#but I blame that on the show and its ridiculous timeline

[black-rose-writings]

Hello! I know it has been a very long time since you added anything, but could you write something related to Price of safety? Maybe related to the one-shot you wrote about the different ending of Siege and Storm featuring Marya? (I'm always dying for more "The Saints are actually all friends and help Sasha in hsi quest for safety for Grisha" content!) I love your blog so much!!

I have a couple of short fics I'm almost done with for the Grishaverse, though unfortunately none of them involve the Saints. I'll try to finish something and post it soon (I've been on a more of video game fic / original work kick recently, so Grishaverse (which is a lot of work and not much fun, especially considering the things I have almost finished are largely Alina POV, which is bad for my mental health in larger quantities) had to take a back seat.

But to make me more motivated to write, I'll post the premises for some of the fics I'm pretty far into:

Retelling of season 1 of the show but Kaz is Aleksander's son and all of the Crows are Grisha

Baghra's attempt to convince Alina to leave ends... poorly for Baghra. Shenanigans ensue.

Aleksander overhears the fight between Mal and Alina after the Fete and goes to see if she's okay, unintentionally preventing Baghra from doing her "big reveal".

Mal and Alina do find a bit of privacy (wink wink) during their time in Novyi Zem. This causes some challenges for Nikolai and Darkling that they probably should have forseen when chasing after two a couple of teenagers.

And a few that are slightly less finished/fleshed out:

Luda Lives AU (I have the idea and a few scenes but can't quite pin down a plot)

Alina is Aleksander's daughter AU (same as above. I have a few posts about this, but it's one thing to make a bullet point post and another to write a compelling story)

Show!Inej centric story that is unfortunately (but IMO completely justifiably) very mean to Kaz and Jesper and I'm kinda scared to post because of that (might get mixed into some of the other ones, because it has more of a side-plot vibe than a stand-alone story vibe)

[canmom]

when robots got muscles

You can blame @centrally-unplanned for this post. She(?) wrote...

The ‘chrome’ designs pioneered by illustrators like Hajime Sorayama (Sexy Robot from 1984, for example) tended to be more in vogue at this time (or just…a  hot girl, who is apparently a robot, trust me bro), you don’t see designs like this too commonly until later (ask resident robo-fetishist/animator expert @canmom for details on that timeline).

After a challenge like that how can I refuse? Although the question is ‘when did robots get muscles’, this turned into something of a historical survey of robot designs from the 80s on with a throughline of biomimesis.

(Originally this was just going to be an excuse to talk about Ghost in the Shell... but I gotta be thorough.)

This was all brought on from this picture from a 1989 fanart magazine...

by an artist going by ‘Facepunch Tatebi-kun’ (顔面強打たてびー君, Ganmenkyouda Tatebii-kun). I remarked that it was interesting to see these kinds of ‘robot muscles’ in a picture from 1989, since I thought that kind of design became popular in the 2000s.

On some reflection, I think I gotta revise that opinion! I think ‘robot muscles’ became a thing around the mid 90s in anime; in the West I think it took a bit longer. But you can also see precursors already before that.

So. One thing artists are super into is biomimetic robots. That is, robots whose form (and perhaps function) is similar to animals, especially humans. The word ‘android’ referring to a human-like automaton dates all the way back to the late 19th century, but the modern ‘android, robot, cyborg’ taxonomy apparently became established around the 40s.

There’s two types of humanoid robot that get a lot of play, especially in anime. One is the convincingly humanlike cyborg, which is the same size and shape as a normal human; the other is a what we call in English a ‘mech’, i.e. a big robot you can sit inside.

Of course, if your androids just act like humans all the time, then there’s not much point having them be robots. To really create the frisson of contrast between human and mechanical forms you have to show the mechanism somehow. This could be because the machine isn’t perfectly human-like, and has visibly mechanical joints - take a look at the works of @sukabu89​ for very inventive depiction of this theme - or, the android could be damaged or undergo maintenance.

When you attempt to translate biological forms into a more mechanical design language, the traditional way has been to use hard, rigid shapes, since these make the contrast especially clear. In more recent designs, particularly as we started to see real robots with ‘artificial muscles’ such as the ones created by Boston Dynamics, we get another sort of design language to express ‘mechanical parts’, and robots start having more biological forms with exposed plasticy muscles.

So let’s tell the story. We begin at the end of the 70s.

the dawn of mechaguro

For an early example of ‘mechaguro’ (a term I’m applying very anachronistically!), when a robot gets smashed up, we have Alien (1979). This film did a ridiculous amount to define sci-fi design language, and of course the alien itself blends mechanical and biological forms, with its glossy black surface allowing it to seem to melt into the exposed pipes of the spaceship. But let’s focus on the character Ash, a secret android who is broken apart in the second half of the film.

When Ash is torn apart by the alien, his insides consist of weird white plastic beads and a milky fluid that seems analogous to blood. It’s not clear what the function of any of this tech is - it’s intended to be vague and mysterious. The outside is biomimetic but the inside is anything but. He has a kind of artificial skin which resembles a latex mask.

The Terminator films are another major touchpoint for 80s science fiction. Late in the film, Arnie starts taking damage which reveals the Terminator skeleton underneath his fake skin.

The stop-motion Terminator model is basically designed according to the principle of ‘replace human bones and muscles with hard metal bits’. So you have a metal skull, metal clavicles (which are pistons for some reason), metal shoulder blades, hydraulic pistons generally in the places where muscles are. e.g. in the above picture you can see pistons that stand in place of the sternocleidomastoid muscle, and in this picture...

...you can see metal scapulae and piston biceps and triceps and a piston. The shoulder joint by contrast built in a very non-human-like way. Also there’s random tubes everywhere lol.

That’s generally how androids are portrayed in the 80s. The ‘droids’ in Star Wars are similar; C-3PO is an arrangement of metal plates with gaps suggestive of underlying mechanical details and rudimentary joints and pistons.

In Blade Runner, we have the Replicants, humanoid robots - but by the premise of the film, they are essentially indistinguishable from humans. So when the Replicants die, we never really get to see their robo-innards.

and now, anime

OK, that’s the big four Western 80s sci-fi movie series; what of anime? Of course, androids in anime go all the way back to Astro Boy. But most of these early designs don’t really focus on mechanical details all that much. Super robot designs are more like tokusatsu suits than anything. There were certainly instances of impressive mechanical animation in the 70s, with early experts including Kazuhide Tomonaga on Space Battleship Yamato. Then there’s Hayao Miyazaki’s episodes of Lupin III Part 2 which featured proto-Nausicaa flying a prototype of the robots from Castle in the Sky. It would be some years before anyone could come close to matching these!

The original Gundam in ‘79 famously started the ‘real robot’ movement [Animation Night, so let’s take a brief look at how a Gundam fits together.

Generally speaking, the way Gundams are drawn in Gundam ‘79 is kind of rough. The methods to animate these rigid mechanical systems in super accurate perspective were just not yet established at the end of the 70s, certainly not on a TV budget. The actual joints on the Gundam are left very vague, but it broadly speaking seems to move like a human in armour.

But the OVA boom was about to begin, and while it would be a while before we saw the heights of Headgear/Production I.G./Gainax, things were going to change a lot. Mechanical design and animation was about to get much more sophisticated very very quickly.

In 1982, we have Super Dimension Fortress Macross, with robots that transformed into fighter jets. Its robots are designed by Kazutaka Miyatake, who cut his teeth doing mechanical design for Space Battleship Yamato and Daicon. The Macross TV series introduced the world to the animation of Ichirō ‘Missile Circus’ Itano. [AN64] A plane with legs... honestly looks kind of goofy, but Itano’s ambition to have a highly mobile 3D camera that could move in ways that would simply be impossible in live action marked a huge step up in how robots are animated. And this would get refined even further in the film Do You Remember Love.

In terms of design, we’re really moving our inspiration from ‘tokusatsu suit’ to ‘military hardware’ here. A Macross suit has to look like something that could transform into a plane, so its silly little arms and legs have to look kind of plane-like. In any case, we are definitely still in a world of hard and rigid robotics.

Dallos (1983-4) dir. Mamoru Oshii is known as the first OVA, if not the first successful OVA [AN115]. It features a variety of mining robots on the surface of the Moon, which are generally less humanoid, taking their design cues from JCBs...

...as well as humanoid robots with fairly clear joint patterns...

...and more humanoid robots too.

The eponymous Dallos, however, is a huge humanoid robot that looks like this...

Here we have a pile of mechanical shapes that vaguely calls to mind a human face. It’s suggestive of motifs we’d see later in works like Akira.

A year later in 1985, Megazone 23 really kicks off the OVA boom in earnest [AN 103]. It also has a robot, in the form of a transforming bike that can become a humanoid piloted mech...

You can see mechanical designs and shading have become considerably more detailed; its motion is a lot more complex as well with a ton of indulgent background animation shots. The actual details of the bike -> robot transformation are rather brushed over. But to sort of sum up the design language: we have organic but hard-edged shapes contrasted by inorganic but round shapes. (These terms ‘organic’ and ‘inorganic’ refer mostly to symmetry and a sense of ‘flow’ in the shape.) There are few right angles as such, but a lot of broadly boxy topology. The shapes are broken up by elaborate specular highlights in complex shapes, a motif of the later Kanada school.

OK, but that’s all variants on ‘rigid robot’ so far - what about the androids? What about the more directly biological designs?

Following the enormous success of Megazone 23 Part I, Toshiki Hirano got the chance to adapt his favourite lesbian cosmic horror hentai manga Fight! Iczer One into a rather more tame OVA which released from 1985-87. In terms of mechanical design, this starts to do some interesting moves towards blending biological and mechanical forms...

Of course it has a robot in addition to the requisite bishōjo and lightsabers. In contrast to the boxy shapes we’ve seen so far, the robots in Iczer-One have a much more curvy organic sort of design language. Still, there is not a lot of emphasis on the precise details of mechanical articulation outside of select shots. (It is however notable for the first ever Obari punch!)

Despite the change in shape language, these are still very clearly animated as metal plates and not yet muscles.

In 1984 we have a very important film (for this narrative, and in general), Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, the film that created Studio Ghibli. Here we have the ‘God Warriors’, giant humanoid weapons with the ability to shoot a massive laser out of their mouth. Rather than robots, these are very much biological in nature, having to be grown in a kind of cocoon. In the film version of Nausicaa, an incomplete God Warrior is released, leading to an iconic scene animated by Hideaki Anno in which the God Warrior attempts to blow up the oncoming wave of Ohmu.

The God Warrior’s melting flesh is gorgeously animated, bubbling and sloughing off in great big lumps as the skeleton pokes out from underneath. Throughout, Nausicaa is full of beautiful and impressive animation of both machines (mainly planes) and biological (the giant insects), but the God Warriors, as human-made lifeforms, bring the two together. However, this strand wouldn’t be especially followed up on for a long long time.

Right, but what about Bubblebum Crisis (1987-91)? That is, after all, the iconic 80s robot girl OVA. It’s inspired heavily by Western robot-related films like Terminator and Blade Runner; here we have ‘Boomers’ (never stops being funny) as androids that can appear convincingly human. Like the Terminator, the underlying metal parts can burst out. Here we have a metal frame designed to resemble muscles, and also metal tentacles.

The shapes of these robots are a lot more organic. The robot neck has tubes that sort of resemble the neck muscles, metal plates that resemble pectorals and abs and deltoids and biceps and so on. You’ve even got a direct riff on the Terminator ‘fleshy face falling away to reveal metal skull with glowing red eye’! Under the plates there are clusters of tubes which also heavily resemble muscles. Also you’ve got the classic ‘three small circles’ motif there.

Contrasted against them are the Knight Sabers, who aren’t cyborgs as such but fight in powered exoskeletons which fit the design motifs of robot girls.

These suits are quite form-fitting, with a rubber under-layer and metal shells on top. There is definitely some attention paid to how they’ll articulate around the joints. One very recognisable 80s motif is the sort of extending spike thingies you can see on her hat there; there’s also the jets that extend out behind the suit. And, you have that multi-layer shiny highlighting of course!

Still, the way the characters move in Bubblegum Crisis is still very squarely Kanada School poses; big movements, lots of held poses accentuated by flashing and line boil, not a lot of concern for conservation of momentum or anything like that.

For a contrasting strand we can look at the rise of the ‘Otomo school’ (if you will) of realism. Around the end of the 80s, a pool of talented animators were gathering around Katsuhiro Otomo. Their most famous work is Akira, but I’m actually going to begin with Robot Carnival (1987), a wonderful anthology of short films from 1987. This features a huge variety of interpretations of the concept of robots.

For example, for Kōji Morimoto, later co-founder of Studio 4°C, the robot is a kind of cobbled-together steampunk Frankenstein’s monster. It’s a very cool design with all sorts of asymmetries and exposed parts suggesting its cobbled-together nature. And although all the robot does in this short is stand up and then fall over, a great deal of attention is paid to the little details of its articulation and its movement through space.

Presence, directed by Yasuomi Umetsu, is notable for its steps in the direction of realism - Umetsu’s characters are hyperdetailed and in some ways over-drawn. The opening shots establish this is a world where lifelike androids are common, when an android gets his head kicked off and stolen by children. Here the robot-as-doll metaphor comes in, something that will be increasingly central in the next decade. The robot girl is essentially a human-sized doll in a room full of other toys. Her creator smashes her to pieces with a wrench; later her ghost visits him as an old man. We see the girl attached to a bunch of wires, but she bleeds like a human.

Cloud by Manabu Ōhashi features another humanoid robot, an Astro Boy-like child recognisable as a robot based on his segmented torso and legs and robotic ear... cones. Here the robot is a standin for human emotions, the boy’s struggles projected onto the constantly changing sky as he walks against the wind.

Strange Tales of Meiji Machine Culture: Westerner’s Invasion by Hiroyuki Kitakubo (later to direct Golden Boy, Roujin Z and Blood: The Last Vampire) is a sendup of mecha shows in which two very goofy looking steampunk robots operated respectively by Japanese and Western crews duke it out, laying waste to the city around them. The Japanese robot is basically a big wooden samurai...

and the Western (more specifically American) robot is, uh

sorta big barrel with little eyes on top? I’m not entirely sure what the deal is with this design!

