. My Writing Process - used to be a hot damn mess. literally word docs strewn throughout my pc. However, I recently switched to using Onenote (it’s what i use to organize my d&d campaign notes) and hoo-boy is it so much nicer. this is how it’s set up and it’s honestly night and day. i can have a page with outlines, a page to organize & order screenshots, and a separate page for drafting text, and i can easily toggle though them without having to switch windows? a big thumbs up from me.

When it comes to actual writing- I used to write my drafts in novel format, which i enjoyed but it made “converting” them into tumblr posts time consuming and frustrating. I ended up scrapping most of the text in the process, retaining pretty much only the dialogue.

Anyway, nowadays I write in more of a screenplay format: dialogue only + key scene information with the occasional note to self.

I do keep a master “arcs” page with key events and each individual character’s arc from beginning to end and secondary “outline” pages with slightly more detailed outline for each leg of the project. No screencaps b/c spoilers galore!

My typical work flow process for a scene goes: (1) brainstorm scene ideas, (2) take screenshots, (3) organize screenshots into a rough storyboard, (4) add 1st draft of text, (5) edit photos, (6) edit text, (7) upload to "drafts” here on tumblr, (8) let sit for a bit (9) take a final look at things/proofread and edit as needed. It may sound counterintuitive, but i find it much easier to write dialogue for a set of images rather than attempt to take images based on prewritten text. I feel more comfortable editing and tweaking tone and content in the text this way. Otherwise, I get frustrated when I “can’t” shoot a scene exactly as it appeared in my head.

2. How I build my scenes - A lot of what i do is rooted in gameplay, therefore my sets are usually (a) play-tested and (b) not super pretty. I’ve certainly improved at decorating & building over the years but more often than not I download lots off tumblr and the gallery because I don’t have the patience, aptitude, or time to build all of my own sets. That being said, I frequently gut builds only to build a number of completely unrelated mini sets inside to reduce the number of times i have to replace lots. I also keep a list of “important locations” and where certain characters live / will move to, to help keep this all straight as there aren’t nearly enough lots per neighborhood or even per world in this damn game...

my least favorite part of scene building is actually decorating. lol. Don’t get me wrong, I love clutter. I honestly do. but fuck me if i expect myself to spend hours meticulously decorating a set, spend another 3 hours toggling back and forth b/w BB & live modes adjusting things to get rid of the damn routing errors. (yeah, yeah, i know i could ignore them, they’re not important, especially in those scenarios where i’m using a set for screenshots and nothing else, but idk. it really grinds my gears.) and then have to replace the lot like a week later because there aren’t enough lots in the game. *sigh*

3. CC/Pose Making - i do not consider myself to be a cc creator nor a pose maker but i do dabble occasionally. And to be completely honest i’d much rather spend my time doing other stuff, so it’s not high on my list of priorities atm. plus there are so many talented cc creators in this community; i can usually get by with what’s already out there.

4. Getting in the zone - Honestly, I do a lot of brainstorming for plot & dialogue in the shower. I don’t have any particular playlists to get me “in the writing mood” but I do enjoy listening to music as I work. Either instrumental stuff or simply artists/songs I like. If something just so happens to “fit” a scene I’m working on, one i’ve got planned, or even just gives me vibes for a certain character or group, I add a quick note to the top of said scene’s draft. Most of the time I stick it in the recesses of my brain and add a quick link when I finally get to the point of posting the draft to tumblr. For whatever reason, when I have one of those “oh this song is perfect for X” moments it’s essentially ingrained in my mind for the rest of eternity.

5. The screenshot folder - this will most likely give some of you out there major anxiety. but i swear it’s an organized chaos. :)

yep. 32.9gb of screenshots & related things...

So with the raws from a single random scene selected, you can see i take roughly 10 screenshots per image posted. not terrible i guess but i’m working on it. Typically I take screenshots and once I’m done editing a scene I’ll move them from the general folder to a more specific project folder.

6. Captions - I’ll answer this in three parts:

for my townie story. not really. I prefer using the text box. I tend to write (& re-write) the dialogue for each one of these scenes several times over as I add more “scenes” into my drafts. It would be incredibly inefficient, time consuming, and would waste a lot more space on my pc to have to save .psds of each image just so i could edit dialogue when I decide: “oh hey maybe so and so needs to bring up X in this scene” and then change my mind an hour later.

for niko, noor, & co. I’m a text on image type gal here. don’t really know why, but it gives the project a different energy. ironically it makes it feel more laid-back to me. which i guess makes sense, it’s a much more light-hearted “story” than my townie project. which is, imo, very soapy haha.

for legacy stuff. all text goes below the images in the text box. reasoning: it’s gameplay, I don’t brainstorm, outline, or pre-write for this. I play the game, take screenshots, plug ‘em into my drafts and write some commentary / dialogue to go along with it.

7. Editing - i am a creature of habit and have not majorly changed my editing process in probably a year and a half (when I began using reshade and had to adjust my color correcting psd). it’s a super basic system:

drag & drop my “color correction” psd.

run actions in ps. (i made my own “all-in-one” actions to really streamline the process; i have different “actions sets” for my premades’ story and for other things that get posted to tumblr. even if no one else notices it, i like the little details that keep my projects separate and “identifiable”.

voila. all set to upload.

sometimes i crop images, add “text effects”, or do more in depth editing (i.e. editing a phone screen or adding rain etc.) but overall i try and keep it simple for myself.

8. Throwback - i posted an image of one of the first (but never posted) scenes I’d written for my townie project up above. but as for how would i redo a scene i’d already posted. well i’m currently re-doing my townie story so i guess i’ll just say you’ll see how it’s redone when i get to part 1! 😉

anyway, no tags because i’m so embarrassingly late to this party but if you hadn’t gotten around to this tag, wanted to do it but didn’t get a tag, or started it and left it to sit and now you’re thinking “oh god that was months ago should i even post this anymore?!?” consider yourself tagged by me and go ahead and post it for all to see!

#tag train #story process challenge #it's long. it's rambly. but that's me.#this one was a challenge! a challenge but fun.

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filippoinzaghi · 4 years ago

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1, 2, and 4 pls!

1.Tell us about your current project(s) – what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?

So I have four main projects at the moment. I have others but they are just embryos, a couple lines written down somewhere so as to not forget about them and work them later on like brioche dough.

That Carraville cuddles prompt

You sent me this one months ago now I think but I’m getting there!!

Progress : It’s about three fourth done, I’m just trying to find a nice transition scene to link what I have so far and the last scene I have written some time ago already.

What I love about it : it’s totally self-indulgent in the setting/context. I don’t want to spoil too much as I want it to be a surprise but the drabble is set in an AU-ish sort when Carraville (and others familiar faces) take part into a TV game show about teams of two having to hitchhike to reach their given destination with barely any money and having to complete different challenges along the race.

“Uncle Beom-pal” Project

What was intended as a drabble and will probably finish at 4/5k words qzsedrcftgybh. A fic about Cho Beom-pal, himbo extraordinaire from Kingdom, a korean original Netflix show about zombies in the early Joseon era.

Progress : I’d say I’m about halfway done. The more I write and think about this WIP, the more I think about scenes I could add or change, the more I can see the construction of the story, almost like a storyboard. I do have a clear-cut vision of how it will be now so I think it won’t change too much from what I have in mind.

What I love about it : I decided to set the story during the timelapse that happens at the end of season 2 so it allows me a certain form of freedom to imagine what may have happened during the seven years timelapse (the fic is set a year before the story resumes). It also gives me the opportunity to develop further Beom-pal’s layers that we see in season 2 (honestly the best character arc of the whole show) and to speculate on his relationship with the new king who happens to be his young nephew. To give you an idea of Beom-pal’s situation at the end of season 2 : he’s alone. His friends are not with him anymore, his family is all gone. Except for his nephew. Who also happens to be the king. Whom he also happens to be the prime advisor. I try to explore the complex relationship this situation creates because of protocols and royal duties in contrast to the king being just a child and he and Beom-pal basically being the only family they have left. As you can see I’m very invested in this project haha ^^’

The “Ceci predicted an actual scene of the show in fic” project

This WIP has been going on since August while I was watching Miss Korea (a truly beautiful show and criminally underrated).

Progress : it’s been a slow progress but I’m almost there.

What I love about it : the characters, who are the secondary couple in the show but who, imo, steals the spotlight. During an episode at the end of the first half of the show, there was a scene that made me wonder what happened after and I just expanded it trying to tie it with the character’s traits and depictions. Find me wheezing four episodes later when like... 85% of what I had in mind ACTUALLY HAPPENED in the show aqzsedrftgyhuji. Anyway, I’ll go through with it even though it is a bit of a canon divergence. What I like about this WIP is that I make the characters “see” one another for the first time and not just a glimpse (which happened some episodes earlier). They are more vulnerable, especially Teacher Jung (his name truly means Teacher so I just call him that) who is your typical petty thug but with some moral code and a good heart underneath.

The “5+1 times Nam Ju-ri x Lee Sang-in” project

Lots of projects about korean dramas at the moment but I have watched a lot of them lately so I guess it’s only fair. And it’s also because I can’t find any fics focusing on my favourite characters (usually supportive characters) so I guess I want to be the change I want to see in the world.

Progress : very early stage of the fic, I wrote bits of paragraphs or dialogue for different chapters at the same time, it’s kind of all over the place at the moment.

What I love about it : there are no fics focusing on these two who had a cute, individual, development of their character and who have a blossoming relationship. They are both losers who cares and I just love themn, they deserve more love. This is truly a self-indulgent fic and that’s just nice in and of itself.

2. Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project

Re : the Uncle Beom-pal project.

There are two scenes that appeared to me after I began writing but which gave me so much feels just thinking about it that they had to be there.

The plot of this WIP is basically the young king, on the eve of the day in remembrance of all the victims of the “great plague” (he doesn’t know it was a zombie epidemic, everyone tries to protect him and not tell him what truly happened), asking Beom-pal to tell him a story before going to sleep. The ceremonies planned the next day weighs on his mind and makes him think about his friends and, especially about Seo-bi : a nurse who saved his life and to whom he is truly devoted like a lost puppy. And thus, he tells the king what happened without really telling him. By turning it into a story, not mentioning names but using nouns or adjectives (”The Healer”, “The Warrior” or, for himself, “The Fool”) and just being vague about “monsters” in a far away place, a long time ago. As he goes on with the story, past and present mix together as Beom-pal remembers his and his friend’s journey.

The two scenes are flashback scenes between Beom-pal and Seo-bi right after the last big “battle” against the zombies. One flashback she tends to his wounds and there’s a sort of silent reverence as if she finally realises he’s not just a useless and coward nobleman. And he, on the other hand understands what is probably to come (her leaving with two other characters, their friends) and how he wishes he could go with them or keep her with him but either solution is simply impossible. And the other is their goodbye (they won’t see one another for, AT LEAST, seven years and the guy is still yearning, can you believe). And again, it’s mostly silent, sentences cut short because they understand and they don’t need to say all of it. He’s not being talkative and a lost puppy following her every move anymore and she lets herself be more relaxed, lets her guard down a bit with him to show just how far they have come personally and in their feelings towards one another. Truly cannot wait to make myself cry and for my friend to threaten me to call the police on me zserdtfygh

4. Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like)

He was tired, tired of pretending, of wearing a mask when nothing seemed bright anymore in his life. He felt the salty tears brush his lips before he realized he had begun to cry. He put the barbell back in its place, before it threatened to fall from his soon trembling hands, and he sat on the bench, completely consumed by uncontrollable sobs.

Failure, fraud, failure, fraud, failure, fraud… His mind did not leave him any rest.

From and I’ll only need to hold you (go back to sleep and dream) – Chapter 4

More than that paragraph, it was the whole chapter that I was happy with. It came from a rather personal place and it wasn’t always easy to write it but when I was done, I felt a bit better and I was happy with the result. The paragraph above is the beginning of my favourite scene in the chapter which is when two then-not-old Italians have a confrontation. Well… More like Rino confronting Gigi after the latter has isolated himself for some time. And it’s in the dark. Ever since I’ve read Long Day’s Journey Into Night and studied it, I’ve been fascinated by the trope of dark/night setting = when the characters are the most honest, the most vulnerable and the most true to themselves. And that’s what happened in that scene. I was happy with how I wrote it out and the vibes it gives off.

#thank you!!!#and sorry for taking so long #Answers #Ask stuff #My Fics

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bluedaviau · 4 years ago

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「 cherry. rachel hilson. cis female. she/her. 」 are you ready for the time of your life, BLUE DAVIAU? the TWENTY ONE year old FINE ART graduate from tulane is ready to HOT AIR BALLOON in DUBAI this semester. close friends would describe them as IDEALISTIC and CREATIVE, but there’s really only one way to find out. get ready for what august has in store for you, BLUE ! 「 pepper. twenty one. est. she/her. 」

ABOUT THE MUN. the 2000 claymation film chicken run radicalized me

what up, i’m pepper, i’m twenty four, and not to flex but i’ve had writer’s block for two str8 months !! but i’m hoping to change that right here right now with one ms. blue daviau so thank you for coming on this journey with me friends it’s gonna be wild. a bit about me is i’ve gone to the mall literally every day this week and honestly, i am Exhausted from it so i apologize for the mess this intro is about to be. i’m a taurus with a libra moon and libra rising so do with that information what you will. my favourite pokemon is mewtwo. growing up i had a massive crush on danny phanton and ben 10, like i loved those lanky boys that could transform to fight crime for some reason?? i can’t tell you why. also when i was a child i thought god looked like king triton from the little mermaid. alright that is enough about me, moving on to blue.

BIO. if you use my coloured pencils you better put them back in rainbow order

this is going to be the short version of her bio but if you want to see the long rambly messy version you can find my google doc/app here ! which i recommend you looking at for no other reason than to see how cute the little cherry doodle i inserted in there is. it took me so long to get that in there and looking cute. it’s baby’s first fancy google doc 😌 anyways sdjhdsjh

blue was born and raised in hawaii! her mother, stormi, was miss hawaii state at one point and her father, reggie, was a pro surfer! however before blue was born her father had a surfing accident that left him in a wheelchair. he turned to art to try to cope with the trauma of this accident and the reality of never being able to surf again, and he even opened up his own gallery! his gallery became a tourist attraction in hawaii and pretty well known in the art community and after passing down her crown blue’s mother became a news anchor. so the fact was blue was the daughter of two local legends in hawaii and the expectations were high!

not to mention the fact that all of blue’s elder siblings were amazing too. blue has five older siblings and all of them are successful in their own right and in their own niche. they’re also all named after colours funnily enough. the daviau parents had big hippy energy in case you were wondering.

so growing up blue was always just kind of the ‘other’ sibling. all her older siblings had showed their talents at a young age and grew into them pretty quickly, while blue was just kind of... there. she was an artist, but she wasn’t a groundbreaking artist. she could sing, but her voice was simply pretty, not lifechanging. she could surf, but she was average at best. to put it simply, blue was the daviau sibling who wasn’t at all special. which ironically, made her stand out like a sore thumb.

blue didn’t mind too much though, at least not when she was younger. she kept to herself anyways. all blue wanted do when she was younger was read, draw, and explore hawaii’s wild life, so she had everything she could possibly need to be happy right at her fingertips. life was good for her despite her inadequacy, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t aware of it (and wouldn’t develop a complex about it later).

when blue was six though her parents decided that they needed to have sweet, sweet, baby number seven to save their marriage. they named that sweet boy gray. he did not save a damn thing, but he sure was cute. blue was eleven when her parents finally divorced and that pretty much marked the end of blue having any kind of parental guidance.

long story short, both of blue’s parents went kinda buckwild the moment they were single and most of the responsibility to take care of five year old gray fell on blue. blue was the one to make gray’s meals. blue was the one to give gray a bath. blue was the one to tuck gray in at night and get him into his school clothes in the morning. blue was the one to help him with his homework and hold his hand as he crossed the street and honestly pretty much do everything for him until she was about seventeen. both her parents simply checked out on that front, and it the end blue was more of a mother to gray than either of their parents were.

the pressure of having to not only take care of herself but also gray when she wasn’t even legally an adult yet, was honestly way too much for blue. her anxiety skyrocketed, and the pressure she put on herself only grew. the only way blue could really cope with it and calm herself down was by 1. losing herself in nature, 2. drawing, or 3. reading, or rather most likely, doing all of the above at once. using art of an escape pretty much guaranteed that blue’s love and passion for it grew, and with that her talent for it. by that time blue was seventeen she had a full portfolio ready to send off to any university outside of hawaii that would take her. because you bet your bottom dollar your girl was getting the hell outta there!

as we all know blue got accepted to tulane. it was hard to leave gray and her family behind, but blue set her mother and father straight before she left, ensuring that gray would be well taken care of in her stead and hoping that some distance between herself and her family that was so dependent on her (her mother never new how to cook so blue made all the meals, her father never knew how to handle gray so he was always coming to blue to advice, gray was absolutely lost without her, etc) would lift that pressure off her shoulders.

it didn’t at first. the first few months were tough with all the calls blue got from home. that plus the schoolwork she had on her plate almost left her more stressed than before. however, slowly the calls began to fade and slowly blue was able to put her full focus in her art program, and later, her animation programs.

sorry folks my brain is fried, we’re gonna stop here!

HEADCANNONS. on all levels except physical i am sitting on top of the moon with my legs swinging back and forth

Blue’s father is in a wheelchair from the surfing accident that made him take up art. His past as a professional surfer is actually part of the reason why his gallery is so popular though honestly, because the accident was televised and after that tragedy many of his fans and the public wanted to support him. He just also so happened to be really talented. But yeah, Blue’s father was really talented at surfing, he was even invited to the summer olympics in the nineties! But he was also the type to refuse to go because ‘surfing should be freeing, the olympics have so many restrictions, it takes away from what surfing is!!’ dkjsd he was that type yk? I also imagine Blue’s parents were the type to be on the front lines at protests. As it is, Blue is the same, very passionate, definitely has made some bomb ass posters and t-shirts for every women's march she’s attended.

Blue can play the ukulele really well and she honestly has a really pretty singing voice. However she can’t dance even a little bit. Honestly, she could literally break a bone. Really wants to throw it back though 😔

Loves to bake and cook because they’re relaxing activities with built in rewards. Learned to bake and cook because of having to take care of herself and her brother's meals when she was younger, that is if she didn’t want them both to literally get diabetes. As it is though, now that she doesn’t have to worry about her baby brother’s diet as well as her own, she will make a whole chocolate cake just cause she’s a little stressed and proceed to actually eat it. But she will share though. Catch Blue coming to your hotel room with sweets.

All of Blue’s elder siblings are adults now, but Gray is still about sixteen. They exchanged letters from Hawaii to Tulane and Blue always spends hours decorating hers and including little snacks and cute little knick knacks in them, despite the fact that Gray is now an angsty teenager and does not find these things as entertaining as he used to. Despite that, they are definitely the closest out of their siblings for the most part.

