#aside from that if I give her a gay arc it takes away from the Catholic closeted boy arc her first love interest goes through

[theamazingannie]

Idk if I’m just incapable of writing straight characters or if the gods have just spoken through me but I’ve been writing one of my few straight girl characters and realizing more and more that this girl is gay af and it’s a problem cuz I’ve already got her whole arc planned out of the different guys she dates and her endgame guy and there’s really no room for a sensible gay awakening but I’m worried she might be a lesbian lmao

[braghis]

Listen. I had fun the last time, so i'm gonna leave here another list of my Riordanverse unpopular opinions/hot takes. I hope no one is gonna cancel me:

- Throwing every single female character in the hunters is lazy writing and kinda OOC for Reyna;

- The Cupid scene is disgusting and the fact that it was made by a queer god makes it even worse;

- Jason and Nico's friendship >>> Percy and Jason's friendship. Nico and Jason were more foils than the latter and Percy will ever be;

- Leo and Nico should have been friends, and the fact that Leo was so scarred of him in HoO is wasted potential;

- Today Percy is basically the not-so-unconfirmed most powerful demigod BUT both Nico and Hazel have the potential to being more powerful than him. However, since Percy is based on Rick's own son he refuses to elaborate on it;

- Actually GROVER is Percy's best friend, not Jason, and in HoO Annabeth and Piper had a more "kinda homoerotic bromance" going on than their boyfriends ever had;

- Aside from that, Jason is clearly alive. Trow that ToA scene away;

- Nico killing Bryce Lawrence is both the most terrifying and the best scene in both PJo and HoO;

- It would have been better if Hazel and Frank were friends-crushingoneachother during HoO and started dating in ToA;

- Riordan's amatonormativity wasted the potential of many characters (like Nico and Leo) and the potential of many friendships;

- Caleo is acceptable in HoO but in ToA it fucking sucks;

- Actually it would have been interesting if Calypso discovered herself as a lesbian during ToA OR in a possible Leo's standalone novel;

- In terms of capabilities, storylines and roles in the plot Percy, Annabeth, Nico, Hazel and Reyna are Riordan's most badass characters. Others (mostly Thalia, Jason and Piper) have the potential but are underdeveloped;

- And that in my opinion is HoO biggest problem: the series has many new interesting characters (Hazel, Leo, Reyna, Jason) but they are underdeveloped in favor of 1) romance and 2) Percabeth being in the major spotlight;

- I have mixed feeling about Percy and Annabeth being part of the Seven;

- Fierrochase >>>>> Solangelo;

- Tsats is utter dogshit and it is REALLY hard to consider it canon;

- Canon Solangelo is ableist and the fact that a big part of the fandom has no problem with it is kinda disturbing. Also some fanon solangelo contents are ableist as well and it is partly RR's fault;

- The fandom basically wrote and characterized Will Solace's character. Neither Riordan or Mark Oshiro give a fuck about him, and problably that's NOT gonna improve in the Tsats sequel;

- Accusing people who don't like solangelo and/or Tsats of homophobia is like the dumbest take ever;

- RR's representation characters are a concentration of stereotypes;

- It would have been better if Piper had her self-discovering - queer storyline from the beginning of HoO. It would have made her more interesting and relatable;

- Even more, it would have been more interesting if Piper had her queer-reveal storyline in HoO THANKS to her not-so-straight chemistry with Annabeth;

- Making Nico a overly morally correct/morally "pure" character makes him less interesting;

- CJ >>> CHB;

- Nico should be a rough demigod;

- It is heavily implied that the majority of CHB STILL doesn't like Nico and they only "tolerate" him because they like Will;

- Bisexual Jason is better and makes more sense than bisexual Percy. Jason's arc is basically a metaphor of bisexuality;

- It makes me sad how RR basically throw away every other Nico's beautiful relationships (with Jason, Reyna, Hazel, even Percy..) in favor of solangelo. Nico WAS a complex and developed character, now he's kinda just "the gay one";

- With his latest works RR is ruining his own franchise;

- PJo>>>>>>MG>>>ToA>>HoO;

[undertheorangetree]

How to Improve HOTD S2

This is truly just me feeling frustrated with the second season and screaming into the void. Feel free to ignore it I wrote it at 10pm in a hater spiral and probably have some information wrong

1. Shift away from the Alicent vs Rhaenyra thing and highlight Aegon vs Rhaenyra. It would be hard when zero relationship had been established in season 1 but after Jaehaerys’s murder it would have been SOOO easy to shift the focus of Team Green on to Aegon and make him really want to take Nyra down.

2. Speaking of Nyra I’m begging them to give her some agency. Her son was MURDERED. She spent TEN DAYS SEARCHING FOR HIS BODY. She should’ve been ready and raring to go to war at the end of episode one!! She should be doing everything she can to destroy those who took her baby boy from her!! Instead they had her crying about going to war and no one taking her seriously for 5 episodes. Let her be morally grey I’m begging you she is not a saint nor should she be

3. Introduce Ulf and Hugh WHEN they claimed their dragons. No one cares about their lives yet. Regular viewers don’t know who they are. They can talk backstory once you’ve shown why they’re important

4. While we’re introducing characters GIVE US SOME TIME WITH DAERON. Non book readers have no idea who he is. Establishing his place in Oldtown, the fact that he has a dragon, the dichotomy between himself and his brothers all would have been GREAT to see before they started throwing his name around.

5. More screentime for the younger generation! Helaena lost so much of her arc due to them removing her fall into madness (which I’m not mad at btw) but showing her grief would’ve still been nice. Baela is ride or die for house targaryen and that’s about all we’ve seen from her, plz give my girl some agency. Rhaena is angry about being cast aside and that’s got so much meat for character motivations but EVEN THE WRITERS ARE IGNORING HER AND GIVING HER ONE 30 SECOND SCENE EVERY OTHER EPISODE. Jace is also being done dirty, they should be establishing reasons why we should care about him and why he’s such a good heir before the battle of the gullet (which in an ideal world would’ve been where we ended season 2 but).

6. ENOUGH WITH THE HARRENHAL ARC!! The first few scenes were fine but now it’s just repetitive. Daemon wanting to be king in his own right came out of nowhere and will have zero consequences when we all know Nyra is just going to take him back when he’s done pouting. He’s literally just wandering around Harrenhal like a freak. That arc needed 3 episodes at the absolute max to establish the castle and Alys and the river lords and then he should’ve come back. I hate him but they’re wasting his character.

7. Aemond turning into a super villain?? After we established he regretted what he did to Luke?? Trying to take out his own brother for power is fine and I support you if that’s what you want king but maybe give us some more context other than “brother bullies you in front of his friends”?? Maybe my sister was just mean but that’s an average sibling experience as far as I’m concerned. It would have made more sense with the characterization they had already given him if Aemond had been given no choice but to burn Aegon in order to save him and take out Rhaneys and Meleys. The 180 into anime villain felt way too abrupt (like dany going mad sorry)

8. Alicent and Cole………… as much as I fly the Alicent is gay flag it could’ve made sense if they didn’t just immediately beat us over the head with it. We were immediately thrown in the deep end of them having a sexual relationship with zero context other than “everything you feel for me… as your queen” PERHAPS GIVE US SOMETHING MORE. I actually would have loved Alicent reclaiming her sexuality after 20+ years of having to fuck her rotting old husband but they went about it the wrong way.

9. Speaking of Alicent, I feel like they truly do not know what to do with Alicent. They took away every ounce of agency she could have had in order to make her a victim and now they don’t have anything for her to do. They just keep taking everything from her in a way that just shoves her character in a box while also trying to maintain her as one of the main characters?? It’s just all very odd to me

10. In that same vein, I feel like they don’t really know what to do with ANYONE honestly. Game of Thrones also had a big cast following multiple locations but somehow juggling between them all felt much cleaner than it does here. It’s as if they lose track of their characters and forget about them so they throw in a quick 30 second scene to be like “btw they’re still here!!”

11. I need more character interactions. Aegon/Helaena. Daemon with his children. Just people you expect to have some kind of relationship. I don’t think any of those characters have ever actually had a significant interaction with each other which feels absolutely WILD to me but

12. STOP WITH THE TEAMS!!! STOP IT!!! There is no good guy and bad guy here and there shouldn’t be. It’s a monarchy, a whole ass empire that has its roots in an even worse empire. None of the Targaryens are good. They aren’t gods. Rhaenyra has been completely screwed over due to the patriarchy but being a victim doesn’t make you a good person. She’s still sacrificing the country for her birthright. Let her be evil, morally grey, ANYTHING is better than her pushing against common sense in order to seem like a good guy. Aegon and co as well shouldn’t be portrayed entirely of super villains and victims. They’ve also done a shitty thing but at the very least give us some nuance no one is entirely good or bad.

13. This is nitpicky so it’s at the end but it’s called house of the DRAGON. I wanna see more rider/dragon interaction. I shouldn’t be introduced to a dragon the same episode it’s maimed (Sunfyre). You shouldn’t be telling me one of the main characters has a dragon when we haven’t so much as heard her speak about it (Dreamfyre). If a bond is so important between a dragon and it’s rider I want to see that bond

• IN THAY SAME VEIN why was vermithor letting nyra and daemon get all up in his grill?? They’re bonded dragonriders they’ve got their bestie, he doesn’t. Shouldn’t he have lit them up for that?? What makes them so special?? He’s barbecuing Targaryen bastards left and right but these two get a pass?? Why??

And now for some general overall complaints🫶🏼

1. Fix your pacing I’m begging you. They could have made 8 episodes work if they had let us move through the plots faster but instead there’s so much dead air. After Jaehaerys was killed we should’ve been FLYING through plot points. Two child murders are enough to declare a war started, but we still hadn’t seen any battle until episode 4 and then it stalled out again. Harrenhal doesn’t need this much screentime. You don’t need to hint at Rhaena claiming Sheepstealer for 3+ episodes. We don’t need to hum and ha about going to war for 4 episodes. There should be fewer long shots of the actors faces simply reacting and more SPEAKING. More PLOT. MORE OF ANYTHING TO MOVE THE STORY FORWARD

2. Stop repeating information. Characters constantly beat you over the head with the same information over and over again. One character will tell a person something then a second character tells that same person almost the exact same thing an episode later it’s like no one proofread the script.

