#because the moral of that episode is kinda dubious

[psychronia]

I've been rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender because why not and I'm losing my mind at Zuko's proper introduction. I don't know if it's hindsight, shifting characterizations, or just me not watching this in a long time, but this was amazing.

We start off showing he's an impatient and very angry kid. Reasonable, and the sort of flaw we might expect to see in a villain. Kinda funny that he expects to go up against an adult and fully 4-Element realized Avatar, but the kid is desperate and Iroh clearly expects his nephew to get the banishment-denial kicked out of him.

What's important here, though, is Zuko's introduction to the Southern Water Tribe.

Here, we have a very intimidating entrance where his entire ship just sails through the ice right up to the village's front door. It's quite ominous and this is our first proper introduction to how the Fire Nation interacts with a foreign people.

Sokka charges, I'm assuming fully prepared to die, and Zuko casually knocks him out of the way. Okay, so clearly the Water Tribe are entirely outgunned.

He asks "Where are you hiding him?" and the people of the Water Tribe go silent. I assume they're either just too scared to talk or actually protecting Aang.

Whatever the case, it's important to note that the Southern Water Tribe know the terror the Fire Nation can inflict. We have a whole episode dedicated to tracking down a division of raiders. Sokka was able to not only identify the ash-mixed snow as signs of an incoming attack, but estimate how many ships the amount of ash measures to. These are a people who have experience being terrorized and are probably expecting something terrible to happen.

And then, after they don't answer, Zuko grabs Gran-Gran. There was a horror sting to it, and everything the tribe knows about the Fire Nation suggests that Zuko is about to threaten or straight up hurt her to get answers. Classic "terrorize the elderly" bad guy stuff.

And then...

He goes "He's (the Avatar) be about this age and is a master of all four elements!?" and lets her go.

And all of a sudden, the tension that was built up is shattered as Zuko went "I know, I'll give them a reference for the person I'm looking for because clearly they're confused and I wasn't specific enough."

This went from a show of villainy to a show of Zuko being totally socially awkward and misreading the situation entirely. Not helping is that when he does try to menace them a moment later, his fire is slow and angled quite safely.

It still worked on the Water Tribe because they're understandably scared, but all I could think of is that this was the equivalent of a playground bully trying to make someone flinch with that fake-out lunge thing.

Because the fact-and something we'll come to learn-is that Zuko is TERRIBLE at being a Fire Nation oppressor. He's capable of doing morally dubious things and is a competent fighter. But he's lousy at terrorizing people and cruelty-that's kind of the point of his banishment.

And while we can see the story paint this picture of Zuko's true character as the story goes on with hints of good and conflicting loyalties, here we get to see just how bad he is at being "the bad guys". He's still unambiguously being the villain of this scene, and it makes no real difference to the oppressed themselves, but there is a comical gap between where Zuko thinks he is, where he actually is, and somehow it still puts him on the same page as his victims just because of how terrible the Fire Nation's influence is on everyone involved.

[myusuchaa]

ikemen villains: my recs and route/suitor rankings ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ

disclaimer: these are my opinions based on the current released routes in both ENG and JP. i tend to love dark psych thrillers, lots of angst and pining, great banter between characters/lively convos, and a captivating plot, so that's what influences my ranks~ will update with future releases

figured I’d post my thoughts here!! in case anyone is a bit newer to ikevil and is curious OR if anyone has similar interests as me I’d love to squeal about them with you!! ♡

₊˚ପ⊹ROUTE RANKINGS

rank is based on: written flow, plot, descriptive language and emotional pull, uniqueness

1. Elbert

2. Alfons

3. Roger

4. Ellis

5. William

6. Liam

7. Harrison

₊˚ପ⊹SUITOR RANKINGS

rank is based on: how much I fell for them, their likability, personality traits, inner monologues from his side stories, overall character story, their interactions with others

1. Elbert

2. Alfons

3. Ellis

4. Liam

5. Roger

6. Harrison

7. William

₊˚ପ⊹ROUTE RELEASE TIMELINE

Beginning trio (JP/ENG): William, Liam, Harrison

Aug. 1st (JP/ENG): Elbert

Nov. 14th (JP): Alfons

Mar. 19th (JP): Ellis

Jul. 23rd (JP): Roger

my thoughts & recs on each suitor's route (no spoilers)

William: such an interesting take on love. maybe because of his curse but his route is up there with feeling the most historical, period-piece fantasy like (along with elbie and roger imo). he's a very unique LI i honestly felt like his route would do well as a 3 episode anime OVA ヾ( ˃ᴗ˂ )◞ i recommend him if you like a more undefined approach to love, contractual partnership, mature and refined guys and not-so-innocent MC's

Liam: a precious bb ahh, and his VA is so amazing at emotional inflections! liam really shines in being attentive to kate and to the other crown members, i loved how he treated her in his route. i recommend if you don't mind self-deprecating guys, if you like drama and whirlwind romance, and if you enjoy a relationship built on assurance.

Harrison: the best soft opening to ikevil imo. quite a tame route with very real world problems as opposed to dark fantasy. if anyone stays true to his self, it's harry! he has some funny one liners too lol. i recommend him if you like intelligent sarcastic LIs, you like noir crime vibes, and if you don't want a heavy read.

Elbert: i mean he is my oshi for a reason! every time i read his route i fall more in deep love.. the localization team did an amazing job w the translation. i think his POV stories are the best. they add so much to his qualities and i feel really boosts his story. i recommend his route if you love yearning, emotional understanding, tragedy, dark psych thrillers, and slow (but dramatic) burn stories

Alfons: i used to hate him with a passion... until i loved him. his route truly is the definition of "fuck around and find out" keeping you on your toes. i loved the depth he has and how dubious they made him. i recommend his route if you like word/roleplay, morally grey characters, if you like having to guess at things without ever being told the answer, and a "we shouldn't be doing this but.." kinda feeling

Ellis: this man had me doing mental gymnastics to understand his true motives and i looooved that. visuals are also top tier. what i noticed is his route really focuses on his time with kate and has a bit more of a mundane (as mundane can be in ikevil) plot compared to other routes. this let his interactions with kate shine. i recommend ellis if you like hidden duality in a suitor, puppy boys that will do anything for you, a love that feels like a warm blanket, and you're ok with no real character growth (conditional love)

Roger: honestly i put off his route cus i wasn't interested at first but by the third chapter i was like WOW this is a breath of fresh air. the writers showed UP for part 2, i love the new plot points introduced, and his interactions with kate are sooo good. i loved his letters too! i ended up finding him extremely supporting and with a slight gap moe which kept me interested. i recommend this route if you like stories that are plot AND character driven, back and forth banter between MC and LI, and a shojou traditional charismatic love!

[bri-the-nautilus]

Come To the Dark Side, We Have Hot Guys: A Star Wars Story

Spoilers below for S1 of Ahsoka and the first six episodes of The Acolyte.

I'm writing this with The Acolyte most of the way through airing its first season, with episode 6 having released earlier today. Say what you will about the show, but it's really brought out a lot of the uglier sides of the Star Wars fandom. Everyone and their mother has seen videos or Reddit threads dunking on the Critical Drinker or SWT and their mouth-breathing misogynist audiences at this point, so I don't feel particularly compelled to retread that ground. Instead, I want to talk about the... other side of the fandom, the hypocrisy therein, and how we're all being played for absolute fools by the creative team at Disney Lucasfilm.

Yes, this post is about Qimir.

Now I want to say that I have no problem with villain simping/shipping. Far from it. Most of my posts on this account are me simping for Shin Hati (we'll talk more about her later) or various Soulsborne bosses. Hell, my mutuals and I have a running joke about me having a weakness for evil blonde women. While I personally am too gay for my own good and couldn't care less about men as a concept, I absolutely see the appeal of characters like Qimir and Kylo Ren. I absolutely get why people thirst over them and love making fandom content for them. I think Qimir/Osha has the potential to be a really fun ship, actually. The point I'm making here is not "simping for these characters is wrong and bad," and I want to make that crystal clear before we continue.

That said, let's talk about Qimir, and how the landscape of the show and its surrounding discourse has changed since his reveal. Again, I'm ignoring the chud sphere here, partly because their little corner of the Internet has remained remarkably stagnant since then. The podcast bros still think it's woke, fucking Shadiversity is still whining about fight choreography (which as someone who actually has done HEMA/stage combat, Shad annoys me to no end, but that's an entirely separate can of worms), and it all seems to be business as usual over there. No, the most marked changes have been on the Acolyte-positive end of the fandom space. Here's what the top posts in "hashtag TheAcolyte" on Twitter look like tonight:

You get the idea.

Again, no hate to any of these people. This is tumblr ffs, we've all engaged in a little simping for a morally dubious hot person. I love seeing fans having fun engaging with something, and again I kinda dig the Osha/Qimir ship.

Anyways, if you were around for the Acolyte-positive discourse before the Qimir reveal, and especially the show's marketing and the reponse to that, you'll have noticed a marked difference.

Fans quickly began to see The Acolyte as " the gayest Star Wars ever." Showrunner Leslye Headland is an out lesbian, and her wife was cast as Master Vernestra Rwoh. Archetypical girlboss Carrie-Anne Moss was cast as Master Indara, immediately drawing comparisons to her role in the Matrix movies. Leads Osha and Mae Aniseya are played by the nonbinary Amandla Stenberg. The lesbian witches of Brendok were talked about in press releases before the show aired. Dafne Keen (Jecki Lon) stated in an interview that she portrayed the short-haired, serious Theelin as having a crush on Osha, something that fans were picking up on in their first interactions in the premiere before Keen even gave that interview. While Headland said in a post-premiere interview that she didn't set out specifically to make "a capital Q Queer show," it's an objective fact that no Star Wars movie/show has had as much potential in that area, and fans (especially the queer community) took notice. (For what it's worth, in the same interview Headland commented that she was proud of creating something that so many queer fans identified with.)

The show came out, and Master Indara was killed off in the first sequence, which I'm honestly fine with. It was a good scene and works on a lot of levels. Headland's aforementioned interview came and went. Episode three aired. The lesbian witches turned out to be even gayer than was previously thought possible, and people ate that shit up while the Critical Drinker's brain suffered a major cascade failure. Jecki became a runaway favorite in the premiere and episode four, as did lovable himbo Yord Fandar and the wise, paternalistic Master Sol. In Acolyte-positive circles, this was basically how it went. People thought Brendok was cool, the Yord Horde became the show's biggest social media sensation, Jecki and Sol cultivated devoted followings alongside Osha and Mae, there were a wealth of different ships involving various combinations of Jecki, Yord, and the twins... you get the idea.