That’s really not relevant to our story tbh I just think it’s a neat short.

Chicken Man and Red Neck, by Takashi Nakamura, features especially distinctive robot designs. The film is kind of a dream sequence in which a terrified drunk man witnesses the revels of the machines of Tokyo, transformed into robots; the robots are extremely shaped, moving through a world that is pretty much just pistons...

These robots call to mind the dancing demons in Fantasia’s Night On Bald Mountain sequence, or even Bosch.

Otomo’s own segments feature the Robot Carnival itself, a vast mechanical structure built as... well some kind of entertaining spectacle, but which now drives around the post-apocalyptic wasteland dropping robots which explode as bombs. It’s cute.

OK, to wrap up the 80s, we gotta cover Akira (1988) [AN34]! Akira has plenty of impressive mechanical animation of helicopters, hovercraft thingies, satellite lasers and of course the famous bike, but it doesn’t really feature robots as such - but what it does have is a blending of mechanical and biological forms in its climactic sequence where Tetsuo’s psychic powers go out of control. First, wires start to spread like the roots of a plant from his robot arm - less an actual machine and more something he assembled with his psychic powers...

He takes a bullet, and the mechanical wires and muscles start to blend together and spread out like a slime mold...

...which he can extend as essentially a giant tentacle.

When his powers fully go off the rails, he bulges out into big blobs of flesh which have both veins and wires running over them. These burst out of the metallic parts as well.

He turns into essentially a giant biomechanical baby.

Did Akira invent these images of blending biology and machinery? Probably not, but I’m not really familiar enough with manga of the time to say. What can at least be said is that Otomo’s absurdly meticulous style could really sell it. Otomo was truly a god of perspective and detail; Akira the film was an enormous, prestigious production that threw ludicrous effort and resources towards realising his vision (which doesn’t mean it paid its inbetweeners much more...). A lot of the animators who worked on Akira would go on to be prominent in...

the 1990s

So, the 1990s. If the 80s was dominated by the later Kanada School, the new movement of the 90s, at least as far as film animation goes, was ‘realism’.

But before we get onto that, let’s take a brief look at Gunnm (1990). Known as Battle Angel Alita in the West, this manga by Yukito Kishiro depicts a world in which most people are cyborgs; it was adapted to an OVA by Madhouse in 1993 and became wildly popular overseas. Its protagonist Gally, aka Alita, starts out the story as a wrecked cyborg body like this...

Looking at this design, you can see similar patterns as we have so far. We have metal clavicles, metal sternocleidomastoid muscle, metal pectorals, metal spine. There aren’t robot muscles, per se, but there’s a lot of attention to detail on mimicking biological shapes.

Before long she is rebuilt (twice in the manga, once in the anime). Her new body is like this...

...which is to say a skintight bodysuit in the middle, and metal arms. These arms, although designed in a way that indicates hard surface and with a hinge joint at the elbow, are designed in a way that mimics the flow of muscles in a human arm. By contrast, her sorta-love interest Yugo has a body like this:

which gets mashed to pieces in the finale of the OVA. There’s a striking mechaguro scene in which Gally catches Yugo, but leaves him hanging by a fraying arm, which snaps, leaving him to fall to his death. Compared to later iterations of the ‘robot arm torn apart’ device, this one’s relatively light on detail...

Cyborg bodies in Gunnm are used as a visual indication of character type. Gally has curves but also sleek robo muscles: she’s a Beautiful Fighting Girl, sweet but also extremely powerful. A huge ‘muscular’ cyborg with wide shoulders is likely to be a brute. Yugo here has much more plain, simple shapes with visible bolts, not precision pieces like Gally.

I don’t know how much of this originates with Gunnm. I’m sure the idea of cyborg girls was in the air long before, but this became an influential example on the tail end of the time of the 80s bishōjo. One device that is notable here is the idea of a ‘full body cyborg’, which is only human down to the brain (or perhaps not even that). Body swapping is a major theme in Gunnm, something that would be expanded on before long...

And if that was going out, what was coming in? Let’s look at Patlabor, which traces the evolution of the Headgear artistic collective and IG Tatsunoko into Production I.G.. This is about as down to earth as giant robot stories can get, with robots as just everyday machines used for work and by the cops. But where things really go nuts in animation terms is the opening to Patlabor 2 (1993).

Here you can see some of the most impressive sequences of mechanical animation ever drawn. We see pilot Noa testing out the robot, and especially notable are the scenes of the hand flexing and of walking. Enormous attention is paid to the articulation of joints. The robot’s hand can swivel 360 degrees, unlike a human; however, like a human, the articulation of the fingers seems to be controlled by hydraulics in the forearm (whereas in humans, the muscles and tendons in the forearm control our fingers). When the robot’s foot steps, it flexes like a real human foot, with believable joints, and a sensible arrangement of pistons to absorb force.

It’s not imitating a human’s muscles, but the attention to the details of the robot’s mechanical design serves precisely to draw our attention to the ways it’s like/unlike a human - the robot’s hand impossible motion immediately contrasted with its pilot shot from the same angle. And the perspective drawing is absolutely impeccable. The robot is made of purely rigid structures, and the way rigid structures articulate is not at all how a human’s joints articulate.

The sequence above was animated by Atsushi Takeuchi. But across the board, the bar was getting pushed for mechanical animation. For example, observe this cut from Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team (1996-1999), in which the robot tears off its own arm and beats up another robot. The precision of the way the joints are animated and the way the robots move in space is just completely on another level compared to what Gundam had been doing a couple of decades prior.

Anyway, we’re here to talk about robot muscles, and we’re just a few years out from that now!

The year that robots got muscles, at least as far as anime is concerned, is 1995.

You can probably guess the next part. In 1995, we get Eva and GitS. Let’s start with GitS, to continue the Production I.G./Mamoru Oshii thread. The opening sequence of GitS, animated by - who else could it be? - Hiroyuki Okiura - has to be one of the most iconic segments of video ever drawn. Here’s a merely 720p youtube upload but go and find the place you have GitS stored on your hard drive and watch it in proper quality eh.

OK, yes, a lot of it is a naked lady floating around, sue me or whatever. But the sense of form. We see early on an appearance of ‘robot muscles’, here closely resembling real muscles...

We can see from the way this is drawn that it’s made of a combination of artificial muscles, solid segments, and flexible, fabric-like panels. One of my favourite shots at the beginning shows the solid segments of the skull clicking into place. Here we have a very clear contrast between the angular, hard edges of the mechanical pieces against the organic forms of a human body.

Elsewhere in the film, we see various incredibly cool bits of ‘wouldn’t be fucked up if a body did this‘, like the fingers...

Here, what we expect to be soft biological fingers is contrasted with unexpected rigidity, mechanical joints under a shell.

Also in this scene we encounter a robot body that has been stripped of her arms, legs and hips but is nevertheless still alive...

most extraordinary hacker in the history of cybercrime and you have your titties out and yet you still can’t get them to stop misgendering you, smh

For the Terminator, having its body smashed up and continuing to walk was a demonstration of its strength. Here, as would become perhaps an increasing motif, having a robot body is a source of vulnerability: people can do things to you that would kill an ordinary human but you keep going through it. Not surprisingly, ‘robot body maintenance’ is a recurring porn device. (One that GitS deploys in SAC s2).

But of course this all builds up to the all time classics of mechaguro scene at the ending where the Major attempts to tear off the hatch of a spider tank. Muscles ripple individually under the surface of her skin, her arms bulge in exaggerated contraction, and then her arms fully tear apart under the force.

Here, we’re showing her as mechanical not by contrasting rigid forms with biological ones, but by exaggerating the biological ones to the point of doing something extremely unnatural. Human muscles do not generally flex in such an individual way, nor are they strong enough to tear the arm apart, but robot muscles? Yeah, they could do that. This sets up the next scene where the Major lies unnaturally still, but can still exert control through hacking through her union with the Puppet Master.

Robots holding onto something so hard their arms explode has become... if not a recurring image, then at least one that was called back decades later in Violet Evergarden.

The final scene of GitS brings back the image of robot-as-doll, with the Major’s consciousness now uploaded into a black-market robot body that resembles a child in a dress.

This is further expounded on in Oshii’s second GitS movie Innocence (2004), with its Ballade of the Puppets in the soundtrack as Batou and Togusa (and eventually, the Major) are attacked by essentially an army of ball-jointed doll gynoids. The puppets’ movements are extremely unnatural and erratic acrobatics, constantly flipping all over the place; when hit by bullets, panels pop open to reveal the underlying brass skeleton. It’s a very cool image. (The thing that lets the sequence down is the extremely dated CGI and aggressive digital compositing.)

It also has Donna Harraway as a literal cyborg!

Now, the GitS movies didn’t drop fully formed out of nowhere, but draw on the work of Masamune Shirow. The manga has a somewhat different design sensibility than the movie, distinctive and shiny as all Shirow’s art. It is more rounded and organic, less cold.

So, the basic design of a cyberbody originates with Shirow. You can see it on this page (unfortunately from a flipped version, translation Dark Horse):

You might be able to determine from how the nurses are dressed that, yeah, the GitS manga is in significant part fetish porn. But really nerdy fetish porn, which is the best kind. This chapter is almost entirely dedicated to explaining how cyborg bodies are constructed in great detail, from the ‘sensory film’ (that’s what’s being applied in the opening to the 1995 film) to the hair implantation.

It’s interesting seeing how some of the more out-there designs of the manga, like Chief Aramaki, are transformed into the realist style of Hiroyuki Okiura. It’s Okiura, so it works great of course.

I don’t know if there are manga examples of such detail about cyborg bodies that predate Shirow.

Anyway, that’s just one of the two punches dropped in 1995. The other is Neon Genesis Evangelion. To the pedants: sure, the Evas are not actually robots, but they’re giant cyborgs that play the role of ‘robot’ in the story and they look like robots so I’m counting them.

Anyway, the thing about the Evas is they are incredibly lithe. They run, rip and tear and swing heavy objects around in a way that’s both weighty and distinctly biological. Their bodies are extremely flexible compared to prior mechs (look at how much the spines bend in that Iso cut from EoE!), but not without hard, rigid components such as the shoulder towers. Their jaws are bestial but feature mechanical-like components like interlocking hexagonal teeth and jet-like vents. They are in short a fantastic design that blends biological and mechanical features.

The impact of Eva on just about everything can’t be overstated, but as far as robot design, well. There certainly were works that leaned on the precedent set by Eva, as for example RahXephon, which also treats robots as something spiritual, prone to popping into a blob of weird little bubbles just like in Eva.

There’s a great deal missing from this account. I am very focused on anime because I’ve watched a lot more anime than I’ve read manga or played games from this period. So I’m sure there’s major foundational works I’m missing here!

the 2000s

When did the West start to catch up? eh that’s subjective - David Cronenberg was way ahead of the game! - but specifically in the sense of robots with mechanical muscles, I think the major points in the timeline go a bit like this.

In 1999, there’s the Matrix, which leans heavily on anime. This features a similar ‘robot takeover’ premise to Terminator, but here it’s biomimetic robots modelled after squids, with clouds of constantly moving tentacles that sweep behind them. After making a cool half a billion dollars, the Wachowskis decided to pay all their favourite anime directors to make short films. I’m not going to comment on every part of the Animatrix, since most of it isn’t really relevant, but I will point to this horrifying cut by Takeshi Honda in The Second Renaissance in which a robot woman has her clothes torn and then skin bashed off by a mob. The framing, motion, her expression of abject terror, and the ‘reveal’ of her ‘true’ nature, all viscerally call to mind a trans bashing.

On the manga side, a big one to mention is Gantz, a gory nihilistic seinen manga which ran from 2000-2013. The characters in Gantz fight in special latex-like suits which take on the appearance of muscles while engaging superstrength, but can also sustain damage that causes them to drip fluids from ports located at the neck and become fatal to their wearer. Gantz was adapted to anime by Ichirō Itano in 2004, but I haven’t seen it so I can’t comment on any notable animation.

Cyborgs are a favourite subject of games, but in the 2000s, games are really pushing art direction and biopunk stuff is in. Half Life 2 (2004) has its spider-crab like Striders and dropships and so on. Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee (1997) bases its whole concept around the sheer variety of weird creatures that would inhabit its dystopian factory. And I gotta give a shoutout to Septerra Core (1999) - in case one other person has played that lmao

At some point after 2005, Boston Dynamics became a viral sensation thanks to their robot BigDog. BigDog is just welded steel and hydraulics, but its lifelike hopping movement style definitely brought to mind the idea that the future of robots is going to be in biomimesis.

So, 2007, here comes Crysis to melt your PC! This is an FPS with the not-uncommon premise of being a supersoldier fighting (country America hates) and also aliens, but its gimmick was that you have a special exosuit that wraps around your body with artificial muscles, making you much stronger and manlier or whatever.

This is indicated by a visualisation that could be right out of a toothpaste ad, where tiny little balls drop into the character’s pores and somehow go straight into the bloodstream which is of course a void full of flying red blood cells. And so on. It sold the game, though! The ad there focuses almost entirely on the suit and not the character wearing it, who is basically an irrelevant soldier man. What it entailed in gameplay terms is that you have a mode switcher so you can have strength or armour or invisibility or whatever. But it’s cool military superscience, you see!

Anyway. Not like my preferred flavour of cyborg is any less stupid I guess x3

In the same year, Bayformers started. These films’ robots are honestly just visual noise, there’s so many moving metal shards going every which way that it’s next to impossible to discern any sort of underlying mechanical principle. A similar ‘overwhelming business’ visual effect would be applied the next year in Iron Man, kicking off the MCU. So mechanical muscles definitely weren’t the only expression of ‘hyper-advanced robot’ in Western visual media in the late 2000s.

I’m going to end my story with two more games: Horizon Zero Dawn and NieR Automata.

Horizon features a world inhabited by a large variety of robot animals, using the peak of AAA rendering techniques. The robots are designed to be biomimetic after both modern animals and prehistoric ones, and feature a combination of hard surfaces and softer biological muscles. For example, a robot horse:

The discipline of making designs like these now has a name: it’s called ‘hard surface modelling’ and it involves boolean operations and bevels and other techniques designed to create a balance of hard edges on a surface against the smoother parts. The design language of Horizon says that the hard plates are white, the soft parts are very dark and may be patterned like a cloth texture, and there can be small colour accents here and there.