3. Why are you having your actors use giant words in order to sound more period accurate?? You don’t need to repeat lickspittle every five seconds. You don’t need to use gainsay or comportment. I promise your audience knows it’s a medieval setting, put the thesaurus down you sound like an idiot

4. It’s almost totally inaccessible for non book readers. I watch with my mom and sister, neither of whom have done any research about ASOIAF but have seen GOT, and I’m constantly explaining shit to them. The showrunners rely too much on people having read them that they don’t explain anything. I know Helaena has a dragon, but they don’t because NO ONE HAS MENTIONED IT BEFORE!! BY THE SECOND SEASON!!

5. This is just a me thing but I would’ve LOVED more regional costuming. We got a hint of it with Sabitha Frey wearing a headpiece when treating with Jace and I love the idea of each region having their own specific fashion trends. The costumes are fine, some are even great, but most are lacklustre and feel too fantasy to me. I’m a history girly I want to see more hoods and headpieces and different shapes in the dresses etc etc.

Despite all this there are still some great scenes!! Aspects of this season were awesome and I think the first two episodes in particular were really strong, there is just so much lost potential this season and it has been really disappointing. I’m still gonna be sat for the finale this week but I hope that they really up their game in season three

[garaks-huge-naturals]

the frustrating aromantic representation of chuck tingle's "bury your gays"

i feel like i should preface this by saying that i'm a huge chuck tingle fan and, representation aside, i greatly enjoyed his book. so this is not like, a hate take down. this will contain spoilers for bury your gays, you are warned.

the parts i have issues with will be more towards the end and are marked.

a quick synopsis: misha is a queer horror writer who is told to either kill off his gay characters after getting them together, or let them live and be straight (for the algorithm, ratings, etc). while he is reeling from this he begins being stalked by the monsters/villains of his past works. plot happens and these monsters are really nanobot contractions from his studio's fx company. misha survives these attempts on his life (and his boyfriend's and best friend's), eventually giving a heartfelt award speech about the need for a shift towards queer joy. when he comes back to work the entire studio is like decked out in pride flags and the now stereotypically gay management tells him that queer is IN! even better, it's profitable (according to the algorithm). but these nanobots are still out there. so they go to the fx studio to insert a virus that takes them down, the best friend, tara, being an unprecedented aroace that the algorithm has no information on due to a lack of content, is able to circumvent the nanobots and take them down!! happy ending!! yippee!!

i'll be going in order of the book, touching on the times where tara's identity is relevant

tara's aspecness is established almost immediately when she says "you know i don't swing that way...i don't swing any way, baby." classic aspec joke, i have no issue with this.

its first explicit mention is on page 42, "tara is aromantic and asexual, which has always made me appreciate her take on relationship advice." ok this part is so real. we are so good at that.

ok now we get into the main stuff. Tara says, "do you realize how hard it is to tell your parents you're asexual?" this part is true, and in comparison to misha coming out as gay. and i really appreciate it highlights the strange societal position aspecs are in!! it's hard to affirm an identity defined by a lack. and even harder for baby wanting parents to accept an identity that is largely incompatible with the nuclear family model. as this is in reference to like sex -> having a child, mentioning just the asexuality makes sense. but it is still weird to not mention how hard explaining aromanticism would be considering aces can more easily have straight passing relationships. let's begin a tally: ace mentions: 2, aro mentions: 1.

(!) time skip we are now towards the end. misha is giving his heartfelt speech, "i call on all of you to usher in a new era of stories where the gay, or bi, or lesbian, or asexual, or pansexual, or trans character lives happily ever after. buy those stories. make those stories profitable." we are now entering the territory here i begin to get a little angry. fandoms and drama in shows are so closely tied with romance. they are profitable. they are like, the lifeblood of ao3, etc. people also have this notion that you need a partner to be happy, and that this is a universal goal. so characters and story arcs that stray away from this tend to be, y'know, less profitable. and since this is extremely relevant to aromanticism as an identity and important to debunk, the lack of a mention of aromanticism is frankly stunning. our stories are not wanted, we have no characters to live happily ever after. because we are not profitable. we don't get that joy. so where are we? this is a nitpick but i find it strange that misha would forget to mention like, entirely half of his friend's identity. ace mentions: 3, aro mentions: 1

(!!!) this is the most egregious part to me. when i read this part i was genuinely so stunned that i started crying. ok so i've established that aros have very little representation. it is a fact that there is less aro representation than ace representation. especially in regards to non-ace aros. "there's a hero clad in pink, purple, and blue, the bi one...this continues on and on until every aspect of the community has been covered...tara steps up next to me, her eyes locked on the poster. "there' no asexual hero...they've got everyone up there besides an ace character...every fucking time." ok. so. a lack of representation for aspecs is like a Thing That We All Know. as also established, aros are not algorithm friendly, so i just see no plausible way that there is aro representation but not ace representation. and there's just this like, poetic irony to this. that aros are so forgotten, so uncared for, that the author of the fucking book forgot to even mention them. because there are three ways this shakes out here. either there is an aro in the line up and dr. tingle deprived us of the validation we need to justify our anger for a lack of representation (which effects us all but aros more). or he just straight up forgot to include us. or he's grossly conflating the two identities. there's no good option. anyway. ace mentions: 5, aro mentions: 1

here we have yet another mention of tara being ace, yet not aro, "my name's tara. i'm the asexual in the corner everyone's been ignoring." would be funny if aromanticism hadn't been grossly ignored once again. ace mentions: 6, aro mentions: 1

(!!!) time for tara to save the day (girlboss). "just pull up all the information you have on asexual and aromantic heroes...oh wait, that's gonna be pretty fucking difficult because there are almost no human asexual heroes represented in popular media, are there." like actually like the fuck. what the fuck. there are so little aro heroes that the author forgot about the one he had!! there are so little aro heroes that the author fucking forgot to mention how few there are. incredible. ace mentions: 10, aro mentions: 2 (ace mentions not quoted here but part of the rant)

so. thats the end of the book. it seems to me that dr. tingle might be a little confused. he's been a great supporter in the past of the aspec community. but there is a pattern of aro erasure in this book that frankly, pisses me off! but wait, there is more!

dr. tingle. babygirl. bestie. what the fuck is this? op explicitly said aroace character. and what do you do? you reblog with only an ace flag. do you not remember your character's own identity? or do you not acknowledge aros outside or aces? let's look at some more quotes from this post.

wow thanks for the solidarity dr. tingle (like, actually)!

what is this? whoopty fucking doo! aros totally dropped after their initial mention? again! but there is simply no precedent for this!!

i'd like to end this with a quote by dr. tingle.

glad you remembered the aces. maybe next time, remember the marginalized people you leave behind.

[aotopmha]

i totally get your point of view and i too wish that we got more of historia, not only in the final episode, but throughout this final arc. but that doesn't bother me as much because in my mind historia's arc is complete. and while i do wish she did more in these final chapters, i'm happy with everything she did throughout the series and how she ended up in the end. i don't think she ended up in a bad place. sure, she could have been more on-screen, prominent etc. but i'm just happy to see her happy. i think all the characters got a good conclusion. some better than other, though, for sure.

I just really disagree with that.

The very specific idea behind her character to me was that she was no longer her passive persona Krista Lenz.

I, not for once, thought that was her actual "true self", but that's what I feel like she reverted to for the minimal amount of time she was on screen for the last arc.

She complied with her position as a baby machine and took all of Eren's bullshit while for some reason deciding to have a child to simply basically "save herself and stop the 13-year cycle".

We had chapters of character exploration of why she wouldn't doom another child to save herself.

Her father only wanted to use her for his gain and she denied it.

*SHE OPENED AN ORPHANAGE TO GIVE PURPOSE AND PLACE TO THOSE WHO DIDN'T HAVE ONE.*

I 100% think she would not doom another child like this no matter what, even if it ended up "okay" in the end. Even if it is "the only option" to save herself.

Ymir, who is the most important character to her for most of her journey, doesn't even get the tiniest of nods in relation to her at the ending.

Who even IS the Farmer Guy?

If you know anything about how gay-coded characters are treated in fiction, you know how common it is to pair them off with random straight partners without any work put in the character writing.

And okay, let's make the argument that Historia only had a strong friendship with Ymir, she's bisexual and all of the usually weak excuses people give when (even potentially) gay characters are denied a full on relationship by the writers pretty blatantly.

I don't know Farmer Guy. He doesn't even have a name.

As much as I don't care about the romantic aspect to Annie's and Armin's relationship, both also actually have talked to each other on screen. It was there for a long time.

For Farmer Guy, we just have a blurb of saying he used to be one of her bullies who wishes to make amends.

*SO MUCH TIME* went into building her character and this is the payoff?

Her end is "happy" and "complete" only in the most surface-level sense. She and her child are okay. It's not even that I want more, it's that I want something that isn't a bunch of nonsense.

But in reality she has basically zero characterisation in the last chunk of the story and most of what she does is only explained in a couple of lines – so much of the meaning of which is gleaned from other characters talking about her. And because her own words are so minimal, reading her motivations is based on a bunch of conjucture, too.

It's a vague mess.

You can *assume* she had the child because she was pushed into a corner by Eren and the threat of repeating the 13-year cycle. But we never get anything from her beyond this. It's a really massive reversion with very minimal explanation to me.

Aside from the base thematic issue of her taking away the freedom of another child, I think Historia, just like Eren, would be able to be immune to the "influence" of King Fritz (which is actually all OG Ymir herself). I think she would stand against the Rumbling in a way that doesn't involve being a passive pawn because she found her meaning in giving meaning to others.

She wouldn't just forget what she wanted with a snap of a finger and I do not think she was so bound to Ymir emotionally her death removed all of the actual fight from her.

I'm sorry, but I just deeply do not like this take. To me a good character ending isn't the most surface-level happy or sad ending, it is payoff to all of the work the story has done with its characters and themes.

And regarding Historia, I deeply disagree with how she was written in the final arc.

Thank you for the ask!

