#but i could never pull it off

[mostlyjustgoose]

one thing about this season of d20 that is absolutely driving me up the wall is how easily I can imagine Bruce Willis, at the height of his powers, effortlessly channeling Paula Donvaldson trying to pilot his body. it would have been one of the great comedy performances of all time. Oscar-worthy. he had the comedic chops, he could absolutely have sold being a thirsty middle-aged divorced lady security guard suddenly dropped into the body of an action hero!

[backpackingspace]

Okay so with the line "the olive tree where we first met" we have two equal hilarious options.

When penelope was sassily like oh I'll marry you if you make a living bed out of this tree right here! Cue penelope stumbling over odysseus very very carefully digging up the tree "because how else is he going to get it to itacha we can't have a wedding bed out in the open in sparta duh"

Or

2. Penelope, knowing that Helen's suitors would soon be arriving to take over her home for a while. Snuck out and went on her own wacky shenanigan filled journey where she scoped out all the major players. Odysseus caught her spying in an olive tree. And when she got back she told Helen she had dibs on the cutie from itacha.

[arcanegifs]

if we got a caitvi kiss in act 1, with jinx telling vi that she hoped they wouldve made whopee before their “final” battle, then yeah i think theyre the gonna fuck in act 3

[minhosblr]

He is my Roman Empire

Random Minho gifsets [2/∞]

[ckret2]

Writing a character who's a brilliant manipulator is easier than you'd think, even if you yourself aren't a brilliant manipulator.

In order to manipulate somebody IRL you have to know how they think, what motivates them, what sort of things to say to convince them to do what you want them to do, and how to frame it in a way that makes them trust you rather than get suspicious. These are all relatively difficult things to figure out about another person.

However, they're very easy things to know about a character. If you're writing a manipulator's victim, you already know how they think etc etc because you're writing it. You're in control of their backstory and personality. You are god and know exactly what kinds of things would persuade them to take action and what kinds of things would make them distrust somebody.

So all you have to do is go "because the manipulator is so so smart, they've also figured all this out" and feed your own authorial god knowledge into their head. Make it a tiny bit inaccurate & saw off the details so that it doesn't look like the manipulator is psychic. For extra credit, deliberately write in a couple little clues for your manipulator to pick up on that will let the audience go "wow! Look how observant the manipulator must be."

And if you're not showing your characters' thought processes, it's even simpler. You don't have to be able to manipulate a REAL person; you just have to write your character attempting to manipulate somebody, and succeeding at it.

[beautifulstorms]

Kao Miura, FS Umbrellas of Cherbourg • Skate America 2024

[dapper-lil-arts]

Anyone else got utterly flashbanged by the episode of Applejack's parents

[bumblingbabooshka]

VOY Memes: He's always just had an extremely heavy brunch

[onifanss]

Tharchog x Yansae •

[sesamestreep]

sexy himbo jock interpretations of James Tiberius Kirk are silly and do a disservice to the character for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that it fundamentally ignores all the times in canon when Kirk is faced with a scientific discovery or oddity and you can see the effort it takes for him not to clap and skip with excitement. like in ‘the devil in the dark’ when Spock posits that they might be dealing with a silicon based life form and McCoy’s like “but that’s impossible!” and Kirk literally crosses the room to flirt talk excitedly with Spock about the prospect and how it could work! and what it would mean!

What I’m saying is, Kirk’s gotta be smart and a huge dork because how else could he pull a bad autistic bitch like Spock?

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

it's been a little bit but i gotta say. that diary of a wimpy kid punchline was SO GOOD. like you /told us/ that the first two were a set up for a joke and yet it still landed absolutely perfectly. like. /wow/ i was CACKLING and i still giggle a little whenever i think about it. just phenomenal execution

Comedy comes in threes, and sometimes that means two great high fives before slapping a diary of a wimpy kid crossover in your hand.

