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virghogh · 4 years ago

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NCT Dream Birth Charts x Hexaco Results Analysis pt. 3

recently NCT Dream were on a new reality show called Mental Training Camp where they are doing a variety of activities and all of their behavior and interactions are being analyzed by professional psychologists

ofc my virgo sun mercury ass was thrilled and I had their birth charts pulled up the whole time to cross reference.

I wanted to share some of my personal thoughts on how the 2 might connect!

Thank you for all the support on the previous parts <3

part 1 // part 2 // part 3

**key: in the hexaco charts the blue represents the Dreamies, the orange is an average result of 300 college students who took the same test**

Haechan - “Popular and Ambitious”

✨gemini sun // leo moon // cancer mercury // gemini venus // gemini mars✨

they started Haechans analyses by labeling him as popular and ambitious, and even without looking at the hexaco or his birth chart these 2 traits are very easy to see in him. Haechans birth chart and hexaco are really interesting and almost refreshing to me because everything is so straightforward. I honestly think Haechan is a very what you see is what you get kind of person. I think the psychologists on the show were feeling some of that interest and refreshing feeling too because they described him as being very different from the rest of the group (and the college students), and kind of special. A somewhat rare personality.

the first thing they talked about was his insane level of extroversion. I have to say when I first saw that I choked on air a little. Not only is it just ridiculously high, but it’s also so obvious given his birth chart too. looking at the hexaco chart, the focus on extroversion and then how the other areas are either just around the average or below is very interesting to me. we saw something similar in a few of the previous dreamies too. Some of them had highly above average scores for one area and to me that says a lot about the dominant parts of their personality.

Looking at haechans birth chart, we all know he’s practically on par with Seventeens Hoshi for being an iconic gemini. Having such a social, extroverted and excitable sign in 3 different planets will certainly make someone extroverted, but charts have to be looked at as a whole as well and he’s also fortunate to have a leo moon because it doesn’t add any kind of introversion. He is a pure excitable, affectionate and social extrovert. His extroversion can be seen in the ways he’s very interested in whats happening “out there”. Gemini’s are very curious and restless and like to explore the world and environment around them, and have a lot to gain from connecting with people.

Right after they mentioned this though, they quickly added that it’s actually somewhat rare for highly extroverted people to be highly conscientious too. If you look at his hexaco his next highest scores are conscientiousness and openness. Even though gemini is a mutable sign and likes to try new things and stay entertained, they are some of the most determined people I’ve ever met. You do not want to get in between a Gemini and their work. Gemini is a very mental sign as well, they’re good with tasks and enjoy getting them done and focusing on their work. As well as his firey Leo moon. Leo is a sign that I often think can change quite a lot depending on the chart and houses but his with the gemini, is creating a highly focused, ambitious and driven person.

they described him as the “relief pitcher” for the team when in crisis. He’s the one that comes into the game for a round or 2 when things aren’t going well to secure their win, then steps back out. If this isn’t the most accurate description for haechan and gemini/leo?! Leo and Gemini are both highly intelligent signs, I feel like people don’t talk about that a lot with leo but it’s true! Also his combination of leo with gemini is interesting because sometimes people have drive, ambition and passion, but there are other placement that kind of complicate how it gets expressed. And they can’t always fulfill all of their desires and passions. But having all gemini and that one leo is really in his favor, he’s very “this is what I want, so I’m going to get it”. It’s easy for him. He can easily bring his ambitions to fruition which is why he’s the “relief pitcher”. It’s gemini magic and leo talent honestly.

this was the extent of what they said for Haechan but I have more I’d like to add!

his openness is on par with his conscientiousness and that is also no surprise because even though gemini gets a rep. for being “detached” it’s actually a fairly open sign too. What gemini is open about depends greatly on the other placements, and in haechans case with his only other influences being leo and cancer, he can easily be open about those traits and desires. The attention, validation, love and affection. They are all very big parts of him, and he also has no problem speaking his mind. But he also isn’t as obsessive as other leo and cancer combinations because of his overwhelming gemini. It’s very “in this second I want affection” and then the next second he’s over it. With haechan I’ve always found it interesting how he is so openly affectionate but it never seems like an unhealthy attachment thing? he isn’t reliant on it, and can easily go from wanting it, to not. It’s very uncomplicated. This is also part of the Gemini rep. they are very flighty and their minds change by the second, but are also very self-reliant and independent. This is also why his emotionality is low even though his openness is high. Again, I don’t think he’s an emotionally driven person, he’s just open with his desires.

tldr; talented, confident, skilled, self-sufficient and independent. He is driven by exploring the world and people around him, he enjoys making connections. Very open about his thoughts and needs, but emotionally uncomplicated. His drive and ambition is bottomless, never-ending. What he wants, he gets.

Jaemin - “Optimistic My Way”

✨leo sun // capricorn moon // leo mercury // virgo venus // leo mars✨

I would like to start by saying that Jaemin is the sole reason that it took me so long to get this post out. This boy has always, and probably always will, confuse the hell out of me. And I’m sure he likes it that way. Actually, I’m confident he likes it that way because he admitted to the psychologists that on the test they took he answered number 3 for every question, so he wouldn’t have to reveal too much about himself. This is why they labeled him as “my way”, very “do what I want” kind of person. They said he really made them use a lot of brain power, and I relate lol. Even outside of this post every time I watch nct dream I’m always trying to understand Jaemin. So here goes my best shot at understanding this man.

they mentioned jaemin is difficult and complicated, he’s hard to read, and he’s someone that cannot be perfectly described with one personality test. I agree, which is why I hope one day we can get those house placements please!

The first thing that caught my attention based off his chart is how small his blue hexagon is. I actually had to double check that the blue was him and not the average😅 because of how he answered the test I don’t know how accurate the hexaco is? they didn’t really comment on that but they did continue to reference it.

the main thing they talked about with Jaemin was about how he is very aware of what he does and doesn’t like, he knows who he gets along with and who he doesn’t, he has no problems showing when he doesn’t like something, and he is very uninterested and borderline apathetic when it comes to things and people he is simply not interested in.

I think where I get really tripped up with Jaemin is because he has 3 leo placements, yet I feel like he doesn’t act much like a typical leo in my opinion? At least not to the cameras. I honestly think Jaemin might be someone who is very different off camera and at home. When I see jaemin I see flashes of it, but I get a lot of his earth influence.

I want to start with his capricorn moon because I feel like it’s something i see the most in him. For starters, it is literally why he is so private. Even before this show, it was a well known thing amongst NCTzens that Jaemin is a very private person. He also comes off as very reserved, in control and calm. Jaemin answering every question with a 3, so that it neither over or under represents him, but puts him in the questionable middle, is very capricorn moon. Not wanting to be understood. Not wanting to appear as having any exact problems. They’re practical, controlled, level-headed... right? They’re not the ones with messy emotions, couldn’t be them.... That’s the whole capricorn struggle. The moon is put in a very tough spot with Capricorn. Scorpio moons are in fall and Capricorns are in detriment. But it works very differently. Scorpios have wickedly intense emotions that they are kind of scared of, so they hide them, but they want to be understood and feel safe enough to express them. Capricorn moons straight up deny their feelings.

On the bright side though, I feel like his Capricorn moon is also responsible for the other part of his personality which is: how weird he is. Capricorn moons are also known for being ridiculously funny and weird. Very weird. I think this is also where his Leo comes in and kind of teams up with his moon. Leo’s are natural performers and sometimes when I watch Jaemin I find myself being like “he is really putting on a show right now” but not in a bad way, I’m always highly entertained lol. He is a natural performer.

In haechan’s section I mentioned how, to me, leo is one of the signs that can change so drastically depending on the other planets and houses. I think jaemin is a really good example of this, because even without his hexaco chart we all know Jaemin is a huge introvert. He is actually a self-proclaimed introvert. He is open is the way he shows it, and he even said in a show that talking with people is hard because he loses so much energy. I think his Capricorn and Virgo play a big role in this and it’s why I’m so curious what his houses are and where that leo is. Because even though our moons affect us a lot, with 3 leo placements i would expect someone to be a little more extroverted.

Where I also see a lot of his Leo though, is of course, with how affectionate he is. he’s also very creative and a huge provider. A big misconception with leo is that all they do is take. This is one side to leo, and Haechan is a good example of that side because he has the gemini and leo moon, but Jaemin is a really good example of the strong provider and caretaker side of Leo. With his earth placements too. he is definitely someone who prides himself on taking care of people.

now to compare his hexaco to his birth chart, his extroversion, emotionality, agreeableness and honesty-humility is lower than average. Sure, part of that could be the way he took the test, but I also think it can be seen in his very controlling earth placements. Having earth in 2 of the planets that hold a lot of our emotions and expression, and the fact that it is virgo and capricorn and not taurus, is making him very in control of his emotions and expression, and he has strong boundaries. It also makes him more introverted. The low agreeableness is just his whole chart honestly. Leo is a fixed sign, and even though virgo is mutable, they still have very particular ways they like to do things, and capricorn is a leader and takes charge.

His openness is interesting to me and I wanna say that I think it’s very similar to what I wrote for haechan. He’s open, but not necessarily emotionally driven. He is open about the things that drive him, so not emotions, but something else. Work. His morals and values. His boundaries. Things he does and doesn’t like! lastly, his conscientiousness also fits into this, virgo capricorn and leo are all extremely driven, passionate and hard workers and we know work and stability is a high value and priority of his.

tdlr; hard to read, very private and likes it that way. He is driven by work, ethic, stability and providing. He knows his values, and has little interest in things he doesn’t care for. Optimistic, weird, funny and a natural performer. Likes to be in control and needs to recharge a lot. Probably the most different off camera and at home.

and that’s part 3! Thanks you to everyone that has tuned into this series it was so much fun. Thoughts and feedback are always welcome <3

#cant believe I finished :’)#what does everyone think?#kpop astrology #kpop #NCT dream #mine #astrology #zodiac signs #jaemin #Haechan #astrology observations #astro community #renjun #mark #chenle #jeno #jisung

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mystech-master · 4 years ago

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A while ago, I made a post discussing my thoughts on Nu and Lambda, in it I also described why I personally can’t ship them, even if I also said you could do mental gymnastics to ignore the Saya clone stuff (read it to understand what I mean).

But, they aren’t the only ones to have this issue; What about Noel and Celica, two more MAIN characters who have a similar issue in their storytelling.