[distort-opia]

do you ever think that joker's character would be hated less if harley was never created? dont get me wrong i love her, its just that her inclusion in the first place was for joker to beat the gay allegations and the abuse isnt rlly fun imo. whining about this is kinda pointless since we cant change the past but i just wanted to hear how you feel about this topic

Mm. This is a bit complicated. I know that it's a popular belief, the idea Harley Quinn was created to make Joker appear less queer, but that's not entirely rooted in fact. Not saying this motivation didn't play a role at all, but if you read up on Harley's origins, some writers involved were against her becoming a regular character on BTAS because it would humanize Joker too much to have a love interest; that was a significant concern. When introducing her to main comic continuity, Dini specifically had Joker be as dark and murderous towards her from the start, and this persisted in most comics featuring them afterwards.

It's not Harley's sheer existence that contributed to the hatred for Joker's character in recent times, in my opinion. It's three combined factors: her redemption arc for the past decade or so, Joker's abusiveness towards her, and the fact she was given a female love interest in Poison Ivy (which turned her into explicit queer representation). The draw of Harlivy as a ship and of Harley being depicted as an abused woman standing up for herself was understandably massive, for a big segment of fandom. And unfortunately, many were eager to forget about Harley's past crimes and choices because of this; after all, it's not difficult to just blame Joker for all the "evil" parts of Harley in order to justify her actions. Joker undoubtedly had a big influence, but it really takes away from her character if her agency is denied entirely (I do hate this recent cross-fandom tendency to take conflicted darker characters and sanitize them). And there is something to be said about Joker being written as a one-dimensional abusive asshole, in order to uplift Harley's character arc and make her triumphs over him more impactful. It is a pity... while I can't say I am a fan of Harley, I find her interesting, and her relationship with Joker has some fascinating aspects to it that get downplayed and ignored in this wave of oversimplification. The main reason she stayed with him was because she thought there was humanity to him, and that she could be the one to bring it out. The tragedy of it, of course, is that she's not wrong-- it's simply that Joker is pretty much incapable of seeing anyone other than Batman as an equal and a fellow human being. Joker does care about her in his own twisted way, but as an extension of himself; a possession, something he created. He also treats her as an extension of himself, which is to say... badly. Because despite how contradictory it might seem at first glance, Joker is suicidal and self-loathing.

Anyway, an analysis of Jarley isn't the point of this :)) To make a long story short, it's true that Harley never being created would've led to none of this happening... but thing is, I do think a female sidekick was inevitable. If they didn't give Joker Harley Quinn, they would've come up with a different character like her eventually, and then who knows where that would've gone. And even if you try to imagine a world with Joker having no one like Harley in his story... the current hatred towards Joker in Tumblr and Twitter circles is quite intertwined with the rise of purity culture and with Joker fatigue (due to DC's overuse of him). Joker as a villain is associated with alpha male toxicity and the whole "we live in a society" mindset, which instantly makes fans on this side of the fence wary; although, even leaving aside the fact Joker has killed countless people in canon, it's more that he shot Barbara Gordon and killed Jason Todd that gets him the biggest amount of hatred. Of course that his abuse towards Harley plays a big part as well, but personally, I don't think it's the main cause. Batman has so many villains, but few of them have harmed Bruce and his Family as personally as Joker has. Seeing as the fandom for the Batfamily is the biggest one, it's not surprising that Joker is disliked within it. (Which is perfectly fine. Issues only arise when fans don't make the distinction between reality and fiction and begin to harass each other over make-pretend non-existent people.)

[daz4i]

I'm bored and i said I'd make at least one of these posts and thought about the other. so instead of making 2 separate ones. I'm just gonna combine those completely unrelated topics into one post. bc i can

anyway here are my bsd pronoun hcs. and also that think i mentioned abt what sibling energy they have (as in youngest eldest etc). edit: i decided to add sexuality hcs too. why not. I'm bored 👍 i think i made a post like that in the past too but this is an upgraded version.

atsushi: he/him. bi. middle child

dazai: he/it. bi. YOUNGEST!!!! i will not budge on this 🧐

ranpo: he/him. gay and ace. simultaneously youngest and oldest and also only child. schrödinger's sibling

kunikida: he/him (for now). aroace icon. eldest child

yosano: she/her. bi. middle child

kenji: he/him. idk he's 14. oldest

kyouka: she/her. idk she's 14. youngest but in a valid way

tanizaki: he/him. bi. canonically eldest...?

akutagawa: he/they/it. acespec. canonically older sibling but nothing says he can't be a middle child too

chuuya: he/him. gay. OLDEST i am not budging on this either

kouyou: she/they. lesbian. only child

verlaine: does not give a shit abt pronouns. gay. wishes he was eldest sibling coded but he is so painfully an only child

tachihara: he/him. bi. canonically youngest iirc?

gin: he/she. ace. canonically youngest but like kyouka, in a valid way

higuchi: she/her. bi. middle child

odasaku: he/him. ace. oldest, obviously

ango: he/him. gay ace. possibly controversial take but only child

poe: he/they/it/xe/ze. gay ace. only child for those spending habits alone fr

lucy: she/her. bi but doesn't know it yet. youngest going through a redemption arc

i don't wanna do any more from the guild. except

mark: he/him. pan. YOUNGEST

fyodor: it's a secret. aroace. only child

mushitaro: he/him. gay. middle child

nikolai: any. gay. only child

sigma: he/she/they. idk they're 3. oldest

teruko: she/they. i actually don't have a sexuality hc for her sorry. oldest trying to pretend she's youngest to see if she can get away with it

jouno: he/they. gay. youngest ofc

tecchou: he/they. gay. middle

ok i think that's everyone i have. hope you enjoyed. as usual feel free to disagree i def did not think deeply abt any of this and will not die on any hill here aside from like 3 options fr

[denimbex1986]

'*****

Isaac Newton had Indian heritage and the Doctor is gay and fancies him.

Yes, the returning showrunner Russell T Davies’ second episode back continues to gleefully rub the faces of the haters in a big pile of steaming Woke. In fact, ‘Wild Blue Yonder’, which Davies also wrote, has a false start purely to do that – ok not purely, also to set up a brilliantly silly running joke - with a little stop off in 1666 when the Tardis crash lands into the tree under which Newton had just had the apple drop on his head, before toddling off again to the location of the episode proper. It’s a highly amusing little flourish, since Newton is played by the excellent British-Indian actor Nathanial Curtis from It’s a Sin, and it causes Catherine Tate's Donna to reflect later, "Wasn’t Isaac Newton hot?", and for David Tennant’s Doctor to concur: “He was, so hot…oh! Is that who I am now?” slightly taken aback at this apparent change of sexuality in his new incarnation. “Well it was never far from the surface,” Donna deadpans.

"Wait, the Doctor isn't gay!...and…and I think you’ll find Sir Isaac was very much white!’ splutter a thousand GB News trolls in their front rooms, before hurling their toad-in-the-holes at the flat screen.

Come now, chaps, sit back down. Of course the Doctor has to be a bit gay - knowing the flux of genders he’s been through by this stage, it makes perfect sense for him to be bisexual at the very least. As for the Newton stuff, well, who really cares about the details, he's supposed to be sexy in this and Curtis most certainly is that. More to the point, this is the kind of freewheeling, nod-and-a-wink, devil-may-care attitude that embodies Tennant’s and Davies’ Doctor Who, which, after a joyous return last week in 'The Star Beast', is now fully in the groove with this five-star instant-classic episode.

At the end of the last one, Donna spilt her coffee into the console of the spanking new Tardis, so it’s now in flames and crashing around time and space. After the bit of Newton ogling, the pair find themselves on board a massive spaceship (Donna: “I’d hate to be the cleaner.”). No one else is around apart from a rusty old robot which takes one step about every half an hour. The ship keeps on reconfiguring in some way. And, actually the ship is not space, they realise, it’s in a dark void beyond the edge of the universe, “absolute nothing”. The ship’s computer reveals an air lock opened and closed again three years ago to let something in. Worrying. The best thing to do would be to get back into the Tardis and get the hell out of there, but the Tardis does a runner on them – the Doctor stuck his sonic screwdriver in its keyhole to regenerate it after the fire, but in its recovering state it left because it senses danger.

“There’s something so bad on board this ship that the Tardis ran away...”

As in 'The Star Beast', this represents Davies leaving behind previous showrunner Chris Chibnall’s multiverse and taking things back to basics, as the very best science fiction tends to do. After the Newton escapade, the episode is just a two-header, with the Doctor and Donna in isolation on the ship. It is reminiscent of Alien, of Silent Running, and, given (bit late to give a spoiler alert, but: spoiler alert) the fact doppelgangers of the Doctor and Donna turn up, Solaris. Of course, it’s not at all pretentious, with huge dollops of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy thrown in too – the way the doppelgangers can’t “get the arms right” is a giggle for the kids watching. There’s a delightful puzzle to the episode that works as a satisfying mini-movie, while also delivering some intriguing lore tidbits and tease Davies’ overall new arc.

And actually, it even manages to not cast aside Chibnall’s work, but to humanise it a little more. Chibnall worked it so that the Doctor is not actually a Time Lord at all but the ‘Timeless Child’, a kind of Patient Zero for Time Lords, who’s from another universe entirely. Anyway, Jodie Whittaker had to deal with the shock of that, but Tennant does great work here in tugging some heartstrings to show how haunted the Doctor is by this new knowledge. After being riled up about the fact he doesn't know who he truly is by the spooky space doppelgangers, Tennant kicks at the ship in a rage, and generally demonstrates in his Hamlet-meets-Ace Ventura way that he is very tortured indeed, but still a laugh. (Incidentally, are his suits getting tighter? Is another lore-busting sub-plot here that the Tardis is actually some kind of intergalactic spin dryer slowing shrinking the clothes on the Doctor until he loses his mind? Just putting it out there)

‘Wild Blue Yonder’ has a tremendous sleight-of-hand climax, and ends on a particularly emotional moment with a returning cast member. It's pretty much as perfect a piece of televisual entertainment you could hope for in the year of our Time Lord 2023. Truly, we’re all watching way too much TV, but this returning Doctor Who makes you think that actually this is a worthwhile thing to do with our lives.

Oh, and ‘Wild Blue Yonder’, they explain, is a war song, so another question was why the Tardis was playing while it was on fire? What���s coming? Spooky space stuff, no doubt. Roll on episode three...'