I think you can definitely see the influence of Boston Dynamics’s robots (and recent military tech in general) in these designs, iterated on through a decade and a half of increasingly intra-referential concept art. They are visually very busy designs, but there are a couple of recognisable features that draw attention by being inorganic, such as the cylindrical fuel tank at the back. Vitally, the silhouette is very readable.

This robot T. rex for comparison serves as a world boss monster, and you can see it’s got a bunch of military looking attachments that look like radars and missile launchers and so on. As real tech evolved, so too did our idea of what a scary robot ought to look like.

So, that’s where this kind of design pattern has gone in mainstream games.

Now to finish, a brief comment on NieR Automata. Its designs draw hard on those of Ghost in the Shell. Visually it draws a strong contrast between the Machine Lifeforms, who have inorganic shapes (spheres and cylinders) and very visible and plausible mechanical joints, and the doll-like androids, who might as well be human (although A2 provides some contrast in an android who is damaged enough for the underlying materials to show through). The mechanical nature of the androids is communicated by the acrobatic way they move and the interface elements, and dead androids you find in the field - and later when they start losing arms and stuff, it’s a whole thing. But just like humans in Yoko Taro Games, they’re capable of dying in a puddle of blood.

(I guess if you take one thing from this post it’s that if you’re a robot, don’t expect to keep your arms.)

Robot muscles gives you a chance to give both the ‘anatomy porn’ of drawing something very precisely right, with the added bonus of giving you a reason to draw the muscles écorché, and the chance to make it weird and defamiliarised by splitting it with mechanical elements. In short... they look cool!

In this whole post I’ve basically not touched at all on illustration. I can point to a variety of illustrations of robot girls, but in terms of periodising them, I just don’t think I know enough. Though it’s safe to say that cyborg bodies in various states of construction or disrepair are now a mainstream of concept art - and that Ghost in the Shell is usually cited as an influence. I don’t know if robot muscles ever truly became the mainstream way to depict a robot, but it does feel like they’re increasingly common.

One artist I will briefly mention (besides sukabu), mostly bc I think they’re neat, is Haruyo Megurimu, who draws these very intricate designs of ‘necrotech’ which is sort of very biological robots extending out of human bodies - limbs extended on long spindly insectoid strands, jaws splitting open, that kinda thing. Can��t say who influenced them or anything but it’s a compelling extension of the idea into a particular corner of aesthetic space.

And that’s all I’ve got I think. There’s definitely big gaps like. More recent sci-movies. Western comics. Nevertheless, that’s an arc.

If you’ve read this far: thank you for indulging my autism.

[darkbluekies]

this poll is hard af! Hear me out!

Silas: would be happy that no one has done the deed with you, but if you werent a virgin, he would kill the person that touched you.

Dr.kry: hes a doctor, yes, hes a yandere, but hes still a doctor, he knows he cant do anything about you being a virgin or not. he knows you only see him as your doctor. he may be annoyed that someone got to touch your innocent soul, but yeah.

King edmund: During his timeline (if i remember correctly) was the 16-1800, so if the wife of the king or anyone in fact would be a non virgin, that was said to be bad or smth like that, so i think he would mad, and kill the person that did take your virginity away, and kill their family.

Jerry: personally, i dont think Jerry would give a fuck if you're a virgin or not. you're hers now so..

Hedwig: think she would be happy to know that youre a virgin, happy to know that no one has touched you yet..

personally, its hard to choose, but if i had to choose, it would be King Edmund..

I am hearing you out and I am agreeing with you😵‍💫

Here's my thoughts:

I think Edmund is the worst too (despite him being the biggest whore in the kingdom) because of his entitlement. He DESERVES someone virgin, DESERVES to be the first one to touch you, DESERVES, DESERVES blah blah. But if someone had done that, he will end their blood line, you're right in that. Kill their entire family — mother, father, cousins, grandparents, dogs, cats, everyone. That family has now never existed, so how could you be anything else than virgin if the one that took it from you never existed? :D

I think that Silas would be the next worst because of his ridiculously large possessiveness. He can't stand knowing that anyone else has had you in the same way he has. If you weren't virgin, he would bring the one who dared to touch what is his (despite knowing you before he did) and torture them worse than anyone else.

Hedwig would feel sad, like she could have prevented things and would blame herself. I'm sure that she is a virgin as well before meeting you and want your first time to be special, together:(

Dr Kry would be fuming, but wouldn't be able to show it. He reminds himself that he isn't a virgin, it wouldn't be fair to assume that you were as well. But he wishes. He wants to teach you, wants to be the one you trust with your first time. But he would most likely deny it. You never had any sex, why would you think so? You just had some fun, not anything real. Dr Kry will show you what is real.

You're right in that Jerry wouldn't care at all. She doesn't care about past things, only the present and the future. She will make sure you forget anyone who has ever "tried" to make you feel good. After all, no one does it like Jerry♡

[hargreevesrage]

I'm so pissed off about season 4 that I made a whole new Tumblr account to complain about it.

What the fuck was that? I had never seen something so truly ridiculous, senseless and bad, just plain bad. I'm embarrassed to even say I liked the show now. There are so many things wrong with it I can't even begin to list them. From beginning to the end nothing made sense. The only positive thing to come out of it was Klaus and Claire's relationship, and the only interesting idea was the timeline train + Five Cafe, everything else was garbage.

Ben's whole thing. Klaus's regression and sexual abuse being played for laughs. Luther being reduced to a single joke. Lila being butchered to give Five a useless love story. Five being numbed and dumbed down, and also not even actually being Five, because Five would never in a million years do that to his family, his own brother. Diego having to deal with all that shit, being blamed for it for no reason, and it also being played for laughs. Allison not actually dealing with anything, adding no depth to her character, sending her and Ray's story into oblivion. Viktor being virtually non-existent. Villains being wacky with no substance, stupid useless wastes of time like the puke scene, the plot being all over the place, Jennifer, nothing being cohesive at all, no themes being explored like before. The whole ending which threw all of the themes established in previous seasons down the drain. And maybe I'm being picky, but the stupidity of saying Claire, Grace and the twins would still exist without Allison and Diego there to conceive them is so laughable and ends the whole thing on such an absurd note that I still can't believe this is actually what they wrote and went to all that trouble to film and release.

It was like the show had no heart, the season had no center because at its core it was empty. Like an AI generated picture or text. Cold, dead images. No light behind its eyes. Just a bunch of scenes someone put together, with people saying things that mean nothing, in a world that means nothing, to say nothing of importance to no one at all.

The cast did all they could do with what they were given, and I will always be grateful for the love and care they put in their characters since the beginning, but that could only go so far in this case. They were hanging on for dear lives. At least there will always be season 1.

[2maegor2cruel]

re alicent, idk i think its reasonable to give up on ur sons after seeing them grow up and repeat the same violence all men do and realizing they will not protect you or their sister anymore. like alicent is shown to be very aware of her sons' violence and has now seen both of them exhibit it toward her daughter. they're not innocent bullied children who need their mothers defense and protection anymore. i hope that made sense

i appreciate you taking the time to explain your thoughts to me, genuinely i do! i think i came across as really negative about the show (and probably still do lol), but honestly, i was more disappointed than angry. I've always been a season 1 defender (for all its wonky and break-neck pacing), and i genuinely think ryan condal and sara hess have it in them to be great writers.

that said, my issue with the alicent-rhaenyra scene wasn't a matter of me not understanding the writers' intent, but rather me disagreeing with it in terms of both characterization AND narrative. i do definitely agree that alicent's perspective on her sons has understandably changed a lot in the 5-10 years (?) since the driftmark incident (aemond is 16 in the show's current timeline, which is ridiculous, so i'm just gonna ignore that lol).

it is everything else about alicent's characterization and how she is treated by the narrative that annoys me. in particular, i really disliked alicent's relentless "humbling" in this season. neither aegon or aemond listen to her; her one ally, her father, is sent away a few episodes in; her lover, criston, won't stand up for her; she has a chilly relationship with her brother, gwayne; larys drops her the second he finds a better mark; her relationship with helaena is almost entirely one-sided; she seemingly has no relationship with her grandchildren at all; etc.

worse, alicent's affair with cole is used to frame b&c as somehow their failing, rather than daemon doing something heinous to hurt his innocent family members. making helaena bust in on them actively fucking was a specific choice the showrunners made, and i cannot fathom why they would do that except to further "embarrass" both alicent and cole. in the book, helaena brings the children to visit alicent every night, as they (shock, horror) love each other and spend a lot of time together. in the show, alicent never has a single scene with jaehaera, doesn't seem to care about jaehaerys at all, and only becomes involved with b&c when helaena walks in on her and criston having sex. hmm!

i honestly wouldn't have as much of a problem with this, if we didn't have the books to compare it to. alicent in the books is a valued advisor to both her sons, she's VERY politically involved throughout the reigns of her husband and sons, and she's an active participant in the protection of king's landing. in the show, alicent is unvalued, powerless, miserable, and with no particular attachment to any of her family members except helaena (kinda).

and this is contrasted with how rhaenyra is framed- a champion of the people! the prophesized savior! feminist icon! she's always being unfairly pigeonholed by her advisors and blamed for daemon's choices, even though she's The Good Guy. the showrunners are seemingly terrified of making rhaenyra unlikeable, so her actual moments of selfishness and cruelty were few and FAR between. i do appreciate the show attempting to address rhaenyra's difficulties ruling as someone with no "martial" training, but i think it would have been a lot more interesting juxtaposed with alicent's adept political maneuvering, her "woman's power". rather than alicent just being a sopping wet paper bag the entire season.

which brings me back to the scene in question. in addition to being a season 1 defender, i've also always been a rhaenicent enjoyer, which is why that final rhaenyra-alicent scene left such a bad taste in my mouth. it did not resonate with me at all, being so logistically idiotic and such a disservice to both of their characters. first, the constant sneaking in/out of king's landing was ridiculous. the sept scene especially annoyed me not just because of the insanity of that choice on rhaenyra's part, but also because SOMETIMES THINGS CAN BE LEFT UNSAID!!! sometimes misunderstandings are perpetuated and we never get closure or catharsis!!!!! less is more, guys, PLEASE, i'm BEGGING.

second, rhaenyra should not be the sole axis upon which alicent's world turns. what about daeron? what was the point of the "he's kind" scene if he doesn't even factor into alicent's sacrifice arithmetic? alicent would have to know he would die too. and what about jaehaerys? in the books, alicent spent time with him every day, but in the show, he doesn't matter to her at all. rhaenyra's husband had his grand-nephew's head cut off in front of his mother and sister, but alicent doesn't mention that. where's the "sacrifice", when alicent doesn't care about any of them to begin with?

like, i keep seeing posts about how "the deaths are supposed to be pointless!!!! that's the point!!!!", but the deaths should be pointless in the context of the broader narrative, they shouldn't be pointless TO THE CHARACTERS THEMSELVES. anyway, i could rant forever, but i need to like. do other stuff. until next time...

[anawkwardlady]

(Warning, sleepy rant incoming, proceed at your own risk)

Is it just me me or does wtc just have an allergy to dismantling structural evil. It goes "wow it sucks" but like a lot of stories it never gives a conclusion. Higurashi with how shion is presented as selfish for not "taking responsibility" instead of admitting the family is evil and that their structures of power need to be torn down, instead blaming everything on a secret operation by takano. Like, can't we just accept that the town is a bit fucked up instead of it being some outsider's fault? And accepting the town is fucked doesnt mean ignoring how the goverment fucked over the town, u know?

Without love it cannot be see? Well you can love something and know that it needs to be put down

Umineko to a lesser extent, by sheer virtue of the Ushiromias being blown asunder- but I am still salty about the lion timeline. Like yes we are shown the servants suffering and told to sympathise but there is no conclusion for the servants- only the family, which I guess makes since since the story focuses on the family but it still bothers me. I don't like how the relatives of the kumasawa are portrayed, it reminded me of this one sherlock story we had to read for lit where sherlock says that the poor are gossips and good only for the information they may give. Its more complicated than that but you get the point, they are not afforded the same dignity.

Ciconia is still up in the air cause maybe the narrator is unreliable, or maybe ryukishi is being a centrist, I don't know.

That doesn't mean I dislike wtc... okay I dislike higurashi but that's mostly for other reasons and I still adore rena- but I love umineko and I'm fascinated by it structurally- but I feel like I have to say this to someone or I'll explode

It's not like this problem is unique to wtc, the "return to norm" is the ending to heroes journey in writing, a structural tool that is very widespread and is very easily utilised for centrist storywriting, and I'd go as far as saying the heroes journey is inheritly centrist but I'm too sleep deprived and under qualified to make that argument

(For clarification I'm not saying wtc uses the heroes journey as a basis I'm just saying stories with a centrist basis are common because stories that use the heroes journey are common)

None of this is even probably intentional, but isn't that worse? That centrist thinking is this deeply embedded into the worlds cultural subconscious?

Sorry for the incomprehensible rant, I need to sleep

Okay,

So I don't agree that everything is blamed on Takano. The way the town treated Satoko was very much on them and I believe we were shown how everyone was ridiculous and stuck up on a "We can't be normal to this family because the village is against them therefore I should be against them" mentality and Oryo stubbornness on this. Takano's actions were what they were but she didn't make the locals bully a little girl. I believe we were also shown this during the violent argument Keiichi had with Mion and Rena when they were asking each other what to do with Satoko. Keiichi started blaming Mion for not taking her in, then Rena showed his hypocrisy because he is also pretty well off... and you know whats sad about that : they're all kids fighting about how to save an abused little girl because they're almost all neglected to some point and they can't reach out. Can't really see a better proof that their respective families and the village itself are dysfunctional beside how Takano's plan interacted with it.