I will go into that now, starting with Noel (beware possibly long-ass post)

Noel is one of the main characters, and one of the most important characters in the setting (to many fan’s displeasure), so of course she is highly tied to the MC Ragna, even getting a lot of shippy moments with him. This is in spite of her being a Murakumo.

Now in my Nu and Lambda thing I said that b/c Ars Magus is weird and not an exact science and seem to be made from Saya’s soul not her DNA you could do mental gymnastics to ignore that and make the shipping okay. Could you do that with Noel? I say NO.

Not only is Noel MUCH closer to Saya (seriously put a picture of her next to young Saya from flashbacks and she looks exactly like what she’d grow up to be), but she is also apparently made from the largest chunk of her soul.

The games seem to go along this thought process with her:

Noel is a Murakumo -> Noel is not human -> Noel is a weapon -> cue angst

but the fans have the thought process of

Noel is a Murakumo -> Murakumo Units are clones of Saya -> Saya is Ragna’s sister -> Murakumo Units are clones of Ragna’s sister -> they are Ragna’s sisters.

This gets even more stupid once Izanami comes in and we learn SHE is Saya, not Noel (her being an amnesiac Saya would’ve made things much easier), because then it is like “See, Noel isn’t Saya, THAT’S Saya!”. Also Blazblue has a while thing about roles, like Ragna has ONE little brother and ONE little sister: Jin and Saya, respectively. But fans say he can have multiple little sisters but the story doesn’t because “roles” or whatever (using the weird stage terms that Rachel and Amane use).

Like, here is an idea I had for CS’ plot with more emphasis on Noel actually being Saya rather than just a clone/copy, or at least more focus on her connection with Ragna to HAVE that sibling instead of just taking the “I am not human” thing from the Murakumo:

They escape from the Cauldron at the end of CT, and Ragna now gets a god look at her, maybe he does think that this IS Saya, and you can have a bit of an emotional scene here, but Noel runs off b/c A. she is still shy girl and a MAN is so close to her, and B. this is still the SS-Class Criminal Ragna the Bloodedge. A bit of angst there because Ragna supposedly thought something horrible happened to Saya (based on a flashback in CF with Jubei).

Much, MUCH later, he can meet up with Noel again, before she is kidnapped by Terumi for the final act of being the Godslayer, maybe with Makoto there. This is where they can actually talk and bond for a bit so Ragna has an actual reason to go running off an saving her. This is where Ragna can explain his little sister to the two, maybe thinking that he got Noel confused for Saya since she looks just like her.

But, then they start piecing together everything. Noel has weird memories of Ragna, and she has amnesia from before the destruction of Ibukido after the Ikaruga Civil War. SO, what if Noel IS just an Amnesiac Saya who has trauma induced amnesia from the Ibukido stuff? This is great for Noel because all this time she might also be worried about her humanity after the shit with Nu in CT’s true ending, and maybe a cryptic line from Terumi/Hazama, but now with this information, she reaffirms that she is HUMAN, she has a family (imagine the reaction when she learns that major dickbag Kisaragi is her big brother). We could then maybe cut back to someone watching them cryptically commentating, and when we cut back Noel is in the middle of telling Ragna, her newly re-discovered big brother, about what she’s been up to, her adoptive family and her time at the Military Academy. Maybe here we could also have a gag reel where, like a later one where they try and help Celica improve her sense of direction, Ragna and Noel cook something. We get some fun-sibling time and get to see Ragna’s cooking hobby in semi-canon action. He’d call her Saya, but everyone else calls her Noel since that’s what they know her as (think of it similar to how Vegeta calls Goku by his Sayan name “Kakarot” while everyone else just calls him his Earth name).

THEN we have Terumi come in and kidnap her.

Rachel stops Ragna from running after them for cryptic warning BS, then the fight with Jin, then the fight with Terumi, etc. everything happens the same from there. Only it isn’t some random stranger who Ragna all of a sudden is risking his life for, this is the little sister he lost so long ago.

Then comes the shit with Izanami. One idea that had was that Noel IS still a Murakumo AND Saya, but she is Saya’s good half fragmented off when Izanami was made. Izanami is one part the Origin’s Drive and one part Saya’s Darkness. So Noel breaking off from Saya is kind of like M.Bison from Street Fighter removing all the good from his soul to use Psycho Power, resulting in Rose.

Then in CP, we can have an extra layer of conflict because Noel is trying to save Tsubaki, who points out that she is affiliated with a wanted criminal, Ragna the Bloodedge. Remember, Noel just wants to be a normal girl with a normal life. She already has the issue of her humanity with being a Murakumo, but then you have the more societal BS of being related to a super criminal. She cannot be “normal girl“ Noel Vermilion, AND friends with Ragna the Bloodedge, SS-Class Criminal at the same time.

Tell me that wouldn’t all be a really good alternative.

Also being able to refer to the three MCs as “The Siblings” is just so much easier.

and then we got Celica A. Mercury.

she flops back and forth between, Ragna’s mom, and Ragna’s love interest.

Celica A. Mercury in Blazblue Chronophantasma, is well, a Chronophantasma. A copy of someone who isn’t supposed to be alive in the current timeline. Specifically, Celica is the younger sister of the Great Sage Nine, one of the Six Heroes who defeated the Black Beast 100 years before the setting of the games. the ORIGINAL Celica, after the Six Heroes were almost wiped out by Terumi, proceeded to become a nun/sister in a church built over the remains of the Black Beast’s corpse, as she has a unique Order power to nullify seithr. With her healing magic keeping her young and healthy she lived there alone until Jubei brought the three siblings, Ragna Jin and Saya, to be under her care for an undisclosed amount of time. This is where people get her being Ragna’s mom, even thought nuns/sisters are more just general caretakers instead of parents, but she is still a female maternal figure who looked after Ragna so you can see where people get that.

But then you get “teen” Celica, the one the games show in the story. She is from the Dark War, where she actually met Ragna first. Ragna was sent back in time, with Amnesia, to fill the role of the unsung 7th Hero “Bloodedge” and stop the Black Beast for a year allowing Nine to arm humanity with Ars Magus. Celica apparently fell in love with him because she is very affectionate and familiar with Ragna once she is brought to the future as a Chronophantasma.

The story really does ping pong between her being very motherly, specifically her scolding Ragna and Jin for fighting in CP, and just being a naive child, see her complaining when people get on her case about her awful sense of direction. But it is really hard because the image of the sister seems to flash over her, which the other characters seem to notice, but much like Noel and Saya, no one in the story EVER seems to connect the dots and have that change the relationship between them.

Now I personally don’t like the ship because she is a naive child in a woman’s body, with the stupid no sense of direction gag, to her scolding Ragna and Jin as if they were Natsu and Gray from Fairy Tail who are just fighting for some dick measuring contest when we all KNOW the actual reason is more complicated but the story just seems to abandon that and GGRRRR!!!

But, looking at Celica, really you can;t do the whole “Schrodinger’s Relationship” thing like they’re doing with Saya and Noel and the Murakumos. They need to COMMIT, to a role.

If Celica is Ragna’s MOM, no ifs and or buts, then 1. They need to make her less of a cutesy child. and 2. Maybe age up her design, Litchi has the design vibe of someone who is “older” than the cast, maybe something similar to that. Just imagine another angsty scene of Ragna meeting this woman who has the same face as the Sister who raised him who he KNOWS 100% is dead, so no mistaken identity shit like I already suggested with Saya/Noel, and her looking at him with her face is just MOCKING him, especially since his first two meetings with her in CP are after he gets his ass kicked (once after he is sent back in time after Nu kicking his butt, and once after Kagura knocks him out and arrests him). Also you’d have to undo ALL ship teasing in Phase Shift, or just use one of my friend’s ideas and just have Ragna be a reincarnation of Bloodedge instead of going back in time.

If you want Celica to be the cute girl love interest, and this is the option I feel most people would want either b/c shipping or the cute girl waifu factor that Japan likes (I base some of m reasoning based on “could this be made”, then you’d have to undo all connections between Celica and the Sister. My simple idea was instead of Celica living all those years she dies there, but Nine also had a bunch of other caretakers go with her to help take care of the church. I mean Nine is one of the Great Sages AND a member of the Six Heroes you’re telling em she wouldn’t use some of tat fame and authority to make sure his little sister is safe when she is all alone out there. Seems almost out of character with how fiercely protective Nine was of Celica. Of course this all means that the Sister that raises Ragna and the siblings is less important as she is just a nameless backstory character in a similar vein to Noel’s adoptive Parents, but is is a much easier thing to do than the previous option.

Either of those two options are good IMO, but I still think Celica needs to grow up a bit and release how much everyone around her is an asshole before I can fully ship her and Ragna.

So, what do you guys think? Noel being fully Ragna’s sister leading to much more interesting plot stuff, and Celica committing to either the cute girl love interest or mom role. I feel lkike my ideas are good, but what d you guys think?

#blazblue #my thoughts #noel vermillion #ragna the bloodedge #celica a mercury

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rwbyconversations · 6 years ago

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Why Oscar’s writing has been disappointing

Stories rely on their characters. You can tell a grand, sweeping narrative that spans continents and timelines but if you don’t give a rats ass about the people at the center of these events, viewers won’t care. Stories with high kill-counts like Walking Dead, Game of Thrones and Attack on Titan rely on audiences forming an attachment with characters very quickly, so that the possibility of their sudden death is all the more painful for the viewer. Long story short, if you can’t make an audience care about your character, it can be hard to keep them interested.

RWBY has overall done a fantastic job at getting people to fall for its cast; I’m a case in point with how hard I’ll go to bat for Emerald and Mercury. But be it the obvious choices in the main cast, the wide array of villains to obsess over. The fandom even has a few eccentric folk who stan for people not seen in years! (shoutout to CFVY fans, who knew you’d get rewarded over the whole Coco in Chibi thing by getting a book?) But rather unfortunately, while one character has managed to earn a fanbase happy to see them get content, the writing has consistently failed one particular character, through constant refusals to allow them the screentime they deserve and often putting it in the wrong places when they do get morsels of time to shine each year.

Oh no, not you. I’ll get back to you before this hiatus is out.

... actually why are his gloves orange of all colors? And what’s with the banages, is he planning on cosplaying Dazai from Bungou Stray Dogs at an Atlas convention during the off-season?