Then episode 5 happened.

The writing was really on the wall when the Brendok coven was abruptly wiped out. Introducting such an interesting (and queer) Force-wielding culture only to exterminate them in the same episode was certainly a choice that somebody made. But episode 5 was a shock to the system for many fans, as the show's resident Sith revealed himself and killed Jecki and Yord in some of the most brutal recent onscreen deaths in Star Wars. To be clear, I think this was a great sequence. Two beloved main characters being suddenly and gruesomely killed off was a masterfully executed shock to the system, especially after viewers were lulled into a false sense of security by all the redshirt deaths in the previous scene.

This, understandably, completely changed the landscape of the Acolyte fandom. Virtually overnight, much of the simping and shipping involving Jecki and Yord dried up, and once the dust had settled as far as the "rip blorbo, gone too soon" posts went, what remained were the usual Sol/twins offerings and a wave of Qimir hype. Which is understandable. He's a badass emo Sith boy with a cool helmet who brutally murdered fan favorite characters in front of us and has palpable tension with the female lead. Who wouldn't love... wait a minute.

This feels familiar somehow.

But if you close your eyes, does it almost feel like nothing's changed at all?

And just like that, "the gayest Star Wars" is all about the (straight) sexual tension between an edgy, murderous Sith boy and a light-side girl plagued by dark thoughts whose friends said boy just killed. This is all eerily similar to how the Sequel Trilogy focused on Rey and Kylo while abruptly dropping Finn and Poe's character arcs. Even the fandom discourse is the same. I mean Reylo was so ubiquitous back in the day that it became a derogatory catch-all for good girl/evil boy shipping. Multiple authors now have either gotten their initial start/fame writing Reylo fics, or straight up published legally distinct Reylo fiction after the fashion of Netflix's After. You had the occasional person piping up to say "hey they kind of just left Finn and Poe hanging after TFA, it would've been cool if they got together but at the very least don't relegate them to being side characters/comic relief in separate story threads," and that was it. The same thing is going on with The Acolyte now, only the sequel trilogy wasn't marketed on the strength of being a queer story by a queer creative team. The Acolyte is, which makes it all the more baffling that by the midway point of the first season, all the gays have been buried and the show seems to be heading straight for Reylo 2: High Republic Boogaloo. And the fans are eating it up.

As an interesting aside, I think it's an interesting exercise to contrast the Kylo/Qimir pattern with the broader fandom's treatment of Shin Hati (told you we'd circle back to that), and the ship between her and Sabine Wren. On paper, Shin is very similar to Kylo and Qimir. Villain? Check. Edgy-looking armor? Totes. Emotionally damaged/stunted in some way? Sure looks like it. Tension with the heroine? You betcha. If anything, the only major difference is that Shin isn't as evil as the others. Compare her actions in Ahsoka (clearing out part of a light cruiser with Baylan and making repeated attempts on Sabine's life) to Kylo (oversees multiple war crimes, kills his fan-favorite dad) or Qimir (orchestrates the murders of several Jedi before brutally executing two fan-favorite characters). She's definitely bad, but I struggle to see her as on par with Qimir, let alone fucking Kylo, in terms of evilness.

Which makes it all the more interesting to me that the Shin/Sabine ship has received so much more mainstream skepticism/criticism than the Osha/Qimir or Rey/Kylo ships. "They have no chemistry!" "She's an evil murderer!" "She's a blank slate!" "Sabine is taken!" I may be a touch biased, but from where I sit a large part of the fandom, even the ostensibly progressive side, seems to look down upon Shin/Sabine shippers while swooning for heterosexual variants with far more evil villains.

This isn't a monolith, and I can't stress that enough. I'm not trying to start shit here. Villain shipping is awesome. We support women's wrongs in this house. You do see the occasional person decrying Reylo or Osha/Qimir as toxic, which I think is fairly unnecessary. Like yeah, maybe it's a toxic dynamic, but these are fictional characters. For these specific characters, part of the crowd appeal is the toxic badboy side of things. I don't think we should really spend much energy attacking any fictional ship (between adults, mind you) as toxic, which is why it puzzles me that an as-yet-unconfirmed lesbian ship in a niche show receives such a large proportion of this sort of criticism compared to the canon relationship between two main characters of a blockbuster trilogy.

At the end of the day, this whole affair has been rather sobering for me on both Disney Lucasfilm and the Star Wars fandom. For all the support the Shin/Sabine ship has received from Ahsoka cast members Ivanna Sakhno (Shin), Natasha Liu Bordizzo (Sabine), Eman Esfandi (Ezra Bridger, the other character people like to ship with Sabine), and Rosario Dawson (Ahsoka), I'm rather sour on the prospects of it becoming canon. The sequel trilogy dropped the ball on what many saw as a promising chance for an MLM romance between Finn and Poe in favor of trotting out the "why do good girls like bad boys" dynamic, and The Acolyte, "the gay show" overseen by a lesbian, has seemingly shifted to center a similar dynamic after killing off most of its prospects for a queer relationship among the main cast. Simply put, I think that Disney as an international company based in the frighteningly divided United States is reluctant to commit to anything beyond lipservice in terms of LGBT representation in their movies/shows, which again doesn't leave me feeling optimistic about WolfWren's canon potential. And the fandom takes the bait. People love the damaged evil badboy/good girl dynamic, and when the queer fandom suggests the possibility of a queer ship taking center stage in a show with no other extant relationships, even the more progressive side of the fandom tends to either ignore it or actively push back on its basis in reality until Disney Lucasfilm inevitably puts the kibosh on it. The amount of times I've heard people dismiss WolfWren for the same reasons they now like Osha/Qimir and liked Reylo (before that ship was fleshed out/canonicalized, anyway) is ridiculous, but at the end of the day you kinda feel stupid for expecting anything else. Again, I think Qimir is a cool character and I'm as much of a sucker for villain romances as the next girlie, but seeing how easily the fandom lets dangling heterosexual carrots lead it away from Disney Lucasfilm's broken promises of queer rep is a sobering ordeal.

[batsplat]

speaking of smallville now that was certainly a show. how many seasons did you manage and when is it best to stop? I am currently at s2 and already I would kill every other character for lex, wyd it’s only gonna get worse 😭

lmaooo okay so I got to. six. which actually kinda kills me because I swear I poured my heart and my soul into that stupid show, it drove me insane it left me a lesser person and I BARELY GOT HALFWAY

my basic analysis of the default journey with that show that I'm going to pretend is universal is like. it hooks you with something compelling in s1 and you still have enough naive faith to give it benefit of doubt that the writers actually know what they're doing, because you just wanted to have a bit of fun but, hey, these characters are actually more interesting than you expected!! then in s2 you're starting to get doubts but you're already kinda too deep. then s3 breaks your sanity and makes you scream and at this point you just see how far this shit goes. then s4 is.... mid..... but is also in a way the last remotely palpable season? and then at some point in s5 you're just like. wow I don't even enjoy the hate watching any more. and s6 is. yeah. eventually there was one storyline that is so insanely uncomfortable that it's just. enough. enough!

[mild spoilers to follow]

if s2 drives you insane on lex grounds then!! boy!! s3!! the thing about s3 from lex's pov is that. okay it's extremely angsty and does increasingly radicalise you... I have to say I started this show in a very innocent jokey 'oh ho ho I heard they have some good superman/lex luthor queerbait in that noughties show!!' and was ready to be a lex fan like. as a bit. and y'know my readiness to adopt morally dubious characters is pretty high anyway. but the first few seasons made me go?? okay but he genuinely isn't even the villain?? like I'm not even saying this for the bit, he LITERALLY is not the bad guy in this story?? guys??? and then by the end of season 3 I had been completely radicalised to the 'Actually Lex Luthor Should Turn Evil And Kill All Of You People And I Will Cheer Him On' stance. but what really, really, really kills me is that after all that, they still manage to bungle his transition to evil. like, they ignore all the very obvious reasons for why lex would turn evil after all that, and just come up with completely new ones? that have fuck all to do with this character you've been writing up to that point?

and the worst bit. the WORST bit. is that after all that, he literally does not even have fun being evil. like, you know that season one episode where he's being mind controlled and does his gay little swagger. this scene, yeah:

first of all, again, they ended up erasing lex's canonical motivation for turning evil, which is being so queer-coded he might as well be wearing a sign with slurs around his neck while he's stuck in a small town in fucking kansas. like "you think I don't see the way your parents look at me? the way half the town looks at me?" okay, great, love how this entire arc is eventually concluded by having the show say the entire town including clark's small-minded parents were 100% right to be suspicious of him, that there was something fundamentally defect with him basically from birth and he was always going to turn out to be evil. I feel like you definitely thought through the implications of what you wrote here!