And yeah for Umineko the servants were pretty neglected at the end, as you said its because it mostly focuses on the family itself but I get this criticism. I can't say anything about Ciconia, haven't read it. But I also don't think its inherently a return to normal, a lot of them seem to find piece but i'd argue they not unharmed. I think a lot of it is trying to say you have been hurt and still find some kind of balance, which, considering Ryukishi's background I get why he would rather go that route even if it can completely be criticized (I sometimes have some point i'm a bit "meh" about when handling abuse and forgiveness but whatever). I'm not a literary professional tho lol, what do I know about all of that.

[lostcauses-noregrets]

ASDFDSADF I am sorry for showing up uninvited but oh my god that other asks speaks to me! I joined Eruri fandom in January and the whole "you are a fake Eruri if you love Levi more than Erwin" thing (someone posted several screenshots of Eruri shippers and blamed them for liking Levi more????) happened back in the first or second day of February so I was pretty new to Eruri and its fandom and it ruined my entire vibe because I'm not interested in fandom dramas I just want calm and nice fandom interactions. You probably understand me considering how I have never seen you involved in any shipping or fandom drama. Anyway, that really made me feel :/ about this ship and 2-3 days later I saw someone mocking OC shippers and L*vihan shippers "oh he's a gay man he'd not fuck you you can't call yourself a Levi stan if you don't ship him with Erwin" and I was only a baby Eruri, only for a month and I thought no matter how amazing the ship is the fandom was terrible but luckily I saw how the fandom reacted to that first tweet they were all joking about how they are fake eruris for random reasons and thank god I stayed around to see that because for me honestly Eruri is the best ship ever and I really enjoy all the fan arts and fanfics but that tweet still haunts me SDFGdsadf some people need to realize that Erwin's position didn't allow him to get close to anyone else and his deepest bond was with Levi so a huuuuge majority of Erwin stans ship Eruri while Levi is extremely popular especially in Japan and he interacts with other characters more and he's "shipping shaped"/perfect for shipping so I think his stans are often multishippers and that's why it seems like Eruri is an Erwin ship to that other person, there is no consipracy theory or anything, it's simple as that. I know some Eruri fans pick fights or argue with other Levi ships but my experience after that tweet was very calm and wholesome, I think it's because Eruri is a mature ship? Most Eruri shippers I see are adults. (Sorry if I sent this twice I am drunkish but I got excited because lol that was my first Eruri drama and I never saw anyone else mention it before) love your blog by the way lots of love <3

Ooh....right! This is actually starting to ring a bell now! I do remember seeing people posting the most hilarious shit about being fake Eruris, but I missed the original tweets that caused the whole drama in the first place. This is invariably what happens, I miss the actual drama and end up catching the tail end of the fall out which leaves me completely confused. Literally me when there is drama on the timeline 😂

Fandom, by its nature, attracts people who tend to be...a little obsessive (to put it mildly) and no fandom is immune to drama, no matter how old or supposedly mature the fans are. The Eruri fandom is no exception. However I do think that with an older fanbase there is a better chance that drama will be viewed more dimly and shut down more rapidly when it inevitably arises. This is a case in point. I have no idea if anyone took the original posts serious or not (I hope not) but the fandom was pretty quick to turn the whole thing into a joke and pour ridicule on the idea that you were a "fake Eruri" if blah blah blah.

Anyway, I'm so glad you didn't let this nonsense put you off the Eruri fandom Anon and I'm glad you stuck around to enjoy all the amazing fic and art that we've been blessed with over the years.

[miraculouscontent]

where do i even begin

The focus in this episode is all over the place and also on none of the right things.

Let’s just start with the obvious: they didn’t even bother showing Alya's reaction to Marinette being Ladybug. We got nothing. Marinette revealing her identity to Alya is supposed to be a big deal, but the episode brushes it under the rug and even seems to lowkey blame Marinette for not telling Alya sooner, to the point where it outright lies and has Alya claim that Marinette’s secret was responsible for all of Alya’s Lady Wifi appearances.

It’s not like I’m surprised anymore when the show blames Marinette for like--anything, but the fact that this season seems to brag about its continuity by being on a firm timeline and then keeps going against continuity is really irritating.

And speaking of continuity, the Adrien pictures are back on the wall with absolutely no reason given. Narratively speaking, the show put them there so Alya would see them and think of bringing up Adrien to get Marinette to take a break, but the show can’t just do that if it wants to imply that it has continuity. Worse still is that this is the episode featuring “Charm Bug” (does her form have a name? I just call it Charm Bug and continue to do so), meaning that “Gang of Secrets” (where there were no Adrien pictures) has to take place before this and “Furious Fu” (where there are also no Adrien pictures) has to take place after.

At this point, they might as well just confirm that “destiny” is a real force and the ladybug miraculous is messing with Marinette’s room and twisting her emotions to make the love square endgame because--yeah, that’s all it is at this point.

The other thing is that Alya shoos Marinette away from her guardian duties so Marinette can go comfort Kagami (let’s be honest, the best part of the episode was Alya being like, “but what about Adrien?” and Marinette was basically like, “what about Adrien?”), which sounds great, but then it all goes back to Adrien, because of course it does.

Not only that, but the episode mocks Marinette for worrying about Kagami. Not only does Alya doubt Marinette’s concern, but Kagami isn’t at all affected by the break-up and isn’t even touched by Marinette’s worry.

The thing is, I get where Marinette’s coming from, because this is the Kagami who told Ladybug in “Heart Hunter” that she (Kagami) and Adrien were perfect for each other to the point where Kagami prioritized her potentially getting together with Adrien over her friendship with Marinette. Also keep in mind that Marinette is Kagami’s only friend, and it makes total sense that Marinette would expect Kagami to be devastated by the break-up.

But because it’s Miraculous, the show makes Marinette look like an idiot for being concerned for Kagami, as if saying, “Silly Marinette! Kagami’s not like you! Kagami is a strong independent woman!! You’re just so over-emotional and you were ridiculous for being sad about your own break-up! You should be more like her!”

I also don’t like it because it presents Kagami as this character who really does feel nothing due to the show not letting her. She was angry at Adrien, obviously, but she was also immensely upset and it made sense when she put so much effort in trying to get him to return her affections.

Buuuut no. Kagami is just annoyed by Marinette’s efforts to try and get her back together with Adrien (it’s not that her anger isn’t warranted, but that’s all they let her feel instead of any genuine sadness over the break-up).

And of course, there’s no mention about Marinette literally trying to help get Kagami back together with Adrien and how selfless that is on Marinette’s part. Obviously I don’t agree with Marinette disregarding Kagami’s feelings (I do hate though how the episode refused to have Kagami explain why Adrien upset her, which would help Marinette understand because she seems to think there’s a misunderstanding/Kagami doubting herself), but the episode refuses to acknowledge Marinette’s good intentions because it’s Marinette and because she’s supporting Adrimi and not the love square, so they’ll make her look as bad as possible. This led to the fandom talking about Marinette and her oBsEsSiOn with Adrien instead of saying UM HI YEAH MARINETTE IS DOING A “HEART HUNTER” 2.0??

(The show also does this consistently, by the way.)

Another thing the show won’t acknowledge is that what Marinette does with Kagami is extremely similar to what Alya does with Marinette. Alya has ignored Marinette’s agency, physically pushed her towards Adrien, and locked her in a room with Adrien no matter how many times Marinette has told her no and that she doesn’t want that.

But because it’s Marinette and because what she’s shipping is Adrimi (i.e: a ship that interferes with the love square), the episode absolutely tears her apart for it. If Alya’s meddling was treated the same way - where she’d be constantly put in the wrong and punished for it - I wouldn’t say a word about this, but we know that’s not the case from “Reflekdoll” (where Reflekta targeted Marinette and Rose of all people) and “The Puppeteer 2″ (hey, remember when Alya did all of that and then it was the museum staff who did nothing wrong who got the worst of Puppeteer’s wrath?).

And this isn’t even taking into consideration that, once again, Marinette has learned something from someone else because they were never called out or punished or learned (originally being Adrien/Bustier where she “learned” to trust Chloe and see where that got her???), and then she’s the one who gets the heat for it.

Might I also add how insulting it is that the episode before this had Marinette saying that she “didn’t want to focus on love,” and then immediately afterwards, Alya is pushing for Adrienette and the episode itself won’t let anyone shut up about Adrien?

Like, this is the episode where Marinette does guardian stuff, gets an upgrade in Charm Bug, and yet the episode hyperfocuses on Aaaaaadrien. He doesn’t even do anything; he’s just a black hole that inhales all available attention and magically pulls all the characters towards his general location.

Then the episode keeps breaking its own continuity as an excuse to make things more about Adrien and also more about the love square, like saying that Marinette carries her disguises everywhere when it’s really just an excuse for Marinette to conveniently have the umbrella so that they can recreate the umbrella scene (by the way, the line from Marinette about “recreating Kagami’s moment where she fell in love with Adrien” is both incredibly forced and incredibly obvious because we’ve never even seen how Kagami fell for Adrien).

And when you already know how the show goes, it all becomes so predictable, which is a huge problem. By the time you hear Marinette say that she “didn’t want to focus on love” last episode, you already know what’s going happen. This episode reaffirms Marinette’s crush on Adrien, which is weird because it’s not as if there was ever any doubt in the first place? The show didn’t even try to convince its audience that Marinette was actually trying to move on, which gives the scene no impact when it happens. We already know that Marinette isn’t really in denial (she’s not stupid) and is very likely saying that she’s not in love with Adrien because admitting it hasn’t gotten her anywhere and she’s repeating something to herself is an attempt to make it true (which is a common coping mechanism for people with self-esteem issues/anxiety), so the scene is just for shipping fuel.

We’ve seen future episodes that show that Marinette hasn’t made any actual progress, hence being another piece of evidence towards my theory that the show does it on purpose to get the Adrienette fans to freak out when anything happens even if it’s reversed in the end. It’s particularly frustrating because it denies Marinette of agency yet again, with her saying something and the show then going lol okay but what if--

It’s gross, and made more so by Kagami watching Marinette and Adrien from a distance and saying that they’re “made for each other.” I’ve talked many times before about how the show is too lazy to have actual chemistry between the love square so they’ll just have characters say that they’re meant to beeeeee, so I won’t go into that, but really, actually think about what Kagami’s saying here.

This is the guy that, in her eyes, abandoned her repeatedly on dates and lied in order to get away from her. She stated outright that Adrien had disappointed her to the point where all of her feelings for Adrien seemed to have completely disappeared and she didn’t even want to be friends with him anymore (at least for now).

Yet, the show had Kagami not only say that line, but told Marinette directly that Adrien was perfect for her. This means either one of two things, neither being good:

- the show intentionally had Marinette do all this so that Kagami would feel embarrassed for Adrien and thus fix all of Adrimi’s relationship problems without Adrien having to do any work to earn her trust back (notice how Adrien in this episode is an “extra good boy” this time around, probably even more than they usually try - keyword: try - to portray him)

- Kagami’s opinion on Adrien hasn’t changed at all and she’s essentially saying that Marinette belongs with this guy who has hurt Kagami, betrayed her trust, and will probably do the same to Marinette

And obviously the show doesn’t think about any of that. It just wants to push for the love square. The only reason there was any focus on Kagami at all was to have a reason to get Marinette to go to Kagami, for Kagami to get angry at Marinette because - as we all know - Marinette “has to mess up and learn in every episode,” so there’d be a reason to go to where Adrien was, and so Kagami could become the next local shipper for the love square.

Marinette didn’t even get to figure out the magical charms by herself; Rena Rouge gave her the answer. It was like the show saw her doing guardian work and shoved her out the door because the only thing she’s good for is being part of the love square. Alya gets seconds of time shown with her looking over the grimoire to figure out the trick, which makes the whole thing underwhelming and rushed when Rena comes up and tells Ladybug that it’s essentially “just been about her” the whole time, meaning it’s just the show yet again being like “see, Marinette? If you’d just figured this out bEfORe...” (note that the episode never tells Marinette that she’s unnecessarily guilting/blaming herself)

But yeah, despite the episode not giving Adrien anything to do, characters talk about him constantly, Marinette somehow doesn’t get the spotlight she needs despite getting a power-up form, and the episode feels the need to constantly railroad Marinette exactly where it wanted to go, not for her, but for the love square, which has always been about not her. It’s already bad when the episode itself is bad, but when it has so much to throw in and delivers on absolutely none of it, it just makes it all the more painful.

[thefanficmonster]

Just Another One

Sequel to: ‘A Little Bit Of Honesty’

Corpse Husband x Actress!Reader (Female)

Warnings: Angst, Heartbreak, Mention of bad past relationships, Swearing

Genre: Angst, Romance, RPF (Real Person Fic)

Summary: They keep proving each other right in the most wrong ways possible. They each want to be guarded even if that means the other will be hurt. Maybe that’s what they want - to hurt one another because they’ve already hurt each other once before.

Requested by the lovely readers who enjoyed the previous fic ‘A Little Bit Of Honesty’. Sorry for the large time gap between the posting of the two fics but I still hope you guys will take the time to read it and if so I hope you enjoy it! Love you all with all my heart, Vy ❤

When you go out of your way to avoid leaving the house your options of entertainment are severely limited and you can’t blame anyone or anything but yourself for it. Today, I wouldn’t have gone out of my apartment even if I was one of those people who frequent the outdoors seeing as how the sky is trying to flood the Earth with all this nonstop rain. It does set a mood for a perfect night in but when you spend all your nights in doing the same thing over and over again, the atmosphere is practically meaningless. And so I ‘ve decided to resort to channel surfing as though I’ll find something interesting on TV that I haven’t yet seen on one of my social media timelines.

I pass several cooking channels on my journey, making a mental note of their individual numbers in case I don’t stumble across anything capable of better distracting me from my boredom and loneliness that’s slowly starting to creep in. I pass by a few movie channels showing teenage romcoms as if to celebrate the start of summer so you can imagine how quickly I moved on from those. Then come the celebrity channels which can often get a laugh out of me because of how pathetic and unbelievably ridiculous they are. And so, I stick around one where there’s a broadcast on a movie showing that’s happening tonight in LA. Oddly enough, despite my anxiety, going to a movie showing has always been on my list of things I’d want to do. This can be considered living vicariously or rubbing salt into the wound that I’ll probably never go because my anxiety and fear of being recognized is too severe. Either way I stick around to watch it.