[drageverywhere]

I think it’s normal to wanna take a break from WTW she has done so many of them maybe she just wants to do some different things. Or maybe the WTW contracts/plans were all arranged way earlier this year when she was still dating someone in LA and she had been planning to spend more time at home next year before they broke up. I remember her posting about being sad to leave and go back to the Vegas show. Or maybe she’ll be doing the Vegas show instead of WTW. Or another all stars shore season! That was filmed in the fall i think? OR maybe Shanjie’s giving her the dancing with the stars hookup! I would LIVE!! Or maybe she is trying to kill us all and will do another season of her dating show haha

I LOVE that she’s gonna be in biancas movie im so ready for her movie career era!

They put the gay sex ed episodes up as podcasts. I would loveeeee if they started it as an actual podcast and did weekly eps. I know there’s been speculation on whether she liked being on youtube haha but she should totally start a youtube channel like trixie and laganja. She has so many fans and would be really entertaining to watch in a vlog format.

I do think she seems to be kinda spiralling out in her personal life since the break up like posting cryptic post and deletes and posting with random guys who she’s all over and then they never show up again, being quiet on social media and posting memes about sadness and circling back to the same ru girls she flirts with publicly when she wants to make a scene like brooke and aquaria. But a lot of people are like that after break ups, and maybe she’s still getting over it since it was very sudden.

It makes me kinda sad for her cause she seemed really calm and happy in the relationship for the couple weeks we saw it, I think being in a relationship was good for her? This was one of her best years yet career wise moving into mainstream on all star shore, having her own WOW show, and even her boy looks glowed up but also the look and performance of her drag really elevated this year. (I am actually gonna kinda credit that to jack - sorry jack haters haha - not directly but i think you can really see beyonce influences on vanjies look and performance style this year and i bet it comes from the person she was closest to all year being obsessed with beyonce. I know V liked beyonce too before she met him and had used her songs before but even aside from him probably sharing videos and stuff that might have inspired V i can totally see V making it her mission to embody the qualities the icon the guy she loves is a huge fan of so that he’ll be impressed by her just as much, you know?)

I have been wondering if she would go on all stars next year. That would be cool! But i also want her to wait until she’s fully ready to go in there and tear it up and have an amazing redemption arc and leave no crumbs. Now that she seems kinda distracted by her personal life maybe it’s not the best time to go on until her life is more stable. Unless she wants to give us another drag queen romance season haha. But i would actually love for her to have a really professional season where she is charming but that’s not her main storyline she also slays the looks and challenges u know??

I would love to see her happily settled in a relationship again too. She’s never made it a secret that it’s something she wants and I really do think it’s a good look on her and brings out her best qualities like her charm and sweetness. And I think having that steadiness and support will help her achieve bigger and bigger things in other areas of life. I know she has her mom and friends but most of her friends are performers and creatives too and busy with their own lives, so I doubt they see each other that often. She’s so used to touring and being away herself I wouldn’t be surprised if on a normal night in LA she doesn’t have many people to hang out with. I think it would be good for her to have someone who’s her person who she can rely on and will be around for her a lot of the time. (And hopefully talk her out of things like face tattoos! Haha)

Whatever 2023 has in store I hope she does some cool things! And doesnt get more face tattoos!! Haha. And that we’re ready for whatever she does next to gag us! (I’m probably not! Hahaha)

Thank you for once again being the place to discuss all things vanjie this year, it’s so nice that you’ve kept it going through everything! 💖

❤️ ❤️

[endless-sketching]

Maybe I should make it the title

Identity Least Searched

Or maybe

Identity Last Searched

Just been thinking about how the story really does ultimately start with Zenny's final bit of their arc timeline wise. Prehardlight incident they escape years worth of abuse from their father then was able to form an unbreakable bond with Emi after coming out to them without a single word, then inconvenient timing comes in and wrecks their plan to fully transition by giving them a corporeal form that changes at a slight self conscious thought.

I do want to emphasize how transitioning really does take time, I guess that's why I want to interweave Rosa and Pumpkin's story into this so that as Zenny takes slow but gradual steps to be their better self that we get sweet yuri goodness in between those moments.

Still doesn't help how my main cast is basically all girls lol, it's not like I need to make male characters but at the same time I do need side characters. That and I might as well make that Zenny's bully idea into a pricticious side dude.

Oh yeah, story telling wise: the story starts with Pumpkin's perspective after waking up from a weird dream but you're not shown her dream but a dark rubble filled screen with Emi's muffled screaming searching for Zenny, it needs to stay muffled and really hard to make out all to make it a neat little foreshadow of the Hardlight Incident.

I never really gave Pumpkin a solid story ground aside from her frantic gay panics and her working at her grandma's cafe. I've been thinking of making her a battle artist of sorts, a magic battle artist. The concept is basically fancy fighting for show, that way it works with Pumpkin's shy (I think it's shy at least, it's that bashful reluctantly not drinking at the party then minutes later is the most wasted person kinda deal, a hesitant kind of personality but isn't afraid of doing it anyways) personality and her magic handicap.

I guess in a way I did want Pumpkin to be bullied in a really weird way? Wait no it's alienation, it's the fact that she needs a elemental gemstone to help stabilize her magic. And in this world, even though magic has taken a slight back seat in the modern age of technology, there are still parts of the world that are slightly outdated in their ways so they would often be boastful of how pure their magic is.

Did I ever talk about that great mages concept here?

Essentially it makes it so that elemental gemstones become the world's main source of energy but before the industrialization there were temples across the world of each element. 4 major ones and one that's buried deep. Each temple housed a great mage of each of the respective elements including the light element, but then all 4 of the great mages feared the light element at how almost impervious the element is so they collectively banished it and killed light magic as a whole.

That bulk of lore was essentially how Emi was able to rediscover the light element through odd elemental casting notes and elemental gemstone notes.

And I'm thinking that Emi, Zenny and Luna rediscovers the light temple to see if they can turn Zenny back.

Though I wanna make it so that at this point in the story, Zenny's content with staying how they are now. They just want to shed light to an unfairly restructure of history and push forward light element tech.

There's also a plot line here where each great mages has an apprentice, and the light great mage knew their time was limited so they told their apprentice to run away before the other great mages get them. Which then lead the apprentice to develop the very spell that helped them to alter their form with light magic, a one way magic transformation.

Oh my god this could lead into myths of a light spirit in the deep forest near where the buried light temple is. Which said light spirit is the original light element apprentice in a drastically altered primal owl form.

Hm it does break into a lot of story beats that I need to write more about later.

Yeah I just need to write a lore bible lol.

What I have in mind right now is that the main crew finds relics and artifacts from the light temple that helps them reach out to the primal light owl or understand leftover notes of the light elemental apprentice. It honestly might be better if that owl was the apprentice's pet of sorts. That said owl would appear in random forest backgrounds where it involves Zenny, and the light owl has a big liking to Zenny for being really similar to the apprentice and a light being themselves.

I just really want Zenny to have an owl friend huh

If anything it helps set in stone how old the temples are where everyone from that age is basically dead. Except the light elemental apprentice, the idea rn is they're basically the opposite of Zenny form wise, that despite being able to create light creatures they failed at turning themselves into a light being. And failing such spell has essentially killed their identity. What Zenny had accidentally become was what the apprentice tried to do.

Oh wow I could make it so that the apprentice losing their mage because of the fear of their magic potential mirroring people fearing trans people because of the fear of breaking down the stupid pillars of gender norms. So In turn losing the last person that the apprentice could've confined in had left them isolated by society. That loneliness drove them to advance light magic faster than the other elements but at the cost of also burdening the advancement with the intent of vengeance.

Light magic takes hold of the caster's psyche, the clearer the mind the more powerful the spell will be.

It can also be wielded creatively but that's the case for all of the elements.

So when the apprentice casted the form change spell on themselves, they made sure they were inside the ruined light temple. The spell only failed for them because their mind was tainted by revenge. Resulting in creating a vengeful light spirit instead.

And the idea I wanna run with this is that Zenny faces the light spirit by essentially keeping it into a Steven Universe fusion stasis.

What that means is that Zenny has a conversation with the leftover feelings of the light elemental apprentice by fusing with the spirit instead of fighting it. And what I meant by fusion stasis is that they just become a ball of light that basically went by in a flash for the other people in the room but was a whole ass neon genesis final few episode kind of deal for Zenny and the spirit.

The key part of this thing being a spirit is to firmly state that Zenny chose to stay the way they are, during that conversation with the spirit, they offered Zenny a way to change back but Zenny chooses not to.

Now that I'm thinking about it, this is the same kind of deal the mc from Boku Girl had between being a guy or a girl at the end of that manga. The main nitpicks I had with that manga was how it doesn't explore fully the mc's perspective enough and how it links gender identity with sexual orientation. Like there are parts in the story where the main mc changes back into a guy when they're having feelings for their girl friend crush but then changes back to a girl when they're having feelings for their guy childhood friend.

So when it comes to the final arc to Zenny's character development, I want to write something like what Boku Girl tried to do but firmly disconnect that link between gender identity and orientation. Basically making it so that Zenny turns into a girl when they're feeling feels around Luna is my end goal :p

Alright sleep time weeeeeeeeee

[freezing-kaiju]

ENOUGH HAVE ASKED SO HERE’S SOME THOUGHTS ON MONONOKE AS FEMINIST SHOW

- Women being denied their agency consistently causes the appearance of Mononoke. Ochou’s forced marriage, the forced abortion policy in the brothel, the possibly-real Lady Ruri’s arranged marriage, Setsuko Ichikawa’s untimely death and unpublished tale

- Even in arc 2, as…fucking uncomfortable as that revelation is, the core of it is a contrast; a woman choosing to give up her life, taking agency in a way that a man can easily take advantage of… yet for a reason that causes him to see her as a person, maybe for the first time, and rebuild his whole mentality around her.

- Women’s influence on each other. Often “I was denied this so you should be fine with being denied it too” comes up; the hotel manager in Zashiki Warashi finding herself completely lost in an old role that hurt as well as helped in a way that explicitly would be horrible to the woman in front of her, Ochou’s mother scolding her for faltering or existing as herself, Chiyo providing false evidence about Setsuko, always actions that *seem like nothing, even seem like kindnesses, but perpetuate the same cruelty those characters suffer from*; a spotlight on the holding up of institutional misogyny.