Blue’s siblings' names are Sage, Jett, Jade, Ruby, Rose and of course Gray. Jade and Jett, and Ruby and Rose are both twins.

The type to cry easily honestly. Also the type to carry other people’s problems with her. Like if you tell Blue that someone hurt your feelings last week she will remember and she will check on you the next time she sees you. Very empathetic, almost to a fault though because she’s constantly being careful of everyone else’s feelings rather than her own. The type who’s a good listener though. Also the type to give either really good advice or really odd advice.

Art still tends to be her happy place, something she got from her father. Trying to find her own place outside of her father's shadow. She wants to get into the world of animation and cartoons but the whole task is a bit daunting. Is planning to work her ass off for it though! Spends a lot of time in coffee shops storyboarding and making animations. I think she may have a contract going on with a cartoon network of some sort, like they may have picked up a show of hers? Because I imagine her putting out some of her first shorts on Youtube and that might have gotten a bit of attention and led to her getting a deal for a show, so. She’s probably working her ass off towards that, and is honestly probably 1.doubting if they really picked up her show because of her talent or her father’s name, and 2.wondering if she can really do this.

Loves water in all shapes and forms. Since she can’t go to the beach everyday, the small bath in her tiny ass apartment??? Suddenly heaven. That said, Blue is either terrified of the ocean or loves it and I can’t decide which. Standby on that.

Makes a great coffee cake. Like it’s to die for.

Is VERY passionate about the environment. Is a pescatarian. Goes to the farmers market to pick out fresh produce. Loves to hike.

Always has the urge to sketch or paint after she reads poetry or novels. Highlights her favourite bits and has the tendency to read them over when she’s sad. The parts she loves are usually the parts that leave her wanting something.

Draws when she’s sad too. Claire Saffitz energy when she’s cooking but also just through life. Very friendly, but an introvert when it comes to gathering her energy.

Lives for libraries and bookstores, and has stacks on stacks of books in her old apartment. Loves old children's books honestly, like The Secret Garden, and poetry. Like whimsical and fantastical fiction with flowery words that just brings you to another place? Blue’s freaking jam. Falls in love with someone in fiction every five days, and desperately wants to be in love in real life, hence all the tinder dates and blind dates. I don’t think Blue ever has fallen in love though, like not really.

An absolute baby when it comes to the cold. Literally there could be a slight breeze and Blue will be acting like she’s suddenly in the arctic. Any cold destinations will be greeted by a bundled up Blue’s Clues.

Made her first painting out of her own feces at six months old. Her parents proudly framed it. It’s probably still up in the attic in their Hawaii home.

Won her first art show at six but was unsure whether it was because her art really was something worth awarding or because of her father’s name. The award got her on the front page of the Honolulu Tribune but with her father proudly at her back and the title ‘Following in her father’s footsteps’ above her head. Blue just wants to find her own footing in the art world, and be her own person.

Keeps a journal and has since she was a teenager.

WANTED CONNECTIONS. i’m the friend that needs help opening water bottles.

coming to theatres near you soon!

#august.intro #i am too tired to write any more for now but tomorrow ??? it's over for you hoes

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olivetheflyinghuman · 4 years ago

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Wip masterlist

Click read more to see some of my wips. Many are in very early stages, others (one of them) is currently in the second draft

And as y'all can tell I haven't even come up with most of the names smh

Fallen gods

CW: death, gore

Like everyone else, I too have a story where some irresponsible people mess with gods

There's this lil bitch that is doing a weird research and...then he dies for reasons (all of his friends are witnesses uwu)

So main character that is lil bitch's best friend finds the notes about the research and brings him back. Obviously he's not fully alone

So things go as the now rencarnated friend is wild and tried to do things like murder and robbery

His friend group is all like: ah ah ah u so sexy don't do that or... We might have to kill you again luv

Anyway mc has a chicken as a pet. And they take very good care of her!

To be honest there are a lot of things about this that I still need to work out

The vibe: snow filled roads, street lamps illuminating empty roads, cozy knits, blood on whispering woods

Storyboard ii

Mc has his personality/body stolen. Basically he looks like a Chad now and sometimes he thinks and acts like one too. Truly tragic I know 😥

The inspiration for that came to me on a history class where we were discussing Greek art... Don't remember how I actually came up with it lmao.

Anyway MCs friends r helping him get himself back before he looses his own memory and is stuck as a Chad forever

The setting changes from our world and a different sorta of fantasy world

It's about friendship👌 and betrayal 👌

Characters r: Logan, our Chad that just wants his memory/personality back so he can be pretentious again

Jedi, Logan's best friend that just wants her childhood best friend back

Twins, basically the ones with the biggest connection to the magic world, I won't say their names bc now I think they r cringy and I want to pick new ones

Joshua, the smart one intellectually but makes dumb choices when it comes to real life.

Nicholas, I don't want to say that he's the baby of the story but he's definitely my baby. Honestly too scared of everything and he just wants to hold a hand. He's still in highschool (he's in his last year whereas his friends r on the 1st of uni) and he feels left behind

"even a worm will turn"

Vibe: green and blue neon lights, abandoned churches, a thin line of smoke, vintage books with annotations

wlw period drama

I actually came up with this some days ago.... It's a really funny story but I'm not telling it now

Anyway mc is lonely and stays at her house most of the time writing stories and poems

Her sister is usually traveling bc she's a scientist or smt ejfnfjf

Then one day her sister comes back to their home and brings a scientific artist with her

The sister has to leave for one afternoon so mc has to show the artist around her house. They end up in a meadow near a lake painting and writing poems and sorta of get feelings for each other

When the artist goes back to her country they keep exchanging letters and falling in love one word at a time

Vibe: wild flowers, white linen sheets, countryside, rivers but in a nice way!!

Superhero story

I pretty much have everything figured out about this story but the villain so

Half of the characters are unhinged and just do what I wish I could do :'( like set their abusers on fire figuratively and mentally

I honestly don't know how to speak about this without giving away major spoilers and there are a lot of povs so... Yeah it's a talk for another day

cloves and bread

Inspired by a childhood tale and a myth:-)

Dragons, rich girls and kings

Burning woods

Lots of dissosiatian

Mc hears voices from the woods (when he was young the fey tried to kidnap him and he sorta of stayed linked to them)

It mostly deals with mc feeling crazy and wild things happening

There's also a mysterious love interest

Autumn knight

Mc's sister goes missing so mc goes looking for her

She is my bby but I have planned 1% of this wip smh it shouldn't even be here

Sleeping wolves

I watched too many Ari aster movies and a lot of heist movies and then I was like ok luv

The concept is eat the rich but in a really wild way and part of the reason why I did the mc characters white and male was because I'm afraid people will look at the story and think these characters r doing what they r doing bc for example they r crazy emotional women(yes people still think that unfortunately) so by being male I really want the reader to get that perhaps they r just crazy and r using the eat the rich as an excuse for what they do

Mc is lost in life bc his brother was missing for a while and then he was found dead

Then he gets closer with a weird group of people

They go apeshit and uhmmm

And uhmmm maybe one of the characters took eat the rich a bit too literally

I don't want to talk about this rjbghff it's a mess luv

But it actually sounds better when u read it bc like half of these things r supposed to be... A "surprise"

#one day ill make peoper aesthetics and intro for these wips #idk i just wanted to post and didn't know what to post #writeblr #wip #writers of tumblr

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cowsaresushi-coral · 5 years ago

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Webcomic Progress Update

ONE last reference sheet before I can officially start drawing the main chunk of the webcomic. I’ll be posting the reference sheets for the two protagonists, and then all the main characters are done.

I thought I would do the occasional update on what’s progressing for “Spirit’s World” because I’m kind of all over the place for it. If you want details of what needs to be done, and plans for it, please proceed with the read more :P.

Oh I’m excited because I like what I have, though I’m nervous that it won’t live up to expectations because I talk it up a lot. Please lower those expectations because this is my first time doing some REAL writing, and comic things. I’m learning as I go. :V

Hope you guys enjoy it as much as I do!

Things that needs to get done:

-I need to make a clear sheet on personality, and dreams for each of the 4 main characters (2 protags, and 2 antags). Get them more hammered down, and consistent, so they don’t feel flat. I know what they’re like, but it’s a bit jumbled right now, so I just need to brush it up, and organize it.

-Go through the storyboard again for pass number 2. Everything that’s happening is down in the storyboard, but some areas I’d like to change up, make more specific, or extend a bit. So not a rewrite of the storyboard, and more of a polishing. Just make sure all the dialogue is written down, accurate to the characters, and beats hit well.

-Make a master map and a name for the locations. I don’t necessarily need to worry about this too much because the first area won’t be visited in the near future, and the main town location is only looked at briefly before proceeding to a forest, which I can just BS because haha trees!

Plans for the Comic:

-I’m planning on splitting Chapter 1 into roughly 3 parts because the way the story is told, there are areas that are a nice stopping point where I can take a hiatus, and finish the next sections. I don’t like to upload one page at a time because I like to go back and change things if I’ve made an adjustment later down the line. Also nobody likes waiting! Including me. Anyways, I’ll have a day where I’ll mass upload pages, take probably a couple of months to finish the next section, and do the same thing again. I’d like to upload the whole chapter, but it’s VERY long, so I thought I’d release parts of it early.

-Side comics where we hang out with characters other than the main characters. I have lots of characters I worked on that are only important for a small portion, or are just the main antags for one chapter. If I like them, I’ll take the time to write and draw a comic JUST for them. Have fun and all that.

#spirit's world #progress #2020

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whitleyschn33 · 5 years ago

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RWBY 7 Trailer Thoughts

So, I said I would share my thoughts on the trailer, so here they are! I’m going to start at the beginning and write down what comes to mind for each little section, but since I have seen the entire trailer a couple times now, I may jump forward to connect whatever I’m addressing to something later in the trailer. This might make things seem a bit erratic, so I apologize in advance if this comes out like a lot of rambling nonsense. That said, let’s begin!

1. We open with Ironwood narrating that these are “uncertain times” over a montage of the Kaiju Grimm attack Argus, then cuts to Ruby saying that she’s trying to do what’s best, but doesn’t know if what’s best is what’s right as we see her use her Silver eyes on the Kaiju.

I’m hoping that this line about Ruby not being sure about what’s best being what’s right implies that we’ll get some kind of fallout for the events of Argus. One of my major gripes with the V6 finale is just how dangerous their plan was for the civilians in Argus, and how the narrative so far hasn’t really acknowledged that. The first step of their plan was cutting communications in Argus – something that would have caused mass panic even if they had succeeded and got away without the military noticing in time to send out forces. That panic can and did draw Grimm, and very easily would have killed dozens to hundreds of people. They’re huntsmen and huntresses – even if what’s “best” may be getting the Relic to Atlas, that doesn’t make what they did to do so (putting the civilians of Argus in unnecessary danger) “right”. Anyway, moving on.

2. Next, we get the gang flying into Atlas, whose airspace is completely full of military airships, with Weiss saying that this isn’t right. It then transitions to a shot of Atlas above Mantle, which seems to be on fire, then to the city, then the streets, where we see Atlesian knights patrolling, and only a handful of civilians walking outside, while Blake says the city just seems awful. We see a man throwing a trashcan at a TV screen (which as far as I can tell was showing the “Atlas Broadcasting(?) Network”) while a voice asks “what can we do?” (Can someone tell me who that is? It doesn’t really sound like Oscar or Jaune, and Qrow’s new VA pulls off a much more convincing performance at the end of the trailer, so I don’t think it’s him). Cut to Ruby saying that they didn’t come this far to fail now.

So, from Weiss’s line, we know that this is not how things usually are. The military is on high alert, showing off how strong their defenses are to match the closed off borders. I would guess that this also means troops roaming the city on patrol isn’t how things used to be either. Now, from what I’ve seen, most people seem to be taking this as a sign of martial law, and that theory certainly seems likely – the man throwing the trashcan and the fires we see are all potential signs of rioting, which could be a cause and/or effect of martial law being enacted. I have to wonder if that’s only part of the story, though. Later in the trailer, we see the gang fighting Grimm on the city streets (so I assume that’s what Ruby’s line is directed at), which we know from the leaked storyboards and their clothes happens immediately after they enter Atlas. The only time we’ve seen Grimm inside kingdom walls is during the Fall, so why are they there? What if this is a recent occurrence – a sudden influx of Grimm making it past the defenses and into the city proper? That’s another explanation (or even just another reason in addition to rioting) for troops to be patrolling, and I could very easily see that becoming a vicious cycle. Grimm get in, people panic, drawing more Grimm to the area and making it more likely for them to get it, causing more attacks and more panic, and making the soldiers seem less like protectors and more like ineffective “peacekeepers”. There’s a lot more I could say about this, but let’s keep going.

3. We go back to Ironwood’s voice overlaying what seem to be two/three different fights – the fight in the city streets against the sabertooth Grimm and two different fights in a mineshaft (and yes, they’re mines, the warning signs on the walls warn of deep mineshafts) against a new type of Grimm that I’ve heard are called Centinels and later an Ice Geist. He says, “Until now, I believed it was impossible to truly turn the tides against Salem. We find ourselves in the position of needing…. A new approach. She will keep returning stronger and stronger –“ cut to the new model for Ironwood “- unless we destroy her.” Cut to Ruby saying “Tell us how we can help.”

So, the main thing of interest to me here is Ironwood. We can see from the shot of his new appearance that he’s no longer taking care of his appearance like he did in the first few volumes – the stubble from V4 has become a full grown beard, and his hair doesn’t look like it’s been combed in weeks. The guilt and paranoia that we saw budding in V4 has fully come into bloom, as evident by his lines here, the heightened defenses we saw around Atlas, and the troops patrolling the city. In V4 E11, Jacques accuses Ironwood of never trusting anyone but himself, to which Ironwood responds to “For good reason,” then immediately says, “If Oz had just listened to me from the start…” Ironwood clearly believes that the Fall of Beacon would not have happened had Oz listened to him – used his strategies. Oz’s strategies “failed”, so this reaffirmed Ironwood in thinking that he’d had the right ideas – that if he had been able to control what was happening in Beacon, he could have stopped it. So, now, he’s not taking any risks with Atlas. He’s doing everything he thinks is right to protect the kingdom, no matter how paranoid or insane it seems – closing the borders, dust embargos, potential martial law, whatever it takes to keep the kingdom “safe”.

Now, this seems to be extending to Salem herself. If Oz was flawed about Beacon, he may be reasoning, why can’t he be wrong about Salem? Maybe there is a way – maybe the strength of Atlas *can* destroy Salem. Salem always seems to come back, maybe she’s just never been completely destroyed, and that’s what we need to try to do to fully get rid of her. Now, we know that this isn’t true, that Salem can’t be killed, can’t be destroyed, but even if Ironwood knows this (from his “believed it was impossible to turn the tides” line), he’s clearly no longer thinking straight. He no longer trusts Oz for having reasons for not simply going after her with an army, since Oz has been knocked down from his pedestal of “all-wise and powerful” with his “death”, so now he’s going to try to go about things his own way… which, from the state of Mantle? Doesn’t seem to be working amazingly well. More on that when I try to summarize my thoughts into a cohesive TLDR.

4. Cue Team RWBY jumping out of a plane into some kind of complex (my guess would be the mines/refineries at the mine site), interspersed with them fighting either the Sabertooths or the Cenitals, and title card.

So, “final” (I say that, but I’ll probably talk about them again) take on the new outfits. Ruby is still my favorite – it still looks really good, the hair is far tamer than I or anyone else thought it would be and I’m glad (though in some places, particularly the concept art that went around like a week ago, it really looks like Cinder, and I’m not sure how to feel about that), since this just gives her hair a more stylized look.

Blake is sitting at my second favorite – I think it’s a look that comes together pretty well, and the hair looks fine (I’ve seen some people complaining about how flat it looks, and I’m just here like, yeah, that happens a lot when you cut it that short, it can lose the volume it used to have).

Now Weiss and Yang… are now kinda tied. Yang’s outfit looks better than it did in the original art for me, and I think that’s mainly because the belt breaks up the khaki a bit better in 3D, so it’s not just a great expanse of bleh (still think the jumpsuit itself is ugly as hell, but I’ll take what I can get).

Weiss’s… is still a case where I like the aesthetic they were going for, but it doesn’t come together right. The big poofy skirt looks okay when she’s on her own (sometimes), but next to the rest of RWBY just looks so out of place and in the way and honestly a bit bland. The top half with the sleeves and gloves look… fine, but again, I wish they didn’t poof out the arms so much. The braid… still gives me really mixed feelings because it’s shorter than the concept art, but it’s still looks so thick and heavy, and adds to this unbalanced feeling I get. If it was in the back completely, instead of the side, I would be perfectly fine with it, but as it is, just throws me off. I can see what they were going for, particularly in the clip where she’s fighting a Cenital since that’s where the outfit as a whole looks best to me, but as a whole, there are too many little details that throw me off for me to really like it. Again, that might change when the first episode hits, but for now… eh.

The title card is pretty, though.

5. Back in the city streets – Qrow comments that he was expecting things to go a lot rougher, Blake and Yang are walking away when suddenly – captured by bolos! We see Blake, Qrow, then Ruby go down, the Relic falling off on to the pavement. A man approaches, while another standing of to the side, and then picks up the Relic. End trailer.

So, first off, major kudos to the new Qrow VA – his performance is outstanding. I was worried that the transition would be jarring, but if I hadn’t known they’d put someone new in, I honestly wouldn’t have noticed. His mimicry of Qrow’s voice is exceptional.

Second, I’m fairly certain that the people that captured the team are Atlas personnel. While we can’t see much, the man in frame wears white and blue, Atlas colors, and has a fairly militaristic haircut. The other figure is either wearing white boots, has a model that hasn’t been completely rendered yet, or seems to be an android, looking at the odd pattern and shape of his feet. I’ve seen some people throwing out the idea that this is Ironwood trying to take the Relic, or Atlas trying to steal the Relic, since the man picks it up, but – guys. Really? We see Ruby talking to Ironwood earlier in this trailer. They’re still in their old clothes, this is episode one. The more likely explanation is that these guys captured them because RWBY and Co attacked a military base, stole an airship, arrived in said stolen airship, and clearly are not supposed to be here if they just suddenly appeared without the border officials being informed, and so are clearly criminals in the eyes of Atlas. So, yeah, my 5 lien are on them spending, like, 5 minutes in jail before they can get to Ironwood, where he (hopefully) reams them out a bit.