but never mind all that, my actual point is that lex is having fun here!! this is one of several episodes where they're 'foreshadowing' lex turning evil by 'having a paranormal reason to make lex evil for a few minutes' (some subtle writing, this), and he's generally having a lot of fun with it!! he's leaning into the camp of it all!! he's freed from all his nasty and completely unnecessary inhibitions like 'not killing everyone in smallville' which. good. and he's just having a great time. and then he becomes a villain and he's literally just miserable all the time!! it sucks!! like omg if you're going to butcher his writing and ruin the character then at LEAST let him have some fucking fun?? at least let him experience joy at his own depravity or whatever? like he doesn't even get to do any fun villain monologues at clark, he's literally just sad clark isn't his friend any more while clark is giving him the homophobic dog slur. and then also about twice a season something paranormal happens to clark and he physically assaults lex to the point where he like, almost kills him, and then after that everyone pretends it didn't happen and clark never apologises and continues to burst into his room demanding answers. like omg?? lex, they hate you anyway, can you please just attempt to shoot clark?? also, obviously the turn to villainy should have been in large part motivated by lex finding out clark's secret and going?? the fuck is wrong with you for not just SAYING this?? (plus finding out everything clark did to lex in season three to keep his secret like it's genuinely so fucked up #lmao) but. I hate to break bad news to you about where we're at with the whole 'does lex know clark's secret yet' situation at the point where I gave up. genuinely what is the point of all this building and perfectly interesting character work if you're NEVER gonna deliver

but quite possibly an even worse sin of the later seasons that genuinely broke my brain was the treatment of lex's father. like, not to give the game away too much here, but the show's philosophical stance on rotten apples ends up being.... well. it's interesting which characters this show feels is worthy of redemption!! also interesting when they retcon several seasons of writing for the show that already very much set up why a character would actually perfectly legitimately go insane and instead settle for 'well his father sure did know there was always something wrong with him'!! watching some season 3 and season 5 episodes back to back would leave your face scarred from the amount of whiplash in the writing. the whole thing's kinda incompetent and dumb but is also like?? actively a little bit evil when you really think about the implications of what they're writing here

anyway. it's a brave stance on superman to go 'okay but what is being a superhero really about if not a whole whole lot of gaslighting'. and I do love the clark stalking room!! but the problem is, they could've played the clark/lex dynamic in a kinda tragic 'wow clark really has been so blinded by his parents that he's gonna end up destroying his relationship to lex because he just can't be honest with him and lex really needed one person in his corner who actually trusted him but clark wasn't the right person to provide that' way. they could've played it in a sort of fun 'yeah this is kinda fucked up and weird and toxic how they simply cannot stop doing dubious shit to each other' way where you just kinda roll with how terrible the whole thing is. but they don't go for either of those!! they're so stuck with treating clark's parents as the moral centre of the universe, with their "marriage is SACRED, clark" schtick and all that (yeah, there's an episode where clark gets lectured about the importance of the bond of marriage, this is a thing that happens) that they're blatantly unaware of what story they're telling but ALSO just refuse to lean into the batshit insane elements and just have!! fun!! and it's one of those things where you really do feel like an idiot for even thinking about this stupid fucking show so!! much!! but I swear, I swear they had a dynamic that hit like crazy in season one... also some of the fic out there for them is CRAZY like it kinda does make it all worth it but still!! still!! this shit infuriates me!!

anyway, here are some bonkers plot bits I remember happening in this show for you to enjoy if you continue in this endeavour:

the lex luthor slut shaming episode

clark kent slut shaming lex luthor, which is conceptually funny anyway but becomes funnier if you just read it as clark being unable to figure out he is actually just subliminally attracted to his friend. like, okay, clark being disappointed at lex for sleeping with thirteen different women, I see you

like. multiple lesbian lana moments. she's constantly getting herself in lesbian situations. and I get this is some kinda weird fanservice-y shit from the showrunners but, sue me, I thought lesbian vampire lana was cute

which is a thing that happens

they get spike from btvs to tell clark vampires aren't real, which is the one funny thing they wrote in about a season

the native american stuff is always deeply uncomfortable but it becomes even weirder when they invent some native american prophecy *deep sigh* to explain how lex was always evil

clark steals a car from lex several episodes after committing like, one of the most obscene acts of betrayal it is possible to commit against a friend (lex is unaware of this and possibly never finds out? I think the writers maybe forgot about this.) and lex is just like. it's fine <3 I know friends sometimes have to do crazy shit for other friends!! you're my friend, right?? and clark goes... yeah. sure

I vaguely remember lex buying stuff the american football high school team at some point and showing up to the lockers to give a speech and it's just?? this is right after the friendship break up and it's basically lex talking right at clark and he's talking about the importance of fresh starts and it is so fucking funny

the one episode where lana is in paris. they had built up to this for ages as like a whole thing where lana finally frees herself from that miserable town and all the people in it (don't ask how the 'lana knowing clark's secret' situation develops. it doesn't) and then she's there for. one episode

martha kent tells clark how they can't harbour illegal immigrants at one stage?? she eventually changes her mind I think but what even was that all about

the papa kent goes into politics arc. shoot me

lex becomes like. possessed by zod. which somehow manages to make everyone involved more dull

silver kryptonite makes clark paranoid, which ends up being pretty funny because he genuinely talks the exact same way

lex thinks clark can throw him across the room because he's been hypnotised

lex starts capturing various clark super powered friends and delivers these gay villain monologues to them (like genuinely, in one of them he's got shirtless aquaman strapped to a gurney and he's like, leaning over him, teasing him with a glass of water) and they're some of the best bits of the show

clark discovers the clark stalking room, which I will say was very funny

chloe basically saying lex always sends clark these massive gifts as a way of keeping his affections which?? clearly true but I thought we were keeping that the subtext

clark gatecrashes lex's wedding high on red kryptonite

one of lex's old bullies gets killed by like, a statue falling from the top of the building they're standing next to and stabbing the guy and then some of the blood splashes on lex and he's just like ?? bleh. fantastic scene

and THEN there's several scenes with his father where lex is like 'well that sure was a nice shirt :(' and lex's father is berating him for his lack of humanity. or something

there's an episode where lex is split into good lex and evil lex and it's genuinely the only worthwhile thing the show did that season. like the writing is still kinda incoherent but, crucially. it sure is fun

the spirit of lex's mum tells him she thinks he sucks

worst show in existence. I'll never forget it

[fernsnailz]

thoughts on shadow's characterisation in prime?

i think it's great! like obviously the bar is on the floor in terms of what i consider to be "good" shadow characterization (since so much recent shadow writing has been.... Not That), but i think prime does a really good job of conveying three of shadow's most important traits:

tunnel vision for the big picture (idk how else to describe this trait). shadow is all about finding solutions to problems HIS way, which means that his solutions are very efficient and often morally dubious. this is something we see a lot with shadow’s choices - his plan to kill cosmo to stop the metarex, him going after mr. tinker to finally get rid of eggman, his desire to elminate emerl in battle, even his willingness to fall to earth at the end of SA2. he finds the root of the problem and goes for it, because usually that’s the most efficient solution. so when shadow starts taking all of sonic's tech simply because of his lack in trust i was like… yeah, i get it! kick that guy's ass!! because ultimately, shadow isn't wrong - the breaking of the universe can be linked back to sonic, and although it's kinda fucked to just rob him and leave him in the void, shadow is willing to do morally dubious things if it's for the greater good. plus he knows sonic will be fine, that dude has been to space like ten times at this point and shadow even goes “lol see you back home idiot”

a desire to be understood. this is something i think a lot of modern shadow writing misses out on when it leans really heavily into the “loner shadow” style of characterization. when it comes to these large moral decisions shadow has to make, he often takes the time to explain his stance on the situation. sometimes it’s to solve the problem faster, but often it’s because he wants to be understood. he isn’t necessarily looking for people to agree with him - i think it’s really telling (and kinda hilarious) that he only attacks sonic after explaining his stance when sonic replies “ok i can see why you would say that,” because at that point shadow has said his piece and has gotten 1. confirmation that sonic understands his view, and 2. confirmation that sonic’s opinion hasn’t been changed. and that's all he needs! literally like half of the episode is dedicated to shadow just explaining his side of things, which serves as a device to exposit to the audience AND show that shadow wants his side of the story to be heard and understood. however i do think it's telling and also hilarious that he has to beat the shit out of sonic for a little while before actually telling him anything lol

he's kind of a bitch

prime shadow has so much personality and it's really refreshing to see again! i like that he's allowed to be an asshole in a really funny way, it's charismatic rather than frustrating this time around. i think the voice acting and animation/choreography is JUST as important to prime shadow as the writing is, ian hanlin absolutely kills every line and is my favorite voice for shadow in... maybe ever? and you can tell the animators had fun with this hog, there's some nice little character acting moments whenever he's frustrated that i think are really charming.

also this one shot of him flopping around fucking kills me every time it's so fucking funny

so uhhhm yeah. i like it

[frances-and-the-moon]

Why "Beyond Evil" is an enemies-to-partners-to-lovers story❤️, a (very) brief timeline (for those who haven't watched the show):

In the first episode, Han Joo-Won (our main lead + sweetest flower in the entire Korean police force + son prince of Deputy Commissioner to-be) goes to the little merry town of Manyang, hellbent on arresting Lee Dong-Sik (our other Main Lead), local dilf and renowned lunatic, whom he believes to be the serial killer from a string of murders that started 20 years prior;

Our Joo-Won (who also coincidentally happens to be a collector of stylish coats and has hair softer🌷than any woman in the show) is obsessed with said dilf already before the start of the series but we don't get to see that (but the obsession was definitely there much earlier than when he moved to Manyang);

Once he is in the merry town of Manyang (where everyone seems kinda sus and in need of therapy tbh) he breaks inside Dong-Sik's house multiple times, uninvited and casually making himself at home. DS is often annoyed at him but never throws him out, which says a lot about DS's already compromised + whipped state of mind™️;

In the course of the first episodes, Han Joo-Won (our boytoy) keeps accusing Dong-Sik (our crazy dilf) of having murdered his own sister (ffs Joo-Won) and other various women (without any evidence whatsoever). As he repeatedly accuses DS without rhyme nor reason he ofc thinks he's being such a clever officer - because telling the person you believe to be a serial killer he's a psycho the first time you meet him and repeatedly grabbing him by the colllar and shaking him is how investigating murders works in his seasoned police officer mind;

As JW fulfills his need for approval (stemming from Daddy Issues™️) and sense of justice, Dong-Sik taunts, manipulates and messes w/ his head and has him wrapped around his little finger, making Joo-Won think he's the killer;

Joo-Won ofc falls for that bc he has tunnel vision and can't connect shit.

BONUS:

Romantic drama tropes (x 2): (1) Han Joo-Won staring at DS under the rain (1st appearance of the Rain Trope™️) as the man whom he believes to be the serial killer smiles sweetly and shields a boy who has lost his way with his umbrella - cue longing, lustful stare from JW and the moment he falls in love w/ his partner (which he doesn't realize yet bc he's clueless); (2) Han Joo-Won disobeying DS's orders not to get involved and protecting him from a local band of thugs, potentially sabotaging his career and his relationship w/ his father - start of Protective Boyfriend Arc™️.

SECOND PART OF THE SERIES:

At some point Han Joo-Won (our clueless flower inspector who's oblivious to his feelings for DS) slowly slowly starts connecting the dots (finally) and realizes that the dilf he's been repeatedly accusing of murder is - in fact - not a serial killer (in spite of his dubious morals, his tendency to tamper w/ evidence and move amputated fingers & cellphones around town), and learns to slowly slowly trust him;

JW & DS finally pair up and arrest the killer together - beginning of Partner Arc™️.