Yeah, no, I’m talking about Oscar Pine. First introduced in Volume 4, Oscar has now been a part of the main cast for half of the show’s runtime. In that time Oscar has developed psychosis, met a ticket-punching man, got stuck in a house for a month, fought a teleporting staircase man, was involved in a train crash, bought new clothes, and stole military property.

Notice something? Nothing in there mentioned Oscar getting character development. Or rather he does... but it’s always offscreen. Oscar is infuriating in the sense that he has a lot of wasted character potential to be one of the best characters in the show- a simple but efficient design, great voice work from Aaron Dismuke and a charming personality that makes him a likable hero. But in spite of that all, Oscar constantly get the shaft when it comes to his screentime showing him developing from his problems, and each volume so far has had Oscar be faced with a trial that would make for a truly fascinating character arc, only for him to get over it while the camera’s focused elsewhere. And that’s what I’m going to focus on in this essay- I’m going to go over why I think Oscar’s writing has been consistently mishandled, and my hopes for the character in Volume 7.

God damn I don’t like doing this, I want to like the farm boi most of the time

1) Volume 4: All these voices running through my head, I’m on fire, face burning red

Oscar is introduced very early in Volume 4- as in, he’s in the first episode and is the eighth character we see onscreen after the villains. Oscar is in fact, if you don’t count Ruby’s character short, present in Volume 4 before the title characters. His first episode is... a lot of nothing, mostly just Oscar doing some farming. Oscar’s introduction does a good job telling us a bit about his character without him saying much- he’s prone to daydreaming while working on the farm, clearly not enjoying himself and his work. It matches up with what we learn later, that Oscar dreams of becoming a hero. It’s a stock motivation, and a stock background, but a simple and effective way of setting up a hero who desires the chance to prove himself in the wider world. His intro scene is a nice, quiet beat between the dark opening of Evernight and Salem, and the more frantic action of RNJR fighting the Geist. But overall the time the fandom was wondering what was up with Oscar- he wasn’t in the OP and nothing had set him up before now and yet here he was, getting focus before the main girls.

It takes until Oscar’s second appearance, three episodes later in Family, that we get the real reason for his importance- Ozpin’s in his head, but it would take another three episodes, in Punished, for this to be elaborated on in an unintentional Christmas gift from Rooster Teeth; Ozpin’s in his head due to their Auras and souls merging thanks to Ozma’s pact with the Archangel Asshole a few centuries back, and now Oscar is starting to act like an Assassin’s Creed character with all the memories that are in his head that he didn’t create. It’s a cruel irony for Oscar- Ozpin plays on how Oscar wants to be more than just a farmhand to try and get him to go to Mistral, but Oscar’s body language and face make it clear that this wasn’t how he saw himself getting some new life choices. Rather tragically, Oscar finally gets the chance to be part of something bigger but the manner in which it’s offered to him is anathema, as it’s coming from a literal voice in his head who claims to be a dead headmaster, and more importantly, he was never offered a choice- this was thrust upon him, a young 14 year old child who never asked for this burden of responsibility. And the last shot of Oscar in this episode already has him cracking under that burden, stuck on his knees and unsure what to do.

(also btw Oscar’s Aunt tells him to clean his hands but Oscar’s model has gloves on all the time, so... how would he clean his hands? Or does he read books with dirty gloves? Eww)

It’s an interesting place to leave Oscar, at the metaphorical and and spiritual crossroads, and means the viewer wants to see Oscar’s next actions and the deliberation between the easy, boring life he knows or risking everything on a voice in his head telling him to try his chances in the big city. Sounds pretty interesting, right?

Not to the writers, unfortunately. Because when we next check in with Oscar three episodes later during Kuroyuri, Oscar’s already on the road to Mistral with his backpack all ready to go. That deliberation, the consideration, Oscar eventually choosing to trust Ozpin and go along with his plan? All done offscreen. Similarly, Oscar goes from treating Ozpin’s voice as an irritating thing to be annoyed has been chucked out a window- now out on the open road, it doesn’t “feel crazy” anymore. It just feels like such a cheap way to handle Oscar’s writing- rather than show his development naturally, it just fast-forwards until it reaches a point where it skips all that. And unfortunately, this isn’t the first or last time Oscar is victim to the writers fast-forwarding through his development moments. Given how much of Oscar’s arc hinges on this crucial first step, it just seems inane to me that of all of the potential Oscar scenes to cut... him coming around on Ozpin and making the call to leave was what got the cutting room floor. Especially since nothing in his Kuroyuri scene was all that essential for Oscar in contrast, barring setting up the the mystery Hazel and Ozpin’s past.

Oscar doesn’t appear again after his encounter with Hazel until the finale, when during the montage of Ruby’s letter (that consists of half her dialogue this season) we see Oscar on the train to Mistral, which really only caused a problem thanks to all the people who used it to ask why RNJR didn’t take a train. He also appears in the post-credits scene, meeting Qrow at a bar and asking for his cane back, the volume ending on Oscar extending the cane experimentally.

Being blunt, I feel like Oscar should have been cut from Volume 4 and just introduced in Volume 5 with the bar scene. Volume 4 already had to juggle far too much in RWBY and Cinder’s plots, and adding Oscar to the mix unfortunately meant the screentime for some characters had to suffer- especially Yang. His time this season ultimately goes nowhere and only gives him a basic background that most fans would have already guessed from his character design, and the already wobbly Jenga Tower that was Volume 4′s screentime didn’t need more blocks thrown on top. I like a fair few things in Oscar’s arc, but it’s content that ultimately I’d have been fine having left on the cutting room floor. Hell, if nothing else, Oscar’s first scene should have ended with Ozpin’s reappearance, that these are two separate scenes is mind-boggling and left the fans wondering what the hell was Oscar’s purpose for weeks.

Oscar’s debut arc has its ups and downs, much like the volume itself. His intro scene and argument with Ozpin are both well-executed and show the viewer the vocal dynamite of Dismuke’s performance or just set up his base character, but for every good thing to come of Oscar’s arc, it’s fraught with issues- most notably, his scene of choosing to leave his home being omitted and beginning the unfortunate tendency for Oscar to get the short end of the stick when it came to development and agency, which undermine his choice to leave. But overall, Oscar built himself a small but dedicated fanbase with his debut volume, even immediately shooting up to become a potential target for Ruby’s affections in the fandom shipping wars. It was a rocky start, but surely now that Oscar was going to have his plot merged with RNJR, he’d be able to handle his screen-time more effectively, right?

Right?

Volume 5- Two for one on meatsacks

Volume 5 is Oscar’s worst volume so far, being blunt. It’s a lot of people’s worst volumes though (Cinder, Ruby, Weiss, Mercury, Adam, mine) that at least he can share the load. It doesn’t help that he’s not in half the damn thing because his body is being used by Ozpin to regale the audience with expositon that makes them actively yearn for the sweet embrace of death... or just the return of the World of Remnant shorts. Oscar’s first scene in Volume 5 is just a recycling of the Volume 4 post-credits scene, which raises the question of why the scene was used in Volume 4. I don’t think it’s even touched up, they literally just copy-pasted it. Much like his first scene in Volume 4, his intro scene this volume is intercepted by comedy relief- last time it was Jaune’s miserable attempts at being a strategist, this time it’s Drunkle Qrow.

... You know, this scene ages poorly in hindsight given how just one volume later Qrow’s alcoholism is treated with ice-cold severity.

Episode 3 follows up on this and gives us Ozcar’s first major scene of the volume, and unfortunately also sets up their dynamic this volume. Oscar gets some awkwardly charming moments with Ruby but overall the scene is dominated by Ozpin taking over for the first time and explaining his reincarnation powers alongside setitng up RNJR’s plot for the season- “training.” An episode later sees the entirety of this training, with Oscar and Ruby engaging in hand-to-hand combat and Oscar getting a lore dump from Ren (in hindsight this is novel not just because they’re outside during it but Ren’s the one delivering the infodump and not Ozpin). Ozpin barely even factors into the episode barring some fisticuffs and a generic speech at the end. But the scene is overall just pointless to the narrative beyond loosely setting up Jaune’s own Semblance unlocking, and this is the last we hear of RNJR “training” for the upcoming trials at Haven. Hell, even though the story makes a point of noting Oscar still hasn’t unlocked his Semblance, that still hasn’t come up two years later. This scene really only pays off in one immediate way:

This is Ruby’s sole contribution to the Battle of Haven after getting KO’d by Emerald outside of just yelling orders for offscreen fights, and all this helped do was begin to convince people that “MERC’S A BAD FIGHTER WITHOUT EMERALD.”

Lighting the Fire’s training scene is one of Oscar’s only major scenes where he interacts with RNJR to boot for the entirety of Volume 5, and it’s quite sad that nothing really comes of it. It just serves to highlight how little Oscar interacts with the other kids, as most of his dialogue this season is just as Ozcar.

Necessary Sacrifice then, should be great on paper. It’s an entirely Oscar and Ruby scene with Ozpin only chiming in at the end. It has Oscar confronting Ruby and himself on his fears and how Ruby can put up a brace face, and Ruby finally gets to open up a little about losing Penny and Pyrrha at Beacon. But the scene just falls flat on its face and botches the execution. Putting aside Ruby’s own problems in this scene (her speech feels incredibly pre-rehearsed, as if she spent hours practicing it in the mirror to ward off anyone actually prying into her life). Oscar’s anger and fear come out of left field with nothing setting this up in his prior scenes this volume. Ruby needed a scene where she talked about losing Penny and Pyrrha, but it should have been during Volume 4, with Jaune. Having it now with Oscar feels like the writers apologizing for having Ruby get shafted for screenitme during Volume 4... during the volume where she gets shafted by literally everyone else. The scene is frustrating to me, it could and should have been a lot better (musically at least I love the reprises of When It Falls and Lets Just Live), but it just feels like a hasty patch note. Oscar doesn’t really develop from the situation and his fears are just forgotten for the rest of the volume.