And man do I regret it now looking at several different angels of a couple of actors entering the venue where they are to be photographed and asked questions by the mob of paparazzi that’s gathered due to the massive event. That in and of itself doesn’t sound - and really isn’t - so bad. However, it’s important to note that the actress in this duo is Y/N. Y/N L/N. My Y/N....shit, sorry, I mean my FRIEND Y/N, her arm linked with whatever-the-fuck-his-name-is who is holding an umbrella above the both of them, shielding them from the downpour of rain that is also taking place in LA apparently.

“The two were seen entering the venue earlier this evening, looking particularly cozy in each other’s presence if I do say so myself. The rain probably worked nicely in their favor.“ The first reporter says, her teasing tone of voice sending chills of anger down my spine as I glare at the screen, hands balled in fists, jaw clenched - all my body’s instinctive reactions to what is being shown to me. I know I technically have no right to behave or feel this way, in fact I should be fucking happy for Y/N and her successful career and the progress in her love life. But damn it how can I?! I was so damn close to kissing this girl! I was so fucking close to falling in another trap, tripping and landing in the embrace of another liar and user, another girl who switches partners more often than shoes. How could I’ve been so reckless to get so close to her even platonically? How did we become close enough for me to 1) show her my face; 2) start inviting her over to my apartment regularly; and how didn’t I notice the kind of messed up person she was all that time.

She was all sweet and flirting and shit a week or so ago and now she’s doing the exact same thing with him! The cameras are capturing them perfectly: every laugh, every exchange of a knowing look or nod, ever smack to his arm when he tells a joke. But what bothers me most is the many times he’s wrapped his arm around her to pull her closer. Not just for pictures, but just because the fucker felt like it! And Y/N doesn’t seem to mind it at all. 

“They have been the talk of the town recently, so while they could just be adding fuel to the fire, they could also have been caught by the flame and ‘caught feelings’ as they say. Regardless these two are a view we’d like to see more often.“ The other reporter says and that’s the final straw.

In one swift motion I turn the TV off and throw the remote across the room. It hits the wall and falls to the ground in several pieces, broken by the force of the impact. Just like I am broken by the force of the impact of these news. I don’t know which is worse: the fact that I fell for her and almost let her know it; the fact that she’s just another member of the club I don’t want anywhere near my life; or the fact that I can’t believe it.

Yeah that’s right - one foolish part of me refuses to believe that’s she’d do such a thing. I think that’s the same part which is still in awe of her so you can bet I ignore that part the majority of the time.

She is just another one. Not the one. Having been hurt before doesn’t mean she won’t hurt me or anyone else she’s gonna be with. Hurt people hurt people.

And damn has she hurt me, probably without knowing a damn thing. How selfish can you be, Y/N? How selfish can you really get? And how much am I going to allow you to hurt me?

                                                             *  *  *

“Thank you so much, Andrew. I would’ve died on the spot of anxiety if I was on my own.“ I say to my best friend who is currently sitting next to me on a park bench, in a tux, eating a cheeseburger. I too am still in my gown and am also gorging on a cheeseburger of my own.

“Don’t mention it. Us anxious people need to stick together.“ He bumps his shoulder against mine, stealing a small genuine smile from me, “Plus I couldn’t not come with you. You know how much I like a good rumor.“

I scoff, “Of course you do, but then again there was no need to add to what the media has already made a whole-ass ship out of.” I roll my eyes and take another bite. My appetite hasn’t been in its best condition so I’m only eating this under Andrew’s orders. I have no idea how people can ship us romantically, he’s the definition of an older - and very bossy - brother to me. I wish I could tell each and every single one of those girls who hate me because I’ve ‘stolen their man’ that I’d most likely be their sister in law rather than man snatcher, seeing as how my relationship with Andrew is so sibling-like.

That’s because we’re too alike, no one gets that. People play the ‘opposites attract’ car more often than I consider rational. But  then again when they see a couple like Andrew and I - who are basically the same person in different bodies - they suddenly think we’re super compatible. Trust me, we’re not. And everyone who’s been on set with us will tell you the same.

“What can I say...“ he shrugs, smirking at me, “I like the fun. I bet Becca doesn’t though.“

I can’t help but huff. Andrew is the only one I’ve ever openly expressed my frustrations with Rebecca to. He was super helpful on the subject, seeing as how he can relate - many partners of his have tried to use him, some of which even succeeded. He’s more than qualified to school me on the topic but it turned more into sharing bad experiences. One of which was that instance back at Corpse’s apartment.

“And neither does Corpse I suppose.“ As though he’s read my mind, he pokes the hurt spot, pouring salt in the wound causing me to visibly cringe as though the pain was physical - because it was, I felt it in my chest and in my gut, a sharp stab of guilt and regret. 

Why did I let it come to that? Why did I let us get so close? How did I not think of the consequences?

“I don’t care if he does or doesn’t.“ My hand automatically reaches for the pocket of the jeans I’m not even wearing in search of a cigarette. Not that I’d be able to light one even if I had them on me - Andrew would smack it out of my hand before I could even take a single puff.

He has the audacity to laugh, “You’re such a bad liar, Y/N.”

That’s all he needs to say really - that’s enough to make me feel seen and understood. Though that’s not always a good thing. I often times wish he couldn’t read me so well. Better said: I wish I didn’t let myself be so readable, you know. I’m just glad he’s the one who sees me because if it were anyone else they’d use this vulnerability of mine against me. I’m well aware that it’s a weakness, a really inconvenient one, but damn it I can’t get rid of it. I feel like I’ll be less human if I lose it. Everyone’s allowed to be vulnerable, some just are lucky enough to choose who they’ll be vulnerable around. I’m lucky enough to to have a choice, not so lucky in the people I choose to trust. Guess that’s not a luck thing, it’s just my inability to decipher whether a person is worth all the pain and torture of coming clean to them or not. So far many people have burnt me but two stick out in particular - Becca and Corpse. Corpse especially, which is the odd thing considering he hasn’t even wronged me in any way. At least not yet.

“Your phone’s vibrating.“ Andrew says, pulling me out of my overflowing head when he hands me my phone which I handed to him because of my dress’ lack of pockets.

“Thanks.“ I mutter through a sigh as I take it from him, checking the notification I’ve gotten.

My stomach drops: it’s a message from Corpse.

“Hey I saw you are in LA but we have a stream tomorrow, will you still be participating?“

Before I can reply, he sends me another message.

“I know you’re probably very busy but we get the most viewership on the streams when you’re in them so....“

I’ve probably been staring at my phone screen for longer than I thought since Andrew felt the need to make sure I was still breathing: “Hey, you ok? You look terribly pale.” I can barely hear him let alone reply. I can’t hear my own thoughts to know what to reply to him. “Y/N, you’re scaring me.”

I’m scaring myself too, Andrew. I’m scared too. I’m scared of how broken my picker has become. I almost kissed this guy! I almost entrusted all my thoughts, hopes, wishes and goals to him! What the fuck was I thinking?! Well, at least I know what he was thinking about - viewership. Likes, subs, views, publicity. The more eyes on the stream the better for him and everyone else. I genuinely want to applaud him, no one has been so direct about using me before. I was in a relationship with Becca for almost a year before I accidentally found out what she had been doing the whole time. No one’s ever smacked me in the face with this much honesty. It’s bittersweet really.

I want to laugh, I want to cry, slap myself across the face, slap him...I want to do so much, but all I can do now is sit in silence and think of how I could be so stupid.

He’s just another one, how did I not see that? How do I never see it until it’s too late? Why is one part of me still screaming: ‘He didn’t mean it like that!’

AND WHY THE FUCK DO I WANT TO BELIEVE IT?

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[antiloreolympus]

12 Anti LO Asks

1. its victim blaming of hades to tell minthe its HER fault she "couldnt get over him". like? you lied to her! youre the one who blurred the lines to date her! you were just as toxic to her if not more so by controlling where she lives and her job, all while never defending her to your cruel family! you had all the power over her while she had nothing! you dumped her for a 19 year old and dont care she crippled minthe! i wont excuse minthe's actions, but hades is ultimately the worse of the two IMO

2. you know why fans claimed "Minthe should've reacted better"? since the first episode Rachel has been drilling into their heads Minthe is an irredeemable monster, and her not bending over backwards to H/P means she deserves the absolute worst. Minthe reacting how anyone logically would doesn't matter when LO is designed to coddle H/P, and anyone against them must suffer for it, even if the victim to H/P's actions. they never wanted her to be "redeemed", they want her head on a silver platter.

3. i know this is not what she intended bc the only characterization rachel has of hxp is "the best over everything" but uh, does she know having hades control all the petroleum and gasses and whatever else is actively destroying the planet, right? like hes helping the very thing persephone draws her power from and what she's connected to be destroyed to appease hes need for wealth and power. its kinda gross hes being romanticized while he commits horrible acts like this for his bank account.

4. its not impossible to go opposite in their original myth personalities and still have it work. like in hades game, sisyphus is one of the most likable characters, achilles is gentle and kind, ares is calm and rational, etc, but it makes sense within the context of the story. LO in comparison goes "all these loving mothers are evil because i said so! this beloved god is now evil because i said so! minthe is evil because i said so!" and that's about it in terms of logic to these wild changes.

5. I can kinda get behind anon's theory about the flower nymphs looking like P to help her be undetected, the problem is there are also unrelated women in comic who are bright pink and look just like her, with hades even confusing them for her! if i had to bet the only reason they look like that is because rachel just wanted daphne to look like her to hammer home apollo is "obsessed" with P and to fake them as her "real family" over demeter. also just laziness in designing characters in general.

6. its weird hades and persephone are well aware what they're doing is bad even openly admitting it and yet the narrative is so hellbent on excusing their bad actions?? like hades being the major toxic factor in his relationship to minthe, persephone killing people, or hades wanting to bone an eternal 19 year old? like rachel you know thats not how character growth works, right? you cant show they have horrible flaws and leave them to never grow and learn from it, that's not good writing at all.

7. what i also dont get is the hierarchy makes no sense? like zeus is framed as the top god, but that would mean hades cant be the most important man ever so rachel also made him equal rank with zeus (and i guess poseidon too) so?? how does zeus have all that power over them then if theyre all equal? is it because zeus swallowed metis?  also how are the fertility goddess so powerful and rare yet so easily taken down? how are they overpowered and super weak at the same time? i just dont get it.

8. Re reading chapter 144 and other anon is right we do see the pomegranate pin on Hades outfit (so Hades gifts it to her)

But also some things to note

During the makeout session persy begins to disappear in butterfly form and hades is like "no don't leave!" And he grabs her, preventing her from leaving. Which is..kinda Ick considering they were on their way to having (public) sex and he doesn't want her to leave which seems like he's not really respecting her boundaries? (because if she does he'll "be lonely")

The pomegranate pin is Hades' to begin with so technically one of Persephones symbols is not hers (yes I know in the original myth she ate it in the underworld / was forced to eat it but still its supposed to be her symbol)

Hades notes that he "doesn't want to overstep his boundaries as host" because Persephone is a guest (too late for that)

Persephones main concern (after what a week or 2?) after being raped is when Hades wants to stop her reaction is "dont you want me anymore?"

Girl you aren't even dating ...??

Persy's literal one and only concern is that she thinks if she doesnt sleep with Hades right then or when/if he wants to that "she wont be able to give him what hes used to" ... Which is reinforcing that she went to therapy to get "over being blocked" in regards to having sex

Although Hades does mention that she shouldn't feel like she needs to please him and that a kiss can just be a kiss which would be nice

(And yet his thinking of marrying her amd he's known her for 2, 3 weeks? ... And he says "the beginning of a new relationship is exciting and scary" so hes basically indicating thay their dating at this point, I think?)

And later the nymphs in the store are like "do you wanna be the dominatrix of the bedroom?? Buy this lingerie!" And persy does. So??

Meanwhile Demeter is very worried for her daughter who is busy sitting in Hades lap in a pool. 

9. Can we talk about how anons are making fucking flow charts for the LO Timeline cause it's so ridiculously jumbled?

10. im not even against rushed relationships, ive known actual couples who met and were married all within the same year and it worked out great, the difference though is these were people who had their own lives and previous relationships. the issue with LO is RS designed it so Persephone can NEVER have relationships or a life outside of Hades, and if they did get married offscreen, it's framing their marriage in a toxic and unbalanced light. That's not a romance, it's a disaster waiting to happen.

11. i feel like there's a difference between drawing an interesting hooked/aquiline nose versus whatever the hell RS puts on Hades' face. It honestly looks like he's in between morphing into a bird half the time since it just looks like a beak over an actual facial feature.

12. are there shareholders or a board of advisors or something at underworld corp? because if there is id say they have more than enough reason to kick hades out and strip him of his titles/shares because of all the shit he's caused by being guided by his broken pp over thinking with his head. liking dating TWO employees? and getting one of them phsyically crippled by the other bc he can't be honest with either of them and she's a walking time bomb? he's a walking HR nightmare.

[janekfan]

for the bingo board, would you mind doing health scare with jon and the crew? i love your writing btw

Thank you so much!!! 

Uh, I filled this probably unconventionally? But I hope it’s okay!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/28514178

Jon first noticed something was off when he woke up shivering in the dead of night. But temperatures had been dropping steadily, there was no reason to think that it was anything other than the thin, poorly insulated walls of his flat causing the problem. Exhausted, Jon knuckled enough sleep from his eyes to retrieve another blanket, deciding before he slipped away again to wear a warmer cardigan tomorrow because the archives had a tendency to be chilly.

When Jon limped his way into the office the next day his joints were already burning and loose, feeling all too much like they’d been crushed into powder. He knew better than to walk that extra stop from the train but he was so embittered about his new, illustrious position as Head Archivist that being crammed like a sardine with hundreds of other people all but reading his mind, knowing instinctively that he wasn’t cut out for the work, was unbearable and he’d needed an escape. It wasn’t that bad; he was just tired from trying to fix Gertrude’s mess, that’s all. He just needed to redirect his attention away from the needles stabbing into him every time he took a step and focus on the mountain of files he had yet to sort through.

There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to how they were organized, but he had been able to use the dates scrawled across the tops of the stiff yellowing papers to get some semblance of a timeline going. That was where Jon found himself when Martin dropped off a cuppa, thanking him absentmindedly as he compared what was either a nine or a seven to another, clearer script.