Han Joo-Won goes berserk when Jin-Mook (local full-time supermarket guy, part-time serial killer) tries to strangle Dong-Sik in the interrogation room bc he's the only one who is allowed to manhandle his sugar daddy and wrinkle his coats;

He then decides to take a vacation (as he often does bc he's a delicate flower 🌸 who needs lots of time off) and comes back with stylish clothes and a newfound bratty attitude, flirts with Dong-Sik more than once and uses Dong-Sik's methods to manipulate him back because he has learnt from the best teacher and he is such a good student;

THIRD PART OF THE SERIES:

Joo-Won (who has now officially been adopted by the local, dysfunctional Manyang family) discovers that his bad abooji is the one who killed his boyfriend's sister 20 yrs prior; he then proceeds to drop on his knees in front of said boyfriend, whispering: "I will go to hell for you" (cue 2nd instance of Proverbial Rain Trope™️ + tears + sad puppy eyes);

He and his soon-to-be husband make a plan to ruin Han Gi-Hwan's (JW's bad abooji) career and they end up exchanging wedding vows on national television at his father's hearing to spite him (and also to take the spotlight bc they are such a power couple);

JW willingly goes into the trap his dad later sets for Dong-Sik in order to protect him and to take the blame in his stead (cue boyfriend's angry reaction "How dare you put yourself in danger for me" etc.) - continuation of Protective Boyfriend Arc™️;

In the final episode - after Joo-Won has arrested his father and Dong-Sik asks him to arrest him too (which is the main reason why JW went to Manyang in the first place, as he's been continuously reminding Dong-Sik since the start of the series) - he starts stuttering and saying "H-how could I??", all while crying like a little baby.

He finally arrests his boyfriend on charges of obstruction of justice, cries with his handcuffed hands in his hands, and they meet a year later and smile at each other and DS says goodbye with the words: "eat well, sleep well, poop well" (which is, as it is widely known, the Korean version of "I love you").

[felixcloud6288]

PMMM episode 9-12 recap

Mami's story is about how being a Magical Girl is tragic. Sayaka's story is about what happens when a Magical Girl cannot handle the despair of their life. Homura's story is about clinging to hope even in a hopeless situation.

Prior to this point, the Magical Girl system was presented as flawed and broken. Girls are chosen to protect the world from witches and in exchange, they are granted a wish to fulfill some great desire of theirs.

However, being a Magical Girl is an ultimately thankless job fraught with peril both from witches and other Magical Girls of dubious morals.

But with the reveal that Magical girls are just juvenile witches, we learn that the system is neither flawed nor broken. It is working exactly as intended. And now the mask comes off.

If I had prior knowledge of the series, it would be more appropriate to include episode 9 in the previous recap because episodes 5-9 are a whole arc to themselves. But I guess that's what happens when you do blind discussions.

Sayaka and Kyouko's arc is focused on the duality of hope and despair. Both made a wish to bring hope to someone only for that wish to bring them despair. And they had opposite reactions to it. Kyouko decided to shut herself away and live only for herself while Sayaka doubled down and continued to let herself be hurt in some vain attempt to say her life has meaning.

If I were to make an allegory to any real world aspects, Sayaka and Kyouko's story is about suicidal depression and episode 9 is when it reaches that point where the victim has decided to go through with it.

Kyouko's entire strategy to save Sayaka essentially boiled down to bringing the people who care about her together to help Sayaka recover from her heartbreak and sorrow. But when that fails because everything has become too much for Sayaka to handle, Kyouko chooses to stay by Sayaka to the end so that she won't die alone and think she wasn't loved.

With each episode, Kyubey becomes more and more open about how the entire system is intended to exploit girls rather than help them. And he ultimately intends to abandon humanity to be destroyed by the witches created by this system when he has everything he needs.

It's kind of like a corporation coming in saying it will boost the local economy so you should let it do as it pleases. And over time, it drives out the local population because people start moving in to work there, land is torn down to make more room for the corporation, and the soil, air, and water become polluted because the corporation controls the system and can do what it wants.

But all the money goes to the executives and when there's no more value to be had, the corporation abandons the area leaving behind destroyed land and a destroyed community that will now die because of what the corporation did.

Kyubey's remarks that his species calls emotions a mental illness just adds even further to the exploitative nature of the system. The system is meant to target beings who by his definition would be more vulnerable.

And his method of only giving half-truths or withholding information unless explicitly asked is an aspect of this exploitation. He's deliberately presenting things in a way that preys upon human vulnerabilities. He even admits that his species studied humans and found that young girls going through puberty were the ideal targets and then catered the system specifically to target them.

Kinda like how games with gacha elements are designed to exploit people with gambling addictions.

And since the power that is made from a magical girl becoming a witch is tied to her role on fate, Kyubey is really only interested in targeting people born into high positions or with great skill. Basically, Kyubey is propping up those who exist because of survivorship bias.

I'd wondered why he didn't just go to some war-torn nation and offer a contract to every girl about to die, and I guess it's because they would offer so little power that Kyubey deemed them worthless.

Meanwhile, girls from prosperous nations have far more potential to have an impact on the world, so Kyubey hangs around nations like Japan where he can look for big potential targets while also getting some decent secondary targets.

Anyway, I'm going to move onto Homura. I got really into talking about episode 10 and how it recontextualizes the entire series so I'm going to focus more on episodes 11 and 12.

Everything Homura is doing is to save Madoka. At first, she wanted to restart when she met her so they could fight side-by-side. But then she discovered the truth of the system and fought to save Madoka from her fated death or transformation after the walpurgis night.

And since hope and despair exist together, the more Homura fought to save Madoka, the more aggressively Kyubey tried to make Madoka a magical girl. With each new timeline formed, Madoka's potential grew because every timeline tied back to her.

Homura's story is about her fighting against the despair that comes with being a magical girl. She tries to cling to hope in a situation that is hopeless. Each time she fails to save Madoka, she tries again, only for the next attempt to become even more difficult than the last one. She always managed to push back the inevitable, but in the end, she always lost.

And at the end of this story, Homura still never achieved her goal. She never managed to stop Madoka from becoming a magical girl, and it ultimately resulted in Madoka vanishing from existence. This should be the moment of ultimate despair for Homura where all her efforts come to nothing.

Madoka struggles with feeling inadequate. She initially wanted a rather tautological wish. She was going to become a magical girl by wishing to be a magical girl. She thought being a magical girl would give her the chance to help others, make the world better, and ensure her life mattered in some way. And her wish ultimately is an extension of that. She wished to be helpful to all magical girls who ever did and would exist by becoming the hope that drives them and chases away despair.

In the new world Madoka created, Mami, Kyouko, and Sayaka still became magical girls; and Sayaka still despaired over how her wish turned out. But instead of becoming a witch - a being that represents despair - Madoka took Sayaka from the world and showed her what happened to Kyousuke because of her wish.

Madoka showed Sayaka that her life mattered in some way.

Homura's wish and desires ultimately can never come true. But instead of giving into despair as she would in the old system, she's been given a new hope and purpose. Madoka became the very embodiment of hope thanks to Homura's efforts. And as the only person who will ever remember Madoka, Homura is now able to start the next phase of her life where Madoka's words echo in her ears and she shows that Madoka's life matters.

Homura should try spreading Madoka's name around as the patron saint of magical girls. Madoka is literally the goddess of hope who protects magical girls in this new universe.

back

[aestariiwilderness]

Bad Batch Season 3 Ep. 8 SPOILERS

Omega can get Crosshair to do absolutely anything and Hunter is taking full advantage of this

Why was this episode about Hunter and Wrecker bug hunting and Crosshair meditating (what the heck that's hilarious) and learning about psychosomatic issues (CALLED IT! Internally, so it doesn't count. But I know.)

"I'VE EXHAUSTED ALL MEDICAL OPTIONS" in a galaxy of super bacta where people can literally walk off broken femurs and lava dunks but childbirth and unspecified nerve damage (??) are just *shrug* Too Much

They forgot to tell Crosshair about Tech's girlfriend?

Actually a good part of this episode was Crosshair deadpanning "Who" -- or, as a friend says, being an adverb-identifying question the entire time with increasing horror ("Who?" "Where?" "WHEN?" "HOW OFTEN???") -- because SOMEONE was being a brat and hanging out with the Empire

"You don't like anything" "True" Amen

Why is everyone so afraid of a tiny Asian woman? If you didn't know she had plot armor we could have strung her up by her toes and shaken her until M-count knowledge fell out of her pockets and not bothered with the bug-zapping and alligator-wrestling in Space Florida. Elite commandos my foot, they're all so homeschooled. JUST BE MORALLY DUBIOUS FOR HALF A SECOND FOR ONCE. IT'S FOR THE KIDS, HUNTER.

Why was Fennec hiding her clones in her closet

Why did Hunter and Wrecker, elite commandos, allow themselves to be stuffed in Fennec's closet

Man, one televised massacre and suddenly no one knows anything about anything to do with Jedi. Didn't half these guys work with Jedi and the other half deal with galactic-wide government-sponsored infant testing for midichlorians for centuries, how does "no one" know what M-count means all of the sudden

Hunter finally -- and kinda late, buddy -- wising up to the fact that we should NOT take the child hunted by the Empire everywhere we go

Echo and Rex: still Sirs Not Appearing In This Season, which is hilarious because it's not like his voice actor is unavailable

Fennec: "THAT'S going to cost you" Crosshair and Omega, coming in clutch with gambling skills: pfft. how much do you want @clawedandcute

[halloweiner69420]

doc is so princess bubblegum coded its crazy!!!! there will be spoilers for both Adventure Time and Stray under the cut.

both are scientists (obviously, don’t think i need to have proof for this one)

both have done some morally dubious things sometimes for a relatively greater good PB: many things 😭😭 First episode she tries to revive her dead citizens but ends up making them suffer more before finally fixing the problem, in the Lich(I think) when Finn comes for her gem and we see her removing little creatures limbs and adding them to one another… kinda fucked up. Doc: In his lab you can see Zurks in containers, seemingly dead and preserved or simply deep asleep. And in his little stranded area he has 3 Zurks in a cage with a stained/used knife(No other knife in the area has stains on it and trust me there are QUITE A FEW.) resting on top leaving some disturbing implications. He also seems to have played darts with knives and screw drivers, put screwdrivers and knives on the ends of sticks and used them as a sort of pin for paper on the walls. (It’s all around in his little stranded area.)

both became sort of obsessive over their work, resulting in them pushing others away PB: In Varmints, she talks about how she surrounded herself with work and pushed others away because of it. She said it herself. Doc: Heptor says “But he went missing a while ago. His obsession with the Zurks ultimately was his downfall.” about him, straight up telling us that his obsession with the Zurks caused him to go out without really considering how it’d effect the other Outsiders or his own son. (Seamus wasn’t even entirely sure he had actually left the Slums, saying “This must be it. He really left the Slums.” He probably didn’t even tell anyone exactly where he was going based on the fact it’s implied he’s been missing for years.