So, yeah, that’s the trailer! No sign of Whitley, which, disappointed by not surprised. I’m gonna hold out hope for him to be in the intro, like in Volume 4. As for what I think may be happening this volume from the trailers, I expect we’ll have a heavy focus on Ironwood, his paranoia, and his relationship with Oz, and how that extends to how the inner circle has operated for the part 10/20/?? years. I also feel like the first big thing to be tackled will be the Grimm in the city. The fact that Grimm are getting in points to a huge breakdown in the kingdom’s defenses, despite the fact Ironwood seems to have ramped them up to 11. So, the question is, where are they coming from, and how are they getting in? Considering that the Centinals break out from the ground, and RWBY and Co are fighting in a mineshaft, I would say that it’s coming from a subterranean pocket of Grimm, like the ones that people of Mountain Glenn broke in on. Since we know Salem is experimenting more with Grimm, it’s possible that this Grimm outbreak is being caused by her seeing how viable it would be to launch an attack on Atlas from underground, where their defenses are at their weakest, and this is showing most prominently in the mines and the city around them/on the ground. Otherwise, it could be possible the SDC, while mining, broke into a cavern full of them. This doesn’t seem as likely, though, with the dust embargo. If the SDC isn’t able to sell overseas, then mining operations were most likely shut down temporarily. No use wasting money trying to get product that you can’t sell. It could be an old mine, though – one that had been boarded up cause Grimm, but that broke loose due to all the negativity caused by Ironwood’s new measures.

But ultimately, we’ll just have to wait and see! Once again, I’m sorry if this is a bit rambling – I have to leave any minute now, so I haven’t given this a through reread, but I want to get my thoughts out there in a timely manner for once, so I’m going to post anyway. Thank you for reading this far! What’re your thoughts on the trailer, the outfits, the potential plot? Feel free to comment below or send an ask, and I’ll talk to you all soon! Have a good day!

#rwby #rwby7 #ruby rose #weiss schnee #Blake Belladonna #yang xiao long #ironwood #general ironwood #qrow branwen #RWBY spoilers #rwby7 spoilers #rwby 7 trailer #rwby7 thoughts #salem #grimm #ozpin

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jodywegner · 6 years ago

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A bad day. (I just need to rant into the abyss of the internet)

I’ve never actually left work early for a bad day before. But I felt that today if I didn’t, I’d end up embarrassing myself and ruining all of my relationships with my coworkers or better yet end up in the HR office. It was just an accumulation of a few too many small things that have been building up for months while I’m emotionally vulnerable.

I also know that none of my coworkers will ever see this post. But even if they do, I doubt they were aware of my feelings. The worst part is that nothing is really anyone’s fault. There’s no bad guy, and that makes it all the more frustrating, and that finally came to a head today. Because I can’t chew people out for doing nothing wrong. Sorry for the long post. Lotta resentments getting bottled up.

So context. 1. My grandfather has been in declining health for a while now. This isn’t very upsetting for me. He’s in his mid 90s and lived a full life. We were all provided for and everything is taken care of. For me, it feels more like a natural thing that is now finally happening. My aunt and my father have been fighting for years over different things, but my grandfather’s declining health has definitely rekindled the flames of war. 2. I work in TV animation production, and my goal is to become a storyboard artist. I’ve made that goal clear. I’ve asked for tests but I can never get any. I’ve asked for feedback and no one has given me any. The shining star of this was my boss giving me 5 long minutes of not quite saying “it’s not good enough.” I figured he was busy and didn’t want to hurt my feelings. He did say that if he hadn’t hired our then current revisionist, he’d love to have me start as one. Since then, he’s hired 4 more revisionists who have come and gone for different reasons. 3. I don’t think I draw that fucking bad. I’ve been told my artists I work with “why don’t you have an art job yet?” which the answer is “because no one will fucking give me one when I ask and you guys aren’t in a position to.” (they mean it as a compliment but it just really keeps bringing me down whenever I fail) And there are a lot of people my age getting art jobs while I’m not and yah I’m not that old but it’s very stressful and discouraging regardless of logic and optimism. 4. My intern this last semester showed my boss a sample board and got extensive notes and feedback and was offered freelance revision work even though she’s still a junior in college. She’s 3 years younger than me and was here for 2 months. My boss literally walked into my office then started talking to her in the adjacent cube over the wall about how good she is and the upcoming freelance revisionist work. And I have to sit there quietly and pretend it’s not killing me. 5. I’m lactose intolerant. 6. I guess I’ve been suffering from job related depression for the above reasons. Nothing major, I’m not suicidal, but I’m definitely very unhappy and going to work is definitely not a fun or even neutral experience anymore. It’s hard because the correct answer to my problem is “git gud’ and we all know how NOT FUCKING HELPFUL that is. Today 1. I get a text from my parents at 6 am telling me that my grandfather has passed away. We went over yesterday to say our goodbyes expecting him to pass either today or tomorrow. We left at around 8pm and asked my aunt to call us when he passed and that we’d come over. So my parents find out that he passed away at 6 am today. From a third party that isn’t even FUCKING RELATED TO US. Apparently my grandfather had passed away 10 minutes after we left yesterday, and she decided not to let us know. We had to find out through some other person offering my father his condolences. 2. Well the two coworkers I am closest with were late for miscellaneous reasons so I kinda had to keep #1 bottled up for 2 hours. 3. When things happen, I bluster and storm for the first hour before calming down and becoming rational. So I’m sitting at my desk all morning trying my best to keep my shit together because I’m absolutely fuming and was (forbid) by my mother to retaliate. She’s not wrong but there’s a lotta stress and emotions here. (3.5. Although I was directly forbid retaliation, I still went ahead and planned it anyways because it was a mildly constructive use of my stress. DM me if you want to know how to ruin someone’s entire week and never get caught.) 4. I took some Lactaid 30 minutes before I decided to finish my leftover mac n cheese from the fancy food truck yesterday as breakfast. Yah the Lactaid didn’t work at all for some ungodly reason... It’s 9am and I’m in a lot of pain both physically and emotionally now.... 5. So one of my favored coworkers finally beats traffic and gets in so I go to talk to her about all of this. I immediately get cry-y. Which blah blah blah crying is part of grieving but I can do that later. It’s not great when I’m at work because crying opens up the floodgate of emotions and the near impossible task of re-wrangling them under control is now daunting. Emotional fortitude -50. And people just kinda didn’t notice that I was crying and upset and not very quietly recounting this horrible morning story. They kinda walked right by. Not a single person other than that one coworker (and my other favored one who came in a bit later) offered me any condolences or asked about how I was doing of if I was ok. It’d be one thing if that happened and no one was around and I regained my composure. BUT I DIDN’T. 6. That fucking intern (who’s a nice person but god I wish they’d stop existing in my life. It’s fucking petty but today is really the worst day for it so fuck it I’m saying it.) is coming in for a big storyboard meeting between all the board artists, revisionists, and supervisors. So I had to see her and pretend to smile and be pleasant and supportive while I’m emotionally compromised, grieving, pissed, and now petty and jealous all over again. So I get that out of the way and I sit back down and get to work. 7. The other coworker I like to talk to comes in. She was a former intern who also wants to be a board artist so we try to help each other in our endeavors together. She’s an optimist. She says that she’s going to ask if she can sit in on the meeting and asks if I’d like to come along. Bless her outgoing-ness that I struggle with. But as much as I’d like to... that’s a room full of people who either forgot that I want to be a board artist, don’t care, or are straight up ignoring me about it and keep doing and saying all of these unintentionally hurtful things to and near me. Also that fucking intern is there. Also I’m pissed. Also I’m emotionally distraught. So I declined her offer. Even if I could get something good out of that meeting, I’m pretty sure I would have just had a breakdown in the corner. So I didn’t want to embarrass myself like that or make people feel uncomfortable for doing their normal business. 8. So by this point I’m sure I’m going to be snippy or mean or start crying in front of people, so my goal was to finish my most important task and leave at noon. I finish, I grab my bag to leave. As I do, they all get out of their storyboard meeting and bluster past me because they are now late for seeing the storyboard trainee program final presentations. GREAT. 9. Another production coworker of mine comments on how its important for them to go in case they see anyone they’d like to hire as a revisionist. I fianlly hit FUCKIT and say “IM GOING HOME.” And so I go to walk to the elevators. 10. I chose the wrong time to walk to the elevators because everyone in that meeting is waiting at the elevators to go look at the storyboard trainee presentations and scope out the new talent. They’re in too much of a busy mind to notice that I’m about to cry and am probably glaring with white knuckles as I clutch my bag. Luckily for me the elevator is full and I have an excuse to take the next one and not theirs. A part of me wished that they would say “come on in! i’m sure you can fit!” But... stuff like that never happens with them. No one goes out of their way to include me in things. So... whatever. Maybe I’m just being negative trying to find the bad in every little thing, but this is a rant so I’m going to do just that because fuck the consequences of people liking me and thinking I know how to adult properly. 11. I’m driving home and get a message from my coworker (glanced at a long red dont arrest me pls wait till tomorrow) saying that the intern asked if I had sent her intern evaluation to her school yet. I did. A few weeks ago. This isn’t really a bad thing it’s just that I was finally fucking free and just about to not have any reason to keep it together but then BAM. Intern shows up in my life again. Right after I though it was all over. A little god damn poke. Now So I managed to drive home without crashing into buildings or furiously honking and I am now just holding my cat and typing this. I’m pretty sure none of my coworkers will ever see this. A part of me wishes they would and that maybe they’d care, because I really don’t want to have to start a conversation specifically about all of this with them. Who the hell starts a conversation with: “By the way boss, can you please stop discussing giving the intern freelance work when I’m within earshot let alone in my god damn 6′x8′ cube?” “Hey boss, remember when I asked you for feedback and got none? Why does the intern get your full attention when you are even busier?” “Hey boss, why have you hired 4 more revisionists when you said that’d you’d love to have me as one? Did you forget? Were you just lying to me because you didn’t know how to give me feedback? Did you even care about what you say to me?” “Hey intern, I understand you are excited and this is a great opportunity for you, but can you please read the room at least a little because I want to cry every single time?” “Hey everyone, I want to be a board artist remember? REMEMBER?” ”Hey everyone... I’m an artist too.” “Hey everyone, can anyone just give me a little help?” ”Hey everyone, if I keep my purse stocked with your allergy medications, pain killers, band aids, digestive relief, girly goods and keep good snacks around and remember your schedules and try to make your jobs easier and serve as your primary IT person...will you remember that I’m here?” “Hey everyone, do you all dislike me or do you all just not care enough to notice me?” They’re all good people, but it’s not stuff that I really know how to say just out of the blue. So today... I just couldn’t stand being even in my own cube anymore. I’m not an outgoing entrepreneurial person who bugs people everyday trying to sell themselves as an artist. I’m someone who tells you my intentions, and asks for help, and then believes people when they tell me sorry they’re busy, that they wish they could help, that they’d love to have me if only not for “x”. No one is entitled to give me a job or help me. But... I don’t get why I’m the only one who gets nothing for a response when I do ask. If they were busy, that’d be fine. But since then things have gotten busier, and my boss personally worked through multiple iterations of my intern’s practice board with her. A good piece of advice I got was that your first 5 tests are awful...but I can’t even get anyone to give me my first one. I’m told to work hard and “git gud”. But it feels like I’m just bashing my head against a brick wall, and no one even acknowledges the effort. It feels like if I decide to stop doing that because I’m about to have a breakdown, I’ll be looked down on as a quitter and not passionate enough. I have passion, but all of this is 100% killing it, and I don’t want to hate art. I really don’t. But I’m starting to. It’s hard for me to enjoy it when now it’s only done to seek attention and approval that I’ll never get from these people. Today would have been difficult still, but not unbearable if not for that. My grandfather’s death isn’t a tragedy for me. He was in pain for a long time and he definitely made the most of his life. The tragedy is that despite all of this, my aunt decided that my family didn’t deserve to know that our grandfather, my father’s father (who lives literally 5 minutes away by car), had passed. I’m definitely not looking forward to the memorial service for my grandfather. Not because the death is hard to deal with but because all of the family there is. Would love to make life terrible for my aunt. Would love to be just as petty. I have so many colorful things to say and do. But ultimately none of that matters. It’s just death. Nothing changes it or adds a new flavor to it. So all of that anger and hurt just kinda snowballed today. And to top it all off as I’m typing this some asshole is beating a dog somewhere in the neighborhood and the dog is screaming and yelping. (called the police so hopefully they find them) Thanks for reading this long negative rant. I hope it helps anyone who is feeling similarly frustrated, because I dont have someone around who’s breaking down quite like I am so this is all I have. Shooting it into the internet in a passive aggressive attempt and chance that maybe someone who needs to read it will. Positive news: I watered my plants with the extra time. I hugged my cat. I will be returning with art for Mermay.

#bad day #rant

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steve0discusses · 6 years ago

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Yugioh S3 Ep 13 pt 1: Mokuba Finally Gets Stockholm Syndrome

So, I have today off work so lunchtime on a Thursday feels like a better time than ever to chime in on a 20 year old anime and say, uh this episode is nuts?

Like this whole arc has been somewhat tame compared to a lot of the stuff we’ve been dealing with in regards to Yugioh. Yeah, Tristan died, but like...Marik hasn’t murdered a hundred people lately so it’s been a pretty pleasant ride. And this was alllll part of Yugioh’s greater plan, Yugioh likes to do this, where it’s been overall a monster of the week Sat Morning cartoon type of affair, giving you a false sense of “I think I know what’s going on. I think I understand the logic of this show” before they start ripping the rugs out from under your feet with no other reason than to utterly confuse you.

And it’s like you just...you don’t expect this from a kid’s show.

And like don’t tell me you predicted this episode, guys, because it makes no freakin sense. I had to binge to the next episode just because I was like holding up all my paperwork of Seto Kaiba’s timeline and motioning at my brother “SHOW ME THE RECEIPTS!!” Because y’all this did not...

This just did not.

And like I’m very calm as I write these posts, but as I was watching this episode, I kept pausing it, turning to Steve-O and saying “NO.” Of course all of that drama goes on in the second part of this episode. The first half is still that somewhat tame area where it’s definitely very weird but it’s not...it’s not unpredictably weird yet, youknow?

So, to start out, Noah has given up on trying to persuade any of the Kaibas to change. It is not a thing Kaibas do.

He decides to show off his skills as a master manipulator, by manipulating one of the most manipulated boys on this entire show. The only person more manipulated is Yugi, who is has an actual brain parasite (and people might like the brain parasite more than him even so it’s like...it’s a situation up there).

Everything from here on concerning Mokuba is bizarre and kind of frustrating. Starting with the clone entering in from the black void.

(read more under the cut)

I like that we know this is Seto because of the 6 inch hip spike on his jacket. Yo if they ever did a Netflix Live Action Yugioh first off of all, they cannot do half of the hair on this show, second of all, this jacket. It can’t be possible. And like I’ve seen some pretty good high effort Seto Cosplay but the jacket spikes are like...that’s pretty rough youknow? First off, this custom jacket would take you like 8 months to sew, it’d be insanely expensive with the custom lining and the poofy everything, and then those spikes? Like what do you even do? I can’t even imagine.

One off screen slap by the clone, and then Mokuba decided his brother is now Darth Vader. Can’t believe it was that easy.

And then, to top off my frustration with how quickly Mokuba’s Stockholm Syndrome set in--Noah could do this the entire time.

Y’all I was so mad. It’s Episode 13 and he pulls this out now, are you kidding me? The entire time. The entire freakin time. This is like “and Bakura can just shoot lasers whenever but won’t be bothered.”

I still love this storyboarder but maybe they just don’t like drawing hugs? I mean, it’s supposed to be a spooky hug, but like...it’s more like a wrestling move that Mokuba has just decided to give up and lean into.

And you know what? I get it. Drawing affection freakin sucks. Hard to explain why but trust me--it’s freakin cursed. It’s worse than drawing cars. I’d rather draw like 3 cars. (And exactly 3 because it would take a hell of a lot of money to ever make me draw 4.)

Seto decides to run ahead although, and I just want to point this out--this bridge joins in the next scene so they can all reunite and there is a car right behind him.

There is a car and he uses his damn legs.

Smartest boy in Domino.

And off he goes, his wedding dress coat elegantly flapping in the wind as he...

runs...

...down a tunnel that is clearly marked with lane lines for cars.

Because Noah gave them a car.

Meanwhile, back at the car, Joey is Done and has found a great way to win the Battle City Tournament.

They did not. It was so weird. They took out most of the the slaps, but left in this monkey burrowing into Serenity’s chest for like 20 weird seconds. It made squeaky noises.

Serenity doesn’t seem to care by the way, it’s very, very 90′s.

Anyway, Tea’s decided she’s now done hanging out with these guys and the pervert monkey, so off these two go. Off to follow the plot. On foot.

The tunnel vanishes, and these four are left outside to continue...just doing nothing guess. Duke always ends up on the lowest effort team, youknow? I dump on Duke a lot but I’ve been kinda feeling bad for him.

Anyway, inside this tunnel, Noah is catfishing Seto as Mokuba and I gotta say, it’s way better than the shorts. Just put Noah in this outfit all the time.

And our heroes have decided to save the day by going the wrong way at the fork and completely missing Seto Kaiba’s loud booming voice. How do they get lost when Kaiba is being exploded just off camera?

Like it says a lot about these kids that they got lost down a tunnel with only 1 fork.

I had to look this up, and unfortunately this is not the same house as Kaiba’s Season Zero house. Would have been a neat touch but nah, it’s just a generic university style house that no one would ever want to actually live in.

ENTER MARIK. Thank all those gods, including himself, he’s finally here. To...not do anything. Especially since this is a 2-parter. He’ll do a little more next update. Still not much, but oh man, am I glad to see Marik. Am I glad to see that third eye is absolutely still glowing on his forehead. Can’t imagine how hard it is to sleep with that thing buzzing all day.

Back in VR land, I have been hit in the face with Seto’s design and it’s like the first time I’ve ever seen it.

Every single season of Yugioh spices up the character designs a tad and it takes a little while to get used to. I think Seto may have been slightly exaggerated in this scene but...he still seems way taller now. Like he’s basically Yugioh Pumpkin King at this point. Peak 00′s.

Anyway, was this why Noah said “Look down” ? Because like...that’s not really a hint if you throw him down a hole.

Seto’s reaction to this was “I’m just really tired of everything that’s happened today and I’m going home.” and he grabbed Mokuba by the hand to leave but, apparently Mokuba is too slippery to be abducted twice?

Weird that the only person who physically cannot abduct Mokuba is Seto Kaiba. The only person.

And just like that, Mokuba is now on team Noah and Seto is just...standing there. Noah is sort of a god person in this universe since he can code whatever he wants around him but like...

...still feels a little weird to see Seto go from “I’ll punch whatever I need to get Moki back” in S1 to “I guess Moki hates me so I’ll let him stay here now” when Mokuba is clearly possessed.

Anyways, this all gets much weirder next episode, but it was very, very long so I split it in two. Like I dunno how many of you want to read tumblr posts that rival Livejournal posts in length so...we’ll save that for next time. (in fact I was just telling bro that if Tumblr does go down, I don’t even know if there’s long-form blogging platforms left other than like webcomic sites and fanfic sites. We’ll cross our fingers that I never have to move this blog over to like...Tapas ((I would never do that ps, Tapas is a nightmare to upload to even if you just want to do comics and that is a whole story in and of itself)))

But ya. Noah could just mind control whoever.