[goldnskyart]

And then they kissed~

Silly little prinxiety animation that I made based on one of the ship doodles I did, I’m actually really really proud of this

Feel free to give me suggestions on what else I should animate with these two

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

I wouldn't really agree that boys are just arm candy in magical girl shows and only there to look cute. Yeah, sure the girls' friendships are the focus, but the boys are usually very much involved in the plot and most shows do explore their feelings about the odd things that happen due to magical shenanigans even if they aren't in the know (It's why ML baffles me even more with how they screwed up Adren's arc when he's the deuteragonist, when all these boys are supporting cast and get well rounded arcs)

I'm not much of a winx fan, but the specialists were very much not arm candy. Did the girls talk about them being cute? Yes, it's what teenage girls do. Did the narrative suggest they were good looking? Yes, but that's standard for most love interests in any genre. But we still got scenes with them talking amongst themselves about how they themselves feel and they got a fair share of badass fight scenes even if they wield no magic. A large amount of episodes actually included the boys and girls working as a team solving a mystery or fighting a villain. The girls might deal the finishing blow but the boys were still integral to the plot.

I hope this doesn't come across as hate, it definitely wasn't my intention. I'm just a bit too passionate about the magical girl genre.

I do think you have a good point with ML having a problem choosing a genre or blending two genres successfully.

For the CCS fans, I will add though that Cardcaptor Sakura had both Tomoyo and Syaoran serve as sources of motivation for Sakura. And both Sakura and Syaoran collecting cards even if Sakura is the only one who could seal them and yet never made you question whether Syaoran was even necessary for the job the way ml does with Chat.

I wasn't trying to say that boys have no part to play in magical girl team shows or that they're always treated as having no lives beyond the girls, that's why I mentioned that the Winx Club boys - aka, the Specialists - have their own (mostly off screen) lives and occasionally show up help the girls:

the boys are usually off doing their own thing and only occasionally show up for a date or to give the girls a ride on their cool bikes or magical spaceship

Even then, this is certainly a simplification of the roles that they play in the story, but I kind of had to simplify their roles down to their base components for the original post's discussion as I was talking in broad strokes of how these stories are written.

In terms of those broad strokes, the Specialists are absolutely only there for shipping fodder. That's why each one is assigned to a girl from the start and why their main role in the narrative is supporting their assigned love interest or causing relationship-based drama for their assigned love interest. If it weren't for shipping, then the Specialists would not exist.

While the Specialists do have fleshed out characters and may even effect the plot, the execution of those elements is designed around the girls. A really obvious example of this is the character Timmy, who has character development as the boy's tech guy. Why is he into technology? Because he's the designated love interest for the fairy of Technology and we have to show why they're a good match. Along similar lines, the boys don't really get plots that are removed from the girls because this is the girl's show. Every episode features one or more of the Winx, but the boys are optional and often don't appear.

This is because, narratively speaking, the boys are just love interests and that brings us back to Miraculous' big problem. You can't have a show where Adrien is written like a Specialist while also being part of the Winx Club and where Alya is written like she's part of the Winx Club while technically being more of a Specialist in terms of power set and actual narrative role.

I'm was thinking back to my memories of various Winx Club plots to find one that really highlighted what I mean here and I remembered that one of the big dramas in season one was the reveal that Bloom's love interest - Sky - was in an arranged marriage and had just never told her. As it turns out, that's a great example of what I'm talking about re Adrien!

Is that plot line technically based around Sky and letting his life effect the plot? Sure, but the fallout of that reveal revolves around Bloom, not Sky. The story doesn't really care how Sky's feeling as the conflict progresses. Instead, it focuses on how it affects Bloom and her friends because of course it does! She's the main character. It would be really weird if that plot suddenly focused on her side character love interest and his friends during one of her darkest hours/biggest moments.

Think of that and then consider how the ending of season five is written. Notice any similarities? Sure, this is Adrien's family drama, but because he's just a Specialist, the focus isn't on him. It's on Winx Club member Marinette and Adrien only shows up at the end for a kiss. That is the problem. That is what I'm talking about when I say that Miraculous will randomly write him as if we're watching a magical girl team show where Adrien is just the love interest.

In fact, let's really dig into this example because it's a good one.

You can have a look at the transcript for the finale episode of Miraculous season five here and see for yourself that Adrien doesn't even show up on screen until the final scenes when the big drama is over. The Winx Club wiki also has episode transcripts, so I took a look to see what happened in Winx land during the arranged marriage reveal plot (I love that this is a thing. It's so useful for fact checking myself!) This is the script for the episode after Bloom learns the truth. Sky does not appear even though his lies and family drama are the fuel for this episode's events, which are a major part of the season's arc. Note how perfectly that matches Adrien's writing?

