#but even though I do think buffy and angel escalated kind of quickly it is NOTHING compared to how fast tv show couples escalate today

[oveliagirlhaditright]

My entire family ships B*uffy and A*ngel. Haha... Well, for the most part. Though originally, I was a S*puffy. And it was in trying to figure out what everyone else saw in B*angel--and giving it some deep thought for a long time--that what the writers were going for with them finally clicked with me, and then I thought they were the most beautiful thing. And I’ve recently gotten my sister into B*tVS. And at first, I don’t know if she was going to like them that much. Because she came over one night and was like, “Can we talk about how fast the B*uffy and A*ngel thing escalated?” And tbh, I still feel that way myself and wish it had been a bit different. My only gripe I still have with them, is that I do think they were rushed (at least in season one. Season two actually builds up their relationship more), but oh well. But then I explained to her why I like them, and now she’s completely Team B*angel (and was happy when my uncle visited--who told us we should watch B*uffy a long time ago) said that he ships B*uffy with A*ngel when she asked him. My mom, on the other hand, somehow ended up at my house a lot when I was watching A*ngel the Series and loves him (so she hasn’t seen B*uffy yet). And from what she’s seen of B*uffy on A*ngel, she doesn’t like her (to be fair, I also think A*tS kind of does a terrible job of displaying B*uffy) and she ships C*angel. But I feel she’ll ship B*angel when she one day watches B*uffy. Since C*ordy is a dark reflection of B*uffy, and towards the end of A*tS they were making her B*uffy more and more, tbh.

Also... my entire family--and everyone I know in RL--are Max and Logan (Lomax) shippers when it comes to Dark Angel (and most of us hate S2, tbh. With me being the most okay with it now, tbh). But I prefer Lomax and always have and always will, my sister does, said uncle does (and tried to warn us against watching S2. He’s actually the one who got us into this show). My sister’s old friend, Juanita does... And my friends Danielle and Rachel, I think (back then, I told both of them not to watch S2--and Rachel just took my word for it--but Danielle understandably wanted to watch S2 because S1 ended on such a big cliffhanger. So I lent her to it, and she couldn’t even get through the first episode... which is one of the best S2 ones. And she told me that I was right and that that fast she could feel the tone shift and she didn’t like it. And my boyfriend who I recently watched it with--and actually watched S2 with, as I’m done making people’s decisions about S2 for them--loves Lomax (and doesn’t get why MaxAlec is so big... and none of us do. He actually has a lot of issued with Alec). And while he ended up liking S2 in the end, and thought it was worth it (probably because I was there to talk about the good parts of it with him), he still vastly prefers S1... as I do. As we all do. And he said Lomax is now one of his favorite pairings from the 90′s era. Because even though it came out in 2000, he thought that was close enough to the 90′s--and still kind of felt like the 90′s--and was counting it for that reason. As for my mom, this is a show Ashton (my sister) and I got so into back in the day, that we were bad and didn’t wait for her to be around to finish it with us. So she hasn’t seen most of this show, but some of it. Oops.

[myassbrokethefall]

Do you have any favorite scifi shows? Or any recommendations?

Well! This is a fun ask. Let me see…

So, I really like sci-fi, but sometimes I also don’t like sci-fi. I overdosed a little bit on spaceship stuff after my years of Star Trek obsession and then BSG (and like, I hear The Expanse is great but I just…haven’t been in the mood), and these days my favorite sci-fi is talky, high-concept atmospheric mystery stuff in a fairly realistic world where something is a little bit weird. What I really DON’T like is violence/shooting/chasing/action, and a lot of sci-fi, unfortunately, is that. (Westworld, I am looking at your ass.) I also am a LITTLE bit over sci-fi as sledgehammery social parable, again a la Star Trek. Even though I’ll always love Star Trek (and will get around to watching Discovery one of these days). 

Some sci-fi TV that I’ve enjoyed recently includes:

(hey surprise, this got very long! so it’s under a cut)

Dark. There’s just one season of this on Netflix right now, but I LOVVVVVED it. Talk about atmospheric. It made me want to move to Germany and live in a forest where it rains all the time. It’s in German – this isn’t a bother to me because I like subtitles, but it’s available dubbed as well if you prefer that. It takes place in a small town and starts with a missing child, and it quickly becomes clear that something strange is going on. Time travel is an element. A central part of it becomes about the way all the characters in the town are interconnected and how the events of the past affect the future. It’s part Lost, part Stranger Things, part Back to the Future. 

The Returned/Les Revenants. So there’s an American show called The Returned as well, and this is not that one – the one I’m talking about is in French (sorry…I swear some ones without subtitles are coming) and was on uh, IFC or something like that. One day in a(n extremely attractive and cinematic) French town in the mountains, a girl comes home from a class field trip…except she died on that field trip years ago, in a bus accident, and her family is completely shocked and freaked out. The same thing is happening all across town. Includes one (1) very creepy child. Very spooky and also super atmospheric. (One reason I loved Dark so much was that aesthetically it reminded me of Les Revenants.)