“Um. Jon?”

“Hm?” It couldn’t matter that much and Jon filed them away in deference to the tea. Jon hadn’t realized how thirsty he was...what time was it?

“I. It’s half three.” Oh. “And I. I just haven’t seen you eat? Anything?”

“Oh.”

“You’re so busy, of course! It’s natural to get, uh, caught up! I could fix you something, if you’d like?”

“I’m.” Not hungry, that was for certain. Either the pain or the exhaustion was upsetting his stomach and the idea of eating right now was--

“Jon?” Maybe he’d eaten something gone off? Past the expiry?

“Oh. Um. Actually.”

“It’s no trouble!”

“Some. Some toast would be lovely, Martin, thank you.” A bite or two would help and as strange as it felt to take Martin up on his offer, the slightest bit of tension bled out of his shoulders.

Things had been.

Tense.

Since he’d accepted the position.

It was clear, no, true, that Sasha was better deserving of the job. She had more experience, more knowledge, more everything and yet Elias had passed her right over, giving Jon the ridiculous choice to resign or take it.

He should have resigned.

Finding a new workplace would be easier than watching his friends pull away from him. He didn’t blame Tim for siding with Sasha. She needed support right now. And anything he could think of to say to her would make him sound ungrateful that he’d been selected over her. Couldn’t very well go up to her and admit that he hated this and wanted everything to go back to the way it was in Research, because she really did want it.

And he.

“Toast’s up.” Martin sidestepped into the room to place the small plate on the corner of the desk. “I wasn’t sure what you’d like with it so I got a few things!” Cheerful and bright, he placed the jams down with a small spoon. He couldn’t have known it was exactly the right thing to do, that dry toast was about all Jon was going to be able to manage. “Anything I can help with?” Tentative, it was no secret that Jon was prickly at the best of times.

“Ah, um.” Jon gestured to a box, repressed a flinch when it seemed like his shoulder would jump from its socket. “I’ve been organizing by the dates on the top? Just, just for something.”

“Got it.”

Jon made his way slowly through one slice, later agreeing with Martin that he’d gotten too caught up with work to think about the second.

Things didn’t improve.

Maybe it was this.

Maybe it was that.

Excuse after excuse, because anything would be better than what he knew in his heart this really was and finally late one evening Jon clutched the bed spread despite the fire flaring in his fingers and buried his face into the soft fabric. It was foolish; it wouldn’t change anything to be so upset and he should be better equipped to handle it considering these spells would continue happening. He breathed in, out, slow, measured, but instead of calming him, he burst into sobs, muffling himself in the sheets and crying despite the pain and as he lay there, coming down from his tears of frustration, Jon realized, accepted, what was happening. The reason for his fever, headaches, the increase in pain, the trouble eating, sleeping--

“You are fine.” He whispered repeatedly into the cold isolated dark of his bedroom. “It won’t last forever. It never does.” But it always felt like forever and he couldn’t help but wonder how long it would be this time. What mistake did he make to cause it, even though Jon knew deep down it didn’t matter. That these things came and went with the wind and no matter what habits he changed to try and mitigate it, it never mattered. It was as if he was only able to talk himself down in time for it to flare up again and the constant fight to convince himself he would be alright, that he would make it through again and again and again was exhausting because it meant he was done in before the day even began.

Jon’s body ached like one giant bruise, crushed, pulled apart, at once boneless and so heavy that moving out of bed was out of the question. Brain stuffed with cotton wool and foggy thoughts meant that to speak meant to hurt so he didn’t, knowing he came across as spiteful but he didn’t have the energy to explain, not when he was so focused on making it from train to Institute to door to stairs to office; each leg of such a routine journey worse than the last. Sitting up was an ordeal and Jon had to drag his stick and string self out of bed after each restless night with caution, lest he pull something loose out of place. Braces, tape, hidden, hiding, normal, normal, normal. How he could be so tired and still not be able to sleep at night was a torture he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy.

Greetings, pleasantries, small talk all standing in the way of Jon reaching his desk and taking a break from what was essentially waking up. But it hurt. It all hurt. And it made it all worse because they were already angry with him and they wouldn’t stop being angry at him unless he put work into mending their relationships and he couldn’t put work into it when he wanted nothing more than to lay down and be unconscious for however long it took until this all passed.

The worst part of it all was that he needed help and didn’t know how to ask for it. Not with the cold shoulders, the whispers, the looks. And he only had himself to blame. The desk phone caught his attention and Jon was surprised it wasn’t shrouded in a layer of dust, still weighing his choices. Call someone, probably Martin. Or drag himself out of his office. One would only wound his pride. Gingerly, Jon cradled the phone to his ear, licking chapped lips before dialing Martin’s extension.

“Oh, J’Jon?” He’d never called any of them before. “Uh, what can I do for you?” Thank god. Trust Martin’s helpful nature to override any other questions.

“Ah, Martin. Yes, thank you. If you could--” There was a scuffle, a yelp, muffled through his door, followed by the dramatic clearing of a throat and:

“You can’t hide in there all week, Jon!” Came Tim’s sing-song reply and the hang up was two fold; through the receiver and the clang of the thing on Martin’s desk. Jon took a deep breath, pushing back the emotions threatening to flood him, tipping his head back and begging the tears to stop.

Having to ask for help was almost impossible and the longer he waited to show his face, the worse it would be.

The only thing he’d accomplished by picking up the phone was to put himself on a time limit.

This was too overwhelming.

Their desks are meters away but it may as well have been kilometers with how much he was hurting. But Jon pushed himself to his unsteady feet anyway, wishing both that someone would just notice and that he was masking his symptoms enough that they wouldn’t. He wasn’t foolish enough to leave his cane behind. It took concentration to keep his expression neutral, to force himself to walk smoothly. To pretend it was a regular day.

“That’s a level ten scowl, boss.” Jon rolled his eyes. “Honestly, you’ve been so moody lately.” Tim looked up from where he was twiddling away on his phone. Taking a break, that’s all, nothing to be upset with even though he couldn’t help but compare the number of files stacked on their individual desks. Jon swallowed hard around the tangle of hot disappointment.

“I’ve b’been, uh. It’s well, it’s a lot.” He hadn’t heard Sasha come up behind him, tone droll and capricious and all too familiar these days.

“I thought you’d be happier considering your position.” When Jon laughed nervously, it was damp with suppressed emotion. “It’s like you didn’t even want it.” And good lord at this moment he’d never wanted it less. But how could he talk to her about how difficult this transition had been when he was the thief? So he didn’t defend himself, instead going along with their jokes at his expense, trying to explain what he’d tried to call for. It was difficult to breathe in their presence, it was difficult to stand. It was difficult to accept that his friends were actively making things harder.

How would they know?

Tell them.

They’ll think you’re lying.

You were fine the other day.

“I was hoping you’d help me collect some files.” Jon wrapped his pompous academic exterior around him like a shield and for a horrifying moment he thought Tim was going to tell him off.

“Why didn’t you say so, boss?” Sarcasm dripped like crude oil from each syllable. “You just tell me what you want and I’ll fetch it for you.”

“Ah, j’just uh.” Jon pointed to what he needed in the stacks and Tim grunted with the weight of it, chuckling without mirth.

“Letting being the Big Boss go to your head are you?” He wiped a hand dramatically over his forehead. “Too shiftless to collect your own work?”

Why was he being so cruel?

“Too busy, I think you mean.” Jon shot back, letting anger and frustration seep through the continuously forming cracks. It was that or sob.

“Yeah, well. If you need anything else, you know where to find us.”

Jon absolutely refused to cry in his office.

It was stupid of him to not ask for help.

But he’d needed help with so many things this week past. Small things. Moving things. Carrying things. Things a normal person could do without constantly relying on others and the idea of parading himself into their midst again made his eyes sting with tears and his knees and hips burn. They hurt so much even with the bulky braces and sticky tape hidden beneath his trousers literally holding his joints together he didn’t think he’d be able to make another trip back and forth.

Which is how Jon found himself staring dumbly at his dangling arm for full seconds after trying to lift a box.

He’d dislocated his shoulder if the audible and sharp pop! was any indication and when the hot flush of agony hit he yelped mostly in surprise before controlling his fall to the floor. Someone was digging around in his shoulder socket with a superheated spoon as he writhed on the ground and he took just a moment to feel sorry for himself. He’d just wanted to do this one thing by himself and not have to surrender the tiny scrap of independence he’d been clinging to with his fingernails. Cursing himself for being so stupid and cursing himself again when his mewling brought all three of his assistants to his door, Jon looked up, feeling not unlike a beetle trapped on its back and waiting to be pinned. Now he was surrounded, in pain, under the glass of their frightened stares and he couldn’t spare the breath to tell them that he was fine. Just needed a moment to, to fit the puzzle pieces back together while he was being torn apart at his fragile seams.

“Boss--” A cacophony of panicked voices rising higher and higher and--

“Don’t!” They were reaching towards him, stopping at his tight command. “Don’t. I need. I--a minute. It’s fine.” Sweat streaked into the greying hair at his temples.

“This isn’t fine.” Tim sounded angry, scared, and Jon didn’t have enough in him to explain. Not right now. “Jon, you need--”

“Don’t tell me what I need!!” Surprising even himself with the vehement strength behind his declaration Jon put real effort into slowing his rapid breath. If he couldn’t control that, he couldn’t control himself, he couldn’t control the situation. At some point he closed his eyes, willing himself to relax, listening to the sound of Tim’s angry footsteps, Sasha’s following, their muffled voices upset and far away. He sensed Martin kneel beside him.

“Got you a cold cloth. Would you…?”

“P’please…” carried on the gust of his next exhale, the hum of relief stuck in his throat when Martin smoothed it over his eyes and it dulled the constant headache.

“You feel warm.”

“S’normal.” Martin was a surprising well of calm, not pressing or pushing or probing.

“Can I help?”

“In a, need another minute.” Experimentally Jon wiggled his fingers to check for numbness before trying to extend his arm and ultimately asking Martin for help.

“Are you sure? I don’t want to, to make it worse.”

“Can’t. Not really. Just there.” Martin’s hands were soft and warm as he maneuvered his arm over his head, helping bend it at the elbow and Jon grunted at the sensation of it falling back into place with a cool wash of relief.

“Oh! Uh, better?”

“Much.”

“I’ll make you some tea.” As though it were the man’s answer to all ills.

Jon took his time sitting up and getting to his feet, grabbing his cane and making his way to the breakroom where he knew he’d find Tim and Sasha. They at least gave him time to get settled before Tim launched into his interrogation.

“What happened?” Jon squirmed uncomfortably under their scrutiny, eyes downcast and focused on the glare of the fluorescent lighting reflecting off the surface of the tea Martin made him and glinting off the untouched foil backing of the paracetamol blister pack. His arm was in a sling. A sling he happened to have in his desk. A sling he happened to have in his desk “because this just happened sometimes.” The pain had decreased significantly but it didn’t feel right and probably wouldn’t for a while.

“I tried to lift a box.”

“A box.” Jon could really, really do without the incredulity.

“You don’t understand.”

“Yeah, because you never talk about it!”

“Because it’s always the same!” Jon didn’t mean to shout, but they wouldn’t understand. They couldn’t. And no amount of explaining or talking about his symptoms or complaining when he was hurting because he was always hurting would make a difference. “People don’t want to hear about it, Tim. It’s. It’s depressing.” They don’t believe me. “It makes people feel bad and then they get awkward. It’s easier for all of us if we just. Pretend.”

“Jon--”

“You’ve known since Research.” Jon wrapped sore arms around a sore stomach. “You know what these episodes look like, if not what it is.” And you didn’t care enough to even ask. It goes unsaid. Blaming Tim for something so far beyond his control wasn’t fair and Jon refused to do it.

Noticing would have been nice.

Not being forced to haul himself out to their desks to ask for help would have been nice. He understood they were acting out a bit of revenge and he didn’t blame them considering he’d stolen the job out from under Sasha. But it had been a blow to his pride all the same. Every time. Like being kicked when he was down.

Tears sprang to his eyes.

“And I. I don’t need. I don’t need to be coddled. But.” It felt stupid to say he wasn’t always able to walk between their desks and his office. He should be able to do that. It should be easy and he hated that it wasn’t. “I n’need to be allowed to, to.”

Leave. Leave here and never come back because he’d never felt worse than he did right now trying to beg his assistants for permission to use the phone.

“Call us.” Martin provided. “On the bad days.” Jon nodded, hiding his trembling lips behind the mug of cooling tea.

“Jon.” Tim sounded stricken. “I, I never meant--I.” Jon knew that. Tim was kind, had helped him when they worked upstairs together. But being punished like a child for saying yes-- “Jon.” He looked up to see that Tim was sitting across from him, hand outstretched on the table between them. Reaching. “Jon. I’m so, so sorry. That was. I shouldn’t have taken it that far.”

“I never. I didn’t say anything. You didn’t know.” It was Jon’s fault for being stubborn. It was Jon’s fault for not explaining.

“That’s no excuse for acting like a prat.” Jon ducked his head, embarrassment heating his face.

“I just. I chose y’you because.”

I trust you.

When Sasha sat beside him and bundled him into a gentle hug, that’s when the tears came in a biblical flood.

“Oh, Jon. I’m so sorry.” She rested her chin atop his head and the relief outweighed the unprofessionalism as he let himself be held. “We’re going to be better, alright?”

“Al’alright.” Salt damp and trembling, Jon was too exhausted to worry about what they thought of his greatest secret.

Hours later Jon blinked awake, bleary and warm, on the couch, head in Sasha’s lap as she read through a case and wrapped up in one of Martin’s jumpers.

“Almost quittin’ time, boss.” Oh. “You okay to make it home?”

“Uh, y’yeah, yes.”

It was nice to be asked.

It was a bit like walking on eggshells, the first few days of them navigating Jon without smothering him but the support was a far cry from the isolation and loneliness he’d dealt with since this whole thing started.

And then finally it began to break; the pain that’d been ratcheted up to eleven finally started dying down to a more manageable five or six.