- There is, consistently, a masculine authority figure expecting to duck responsibility and neglect someone. Ochou’s husband, the priest Genkei-dono (the only one who seems to genuinely REGRET this), the newspaperman Moria, the barely-seen nobles in Zashiki-Warashi. Dismissiveness and neglect are the roots of all evil.

- Better men often include oafs; the train driver in Bakeneko, the incense specialists, there to take various Ls. The boy, cop, and train driver in Bakeneko and the two gay men and merchant in Umibozu all try to help the situation, half for their own self preservations and at least partially out of genuine care, and all seem to come away somewhat changed by the experience with at least some amount of greater respect for a woman or multiple women who either took the helm while they were screaming or screamed alongside them

- Ochou and her mother have a very nuanced relationship, with the masks of perfect behavior essentially forced on her by her mother; yet Ochou still loves her, with the same sorrow as many will love a parent who had a reason for being cruel and put the emotional burden of that reason onto the child. It was for her own good, and it absolutely wasn’t.

- Nue’s women are a means to an end, and they are a collective END in themself; an excellent take on the woman-as-prize, woman-as-convenience, and woman-as-mystery, a literal prize shaping itself into women to toy with and attract men, ready to toss them aside and play with them again later just as cruelly as the authoritative men in other arcs. They’re fools, and she makes them dance.

- but the women in Mononoke AREN’T FLAWLESS. Neither are they useless! Ochou is a very flawed woman and a very sympathetic one, the absolute center of the Nopperabou arc and the main goddamn character of that one far more than the Medicine Seller. Kayo is the most capable investigator in Umibozu and as pointed out in another set of very good Mononoke posts is a good source of authority and DRIVE for the Medicine Seller, a drive that Setsuko of the Bakeneko arc and the white woman in the Zashiki-Warashi arc also have in spades! Not a one of them is universally foolish, universally incompetent, universally perfect, or universally cruel, all are absolutely nuanced and interesting people!

And the protagonistic ones are often sex workers and former housewives, two things so often disparaged or not left for heroic roles. The Medicine Seller treats them as people, more human than himself.

One of the few times he’s horrified is in the Nue arc, when he sees the other men at the table disregard and desecrate a woman’s corpse.

i think that mononoke's undeniably a feminist text. like you can say a lot more (and i might if asked) but it's definitely a feminist show

[circular-time]

I'm a little annoyed Chibs keeps having guys tell women how they feel, but I have to give him this.

Bill telling everyone she was gay? Never worked for me. I grew up at a time when it wasn't safe to do that. Whereas Yaz? Not straight, but buttoned up about it? Totally believable.

Yaz telling the Doctor she wants "more time with you" way back at the end of Arachnids in the UK and "you're the best person I've ever met" and "I'm not ready to let you go," constantly trying to be like the Doctor... the pining for months while she's gone... the determination to find her on Gallifrey, every other time she disappears...

ALL of it, but most of all, Yaz never quite admitting to herself how she feels about her crush until a good friend pokes her about it, and then losing the façade she's built for herself and crying?

Yep. 500% realistic. How do I know?

...From a certain point of view.

Take away the over-the-top adventures (My knight in virtual armor vanished mysteriously on a medical leave of absence instead of space prison, eg), make the Doctor the head of a long-running medieval club (the sword she knighted me with when she asked me to take her place hangs over my mantlepiece to this day), and make Dan a plaid flannel shirt lesbian, and Yaz was baby me. Her arc is like a heroic Mary Sue glamorization of my coming out journey.

And I bet some of you laughed with me and can say the same, because it's so, so, so TYPICAL. It's so grounded in queer experience — queer women in particular. Women are often shy when we fall for one another, and since women can be good friends/BFFs anyway, it often sneaks up on us like this, so we ourselves are the last to know.

I still remember my not-Dan's incredulous response when I realized that dammit, she was right.

Me: Why didn't you tell me sooner?

Not-Dan: I thought you knew!

Me: I thought I was straight!

Sorry Yaz. You never get your first crush. And you'll never, ever get over her, not completely, because she really was the universe. But you'll be okay.

Personal experience aside, my point is this: Chibs got it right. I dunno what it's like for straight people, but this is a f/f crush written in a realistic way.

In the midst of all the insanity of Doctor Who, Yaz's crush is the most normal, ordinary thing in the show. As it should be.

[takaraphoenix]

Ship game!! What about Nico and Will?? It’s pretty popular, but I don’t think I’ve seen you write much of it…

That's an interesting one in that I have vocalized my reasons for disliking it way back when it first became popular but instead of just linking that, it has been years so I think it's time for an updated version.

Firstly: This post is gonna be properly tagged and not crosstagged so if any shipper comes across it and feels the need to bitch about it, just don't; your lack of curating your own tumblr experience is not my problem! ;D

Now, there are three key factors that play into my dislike of this ship: How it was written, what it represents, how the fandom around it acts.

1. It’s rushed and uncomfortable

In BoO, it was incredibly rushed. They had literally five sentences of interactions before they walked into the literal sunset together. Five. It was just entirely born from Riordan's Noah's Ark Complex, where he just can't let people be single. The series was ending and he needed Nico to have an endgame so he rushed into some random romance with zero build-up.

The way their interactions went down was also severely uncomfortable for me. Will was acting so offended by Nico not wanting to go to camp and be friends in an entitled way that he had no right to be, he downright guilt-tripped Nico about how he had wanted to be friends. Nico has been just so severely traumatized at such a young age and his coping mechanism, as unhealthy as it was, was to run away and hide. Will acted like Nico not wanting to form attachments to people who could potentially leave him again was somehow just an Edgy Emo Decision and not a direct reaction to his trauma. His entire approach to Nico was basically all these hippie posts of "Don't have depression!! Just go out into the sun and stop being depressed!", which is already a bad take with non-medical people but he's supposed to be a doctor (and let's not get into the shadiness of him technically being Nico's doctor).

There is also an inherent "I can fix him" angle to this ship and to me, only few ship dynamics are more uncomfortable than that. If you want to fundamentally change a person's behavior and personality, you... don't actually want to be with this person.

Now, here's where my points overlap, because the following parts of their writing that bothers me also stand for what this ship fundamentally represents.

2. Solangelo is a queer ship written by and for straights

I'm a queer woman and as a queer woman, I want queer wish-fulfillment, not what straights want out of queerness. I'm kind of tired of that, I've been sitting through it for enough decades now. That's, of course, not to say that no straight writer can give proper queer representation, but far too often do straight writers - even the most well-meaning ones - project straight desires of queerness into their queer representation.

Let me explain that closer through this ship.

Nico's been in love with Percy for years and I'm going to do my best to not hijack this post with some Percico agenda; that's not what this his about, this isn't some "my ship is better than your ship" ship-war nonsense. It's simply a canonical fact that Nico has had romantic feelings for another character for years.

A character who, in this medium, is heterosexual. And if you're queer, you've been there. In love with your straight best friend. It's a cliche, but it's a cliche for a reason.

We have also all been well-meaningly rejected by said straight friend.

And here's the straight desires for you: The queer person who was in love with a straight person just immediately stops having those feelings and will then as quickly as possible fall in love with the next queer person they meet to be happy and no longer uncomfortably in love with a straight person, because that thought makes the straights uncomfortable.

Queer wish-fulfillment would be for Percy to return those feelings, for the queer character to get his first love, to not be rejected. That thing queer teens always dreamed about for themselves.

Aside from the wish-fulfillment angle, the pacing is another problem. Let me repeat, Nico was in love for years. But a five sentence conversation with Will once causes a crush on Will and we see him physically turn away from Percy and toward Will just immediately to rebound and actually fall out of love with Percy and in love with Will. Anyone who's ever been unlucky in love will attest to just how unrealistic and ridiculous the pacing here is.

It's also straight queerness in another respect; Nico has been the first ever queer character we meet in that world. He loves a straight guy - and to get over that, we introduce the second queer character. Because heaven forbid there are multiple queers to pick from. No, in straight-written queer romances, there is always that one main queer and then they introduce a second one and the two just immediately hit it off and develop a romance like all a queer person needs to form attraction to someone is the confirmation that the other person shares your sexuality.

Also the notable gay guy on gay guy ship here, whereas the more queer-wish-fulfillment option would have also included more nuance to the queer experience, because Percy doesn't have to be heterosexual just because he has only been with girls so far. It's a very old-fashioned - think 90s and early 2000s - kind of straight-written queerness that there are only exactly two homosexuals and that those two homosexuals then pair up.

And, listen, I'm not immune to these outdated straight-written queers entirely, I have many such ships that I grew up with that I am still fond of because they were groundbreaking at that time and they weren't outdated yet back when they happened in said 90s and early 2000s. I am however a grown woman now and just like I have grown, so has queer rep so I am not as easily baited into falling onto my knees in gratitude for canon rep. You have to go with the times. And this ship, by all that is given to us, is just entirely outdated straight-written rep.

Which, I mention earlier that even straight-written rep can be good. If the author tries. Riordan doesn't really try though; he does the bare minimum when he writes any of his rep - and there have been many, many more qualified voices being very vocal about his depiction of people of color and, as a woman, I've been vocal about his depiction of women. I don't want to derail this post with all of that, but I do think that it bears mentioning that Riordan doing rep but only doing a bare minimum and not putting in the necessary work to deepen the representation he wants to give is a repeating pattern that has been pointed out many times by now.

(I’d also like to point out that no, it is not just the ship and not just the listed instances that make it straight-written rep for straights. It’s Nico’s entire queer arc, starting with his forced coming out. A severely traumatizing event that is completely brushed over because the straight author doesn’t understand the impact this has on queer people. Not to mention the framework; Nico’s coming out isn’t Nico’s story, it happens in Jason’s POV, it is given to us through the POV of the straight bystander who gets to be Best Ally by assuring Nico that being gay is okay. This kind of coming out is not a queer wish-fulfillment, it’s a straight wish-fulfillment of getting to be the straight savior, the ally to show the gay the light of acceptance. And, additional to the ridiculous pacing of how fast Nico gets over his love for Percy, Nico also gets over years of internalized homophobia just because of, I don’t know, Jason’s few encouraging words and the fact that Will paid attention to him? For a gay kid who was in the closet all his life, the nonchalant way in which he publicly confessed his crush to Percy at the end made absolutely no sense and was written as basically a joke, finished off with Nico literally high-fiving Percy’s girlfriend despite those two never having seen eye to eye before but this is straight wish-fulfillment so all straights are Super Allies, because that’s the way straights want to see themselves, even though Annabeth has shown before just how jealous she can be and she most definitely wouldn’t go around high-fiving people who confess to her boyfriend. Nothing about Nico’s queer arc in HoO felt natural or queer or satisfying.)