The 4400. I binged this show and had a window of time in my life where I was super obsessed with it. Premise is similar to The Returned, actually: A bunch of people (4,400 of them to be precise) who were believed to be the victims of alien abductions – across many years – are returned to earth all at the same time, all at the age they left. So you have a man who was taken in the 1950s (Mahershala Ali!) and a little girl from the 1930s, etc., all dropped back into modern-day America – and most of them (all of them? I forget) have mysterious powers of various kinds. Two police detectives (am I predictable or what) investigate. Things escalate from there. It is a little XF-y in a way I appreciate, while also being totally different (and much less arty than something like Les Revenants). 

Stranger Things. I might as well list it…everyone knows about this show but it really is pretty great. Season 1 especially. Huge ET vibes, creepy/Spielbergy, not a cop-out where it’s all a metaphor or something (pet peeve). 

Fringe. This isn’t so recent (well, neither is The 4400), but if you like sci-fi and you haven’t watched it, you should! It starts out being a liiiiiiittle bit of a less-hooky ripoff of XF (a group of FBI folks, including a retired mad scientist basically, investigate paranormal cases), but after a few episodes it finds its groove and it becomes its own weird and wonderful thing. It was a show I really enjoyed and it ended satisfyingly. John Noble as Walter Bishop is fantastic, and one thing I really loved about it was that it was not afraid to make things happen and shake up the premise if needed. 

Jessica Jones. I really, really am not into Marvel or any of the superhero stuff, but I like this show a lot. It puts the idea of having “powers” in a very grounded kind of gritty, cynical, noir-y setting and I enjoy that. It’s also woman-focused, which is nice, and it’s just different from other stuff on TV. I dig it. 

Orphan Black. Man, I loved Orphan Black. What a fun show, and – not necessarily the most important thing to me in a show, but hugely refreshing nonetheless – it’s also very woman-centered. The premise is that a woman named Sarah sees someone who looks exactly like her – right before the doppelganger throws herself in front of a train. And in unraveling the mystery, Sarah learns that she’s a clone and she has a bunch of “sisters.” Tatiana Maslany is FREAKING AMAZINGGGGG as all the various clones. It is definitely sci-fi, but it’s also a lot of fun and just a fast-moving, action-packed (but not in a way that makes my eyes glaze over) cool-ass show. 

Grimm. Grimm was a pretty silly network-y show, but my affection for it really never waned (though it also never really went too far above “mild”). Premise: Basically, that fairytale monsters (broadly speaking) are real and walk among us (disguised for the most part), and there are these people called Grimms who can see them and are supposed to fight them. Lots of ancient documents, old books, mysterious keys, etc. This one dude who is a police detective in Portland (it was shot in Portland and is basically the second Portland-iest show after Portlandia, as far as I can tell) finds out that he’s a Grimm, and he meets this guy who is one of these monsters but also a delightfully civilized clock nerd who becomes his friend and helps him learn about this hidden world, and it’s pretty much monster-of-the-week episodes every week (though there is a mytharc of sorts involving an evil cabal of European royalty or something, snore). I think it’s the people who did Angel (which I never watched; I’m not a Buffy person). It also started the same year as Once Upon a Time, so it was the “other” fairytale show.

The Leftovers. Technically, it’s sci-fi. It’s also just very imaginative storytelling, and is a good example of what I mean by high-concept and atmospheric and something being a little bit weird in an otherwise contemporary setting. (This is a post-Lost Damon Lindelof, and Damon Lindelof has learned from his Lost mistakes, with wonderful results.) The central premise is a sci-fi one (2% of the earth’s population mysteriously vanishes), but aside from that there are also just a lot of kind of fantastic imaginative leaps and surreal settings and…ah, The Leftovers. My standard intro/warning: Season 1, while really good, is VERY depressing; Season 2 becomes marginally less depressing while also changing things up considerably and in my opinion becoming much better; Season 3 is even better than that. Love you, show. 

Lost. I suppose I should mention it even though it’s another obvious one. I have rarely been hooked as hard as I was by the pilot of this show. It doesn’t necessarily deliver on everything it promises, and it’s interesting to think of it in terms of it being one of the first shows to, basically, cancel itself – to choose to end so that it could pace its story effectively and lead to a deliberate ending instead of just vamping forever and trying to keep sucking the audience in for one more season until that stopped working and it was canceled. However, before that happened there was some time-killing, and I think that maybe contributes to people’s perception that it didn’t know what it was doing half the time. A divisive ending that I did not have a problem with. If you watch it in the spirit of being taken on a ride and enjoying the feelings that the twists and turns give you in the moment, you’ll find it more satisfying than if you’re trying to solve every mystery and trying to make it all work out perfectly with every loose end tied up.  