“Need anything while I’m up, Jon?” Sasha poked her head into his office on her way by, a familiar, easy smile on her face and one he’d missed dearly.

“Ah, no, I--oh. If it’s not too much trouble, Martin was working on a translation?”

“Sure thing.”

Simple as that.

[hamatoclan76]

Lets talk about ¨Fast Forward¨ and ¨Back To The Sewers¨

So, yeah. I was finally able to finish watching the TMNT 2003 series. I know i could write an entire review about the series but i decided to focus on the two last seasons ¨Fast Forward¨ and ¨Back To The Sewers¨ since they are quite controversial seasons in the fandom due to their writing.

I’m going to explain what i think these seasons did right and then what went wrong with the writing that made them not get so well-received in comparison to previous seasons. I´m going to start with Fast Forward and then move to Back to the Sewers.

Time Travel to the future

(Fast Forward Intro)

(Fast Forward) Season 6 starts with the turtles accidentally time traveling to the future, year 2105 to be precise. That’s 100 years from the current timeline. It´s a risky idea but not bad, right?

But here is the problem: There were already unexplored main plotlines that needed to be developed: Karai´s possibe redemption, the foot clan, Hun, etc. Instead of finishing those arcs that were already established in the series the writers/producers decided to jump to a completely new setting that had almost nothing to do with things that were previously explored.

So that´s one of the biggest problems with this season. If this was a spin off, this wouldn´t be an issue at all. That´s because the audience would know that the spin off exists as its own thing and it isn´t part of the main series. Watching ¨Fast Forward¨ was weird to me. It was like i was watching other series but with the same characters.

Before talking more about the problems i have with this season. Let´s talk about what i enjoyed:

I really liked the arc about Cody learning to be his own person and realizing how his uncle was manipulating him (if not abusing him). His relationship with the turtles and Splinter is really sweet. It was nice to see how they took care of him and he let them live with them while he was reparing the time machine.

Bishop episodes are really good. I wished we could seen more of him. The idea of him getting redeemed and forming an alien alliance is very interesting.I always saw Bishop as well intentioned extremist, In the sense he believed he was helping people with his horrible methods. I like how he recognizes he did terrible things in the past and he is trying to make up for his crimes.

I enjoyed some  of the slice of life moments.It helped developing the characters in a way that allowed me to see what they do when they are fighting aliens or the foot clan. For example: One of my favourite episodes is Raph and Leo going to wrestling match and chaos ensues. That episode explores Raph´s passion for wrestling, something i think the series didn´t before.

I like the concept of the ¨Dark Turtles¨. Yeah, i know it is a bit ridiculous but i would have been great had the series given them a proper redemption arc since it was implied they weren´t really that bad. ( DNA is thicker than water in one of my favourite episodes of Fast Foward).

Now that i have talked about the things i liked i´m going to move to my problems with season 6.

I think that one of the reasons i feel conflicted about Fast Foward is due to the lack of actual plot or stakes. It feels like things are happening but at the same time they aren´t. Many episodes have more mundane premises. The villains are less intimidanting and they don´t add too much to the story. There are some good episodes like ¨The Journal¨ and the one about Mikey training but overall it is like the writing itself is dull and boring.

It would have been better had the writers focus on developing the characters better (like Raph having problems with adjusting to the future). There are concepts that are great. The thing is that they later get dropped or forgotten (Dark turtles subplot). There could have been an entire arc about Bishop helping the turtles with getting back to their time as a way to make up for his actions.

Speaking of the time portal, that thing is brought up in only the first episodes and then its barely mentioned again in the season. Like.. wasn´t the main plot about them getting back to their respective timeline? It´s like the main characters were so comfortable living in the future that they forgot about their main goal. There episodes that are just about them hanging out instead of finding a solution. It´s okay to have slice of life moments while they are waiting for the machine to get repaired but it could have been at least hinted that is Cody is working on it.

Fast Forward would have worked better had the crew of show put more effort into writing the story, thinking what they wanted to do with the characters and explored concepts that were interesting. And before you ask: No, i don´t think this season being more lighthearted is an issue, the real problems is that writing itself is sloppy and isn´t as good as previous seasons.

Back To The Sewers

(Back to the Sewers Intro)

Season 7´s main plot is about the turtles trying to find all the ¨bytes¨ that made Splinter after he was disintegrated in Cyberspace. Many episodes are about them enterting in Cyberspace and looking for these bytes to make Splinter whole again. The team also has to deal with a new type of Shredder that is a fusion of viral and Ultrom Shredder´s memories. (More of that later)

Things i like from ¨Back To The Sewers¨

Donatello´s character arc: It was very refreshing to see another side of Donnie. At the started of the season he blamed himself for losing Splinter (something he had not control of). His arc is kinda similar to Leo´s arc in Season 4 except he was able to let go his guilt more easily than Leonardo. Unlike Leo, Donnie wasn´t so afraid of failure as he was obsessed with fixing the problem to the point he isolated himself.

I really like how the Cyberspace and the real world are connected with one another in this season. Some episodes have premises that are downright terrifying such as getting stuck in a false parallel reality or people hacking and rewriting your memories. I think this season had very interesting concepts that much like Fast Foward they didn´t reach its fullest potential.

Casey and April´s relationship was fantastic. It was sweet to watch Casey proposing marriage to April. Their wedding was great conclusion for their relationship too. I like how Casey struggles with asking April and how Raph helps him. It´s definitely one of the highlights of Back to the Sewers.

What went wrong with Season 7?

First of all, i think that one of the biggest issues was how short the season was. It has only 13 episodes to develop the main plot and characters. For that reason good concept don´t get enough time to be explored. They are introduced and dropped in one episode. I would have love to watch a three part story arc of the turtles getting brainwashed to make them believe that they work for the Foot Clan. I mean, that was creepy when i watched it.

If season 7 had 20 episodes-for example- then there would have been more time for the main plot to be better paced. What happened in reality is that with 13 episodes it made arcs feel rushed. Some things were left unanswered, dropped or forgotten.

Another issue i have is the lack of Karai content in this season. Season 5 ended with her falling in love and she was never seen again. I know she gets redeemed in the film but it is really weird how she goes to April and Casey´s wedding in the finale and she is never mentioned by the Foot Clan in Back to the Sewers. They could written an episode about how she left the Foot Clan and how she wants to settle down.. just something to learn what happened to her.

Speaking of the Foot Clan... Why they had to bring up Shredder again for this Season? Why just not make Viral the main antagonist? She was fine as a villain, Why in the world they needed to bring him back? There are so many other characters that could have antagonists for this story. 

Virtual Shredder brings up tons of questions as well. When did Ch´rell deciced to upload his memory on the Cyberspace. Why not on a spaceship or computer? Why on the web? It´s so weird.

My last point would that Back to the Sewers had potential to be a darker season because of its themes and story yet is very lighthearted despite how twisted some concepts were. I wished they could been taken more seriously with having actual consequences for jumping into Cyberspace, how risky it is and what would happen if someone got trapped in there.

So there you have it. Note that i don´t think the last two seasons are horrible, in fact i have fun watching them. I just don´t understand what went wrong with the production that made the show suffer such a downgrade in quality. Maybe the producers thought the series was getting ¨too dark¨ and decided to write a more lighthearted show. Maybe there were new writers in last seasons, that may explain why the writing became more dull. I wished the Tmnt 2003 would have gotten better treatment that the one it got.

[chat-noir-always-here]

I rewatch Miraculous—The Evillustrator

Titled “The Artist” in it’s original French cuz Evillustrator sounds ridiculous.

Once again--this post uses screenshots from the French Dub version of Miraculous, translated by the good people at MiraculousSubs on tumblr. Yeah, I like the French version. FIGHT ME!!!!

“You march yourself down to the principals office! And show him that chicken scratch!”

... Bitch😒😒😒 What a tasteless, insensitive thing to say, Mrs. Crocker.  You’re setting a fine example for someone like, say, Chloe who bullies just about everyone but Adrien on a daily basis. Luka, Nathaniel, Nino and eventually Adrien—Marinette is popular with the boys.

“Artists can be so emotional.”

...Riiiiight, like you’re never not emotional.

“This is a group presentation, not pairs. Deal with it!!!”

Well at least Mrs. Crocker isn’t intimidated by Chloe’s status... like a certain principle i could mention.

...Marinette brings something important to light tho. Sabrina has no concept of what a healthy friendship is like since she’s never really experienced one. As far as she knew Chloe’s form of friendship was ideal. Which isn’t hard to understand. Sometimes it’s hard to see how bad a situation is when you’re too close to it. Sometimes you need to get some distance and take time to grow into yourself to really understand just how awful a toxic relationship is. 

me: slowly looks in the direction of Adrien.

Well as far as graffiti goes, it could be worse. One of the thing’s i love about Ladybug and Chat Noir’s partnership is how Chat Noir isn’t afraid to politely say something when he disagrees with Ladybug’s actions. Queen is usually a very responsible superheroine, but every once in a while she gets worked up and can act irrationally. Like with this episode: leaving Chloe unprotected in a fit of rage wasn’t cool. Or the whole Lila situation in Volpina.  It’s fair to note she usually owns up to it herself and apologizes at some point before the episode ends. This whole thing deserves a post of its own tho so more on that later

Ladybug: “Her name is Marinette. Really cute isn’t she?”

Marinette isn’t just cute, she’s BEAUTIFUL! Now if only she’d wear her hair down more often... Ladybug trusts Chat Noir to handle missions by himself <3<3<3

Chat Noir: “You’re out of danger. So see ya! Later.” Chloe: “Later? What about my presentation?!”

.......Do it yourself.

He’s so fucking cute I CANNOT. I LOVE HIM TOO MUCH HALP!!!

Explodes with laughter at Marinette’s f***ing face in this screenshot. 

Ah yes, the famous “princess” moment which never made it into the English Dub. How many marichat fics have I read where they have Kitty calling her NOTHING but that? Too many, unfortunately.

 I’m not saying I hate his use of “princess” here. I just don’t like how it’s overused in fics, is all. 

I love this moment--and all the little details.

Chat Noir casually pulling Marinette close to him in a way that clearly shows he is comfortable doing so. 

Marinette leaning away as he leans towards her whereas she’d be a puddle of petrified goo if this were Adrien. Here’s proof: 

Her pulling his hand off her waist with one hand and pushing his chin away with the other.

Him letting his arm drop and allowing her to put her arms around his neck before he lifts them away to safety.

Really, we can’t blame Marinette for not understanding Chat Noir loves Ladybug after this episode. He’s quick to show off to Marinette, not Ladybug, even tho he doesn’t know that’s her. Between that and the way he flirts with Ladybug, he’s kind of given her the impression that this is how he behaves around every pretty girl. Even though that couldn’t be further from the truth.

he immediately backs off when she shows she isn’t okay with this, because he’s a good boy and he’s not going to leave his hand there when she clearly doesn’t want it there.

To quote one of my favorite proposals ever, perhaps his “soul” understands what his “heart and mind” don’t yet know. That he’s held this one girl before. That he was meant to hold her. That they are meant to hold each other.

Hawk Moth: “Once I have them all in my grasp... I shall rule the world!”

That’s not even what Hawk Moth wants. To be fair I can see how the English Dub Team would make that mistake. Here’s what Hawk Moth said in the original French:

It’s not an unreasonable conclusion to assume Hawk Moth means “world domination” when he says “absolute power.” We don’t learn until season two that his true goal doesn’t so much have to do with the world as it does with changing history.

 I kinda am hoping he’ll succeed, at least partially. I can see an “alternate timeline” episode being the result of Hawk Moth actually managing to make his wish--and Marinette and Adrien working together to fix the timeline. Kinda like the scenario we got in “Shera” when Catra managed to pull the switch. Hopefully no one gets “trapped between dimensions” though...

Sabrina: “Chloe lent [this beret] to me! She really is my BFF!”

I feel sorry for Sabrina...

Okay Adrien...

Where the heck did you come from?

 Were you hiding inside a locker? 

Did you bunny-hop over the top of the lockers?

 Did you phase through a wall?!?!?!

Adrien: Hey! Marinette: INTENSE AND SUDDEN SCREAMING Adrien: is unfazed and carries on with the conversation

Me:

Adrien: “So what did you think of Chat Noir? Did you think he’s awesome?”

He wanted to know what she thought of him. My heart....!

In conclusion...! Adrien clearly has some sort of ninja skills, Marichat is a wonderful ship, and some of the mistakes made by the English translation team are understandable.

Sometimes.

[never-surrender]

HEADCANON: Basically this headcanon is to help put it into perspective what kind of a douche bag Kyle was during his relationship with Emma, and afterwards. I’m going to bullet point this out as best as I can and explain them a bit, because if you are going to be writing with Emma and you’re wanting to ship with her ... its very important to keep in mind that this has happened to her and generally where I play her in her timeline, Kyle is still very much a part of her life. Or at least he comes back to attempt to do so (which never goes well). SO! Now that I’ve rambled a little, the following is the bullshit Kyle put Emma through:

He saw she was vulnerable and he used that to his advantage - I mean lets be real, what young woman at the age of 16/17 wouldn’t be vulnerable after her Father passed away? (she was VERY close with him). Kyle saw this, and he made his move. With everybody else he seemed so rash and semi aggressive with ... but with Emma he always seemed to be ‘soft’, and he did that on purpose.

As soon as Kyle got what he wanted, he began to change - what did he want? Sex. As soon as he made his ‘conquest’, he very slowly began to show his true colors. Naturally it wasn’t an instant thing, but steadily over time so that Emma never truly saw what was happening, purely because he wanted to keep her around ... but he saw the need for pretending to be less needed.

How did his behavior towards her change? - He began to be more selfish, growing increasingly uninterested in anything that she would want to do, and typically when she was able to convince him into doing something she wanted he certainly didn’t make it enjoyable. Complaining the entire time, as time went on he even began to belittle not on the activity, but Emma herself over liking it. He began to grow less physically affectionate (a very major need for Emma. she is a highly physically affectionate creature and Kyle knew this), and often times actively denied her the affection she sought out, sometimes even going so far to again belittle her and ridicule her in public should she try. Though how he said it was always very carefully calculated, easily brushed off as a joke or him just being ‘a dude’. Whenever they were in public, it was as if he acted like they weren’t together ... only to flip it around as soon as they were home alone.