Both confined themself in a space to focus on their work: PB: in The Suitor it is shown that PB has been in her lab for quite a while and also doesn’t really focus on other people in order to make time for her work, first episode her first idea is to cloister herself in her lab to work on a solution rather than have help, and also again in Varmints when she talks about how she thought it would all be okay if she just focused on her work, shutting herself away in her lab frequently. Doc: Spent most of his time in his lab, he even had newspapers and everything in there. Some of Seamus’ unused dialogue is “I don't understand, I almost never saw him leaving his lab...” and “Dad? That's weird... He never leaves his lab usually.”

[abeautifulblog]

Actually, let's talk about the Baba Yaga storyline

...And how much I fucking loathed it.

(A discussion of tropes, narrative choices, and how goddamn dirty The Witcher Netflix did Yennefer in S2.)

So this subplot is actually a pretty tidy object lesson in literary tropes, and why writers need to understand how tropes work in order to utilize them effectively. The trope at play here is the "Faustian bargain" or "deal with the devil," in which a character barters with a powerful supernatural creature of dubious moral alignment in order to gain something they desire (often something self-serving like wealth or power), at a price that's almost never worth it.

...It is pretty much a given that you will not be getting the better end of the deal, as it’s written. But there are a number of different ways to play this trope, and they each say something different about the kind of character who would take that bargain:

1) If you don't realize this is a trap -- if that sounded like a Pretty Sweet Deal! 😀 -- then you're either very naive or very dumb.

2) If you know it's a trap, but expect to get your prize and then weasel out of it with your soul intact anyway, because you think you're cleverer than this eldritch creature you're dealing with -- then you are very cocky, and probably wrong, because modern narratives don't tend to reward hubris.

3) If you know it's a trap, but you think you can get what you want without consequences to you, because you can pay the price with someone else's life or soul -- then you are evil. (And probably also wrong, because it's rare in fiction that you can commit an evil like that without doing some sort of spiritual damage to your own soul.)

4) And lastly, if you know it's a trap, but you are in such desperate, dire straits that even this self-evidently bad bargain looks like your best option -- then it might still be a mistake, but it's the one that audiences are most likely to forgive you for, or at least find understandable.

I don't make the rules. Those are just the audience reactions you can expect from playing the trope in those particular ways -- and if you want a different audience reaction (say, you want forgiveness for character who tried to sacrifice someone else), then you have to put in some extra work to make that happen, mitigating circumstances, etc (say, that the character genuinely believes it's the only way to save a greater number of lives).

--

So how did TWN play Yennefer's Faustian bargain with Baba Yaga?

E2 - Yen and Francesca and Fringilla meet Baba Yaga in her spirit realm or whatever, and she dangles their Heart's Desire, For A Price in front of them. Yennefer doesn’t ask for her magic, because at that point she doesn’t realize she’s lost it.

E3 through E5 - Yennefer tries without success to get her magic to work again. I don't recall any mention of Baba Yaga during that time -- it doesn't even occur to Yennefer as a means of getting it back.

E5 - Yennefer and Jaskier are being pursued by hooligans or something, and even though Yen has ducked into a brothel to hide and is nominally safe, that's when she decides to contact Baba Yaga for help. She gets whisked off to the spirit realm again, and agrees to give Baba Yaga a particular kid in exchange for getting her powers back. 

She agrees to this deal knowing that she'll be sacrificing someone's child to this creature.

(And, critically, a point I’ll come back to later: she hasn't signed anything yet. She doesn't get her powers back here. That's the reward being promised for after she feeds a kid to a demon.)

E6 - Yennefer actually meets Ciri, but, notably, does not immediately swear off the plan. She's just kinda ~conflicted~ about it now.

(This was also the episode where they started trying to have Yennefer and Ciri do their mother-daughter bonding, and Yennefer says all the right things, to be sure, but since we-the-audience know that she is at least still contemplating feeding Ciri to Baba Yaga, that, uhh, RINGS KINDA FUCKING FALSE.)

E7 - Ciri reads Yennefer's mind and finds out about the plan to feed her to a demon. (Or so wikipedia tells me, since I have literally no memory of how Yennefer's Baba Yaga related plans got outed.) 

E8 - Baba Yaga gets loose, possesses Ciri. Lots of high-drama CG bullshit. Yennefer sacrifices herself to become the host to get Baba Yaga out of Ciri. More CG bullshit, Baba Yaga is vanquished and leaves, and when everyone comes out of their woowoo CG trance, Yennefer has her magic back. But after that BETRAYAL, Geralt can no longer trust her.

--

So, Yennefer losing her powers is actually a subplot I'm entirely onboard for. Whenever a character loses something that is a pillar of their identity, and now has to reckon with who they are without that -- THAT'S THE GOOD SHIT. That's grief. That's loss. That is scattering the pieces of their self and seeing what happens when they have to put themselves back together again. Muah. Delicious fucking food. Peak drama.

We know that Yennefer has been raised to define herself, and stake her entire self-worth, on her magic. It's what she gave up everything for, because they told her it would be worth it, and now she has nothing -- not the magic, not the things she sacrificed for it. Of course she's searching for a way to get it back -- her first reaction is going to be denial and bargaining, not acceptance.

And I can think of two different ways you could play that arc, both of which have the potential for good, meaty character development:

The first (and the one I would have preferred) would have been an arc in which Yennefer discovers who she is without her magic -- that she comes to realize there's more to her than her power, that she's not helpless, that her worth isn't tied to having magic. We get a glimpse of that in the scene where she rescues Jaskier from Rience (my favorite scene in the whole damn season 😁😁😁) using her wits instead of her magic, and that was genuinely REALLY COOL -- it's intensely gratifying to see a character being clever instead of just magically overclocked. 

They could have carried that through into her meeting Ciri as well, and realizing that she has more to offer Ciri as a mother and a friend than as a mage, that her love and support is worth more than her utility to Ciri. Yennefer reaches an enlightened understanding where she might well still want her magic back, but she doesn't need it to define herself anymore.

(This shares a lot of beats with disability narratives, and I think the sensitive way to handle it would be to treat it as such.)

The other kind of story would be one in which the character has no interest in reaching that enlightened understanding -- Yennefer’s not coming to the "acceptance" stage of loss, because she refuses to accept it. She's searching relentlessly for a cure, chasing down every lead for someone who could fix this, every avenue that might get her what she wants. Then the question becomes, "How far would you go for this? How much are you willing to sacrifice?"

And the answer is everything....... until it's not. And that is the pivotal character-making moment in this kind of story -- when you find out where this character's line is, the line they won't cross even for the sake of the thing they want most in all the world. Where the devil could dangle that oh-so-tempting bargain before them, and they would still say No. No, the cost you're asking isn't worth it, even for this. Yennefer -- who has spent her whole life being coached to be selfish, and has wound up alone and alienated for it -- finally has people she loves enough that she would choose them over herself.

--

TWN kinda went the latter route, but they didn't fully commit to it -- both the plot beats and Yennefer's emotional arc are so muddled that it's not clear what they were trying to say, and both the dramatic impact and the message got completely lost.

Problem 1: Yennefer wasn’t proactive enough.

She's sad about losing her magic, but she's not shown DOING anything about it. This is what I kept yelling at the screen about in E3, when she's just drifting aimlessly around Aretuza in that fucking prom dress and being ~helplessly damseled~ by Stregobor. Send her to the goddamn library to do some research! Show her arguing theory with Tissaia, and refusing to believe that this can't be fixed! Show us HOW BADLY she wants it, and how hard she's willing to fight for it.

Hell, seed the future conflict with Baba Yaga: Yennefer finds an account of someone who acquired their power through a deal with a demon, and she takes is to Tissaia as proof-of-concept, and Tissaia is like, yeah you CAN, but you SHOULDN'T. (Hoe don't do it!) That both establishes it to the audience as a possibility, and preemptively raises the question of what extremes Yennefer will go to in pursuit of this goal.

Problem 2: The stakes were never high enough

As I mentioned above, it's easier to get audience sympathy for a character who’s only making a devil's bargain because they're in extremis -- when something predatory has them over a barrel and is taking opportunistic advantage of the fact that they've got no other options. That hits a nerve with our sense of injustice -- we get angry when we see someone being taken advantage of like. It'll make us root for the character to find a way out of the deal somehow, because even though they agreed to it, we don’t feel that they should be held to that extortionate price.

But Yennefer is never quite desperate enough; the stakes are never quite high enough. She wants her magic back, but at no point does she need it. They never make her desperate enough to justify that bad bargain.

So raise those stakes.

Make it so that Yennefer is in desperate straits when she makes the bargain. She is in a situation that would have been trivial to escape if she'd had her magic, but now she is about to fucking DIE, and there's nothing she can do about it, and yeah, this sketchy creature that's been in her head trying to talk her into this bargain is obviously sketchy A-F, but she either takes its offer, or she dies in the next ten seconds. Them's her only two options.

Because without that level of desperation, her decision instead becomes premeditated, selfish, and stupid.

Problem 3: She needed to NOT knowingly make the evil choice.

Audiences will forgive a Faustian bargain made to save a child, but there's no way to sacrifice a child (or even seriously contemplate it) and come out of that looking good. 😬

The easiest way to fix that would have been for Yennefer to not know what the terms would be when she agreed to the bargain. 