Oscar then proceeds to basically sit out Volume 5 barring Chapters 11 and 12. I still don’t get why he wasn’t part of the dinner scene with RWBJNR, since it would have been so very easy for him to be part of the dinner and get the chance to interact with the rest of the kids. Oscar wants to be a hero, so let him... actually interact with heroes his age. Have him brought up to speed on the crazy adventures the team have, let them get to interact with Oscar without having to deal with his backseat driver. You could even make something tragic of the scene where Oscar is forced to go away so Ozpin can take over, and the team’s faces fall flat when Ozpin gets right to talking shop which leads to the YOU TURNED THEM INTO BIRDS exchange. But otherwise, the rest of the House scenes revolve around Ozpin talking. The kids talk past Oscar, and again, you can very easily make something tragic of that as Oscar could grow to resent Ozpin because none of the others see him as himself, just a puppet on strings. But again... Oscar’s just not allowed to develop onscreen in this show.

And perhaps the worst thing about all this is that whenever Ozpin actually is called out on his tactics, one of the most pressings ones in his possession of Oscar,a 14 year old boy, is never used as fuel. Granted, yes, Ozpin has no control over who’s his next host but surely someone, somewhere is going to opine how morally bankrupt it is that Ozpin essentially conscripted a child not even old enough to get a learner’s permit into his eternal shadow war. It’s times like this that my theory that Jaune was going to be Ozpin’s original replacement before the backlash to Jaundice made them backtrack looks more and more possible.

The Haven Battle episodes quickly have Ozpin force control away from Oscar, but it’s not like Oscar did much before then anyway other than serve as the conduit for another lore dump on Hazel’s backstory. He doesn’t try and learn why Leo defected and manages to trounce the headmaster so well one wonders how the hell Leo got put in charge of a combat school. After that, Ozpin takes over (and we admittedly get some of the coolest fighting in the actual Battle of Haven in Ozcar vs Hazel) and Oscar only briefly returns in the last seconds of the finale to drop the sequel hook that they need to get the lamp to Atlas.

Volume 5 is just a bad season for Oscar- this is the one time we don’t get his eternal phantom of offscreen character development because it’s not fair to say Oscar has any development in Volume 5. He’s immediately forced to the back to serve as a projector through which Ozpin can put the audience to sleep, most of his actual scenes are irrelevant or just feel like a waste of time and he basically sits out the entire finale. It’s just infuriatingly incompetent writing- we’ve gone from Oscar being a waste of time in Volume 4 to just being a waste of a character in Volume 5 who barely gets to express himself. Little is done with Oscar that could not be achieved by putting a tape recorder beside a lampshade and calling that Ozpin’s new host. Volume 5′s bad for a lot of characters, but at least most of the rest of the cast had good seasons beforehand to show how well they could be handled or written. Oscar didn’t have that, and while ultimately the blame was placed more on Ozpin for hogging the time, Oscar’s critics began to grow and he was derisively seen as just a plot device to let the writers bring Ozpin back and serve as a mission marker for the heroes. One more bad season for Oscar could spell the end to his character ever having a warm reception among the fans and critics. Drastic action would need to be undertaken in order to regain trust in Oscar.

3) Volume 6- Tossing out the baby with the water

So the big plan to give Oscar some screentime... was basically cut Ozpin out of the story entirely. Oscar is almost entirely himself after the fourth episode, it’s the longest run of episodes with Oscar as himself that we’ve gotten in the show to date and Ozpin doesn’t even surface until the finale. There’s a lovely line of Oscar’s in episode 4 that finally lets him address some of the fears and concerns he should be rightfully worried about- “I’m just going to be another one of his lives, aren’t I?” Oscar’s tone is just so bleak there, it works super well and it was nice to finally see Oscar expressing human emotions. It even my cynical heart hope that Volume 6 would finally see Oscar get the limelight he had been denied for two years running.

But then the ball is just dropped hard. Oscar’s left in a background role for the Brunswick episodes, stuck working on a tire while RWBY encounter the Apathy. What’s already a somewhat rushed resolution to the whole plot of “RWBY express concerns about going onward to Atlas in light of Jinn’s revelations” now leaves Oscar, the guy carrying Ozma’s soul in him, out of the moment. He just gets to be tired and tell Blake to make food if she’s hungry.

Argus at least alludes to putting Oscar in the driver’s seat for his own solo arc where he explores the city alone after Jaune physically assults him (why didn’t anyone stop Jaune from hurting Oscar two people saying Jaune’s name with all the concern of someone stubbing their toe just feels cheap). Even though I was cold on the episode as a whole, Dead End did set up the wonderful idea of an Oscar episode, one where he maybe forces Ozpin to come out so they can talk frankly for the first time in two volumes. Maybe they could even rip off Avatar (some more) and have Oscar meet Ozma himself, using his conversation with the two as his own chance to rally onwards and decide to bring the fight to Salem. It could have been a really sweet moment of him backing Ruby up in her desire to keep going, the two forming a mutual bond of bolstering each other’s hopes as they carry the burden for their team.

But no. Because I can’t have nice things, in an otherwise near-perfect episode where I actually got Mercury and Emerald screentime and the lovely Pyrrha statue scene (which I low-key feel like Oscar should have been a part of but that’s a subject for another day), Oscar just gets over his issues, buys a new outfit and dodges past his problems, getting to develop past them, off-screen, for the third time in a row.

As far as I care, Oscar stole the money for this costume from either Qrow or Jaune and I don’t care if Miles says to my face he earned the money legit, I’m keeping that headcanon. Also, why are his gloves still orange? They don’t fit the rest of his costume.

If there was anything that got cut from Volume 6′s final half, I’d bet money on it being Oscar’s solo arc. Kerry himself has admitted during the RWBY Rewind for the finale that stuff got cut, and it’s very likely (going off comments from Miles that The Lost Fable was a huge resource drain) that this content was going to be part of the entire episode that was cut (Volume 6 initially had 14 episodes but around Christmastime this was remedied down to 13). It’s actually downright insulting and infuriating that Oscar got the shaft again, especially when Volume 6 finally seemed to be addressing the issue of Oscar never getting growth or focus. He was free of Ozpin, and with Ozma’s history revealed it was the perfect time for him to embrace the past forced upon him and resolve to become a hero. But no, the episode count went down so we had to wave goodbye to Oscar’s agency again.

Just think of how beneficial it would be for Oscar to actually confront his sorta-not-really ancestor, who may have had to watch as soul after soul gets consumed for him. Has Ozma ever had someone tell him none of this was his fault? I feel he needs it.

If I was a more suspicious person I’d say it almost feels deliberate, that someone on the writing team doesn’t like Oscar and is purposefully keeping his growth offscreen out of childish spite. But three volumes in a row now, Oscar’s growth has felt artificial and fake, and leaves him feeling like an afterthought. I know it’s not a problem of RWBY not being able to write new characters well, just look at how fleshed out and beloved Maria was after just her debut season. But Oscar just can’t catch a break and it’s frustrating to watch. In a volume that otherwise made huge strides in solving many of the pre-existing issues in Volumes 4 and 5, that 6 still refuses to treat Oscar with anything other than mild apathy is just mind-boggling.

Like, what was even the point of having Jaune say Ozpin was just pretending to be Oscar? To make Jaune look irrational? To plant the red herring in the viewer’s minds? The rest of the volume itself shoots the idea down hard, and it feels like it was going to be used during Oscar’s potential cut scene, but again... it was cut. I can only go off what’s in the volume and unfortunately, Oscar in Volume 6 is only marginally better than he was in past Volumes. Bless his heart, Aaron is trying to save this character but the writing itself is dragging Oscar down every chance it can get.

4) Volume 7- The potential breaking point

Oscar’s character is currently in a make or break spot, and Volume 7 will either finally solve his growth issues or this will be it and his fandom will reach a boiling point. The worst thing is, it’s a very easy solution to fix Oscar.

Just put his character development onscreen.

That’s it, the golden answer to all of Oscar’s problems is to just stop cutting his development and agency short. Oscar has potential to be the most tragic character in RWBY- someone who wanted to be a hero, only for the responsibilities to be forced on him without his consent. He’s someone who the rest of his companions oftentimes don’t see as a person, just a walking telephone to their boss. Imagine how dehumanizing it would be, especially after Qrow’s “Don’t lie to him, we’re better than that” line? Imagine being someone effectively living on borrowed time because sooner or later, your consciousness will be absorbed what makes you you will be but a distant memory? Oscar could easily be a shining example of character growth, he could easily have a great arc of learning to deal with the burdens of Ozma’s struggle, of being the target of Hazel and Salem’s ire when he did nothing to earn it. But it needs to be soon, or all the potential in the world won’t be able to save Oscar.

Perhaps Volume 7 will have a flashback to Oscar in Argus having that confrontation with Ozpin and getting his new outfit. Perhaps Ironwood will be mistrusting of Oscar claiming to be Oz, and Oscar will have to step up and prove he is who he says he is. Qrow never apologized to Oscar for punching him, so an apology would serve both Qrow and Oscar’s arcs as Qrow reignites his spark to fight. A potential confrontation with Salem where Oscar may try something the previous Oz lives didn’t could work wonders for Oscar. Volume 7 could still easily have Oscar get spotlight, but with how many plates the season is already planning to spin (Tyrian and Wattts going to Atlas, Cinder and Neo going after Ruby, Weiss dealing with her family, Ruby learning about the Silver Eyes with Maria, a likely return of Faunus racism for Blake and Yang, Atlas class warfare, the token reminder that Pyrrha died so Jaune, Ren and Nora can be sad, etc.) I’m already accepting that Oscar is the most likely candidate to get the boot again. It’s happened before, and I try to avoid being a sucker who falls for the same thing over and over. Definition of insanity and all that.

5) Conclusion

Oscar is... I hate to say this again, but infuriating to me writing wise. He has so much potential as a character in terms of his growth but despite having had main character status for half the show’s runtime now, it’s hard to really care. Oscar keeps getting the short end of the stick, and if it turns out that the whole reason he got shafted for years was because of M&K’s mystery fetish, I might actually throw a chair out a window.

What makes it worse is that Oscar is not a character with no hopes of being salvaged! There is a very easy way to remedy the problem and it’s just to let him have his time to shine and develop offscreen. Flashbacks covering the lost events such as his leaving his farm or gaining confidence in Argus (or even giving Oscar a character short specifically to address these issues) might be belated and feel like damage control- let’s be fair, after Adam’s short this wouldn’t be the first time they resorted to doing damage control in their shorts- but it would be a step in the right direction and show the team are committed to working to salvage Oscar. But they want to do it, it has to be now. If Oscar leaves Volume 7 suffering from the same problems, he might as well get killed off in Volume 8 because that will be it for his character, no one will defend him and Oscar will fully become the heroic Cinder in that no matter what, you can rest assured they won’t get onscreen development from anything that happens. In the meantime, all I can do is hope that this time, things will work out for the farm boi. There’s a goldmine of a character here guys, someone’s just gotta put the work into finding the first nugget.