Like whoever.

Y’all the past 12 episodes were kind of like Bakura level of “I could do something, if I felt like it, and it would take like 2 seconds max and nobody would stop me, but then I’d have to get off my ass, and I’m too busy watching the world burn to bother.”

Which is very much every villain in Yugioh, being real.

If you just found my blog, here’s a place to find all the episodes in chrono order from S1 Ep1, I apologize now that I never separated them into seasons, turns out a Yugioh season is just unapologetically long oops my bad.

#Yugioh #Yu gi oh #recap #tv recap #photo recap #S3 Ep13 #Feels like every episode 13 Yugioh likes to crank up the weird #like the first one was Bakura killing everyone #the second was when Yugi got strapped to bandsaws #This one is also very weird #yugi muto #seto kaiba #mokuba #noah #tristan taylor is still a robot monkey #tea gardner #joey wheeler #the other ones I don't even remember right now

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fly-pow-bye · 5 years ago

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DuckTales 2017 - “Nothing Can Stop Della Duck!”

Story by: Francisco Angones, Madison Bateman, Colleen Evanson, Christian Magalhaes, Bob Snow

Written by: Colleen Evanson

Storyboard by: Vince Aparo, Emmy Cicirega, Ben Holm

Directed by: Tanner Johnson

Sorry for the wait.

This episode directly continues from the last episode, and I decided not to spoil the ending in that review. One thing that can already be implied by that title card I have is that Della does indeed make it back to Duckberg and reunite with her family. Before she can, she spends quite a bit of time trying to get to that reintroduction.

Specifically, she needed to find the best way to reintroduce herself. Well, that, and having to readjust to Earth's gravity and realizing she can't just jump over the gate. I like how the clouds move in the background with every cut, showing that she is taking quite a while on just this one step.

Right behind that door, Scrooge McDuck has found the Cartographer's Quill: a magic quill that makes maps to. One special thing about this scene is that, if this is the first episode you ever seen, this one scene does show each of the nephew and honorary niece's personalities very well. Scrooge exclaims this will be the most important adventure of their lives.

Della Duck: Sup party people! I'm back in the hizouse! ...oh, that was terrible, can I get a do-over?

Needless to say, those quill plans will have to wait for an indefinite amount of time.

One thing I'm glad to note is that they do bring up one of the most obvious questions that has come up since we've learned whatever happened to Della Duck: how did Scrooge not see her on the moon? They didn't answer it, but Scrooge does say he did indeed search the moon. They don't go any further than this, because there's far more important matters at hand, but the wonder is still there. Future episode, perhaps?

Speaking of wonder, Huey, Dewey, and Louie finally get to see their Mom outside of one photo. Or, as she wanted to name them, Jet, Turbo, and Rebel, respectively. I guess it's neat, and Dewey really thinks so, but was Della just that lucky to name her kids after their personalities before they were even born? Must be a mother's intuition.

Dewey the first to say something, and he says “who’s the cyborg?” Either the long hair threw him off for a second, or, after what felt like years, they just don’t think it could honestly be their long lost mother. Dewey just immediately goes for a hug, showing right off the bat that he's going to be the mama's boy.

How do you survive in a barren wasteland? Barren I could understand. Is that what he thinks the moon is? She never modified her leg, because as the Junior Woodchuck says...by the time she mentions that, Huey's already going to make this a group hug. Louie seemingly needs more time to think about it, thinking this could be another trap from Magica. In a few seconds, he completes the group hug anyway.

As for Webby, she's just crying over how heartfelt this scene is. I usually say these scenes are just trying to force a reaction, but...me too, Webby, me too.

This is going to be a constant through the episode, and while this is spelled out for us at one point, we can tell what everyone feels just through their expressions and actions. As said before, Dewey is a pure mama's boy, which makes sense since he's been the one looking for her since episode 1 of this reboot. In contrast, Louie always has this disinterested expression on his face. Huh, and she wanted to call him Rebel. She really is a great mother. Huey is somewhere in the middle.

Since the family is finally reunited, with one exception I will talk about later, this episode starts a new arc. Della is essentially a brand new character to the DuckTales canon. This show needs to get this new character to fit in, and this episode is essentially the in-universe version of that.

Della is happy to be with her family, and vice-versa for the most part, but she wonders where her brother is. Webby tells her that Donald is currently on vacation, much to Della's disapproval, but she's sure it was much needed.

Oh yeah, that's the other thing. Remember when I said the Donald and Della plots in the last episode felt connected in all but the situations they were in? Turns out, I could have added a "yet" to that. See, he saw the rocket fall to Earth, knew immediately that it was Della, and rushed to reunite with his long lost sister. However, his trademark bad luck set in, as Della already left the rocket, and Donald accidentally pressed that "irreversible emergency launch" switch.

He's lost in space now, and the worst part is that nobody else knows. At least with Della, Scrooge knew what happened to her, even if he never knew where exactly she went until now. To everyone else, Donald's just having a vacation, probably napping on one of the cruise ship's many, many hammocks. The episode makes a few cuts to Donald's current situation, revealing a few more details, but we'll save that for another review.

Back to the Earth, we see that most of the episode is her trying her hardest to be "the best mom ever" to make up for all the lost time. She makes her kids cakes for various special occasions. She even makes a special cake made out of Fizzy Rocks. Dewey ends up being the only, because he wants to shift to Turbo!

Della tries to tell the kids a bedtime story, but the kids are a bit too old for fairy tales, so she has to tell another story from her past. This time, we hear a story from her childhood, and it turns out that the apples don’t fall far from the tree, as she also adventured to distant places.

Specifically, this is the story of the Gilded Man of El Dorado; similar the golem of Jewish legend, except from the Aztec civilization. Originally a protector of the people, the Gilded Man blew a fuse and caused the golden streets to be covered blood red from all the gnawed bodies. She really pushes this story as hard as TV-Y7 can go.

Della stopped him and his "gory gears", but even she’s not sure if the robot will awaken and seek vengeance on their family. Oh yeah, and it’s probably sitting in the garage. Needless to say, this does not help the boys sleep.

The next morning, after getting a haircut, Della wakes up her kids with an airhorn, and brought them airhorns of their own. She then tries to teach Huey how to do an amazing skateboard trick with a shield from a nearby suit of armor. Not helping matters is that aforementioned airhorn made Huey temporarily deaf throughout most of the episode.

This goes about as well as one might expect, though Louie does initially get a rare moment of happiness in this episode. Sure, this is reckless child endangerment, but he could get a sick viral video out of it. Unfortunately, he ends up getting hurt as well, and this causes a ruckus that a nearby Mrs. Beakley can only sigh at.

Mrs. Beakley: (after lifting a fallen chandelier with one hand) I’m used to cleaning up after children, dear.

Ouch. This isn't the only household dweller that she'll have a negative relationship with, though in this next case, it's vice versa.

See, Della used to be Scrooge McDuck's pilot, and she's none to happy to find out that Launchpad happens to be her replacement. Yeah, how dare Scrooge McDuck get another pilot when his pilot goes missing for 10 years! This doesn't get brought up again in this episode, in fact, Launchpad doesn't even appear after this, but, again, this will probably be a subject of a future episode.

She sneaks up on a family meeting, where Scrooge is essentially talking about the very point of this episode. The boys tell Scrooge that while she might be endangering them, she's only trying her best and she's their mom. At least, Dewey and Huey seem to think so. Louie, who has been the least happy so far, admits that he doesn't know how to say it, but says that, as he hasn’t had a mom for so long, he doesn’t know how to have one. Scrooge has a theory on that.

Scrooge: That's because she's not a mom! (waits about 10 seconds) ...not yet anyway, she’s been gone for so long.

In those ten seconds, Della already ran off into the garage, sobbing and talking to herself about how she’s blowing it. She wishes she can have a monster to fight, and...

...oh, hi, Gilded Man! Turns out, he really did end up in Scrooge's garage, currently in an indefinite slumber. I'd say more, but my thought process ended up being "She's going to activate it, she's going to activate it, she's going to activate it..."

Sure enough, this golden android only needed a kick in the...hands to get activated. Okay, maybe that saying wouldn't go anywhere.

Della Duck: Aw, phooey.

Eh, she said it better the first time. Maybe I'm just a little miffed that she's essentially replacing her brother, and she's outright stealing his catchphrase. Della tries to deal with it herself, because "nothing can stop Della Duck!" The title kind of fit in a different way than I expected. Scrooge shows up, wondering what is going on, and is forced to face off against the giant golden monster.

After making an attempt to beat up this robot with his cane, not exactly working like it would in the NES game, Della bumps into something. This causes a Rube Goldberg effect that ends with a propeller landing on a car, causing its alarm to go off. Suddenly, the robot mysteriously puts his hands over his ears. Almost like he really hates noise, but they don’t really catch on.

They're probably distracted by family drama, of course. While this monster mysteriously stopped, Della confronts Scrooge that she heard what he said about her not being a mom. Scrooge then turns off the car alarm so he can explain the rest of what he said. Unfortunately, this conversation would have to take a break before it can make any progress of talking sense into Della before she goes on some reckless treasure hunting, because that robot is going towards them again!

It feels like the episode is setting up what Della wanted in the episode: she would save the McDuck Manor by herself, proving that she's the most adventurous Mom ever. Both Webby and Scrooge, usually invincible in this series, are essentially damsels in distress. As for Mrs. Beakley, the former Agent 22 and lifter of an entire chandelier, she gets knocked out by the monster, too.

Della tries to stop the monster as well, in the same way that she stopped the monster before, but finds that growing up sucks in at least one other way. There are three more people that haven't got involved, and, seemingly on a hunch, Dewey decides to use his airhorn. It's here that Della finally learns that the creature is weak to noise, and it's possible the kids might be able to save the day.

It turns out to be a mixture of both the mother and her children that save the day in the end, which is fitting. The boys combine their airhorns with duct tape, even showing them rushing in and getting the duct tape from Donald Duck's houseboat. I don't think anyone would have questioned if they just had it on them, but the attention to detail is much appreciated. This airhorn contraption is then shoved right into the Gilded Man's neck, and Della uses her metallic leg to jam those buttons right in.

Della even gets to show off how great of a mother she is, and it's not by defeating a giant monster or finding a huge treasure like she said she would. She detaches her robotic leg, jumping out of the android, and saves one of the boys from getting crushed by the rapidly deteriorating robot.

I kind of saw this coming: it's Louie she saves. This finally gets Louie to say "thanks, Mom". My heart's just too full. I've said in the last review that this is the end of an arc and also the beginning of a new one. She's never really annoying, overpowered, or out-of-place with the established characters. She just wants to be a good mother, and that's all that matters.

This family bonding is missing something, and I'll just say that Donald's in for a lot of trouble. Unfortunately, it's going to be a while before we find out whatever happened to Donald Duck, and while I didn't spoil a twist in the last episode that shows up here as well, it's not the focus of the episode. Another future episode!

How does it stack up?

This is another big episode. I'd argue it's better than The Golden Spear in that it doesn't seem to repeat itself as much. There's a few scenes in this that I skimmed through, but trust me, they are funny to watch. I couldn't hate this one, it's too precious.

Had enough of Della? First, why? Second, too bad, because the next episode has her, too.

← The Golden Spear! 🦆 Raiders of the Doomsday Vault! →

#fpb dt 2017 #fpb reviews #disney #ducktales 2017 #ducktales

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patrick-yates · 6 years ago

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Final Major Project: Pre-Production + Progress

As the 2nd part of our Practice 2 assignment, we are to prepare a pre-production document for our final major project. This document is to include several elements relevant to our production process, including: concept designs, storyboards, animatics, technical tests to demonstrate the feasibility of complex portions of the project, colour keys / lighting concepts, scripts, animation tests, compositing tests, Gantt charts etc. Not all of these will be specifically required; however, the more the merrier, and the project I have in mind will require a good few of them to be thought about in order to make it as good as it can be. I will post relevant materials on here as often as I can - I am already a bit behind, but hopefully this will help me order my thoughts somewhat... 1. IDEA At time of writing, I am already well into my planning stages, therefore don’t want to waste time talking about the process I went through of picking out an idea. This would, in any case, be a bit of a moot exercise anyway, as in my case all of my creative touchstones sort of coalesced into the working idea I have now. I had three key tenets I wanted to follow in order to make the best film I could: 1. It should be narrative driven, as both my background and my intended trajectory are in narrative and storytelling. I have good working knowledge of how to make a story effectively, and believe this will be the best use of my abilities. 2. It should involve elements of things that I personally love - not to the point of plagiarism or pastiche, but generally I would like to eschew ‘originality’ in favour of genuinely representing things that mean a lot to me. This, I hope, will produce an outcome with genuine and visible value. 3. I want the film to represent my abilities beyond just straight animation. As a student new to the form, I don’t hold myself too much to that singular definition - rather, I am approaching this as a filmmaker first and foremost, and while attempting to create strong animation, will be focusing also on things like script, sound, cinematics, performance, etc. Technical tests will be necessary, but I want the final thing to ultimately be more than the sum of its parts.

With these things in mind, I began drafting a story. It is set in a world which it will establish, focuses on a few central characters, and has one main character’s story at its heart. According to my 2nd point, I wanted to include elements that I am in love with right now: aesthetics centred around the American Gothic, folk music, spirituality, apocalypse, and reconciling grief. Bringing these elements together, I established the kind of story I wanted to tell. Fast forward a little... I have since been working on a barebones treatment for the script. The characters, dialogue, pacing, tone, etc need a little work but I am confident I can fit everything in! Here is the first draft. Treatment The world is presented: primitive near(ish) future. Nature has reclaimed civilisation; remnants of the past (present) are enveloped by strange plants and creatures. This reclamation is revealed, via a voiceover/in-scene conversation, to have been a response to the Last War (perhaps nuclear), after which Mother Nature/the spiritual essence of Earth enacted an aggravated response to humanity’s recklessness. Lines have been redrawn, ghosts and spirits are now commonplace, and coexistence is proving hard for humans. But a singer/medium from Louisiana thinks she has an answer.

Sundown in the swamp. Ellie (f; 13), Lady (f; 28) and Ern (m; 60s?) float through in a small boat. They are musicians - Lady has a guitar, Ern an accordion. Ellie is firmly holding her violin case, reluctant to express herself. Scene is set by Lady explaining the state of things and how she thinks they can heal - through converting memory into momentum, not getting stuck on the past but using it to extend into the future. She asks Ellie if she remembers the first melody she ever heard.

Ellie responds somewhat haughtily; she is not convinced. She complains about being dragged out here and that she never wanted to come, lightly insulting both of her cohort in the process. Lady offers back something to put her in her place. Ellie goes to argue, but is suddenly struck by where they are. (45s)They enter an open area. In it, a small island; on it, a small domicile, with a patio. It is derelict. They stop the boat. As the sunlight fades, small blue wisps rise up from the swamp and fill the air, like fireflies, or fairy lights. From the middle of the swamp then rises a huge spirit - a 15 foot tall woman wearing a gown, with a ringed planet for a head. The musicians duck down in the boat, except for Ellie, who stares in disbelief. The large spirit begins to amble around swatting the small blue lights, as if they are invading her space. (1m15s)

Lady grabs Ellie’s shoulder and pulls her around - Ellie is crying. Lady looks to Ern, who nods. He starts playing his accordion slowly. All the lights flare up at the sound, and the spirit takes notice of the group. Ellie sobs as the spirit makes its way angrily towards them. Lady starts to play her guitar. The spirit stands before them, about to attack, until Ellie produces her violin and begins to play with the others. The melody stuns the spirit, who then begins to dance - the lights arrange themselves into a circle around her, occupying the whole space. We see images of a young Ellie playing to the spirit as a human - her mother. As the song concludes, the spirit de-materialises and wafts into Ellie’s violin. The blue lights turn a warmer shade. End scene in stunned silence. (2m15s)

From here I would like to develop my character designs, backgrounds, specific dialogue, storyboards, colour coordination, compositing/animation techniques and a general progression chart (how my time will likely be organised). This will be an uphill battle while juggling my other projects, but I am ready for it! Wish me luck!

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aisulinn · 6 years ago

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[Translation Script Only] Florist/Bookshop(Karaoso) Manga

Source : 【おそまつ】花書(カラおそ)まとめ【腐】

Artist : 48Sensei/しば [pixiv id: 324108 ] [twitter: 48sensei ] [tumblr: 48sensei]

I DID NOT HAVE THE PERMISSION TO REPRINT so this is just the translation script! THE ARTIST DOESN’T ALLOW ANY REPRINT SO PLEASE NOTE THAT

Please read it side by side with the manga on the link~!

48sensei made a compilation of the florist/bookshop karaoso that they posted on twitter! It’s really cute so I just wanted to share it with you guys!

It’s 42 pages long so.... MORE UNDER THE CUT!

Notes:

Italic = inner thought (thought bubble or thing that’s not in speech bubble)

Bold = the writing that’s bold in manga

one paragraph = one panel

*__* = sfx

Divider = different section/scene according to the twitter post (note that 48sensei posted the pages separately on twitter)

ENJOY!!

***

PAGE 1

Radio : Good Morning! The first rank of today’s fortune telling is for you Geminis!

Kara : *yawn*

Screen : First place = Gemini

Second place = Sagitarius

Third place = Aquarius

Radio : Your lucky item iiis…. RED GERBERA!

Kara : Heheheheh~ ♪

Kara : Good morning my flowers. As always, today too you’re beautiful it’s blinding

PAGE 2

Kara : heh

Kara : Hello, my lucky baby. You will surely bring me wonderful fortunes today

Oso : Good morniiing~

Oso : is it open yet?

Kara : welcome!

Oso : excuse me, is it okay if I just buy a single flower?

Kara : of course!

PAGE 3

Oso : okay, good!

Oso : I want the red…

Kara : Red gerbera…

Oso : what?

Kara : A red gerbera...

PAGE 4

Oso : Wow! How do you know which flower I want? Are you an esper?

Kara : HUH?! Uh…

Kara: Pardon me, the red gerbera… It’s this flower over here right?

Oso : yup! Sorry to buy just one. I happened to see my fortune today and my lucky item is red gerbera~

Oso : Now to think about it, this flower was also in the book I read yesterday… so yeah

Kara : Sir, are you perhaps a Gemini? Because I am one too

Oso : You too? I saw this morning’s fortune! Haha, somehow I feel like I can relate to you more now

PAGE 5

Kara : thank you for the wait

Oso : thank you

Kara : *doki*

Oso: I recently start working on Akatsuka Bookshop. If you like books, please come and stop by! See you!

Kara: Ah, thank you very much!

Kara: Thank you, baby. You’re really giving me wonderful fortune

PAGE 6

Kara : COME ON NOW! TURN! MY GEAR OF LOVE!

Naration: As he gets closer to Karamatsu, Matsuno Osomatsu starts doing stuff like “Flower Arrangement Fair” or “Gardening Fair” frequently

Co-wrkr1 : Matsuno san, we’re doing that kind of fair agaain~?