To be sure: handing a blank check to that kind of creature is a bad idea, but we've already established that Yennefer needs to be fuckin hard up when she takes that deal; she doesn't have time to negotiate or think it over, she barely has enough time to say yes.

TWN made a big mistake, imo, by not having Baba Yaga give Yennefer her powers back upfront in E5. They made an agreement, yeah, but it did not put Yennefer on the hook, in her debt. Yennefer could still have noped out at any time once she found out what the terms were, since Baba Yaga hadn't given her anything yet.

It would have been far better if Baba Yaga saved her first, restored her magic, and then presented her with the bill -- it becomes a hell of a lot harder for Yennefer to back out at that point.

(And also: get the goods upfront, because why the fuck would you trust that this sketchy creature has any intention of keeping their promise? Whoops, egg on your face, when it turns out you murdered a kid for nothing!)

Furthermore, raise the stakes on what happens if Yennefer doesn't hold up her end of the bargain: that if Yennefer doesn't deliver Ciri to Baba Yaga, then she gets eaten by the demon instead. It’s still evil to murder a child, obviously, but "their life vs my life" is a bit more of a dilemma than "their life vs my magic."

And after she meets Ciri, after Ciri becomes a real person to her rather than an abstraction, then she cannot continue to entertain the possibility of sacrificing her for another episode and a half. Full stop. Yennefer should have immediately started scrambling for "There has to be another way!" The fact that TWN-Yennefer is even still considering it after meeting Ciri says really, really shitty things about her.

(And when she does get caught out, she starts sobbing, I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT YOU WERE TO HIM!!, which is, lol holy shit, not the defense you think it is! "I totally would have sacrificed you without a qualm if you didn't happen to be my fuckboy ex's kid" ??? What? Not "because you matter to me"? Or "because I realized that what I was contemplating was FUCKING EVIL”?? And she tells Ciri that to her face? 

Writers, did you stop to think about the implications of that line for one half of one hot second??)

Problem 4: Revealing Yennefer's betrayal ahead of time

By having Ciri and Geralt find out about her incipient betrayal before it happens, Yennefer never got to decide for herself that she wasn't going to go through with it. There needed to be no guilt trips or external peer pressure -- just that she herself thought this over, and decided on her own that Ciri was worth more than getting her magic back.

The fact that it wasn't her choice to come clean about that -- that the choice gets taken out of her hands before it reached the moment when she'd have decide one way or the other -- not only robbed us of what would have been a massively powerful, character-defining moment for her, but also means that we have no proof whether or not she would have done it, if left to her own devices. 

Because let's be honest: Yennefer doesn't exactly have a track record of prioritizing other people above herself. Maybe she would have found her conscience in time -- or maybe she wouldn't. (She had, after all, already made this bargain knowing full well that it was going to involve sacrificing someone's kid.) It is by no means a given that she would have changed her mind.

So what a powerful moment it would have been when Yennefer throws off those teachings that tied her worth to her utility -- when she proves that she’s come to care about other people, and puts their well-being above her own. Imagine the bomb drama if Yennefer had been the one to reveal the bargain to Ciri and Geralt, ideally at the moment when she also reveals that she's rejecting it and taking their side against Baba Yaga, even at the cost of her own life. The moment when her core of steel comes through, and she takes a stand and is willing to face the consequences of her mistake.

That would have been a fantastic climax for Yennefer's character arc in S2: when she decisively shows how much she's changed from the aloof and self-absorbed (and desperately unhappy) woman that she was in S1.

But that's not what TWN gave us. There's no big dramatic moment. I literally do not even remember her sacrifice in the final battle, even though I watched S2 twice, because it got lost amid the boring-and-confusing CGI fight scene that drags on forever. Everything is supposed to be big drama there, and so Yennefer’s sacrifice doesn’t stand out.

Moreover, it doesn’t even really feel like Yennefer's choice at that point -- more that she's belatedly trying to clean up her mess, after she's already missed her chance to trade Ciri for her magic. That makes it feel a hell of a lot less sincere, like too little too late. Of-fucking-course she's sorry for it, now, now that it didn't work and everyone's mad at her. Yeah I'm sure she does regret it, now. It's just that sorry rings pretty hollow at this point.

S2 didn't give her a chance make the right choice for herself -- and as a consequence, Geralt and Ciri will never, ever know for certain what she would have done if circumstances hadn’t intervened. And realistically, there's no way for them to trust her after this; she can’t retroactively prove that she wouldn’t have betrayed them in the end, which casts a doubt that would poison that relationship forever.

--

So.

Breaking down the story into granular detail like this makes it feel almost like nitpicking, but those small situational changes make a huge difference in what the narrative is telling you about the character, and what kind of person they are. And the audience doesn't need to understand the mechanisms operating behind all of this -- but the writers fucking do. That's their job. To know what the words they write are doing, and the TWN writers manifestly do not. The Baba Yaga storyline is the most egregious demonstration of that, in my opinion, but it's far from the only one.

Through their shoddy execution of a straightforward trope, they made a character we're supposed to love and root for -- whom we want the other characters in the show to love too -- make choices that were unforgivably, murderously, short-sighted and selfish. Which is pretty obviously not what they meant to say about Yennefer, and not how we as the audience were supposed to interpret her actions, but that’s what they wrote. Thanks, I hate it.

(And worse: half this shit isn't even in-character. Yennefer doesn't fucking waffle like that. She is decisive and proactive to a fault, but this season reduced her to such a passive character who just gets shuffled from setpiece to setpiece. I think she makes all of four proactive decisions in that season -- freeing Cahir, rescuing Jaskier, making the deal with Baba Yaga, and sacrificing herself for Ciri -- and half of them were dumb. 

Ugh, it's such bullshit. Yennefer deserved better.)

To be honest, I don't think the season needed the Baba Yaga plot at all, done well or otherwise. It was a misbegotten attempt to pump up fake drama, one that showed a lack of confidence in the story they were telling and a lack of respect for the audience -- like they didn't expect us to care about the found-family story without some cheap ~betrayals~ to spice it up.

But all they succeeded in doing was permanently undermining Yennefer's relationship with Ciri and Geralt, the relationship that is supposed to be one of the bedrocks of the series. That’s a betrayal you can’t come back from (except by authorial fiat, because they're ~Destined~ and so they have to). That's a well that's been poisoned.

And lastly, it puts Yennefer on the defensive now in her interactions with Geralt. Despite the fact that he was the one who overrode her free will by tying them together with djinn, the season ends with her having to grovel for his forgiveness. Geralt is now the one with the moral high ground, the injured party who gets to dispense or withhold forgiveness as he sees fit, and he's not required to make any real acknowledgment, or apology, or amends for what he did to her.

THANKS, I HATE IT.

--

So yeah, there was a lot in S2 that was Some Fucking Bullshit, but that is my narrow-focus deep dive into my single least favorite of their bad-ideas-executed-badly. 

[stripedtabbycat]

since I’m rewatching gravity falls rn I thought I’d make a post about my thoughts so far. (I wanted to start on August 31 which is dipper and mabel’s birthday but I ended up starting on September 1 instead. watching 1 episode a night and challenging myself to do the credits code each time)

under a cut because this will probably get long:

first of all this show is so funny. not all the jokes hold up but I really enjoy its sense of humor in general

i remember liking the second season better than the first and not just because it’s more overarching plot-driven, I just think the plot is a little more focused and the characters and their relationships are more solidified

I love seeing the development of Stan bonding with the kids over time. I noticed in “carpet diem” (the season 1 body swap episode) he’s commending dipper (who is really Mabel trying to turn him against dipper) for finally standing up to him and the next episode is the best we see them get along all season. it’s nice but still done in a funny/weird way that fits the show’s tone

dipper and mabel are siblings of all time. I love how clearly the show establishes how well they get along and work together and how often they’re goofin around and having fun at the beginning of episodes and how realistic their teasing and bantering and bickering feels…if you hate on mabel you’re wrong btw

i appreciate that the show doesn’t need to bluntly state the lesson we’re supposed to learn at the end of each episode but still has clear themes for each one. i also like when they kind of have a subverted/parodied version of a typical cartoon moral like in the truth teeth segment of “bottomless pit” when the expected lesson of “sometimes a small lie is okay” turns into “sometimes you have to let your uncle lie to the cops so he doesn’t get arrested for regularly committing tax fraud”

that said sometimes i’m a little :/ at the conclusions of certain episodes. I try not to harp on this bc I think part of what drives the more intense discourse about kids’ cartoons is the idea that they have to be teaching good messages to their target audiences, or at least not teach them harmful ones. I don’t think all kids’ shows should be Wholesome and Morally Edifying but sometimes you’re like. oh this is imparting a particular viewpoint I don’t love

anyway I’m just thinking about how “fight fighters” seems like it’s going to be about how physically fighting over petty relationship jealousy is dumb and immature but instead it kinda comes off like dipper has to learn “you have to fight your own battles” which…idk. I could be misinterpreting

then again I just watched “the love god” which tries to raise the interesting dilemma of “is it right/okay to meddle in others’ relationships [using magic or not] if they genuinely end up happier?” but given all the baggage around using love potions in fiction you can tell they had to walk that back a little in journal 3. I don’t think the element of “it actually wears off after a few hours” would have undermined the question too much but whatevs.

(i will say that stan in dreamscaperers saying he's hard on dipper to toughen him up kind of gets questioned later when we see the stans' backstory and it's clear their dad was not actually that great of a guy. room for interpretation there too i guess)

another reason I like season 2 better is because the show is finally done with the dipper/wendy crush plot that really dragged down parts of s1 imo. mostly because it felt like dipper had to learn that a relationship between them wasn’t happening a number of times before the show definitively said it and it lead to some of those dubious episode conclusions.