In short, Oscar can be a great character, if the writing lets him become it onscreen. But until then, it’s going to be a frankly depressing journey to get there.

Thank you for reading.

#rwby #oscar pine #ozpin #ruby rose #rwde #rwby analysis #ozma #salem #james ironwood #hazel rainart #aaron dismuke #rwby4 #rwby5 #rwby6 #rwby7 #jaune arc #qrow branwen

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undeadwicchan · 6 years ago

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Rewatching RWBY: Volume 1, Episodes 1-5 [Live Blog]

Let’s get started.

[Episode 1]

Hello Salem. I wonder who is she explaining all of this to before Ozpin interrupted her?

ROMAN. MY BOI. ;__;

The return of the shadow people!

By the way, has it ever been explained why Roman was collecting all of this Dust for Cinder?

RUBYYYY Omg, I am so used to her Maya model and her V4-V6 clothes. The outfit is iconic though!

Asdfjgk MONTYYYY ;___; I miss your fighting style!

Ruby’s voice is considerably deeper in the beginning….

GYLNDAAAAAA

Oh hi Cinder.

So I’m gonna go with a gambit and say that first shot Cinder went for and used was her Semblance….

Okay so I know Maidens weren’t even a thing until like between Volume 2 and Volume 3 but, does that mean what we’ve seen with Cinder was actually her semblance??

“Can I have your autograph” Omg Rubes

I didn’t notice until now, but are they at an interrogation room?

OZPIN. OZ. I LOVE YOU. ;w;

“You have… Silver eyes,” anyone want to bet Oz said the same thing to Summer at some point?

I love how Ozpin baked cookies for Ruby while she was getting scolded by Glynda it really shows how total opposite Oz and Glyn can be towards each other.

Omg Oz’s eyebrow raise when Ruby was talking with food in her mouth.

If you haven’t met me yet, I’ll say this now… I am a Ozpin stan so uh, you’ll be seeing me freak out over Oz a lot here lmao.

I’m thinking we’re seeing Ozma in control here, not Ozpin.

Ruby you’re so pure and innocent and I’m not looking forward to seeing you get traumatized.

Ozpin’s smile after she’s done talking is just aaa.

Glynda’s judgement look at Ozpin when he was considering enrolling her early. “Ozpin no.” “Ozpin yes”

Y A N G

“I just want to be a normal girl,” *laughs in silver eyes*

Adam you prick, that was a peaceful protest c’mon.

“Incredible time of peace” *cries in post Volume 3*

JAUNE BOY

Lmao that ending tho

THIS WILL BE THE DAY WE WAITED FOR. GOD I HAVEN’T HEARD THAT SONG IN AWHILE.

I just noticed after S I X years that Adam pops in this opening lmfao. It’s kinda creepy he’s still there even after Blake vanishes.

Those silhouettes do not look like Mercury or Emerald lmao. Okay, kinda, but not much.

PYRRHA. MY EYES ARE ALREADY WATERING. AAAAHHHA

The Nostalgia… Onto Episode 2.

[Episode 2]

Beacon Academy is fucking huge, and I do feel Ozpin based it’s design off of the castle he went in to free Salem. I can’t wait to see Beacon in Maya.

Ruby is weaponsexual, fight me.

The return of the shadow people lmao.

W E I S S

I forgot she's a bit of a bitch in Volume 1 omg. That just goes to show how much she’s grown since then.

B L A K E

TEAR THAT PIECE OF SHIT COMPANY APART BLAKE.

“Controversial Labor Forces” Yeah Adam would know….

“I’m Jaune” “Ruby” Ah yes, the moment I started shipping Lancaster was that very moment lmao.

I love them so much ;-;

I wonder if King of Vale (Oz) and Jaune’s Grandfather interacted…

Let’s play I spy a main character in this crowd.

“Where am I supposed to find a nice quirky girl to talk to?!” Pyrrha is RIGHT THERE JAUNE.

Yang’s expression when she realizes Ruby was being honest lmao

And so it begins with Jaune and Weiss.

That was so Ozma talking, and that foreshadowing for that moment in Volume 6 oof.

Oh right the moment where I see people and homophobes argue that Yang isn’t into girls. Yeah, no I call BS because as we see later, Yang is into girls too.

“You’ve got friends all around you, you just haven’t met them yet,” FORESHADOWING.

I love Blake’s pajamas out of the RWBY girls. It seems very… Mistral like.

“It’s about a man with two souls” There is so much foreshadowing in this episode it’s not even funny… okay it is lol.

I love this moment between Ruby and Blake, and I think Blake sees a bit of what she used to be in Ruby and perhaps what Adam originally was to her. :c I made myself sad again gdi…

Those girls are going to love each other and treat each other like family…

[Episode 3]

And here’s Ren and Nora!

I’m so used to hearing Neath voice Ren, but hearing Monty voice Ren and just overall hearing Monty… I love that man…

Ruby x Crescent Rose is the real endgame pairing.

PYRRHA I LOVE YOU ;A;

Omg Weiss and the return of her derp face.

I can see how Volume 1 Jaune is insufferable.

LET’S SAIL ARKOS. LET’S SAIL!

And Lancaster too!

That’s probably Ozpin talking, not Ozma.

Poor Ruby lol

Poor Jaune lmao

I think Ozpin might be enjoying this.

I remember reading a comic where that bird was actually Qrow that Ruby flew into lmao.

Man… it’s weird seeing Yang without a prosthetic for her arm…

I missed Pyrrha have I mention that before?

I remember that art style, it’s used in those RT animation skits.

That music that plays as they made eye contact gives me chills and I hear Mirror Mirror in it too.

IS THAT FOREVER FALL I’M HEARING IN THE BACKGROUND DURING PYRRHA’S AND JAUNE’S CONVERSATION. RT STOP YOU’RE GONNA MAKE ME CRY. I’m probably going to bawl my eyes one when the full version comes out.

I can see why people ship White Rose, and I do too. It’s cute.

[Episode 4]

Alright Goldilocks and the… Two Bears?

Oh right Yang values her hair a lot back during the early volumes.

That smirk from Blake. Also I’m going to be paying more close attention to Yang’s and Blake’s bond and also Sun’s and Blake’s bond here.

Ah, setting something on fire. Now that’s the RWBY I know.

Oof… yeah it was rough for Weiss and Ruby early…

Oh… I didn’t get that foreshadowing with the Nevermore fight until now!

Vol 1 RWBY has a lot of derp faces.

You know it’s been awhile since seeing someone use aura defensively like Ren does here.

Unlocking someone’s Aura seems very intimate at times.

Boop.

Oz keeping an eye out for Ruby, it is interesting because I made post where Summer’s death is what led to Ozpin being protective of Ruby during Volumes 1 and 2.

Omg Ruby is letting it all out on Weiss.

“Not yet” that was a dark mutter… referencing how her father is with her perhaps?

I feel like those chess pieces they pick are of importance in later volumes

“Some girl is in trouble” LMAO

And Ruby is falling.

Alright I know what happens next episode, and I can’t wait if I remember correctly.

[Episode 5]

Lol I love their banter

Blake’s ears twitched, that’s how early the speculation of Blake having cat ears have started… actually it might when the Black Trailer was released.

Blake is just... experiencing so much wacky shit that she would never experience seeing in the White Fang

There’s so many anime tropes in this episode lmao.

Lmao, it was heroic for a brief moment Jaune.

#EveryoneIsHere

Ruby was so reckless early volumes damn.

Omg that must have been terrifying for Yang especially.

Weiss to the rescue!

With that character development too!

Ah yes, that small Lancaster moment.

Something tells me in the Final Battle against Salem we’re going to see a more older, wiser, and harden Ruby perched on that rock and turning to her friends and allies as a callback to this.

Alright time for RWBY & JNPR VS Death Stalker & Nevermore.

I miss Monty’s fight choreography. ;v;

The start of JNPR. And Jaune being a strategist.

The start of RWBY, and Ruby being a leader.

That’s probably one of the most iconic moments in RWBY.

Omg Pyrrha and Nora are so happy.

This is definitely going to be an interesting year Oz…

“We’re going to need more men…” Here comes the White Fang..

All in all I miss seeing Pyrrha and Ozpin in the flesh especially, and I feel like I’m 16-17 again. This is great!

#RWBY #Yuuri rewatches RWBY #Live Blogging

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timeagainreviews · 6 years ago

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Rage Against the Machines Piloted by Squidgy Mutants

If you're coming to classic Doctor Who for the first time as a fan of the new series, it can be a bit of an adjustment. It's very much like watching a play, in that the sets aren't so much realistic, as they are implications. The acting is theatric, and everyone speaks in the Queen's English. Back in 2011 when I originally began my foray into classic Doctor Who, I found the differences shocking. But "The Daleks," was a serial that somewhat mystified me.

It's not impossible to put yourself into the mindset of a 1963 audience watching this for the first time. Because if you were to update this story with flashy editing and special effects, it would still be rather unique. Doctor Who is so unlike any other science fiction, despite how many tropes it borrows from the genre. There is still, to this day, not much similar. Only ten years previous, had one of the first adult-oriented science fictions been introduced to British television with "The Quartermass Experiment." But Doctor Who stove toward something broader- a family oriented science fiction.

The inception of Doctor Who was surprisingly "rag-tag," in many ways. The show's creator, Sydney Newman, had a vision, but it was by no means clear. It was more of an intuition on his behalf. He set producer Verity Lambert to the task of seeing this vision come to fruition. Ironically, one of the most iconic moments of the show came from ignoring one of Newman's early guidelines- "No bug-eyed monsters!"

If you recall from the end of the Cave of Skulls, the TARDIS had landed in an irradiated jungle of sorts. The trees were alien and stark white. Our crew, unaware of the dangerous atmosphere set out to explore the surface of this strange planet on which they've found themselves. Ian and Barbara are still upset about having not returned home, but they seem to be adjusting to this new reality as best they can.

After a closer inspection, Ian discovers that the forest is actually petrified. The branches of the trees don't blow in the breeze because some sort of process has turned them all into a kind of brittle stone. None of them can hide their amazement at this strange forest. Susan finds a fragile flower at the base of a tree, preserved perfectly in stone. She asks Ian to help pick it so she can bring it back to the TARDIS, but a scream heard from Barbara causes Ian to hastily drop the flower into Susan's hands, pulverising it.