He used sex like it was a tool and was HIGHLY encouraging of her drinking - basically, if he ever needed to suck up with Emma? They had sex. The longer they were together, the more he noticed that when she was drinking, she loosened up quite a bit ... so he began to constantly keep a stock pile of her favorite alcohols, encouraging her to drink with  him after school and during the weekends.

When she realized she was pregnant he blamed her - and took absolutely no fault of his own. Not only that, but there was a MASSIVE fight over how she was ‘so stupid’ over not knowing she was pregnant sooner, and he held onto this argument for weeks on end. He wouldn’t let it drop as he drug her down, constantly blaming her for not only being pregnant ... but for the risk she put on the baby by drinking as heavily as she before she found out.

He ridiculed and belittled her for showing too much emotion - even when she was pregnant he did this, often times calling her names at this point in their ‘relationship’ for being so ‘silly’. Even during sex, he would do this should she get too vocal or too passionate, waiting until they were done to ‘tease’ her about how she was behaving

The good news is, Emma broke it off with Kyle shortly after she gave birth to their daughter (which he was not there for, she gave birth alone because her Mother wasn’t able to get there in time to be in the room with her). It was a messy break up, and for a couple weeks Kyle didn’t want anything to do with either of them ...

The bad news? He eventually comes to be a “father” and she deals with him for another 5 to 6 years before he up and leaves both her and Aubrey ... and then again a handful of years later when he comes back to attempt to legally gain full custody of Aubrey.

[pluckyredhead]

What's the top 10 worst things about HiC

Oh god, it took me FOREVER to narrow this down. There are so many bad things about it!!!

Literally I’m not even going to address all the little talking heads therapy sessions and how thoroughly riddled with continuity errors and godawful characterization they are, because there’s so much else wrong with the book. Just trust that they’re a mess, even if King is trying to be Intellectual (TM) by putting them in a nine-panel grid. WE GET IT. YOU’VE READ WATCHMEN.

I’m also not putting “they killed Roy” on the list because it’s comics, characters die. The fact that this book was a slaughterhouse is a problem (see below, #2), but the fact that one of those deaths happened to be one of my favorite characters is a bummer but not necessarily evidence that the book is bad. (The book is so bad.)

But okay, so the rest of it, from least-worst to worst-worst:

10. That Poison Ivy cover: Clay Mann draws beautiful people but for some reason he decided that the cover to #7 should be a dead Poison Ivy on her stomach, cleavage pressed against the floor, her spine arched EVEN THOUGH SHE IS DEAD in order to lift her ass in the air so that the reader can see both T and A at once. This was leaked and then ultimately pulled before it hit stands and Tom King tweeted that he'd never liked it, but it’s very telling to me that either literally no one noticed how gross this cover fetishizing a dead woman was before the internet protested, or DC actively planned to use a sexy dead woman to sell comics. In their book that was supposed to be about trauma and mental health and recovery.

10b. Babs, a theoretical protagonist of this book, sexily peeling her pants down to show her bullet scars, which shouldn’t even look like that due to all the surgery she’s had: We get it, you’re only interested in women’s trauma if it’s sexy. She doesn’t even get to talk on this page.

10c. The full splash page of Lois in her underwear, saying “What do you want me to do?” like she’s inviting the reader to bone her in the middle of this story about death and trauma: Stop!!! Just stop!!!

9. The laziness of everything having to do with Booster: Okay yeah, I’m gonna be fannishly self-involved about another one of my faves here, but Booster is legitimately one of the main characters of the series, along with the Trinity, Harley, Babs, and Wally. And yet the “trauma” that places him at Sanctuary was part of a hastily shoehorned-in Batman arc directly before HiC that writes him deeply out of character (he carelessly changes the timeline when despite the fact that he’s spent 15 years protecting the timeline, including the Superman arc he starred in literally directly prior to the Batman one), instead of anything endemic to the character (because spoiler, Tom King doesn’t actually know anything about the character). The series then entirely fails to address it, hanging Booster’s emotional arc instead on his friendship with Ted...a friendship that explicitly does not exist in the Rebirth timeline. The Ted/Booster friendship/marriage is literally my favorite relationship in the entirety of the DCU, but you don’t get to rest a protagonist’s entire arc on a relationship that was retconned out of existence seven years prior and then retconned away again. Do the work. Don’t copy Keith Giffen and J. M. DeMatteis’s papers from 31 years ago.

8. Interpretive hand jiving through the pain: You know how some people have to leave the room when characters do something very embarrassing on television? I’ve never been like that, just Jesus Christ I had to read this page between my fingers. Y i k e s :

7. Harley beating the Trinity in a fight: Come on. Harley couldn’t take a single one of them on her own, let alone all three. Don’t warp the characters to make your MC look more badass and keep the plot moving. (King also wrote Catwoman beating THREE SPEEDSTERS in his Batman run, which again: no. Absolutely not. Stop it.)

6. That Watchman reference: See above re: being so embarrassed for someone you have to read through your fingers. If you haven’t read Watchmen, the line “I did it 35 minutes ago” is extremely famous and absolutely a mic drop moment. It’s not a mic drop moment here. The characters are completely different and talking about completely different things. The only thing Heroes in Crisis has in common with Watchmen (besides copying the use of the nine-panel grid, like I said before) is that it’s about how heroes are fucked up, I guess? Which is hardly a bold statement in 2018; it’s actively cliche now, in fact. The only purpose referencing Watchmen serves here is to let the reader know that Tom King has read Watchmen, which is both pretentious because it is Art and ridiculous because it’s one of the bestselling comics of all time and millions of people have read it.

5. The abysmal “journalistic ethics” on display: There are so many characters literally and figuratively assassinated in this book that it’s easy to miss that Lois is one of them. But here’s a tip: when someone’s medical information is leaked to you, it is not in fact your obligation to share that with the world, no matter who they are. That is not information meant for public consumption, which we might assume Lois knows, since she doesn’t usually share the private business of her husband or her son or their cousin or any of their friends that she is also friends with. But suddenly she’s forgotten that because it’s on a zip drive? Not only does that show horrifying journalistic ethics from both Lois and Clark, who seems to think she had no other choice, it’s also ableist as hell - what, if someone has mental health problems or experienced trauma on the job they’re automatically a danger to the public? And despite the attempt to make this feel like a big twist, there’s actually zero point to it, because a) we never see civilians reacting to this information and b) there are literally zero consequences to publishing it in this or any subsequent comic. It’s never even mentioned again. If a tree publishes all of a superhero’s medical information and deep dark secrets in a forest and no one reacts to it in any way, shape, or form, does it make a sound?

4. The actual premise: I do sort of believe that Bruce would think “go to the middle of nowhere surrounded by robots wearing creepy robes and masks and tell your secrets to cameras which are then wiped and interact with no one” = therapy, although if that’s the case I don’t know why he keeps bothering to put people in Arkham, which at least allows them to talk to other humans. But under no circumstances do I think either Clark or Diana would go along with this horrible, horrible idea, that offers no genuine help to anyone. Not only does the fact that it’s implausible undercut literally everything that happens within the framework of Sanctuary’s existence, it’s just one of many examples of how almost everyone acts completely out of character all the time in order to keep the plot chugging along.

3. Bruce’s terrible detective skills: The World’s Greatest Detective spends like six issues seriously thinking that either Booster Gold or Harley Quinn is the killer. Booster or Harley! Booster has neither the temperament nor the ability to kill on that level and Harley would never hurt Ivy, plus neither of them are a match for Wally (who is believed to be dead at this point), and Bruce should know that. Again, weak characterization all around, but it’s especially egregious given that King wrote Batman for A HUNDRED ISSUES.

2. Wally’s character assassination: This is a three-parter:

2a. Logistical: It makes no fucking sense. Wally got his own corpse to the crime scene by traveling five days into the future and killing his future self. Everyone sees the corpse. Then Booster, Ted, Harley, and Babs talk him out of killing himself. But...he already did that and everyone saw the corpse, so now we have a paradox that’s never addressed.

2b. Moral: The comics have tried desperately to walk Wally’s actions back in the past two years, emphasizing that he didn’t mean to kill TWELVE PEOPLE, including one of his best friends. It was an accident! But he still framed Booster and Harley for literally no reason except to create a whodunnit, set them on each other which could have easily ended fatally for Booster, and then sent everyone’s private information to the media (which again, the comic frames as somehow noble and necessary, but which is actually deeply unethical). So you made this beloved 60-year-old hero into a villain...why, exactly? Just so it would be surprising? Cool, great work, Captain Edgelord.

2c. Metatextual: This comic spins out of Rebirth Special #1. The New 52 erased Wally from continuity and then brought him back as the younger, biracial Wally (and this isn’t the place to get into fandom’s response to that and DC’s response to fandom’s response so let’s just say they are both YIKES MCGIKES and leave it at that). Rebirth Special #1 brought him back, and the return of the “real” (white) Wally (again: yikes) heralded a new universe that was lighter and happier and contained way more fan favorites. It was literally branded as a gift to fans, embodied in Wally West.

In Heroes in Crisis, Wally is crushed by the weight of everyone being so happy he’s there and loving him so much while he’s struggling with grief and depression, and that’s why he snaps. It’s the metatextual equivalent of having Wally look at the reader and say “You’re happy I’m back and comics can be lighter now? Well, FUCK YOU, YOU RUINED EVERYTHING.” It essentially blames the reader for having Wally go evil, because the reader loves Wally too much.

King, what the fuck?

1. The overall message: Heroes in Crisis was sold as a thoughtful exploration of mental health and trauma, instead of just another bloodbath. Instead, it killed a dozen characters in its first issue and dicked around for another seven with an uninspired whodunnit before throwing a beloved hero in the garbage. But in the meantime, it manages to say:

Trauma is unavoidable.

But therapy doesn’t help.

Trying it does more harm than good.

If you’re struggling, you are a danger to others and don’t deserve privacy.

Good luck with that.

Therapy literally saved my life. This comic enrages me. This comic is harmful. Superhero comics as a whole have a lot to answer for when it comes to discussions of mental illness, but at least some random issue of Batman where Bruce thoughtlessly throws another “looney” into Arkham isn’t billed as a sympathetic take on PTSD. Our culture already discourages asking for help, and we don’t need a pretentious funnybook miniseries helping with that.

(If you made it all the way to the end of this post and you are struggling with trauma, depression, PTSD, whatever...please do look into therapy. I promise you it’s nothing like this comic.)

In conclusion, Heroes in Crisis is bad and it should feel bad.

THE END.

[recordsstraight]

HEADCANON: EMMA (ABUSE / MANIPULATION TRIGGERS BELOW) 

Basically this headcanon is to help put it into perspective what kind of a douche bag Kyle was during his relationship with Emma, and afterwards. I’m going to bullet point this out as best as I can and explain them a bit, because if you are going to be writing with Emma and you’re wanting to ship with her … its very important to keep in mind that this has happened to her and generally where I play her in her timeline, Kyle is still very much a part of her life. Or at least he comes back to attempt to do so (which never goes well). SO! Now that I’ve rambled a little, the following is the bullshit Kyle put Emma through:

HE SAW SHE WAS VULNERABLE AND HE USED THAT TO HIS ADVANTAGE - I mean lets be real, what young woman at the age of 16/17 wouldn’t be vulnerable after her Father passed away? (she was VERY close with him). Kyle saw this, and he made his move. With everybody else he seemed so rash and semi aggressive with … but with Emma he always seemed to be ‘soft’, and he did that on purpose.

AS SOON AS KYLE GOT WHAT HE WANTED, HE BEGAN TO CHANGE - what did he want? Sex. As soon as he made his ‘conquest’, he very slowly began to show his true colors. Naturally it wasn’t an instant thing, but steadily over time so that Emma never truly saw what was happening, purely because he wanted to keep her around … but he saw the need for pretending to be less needed.

HOW DID HIS BEHAVIOR TOWARDS HER CHANGE? - He began to be more selfish, growing increasingly uninterested in anything that she would want to do, and typically when she was able to convince him into doing something she wanted he certainly didn’t make it enjoyable. Complaining the entire time, as time went on he even began to belittle not on the activity, but Emma herself over liking it. He began to grow less physically affectionate (a very major need for Emma. she is a highly physically affectionate creature and Kyle knew this), and often times actively denied her the affection she sought out, sometimes even going so far to again belittle her and ridicule her in public should she try. Though how he said it was always very carefully calculated, easily brushed off as a joke or him just being ‘a dude’. Whenever they were in public, it was as if he acted like they weren’t together … only to flip it around as soon as they were home alone.

HE USED SEX LIKE IT WAS A TOOL AND WAS HIGHLY ENCOURAGING OF HER DRINKING - basically, if he ever needed to suck up with Emma? They had sex. The longer they were together, the more he noticed that when she was drinking, she loosened up quite a bit … so he began to constantly keep a stock pile of her favorite alcohols, encouraging her to drink with  him after school and during the weekends.

WHEN SHE REALIZED SHE WAS PREGNANT HE BLAMED HER - and took absolutely no fault of his own. Not only that, but there was a MASSIVE fight over how she was ‘so stupid’ over not knowing she was pregnant sooner, and he held onto this argument for weeks on end. He wouldn’t let it drop as he drug her down, constantly blaming her for not only being pregnant … but for the risk she put on the baby by drinking as heavily as she before she found out.

HE RIDICULED AND BELITTLED HER FOR SHOWING TOO MUCH EMOTION - even when she was pregnant he did this, often times calling her names at this point in their ‘relationship’ for being so ‘silly’. Even during sex, he would do this should she get too vocal or too passionate, waiting until they were done to ‘tease’ her about how she was behaving

The good news is, Emma broke it off with Kyle shortly before Emma found out she was pregnant, though she still did want Kyle in the delivery room with her (which he was not there for, she gave birth alone because her Mother wasn’t able to get there in time to be in the room with her). It was a messy break up, and for a couple weeks Kyle didn’t want anything to do with either of them …

The bad news? He eventually comes to be a “father” and she deals with him for another 5 to 6 years before he up and leaves both her and Aubrey … and then again a handful of years later when he comes back to attempt to legally gain full custody of Aubrey.