Co-wrkr2: Do you like flower that much?

Oso : It’s not that! I told you horticulture system is really popular right now!

Co-wrkr: really, now~?

Oso : REALLY!

***

PAGE 7

Oso : Minette sensei~ I did it!!

Ichi : Niisan! FOR REAL?!

Ichi : then, then?! How far did you go?!

Oso : Karamatsu kun has the same zodiac as me! ❤

Ichi : then?!

Oso : isn’t that wonderful?! The chance of that is only 1/12!! I wonder if our birthday is close~

Ichi : eh?

Ichi : by “did it” you mean, that? That’s all?

Oso : what do you mean “that’s all”? Well, that IS all

PAGE 8

Ichi : huh??? What the hell! I THOUGHT YOU DID MORE YOU IDIOT! Your hands touched and your hearts went doki ☆ for instance! Or maybe he said something like, “compared to this flower, Matsuno san is more beautiful”. OR MAYBE YOU KNOW? END IT WITH A BANG AND MAKE A DATE PLAN OR SOMETHING? NO?!

Oso : You have a wild imagination, huh

Ichi : No those ideas are overused and heck they’re actually really lame?? That is why I already expected those from you, niisan…

Oso : I mean you know, today is the first time I talked to him! Knowing his zodiac is already a great achievement, right?

Ichi : WHAT?

Ichi : seriously??? I mean, every day, the only thing talk about is this “karamatsu kun”…. That’s why I thought…

Ichi : What?

Ichi : YOU WERE NOT EVEN ACQUAINTANCE YET?? YOU ONLY SEE HIM FROM AFAR? UNTIL NOW??

Oso : He doesn’t even know my name yet… I’m sorry

PAGE 9

Ichi : *slump*

Ichi : hah~~~ I’m really disappointed in you, niisan… Ah~~ The deadline for the storyboard of my next series is in two weeks… Ah~~ It’s impossible… I’m dead… Let’s just die….

Oso : Come on~ I even gathered up enough courage to talk about the lucky flower with him! For you!

Oso : niichan did his best you know? Don’t you wanna praise me?

Ichi : …….

Ichi : did you at least properly show him your appeal?

Oso : I said “I’m working on Akatsuka Book shop! Come by if you love books!” ❤

Ichi : Does he... look like the type that loves book? That Karamatsu kun?

Oso : ………………^^

PAGE 10

Ichi : you fucked up didn’t you

Oso : I DIDN’T!! I'M JUST GETTING STARTED

Oso : well, that is why…

Oso : You’re doing book signing event at my bookshop~

Ichi : HAAAAAH??? I DIDN’T HEAR ANYTHING ABOUT THIS?!

Oso : So that I can ask for the decoration flower at Karapippi’s, don’t back out on this

Ichi : YOU’RE USING YOUR LITTLE BROTHER FOR THIS?! I REFUSE!!

Oso : LOOK WHO’S TALKING?! YOU’RE THE ONE WHO’S USING YOUR ANIKI’S LOVE LIFE FOR MANGA REFERENCE!!

Naration : ★Without noticing each other’s feelings, the gear is turning!

***

PAGE 11

Co-wrkr2 : Matsuno saaan~

Oso : here~

Co-wrkr2 : Have you ordered flowers for this week’s Minette sensei’s signing event yet?

Oso : uh.. no, not yet….

Co-wrkr2 : From Flower Akatsuka right? Should I go?

Oso : DO--

Oso : DON’T!! DEFINITELY DON’T DO IT!! I’LL DO IT SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO!

Co-wrkr2 : I-- I see..? But you already said that two days ago…

Co-wrkr2 : if you’re slacking off again the boss will be mad

Oso : I’m not slacking off!!

Oso : it’s just… I need more preparation for my heart when it comes to flowers….

Co-wrkr2 : what?

Oso : NOTHING!! I’M GOING NOW! *dash*

PAGE 12

Oso : Good evening~

Kara : Welc--

Kara : --come

Kara : ah, the red gerbera guy!

Oso : what?

Oso : red gerbera guy….?

Kara : pardon me… you’re the one who bought red gerbera recently, right? So I just…

Oso : Oh!

PAGE 13

Oso : Ahaha you remember! Thank you~ HE ACTUALLY REMEMBERS?! SERIOUSLLLY???!!!!

Oso: but red gerbera guy is like… haha that purple rose guy

Kara : purple rose?

Oso : you know? Glass Mask?

Kara : I’m sorry, I don’t really read a lot of books

Oso : Ah I knew it. It’s an old manga anyway~

Oso : oh, I’m not here to chat

Kara : Then what can I help you with today?

Oso : erm… This week, our shop will be having a signing event of a manga author, that’s why we need some flowers

Kara : Do you have any certain color you’re hoping for?

Oso : The author personal color is purple so I thought maybe purple shades flower is good

Kara : purple…

PAGE 14

Kara : we have purple roses!

Oso : eh, for real?

Kara : yes

Kara : look! Look how pretty this girl is! *smile*

Oso : *kyun*

Kara : Purple rose has “Pride” or “Elegance” or “Honor”, for its meaning…

Kara : that author surely is a lovely person that is no less than these roses~

Oso : well, sure…

PAGE 15

Kara : to be chosen for that person’s gift…

Kara : this girl must be very happy

Oso : heh

Oso : all right, I’ll take that one

Kara : Thank you very much!

Oso : I love this side of him~

***

PAGE 16

Oso : okay then, Friday at 10

Kara : okay, noted!

Oso : I’ll look forward to it!

Oso : somehow it feels like a date. Yay~

Naration : it’s actually just delivery time

Kara : u-- um…

Oso : hm?

Kara : uh… last time… you told me to stop by your place… right?

Oso : ...to my shop?

Kara : yes. Then, uh… the next day I decided to stop by

Oso : EH!!!??

Oso : seriously~~!!??! The next day!! I!! I was working at the back for a whole day, packing and wrapping returned goods~~~?!?! Haaaaaah~~~!!! What a waste!!

Kara : but you were not there

Kara : that was too bad…

Oso : I-- I’M SORRY! That day was exactly the day I’m working on the back, so I already said that I won’t come...

Kara : so, Matsuno san

Oso : eh? Why do you know my name…

PAGE 17

Oso : oh, my nametag… Ah, it’s written my full name here, how embarrassing

Oso : it’s because in this part of town there’s a lot of Matsunos…

Kara : here, as a gift for coming here today. Please accept this

Oso : eh, are you sure?

Kara : of course! It’s my sincere feelings. I will continue on my service

Oso : Thank you… I’m really happy

PAGE 18

Oso : MINETTE SENSEI!!!!!!

Ichi : THE FUCK YOU WANT?! THE PRESSURE OF THE SIGNING EVENT YOU SET UP FOR ME IS ENOUGH TO SEND ME TO HELL

Oso : I got a rose

Ichi : what?

Oso : ka-- ka-- Karamatsu kun gave me this…

Ichi : …………serious?

Oso : SERIOUS!!!

Ichi : wait!! OSOMATSU NIISAN CALM DOWN!

Oso : *boeh*

Ichi : CALM DOWN AND HEAR ME OUT!!

Ichi : you know, I’m a shoujo manga author that’s why I’m pretty familiar with flower language

Oso : o-- okay

PAGE 19

Ichi : do you know the meaning of a single rose?

Oso : I don’t

Ichi : do you wanna know?

Oso : no

Ichi : WHAT ARE YOU BEING SCARED FOR! PAY ATTENTION!

Oso : NO!! YOU’RE MAKING THAT FACE SO IT’S GOTTA BE SOMETHING BAD RIGHT?! ICHIMATSU YOU IDIOT! YOU DARK! NOOOO~~!!!

Ichi : love at first sight

Oso : …..what?

Ichi : a single rose means…

PAGE 19

Ichi : “love at first sight”, osomatsu niisan

Oso : *furiously blushing*

Oso : ha, haaaaa~~~?!?! NO NO NO THAT’S GOTTA BE A LIE!!!?!?

Ichi : this is some content! Some progress? Right?!?! Yes~~!!!

***

PAGE 20

Kara : I finally gave it out~~~

Kara : I feel so happy he actually accepted it that I could fly. But he probably doesn’t understand its meaning….? But, if he knows what should I do….? No, even if he knows it shouldn’t mattered… But I feel like it’s too soon

Kara : …but

Kara : it has been my dream since a long time ago

Kara : To give a flower that is attached with my feelings, to the person I love

Kara : People who bought flowers from this shop, they all put their feelings in those flowers. When they’re happy, when they’re sad, when they want to encourage someone…

PAGE 21

Kara : I envied them. I thought that someday I want to feel that way about someone too.

Kara : hnggh *throb*

Kara : daaammnn isn’t that person superrrr cute?! Red flowers really suits him~~!! Maybe I should give him carnation next?

Kara : *ha*

Kara : I have to stick to the flower he requested. If I beautifully arranged it, I’m sure he’ll be glad

PAGE 23

Oso : wow!! It’s great~ splendid! So beautiful! That’s what I call a pro~

Kara : thank you very much! I did my best into this! So that I can make you happy, Matsuno san!

Kara : But as I thought, the color red suits you better

Oso : eh? Me?

Kara : that’s right, Matsuno san

Kara : Please allow me to give you another gift. For your charm overshadowed an even the most beautiful flower…

Oso : Karamatsu san…. *the sound of Osomatsu’s ribs breaking*

Kara : hmm?? What is that breaking sound? Heh, my imagination is pretty wild, huh?

Ichi: No it’s overused and actually really lame!!!!!

Kara : anyhow, I will do my utmost best *sneeze*

Kara : heh, Matsuno san must be talking about me right now

***

PAGE 24

Naration : previously on this manga, he got a gift that means “love at first sight” from his crush

Ichi : There’s no way a person that works around flowers doesn’t know their meanings? He has a thing for you, I tell you!

Oso : that’s what he said but…. Isn’t it to good to be true?! Well I never thought that he hates me or anything, but to think that far….?

Co-wrkr2 : Matsuno saaaan~!

Oso : YEASH!

Co-wrkr2 : The florist is here!

Oso : o… okay~! HE’S HEREEEE

Oso : Ah~ I can’t bear to look at his face right now… come on, pull yourself together

Poster : MINETTE SENSEI SIGNING EVENT, TODAY!

Oso : sorry for the wait~

Flo : hello, I’m from Flower Akatsuka

Oso : hu-- huh?

Flo : Let’s see… you ordered these flowers, right?

Oso : excuse me…

PAGE 25

Flo : yes?

Oso : the usual shopkeeper… um, that Karamatsu san…

Flo : oh, I’m sorry! He should be the one who’s doing today’s delivery but he’s not feeling well at the moment

Oso : eh?

Flo : after making this flower arrangement his condition dropped, so he’s resting right now. I’m a temporary part time worker that helps him sometimes. I’m really sorry he couldn’t make it.

Oso : oh no, that’s fine

Flo: The truth is he wanted to come and deliver this himself. He said “because I already poured my heart into making this!”.

Oso : I see…

PAGE 26

Oso : it’s…

Oso : really beautiful…

Flo : I think he will come back to work next week, so if you want, please stop by! Thank you very much for the purchase!

Oso : …..

Ichi : that’s too bad

Oso : *startled*

Ichi : I was looking forward to meet this so called “karamatsu kun”~

Oso : he’s not feeling well… I wonder if it’s a cold

Ichi : maybe? I mean, this is season makes you prone to colds

Oso : ….

PAGE 27

Ichi : are you worried?

Oso : that’s… well… That’s because I never saw him sick…

Ichi : According to shoujo manga theory, in this situation you must pay him a visit and bring him stuff. This is an event that will surely shorten the gap between you two. But, you don’t even know his address right, niisan?

Oso : ….know

Ichi : what?

Oso : I actually know his house…Karamatsu kun’s house...

Ichi : what….?

Ichi : Niisan… No way… You’re a stalker? That far? That’s really creepy…

Oso : NOPE! YOU’RE WRONG!!! NO NO THAT’S WRONG! I HAPPENED TO KNOW ACCIDENTALLY!

PAGE 28

Oso : one day I just… Happened to see Karamatsu kun going home, then I got so overwhelmed and the next thing I know….

Ichi : that’s called a stalker

Oso : BUT THAT’S ONLY ONE TIME! AFTER THAT I’M DOING IT MODESTLY!

Ichi : then why don’t you go?

Oso : what?

Ichi : why don’t you go bring him something?

Ichi’s face : “REPORT PLZ”

Oso : his face is too easy to read

Oso : but isn’t this too meddlesome…?

Ichi : don’t worry don’t worry, just trust the theory!

Oso : But if he report me to the police I can never live it down

Ichi : report? you’re right…

Ichi : welp, maybe you can’t but… I’LL THINK OF SOMETHING SO IT’S FINE!

Oso : What the heck have you been blabbering about?!

***

PAGE 29

*At Karamatsu kun’s house*

Oso : I DID IT SOMEHOW

Oso : the nameplate is right. Even for me this kind of behavior is really creepy…

Oso : I mean, if I were him I’d be so annoyed if someone doing this when I’m so tired and in the middle of my sleep… Ah but, I’m already here…

Oso : ……

Oso : ah~~!! This is soooo unlike me!! LET’S JUST GO WITH A BANG!

Oso : HERE GOES NOTHING!!

*ding dong*

*dragged feet*

Oso : *doki doki doki*

PAGE 30

*click*

Oso : DOKI

Kara : yes…?

Oso : goo-- good evening

Oso : …..

Kara : HUH?!

Oso : UM!! THIS IS!! I’m really sorry to come here so suddenly!

Oso : how should I put this…. Um…. I’d rather you don’t ask me the reason why but I heard that you’re sick and sleeping in so I just came here without thinking… or something…

Kara : ……what? A dream?

Oso : it’s not a dream…

PAGE 31

Kara : Oh… Even though I thought my temperature has gone back to normal, the fever comes again…? Or is it my hot heart that’s continuously thinking of him creates a convenient vivid hallucination… *doki doki*

Oso : Somehow you look fine? Thank god~

Oso : I rarely got sick so I don’t really know what to bring. I bought you pudding and Pocari Sweat

Oso : Please take this if you want

Kara : ah, yes. Thank you very much

Oso : well then, I’m sorry I dragged you out even though you’re not feeling well

Kara : eh? You’re… You’re going home?

Oso : yup!

Oso : I mean, you know… I thought I could see you today but I couldn’t…? So I thought I just wanted to see your face even just for a while

PAGE 32

Kara: *stabbed*

Oso : Just kidding nyahaha~ Ah, but please let me tell you this real quick, about today…

Oso : thank you for the flower

Oso : they’re really

Oso : beautiful….

Oso : w-- what…?

*door closed*

Kara : …….did you come because you’re worried?

Oso : …. Yes

Kara : I wanted to see you too, Matsuno san

Oso : Is… is that so….?? GYAAAAAA HIS VOICE HIS VOICE HIS VOICE!!

Oso : TOO CLOSE!! MOREOVER…

PAGE 33

Oso : ISN’T THIS WHAT I SAW IN ICHIMATSU’S MANGA?! KABEDON!!!! OR MAYBE DOADON?! IT’S SHORTEN THE GAP BETWEEN US ALRIGHT~! IT’S WAAAAY TOO CLOSE!

(t.n: kabe= wall, doa=door)

Kara : *huggies*

Oso : ah

Kara : I’m sorry, I’m still kinda dizzy and woobly

Oso : SERIOUSLY?!

Oso : then go back to bed, if you don’t sleep it won’t go away. I’m going home too anyway

Kara : don’t wanna

Oso : what…

Kara : come with me, Matsuno san

Oso : No, I really shouldn’t…

Kara: didn’t you come because you’re worried about me?

PAGE 34

Kara : I’m really happy… Can’t you stay? Just for a while?

Oso : A-- are you kid...?

Oso : okay I get it, but just for an hour okay?

Kara : okay! Yaay!

Oso : you… that’s not fair

Kara : can I eat the pudding?

Oso : sure... you can eat as many as you like…

***

PAGE 35

Oso : are you sure it’s okay to stay up?

Kara : I’m pretty sturdy and the fever has gone down anyway

Oso : we’re sitting next to each other now… we’ve been waaay to close since then it’s driving me nuts

Kara : ah, this is really tasty!

Oso : for real? I’m glad! I really like this so I thought I should bu…

Kara : *stare*

Oso : ……..o...kay....

Oso : should I eat one too…?

Kara : Matsuno san

Oso : YESH!

Kara : I heard from my part timer who delivered the flower, he said that the shop keeper who wear red glasses is worried about me

Oso : o-- oh….

PAGE 36

Kara : But I never thought that you’d pay me a visit too

Oso : a-- about that, that’s…

Kara : why do you care that much about me?

Oso : !!

Kara : ah, sorry… That’s badly put…

Kara : When I got the work request from you, even though I know it’s for the author,

Kara : the truth is you’re the only one I was thinking about while doing the arrangement

Kara : um… I… gave you a single rose…

PAGE 37

Kara : and I feel somewhat satisfied with that… But it’s not good enough, I have to say it to you with my own lips…

Kara : there’s something that’s been bugging me…

Kara : you might have found out already because of that rose but I

Kara : I…..!!

Oso : .....

PAGE 38

Oso : ……..? Karamatsu ku…

Kara : *wobbly*

Oso : WHAAAT??? YOU’RE KIDDING!? WAIT…

Oso : that was close… aren’t your fever getting worse?

Oso : I told you it hasn’t gone away yet! Sheesh…

Oso : I’m barging in your room then

Oso : Haah… I’m glad we’re inside your house… I wonder if your blood pressure went up because of tension and excitement….

Oso : but you know, my heart is going all over the place too nyahaha~!

Oso : …..

PAGE 39

Oso : *smoking*

Oso : that was deeeefinitely a confession!!!!!

Oso : Now to think of it! As soon as I’m alone with him the atmosphere turn into something dangerous! The feeling of the event that’s going to come was overwhelming!!

Oso : But I didn’t think that you’re that serious, Karamatsu kun. Do you seriously like me?!?! This is baaaaddddddd

Oso : I’M REALLY HAPPY

Oso : but he hasn’t confessed yet… maybe he’s not but I’d like to think that he would….

Oso : *sigh*

PAGE 40

Oso : Should I just wait? Or I wonder if it’s better if I’m the one who says it?

Oso : somehow, I feel like you saw right through me

Oso : when you gave me flower I was smiling like crazy, eventhough we don’t have any special relationship I went ahead and come to your doorstep, my heart exploded with that awkward hug, and I always turn red when the atmosphere is nice…

Oso : what am I? A teenage girl?? Well but it’s only just now…

Oso : but I guess it’s the best if I don’t say it? Probably you want to be the one who say it right, Karamatsu kun…

PAGE 41

Oso : what a cute sleeping face

Oso : *looks around*

Oso : Get well soon *peck*

Oso : I’ll…. I’ll go ho…. What the hell am I doing just now… seriously it’s bad…

Oso : well then, see you later Karamatsu kun

PAGE 42

Oso’s letter :

Thank you for today!