Sure, Solangelo on a surface level is big because it's a canon queer couple in a YA book-series and kudos for that and yay for the kids who get to grow up seeing queers in YA books, but I actually do think that kids growing up with books written in the 2010s shouldn't grow up with 1990s levels of representation, because the 2010s overall are actually at a far more nuanced and better level of representation when it comes to queerness. And I do reserve the right to quit on too straight-written and too outdated queer rep in a landscape where I can get more satisfying representation elsewhere; we don’t live in times anymore where you necessarily have to love every bit of rep because it’s the only one you get.

Now that we've gone through my first two gripes, let's wrap this up with the final point, because it also directly ties into this.

3. The new wave of antis hiding behind this ship

A huge part of the fandom is so busy kissing Riordan's ass solely for giving them queer rep at all they think that both the author and the ship are beyond flawless and that kind of attitude is not good. Just because an author includes rep doesn't make either perfect. Absolutely no one is beyond critique - especially not when said critique comes from the very people the author is representing. And even beyond any "valid" critique on the ship, quite frankly, someone should also be allowed to just not like it, without any reasons given at all.

But there is a certain... protective obsessiveness about this ship that doesn't allow a not liking. Very similar to how PJO bore this mindset around Perc/abeth already. It's okay to have OTPs, even OTPs that you have a blindspot for and just don't want to see any flaws in. It is however not okay to then go around attacking people who don't like the thing and mind their own business.

Solangelo's bred a new generation of antis in this fandom. And, particularly with the fact that this post too receives an "anti" tag, I feel like there needs to be a clarification (because tumblr likes to forget what actually makes an anti). Not liking something doesn't make you an anti, venting in properly tagged posts doesn't either; it's the people who harass others, who seek out the content they dislike to then complain that it even exists and who actively try to make others stop creating for it - those are antis.

And with Solangelo's popularity, there was a high rise in Percico antis, who sought it out, were unnecessarily nasty about it, harrassed creators and tried to enforce some kind of "Solangelo supremacy" that won't allow other ships for the characters.

I've been in fandom long enough to be perfectly aware that not all Solangelo shippers count into this category and that there are completely normal and nice Solangelo shippers, but this is a Venn diagram where the overlap between Solangelo shippers and antis is too large to not widely associate the nasty people with the ship itself. (I've been there myself, shipping the very ship behind which a fandom's antis all hid. The second-hand embarrassment of having these people give the ship a bad name is horrendous and I do feel bad for all the normal Solangelo shippers.)

The more often I encountered these people, who made Percico bad (sometimes in wildly ridiculous manners that bent and deliberately misinterpreted canon) and who in the same breath praised Solangelo high, the more tired I grew of that ship. It's a simple game of association, really. You see that linked to the gross and nasty behavior and you start associating the ship itself with that gross and nasty behavior - and with all the things I said before that already weighed into my dislike of the ship, this just was the final tipping point, really.

And that's it. That sums up why I dislike Solangelo. It was hastily rushed, uncomfortable in its execution, it is outdated rep that very much feels as straight-written as it factually is and it does not feel aimed at me as a queer person but rather at the straight audience and it has gathered a cult following of quite uncomfortable people who on their own would be reason enough to avoid it so you can avoid them.

Send me a ship and I will explain why I do or don't ship it

[akirameta84]

Saiki K. - A list of Never-Adapted Chapters

As stated, a list and brief kinda long summery of the chapters never adapted into the anime. Only a few have good reasons aside from time though. (Also a list of reasons for anime only viewers to give the manga a read *cough*)

Warning: I spoil every single one of these chapters. So if you’re lazy and only want to read the non adapted chapters, go ahead and just read the chapter number/name, and avoid the summery. You will be missing a HUGE amount of unadapted scenes if you don’t read the whole manga though, which are present in nearly every chapter, adapted or not. They were likely cut for time like a lot of the chapters, but many add depth and important character development, and actually explain certain dynamics between characters present that were glossed over in the anime.

Reblogs appreciated...this took me so long qwq

Under the cut for sheer length

Chapter 0.1 “Telepathy”: A chapter mainly detailing info about Saiki’s telepathic abilities, and the plot revolves around him stopping his class from believing Nendo stole everybody's wallets.

Chapter 0.2 “Telekinesis”:  A chapter mainly detailing info about Saiki’s telekinetic abilities, and the plot revolves around Nendo “saving” him from being bullied, and him realizing that Nendo actually isn’t a delinquent, and is a good friend. Interestingly, Saiki is able to hear Nendo’s thoughts during this chapter, in which he is internally telling Saiki to run away while he takes the attack from the bullies.

Chapter 0.4 “Precognition”:  A chapter mainly detailing info about Saiki’s precognitive abilities (are you noticing a theme among the volume zero chapters?), and the plot revolves around him receiving a precognition about Nendo’s supposed funeral. Saiki follows Nendo around all day as they hang out in preparation of his date, and it’s (obviously) revealed the girl did it as a dare. Saiki uses his teleportation to apport a bowling ball Nendo had bought with the girl’s phone, and sends a message telling Nendo that she was simply busy and had to miss the date. The two go to Nendo’s house and it’s revealed the memorial was for Nendo’s already deceased dad, not him.

Chapter 0.5 “Teleportation”: A chapter mainly detailing info about Saiki’s ability to teleport/apport, and the plot revolves around Chouno attempting a magic show with a new assistant, after firing Ike-san (still homeless at the time) for making mistakes. His assistant, however, is purposely sabotaging him. Part way through, Ike-san shows up and thinks about how he should’ve been a better assistant, and his makeover is revealed. Near the end of the show a trick is attempted to where Chouno’s assistant is meant to teleport out of a box, but of course she does nothing. It is noticed that her and Ike-san have swapped places, due to Saiki apporting the two of them, and Chouno and Ike-san reunite.

Chapter 0.6 “Clairvoyance”:  A chapter mainly detailing info about Saiki’s clairvoyant abilities, and the plot revolves around Kaido accidently spotting Saiki teleporting from a distance, and trying to find out who it was. Unfortunately, the drawing he is using to ask around for the “Trickster” looks nothing like Saiki. At the end of the chapter, Saiki appears before Kaido with the face of his crude drawing, and teleports out, to appease him. (Interesting tidbit about this chapter is that the mysterious stranger from the birthday arc appears in the class while Saiki uses his clairvoyance to watch Kaido. He also appears in the background of chapter 41 (the telepathy silencer movie chapter), but not in the anime equivalent.) 

Chapter 0.7 “Astral Projection”:  A chapter mainly detailing info about Saiki’s ability to astral project, and the plot revolves around Saiki using telekinesis to deflect a stray baseball from hitting him, but it instead hits Nendo, subsequently knocking him out right before he was due to play in a baseball game. Thus, Saiki uses astral projection to take over Nendo’s body and play in the baseball game for him.

Chapter 8 “ Fighting for a RePSIval!”: Saiki and Nendo end up stopping a failing musician from jumping off a roof due to his enormous debt. Nendo gets the idea to help the man gain money by selling the CDS of his music he had ordered in bulk, which were the result of the debt, due to them not selling. He performs live in the park, and Saiki accidently uses his telepathy to project the song to everyone in the are, causing them to believe it became stuck in their heads due to how good it was. 

Chapter 00 “Special One-Shot: The DiPSIster of Psychic Saiki Kusuo”: This chapter falls in-between 8 and 9. It is a collection of oneshots set in a slightly different universe (likely a pilot or a very early storyline) in which it details information over several of Saiki’s powers, much like Volume 0.

Chapter 32 “ExPSIbition! Jump Festa”: Saiki goes out to Jump Festa to purchase merchandise due to an errand from his mom. There he meets Kaido, and the whole chapter’s gag is subtle advertisement for Jump Festa. The pair run into a crying child, who had lost his mom. He smartly refuses to go with Kaido to a help desk due to stranger danger, but Kaido comes back in his cosplay and since the kid vaguely recognizes him after he “proves” he really is that character (with Saiki’s help), the kid is returned to his mom.

Chapter 73 “PubliPSIzing the Popularity Contest Results!“: Saiki ends up in an alternate universe to where people’s popularity is shifted. (The chapter is based on the popularity poll that was held, hence that being the joke). Saiki is the most popular in this world, and he is bombarded with people until he hides away in the bathroom and transforms into Kuriko. This allows the original world’s Saiki to return, and he briefly explains why the world is this way, before sending Saiki, as Kuriko, back.

Chapter 88 “Press Play! A "Making Of" PSItory”: Saiki finishes watching a movie, and he remarks about how he loved it due to the quality of the acting and would like to visit the place it was filmed. Shortly after, he teleports to the location while returning the movie. He then decides to use his psychometry to see how the movie was filmed, and slowly it is revealed that the actors themselves were quite bad, especially the child star who Saiki believed to be a very good actor. The reason the movie was so good is revealed to be because the scenes in the movie were filmed as a supposed to be “behind the scenes”, and those were put in place instead of the actual filmed scenes.

Chapter 95 “The PSInnacle of the Golden Age of Heroes! A Fun Party Game”: Kaidou, Nendo, and Kuboyasu visit Saiki’s house the same day the game “J-Stars Victory Vs” was supposed to be arriving for him. A package arrives at the door, but instead of J-Stars, it is “C-Heroes Vale Tudo Battle”, a ripoff game by Saiki’s dad’s manga company. Kaido, Nendo, and Kuboyasu are all enamored by the game and reveal that they love Cognac, the magazine the game is for, and they all play the game. At the end of the chapter, the actual wanted game arrives, and the trio are just as excited and want to play that instead.