The OA. This was a weird-ass motherfucking show on Netflix and I still don’t know what the fuck it was about. I feel like I dreamed it. It maybe involves angels? And stuff. 

Carnivale. Lord, talk about atmosphere. This was an HBO show several years ago now about a creepy traveling circus in the 1930s. Being on HBO, it’s very violent and dirty and twisted and stuff. I was obsessed with it, and loved watching it although I vaguely remember the ending being not super satisfying? I should rewatch it, really, because I have forgotten a lot about it beyond impressions (it started in 2003). It’s not that sci-fi, but it has kind of mysterious portents and shit like that all over the place. Anytime I see anything remotely carnival-y I’m like AAAHHH CARNIVALE

Westworld. Sigh…I’m having a lot of trouble connecting to the season of Westworld that’s currently airing (Season 2, on HBO). I loved Season 1. My opinion is that they blew their premise too quickly and now they have nowhere to go – it’s just been violent chaos of the sort that puts me to sleep. Literally – one episode a couple of weeks ago I tried to watch and fell asleep during TWICE – two evenings in a row – before I finally got through it on Day 3. Because it was just a bunch of shooting. But the premise is cool – in the undetermined nearish future, there is a giant elaborate theme park where extremely realistic robots interact with the superrich guests who pay to come and basically be super destructive and violent (this show doesn’t have a particularly high opinion of humanity) in an Old West-themed setting. Like Disney World if your dream was to fuck and murder everyone in the Hall of Presidents. It’s made by one of the Nolans so there are lots of twists and also you don’t know what the hell is going on half the time. But there are some high-budget groovy sci-fi set pieces in it, and if you like amazing piano covers of popular songs (sometimes but not always in the in-show context of the player piano in the saloon), that is a fantastic bonus (the music is terrific overall). ROBOTS.

Battlestar Galactica. Speaking of robots. I loved the hell out of this show, although I have my issues with it. I felt when I first saw it (this is the 2000s remake I’m talking about, not the 1970s original) that it was like Star Trek had grown up. It gets more and more high-concept the longer it goes on, and some people weren’t fans of where it ended up (I, again, was fine with it), but it starts out with a hell of a premise: Cylons (humanlike robots originally created by humanity, which then evolved) destroy almost all of the human race except for a few stragglers in a few scattered ships, who have to pull together and somehow survive. Great acting, great writing, big themes, Laura Roslin. 

Black Mirror. This is an anthology series, meaning each one is a short story basically, with different characters, a different near-future setting, and a different premise (often having to do with technology going wrong. In the words of Mallory Ortberg: What If Phones, But Too Much?) Some of them are better than others but if you can take some upsetting conceptual stuff, it’s really a super interesting show. Your bingeing tolerance may vary, but I personally could not handle more than a couple of episodes a night.

Roswell. Holy shit I was so into this fucking teen soap opera about aliens. Also not recent. They might do a remake of this I heard?? MAX + LIZ 4EVA

Millennium. Yes…Chris Carter’s Other Show. I’ve said this before, but in a weird way I feel like this show is…CC’s best work???? Without the chemistry supernova of Mulder and Scully dimming everything around it, the “scary stories” he’s always talking about actually have room to be kind of interesting. It also works with his inclination to do what is essentially an anthology series loosely connected via recurring characters that are almost more narrators/observers than participants. In XF, this makes me want to break things when it results in stagnated character growth and no continuity and endless reset-button-pushing. In Millennium, Frank wandering grimly through the show universe encountering fable after fable (grimmer than XF – less on the stretchy mutants and fat-sucking vampires and lake monsters and Reticulans and spooky green bugs; more serial killers and cults and angels and apocalyptic stuff) actually worked pretty darn well for me. It’s not that the characters aren’t good, but they are VERYYYYY archetypal (kind of like how M&S could have been if not given such aliveness and humanity by David and Gillian, and Morgan and Wong and Vince Gilligan at that). Frank Black is the tormented detective, he has a beautiful kind wife and an innocent young daughter and they live in a beatific yellow house and he has to keep them safe from the evils out in the darkness. You might say this is hammered home a lot. But: the kind of mythic tone of it is a much better fit here than on XF. Lance Henriksen is perfect as Frank, and some of the stories are really absorbing and emotional. I cried during WAY more Millennium episodes (I can think of three or four off the top of my head that I remember WEEPING openly over, one of which stars Darren McGavin) than I ever have at XF. 