I put the keys in your mail…

Line : Oso05

08 XXXX XXX

See you Next week! ^_^

Osomatsu

Kara : It’s… IT’S NOT A DREAAAAM~~~~~!!!!! I feel like I’m guilty of doing something embarrassing when my health is butchered but I got his contacts as a result!! Yaaaaay!!

Author : the continuation of this probably will be in a book! Please read it if you can! Even though it ends like this, it’s actually not done yet!

#karaoso #blmatsu #matsucest #translation #comic #florist karamatsu #bookshop osomatsu #script only #artist: 48sensei/しば #job matsu #karamatsu #osomatsu #they're such dorks #dorks in love lol #i love ichi #what a good lil bro slash wingman

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queenallura · 6 years ago

Text

Form Podcast Transcript - Ep. 1

Hosted by Kyle Anderson from Nerdist

Guests: Joaquim Dos Santos (co-executive producer) and Lauren Montgomery (co-executive producer)

Episode 1x01 “The Rise of Voltron”

Kyle Anderson (KA): Hello everyone! Welcome to the inaugural episode of Form Podcast, the official Voltron commentary podcast. What does this mean? Who am I? My name is Kyle Anderson, I’m the associate editor for Nerdist.com, and I’m a massive, huge Voltron: Legendary Defender fan. What this podcast is going to be is we’re going to take you episode by episode through the episodes of Voltron that have come out already on Netflix and we’re going to do commentary over them. And it’s not just going to be me talking, you’re gonna get to hear from writers, directors, and even some of the cast and producers about making all of the episodes. And all you would have to do is, you can follow along on your own TV or tablet or whatever it is you watch Netflix on, or you can just listen to it in your car and just kind of imagine what’s going on. We’re pretty open, but we’re going to be talking about episodes directly. Thanks for joining us. We’re going to have a really great first episode because it’s the first one and there’s a lot going on. For this very first episode, which is a long one, we’re joined by two very important people, I would say the most important people maybe, who helped make this show happen. And they are:

Joaquim Dos Santos (JDS): Joaquim Dos Santos, executive producer.

Lauren Montgomery (LM): Lauren Montgomery, co-executive producer.

KA: Alright, so everyone at home, this is how this is going to work. You get your Netflix at home queued up to all zeros and we all hit play together. It’s going to be a big togetherness thing

JDS: There’s a hum in this room by the way. A mirror and hum.

KA: Just pretend it’s part of the show. We’re gonna hit play in three, two, one, play. All right.

JDS: There we go.

KA: We’re off and running.

JDS: So we’ve got the full intro here. The Netflix original series card. That was a cool thing that was sort of build after the fact.

LM: We kinda had to toss one that together pretty quick. Not having worked for anything on Netflix before, we just didn’t even realize that was part of the package. Like yeah, you gotta have that Netflix original in there, so we’re like, “Oh, what are we going to do?”

JDS: Those are all repurposed elements form the show.

LM: We had a few different ideas we were going to do. We were going to do a whole Altean writing and then it transitions and then we’re like, uh, we need to do this a lot faster.

JDS: And we didn’t want to figure out the Altean alphabet.

LM: There’s no actual Altean alphabet.

JDS: Yet. I’m sure someone’s going to make one.

KA: Sure!

LM: It’s really up to the fans, if there’s going to be an Altean alphabet. This is where fan involvement comes in. Make it happen.

KA: So I remember I came and saw this at the first press screening that was held at Dreamworks and then I talked to you guys right afterwards. I thought this was such a great cold open where you get that it’s the future but you’re not sure where it is in the world. And then this happens.

JDS: Initially we were a little worried about the fact that it is a show about such fantastical things, but trying to sell Earth as this place that - while still in the future - hadn’t had alien contact yet. So to them, this is beyond anything they could’ve ever imagined. They were taking boring ice samples. So we were trying to sell the boring nature of what their job was to contrast that with this.

LM: I can’t recall, do you remember-? I think this whole opening scene was something that we put in a little bit later. I think it originally just opened with our guys on earth. And then we’re like, we really need to introduce this alien element.

JDS: Right, as soon as possible.

LM: And then this cold open was added on.

JDS: This was at a time when we had a lot more time on our hands.

LM: This is magical.

JDS: This entire episode was boarded by Lauren, myself, Ryu, with help from others. This is probably the most involvement in actually storyboarding an episode that we have.

LM: And what Joaquim is referring to is this first portion. This actual episode is made up of three different episodes. 1x01 is what we’re seeing right now, and this carries up to where the Blue Lion approaches Arus.

JDS: This is technically three episodes jammed together.

KA: I was going to ask you about that. So you approached them each as individual episodes. I think it flows really nicely as a film, essentially.

JDS: We’re lucky that it was highly serialized.

LM: Yeah it was an interesting thing because this first three-episode arc was initially approached as, we wanted it to be a one piece big thing and it was going to be that. And then at some point there was a weird, “Netflix wants everything to be episodic, and they all have to match up and be the same length.” And so then we’re like, okay, so we have to break it apart. And then it’s like, “Oh no! We’re wrong! That doesn’t have to happen! Put them back together.” So then we got it to be one full movie, which is what it was really planned to be. We do from a production standpoint have to attack it as three separate episodes.

KA: Got it.

JDS: And when this is outside of Netflix’s jurisdiction, they all have to work. So if they’re playing in foreign markets in another country that doesn’t have Netflix, they work as individual episodes. We were all figuring out at that time. That was really early days for the studio, working with Netflix.

LM: I remember coming in and Joaquim was telling to me, “Alright, we figured out production stuff and we’re boarding the first episode.” And I was a little bit like, okay! It’s been quite a while since I boarded a full act. That’s a few year’s down the line.

JDS: A few years removed.

LM: Again, we had a lot more time on our hands. This was our first episode so we didn’t have any other episodes running at the same time.

JDS: It was a dreamier time. It was a time where I had a lot more hair and a lot less white hair.

JDS: So he says, “get out of the” uh. He says something, “get out of the cockpit donkeys!” Something donkeys, we don’t have the sound on guys, apologies.. But the usage of the word “donkey” is a reference to my gym teacher, Mr. Walters. From Walter E. Junior High. He’s a fantastic human being but he called everyone donkeys. If you were in trouble in any way you would be part of the donkey squad.

KA: Which you would be anyway if you were all donkeys.

JDS: That’s right. But when my friends heard that, and they watched this when it finally aired, they all called me up with tears in their eyes like “Mr. Walters! Long live Mr. Walters!”

LM: Yes, some people have noticed that there is a little bit of a wink wink to some of the Macross characters in the background here. We have a- funny thing, originally one of the kids raises his hand here and said “The pilot crashed!” I did the scratch for that because it was an odd on thing.

JDS: That’s right.

LM: And that was supposed to be the Max look-alike character. But I think they’re like “it’s a girl voice,” so they just made it a girl that looks creepily like me.

JDS: It does! It looks like Lauren. They were like, well Lauren did the voice, so it’s Lauren.

LM: And I was like, hey no! That’s supposed to be Max. So now you never really see Max, you just see the back of his blue head.

JDS: I don’t know who’s sitting at that lounge but he looks really cool and he might die eating a bowl of fruit and playing guitar.

LM: The pineapple-y salad type set up.

JDS: So this was part of the fun humor stuff that we were mandated to inject into the show from the higher ups here at Dreamworks. I storyboarded these sections so I’m proud of the way they look, but I remember thinking at the time, “Oh man, we’re going to turn into a slapstick show!” I think it worked out in the end. They’re teenagers, they’re goofy! And they like to hide in trash cans. I know I liked to do that when I was a kid.

KA: That sort of, as you went along, it sort of became the tone of the show.

JDS: It did.

KA: There is that over the top silliness of over the top anime stuff coupled with super serious world destroying monsters.

JDS: Oddly enough that’s how these things go sometimes. Sometimes we’ll get word from on high, “Oh, do this,” and we’re grumbly grumbly grumbly while we doing it, and we do it and we’re like, “Looks okay.” And then it goes on to create the tapestry of the show, which is alright. You gotta have fun.

KA: That’s kinda a great way to start, because we’ve seen Shiro but maybe a lot of people might not realize that’s who that was. You start with these three characters. I remember watching it like, “Lance, he’s clearly going to be the lead of the show.” And as you go along it’s like no, it’s a show made up of lead characters. When you guys were developing this as a new version of Voltron, how did you kind of want to get the characters to where they’re your version of these characters?

JDS: Sort of the starting point was looking at the original show and realizing that it was just a bunch of hero guy characters, and maybe stepping back from that a little bit and looking as to how we could individualize these guys. Really giving them, I think in Lance’s case, it’s almost like an amplified version of elements he had in the original show.

LM: I think we had pretty good ideas of what we wanted to do with some of the characters. Keith we kinda knew we wanted to be more quiet, more moody. Lance was kind of the cocky loud guy. Pidge was the awkward but focused girl. And then there was Hunk and Shiro, and we weren’t quite sure. We knew Shiro needed to be a leader guy. We weren’t quite sure what to do about Hunk and then the writers came in and just gave him this incredible personality that’s unique to him and fun and warm and probably one of the most relatable guys.

JDS: Yeah I think so. He’s the one that’s sort of become the voice of the show to say-

LM: The voice of reason.

JDS: This is insane. This is all complete insanity.

LM: While Pidge and Lance are just so focused on, “Let’s check this out,” but he’s like, “Are you nuts?”

JDS: If this were Scream or a horror movie, he’s the guy that says, “Don’t open the door! If you open the door, don’t go upstairs!”

LM: Pidge and Lance, they’re definitely going upstairs.

JDS: This scene also helped set up Shiro’s mythology within their group. As a viewer, you’re not really sure where this guy stands. Once you hear them talk about Shiro, you realize, oh he’s got this kind of higher stature.

LM: And we also drop a few little hints of Pidge looking for her family without flat out saying that she’s definitely interested in what happened to the other astronauts. That was something we needed to keep consistent throughout to really sell her story down the line.

LM: And Hunk, the voice of reason.

JDS: There you go.

LM: There he is. This is always a funny moment here, where he’s just like, “We just need to OH MY GOSH.”

JDS: I remember we laughed heartily at the actors acting this sequence out.

LM: For sure.

JDS: Here we go. Boom boom boom!

LM: And that was a Tyler adlib. “Oh my god, they got here so fast!” That was incredible. Tyler brings a lot to Hunk. He always kinda goes off the script, makes sure he’s getting what we need, but he gives some of that Hunk personality which is really a huge part of what makes Hunk Hunk.

JDS: A lot of the actors, we want to sort of work in the situation where they can bring themselves to the characters. A lot of the stuff that traditionally in animation people sort of say “don’t do that” because you have to animate these extra lip flaps that aren’t part of the dialogue, we encourage it because it brings so much personality to the character.

LM: We don’t encourage beating up doctors, as Keith as demonstrated.

JDS: Hey, he had to get his buddy off the table, man. These were not doctors, these were science soldier doctor men.

LM: Military doctors. Don’t beat them up kids. It’s a bad idea. Unless you’re Keith.

JDS: Unless you’re Keith. Unless you’ve got a jacket that only comes up to your ribcage.

KA: It’s a bandalero jacket or something.

JDS: Yeah? Is that thing? Where it goes a little high.

KA: Like a matador used to wear.

JDS: Oh, that’s true!

LM: Squall from Final Fantasy VIII jacket. That’s all I know.

JDS: I like that point of reference.

LM” That’s what every cropped jacket is. You’re pulling a Squall.

JDS: This was also an interesting situation where you sort of get these guys coming together organically. Obviously Keith and Lance had some awareness of each other, but Shiro’s sort of the common thread between all of these characters really. But up to this point, I think if you’re playing in a traditional storytelling sense for kids’ action adventure on TV and on Netflix - maybe not on Netflix, but definitely on more traditional TV - the guys would’ve been in the lions already and been off and Voltron-ing around. And right now, we’ve got a passed out leader of the group being held on by the smallest of the group while they all freak out on the back of a bike. It’s an interesting way to kind of get them all-

LM: And one thing that we found out sadly from MIR too late in the game.

KA: Mir is Studio MIR.

JDS: Studio MIR, yes.

LM: Yes. They do all of our animation in South Korea. Incredible partners. And they tell us, hey guys, it’s not easy to draw 2D characters on a CG object. That’s hard. And we said, “Okay, we’re not going to do that except we’ve got this one scene, five characters on the back of an object. We’re very sorry.” So we’ve gone to great lengths throughout the show to make sure we keep it sustainable for MIR and we try not to do that.

JDS: We just had to break the rule right out the gate.

KA: Yeah of course.

LM: This is a lovely scene.

JDS: You get that sort of throwback to life before they were on this big adventure together. And this is Keith’s crazy board.

LM: Yeah, crazy board. This scene was a fun one. Joaquim got to reboard this like 20 times. It started out just with a much longer explanation that probably made a little more sense of Keith finding all these symbols and leading him to the Blue Lion, but in the interest of time and kids apparently not getting bored watching the scene, it had to get severely trimmed down. So now it's like, “Oh I’ve got a feeling.” And there’s a blue lion.

JDS: We literally had to just go with the idea of like, you get. He’s got the board. He’s been thinking about this. Now they gotta get on the adventure.

LM: They gotta move.

JDS: It did at one point have a very thorough and well thought out explanation.

LM: Apparently thought out explanations put kids to sleep.

JDS: Sleepy time.

KA: Especially with what you’re saying, traditionally they’d already be in the lion by now. This is however many minutes we’re into it and they’re just finding out about the lions, or we’re just finding out.

JDS: Yeah, it’s just these vague sort of prophetic elements that are out there. That was kind of our mandate, even seeing Voltron. We didn’t want to do the thing where Voltron shows up every episode. Once the show got going, we wanted the Voltron moments to feel special. As the show went on you sort of come to realize, Voltron’s going to show up and kick a whole bunch of butt because that’s what he’s there to do. But we wanted to really have a good balance of lion action, and paladin action, and Voltron action.

LM: We really wanted to sell that Voltron was not the only way to save the day. Ultimately it’s these pilots coming together, and whether they do it on their own or with their lions or with Voltron, it just happens.

KA: That’s right.

JDS: This was an element again, this graph lines up to this rocks. We never really go back to explain how that all work, but hot dog! It was a good transition guys.

LM: You just need that visual because apparently kids don’t want to research Fraunhofer lines. I dont know, some kids do. I’m sure there are definitely some kids out there who are like, hell yeah! Fraunhofer lines!

JDS: Was Fraunhofer like, man I’m in this desert and this rock looks really cool. Let me-

LM: Make a line for it.

JDS: Yeah, who knows. These elements tend to line up.

KA: All I have is graph paper.

LM: So here we will see one of the first appearances of the B.Jamin symbol.

JDS: Yeah the Kaltenecker symbol.

LM: Benjamin Kaltenecker, our line producer.

JDS: Is it in the lower right once everything lights up?

LM: It’s in the big truck, when things start lighting up. Pause it, you’ll see it. Oh there it is! Upper right!

JDS: Upper right. That’s the same signal you see on Kaltenecker the cow’s behind, the branding symbol. And that’s a symbol that our line producer Benjamin Kaltenecker had come up with for himself, much like Prince. When we first started working with each other, that thing was drawn on everything. Any meeting we’re in it still is.

LM: Still, today, to this day it’s still drawn on everything. If you’re in a meeting and he’s got pencil and he’s got paper, he’s usually scribbling this symbol.

JDS: So if you ever want to get in good with Benjamin Kaltenecker, give him a symbol of himself.

LM: His own symbol. He’ll love it. Or just give him a cow.

LM: So this was fun. The breakdown of this episode was, I had done essentially act one, Joaquim had done act two, and we’re into Ryu Ki-Hyun’s section. He is our supervising producer and just master of-.

JDS: Master animator, master storyboard artist.

LM: Just drawer. Good at drawer.

JDS: Master drawer.

LM: We’re about to see a little vision of Voltron, and that really was kinda what you were alluding to. “Hey, we’ve got this show, and we haven’t even seen Voltron yet.” Well, they wanted to see Voltron, and here he is! We were able to talk them down off the, “I don’t know if we can get everyone in the lions and forming Voltron in the first episode, that might feel a little rushed?” “Okay, well we need to see him somewhere.”

JDS: And they can all mentally experience Voltron at the same time, so that was our cheat.

LM: Yeah, for sure. He’ll be there. And he’ll have a sweet flaming sword.

KA: There was the logo at the front.

JDS: There is the logo at the front. You get plenty of that.

LM: That’s true, so technically, Voltron is in every episode.

KA: THat’s right.

LM: It was just a lot of fun to play with. As awesome as it is to have a crazy giant robot lion, it’s freaking frightening. And so the fact that they encounter it and it’s starts moving and they’re freaking out, to me, that’s a pretty real reaction. I’d be out of that. I wouldn’t have even gone into the cave.

JDS: Yeah, the cave would have been a non-starter for me.

LM: I’m not made or that sort of stuff. But the second that lion started moving, I would’ve gone.

JDS: Hunk, voice of reason, cat face. Classic Ryu right there. And this was us sort of trying to, again, almost level up from the previous series, where you get this sort of mental connection between the pilot and the lion. So that was the first indication that Lance was sort of experiencing something that the other guys weren’t. His bond was already beginning with the Blue Lion.

LM: Here you just get the all out lion fun sequence. It’s been underground for 10,000 years and now it’s just letting loose. It’s part Lance, but honestly I think it’s mostly lion just being happy it’s out of that cave. If we were to have gone super realistic with this show, we would’ve been like, they can’t be this good this fast. But you also have to sell the fact that it’s frigging awesome to be in one of these lions.

JDS: And the lion’s piloting it as much at this point as Lance is. But Lance is still taking credit.

LM: Yeah. Of course. That’s what Lance does.

JDS: And this was also, that sequence you just saw when they busted out of the cave and them flying, it ended right about here. But this was the sequence we used to kind of pitch the show to all the executives internally. That includes Jeffrey Katzenberg, who’s the biggest of them all at the time. I remember being in a meeting and sort of looking out the corner of my eye as this scene played. Is he reacting to this? Is he reacting to this? Please react to this. Please react to this. It seemed to all go well because show got made and that sequence stayed.

LM: Show got made.

KA: Now they’re in space.

JDS: And now they’re in space.

LM: That’s not the end folks because there’s the bad guys. Natural reaction. It’s not enough that they’re in a robot lion, but now there’s a crazy alien ship in front of them.

JDS: And again, we’re cramming a lot of information into a short amount of time, but sort of given the parameters of kids’ TV, it took a long time for them to get into a lion. Now we’re just on the ride.

LM: You gotta get that information out.

JDS: You gotta get it out there!

LM: Again, here Lance is giving it his all, but I think a lot of this is actually Blue Lion helping them out and saving their butts. But also showing that this is an incredibly maneuverable vehicle that they’re in. Crazy fast. Unlike any space ships that certainly Earth has ever seen. And even still at 10,000 years old, far more than anything that the Galra have.