Chapter 102 “The Achromatic InviPSIble Boy”: (My personal favorite chapter) Saiki turns himself invisible to avoid running into his friends on the way to school, and winds up inside an empty storage room in order to wait for his invisibility to wear off. Unfortunately, a group of girls decided to use this room to change due to the peeping tom that’s been rumored around the campus. He hides by gripping onto the ceiling and waiting for them to leave, but when his invisibility is about to wear off the girls have still not left. After some time spent dodging and hiding, the door is opened by Saiki, revealing the actual peeping tom. The girls chase after him and Saiki uses the opportunity to escape.

Chapter 118 “The DiPSIster of the Rental Video Store”: Saiki, due to being bored, decides to go to a rental movie store to rent a movie to watch. Unfortunately, the current cashier is one that Saiki doesn’t favor very much, because she is high on his list for potential spoilers, but he remarks that at least the manager, a man who has seen nearly every movie, isn’t there. But (lmao), the manager switches positions with the cashier shortly after. Saiki then runs into Takahashi, who is purchasing pornography. In exchange for not telling the school about this, Saiki asks Takahashi to check out his movies for him. Takahashi gets caught like the dumbass he is and the plan is ruined.

Chapter 133 “An ExPSIlent Wife and Mother!? Mom's Class Reunion”: Saiki starts the chapter off by explaining how his mother is scatterbrained, and showing examples of it. Kurumi than remarks that she is going to her class reunion, which is being held in the city near her this year instead of way out in the country, meaning she can attend. When she arrives she starts getting reintroduced to her classmates who she hasn’t seen in 20 years, and talking about how different they are. Only one of the attendees, however, is actually from her class, and he reveals that the whole event is a plan to get closer to Kurumi, in order to use her for her eldest son’s wealth. Saiki, who had come to watch after having a bad feeling about the event, follows him into the bathroom and threatens him to stay away from his mom. Before he can finish, Kurumi accidently stumbles into the men’s bathroom, and her former classmate claims that her youngest son had attacked him unprovoked. Kurumi attacks the man, claiming her son would never do such a thing.

Chapter 134 “Kaidou and Kuboyasu's PSIpicions”: (The BEST Chapter) Kaidou and Kuboyasu are talking near their lockers about how neither of them got any chocolate for valentines day, and the conversation strays off to talking about Hairo. The two remark that they never see him talking to or dating girls, despite his popularity, and joke that he must be gay. The two are later found following Hairo, and bring up incidents that add to their growing suspicion. They soon find Hairo talking to Nendo, and begging the latter to join his club, stating that it has to be him. The conversation is normal, but Kaidou and Kuboyasu keep mistaking parts of it as being dirty. They watch Nendo and Hairo have a sumo match, and confront him after it, stating that it’s fine if he his gay, they were just curious. Hairo laughs it off and says he isn’t, but after another risque seeming scene (including an omake where Hairo and Nendo remark about keeping their relationship secret and how Hairo is willing to come out for him 🤔 ) the duo agree to stop thinking about it.

Chapter 165 “Train DiPSIster”: Saiki decides to take the train to a coffee shop 30 minutes away from his house instead of teleporting, claiming coffee jelly tastes much more satisfying if there is effort put into travelling there...though he does plan to teleport home. He explains how annoying train rides are for him, due to his telepathy, and how if someone playing music loudly is annoying for you, how much worse it is to listen everyone complain about said music. Over the course of the trip, Saiki begins to get anxious due to the crowds and his telepathy, and is relieved when several people get off. Unfortunately, he receives a precognition about the train stopping, and ends up saving a man from jumping in front of the train. Saiki winds up teleporting to the coffee shop. 

Chapters 176 & 177 “PSIolving the Biggest Riddle!”: Saiki shrinks himself to retrieve his mother’s wedding band that had fallen down a drain, and when he jumps down, he remarks that the sink had become essentially 80 meters tall due to his height. He lays down in his bed afterwards, deciding to take a nap while he returns to normal size. When he wakes up however, he is much taller than normal. Due to the fact his body keeps growing, to avoid destroying the house anymore, Saiki teleports away to an island to hide, but he realizes that he teleported to an island closer to land due to his height throwing off his teleport. He hides under the water to avoid being caught, but ends up having to teleport away to avoid being seen. He accidently ends up on land, and nearby is a tribe of people, who are speaking a strange language. Before they approach him, Saiki ducks into his shirt, remarking that he feels embarrassed and is at a loss. He ends up floating and crashes to the ground once he reaches a certain height. It eventually clicks and he returns home, normal size. He had realized that his growing and shrinking powers were the same, but growing happened slowly, and shrinking happened quickly, hence why he would return to normal size slowly. The cause of this issue? The off comment he made about the sink “Becoming 80 meters tall.”

Chapter 201 “A Miraculous InvenPSIon”: Saiki notices his dad using a tablet and asks him what it his, to which Kunihara explains. Once he remembers he has work, Kunihara runs off, but not before offering his old tablet to Saiki, saying he can use it to read books and buy things. A little while later, Saiki is amazed by the tablet. He remarks about the shopping sites he an use to buy not only physical copies of books on, but digital ones as well. He keeps thinking about how amazing the online shopping sites and recommendations are, meanwhile he performs basically the same exact thing to his mom, when she requests he go out and buy groceries, as he instantly apports them for her, and also added foil because he had a precognition about her running out. While searching for appliances, he stumbles on the coffee jelly maker he owns, and finds out it has shitty reviews, but everyone recommends a newer model. He looks for the cheapest price of it, and finds an ad claiming to sell it for 100 yen. However, he falls for the trick of a ridiculous shipping fee, and his father laughs and remarks how just like his mother, he got scammed. Angry, Saiki teleports to the factory and threatens them into giving him the model for 100 yen, claiming that he doesn’t have to pay the shipping fee if he picks it up himself.

Chapter 229 “No Need for Bath Salts! Taking a Dip in the PSIcret Hot Spring”: Saiki decides to take a visit to a secluded hot springs in the mountains to relax himself, but unfortunately two strangers decided to hike there at the very same time. He cannot just teleport or walk away, since he didn’t bring his clothes with him, having teleported there to begin with. To make them leave, he decides to heat the hot spring up, so that the two men get overheated and decic to leave. One of the men, however, decides to try and stay in the water that is slowly gaining heat, in order to outlast Saiki. The man eventually gets out and faints, and to avoid having to help them, Saiki feigns having fainted from the heat as well, causing the two men to leave on their own.

Chapter 243 ″Welcome to PSIberspace”: Saiki’s dad has a new VR headset, and while he has to leave for work he offers it to Saiki to play with. Saiki is enamored by the horror game his dad was playing, being that it’s able to surprise him. The jump scares, however, cause him to accidently use his telekinesis, which is actually blowing stuff up at his dad’s workplace, instead of his house. 

Chapter 245 “Trending on a Streaming PSIte”: Kaidou, Nendo, Kuboyasu, and Saiki are all hanging out, and Kaidou mentions he has a camera and wants to become a youtuber (Yotubo-er is what it’s called). At a café, the group suggests video ideas, such as Teruhashi. In order to prevent this plan, however, Saiki uses telekinesis to stab french fries into their eyes when Teruhashi ends up walking by the café. On the walk home, however, Saiki receives a premonition  about all the video ideas they suggested becoming popular, including one of him using his abilities on the french fries. He obtains the camera from Kaidou and deletes the footage, which had been recording due to the camera being on the entire time.

Chapter 255 “APSIsting In Mediating A Long-Term Marriage!”: Saiki and his parents go to visit his grandparent’s, only to learn the pair is fighting, and his grandmother would like a divorce. The start of the entire fight is revealed to be because Kumagoro left the toilet seat up, and Kumi explains how she’s had to put the seat down for 40 years. The reason she was so adamant to divorce as well was because Kuusuke had pushed her to it. Kumi gets ready to leave the house, especially after Kumagoro purposely leaves the lid up one last time. Saiki stops her and tells her to put down the lid one more time, only for the words ‘I’m Sorry’ to be written on it. The fight is resolved.

Chapter 264 “Please Go Watch the Live ActPSIon Movie!”: A manga Saiki reads is getting a live action movie, and he is particularly upset about it. His dad happens to be the editor for the manga, and takes him to the filming set to change his mind. (By the way, this is the best chapter for showcasing Kunihara’s shittiness as a father. He physically attacks his son several times. Missing, of course, but he still actively attacks him. Kunihara is a horrible person, let alone father.) Saiki views the set and is perturbed by the actor choices, specifically Makoto as the lead character. He is even more upset to learn that the movie features an original character (like a badly written wattpad fanfiction), and that the end of the movie even features the death of the main character, and Kunihara explains that it differs from the manga greatly. He explains to his son that the changes make the movie better, and Saiki ends up agreeing after he winds up viewing the actual live-action movie.

[constellaj]

16

Please talk more about your reboot!

16: If you could change anything in the show, what would you change?

okay so how i would re-do CANON is completely different from how i would talk abt a reboot so im gonna touch on a couple things in both contexts! the reason for the difference is canon rewrites imply i can go back in time and introduce dp fresh and new, before anyone knows what it is; but for a reboot, id be working with an audience that has a better understanding of the source material, so i dont need to spend as much time explaining, but i also need to keep everything recognizable

Valerie

REWRITE: i would def make it more danny's fault that her dad lost his job, like danny was intentionally being reckless and shattered some security stuff, and he has a whole mini lesson about learning to not just run in guns blazing. i would probably remove the dating stuff with her and danny (and tuckers crush) too, I think them wanting to be good friends is good enough for freshman year

REBOOT: the fandom already knows valerie exists, so i would actually skip the whole shades-of-gray introductory episode and have her be present as the huntress from day 1-- probably even before danny got his powers. cujo is also HER dog, and her backstory-- we'd find out in like, season 1, that a natural ghost portal (maybe one wulf opened) ripped open on her dog and killed him, and since then shes had a vendetta against ghosts cause of how reckless they are and their disregard for life-- of course, cujo isnt actually dead. cujo is a halfa. a puby halfa. anyway instead of a hoverboard she actually rides cujo around cause he can fly and its big and epic. valerie has BEEN amity parks ghost-eradicating superhero for at least a year (tho shes been in the shadows abt it) and her hatred towards danny actually just becomes really petty, like them flying next to each other chasing skulker just going "I got this. no I got this. no I got this" and they just get in each others' way and its a mutual grudge.