The cause of Barbara's discontent was the discovery of a rather silly looking reptile the size of an alligator, covered in metal plating. Due to its rigid structure, it only appears to be alive. In truth, it's long dead. The Doctor speculates that the creature was held together by internal magnetic forces that it used to attract prey, which may have also been metal. It is obvious that they aren't on Earth. The Doctor decides to get a better vantage point to map the stars, in an attempt to figure out where they are.

At the top of a large hill, the Doctor discovers a city off in the distance, unperturbed by whatever process had petrified the forest. Naturally, his curious mind wants to explore this strange city, but his companions convince him to return to the TARDIS for the night so they might get some rest. Ian refuses to let the Doctor go alone, as he is the only one who can pilot the ship. Upon returning, Susan is distracted by another flower which separates her from the group. While standing behind she hears a strange sound and a mysterious human hand grasps her shoulder momentarily, causing her to sprint back to the TARDIS in fear.

The Doctor is still naive at this point in his life. He still thinks he knows everything. Therefore, the idea that Susan was grabbed sounds impossible to him. The Doctor we know nowadays would never assume what was impossible. She's seen too much to disbelieve things outrightly. But early on, the Doctor is so sure it couldn't happen. No one could live on the surface of this planet. Right?

Back on the TARDIS, Barbara is feeling a bit ill with a headache. We as the viewer know this has something to do with the radiation on the planet's surface, but our friends have no idea. Susan gives Barbara a tincture to cure what ails her. The two of them have a nice moment, where Barbara takes on a bit of a motherly/teacher role with Susan, comforting her. Ian and the Doctor argue over the logistics of surviving on this planet. Can they leave? How will they live? What will they eat? Which brings me to one of my favourite little moments in the Hartnell era- the food machine!

I know it's a funny thing to love, but it's such a product of its time. The Doctor and Susan make Ian and Barbara some bacon and eggs from the food machine. Only it comes out as a sort of tofu looking substance wrapped in foil. The Doctor explains how flavours are a sort of spectrum, much like colour. They can be mixed to make new ones. Funnily enough, you never see it in the show again after Hartnell's era. It's one of those things from Doctor Who that I wish they would bring back, if only for a silly nod.

Ok, back to it. The idea of going back to the TARDIS for the night is a bit of a joke. They spend all of five minutes before going right back outside. There's no indication of a passage of time longer than a moment. The Doctor pulls some mercurial trickster shit to get his way. By slight of hand, he sabotages the TARDIS' fluid link, claiming the mercury is empty, and they need to find more. (See what I did there?) It's a dirty trick, but it gets them out of the TARDIS to seek out more mercury in the mysterious city.

Now they're all back outside, precisely as the Doctor desired. They find a little silver box they mistake for a bomb, which leads to a lot of Ian hopping around like a dolt. It turns out to be a bit of medicine that they bring into the TARDIS. They then set off into the city. By the time they arrive, they're all exhausted. The radiation is taking a toll on their bodies. Ian makes the "brilliant," suggestion that they all split up. He goes his way, the Doctor and Susan go theirs, and Barbara goes hers.

I tried to imagine what it was like to watch that first episode end, but no matter how you cut it, it looks like Barbara is getting attacked by a toilet plunger. I imagine that perplexed many people in the following week waiting for the next episode. The rest of the crew have already met back up and go looking for Barbara. While looking they find a room full of scientific instruments that make me giggle a bit. One of the things I've always found humorous about Daleks was the idea that they could manage to build complex machinery with those sucker arms. One of the machines is a Geiger counter, which alerts them to the fact that they're stewing in radiation. The Doctor now knows why the forest was petrified. He surmises it was a neutron bomb, as the city still stands.

The Doctor admits there is nothing wrong with the fluid link, which upsets Ian. He snatches the fluid link from the Doctor and demands they find Barbara. Upon exiting the equipment room, they are surrounded by robotic creatures shaped like pepper pots. Unless you've been sleeping under a rock, you'll know right away these are Daleks. Their classic look hasn't changed much throughout the years. The ring modulator on their monotone voices is just as evil and grating as ever. They take our friends captive and lead them toward a containment block.

In what may be one of the dumbest moves in Doctor Who history, under zero cover from fire Ian makes a run for it. He's immediately shot by a Dalek, leaving his legs temporarily paralysed. The Doctor and Susan must carry him to their cell where they find Barbara has also been captured. One of the cooler things I noticed this time around was that the Daleks have a small round screen in their control room that has the time vortex from the opening credits. My headcanon is that this is them, pre-time travel, experimenting with this newfound phenomena. I'd love to know if anyone has ever done a story about this.

The Daleks decide for the time to keep their captives alive. They want to know more about these strangers from the outside. The Daleks interrogate the Doctor and discover the drugs our friends found outside the TARDIS are anti-radiation drugs. They allow one of the crew to go fetch the drugs, thinking they could duplicate it and use it for themselves. The person they send is Susan, who is basically useless, so she spends a lot of time running through the forest like a moron.

While in the forest, Susan meets a man named Alydon from a race of people know as the Thals, one of two dominant races of this planet, Skaro. The Thals were once a proud race of warriors who were at war with the Daleks, hence the neutronic bombs. The radiation mutated both races, but the Thals had come back around to a more human appearance, while the Daleks remained horribly mutated in their metal encasings. Alydon tells Susan that it was he who tried to get her attention in the forest and that it was also him who left the drugs as a gift. He belongs to a small group of Thals that have been searching for a new source of food. Their hope is to establish some sort of treaty with the Daleks. He gives Susan his cloak and sends her on her way with a warning about the Daleks.

Alydon heads back to his encampment to discuss the possibility of a treaty. At this point, it's worth noting that the Thals are basically interchangeable. The men are all tall, handsome, with blonde hair. The women all dress like Vegas showgirls and also possess blonde hair. They're all the embodiment of the Aryan ideal, which is ironic considering their biggest enemy is the embodiment of Nazi ideals. The main Thals worth noting are- Alydon: notable for being second in command, Temmosus: notable for being the leader and having "I'll be dead by the end of this story," stamped all over his forehead, and Dyoni: notable for being a woman with actual dialogue. All of the other ones are basically fodder for the story.

Susan returns with the drugs and passes them around, which for the 60's, is a lot less exciting than it sounds. The Daleks listen in and discover the Thals' plan to broker peace, so they play along, all the while devising their own plan. Using Susan's signature on a letter, they plan to trick the Thals into an ambush.

Recurring Doctor Who villains always come back, bigger, better, meaner. The Daleks of modern Doctor Who murder without warning, can fly, are made of reinforced Dalekanium, and can even fry people who touch them. The first time we see them, it's a different story. The Doctor theorises that they must be powered by static electricity from the metal floors and pathways. Or as Ian says "Like dodgems!" at the fair. It makes the Twelfth Doctor's "Anyone for dodgems?" line from "The Witch's Familiar," all the funnier. Mixing what little water they've been given with mud from Susan's shoe, they create a sort of mudball which they use on the guard Dalek's eyestalk and push it onto Alydon's cloak, insulating it from the statically charged floor. The Dalek powers down, and they open up the casing, replacing the squidgy inhabitant with Ian.

What comes next is a lot of cat and mouse. Our friends escape the Daleks, while they try and stop them. Ian tries to warn the Thals that the food exchange is really an ambush. But Temmosus tries to reason with the Daleks, leading to his very predictable death. The Thals and the TARDIS crew escape with as much food as possible and retreat to the encampment. There, Dyoni tells the tale of Skaro's history. Ian, learning of the Thals' previous status as a warrior race, rallies the new leader Alydon to once again take up arms against the Daleks. The Doctor would rather leave altogether but learns that leaving would be impossible, as the Daleks confiscated the TARDIS' fluid link when they took him captive. It's funny that they used to have to write reasons to keep the Doctor around. "When people need help, I never refuse," is not yet the Doctor's personal axiom.

I mentioned in the "Cave of Skulls," review that elements of the story were Arthurian in nature. The next part of our story also has a bit of a medieval vibe to it as well. Our heroes must infiltrate the Dalek city. However, it's well guarded by Daleks and/or cameras at every entrance. From the back is a natural barrier created by a bog known as "The Lake of Mutations," full of deadly beasts, mutated by centuries of radiation. But it has one thing going for it- it's unguarded. This is mostly because to traverse the swamp would be suicide. Ian and Barbara, along with a group of Thals go the back way. The Doctor and Susan act as a distraction going the front way. We lose a few interchangeable Thals along the way but escape mostly unscathed.

The Doctor and Susan sneak into the city by scrambling the Dalek's cameras and work on a plan that will depower every Dalek in the city by destroying the static electricity generator. But doing so alerts the Daleks to their presence and they're captured. The Daleks, having learned that they need the radiation to survive, plan to build a new neutron bomb to kill the Thals, leaving them the supreme rulers of Skaro. However, the bomb would take too long to build with their little toilet plungers, so they decide instead to explode their nuclear reactors. How this wouldn't also power down their static charge is beyond me.

What comes next is possibly the most aptly named episode of Doctor Who ever- "The Ordeal." It is exactly that. Ian and Barbara are now in the cave beyond the lake with their Thal companions. They spend the bulk of this episode trying to cross a fucking ravine, and it's brutally uninteresting. Another interchangeable Thal dies, cutting himself free to save Ian from falling as well. Ho-hum. They make their way through an opening in the cave into a rather large facility, or as it appears onscreen- a stock photo of a big industrial plant. It's all rather comical.

While in Dalek custody, the Doctor pleads with the Daleks to reconsider killing all other life on the planet, but they start the countdown anyway. Since this episode, it's been established that the Daleks count in "rels," rather than seconds. Rels are a bit slower than seconds, and while they didn't call them rels in this story, I pulled out a timer to see just how much slower the countdown was from actual seconds. I counted just below three seconds per number. The fact that they had one single Dalek doing the countdown from 200 back, was possibly the most Dalek thing ever. So stupidly inefficient.

While the countdown is going, Alydon has brought a separate party through the front of the city and met up with Ian and Barbara's party. They join forces to take out the Dalek's machinery, stopping the radiation. They also take out their power source, powering down all of the Daleks in the city. While doing this, we lose more interchangeable Thals as they dance with the Daleks, fighting them off with stone tree branches and rocks from the cave. It's very Ewok of them.