JDS: That’s right. It’s using claws, it’s using beams, it’s doing it all.

LM: And it’s kind of got a brain. It’s very own sentience.

JDS: That was also the place we first came to the realization that we will never try to explain how the mechanics of the controls work, which drove our VR people absolutely insane. They were like, what does each one of the joystick moments means? We’re like, we don’t know! Because sometimes you push it forward and a laser comes out.

LM: It means go. It means shoot. It means stop. It means barrel roll.

JDS: It means whatever needs to happen or the scene looking as cool as possible.

LM: It means look cool and stuff happens.

KA: That’s another thing. For the people who make the Altean dictionary, they can figure out what each-

JDS: What each button does, exactly.

LM: Here’s the wormhole that’s going to determine the rest of their lives. There have been a lot of fan theories for where this wormhole came from. I’m going to blow them all out of the water right now and tell you.

JDS: Do it.

LM: It’s from the castle. The castle, which when it stores a decent amount of Allura’s energy, it can create wormholes. And this lion, coming back awake, finding a pilot, has sent a message back to the castle. And the castle, having access to Allura because she’s on the castle in a cryopod, has used some of her energy to create this wormhole and bring that lion straight back to it. Bring that lion home.

JDS: Bam. So yeah.

LM: Sorry, no Altean Lance, as of yet. Wink wink.

JDS: Wink wink.

JDS: So this is our sort big Altea reveal.

LM: This is actually the last shot of episode 1. This next shot begins episode 2, and that was directed by Eugene Lee, a very talented young man who we worked with for the first time on Legend of Korra and were blown away by his talent and then immediately decided we could never let him go.

JDS: Yes, he’s currently locked up with a chain to his leg to this desk, storyboarding and directing furiously.

LM: So yeah, good times. Always. More typical Keith and Lance banter.

JDS: Yeah, I think was where we really sort of, if the scene between him and Lance trying to rescue Shiro sort of kicked it off, this is where the feud continues. I think we started realizing this is going to be a theme throughout.

KA: Since we’re getting into the episode now, how did you guys come to make this show? Obviously you’re both big fans of the original show. How did this project land with you?

LM: Before we go into that, I just want to point out my favorite fart joke of the entire series. We don’t do a lot of fart jokes but we had to put one in there right up front.

JDS: The fart foley on that one was on point because it was a squeaker.

LM: And there have been some complaints about the fart joke but I stand firmly behind that fart joke because that is legit. A 17 year old dude would absolutely do that ot his friends. I believe that it is in character for Lance, 100%.

JDS: A 40 year old dude, possibly named Joaquim, might still do that to his friends.

LM: My husband would laugh. If any of his friends did that, or if he did that to his friends, he would be cracking up. He’s not 17, but he’s about that maturity level. Anyway, back to-

JDS: Yeah, so how this started. Dreamworks purchased this insane library of properties called Classic Media LIbrary. You know, Richie Rich, Lone Ranger, and all these other properties were kinda bundled up in this Classic Media Library. Voltron was right in there. Lauren and I were both working at Nickelodeon at the time. We had heard about this purchase. Dreamworks TV was just getting off the ground. We heard Voltron was potentially a part of that, and we were super excited as fans of the original series, so we had some lunches about how we could do some cool stuff with this. Just started batting around ideas.

LM: But it was kinda like a pipe dream at the time. I remember standing in your office at Korra. You just read the news thing that Dreamworks had acquired, uh.

JDS: Classic Media Library.

LM: Thats the one. And you welike, that’s Voltron. I was like, “Oh my God. We could make such a good Voltron.” And I immediately went sour and was like, “They’re just going to hire some hack and it’s going to be awful.” Like, straight from positivity to “no, nothing can ever happen well.” It just seemed so out of reach. It just so happened that Mark Taylor, from Nickelodeon, who was very familiar with Joaquim from his work on Legend of Korra and Avatar the Last Airbender, brought him over to talk.

JDS: And Lauren as well. Well familiar with Lauren’s work as well.

LM: Eh, a little bit. But yeah. Ultimately we were able to pitch ourselves for Voltron. And it seemed like they kinda had the same idea, and that’s what they were meeting with us about anyway. It lined up. We had to go through a few interview. We met with Margie, with Petere, with Ian, a number of people in the development process. We were nice so they were like, “Alright, they’re nice.”

JDS: I think they also recognized that we were actual people who grew up with this in their lives at a much younger stage of our lives.

LM: I just think they thought we were nice.

JDS: Okay, sure.

KA: Is that how it works?

JDS: If you’re just nice, you get to run a show! That’s sorta how it came to be.

LM: I’d like to point out a retake we didn’t call. Allura, the screen left side of her dress, gets cut off. Sometimes we miss them, guys.

JDS: There you go. We miss the retakes.

LM: Who knows.

JDS: We brought Tim Hedrick on board and originally, sort of internally between the three of us, had pitched around ideas. This show, originally, just so you know, our original pitch for it was it starts on Earth, post-apocalyptic Earth. The Galra have taken over, looking for the Blue Lion. So the Blue Lion was hidden somewhere on Earth, as it is in this version, but the Galra had already shown up for years and had been laying waste to the land. So it was a little different. Keith, from the get-go, we were thinking he was going to be half-Galra. Spoiler alert, sorry.

LM: I would like to point out Lance’s “Karate Kid” kick right there.

JDS: And this is the best move Coran has ever had.

LM: It’s a crew favorite, I think. Christine Bian, Christie Tseng, and Anthony the design supervisor all very much enjoy it.

KA: I’ve tried to fight somebody like that. I did.

LM: It’s really successful.

JDS: The sternum poke.

LM: Funny thing about Zarkon. We did the first couple episodes with him in a certain color scheme and then at some point had second thoughts, like “We don’t like this color scheme. Can we change it?” And MIR was like, “You can change it from this episode on.” And so I think, it was four or five-

JDS: And we just never said anything.

LM: I haven’t seen anyone bring it up. I’m sure someone has but.

JDS: I like to think it’s because when we first catch up with Zarkon he was like “I haven’t seen a lion in a really long time.” And then he was wearing his sad clothes. And then he put on his motivated clothes because the lion showed up and he was ready to go.

LM: He gets a color change somewhere in there.

KA: Zarkon has fat pants just like we all do.

JDS: Exactly.

LM: And Zarkon has pupils for one shot.

JDS: The little flashback scene. That’s non sequitur.

LM: I think that was just, because we went back and forth. “Does Zarkon have pupils? Does he not?”

JDS: That was a direct drawing taken from Ryu that Ryu had done, and Ryu was like, “Hey man, I’m putting pupils in there.” Like, cool, man. Do it.

LM: Sometimes Ryu is a bit of a wild card. But 90% of the time you get magnificence so you accept the risk.

JDS: You get the pupils.

KA: Well Zarkon certainly looks a lot different than he did in the original show.

LM: There was a funny set of circumstances that led to that. We originally had a different design for Zarkon that I think looked more like the original.

JDS: Within reason. The original, I mean, if you look at him.

LM: Not exactly like the original.

JDS: He had elements.

KA: He looks like the king of the starfish.

LM: Like Sendak harkens to Yorak, our Zarkon harkened back to the original Zarkon a little bit more. But then we ended up, a few things shifted around. We were potentially going to have Hasbro as our toy partner for a little while. And they, as you know, handle all the Marvel stuff for Disney Marvel. There was concern that he- you know what, he had the lines in the chin, which as you know Thanos has.

JDS: He had the lines in his chin. He looked a lot like Thanos.

LM: He had a lot of gold, he was purple, and he had some lines. So it was like, “He looks too much like Thanos.” And we were like, “Oh.” We had to go back and kinda-

JDS: Reorganize his color scheme.

LM: Yeah, explore him a little bit more and just rethink him. That ended up with him looking quite a bit different than the original. Just for the sake of needed to differentiate him from other properties.

JDS: And you know, it’s all good.

LM: We’ll play ball.

JDS: We didn’t take a hard line stance.

LM: “No! He has to be purple and fuzzy!”

JDS: “Or we walk.” We’re like, “No, we’ll change his colors, it’s cool.”

KA: “His entire character is based around the lines of his chin.”

JDS: Haha that’s right. So this is the first appearance of food good. Kinda looks like a weird green brain right there.

LM: It does.

JDS: Ugh. He still goes at it though. Can’t deny that.

LM: He’s lost all the contents of his stomach. I can’t blame him.

JDS: So to me that’s a good example of some good, like Eugene likes to put humor that happens in the background that you don’t really notice sometimes. So Hunk getting sick there and going back for more.

LM: He sticks his little tongue out like, “Ugh that doesn’t taste great. Well, I need the sustenance.”

LM: And the space mice. There was a lot of debate about, do you bring the space mice back, do you not from the execs. “Do we want the space mice, they’re corny.” And I was like, we’re having the space mice.

JDS: There’s no way we’re not doing the space mice.

LM: I mean we came from Avatar and Korra, where they all had little pets. As long as you handle them the right way. Maybe they’re not doing can-cans with frilly skirts-

JDS: Yet.

LM: Well I’m not taking anything off the table right now, the show is not over. But yeah, there was never an option of not having space mice.

LM: And here we go. These are classic Ryu drawings here. Funny little Hunk acting.

JDS: Here we go. The mission begins proper.

KA: So this is a question I’ve had since I started watching the show. And just looking at that shot of Shiro, does he have a scar on his face?

JDS: He does.

KA: Okay. I thought it was a sunburn...

LM: My niece asked, “Why does he have a stripe on his face?”

JDS: Because he’s part tiger man.

LM: It’s a boo boo.

KA: He hurt himself.

LM: Joaquim has his necessarily elements.

JDS: Don’t say it Lauren.

LM: The mysterious past, the facial scar, and robotic arm.

JDS: I mean, those are staples of just awesomeness.

LM: You always get the scar across the eye. That’s kind of the go to. And we’re like, we don’t want to do that. We’re doing that with every other character! Zarkon, Sendak probably has one. So what does Shiro have? The nose.

JDS: I think that was a Ryu or Christie Tseng doing that. I had done the more traditional one in one of my pieces of concept art.

LM: It was Ryu for sure.

JDS: And then Ryu did the one across the nose like, that’s pretty cool. That’s unique.

LM: He just got a sword right across the face.

JDS: That’s right. LM: Here’s Allura doing her minority report.

JDS: We also didn’t come to that realization by the way about the arm and the scar and the mysterious past.

LM: Until much later. I think it’s just embedded in you.

JDS: I was doing some Cable fanart and I was like, hmm Cable. Scar, mysterious past, robot arm. Winter Soldier. Mysterious past, robot arm. No facial scar.

LM: Give it time.

JDS: And then I was like, Solid Snake? Uh oh. Big Boss? Uh oh.

KA: All the coolest people.

LM: It’s all good. We’re not trying to say that everything here is 100% original. It’s based off an old show that we watched as a kid, so we just put everything we love in it.

JDS: And sometimes things just happen. It was the dumbest thing, but as we were pitching the characters and their origins, Shiro had the past where he was in this gladiatorial games, and I was like, hey would you give him a robot arm. There was no real character motivation, can he just have a robot arm. I wanted to give him a Nintendo power glove.

LM: That was all it was. It was purely for the looks. I mean it works with his past, of course.

KA: It shows that he’s vulnerable and yet also super badass.

JDS: And it ends up playing a bigger part because you realize that there were elements that the Galra saw as potential.

LM: Here again is Voltron. He’s in the episode. They haven’t formed him yet, but he is in the episode. I think there was a “one Voltron per episode” mandate at this point. We can’t go too long without the kids seeing Voltron!

JDS: And by the way, at this point, we’re getting some exec heart attack emails going, “Guys, where’s the robot? What’s going on”

LM: Originally we had wanted to give a solo episode to each lion. If we could get, six episodes in and then you form Voltron. And they were like what?

JDS: You are crazy.

LM: Six, so halfway through the season and you haven’t seen the robot yet? We managed to compromise and so not in the first episode but also not in the sixth. We hit it at three. We were able to tack a lot of the lions. We found one in 1, a few in 2, and then Red and Black and 3? And we were good.

JDS: That’s right. Originally each lion was going to get their own episode. We were going to get to follow the big adventures.

LM: We had a lot of lofty ideas.

JDS:Looking back at it now, that’s a little crazy. That’s a little nuts. This show is called Voltron. It would’ve been neat at the same time.

KA: Not Lion Hunters.

JDS: That’s right.

LM: You just gotta keep your audience in mind. If it’s like, we’re making Voltron for adults, you can probably get away with that. But apparently, Voltron is for children.

JDS: But a lot of adults do watch.

LM: No, absolutely. I’m just joking.

KA: I have a bunch of friends who are well older than me who are always talking about theories.

LM: That was our goal. We knew ultimately what needed to be delivered through the show, but we know what we wanted to bring to it as well. We didn’t just want to do the fight fight fight, robots punch, keep kids entertained show. We wanted to do a show that had a legit story and was also entertaining.

JDS: And had characters that you could get behind and root for. And the sloth guy.

LM: Hey, breakaway fan favorite. And the Pokemon little cutesy things? I think there were jokes of them gettingmurder eyes, but they stayed happy and sweet. If Pidge and Shiro stayed on this planet any longer, they would’ve been devoured. That’s why the sloth is in the canoe. If he goes onto land-

JDS: Those little things turn into carnivorous crazies. So this was always funny, that Shiro and Pidge are having the most relaxed experience finding the Green Lion and then you immediately cut to Lance and Hunk and they are freaking out.

LM: That was a lot of fun Just cutting back and forth between those two situations.

JDS: I think that was Tim Hedrick sort of “yeah, we’re sort of ping ponging between madness and serenity.”

LM: It could’ve so easily been both lions get an action sequence, but this is so much fun. And plus Pidge gets this really sweet bonding moment with Shiro, where she’s kinda remembering her dad.

JDS: And this is my favorite. This is the best.

LM: This is incredible. When Lance just shoots him out of the lion, like, “You’re going!”

JDS: This is the one time we’ve seen the eject button and we’ve never acknowledged that hatchagain.

LM: The slo-mo of him tumbling. Oh, this all makes me so happy.

JDS: The hatch served its purpose. We gotta use the hatch eventually. Someone’s gotta get ejected.

LM: It’ll be from the Blue Lion playset. Press the hatch and just shoot Hunk out.

KA: The Hunk you can fold up into a ball.

LM: Here you see some of the first workings of Hunk being a mechanical genius. Hotwires an alien elevator, just recognizes those wires, because hey, it’s intuitive.

JDS: I think he made a comment about that. “Just drop me off on the planet, etc.”

LM: No for sure. But he does it because he’s awesome, and he’s Hunk.

JDS: I remember Tyler cracking up at this. He was like, “What do you want me to say here? Ooh pretty?”

LM: So there were a lot of “whoas” in this first episode. I feel like we could have a “whoa” counter and it would go up pretty high because there’s a lot, especially with seeing a lion for the first time, seeing the castle for the first time. Just whoa. At a certain point they’re like, “You want another whoa. You want whoa again?” Poor Jeremy and Tyler probably got the worst of it, the most of the “whoa.”

JDS: At some point we just said, go full Keanu. Just whoa it up.

LM: Just accept it and love it.

JDS So this is also cool, seeing the lion do things like grab the Galra fighter in its mouth and crunch it up. That’s, I think, the fun of these robots.

LM: Lance is clearly getting better at handling the lion. Becoming a better pilot, becoming more familiar. But here’s the moment of him going, oh my god, is Hunk dead? We don’t know. Of course he’s not dead, we wouldn’t have a show.

JDS: I remember being uncomfortable with that cut at first because I was like, and then we’re just going to cut to serenity? But it totally works. And we also set up this beautiful moment here.

LM:There they are, waiting to eat them. The second you get off the canoe.

JDS: They’re just allergic to water.

LM: They can’t swim. That’s the problem. But yeah. Here’s the moment where Shiro is mentioning what his commander said. Pidge knows that that’s her dad, but we don’t necessarily know that yet.

JDS: Shiro’s not realizing it.

LM: And so it kinda warms her heart to hear him say something to her that she’s heard many times from her dad.

KA: And at this point of course, we don’t necessarily know that.

JDS: We don’t.

LM: That’s one of those “go back and look for it” things. Wink wink.

JDS: Which was sort of a benefit of being on Netflix was that they encouraged that element of storytelling.

LM: The Green Lion reveal is one of my favorites just because it looks so cool. And because I love Pidge.

JDS: And she’s genuinely enjoying the moment.

LM: This was fun in editing and in ADR, because as Pidge pulls herself up here, we had Jeff Adams, our editor, cycle her heavy breathing.

JDS: That’s right. Because it was just one at first.

LM: She’s gotta be more winded, man. She’s spent a lot of time in front of a computer!

JDS: So that was Jeff going back forward, back forward, back forward, back forward.

LM: Pidge gets winded, much like I would.

JDS: She’s not an athlete.

LM: Hey man, if I had to climb that, I’d be over.

JDS: Alien Machu Pichu.

LM: And there it is. Super awesome looking Green Lion.

JDS: And Shiro not quite looking like Shiro, but still looks pretty satisfying.

LM: We’ll accept it. It’s always interesting in the first few episodes as the animators are getting a feel for these characters. You can see some of their drawings have changed over time. As the team gets more familiar with the character, they start to draw them better. But hey! Everything’s gotta start somewhere.

JDS: The show looks obviously fantastic, but it is interesting to see specifically with TV animation, where you have so many episodes, you can watch the evolution of artists becoming comfortable with the style.

LM: Here the amazing reveal of the Yellow Lion and the belly flop. Still badass, most badass belly flop ever. But also just kind of a fun little nod. “I was just rying to get out of the way, but this has got great armor.” Just kinda differentiating some of the lions. We discussed that some lions were faster than others, some were more armor plated. Giving each of them their specialty. Yellow might be slower but can sure withstand a whole lot of hits.

JDS: This just cracks me up. He’s just spinning, like, not this again.

LM: But again, Lance has been flying his lion for a while. Hunk hasn’t, so he’s a little more shaky and is thrown off by some Galra fire.

KA: Do you guys remember, I had a hand me down Voltron toy, like the building put together lions. And I remember them being similar with the exception of the Black Lion. And you guys, I’ve always liked right away that you differentiate not only the personality of the lions but literal. The Yellow Lion is bigger and bulkier and has a different set of skills.

JDS: That was our pitch. We had to make a circuit with all the different executive levels from the company. Initially, one of our boards was comparing what each lion was to a car. So we had a board where the Blue Lion is a sports car, like a Charger or a Mustang.

LM: Was it like a pick up truck? I can’t remember.

JDS: The Blue Lion? No, because I remember, I think Yellow Lion was construction.

LM: Yellow Lion was construction. I think the Blue Lion might have been pick up truck. I think the Black Lion was a Charger. Red Lion was something super fast like a Ferrari or a Porsche. The Green Lion was a bug, it was so cute I loved it.