BOTH: i am NOT keeping in vlad giving her the suit to watch danny under any circumstances. it was only utilized half assedly in canon (when vlad couldve just had an invisible duplicate watching him instead) anyway, and I dont have any reason to keep it in a reboot either. instead i want her tech to be a combination of half-stolen and half-gerryrigged stuff and she slowly slowly learns how to build her own.

I also dont want anyone knowing her secret identity, except maybe her dad, and sam or tucker. i think it works better if danny isnt privy to this magic info

Freakshow

REWRITE: i would honestly just remove him. the episodes hes in arent particularly interesting, theyre just generic "we need a plot about x" filler and he's not compelling enough a character (at least in writing) to carry a better plot that another antagonist couldnt. i'm serious

REBOOT: unfortunately in a reboot he's gonna have to pop up somewhere or else ppl will be like "where IS HE" so I'm going to stick with running some kind of ghost circus, maybe a few occult things, but cut out a lot of the spooky magical knowledge and mcguffin stuff. maybe i could make him like, someone from vlad/jack/maddies college who always felt pushed around by them and so he has a vendetta? and theyd be the only reason he even learned abt ghosts in the first place. idk in either way I want to force him into being irredeemable but also include LYDIA (the tattoo girl ghost) way more-- I want to give her an arc that ends in her tossing freakshow aside and running off to be a ghost vigilante.

BOTH: dear god the infinity gauntlet is stupid that needs to GO AWAY. especially for the reboot cause it would exist in a post-mcu world and way too many people would complain about it

Vlad

REWRITE: amp him up to a far more sinister and villainous character. the crushing on maddie isnt enough, I want to show him on-screen performing experiments on ghosts and himself, dismissing everyone else cause he thinks hes smarter than them. i want him to be actively sabotaging the fentons at every turn. i would also clarify that he doesnt actually want danny as a son, but as a trophy-- a line where danny says something along the lines of "you don't want a son. you want a slave". i want to make him a character who wants to destroy the entire planet and put it in the ghost zone so he can be the true ghost king and i want to make this all evident from day one. if i'm writing a series villain you can bet i'm going to write a GOOD one. less petty drama here and more actual stakes.

REBOOT: it seems silly but sense with reboot we have the benefit of hindsight and recognizing that vlad wasn't a big series villain, theres no way i'd actually go back and write him to be such. for starters, of course, theres the fact that anything he does would really be an exaggerated part of the original, and it would bore an audience to see the same story again-- theres also the fact that it doesnt seem right to take a character who was treated as a joke half the time and suddenly make them big and important. no, instead for my reboot i want to lean into the petty gay uncle vibe. he had a crush on jack and now just casually insults him. he moves mansions every now and again by just haunting the family who lives in the one he wants, and taking over-- i mean, who is gonna believe that an actual ghost haunted you. he dislikes danny not because he has some concept of 'evil' and 'good' but bc danny is just too damn active. of course he actually does care about danny and his safety deep down, it's just on the surface they have very conflicting motivations-- not to mention that danny has been raised on legends from his parents of the villainous Wisconsin Ghost, who has to be stopped at all costs.

BOTH: i want jack and maddie to KNOW he's a half ghost and to actively be hunting him down for it, maybe bc they think hes possessed, or been a ghost tricking them this whole time, or the victim of a tragic lab accident who needs to be put to rest, etc. whatever the case it will give vlad actual tangible reason to despise them and genuinely suspect they dont have dannys best interests at heart. i think it would be neat if vlad was cynical and every time danny hit him with the "I'll expose us both. at least theyll still love ME" vlad could be like in the back of his head "oh god theyre going to kill this child"

Dani

REWRITE: cut her out. we don't need her character at all. maybe replace her with a more ominous shadow duplicate / clone that actually looks like danny himself and doesnt really have a name? you could probably combine her and dark dans characters for their arcs

REBOOT: instead of a clone from vlad, she's a guys in white creation using some of dannys dna after he was captured (and vlad broke him out bc he was like "ugh i guess i have to save this child")

BOTH: vlad actually cares abt her (duh), shes nonbinary (double duh), she gets the funny dissolve into goo powers

i had more i thought i was gonna write but this post is already very long and also im running out of coherency for this LUL

[organic-guacamole]

I've got a lot of thoughts on this finale.

starting with the length.

27 minutes? really?

I'm not asking for a 2 hour episode but cmon, at least give us something closer to 40 minutes.

next, the characters

the characters just didn't feel like themselves, especially portwell.

all season long we saw how much potential they had, how well communicated they were, how good they were at being a proper, healthy couple, and now they just can't talk to each other?

it doesn't feel like them.

portwell had arguably the best set up of all the other ships, they showed us how good they had the potential to be only to throw in a cheap plot to wrap it up? I would understand that they want some angst to make the ending all the more satisfying, but this was pathetic.

there I said it.

of all the ways to add drama in a ship, don't use the one that completely contradicts their entire development.

paired with the length of the episode, it seemed even more poorly written.

here I made a lovely, handy dandy homemade graph to represent how I see portwell's storyline:

as i said before, we saw the build up being nearly perfect. they peaked during episodes 9-11 because they just had the chemistry, the communication, and the most potential to be the endgame couple.

they just got eachother.

then we get Jamie popping in for 10 seconds and erasing a lot of that, only for mediator Ashlyn to jump in and solve their problems.

then there's the "kiss".

I know that Sofia is underage and that even if she/her legal guardians consent to the kiss, the writers can still decide not to show it, but still. In my opinion, if you're not going to show the kiss, then don't bother.

there are other ways to establish a relationship that would work better in this situation. Of course if they get together they'll have to kiss sometime, but one way they could postpone it is by having Gina be a bit more reluctant to give away her first kiss like that. it could also show how accomodating EJ is.

I like to think that Gina is very meticulous when making decisions so she'll probably want to be very sure of the relationship before giving him her first kiss. perhaps she'd stick to cheek kisses until she's ready, and then she kisses him and he's surprised.

that would've been, in my opinion, a sufficient way to hold off the kiss while still wrapping up portwell until season 3 when Sofia would be 18 (assuming they get picked up for S3 this summer then start filming fall-winter. Sofia will be 18 in January).

as my friend @rtcosley (idk why it's not letting me tag them, so their page is linked) said,

"They created like 10 plots

And instead of wrapping it up

They added 4 more"

there's just so much more they could've done...it's the season finale for crying out loud.

I get that seblos already had (what I assume is) their storyline for the season, the fight and resolution. Ignoring the fact that that only lasted for 2 episodes and didn't have anything to do with what we were expecting, (i.e.the financial differences between their families, as mentioned in episode 1, the fact that everyone treats seb like he's stupid, this being carlos' first show and the drama that the stress of that caused, etc.), seblos had to purpose this episode than to stand next to eachother and be gay.

I get that they're not part of the core four or anything, but the poster for season 2 has all of them, as opposed to season 1 just being the core four.

They deserved better, just like redlyn and kowie.

redlyn's arc was pretty early in the season compared to the other ships. they had Ashlyn confessing her insecurities in episode 3, antoine stirring the pot of confusion and causing a bit of distance between them briefly, and then big red confessing his goals and plans for the future in episode 8 and for the rest of it, we just see them getting closer and more comfortable with each other and caring about each other more and more.

they had a good arc together.

but that's just it. I wanted to see them have their own arcs. but then again, this show can't seem to balance multiple storylines. I think it is possible, but not when they keep adding new characters that don't contribute anything much to the story(more on that later).

kowie's storyline is... confusing.

I really like their dynamic, how carefree and happy Kourtney gets around him, how she's remaining true to herself and managing a million and one things, plus a relationship in her own without losing herself to it all.

but the main issue I have is that the entire development was never shown.

we went from strangers, to coworkers, to friends that flirt, to lovers that text constantly and went on numerous dates (and Howie met her mother at some point). but all of that, was off screen.

it's like the writers made every episode with them in it kind of thrown in at a new stage of relationship progression and said "here, accept this, no questions asked because we don't have answers"

I just wish we could've seen more of howie trying to get in her good side again after episode 7 because it seems like that's when a lot of it happened.

I appreciate the Rini scene in this episode, seems to be the very end of them, for good this time.

i'm happy about that.

Ricky especially deserves to be free for a while to focus on his development, and Nini has the chance now to really shine through her talents and make a name for herself.

The Rini storyline is the only one I'm fully satisfied with.

now, that being said;

what the heck are they trying to pull with Lily and Ricky rn???

just like that.

after lily being the villain this whole season, they're just gonna not redeem her and then have her confess her feelings to Ricky, a guy she barely knows and only talked to to harass and intimidate, and for him to reject her publicly then call her afterwards?

please I hope it's just to say "you dropped something, here it is and never contact me again, thanks." /hj

speaking of the villains, this season was promoted as the season of rivalry between North and East High right? so why did that plot idea only progress in about 3 out if 12 episodes?

we got Zackey Roy in there for a few episodes then he disappeared, Lily just caused Gina to stay true to her friends in episode 2 and 7 and then basically did nothing else?

this is what I mean by the new characters providing nothing to the show.

the writers can't manage having so many characters and plots at once so they start so many promising arcs, only to kick them aside later on.

we already know that the first half of the season felt like filler episodes, so I think they could've cut those down to leave room for the more important plots to take root, rather than have them pop up and get rushed at the end of the season.

all that, and they just add 4 more plots at the end of the season.

this post sounds very negative looking back...but if I'm being honest with myself, I'm just very very disappointed.

I love this show so much and I really expected better for the season finale, especially if they don't know if it's getting renewed or not.

given the IMDB ratings of this episode so far, I don't have very high expectations for the renewal, but I'm still hopeful because this show is a great thing, one of the best things that happened to me over the course of this quarantine. I've become so attached to this show, the cast and the friends I made through it, that I don't know what I would do if it just ends like this. writing these reviews and posts about this season has been so fun for me to do and thinking that this may be the very last one is a painful thought.

I'm sorry if you were expecting this post to be as light-hearted as my other posts about the episodes, I just had a lot to say about this episode in particular.

all my episode posts are tagged with "#guac's episode text blocks :)" in case you wanna read through and reminisce the simpler times🥲