Fluid link in hand, the Doctor, his friends, and the newly radicalised Thals head back to the TARDIS. In possibly one of the more shocking moments of the episode, Ganatus, a random Thal, exchanges a romantic kiss with Barbara as they part. It's not the kiss that is shocking, so much as the fact that they had any kind of romantic feelings at all. Nothing in the story up to this point had supported this. It's all rather forced, but whatever. Get you some, B!

Back on the TARDIS, our crew sets off into motion. However, the TARDIS console sparks and flashes, and our four heroes fall to the floor!

Final thoughts: Terry Nation's "The Daleks," is an iconic story. If you've never seen it, it's a must see. Not only does it establish the Doctor's oldest foes, but it's also the story that created "Dalekmania." Children went nuts for these stupid pepper pots, and it really pushed the popularity of the show forward. However, after having seen it once, I must say, I struggled to get through it a second time. The pacing is awful. It's overlong, and there is little to no plot. Though some of the musical cues they played over the Dalek city are particularly effective. It's no secret that I found the Thals one dimensional. I found the cavemen of the previous story more relatable. This is not to say they are without merits though. The idea that the Daleks used to share a planet makes them tragic is some respects. There were some interesting, if not dated, arguments about pacifism as well. The very idea of Skaro, with it's Lake of Mutations, and petrified forests is wonderfully creative. It's easy to see why this was the story that captured the imagination of so many, and never let go.

Hey guys! Sorry this was late. Been a little busy with life. Might push the Twin Peaks review back a day or two. But we’ll see what happens tomorrow. Regardless, I might do the next Doctor Who review sooner than later. “The Edge of Destruction,” is such a short story, it shouldn’t take long to write.

#Doctor Who #first doctor #william hartnell #william russell #jacqueline hill #carole ann ford #susan foreman #barbara wright #ian chesterton #ian and barbara #tardis #bbc #terry nation #daleks #the daleks #doctor who and the daleks

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albinohare · 6 years ago

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A test of commitment: a young couple cross the North Atlantic from Michigan to Cornwall

Jessie Zevalkink and her fiancé Luke Yeates, sailed from her house to his – 4,800 North Atlantic miles from Michigan to Cornwall

Luke asked me marry him. My feet didn’t touch the ground, I was airborne in saying yes. Within a month we were discussing sailing trips, big sailing trips, the kind of trips that people spend lifetimes planning. Luke is the kind of guy who chases big ideas. He tackles them and they become his reality. His athleticism in this department is impressive.

I was never hankering to cross an ocean. It rested on my mind as a possibility but it wasn’t eating me, in fact I probably had to be gently sold on the idea.

Luckily for Luke, he is a salesman, and a damn good one. My perspective on sailing oceans changed in meeting someone who had an admirable passion for the sea, and a confident familiarity with handling its multiple personalities. I began to think that I, too, had a small fraction of what he had. We had barely sailed together, but knew that we needed to.

I grew up as a leisurely passenger aboard Desireé, my father’s 1962 Pearson Invicta, sailing the Great Lakes. Then, I had no interest whatsoever in the action of sailing, purely catching rays and swimming to land. It wasn’t until five years ago that I sailed a boat alone for the first time. I bought a 1979 Cal 27 with one of my best friends, and we dreamed of taking it to the Bahamas.

Luke had his first taste of sailing as a kid growing up in New Zealand. The first time Luke sailed an Optimist he decided sailing was all he ever wanted to do. He forged sick notes and skipped school to go sailing. As a 12-year-old, he would disappear for lengthy afternoons sailing, much to the annoyance of his family, as he never told them where he was sailing and when he planned to return. He became obsessed, with racing in particular.

I remember the first night I met Luke, at the Annapolis Boat Show. There may have been tequila involved but one conversation I recall was sobering. Luke and a friend had sailed a Hobie cat around Britain at 21 years old, setting a speed record on the way. I understood his extremity; his pushing of boundaries, which made me feel like I had yet to push mine, even though I thought I already had. Simply imagining being on the trampoline of a Hobiefor 28 days straight, soaking wet and freezing, had my mind ping-ponging with questions. I wanted to know everything.

In agreeing to spend the rest of my life with Luke there was no question about my future on the ocean. When I realised what ingredients we had laid out in front of us, I pitched him my brilliant idea: “Let’s sail from my house to your house, Michigan to England, before we get married. The ultimate premarital test!”

I didn’t even have to finish the pitch before Luke was speaking in numbers, routes, seasons, and logistics. I sat my father down and chose my words wisely: “Dad, can we sail your boat to England?”

Desireéis solid, built by wooden boatbuilders during the early days of glass. She is a beautiful design tastefully crafted by Bill Tripp Jr. She is a yawl rig with long overhangs, a big, full bow and a lovely counter stern, with sweeping sheer lines and low freeboard.

Luke was in love with the demi bulwarks with their mahogany cap rail, essential for keeping all lines on board, not to mention having stopped both of us from sliding off the deck on several occasions. She was designed for the Newport to Bermuda Race, which her sistership won back in the Sixties. This was the first glassfibre design to win an offshore race anywhere. It was guaranteed the boat would be fast and strong enough for any ocean.

The never-ending job list began. Inside an ice-cold storage unit during a northern Michigan winter, we prepped Desireéto cross the Atlantic. With numb fingers we installed self-steering, solar, AIS, a new head, and pieced together a newly rebuilt engine.

We measured the rig for new sails, installed an inner forestay… and the list went on and on. By spring’s first thaw, we launched her and sailed away on 17 April, just a few degrees above freezing.

Our route took us across four of the choppy and unpredictable Great Lakes, out through the ripping currents of the St Lawrence Seaway and into the Atlantic Ocean.

We were to cross the North Atlantic from St Johns in Newfoundland to Falmouth, south-west England. I had never been so terrified and never wanted something so badly. Planning and executing this voyage took everything we had mentally, physically, emotional, and financially. Our relationship orbited Desireé, our conversation rarely straying from the Atlantic Ocean. We were completely consumed.

It took one month to get out of the Great Lakes and over to Montreal, a wicked and arctic experience of frosty decks with both water and air temperatures just a few degrees above freezing. The Great Lakes were fierce, but my motivation to sail the boat to the ocean was to gain the confidence and to prepare for conditions that we expected to be much fiercer.

Heading for ‘Iceberg Alley’

Sailing double-handed on a classic boat was demanding. Our first night out of Quebec City we had to short tack up a narrow shipping channel, all hands required on deck. With 9 knots of current and ships navigating the channel, we both remained awake until the following day. Progress was hampered on several occasions, by headwind gales and wicked tidal currents pushing and shoving us as they pleased. Time was ticking away and we were far behind our ambitious schedule that had been based around career obligations. ‘Iceberg Alley’ was up next, and it was not the place to be rushing.

We opted to sail without radar, agreeing it was just another distraction, another drain on the battery, and another excuse for our eyes not to be on the horizon. A controversial decision? Yes. We entered the iceberg zone on the south coast of Newfoundland where seven bergs had been reported. The sun had set, and I disliked that night more than any other. It was foggy and windy, the kind of fog that messes with your mind. We turned off our running lights to eliminate the back glow, in hopes of seeing just a few more feet ahead of the bow. We dropped all canvas apart from two reefs in the main to slow down. Lightning flashed twice a minute but there was nothing to see besides birds circling, fog, wind, and blackness.

We agreed to take shorter shifts and I went down below to try and rest. I tried to sleep, unsuccessfully, and I smelled ice. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t trust that it was possible to smell ice.

When we switched shifts we sat together for a few moments in the companionway, looking ahead into the fog. I squinted to focus, and gripped Luke’s arm. “Look, look!” Just 200 yards away a wall of white passed down the port side of the boat. Visibility was so poor we hadn’t spotted it until we were already passing it. A chunk of glacier the size of a hotel silently drifted back out of sight.

It was terrifying and magnificent. I’m just a girl from Michigan; this was hard for me to wrap my head around. We decided to stop on Newfoundland’s south coast the following morning and review our iceberg tactics.

The anticipation of crossing the ocean was the worst of it. It was mental preparation for ultimate disaster. An uninsured, borrowed, classic yawl in which I held huge emotional value, captained by two opposites: Luke, a dinghy racer and accomplished super sailor who thrives on speed and efficiency; and myself, the slowest coastal cruiser known to man who knew a thing or two about diesel engines and virtually nothing about sails, a green ocean sailor.

By the time we reached St Johns, Newfoundland, we had learned a lot about the boat, and even more about each other. We had done our studying. We’d read our books and had a thousand conversations with experienced sailors. We took every precaution. Information was everywhere, it was just up to us to decide on the validity of that information, to agree or disagree.

We had to make our own decisions based on our own abilities and our own boat, no one else’s. This is tricky.

The whole reason for sailing all the way to St Johns, Newfoundland, was so that we could sail the great circle route over the North Atlantic, the fastest possible crossing for that section of ocean. Although it is the shortest mileage, timing is tricky. Leave in June and there are icebergs everywhere; wait too long and the ice has gone but it’s hurricane season. You have two choices: mountains of water, or mountains of ice. We decided ice would be better as you can sail around ice… if you can see it. We kept a diligent lookout for the first 600 miles until we were well clear of the Labrador Current.

Violently ill for the first two nights, it took five days for my body to adjust to the swells and sleep patterns. Energy and motivation was restored after week one and Luke and I found our divine rhythm. We were in a water park along for the ride, fine-tuning the sails and the Hydrovane. Days would go by on the same tack with only the most minute of adjustments. Gales and torrential rain would pass by, stirring up the seas and making the simplest of tasks effectively impossible, only to be followed by hours spent floating upon a sea of mercury, rocking side to side in the leftover swells, completely becalmed.

It took 17 days to cross the ocean. Two days of headwinds, 15 days downwind, three days becalmed. We never saw waves over 15ft, or winds higher than 45 knots. We did see three icebergs and six cargo ships, over 102 watch changes. I kept waiting for it to get worse, to meet God in a 30ft wave, to be locked inside the cabin under bare poles. But it never got worse and I didn’t meet any gods. The only thing that locked us inside was rain. We considered ourselves extremely lucky.