(whenever people claim that mabel was selfish and dipper always had to sacrifice things for her sake I just think…most of the time what he was “sacrificing” was a chance to impress wendy or spend more time with her, and I feel like this is more a problem with that aspect of the show than anything else)

(ALSO when people say there are too many "mabel's crush of the week" subplots - i never really got that impression? when she's going over her failed summer romances i realized there were only like, 4 episodes up to then where there was a plot about her liking a guy and it didn't feel overdone to me. however that's also why i was disappointed with her part of "northwest manor mystery" because i thought we were done with that. i guess they figured she and pacifica had already had their bonding episode in "the golf war" but i still wish she got to be involved with the main plot in that episode, even if i mostly liked it. kind of felt like the writers couldn't think of anything else for her to do)

anyway back to positive thoughts! I really appreciate the show’s creativity with the supernatural elements especially when they need a way to do a standard fantasy cartoon trope. need to shrink the characters down to miniature size? crystals that change the size of things that get caught in the light they refract! need to do a body swap? how about a carpet that swaps your electrons when you static shock someone? time travel? the time machine is in the form of a tape measure. they can get pretty outside of the box and it’s always cool

i also like the balance of humor and (kid-friendly) horror it engages in. there are a number of moments throughout the show that seem like a sudden intrusion of sheer horror but because of their suddenness and (relative) over-the-top nature they’re also really funny. I’m thinking of dipper opening the convenience store freezer and seeing a horrifying brain monster, the summerween trickster eating a kid, bill cipher summoning “a head that’s always screaming” and its skin peeling off (or like. anything he does in that episode), a lot of moments from the shorts like the island head in “the tooth” or the ending of “lefty”…

this show is i think a lot of people's first experience with a cartoon that has overarching continuity and encourages the viewers to analyze it for clues to the greater plot and i love how it does that. also love how it still works as a show even if you're not actively looking for clues to the mystery. they knew full well how much the fandom was engaging with it and both the show and supplementary material are just chock-full of details that really reward repeat viewings in a way that very few other children's shows do.

i did a pretty good job keeping track of the end credits codes in season 1 but by season 2 i had to just look up on the wiki what the vigènere key words were because i don't have the time to scour the whole episode for those sorry. especially when they get more and more hidden throughout the season. i'm still proud of myself for figuring out how to decode those messages using the grid of all the letters though

i think i first caught up with this show right when "not what he seems" was airing and now that's next up on the schedule. it's a very different experience watching the episodes all in a row and not having to wait at least two weeks between each one lol. on the plus side it gave the fans plenty of time to pick over every episode and theorize like hell

final thoughts: i love that a disney channel kids' cartoon devoted an entire extra-long episode to the surprisingly realistic and sad backstory of the main kid characters' great-uncles, one of whom had mostly been a comedic side character for the first season, and it's fantastic. once i'm done with this i cannot wait to get my hands on the book of bill

[that-nerd-who-writes-fanfiction]

Hello, random ask, why do you think that a pretty character with bad personality is famous in the fandom (epsecially anime/manga)? Yes, one of them (that I mean) is Gojo Satoru from JJK. Do you watch or read the series?

So 4 months ago, I'm not into the fandom, but my friend made me watch it with them, so I binge watch s1, the movie, then s2, and now I'm one of Gojo fan and SatoSugu shipper (even if I'm late)... Sorry for the rambling, feel free to just ignore my silly ask.

I'm also into Merlin BBC kinda late, just in 2022, when I first watch it. At first I thought it will be hard to find Merlin fan blog (because the show ends in 2012 or 2013), how wrong I was. Thanks to you @that-nerd-who-writes-fanfiction I can be more understanding of their characters, especially Merlin and Arthur's dynamics. Thanks for sharing your posts.....

So I haven’t seen much of jjk, I watched the first few episodes while I was very medicated in hospital last year (I’m okay) so I don’t remember much of it. I need to rewatch it at some point, from what o do remember it was pretty good.

As for the character archetype, I’m honestly not sure. Usually the characters tend to have more than just the bad personally, think Denki in MHA and Mineta, Mineta is just there for the “comedy” of being a perv where Denki doesn’t take it too far, backs off when told (when he asked Uraraka out and accepted her rejection) and has more than just that to his character, and Gojo was a mentor or something, wasn’t he? I can’t remember enough to comment on him.

But anyway, that’s not always the case, I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head while I’m on Merlin brainrot but I know there are some. SAO, SOTE and possibly Beastars (I’ve only heard from friends on that one) probably have some interesting characters that have varying levels of morality and reasons. Other times, they’ve got a tragic backstory that people can relate to, MHA villains or harlequin, also assassination classroom characters for example.

Personally, I’ll overlook a bad character aspect if it’s only like 10-20% of the personality, any more than that and I can’t get myself to like them, but that’s just me and it’s different for everyone based on their own opinions and a bunch of other things. I don’t pretend to understand people, I really don’t.

My thing with character analysis is that in media, I can see all aspects of the character. I can go back and analyse parts and sit watching situations for as long as I need to work out whatever I want to work out. In real life, or when it comes to real people rather, I’m lucky to get anything about a person from the types of interactions you get in fandom spaces so I can’t really speak for other peoples opinions on characters or why they have them.

I’ve seen people who feel the same about Morgause and Morgana despite them having entirely different personalities and reasons for their varying levels of dubious morality, I’ve seen people heavily stan Meliodas from seven deadly sins and say he’s “just flirting” while others will not like that part of his personality but like him overall.

Mostly, I’ll just live and let live. As long as discussions aren’t hostile and everything is kept respectful, different opinions than my own are what keep fandom spaces (and conversations in general) interesting so I’m always interested to hear what people think.

And as for coming into Merlin late, welcome, happy to have you here. I only started watching 2020, rewatched a few (understatement of the decade) times since, and joined the fandom mid to late last year but the fandom is still going strong. It’s definitely one of my favourite fandoms, so I’m glad it’s growing.

[martianbugsbunny]

OUAT Thoughts Pt.65--Episodes 1-2

I have watched through S7E2; spoilers DNI. Also, spoiler warning for anyone further behind than I am.

—I know I started this with a salty attitude, but I’m already invested. First episode didn’t do it for me, but goshdarnit if episode 2 didn’t just get me. Still a bit shady going forward, but I’m checking it.

—Alice’s lil mushroom shirt is cute. Of course, mushroom shirts are among the most sapphic of things, so I’m legally obligated to like it.

—Her glowing-mushroom cave is fun, too.

—Other Hook having his daughter’s rook while she has his knight is sad-cute. I might be willing to place some money (not much) on Alice being his daughter? Mostly because she’s s u s and because chess is very Wonderland. Also, that Hook is a bit older, so the vengeful witch who locked up his daughter could be Cora.

—Hunny, I cannot stand Rumple’s outfit. And I don’t even know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. He’s supposed to B styling in either a suit or some leather, but he’s gone full Texas tuxedo. On the other hand, he do be cuffing those jeans a bit, so….even wash. (Also, the shaggy hair is really top-tier.)

—I feel much better knowing that other Hook is the one in Hyperion Heights. He’s still sad, but at least CaptainSwan are together in Storybrooke.

—Also, Hook and Emma expecting a baby? YES!

—It amuses me to no end that Hook’s last name in Hyperion Heights is Rogers.

—Rumple looking for a moral compass in a partner is v swaggy. I was expecting the writers to put their heads up their asses and write him as a villain, and even if he seems a little dubious anyway, at least he seems to be a pretty chill dude.

—Mmmkay, so why do he and Alice know each other? And does he actually know her, or does the Rumple from the wish-world know her? Is that even our Rumple?

—Henry inviting his mom to come on his adventure in Cinderella world is nice. And I adore him for not acting like he’s too grown to use one of his Operation codenames.

—I think maybe these two episodes, especially the first one, have been trying too hard to recapture the spirit of the early first season. Is it interesting to see the story repeat with Henry? Ngl, I do enjoy a decent cyclical narrative. But it’s kinda copy-and-paste for my tastes, although I do have faith that it will improve with time. The potential almost makes me disappointed there’s only one season of this.

—Gee, there’s a lady who can cook and makes frog references? Wonder who that might be.

—I’m also not sure how much I like that we’re basically exploring the concept of a multiverse. I hate most multiverses. It makes stuff overcomplicated. However, I will concede that the idea of seeing how different choices make the same people different is cool, and I have liked the alternate realities we’ve visited. But this is different, because Cinderella is an *entirely* different person, yk, different actor and all that rubbish, so it’s not quite the same.

—I’m also not sure I like the way she’s been characterized. Cynical princesses aren’t really my thing. Hope is the inborn magic that draws me to Disney princesses. A lot of their lives low-key, maybe high-key, suck, and if they can be hopeful than so can I. I can deal with a lot of personality traits, such as the difference in Cinderella’s enduring kindness and Merida’s brash recklessness, but hope is something I think those ladies need. Having a cynical Cinderella doesn’t hit the sweet spot for me.

—Do they really expect me to take that bland-ass boring old dry toast biddy seriously? *old person voice* Back in my day, the evil ruler of a cursed town was the one, the only, the stunning, the inimitable, the QUEEN Regina Mills! Tremaine don’t got nothing on my girl.

—Henry’s clothes in the Cinderella world are very Charming-esque.

—I think they cast adult Henry pretty well. It’s nowhere near the caliber of young Snow White, but let’s be real reaching that bar is impossible. His voice is the best, and every now and then he gets an expression that looks very much like Henry.

—Kinda gives me mental vertigo when I think about how much time has passed in the show since the finale of season 6, or since the beginning of the show. Henry’s a full-grown man with a wife and a daughter now. It’s gotta be at least fifteen, maybe twenty, years since the first time we saw him. *sniff* they grow up so fast!

[lights-on-why]

watched my first Disney spin off in a while, was convinced to try Andor.

only watched the first episode, a few thoughts

1. it’s slow. or at least, slower, which i love. things are allowed time to just kinda be.

2. on a similar note, no cliffhanger! a show that actually hopes to stand on its own merit enough that you don’t watch the next episode just to find out what’s actually going on in the last episode

3. morally grey decisions and characters across the board. i like that

however, it’s still kinda... off for me, and i’m not sure why, because the world they’re building seems interesting and the characters in the world are... portrayed as multi-dimensional. not split into villains and heroes. the characters are all morally grey, but... i’m also just not interested. and i don’t know why.

possible reasons include

1. just need some time, settle into it

2. maybe just can’t watch marvel and star wars any more. while i used to be super excited to find out how this corner of a big universe works, now i just... don’t expect anything new. and find that if I want to be excited and think about the world, well - I know that everything will actually be massively over-explained and unsatisfactory, if I explore it. and it’s too much effort as well. I started by going “ooh ok, so 5BBY... so that’s like, 5 years before Ep VI? Ep IV? which makes this a few years before Rogue One and and and” but then... I don’t actually care? (compared to watching a new property, where I’m working from 1 hr of television after watching episode 1. and can analyse and examine the world completely and expect it to make sense and be consistent)

3. it’s slow, but it’s still so damn efficient. perhaps? even if we spend a few minutes just watching a robot trundle along, we’ve got to show off a few different cool sets and be having things happen at the same time? maybe? but i don’t know that could also be a good thing but I’m not sure - it kinda feels like even if there is a slower bit, it’s still gotta be full? idk.