Everything changes in Season 2 when Morgan and Wong take over as (I believe) showrunners – things lighten up considerably versus S1; there’s even a Darin episode! With Jose Chung! And the Spotnitz Sanitarium! – and then everything changes again in S3 when they leave. The show does suffer from a lack of cohesion in that sense, and frankly the “mytharc” parts never did a lot for me (loosely, the world is going to end in the year 2000 and a cabal of mysterious dudes something something). But there is a lot of cool shit in this show. There really is. Every few years I attempt a rewatch and never finish; I should try again. In late fall, which is the only time Millennium should be watched. 

 BONUS

Face Off. This isn’t sci-fi per se (it’s a reality competition show, on Syfy), but if you’re a sci-fi person you might love it. The way I describe it to people is very simple: It’s the exact same premise and structure as Project Runway, except instead of fashion, it’s FX makeup. The best thing about it is that everyone is NICE and HELPFUL to each other. It’s a bunch of creative nerds making monsters together and the competition element is there but no one is a dick and there’s no fighting and drama. Michael Westmore, who did the makeup on Star Trek: TNG among many other acclaimed projects, is the mentor (and the dad of the show’s host, McKenzie Westmore), and he pops in to give dad advice to all these starstruck dorks. The new season just started and it’s just a fun show. I have, at times, thought of it as my FAVORITE show on TV. 

Well, that was probably more than you wanted, anon! I feel like I’m missing some, too. TV! I like it. 

[oveliagirlhaditright]

A friend and I were talking about how much of a slow burn relationship Sora and Kairi have had over the course of the games. How 17 years passed between game releases before they finally shared paopu fruits. So naturally a lot of people joke about how we're going to have to wait another 20 years before they kiss, and then another 20 years before they get married. But then I jokingly said, what if Kairi's already pregnant by kh 4? What if things suddenly escalate really quickly?

Is it sad that with how much SoKai was treated like Willabeth in KHIII, that I thought if Nomura was going to keep Kairi out of the action going forward--and at first, it seemed like he was going to. Ugh--that he might pull a full Willabeth and have her be pregnant? But I wouldn’t have even thought of that, if some YouTube commenters hadn’t imagined that that was what the fade to black after the paopu sharing meant... that Sora and Kairi had sex, that is. But it didn’t mean that. At all. The whole love realization didn’t happen until the tunnel of light scene, I mean.

And then when their Re:Mind date scenes happened... I couldn’t help thinking they secretly could have slept together during one of them, and no one would be the wiser (unless Kairi was pregnant in a next game or something). Especially if they maybe thought it could be their only chance to, with Sora soon dying...

But I also know they of course didn’t. They’re still young babies in a Disney game, who have finally just become a couple and have to do the innocent things first, like actually going on dates. At most, they may have shared their first kiss offscreen during those Re:Mind dates.

I know the age of consent is lower in Japan, I believe... But I’m like 99.9% sure that these two will never sleep together in these games, even when they’re older. I mean, not that Disney hasn’t somewhat gotten away with it with couples in the past, with the Willabeth honeymoon scene, or that moment Emma found her parents (Charming and Snow) in bed together (still clothed and stuff, and getting interrupted) in Once Upon a Time... and especially on Alias (but to be fair, the latter--like OUaT--was on ABC, and that one was targeted at an older audience), but I still don’t see it. Got to keep that E 10+ rating, after all.!

But I guess that doesn’t mean that we couldn’t have something like a “Five Years Later” time jump, or something, where we see Kairi with a kid... where clearly something happened between then and now. And I could actually see the series ending that way--with the notion that Sora and Kairi’s kid is going to continue the adventure--but I don’t think they’ll do so before the forever ending... if at all.

...I feel I’m getting way off topic here. But while I get where you’re coming from--and would be all for their love story not continuing to crawl (especially since they’ve both realized this is the major thing they want right now--I don’t see it happening, sadly.

In fact, I have the thought that it’s only going to get worse. Because I think there’s literally something/someone keeping them apart for some reason. And that Sora trying to fight against that, is going to make it spite them all the more. I have the feeling that they’re not going to get much time together at all in the next saga--though they will have a few moments, before fate tears them apart again--but that we’ll get more Kairi screentime/playable Kairi, and their stories will parallel each other so that they’ll feel compatible (and almost like they’re spending time together) that way. And that this saga or series will end with them finally defeating the thing keeping them apart, and then they’ll finally have their epic reunion and happily ever after... And yes, I am kind of thinking of what they did with Buffy and Angel on those shows. But I could of course be wrong about all of this (because I still don’t know if Nomura would give Kairi such good treatment or even knows how to... I’m also not sure he could parallel them expertly well, like Whedon did with Buffy and Angel, even if it seems that was what he was going for with Noctis and Stella) and I want to be wrong about this.

Because I want them to actually spend time together, dang it, as I actually think that they don’t is the main issue that so many people can't see them as in love and think they have “no chemistry”. But Nomura seems stuck on this “star-crossed lovers who can never really be together” trope for them, so we’ll see what happens in the future:)