Similarly, Sky's dialogue in the reveal episode is all about Bloom. He's worried about her learning the truth and thinking less of him. To match that, here's Adrien's only real dialogue in the penultimate episode of season five (full transcript):

Adrien:(Covers his ears.) I cannot transform... (Looks at his ring and tries taking it off.) Plagg: What are you doing?! Adrien: I'm not in my right mind. I'm too angry — at myself for falling short of Marinette's love, at my father for sending me here in London, at this stupid app and these rings that use my image... it makes me sick! This nightmare is giving me the horrible feeling that, if I transform, I'll get akumatized and destroy everything with my Cataclysm — Marinette, Ladybug... (Takes off the ring and hands it to Plagg.)

Switching back to Winx. After Bloom learns the truth about Sky, bad things happen because she's depressed. This results in her and the Winx going off on a journey to learn the truth of who Bloom is. After the girls share this big plot moment and Bloom gets her mojo back, the boys show up to be their ride home and to give Bloom her romance moment where Sky wins her back by declaring that he broke off the arranged married because he loves her.

Sky notably doesn't get an arc about choosing between his arranged marriage and his true love. We don't even know that the marriage is broken off until he tells Bloom because that was never really a conflict as far as the narrative was concerned. Of course he's going to pick Bloom! He's her designated side character love interest! He only exists to be with her. We don't need to treat this as a serious thing for him. The arranged marriage plot was never about him anyway. It was about giving Bloom a reason to have a darkest hour moment that moves the plot forward. Similarly, Sky calling off the marriage is nowhere near as important as him telling Bloom that he's called off the marriage to be with her in a grand romantic gesture.

This perfectly mirrors Miraculous' season five ending where Adrien doesn't appear until after Marinette is done fighting her big girl power fight against his father. As far as the writing is concerned, that fight isn't about him. His connection to the villain only really matters in terms of how it affects Marinette's actions during the final battle. Then, when the battle is over, Adrien shows up to give Marinette her big romance moment because, while the plot may be driven by Adrien's family, he is not a Winx club member. He's just a Specialist. Or, in the words of the head writer:

[image text: She's Barbie, he's Ken. You don't like it. I get it. It won't change. Anything else?] (The full, even more damning context of this tweet can be found here.)

What else can I say other than, "I rest my case."

Oh, and also that I didn't take this as an attack. I just thought it was a good opportunity to really dig into the nuances of this and what I was talking about in that original post as I never know how obvious this stuff is if you don't closely study story telling. As this case study hopefully shows, if a show is about a group of girl friends using the power of friendship, then their love interests may have important roles, but the boys are never going to be more important than the girls and most of the boy's screen time will be focused on romance and how their existence effects the girls because it's ultimately the girls' world. Without them, the show wouldn't exist. Without the boys? Well, then we just wouldn't have a romance plot.

[epicfirestormer]

[v88sy]

Allow me to be super delulu here for a moment...

We know there's another 9-1-1 spinoff in the works. One city location we've heard is Vegas.

We know Vegas is only an hour away from LA by helicopter.

What if the "unforseen hurdle" for Buck and Tommy's relationship is Tommy getting a job offer in Vegas (hello backdoor pilot (lol) for the new spinoff) and it's not really a big deal for him because "it's only an hour away, Evan. I go, put in my 48, and come home. It's not like I'm moving and this isn't going to change anything."

But of course it is a big deal for Mr. Abandonment Issues. What if Tommy gets tired of commuting back and forth all the time? What if he just happens to like Vegas better and decides he wants to move after all?

And maybe that whole big discussion leads to something like "and if you moved in with me, the time away from each other wouldn't seem so bad."

As much as I think I'm totally in left field and it would suck to see Lou leave the main show (plus they've never carried over characters from the main to the spinoff before anyways), I would absolutely watch him on a spinoff (not that I'm not gonna watch it anyways, let's be real.)

Maybe some Vegas shenanigans is what Oliver meant when he said Buck was gonna have some fun and ludicrous moments. 🤷🏼‍♀️

Anyways, it's probably not that but it would make a good fic if anyone feels like it.

[bill-augatesm]

Girl doodles and Andy’s there too what the hell sure, he’s himedanshing out

First ones inspired by @/pysgodyn’s Fem!Steve post and I couldn’t stop thinking about it, very obviously fem!Bill being the main focus, but god forbid !