4. 2 again, but with the story rather than the world. but this might be expectations more than reality for Andor, since I have actually heard that it’s good and different. but that I expect the same story, the same nods to complexity and set up of interesting story thrown out the window in episode 4 when they give it all up, once they realise they don’t know how to provide a good resolution to what they’re setting up. so the morally complex questions get simplified down when the interesting and complex villains decide that actually their new plan is to eat babies and blow up planets, and the good guys need to go find Ahsoka, Mon Mothma and the popular character from episode 3 (and the morally dubious allies decide they’re full-on heroes now. hey, maybe they saw a baby or something).

I think it’s probably most likely a combo. but also, 2 and 4. not only have i watched too much marvel and star wars, so much of it has A. not been good and B. been so obviously and uninterestingly a bad money grab based on beloved franchises and characters. and now even a good start just does not interest me. i think.

(the reasons why the last 10 star wars and marvel shows and films have been bad are interesting. but they’re also the same reasons for each and every one of them. (ok some of them have additional reasons for being bad too. but they’d only be interesting to talk about in a better show))

[the-darkness-does-not-bargain]

hope you know i went from a neutral :| scrolling through tumblr to a massive :D upon seeing your reblogging and adding more to your superhero au

always love being to blame to some degree for seeds of ideas lmao

i’m so 👀👀👀👀👀 all over your au, i love all the powers and backstories and i especially love shannon being a lot more on the alien side and i love the kinda shady!ocs

always live for shady ocs because like, they’re literally canonically very shrouded in dubious & morally shady shit, like areala was almost defo no saint given b4 adriel she was part of the crusades and well, *gestures at the crusades’ everything*

not to mention how we know the ocs girls (shannon, mary, camila, beatrice, lilith) went on presumably a bunch of religious artifact retrievals judging by one of them being like “it was just supposed to be another religious artifact retrieval mission’ or something like that, them trying to steal stuff from jillian (and note none of the ocs girls seemed to show that much objection to that), to the point of which they were like calling it a “war”, and there’s the obv of everything shady about “liberating religious artifacts” let alone the jillian stuff

the fact that the public doesn’t know about the ocs & demons, despite it being acknowledged that demon possessions are a common and regular problem for many accross the globe

the fact that ava was vv heavily judged for being an atheist and supposedly having committed suicide, and that removing the halo without ava’s consent and risking her loss of mobility or even death was even on the table as an option at all

beatrice & ava being chill w a guy being captured and beaten to some degree for info, superion having been ready to execute vincent (not that i wouldn’t have cheered if that had happened, but it still shows that the ocs aren’t clear cut good guys), not to mention how we know many of adriel’s followers are possessed and we saw how many people the ocs killed in s2, and regardless of their reasoning or the circumstances, members of the ocs have clearly defo killed innocent people who were unfortunate enough to be possessed

and that’s just like, the ocs girls, we know there were a bunch more ocs members at the cats cradle aside froj them, and there’s boatloads of other ocs covents, vv likely plenty of the ocs sects have done a lot of ethically dubious things

also i love the concept of bea being the one to bring ava in!!!!!! see a lot of enemies to lovers avatrice, and it often kind of comes across as being forced, esp as a bunch of them basically just swap beatrice & lilith’s personality for ?? reason (just commit and write a fallenhalo fic if you’re gonna do that lmao), but i think there’s already plenty of material for avatrice being on bad terms w/o forcing a hatred for the most ?? of things, just take beatrice’s being part of a canonically shady organization, her whole “things change when you realize that not everything’s about you” & “duty >>>>” stuff vs ava’s “fuck the enlightenment of death” (side note ava really does not get enough credit for how much of a raw ass line that is) anti institution ass and there’s plenty of possibility, like i think it’s vv likely if things hadn’t gone the way they did (esp in s1) ava would’ve just been some woman that bea briefly interacted w a few times once and/or they kinda clashed more often than not or something

The OCS is shady af, yes! Felonious girlies! Criminals! Queens of dubious morality!

Literally they're so untrustworthy, the vibes in season 1 would be downright rancid if not for Bea, Cam, and Mary (sorry Lil but you're a little gremlin child and you do NOT pass the vibe check in those first episodes).

The heroes!OCS is also shady, in that secret, too-powerful government agency way. They not only have the resources but also the legal leeway to straight up violate your rights if you have powers. And kidnapping people secret police-style is not off the table.

Unfortunately, that's what happens to Ava. She'll wake up in a room lined with divinium or maybe with divinium restraints on and then see Bea dressed in her costume, clearly and undeniably to blame. It's rough, fam. And no one else is really able or willing to help Ava or give her a fair shake. In scenario 1, Mary can barely look at her. Lilith is a stressed out little menace. Camila is kind but not really in a position to help, and Mama S hasn't made the connection between her tenure as a hero and the circumstances of Ava's life. It's bad. Bea is the only one left and there's no way Ava will listen to her (for now).

So she runs, of course. I imagine she meets some friends along the way (Hans, Chanel, maybe Yasmine?) And eventually she has to confront Adriel's minions and fight. Mary and Lilith may still be sent to find her, and the emotions that result from that will be exquisite. Whether Lilith dies/disappears is up for debate, but once Mary and Ava have their episode 6 time, Ava will come back to defend the OCS headquarters against a villain attack and meet Bea again.

It will start slow. There’s an ocean of broken trust to cross, but goddammit Bea's gonna build a boat to cross it.

[ntshastark]

MAWS s2 liveblog: 2x01-02

ok so it's been several months since season 1 and i think i can be honest now...... i don't really like this series too much........

part of it is probably that i'm really not an anime person, so the tone of it all is just... off, idk. the humour especially, i guess, i just don't vibe with it (which is fine, it's a children's cartoon anyway, i didn't go in expecting to be the target audience, even if for other reasons). most of it falls on jimmy, who's the more comic relief-y character, and i don't dislike him for it, i understand it makes sense with the tone of the cartoon. but it also means i'm not very attached to the character.

but my biggest issue is definitely lois..... knowing she's been criticized for being too mean is insane, she's not nearly mean enough!!!!!!!! she's a bit immature, but not in the right way (overly cocky smallville!lois my BELOVED), they just painted her with a Quirky Female Character brush (which is a Specific brand of quirky that imo doesn't really fit lois). and this + her being a full equal to clark at work (instead of a more experienced and established reporter x him being a newbie) just makes it hard for me get into this version of clois. maybe i'd go easier on this lois/clois and justify everything with "oh, it's because they're younger than usual", if both smallville and fucking JL8 (!!!) didn't manage to have even younger versions of lois that were absolutely perfect (and jl8!lois is pretty quirky - she's in the sewers investigating a scoop!!! at age 8!!! - but exactly the right kind of quirky!). the things i love most about lois are her confidence and her mean streak, and the things i love most about early clois are how lois at first doesn't pay clark any mind at all, and even looks down on him, but then he turns out to be more than meets the eye and they start a little rivalry with lots of banter... and absolutely nothing i just mentioned here is on maws... and then they already rushed into the identity reveal and get-together, so i'm just :| what's even left?

clark, i guess. and it's a good clark!! ......comparatively. because, as i said, the tone of the series... they make him look a bit dumb sometimes, especially when dealing with the secret identity thing... and, i mean, both of the characters he interacts the most are very Quirky Sidekick, so even if he was the best clark/kal/supes to ever exist, he doesn't exist in a vacuum, so.

anyway, there's no point to this rant, but i really needed to get it out bc everyone else seems so excited about this cartoon and i'm just... :|

but kara!!!!!!!! i've been on a kara kick lately, and she's in the poster for this season so!!!!!!!!!! maybe i'll love this kara enough to elevate the whole experience! and the krypton plot does seem interesting, i have no idea where they're going with it! (in a good way!)

==

Episode 1

oh my god we're gonna see jimmy's journey back to poverty live!

==

very brazilian of them to air their valentine's day episode when we're almost in june

==

oh my god the pidge from voltron knock-off is still around

==

hmmm very unsubtle surname cut. i'm going through jimmy love interests in my head

==

speaking of unsubtle

==

oh nvm he's married

==

i like what they're doing with krypton so far, but i'm not really a fan of how they're dealing with jor-el specifically, kinda reminds me of how they did it in smallville (and that was one of my least favourite aspects of the series)

==

man i don't remember anything that happened in the s1 season finale, i was really counting on them doing a 'previously on' thing

==

oh i LOVE a morally dubious krypton!!!!

a slow predictable end doesn't really make sense, though. that'd give the els time to build bigger ships, and to a lot of other kryptonians to do the same

==

LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

==

WAIT SHE'S ALSO A BABY?????????? NOOOOOOOOOOO WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT

==

👀.

==

wait. OUR powers? 🤨

==

i know it's probably a colouring thing but it really makes it look like he's wearing a very fashionable top. slay.

==

OH MY GOD HE WAS

==

OH THIS LOOKS SO FUCKING METAL, I LOVE IT

==

i'm crying like a baby

==

um homem cadelizado

==

Episode 2

ugh i can't find this one with subtitles. hate when this happens, completely throws off my liveblogging.

==

oh i'd completely forgotten twink deathstroke had already lost his eye

==

if not even clark knows what's the thing he can't see through why are they subjecting themselves to lead poisoning 😭

==

MÔNICA?????????

==

extravagant transportation is literally the dumbest possible way jimmy could spent his money, he should invest in a beat-up car and a pager for clark

==

A WHOLE FUCKING YACHT JUST TO GET TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RIVER ARE YOU KIDDING ME

==

[paris hilton voice] that's hot

==

i admittedly don't know that much about either character, but i'm getting the impression they're making general lane too soft and amanda too harsh (thinking of this post i saw the other day)

==

PIDGE FROM VOLTRON????????????

==

PIDGE FROM VOLTRON IS LEX FUCKING LUTHOR??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????