LM: It was a ways back, but one of my favorite Coran jokes is the good news, bad news. “Good news is, it’s right outside of Arus! Bad news is….” Well I can’t remember my own joke but it was funny.

JDS: Oh here we go.

LM: The particle barrier joke.

JDS: The particle barrier was one where we were like, wow we’re pushing the limits here.

LM: You can do it because Shiro clearly calls him on it. You can’t let him finish that joke because then you’re just a-holes.

JDS: This is what I like too, is that Hunk is literally, “Can we just bail out of this situation now? I’m still not accepting my fate as a hero just yet. This is a good idea, we can just try jamming them up together and get out of here through the wormhole.”

LM: Starting with Sendak’s transmission is where we go into episode 3. This is where Steven Ahn, director Steve Ahn takes over. You can really tell his voice in his episode. You even see some of his drawings. That whole Hunk snake arms, the little snake worm lion is all Steve. Even these Lance faces, those Allura and Coran faces-

JDS: That Lance posture, that’s Steve.

LM: It’s all super STeve Ahn and it’s incredible. He has a very unique voice and that’s why we love him.

JDS: I think that’s one of the other interesting things about working on a series. As people become more familiar with the episodes, even if were to not have the credit roll in the beginning, you’d probably be able to tell everybody’s episode, every director’s episode from the other because they bring their own unique voice. We try to make it feel cohesive but at the same time we want every directo to have their own unique take on storytelling.

LM: Here is good ol’ King Alfor. He’s also a little bit of a nod to the original with his hologram and his guiding Allura. That was definitely something I remember. I think it was in one of the VOltron episodes where she’s like, I have to go pray. And she runs down and prays to her father. Something kind of hilarious happens where he told her, I can’t even remember what he told her but he told her something super vague like “pray” and all of a sudden the whole castle turns into this massive fortress.

JDS: Is that how it works? You just pray to the hologram?

LM: It was something kinda crazy, but hey.

JDS: There was also the element here, and we address it in a later episode, I think your favorite episode Lauren, where we ran the risk of a Alfor AI or hologram being a fix all for a lot of stuff, so at some point we realized we have to do away with this guy.

LM: For sure. Tim, our story editor, he was very much like “you guys, we can’t have this guy around. He’s going to ruin our story.”

JDS: We kept going into these meetings going like, why? And he sort of broke it down. “Alright, say this happens. Why wouldn’t Alfor just give the solution to this?” We’re like, that’s pretty bad, yeah.

LM: We exited him in the most beautiful way possible, as you will see in episode I have no idea what number it is on Netflix.

JDS: That one. For us it’s a whole different series of numbers.

LM: Was it 11?

JDS: I think it was.

LM: I could be wrong.

JDS: Just because we looked at these all as individual episode, so you jammed the first three together.

LM: 11-2 is 9. Episode 9 on Netflix.

LM: So here is their amazing outfits. The thing with their outfits is, we had not yet fully designed the original paladins. And these aren’t even the same outfits, so in our heads we’re like yeah, the castleship has created new outfits for these paladins. But they’re just one size fits all. You put it on and it just adheres to you.

JDS: Just contours to your body.

LM: You get this funny size joke which could essentially work for Pidge as well, where Hunk is like,I’m not going to fit into that. Neither is Pidge, technically. But luckily it all works, everybody fits.

JDS: Coming up with concepts for the costumes was a little tough because obviously you have the iconic original series. Originally, when we first started tackling them, we were paying way more homage to them. They were pretty much in spandex.

LM: I was literally just drawing the original series. I was like, what’s wrong with this, guys? Hey, it’s classic.

JDS: As we went and pitched the visuals to the different exec tiers, they were like, “So they’re just wearing spandex?” We’re like, what’s wrong with that?

LM: Not a lot of love for spandex.

JDS: Not a ton. So we wanted to do some armor that was kinda form-fitting.

LM: The one thing that we didn’t want to do, which I think maybe some of the toy side would’ve liked us to have done more, was like a bigger armor. More of like a Halo type interpretation.

JDS: Like a power suit.

LM: But that was something that we didn’t feel comfortable with. Because they’re not out there, they’re not infantry, they’re piloting lions. We just wanted something that was a little more fitted and allowed you to see the character through it a bit more.

JDS: And fun! Oh man, I see another retake. I can’t look at it.

LM: Don’t do it.

JDS: You can see right through Lance’s helmet there, oh lord.

LM: Oh gosh. You realize it’s not the face mask, right?

JDS: No I get it. It was under his chin. That’s where it should’ve been wrapping around.

LM: Ah it’s alright. Well no, it doesn’t wrap all the way around.

JDS: I know. It was just too much, you didn’t see chin.

LM: It was a retake, guys. We’re going to debate it for the rest of this episode.

JDS: But yeah. They wanted to, I say “they,” there was discussion as you’re developing that happens where you need to explore every element, but one thing we didn’t want to do was get too aggressive looking with a lot of stuff. We wanted to keep that fun, sort of campy element from the original. As much as I love Halo, as much as I love space marines, Aliens is literally my favorite film of all time - this wasn’t the appropriate venue for that aesthetic.

LM: Those designs are great for the things that they’re in. Halo looks awesome for Halo. But putting that in this show just didn’t really work.

JDS: It didn’t fit.

LM: We looked at Stormtroopers for a light armor. Here’s some armor plating on essentially what is a spandex outfit. It was a compromise, meet in the middle. Little bit of armor, little bit of spandex. Everybody’s happen.

JDS: But definitely don’t cover your bellies with armor, because you gotta show them abs.

LM: You gotta keep cool. You gotta keep your core cool.

KA: You also got to be able to move backward and forward.

JDS: Without crunching around.

LM: I saw a Keith’s belt retake. Hey guys, we’re going to call them live.

JDS: Oh boy. We’re just going to call them now. This is how it happens.

LM: But here’s our first starting to realize. Pidge is about to reveal that it’s her family.

JDS: By the way, brutal Shiro here, saying hey, sacrifices.

LM: Hey, if anyone’s seen the most war, it’s Shiro.

JDS: That’s right. He understands the hard decisions.

LM: He isn’t wrong, but ultimately he hears her plea and he softens to it. And Commander Holt, he loved him too.

KA: We’re setting up Pidge’s whole arc. Everything we’ve seen up to this point as we’re recording, it’s all been leading toward what’’s set up right here.

JDS: And there’s sort of the first glimpse of Keith not feeling capable of doing the job and Shiro starting to reassure him saying, “You can do it, buddy.”

LM: I feel like we had more “patience yields focus” in there.

JDS: We did.

LM: We had a few earlier moments. But as we go through the episode and have to cut it down in time, certain moments have to go and I think there were a couple Shiro and Keith moments that ended up getting the axe.

JDS: There were two earlier ones.

LM: I think that was the first time he “patience yields focus”-d Keith.

JDS: Not the last.

LM: Not the last. That crazy effect, not the shield effect but the almost warping inside the shield effect, is actually a mistake but it was a happy accident. Jeff Adams has this tweener. Sometimes we want to make shots longer, and so he’ll lengthen them and then he runs this tweener which smooths everything together and almost adds in-betweens. SOmetimes some of the in-betweens don’t react well and stuff gets wonk-a-doodle.

JDS: If there’s too much complex elements, this is getting technical, but if there’s too many complex elements sort of animating over themselves, it’ll look like they’re going through a weird time distortion. But in a case like that, when the shield is supposed to get warbly, it looks awesome.

LM: Before it was just fading on and off, but now it had a crazy distortion effect where were like that looks awesome, leave it! Happy accident.

KA: He’s like, I totally meant for that.

LM: So this is interesting because you get this moment of Keith, originally he had seen this Galra symbol, and he thought it was familiar.

JDS: He did.

LM: We knew from day 1 that we wanted Keith to be half Galra and that he was going to have this knife, but what we didn’t know from day 1 was this Blade of Marmora aspect. And that was something that came about a little more organically, through the writing process and through the introduction of the Blade of Marmora, which was actually Tim and the writers’ idea, and we’re like, “That’s really awesome. Let’s do this.” And so that Galra symbol on his knife became a Blade of Marmora symbol.

JDS: Originally we were like, maybe the Galra symbol is going to be on his knife. Maybe he had some element to it, some tie to his childhood that he had kind of suppressed.

LM: Here’s Rover. Beloved, may he rest in peace. Spoilers guys, sorry I’m assuming you’ve watched the whole season at this point.

KA: It would be weird if you didn’t.

LM: I would strongly suggest.

KA: “I’m going to start with the commentaries.”

JDS: That’s right, I’m going to open up with the commentary.

LM: These are not spoiler free.

JDS: We love Paddelboard Head Alien.

LM: Oh God. I referred to him as Fraggle Rock. He reminds me of Mokey, the hippie lady Fraggle, except he has an eggy paddleboard on his head. We love a lot of those guys, a lot of these alien designs. MIR will just send their designs with crazy aliens and it’s always fun to see what they come up with.

JDS: The entire Bii-Boh-Bi lineage was created at MIR.

LM: Yeah it was just one random incidental, in the mall episode.

JDS: And we fell in love with that design. This is so outrageous and ridiculous, we can’t believe it.

LM: The writers wrote an entire episode around it.

JDS: I’ll say Steve Yeun does an amazing job of pleading with the lion. “Come on! I’m bonding with you!”

LM: That was hilarious. That was so much fun. It’s always fun. We do the records up front but when we get the animations in we always do some ADR recording, which is just doing it to picture, plussing some performances here and there, and adding a lot of the “oofs” and “ughs”.

JDS: Yeah it’s the stuff we can’t plan for ahead of time. We don’t know all the actions the characters are going to do when we go in to a script record, so the actors will do that to picture after the fact.

LM: It just so happened. None of us knew that Steven Yeun was going to be the ADR master. It makes sense.

JDS: It’s from his time on The Walking Dead, having to do all the action and zombie killing and stuff. He can literally do an entire run through multiple, multiple scenes where he’s just in real time matching the picture exactly.

LM: He’ll just watch it and he’ll do it. There are other actors where you’d have to do multiple cues all day long. He’s just like bam bam bam! He’s done. Oh my god, thank god Keith is one of the more action-y characters. It just makes it so much easier. We spend so much less time in the recording studio that way.

LM: Shiro’s freaking arm going nutty.

JDS: First time we see Shiro’s arm going crazy. One of the big gigantic inspirations for that was an animation called Mahoromatic, that has an opening sequence that’s kinda homage there where he first takes a knee and his hand starts glowing. The sequence stands totally separate from the rest of the series, but the sequence is amazing so I highly recommend it.

LM: I love that Hunk “break you stupid thing” line. Tyler’s delivery is so good. I feel like I’ve done that multiple times in my life. Like c’mon!

KA: I tried to open a bag of candy in my car yesterday, and it wouldn’t open. And I’m like, no, it’s a bag! So I get it.

LM: Pidge trying to do some com lingo with her Kitty Rose. The eagle has landed. Red Lion, Kitty Rose. That’s all it is. It’s nothing more than just Pidge being silly. For anyone who was looking for any deeper meaning, I’m sorry.

JDS: Kitty Rose is just, that’s all it is.

LM: That’s all it means.

LM: Not the greatest look for our lions there.

JDS: So we realized here that looking up at the lions often times doesn’t look the greatest because their necks are actually a little skinny by comparison. And usually, when you’re seeing them from other angles, their necks are sort of overtaken by the other elements of their body. When you see their necks kinda skinny, it’s like looking at a wet cat sometimes. You’re like, that’s what my cat looks like?

LM: Without its fur? Awesome reveal of the Black Lion. Piece by piece and then here he is. So the Black Lion, it was really fun to give him these huge wings. In the original show they just kinda folded up and were on his back. But we just thought, hey man, these aren’t earth lions by any means.

JDS: No. It’s like a gryphen kind of.

LM: Lets just make him more of a gryphen and give him legit wings, and that was awesome.

JDS: And honestly it sort of masks that he is bulkier by comparison. That was always something that didn’t sit well with me with the toys. The Black Lion, in the show, just kinda looked like a lion, and when you got the toy he had giant shoulders because he needed to become the centerpiece of everything. He still is bulkier than them but the wings help balance that out.

KA: Also it’s good for scale, because we’ve seen how big the lion is compared to the people, and then you see how big the Black Lion is compared to the other lions, and then how big Voltron is compared to everything else.

LM: And that is a completely different Sendak. Sendak jumps around a bit in his design. Sometimes he has kind of a weaker chin and sometimes he’s got the most massive Lantern chin. That guy’s crazy. But yeah, the Lions, that’s something that I don’t even think I realized when I was young, was that the lions had different sizes. I thought they were just all the same size. Going back and watching it over, it’s like, oh no. This was thought out. They had different sizes and that’s just a really cool quality that we wanted to keep, and because it just makes Voltron have better proportions. Because if they’re all the same size then that guy just looks nutty.

JDS: I gotta say I love that sort of fire effect on that wide shot as the shield gets overtaken by that blast.

LM: It’s like the snowglobe of fire.

LM: The nodding joke.

JDS: We obviously use that very anime, super sentai style split screen motif a lot. He’s sort of poking fun at the fact that nobody can see each other.

LM: It’s not like The Brady Bunch, where they’re all like looking at each other like hey, you’re up there, I’m down here!

LM: This was fun, just this idea of how do we form Voltron. We’ve seen him our visions, we saw him in the hologram. Now what? Just run in formation!

JDS: He just screams “combine” and then rams into the Red Lion. I mean, it seems like it would make sense.

LM: It’s not flawed logic, it just didn’t work.

JDS: This was just a testament to Tim and the writers’ writing, you’re taking this story element that, in a lot of other cases they would’ve just formed Voltron. They brought this whole other level of humanity and humor to it because they’re having a hard time, it’s a representation of them not working as a unit yet. But it’s also just hilarious to see them make these attempts, in the middle of a battle.

KA: That’s something I’ve always appreciated right from the get go of this show, is that they’re not good at stuff right away. When you get to when Allura takes over a lion, she’s not good at it either. I really enjoy that.

LM: This, Hunk now panicking. Legit I understand. I would panic too. I don’t know who that guy is.

JDS: That is a handsome devil right there.

KA: That’s a cat man.

LM: This Shiro speech was really cool. Josh did an amazing job delivering it. And the crazy thing was, when we ended up having to do ADR for this episode, Josh had just had that really bad laryngitis. Do you remember that?

JDS: That’s right, that’s right.

LM: So he was on vocal rest, the doctor was saying no exerting your voice. And that’s how he makes his money, that’s his profession.

JDS: For a voice actor is like-

LM: Very frightening for him, and understandable. So we were doing everything we could to make sure we were accommodating. But ultimately it comes down like, we need this big speech from Shiro. And we’re like, just don’t strain your voice, but try to give it as much importance as you can. But this moment gave us chills when we watched it.

JDS: Yeah. It’s tough, because often times Shiro has the lines that a lot of people would consider the cheesy hero lines. But Josh is so earnest. When he reads a script and then he’ll talk about it with us, I’m ready to approach it from like, I know, it’s a little - he really has a real breakdown on the character and understands where the character is coming from and appreciates Shiro’s position in the team.

LM: That transformation sequence, the first of many times that you’ll see it, that was boarded by one of our artists at MIR. Amazing talent.

JDS: You don’t realize it, maybe one of these days we can do a comparison between the storyboard and the final animation, but in a sequence like that we wanted to really sell how awesome it’s going to be so that was another one of those presentation pieces that gets sent around to all the executives and gets a whole slew of notes. But his rendering on the storyboard, you could almost air that. Because he’s an animator, so he basically animated the storyboard. It was incredible.

KA: Then it’s iconic now.

LM: Voltron wreaking havoc. This was one of those things were we just wanted to music to be, there’s the version where it’s action, action, action! But we wanted it to be almost inspirational. This is just the most amazing thing, they have so much power with this crazy robot. This ship just doesn’t stand a chance. And Joaquim Dos Santos special!

JDS: Big explosion while the guy stands in the foreground.

LM: Land in front of the explosion. But it looks awesome. And this was just a really cute wrap up. A lot of Steve Ahn drawings in here as well. And one of the, probably the most iconic shot in the show. All the paladins looking up at the camera.

JDS: This was one we called back to do extra special model drawing on by our character supervisor Christie Tseng. She really just nailed it when they all turn around and look up at the lions. That’s as on model as the show is ever going ot get.

JDS: And Coran going “again and again.”

LM: Always fun.

JDS: That always sounded like a little bit of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous kinda snuck into his-

KA: What’s his name, Robin Leach?

JDS: Robin Leach, yeah.

LM: Rhys, Rhys Darby. He was an amazing find. The character was written with him in mind. He was Tim’s first choice.

JDS: I’d never seen Flight of the Conchords.

LM: But loved it. And he’s amazing. I feel like he was the one person whose role was never in question.

JDS: That’s right.

LM: And he was just like, “And Rhys is Coran. That’s it.”

LM: Alright guys, look at these credits!

KA: We did it!

JDS: We did it.

LM: Rolling credits! We don’t get this very often.

JDS: We don’t. And you don’t get a credit that stays on screen, usually it gets thrown up to the top corner and you’re on to the next episode.

KA: That’s something we should tell you guys up front. We’re going to watch all the credits. Everyone deserves to be recognized. I always sit through the credits at a movie, so we’re going to sit through all of these credits.

LM: There’s nothing at the end though.

JDS: Appreciate that. But you also do realize just how many people it takes to make a show like this. Animation is a massive, massive undertaking.

KA: Absolutely. So going back, watching this first episode now, because since we’re so much further along in production now than what’s even been aired, so how is it watching it again? I’m sure you’ve watched it a million times now.

JDS: I mean you could hear us calling retakes still.

LM: Yeah it’s strange. I feel like even our color styling has evolved. There are some things where I’ll look at them in the lion and everything’s blue except their eyes are bright white, and I’m like, ugh hat’s weird. But that’s episode 1, baby, that’s how it goes. But yeah, I feel like we’ve gone through our paces and we’ve just kinda gotten our feet under us a little bit better.

JDS: We’ve tightened everything up.

KA: Alright. Well, thank you all for listening to our first episode. There’s going to be a lot more of these.

JDS: That’s right.

KA: How can people get a hold of you on the internet or on social media if they want to?

LM: I’m on the Twitter. I believe I am @artoflaurenm. And then I’m on Instagram at @thebestlaurenmontgomery because there’s a lot of Lauren Montgomerys and my name is always taken. But now, haha I gotcha, I’m the best.

JDS: On instagram I’m @jds_77, I believe? That’s potentially not correct information. And that’s all I have in my head at the moment.

KA: Very good. You can follow me on Twitter @FunctionalNerd and Instagram @Functional_Nerd because I hate you, and the internet hates me sometimes. So thank you guys for listening. We’ll keep plugging along at these, and hopefully you’ll listen along with them. So we’ll see you next time on Form Podcast.

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