Desireécame alive once out on the ocean, beam reaching in 35-40 knots of wind heavily reefed, the staysail set with the Hydrovane self-steering gear engaged, and she proved herself as a truly excellent ocean-going yacht.

However, in under 10 knots of wind the boat would start to wallow in the dying swell, and it took a full sail change using the big asymmetric and the mizzen staysail to get her moving again. We had a bombproof set of Hyde Sails and went through every possible sail combination several times. We tried goosewinged, Twizzlerigged (double genoa goosewinged), poled back asymmetric main, mizzen and mizzen staysail, sometimes when really windy just sailing on the staysail only. The inner forestay and staysail combination was essential for this boat and this trip. The Hydrovane was our best friend and our Mazu weather app prepared us for the gales.

Making landfall

On the 17th evening we flew by the legendary Bishop Rock and made landfall in the Isles of Scilly under moonlight. We dropped the hook in St Agnes under the stars. We drank our last two beers and watched the sunrise in the stillest of waters.

It was the greatest reward, and the greatest sense of accomplishment. After 88 days since leaving Michigan and 4,800 miles in total from ‘my house’ to ‘his house’, Luke and I had solidified our joint capabilities. We had short-cut years of married life getting to know each other’s ‘worst’ selves. In very close quarters, we were forced into endless physically and mentally uncomfortable scenarios. When we made it to the other side, I can honestly say I’d never felt so complete, so entirely connected to another person, so in tune with how I wanted to spend my life, my time, my money.

We believe that any decent coastal sailor is capable of crossing the Atlantic, it is truly simpler than many of the hazards that coastal sailing brings. I never expected to feel so relaxed in the middle of an ocean; I became most anxious when we closed in on land. The nervousness of actually going often forces you to over-prepare, and all those precautions stacked up make for an ultra-safe vessel. And once you understand your ability to cross an ocean, you can go anywhere.

We have agreed to sail Desireéback to my father in Michigan. Now it’s just a question of if we’re going to take the long way or the short way home.

The post A test of commitment: a young couple cross the North Atlantic from Michigan to Cornwall appeared first on Yachting World.

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doycetopia · 7 years ago

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Masks Actual Play (Sessions 0 to 5)

There’s so much in my head with the weekly Masks game, every time I try to figure out what to say about it, I’m overwhelmed a bit, so this miiiight be a little random. I’ll try to keep a rein on things.

This is NOT going to be a blow-by-blow summary. I’m aiming for a 10-thousand foot view of how things are going.

Session 0

The players (five) came up with a lovely mix of traditional heroes (a speedster Legacy, a green-lantern-ish Nova), and some stuff that really turned the playbook concepts on their heads (a power-armor-and-AI-designing Bull, a nanite-infused Doomed inspired by Johnny Quest, an Outsider who is a ghost from the civil war era, marveling at the modern world).

One of the big things you do as a group in chargen is come up with answers to the “when we first met” questions, and this series of answers (here) presented us with a showdown against “Hannibal Lectric,” an older blue-blood sort of villain that really informed a lot of initial play, especially after some things that came out at the start of Session 1.

Of note: we’re using Roll20 for a play space (and Discord for voice chat), and during our last game (Dungeon World), we’d started making more use of the embedded forums Roll20 provides for each game. This took off in a BIG way for Masks, even before Session 0, with a lot of player pre-planning, and shows no sign of slowing down. I only wish the forum posts could be grouped more, but it’s still great.

If you’re interested, the (basically audio with a slideshow) recording of Session 0 is here.

Session 1 Prep

I made up love letters for everyone in the intervening week and dropped them on the players at the start of session 1. I am quite proud of all of them. They are collected here: Jason Quill: Doomed, Concord: the Nova, Mercury: the Legacy, Link: the Bull, Ghost Girl: the Outsider.

One of the things that came out of the love letters in play was the fact that the whole fight with Hannibal Lectric was a diversion so that something more important could be acquired while everyone was distracted. (This is/was tied to our Doomed in some way.)

Following the love letters, we cut into a tense “first team fight” kind of thing… which turned out to be four of the five heroes getting interviewed on “The Morning Starr” by nigh-plasticine host Tasha Starr.

When sonic-based villain Iconoclast interrupted the broadcast, the Bull was heard to comment “Thank Christ.”

The fight immediately moved to the street outside the studio, and we stopped the session in mid-brawl, with both the Nova and Legacy rocking pretty hefty piles of Conditions.

One of the players later posted a bunch of mocked-up live-tweets of both the interview and fight, which did a great job setting the tone and feel of the city and the world. Those posts are collected here.

Session 2

The street brawl continued, immediately complicated by the arrival of Troll, a meme-spewing bruiser whose strength and power increases in direct proportion to the strength of nearby Wifi signals.

Like Tasha Starr’s excruciatingly awkward interview questions, I put some effort into prepping bits of Troll’s dialogue, which I shared with the Masks community over here.

After this session, I posted a Plotagon-created video of some super-fan’s thoughts on the interview/fight. Plotagon quickly became a fun tool for the players to create their own virtual diaries and the like, so I’m happy I introduced it.

We had some technical problems that shortened the session, which unfortunately meant we were rolling into Session 3 with the ‘introductory fight’ still happening. Eh. We play for two to two-and-a-half hours, online, so we don’t get as much covered as I might like every session, but we’re having fun.

Session 3

I’d prepped a few other villains, ready to jump in to the brawl and get their faces on the news, but the complications didn’t head that direction, so they’re still waiting for their chance.

The (speedster) Legacy raced a self-destructing Iconoclast out of the city, but a decision to “give the villains an opening” introduced the Doomed’s nemesis to the scene (looking for the Doomed, whose energy signal was all over the speedster for fiction-reasons), which in turn led to a roll that resulted in the Legacy’s powers “going horribly out of control.”

I didn’t have anything prepped for that, but a few minutes of pondering and checking some notes got me to a classic speedster complication: getting unstuck in reality/time by overloading one’s powers, leading to foreshadowing – so Mercury was flung into a sepia-toned alternate earth in which a few Big Clues were dropped.

Meanwhile, the Bull’s “Assess the Situation: How Do We End This Quickly?” question from last session was finally answered when one of the Tweeting NPCs from post-session-one let the team know Troll’s weakness with regards to Wifi signal, which lead to a nice team moment with the Bull and the Nova.

And back at the point of the original fight, the Doomed and the ghostly Outsider had a moment of Comforting and Support – the first in the game, but definitely not the last: once that move was on the table, it quickly became one of the group’s favorites.

Mercury rejoined the team (and their reality) back in the city center, and before the authorities (or more bad guys) could show up, were ushered out of sight by Jaguar, the protege of Hyena, a vigilante superhero who’d become interested in the team after their first fight. (Thank you, session 0 team questions!)

By this point in the game, the players were starting to really get into the between-session stuff. The Doomed’s player started doing video diaries with plotagon, and he and the Bull also did a few play-by-post conversations on the forum. Other players were also sharing their thoughts and creations: art, pictures, and even a collection of relevant NPCs. (Here and here.)

Session 4

Most of this session was dealing with fall-out and developments from the first big public team fight. The most ironic thing was that we didn’t do any combat in this session, and our heroes ended up with more Conditions than they’d gotten in the fight.

Highlights included the Legacy’s dad telling him what a great job he’d done (and leaving him Insecure), and the Nova getting so scared of screwing up that he forgets how to fly at the end of the session.

I believe this also marks the point where the Bull changed his “Love” to the Nova character, in a “little brother” sense. His love up to this point had been his own NPC creation, so I liked seeing that, no matter how cool the NPC is. 🙂 (His rival remains the Doomed, which is all good.)

Session 5

The events of this session encompass something like… 3 hours. Maybe four. And no combat. And still chock-a-block with STUFF HAPPENING.

I reintroduced an NPC (@powerpony) as both a contact point for the Bull and the Outsider (gotta love those PC-NPC-PC triangles), which led to some good scenes and exchanges.

The Doomed got to reveal WHY he didn’t like interfacing with the AI in his “sanctum” – its holographic interface is modeled on his dead genius father.

AEGIS makes an appearance.

More CLUES about the “Sepia-verse” come out, linking the Legacy’s walkabout to the Doomed’s backstory.

And we wrapped up with a cutscene following the @powerpony NPC as she’s grabbed by… someone. Probably the start of an Arc. Duh duh dunnnn.

And that’s where we are.

Thoughts

Man there’s a lot going on! I’ve got Hooks set up for all the players (mostly), a main arc as well as several others impatiently waiting in the wings, and I can’t wait to get to ALL of it.

I’ve said this before, but PBTA-type games really feel like running Amber Diceless in a lot of good ways. (Hard to quantify ways, but good ways.) It’s got that same sense of freedom of narration, but the dice resolution injects and asks for a wonderful amount of unexpected plot twisting that takes any prep and dials it up to the point where it simply can’t be contained in the box I’d built. Good, good stuff.

Other Thoughts

There are a lot of different kinds of PBTA games.

Some focus more on genre-emulation and the dice mechanics, less on pushing for a certain kind of story experience (Dungeon World, IMO; also the Star Wars Rebel Ops game I ran).

Some focus more on mechanics that push play hard towards certain kinds of play or story events or whatever. Urban Shadows. Monsterhearts. Stuff like that.

Masks is definitely one of those games, focused on that superhero teen drama from stuff like Young Justice, New Mutants, Teen Titans, Avengers Academy, and so forth. That’s all to the good.

The only downside-like thing I’ve run into so far has been doing the post-session analysis on our shorter sessions has led to a LOT of co-mutual Influence sharing in the group (damn near everyone has Influence on everyone right now, though maybe that’s as it should be), and a lot of Label-shifting that sometimes doesn’t feel as punchy as it could – it feels like the label-shifting could be reduced by about 20%. I’m not sure if that’s just fallout from the shorter sessions.

Other Other Thoughts

Man I don’t know what kind of alchemy is firing off, but the player engagement in this game is through the roof. We’ve been playing together for well over a year and something just hit the gas on this game, hard. I suspect it’s a mix of the mechanics and (to a great degree) the genre.

Final Thought

This one’s from Kaylee, who’s been lurking on the voice channel during games, listening in during her homework like it’s a radioplay. Her thought:

“I wish this really was a comic book, or a superhero show. It would be SO GOOD.”

And it would. It is.

Great stuff.

original post

#masks #masks rpg #pbta #roll20 #randomaverage

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