#but it literally never misses a beat on character development and character interactions. like it just feels *complete*

[the-oracle-of-the-lost]

tbh Gallifrey is an insane series given how much stuff happens in it in 50 episodes. like the original run of the show (series 1-3) was 14 episodes and in it we cover several coups, a gay vacation bodyswap episode, a whole zombie plague, Nazi time travel episode, time loop episode, an evil ghost possessing the main character and stealing her past body, the premiere spy network collapsing because one guy committed identity fraud and abandoned his wife, and an entire Civil War. and this is just the stuff that happens before series 4.

[m4ndysk4nkovich]

mickey milkovich x nude, radiohead

i don’t think that anybody can disagree that 1x07 is the episode where we learn the most about mickey milkovich. no, i don’t mean he showed any development or anything like that, but we learned something about him that made him significant for the rest of the show. something that never leaves, something that is important to him. in 1x07, we learn that mickey milkovich is gay, and we learn that he is willing to sleep with ian gallagher (even when his father and sister are in the house).

in 1x06, mickey kind of has an interaction with ian that we later see and are like, “yeah, he’s totally gay”, but back then it wasn’t stated that mickey was gay. mickey steals shit from the kash and grab, and he tells ian, “you know where i live if you have a problem” kind of instigating that ian should come over.

but in 1x07, mickey has stolen the gun from the kash and grab, and ian goes to mickey’s house equipped with a tyre iron, ready to take it back.

the “i want the gun back, mickey” scene needs no introduction or explanation. we all know what happened. we all watched in awe as mickey stood over ian and both of their breaths evened out and they made contact and… bam! they’re getting undressed, just like that.

later on, we are no stranger to gallavich and fighting then fucking. it’s something many people know them for, the fact that they’ll literally beat the shit out of each other and then immediately get on each other. but here, it was supposed to be for shock value because shameless utilizes shock value. to those who didn’t know gallavich was going to happen, watching mickey, the thug who had literally just attempted murder on ian, undress and fuck ian was surprising. later on, we can understand why it happened, but we were supposed to be shocked.

so, here’s where nude by radiohead comes in.

terry wakes up from a nap and goes to take a piss in mickey’s room (there’s a bathroom in there, he isn’t just pissing in it, lol). in there, ian and mickey are naked under mickey’s covers. around them, we see a poster of a woman and we also see a drawing mickey made that says “fuck love”.

so when terry comes out of the bathroom and looks at them both, he doesn’t do what season 3 terry does, he simply says “put some clothes on, you two look like a couple of fags!” and it’s a comical scene because, what the fuck, terry, aren’t you a homophobic murderer? you woke up to grunts and crashes coming from mickey’s room, then when you came in he and another boy are naked in his bed… what do you think they were doing?

so when mickey does put some clothes on, he puts on a radiohead shirt.

the shirt says “you’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking” and those are the last lyrics of the radiohead song “nude”.

so for those who haven’t listened to the song, here’s my analysis of why this song is associated with mickey milkovich and how it ends up foreshadowing his entire character for the next four seasons.

“don’t get any big ideas

they’re not gonna happen”

literally this scene. mickey caves and gives ian the gun back because lets be honest, it was really just bait. ian leans in to kiss him, and mickey has a look in his eyes where you can tell he wants to, but he can’t. he built this wall up years ago and he’s already cursing himself for letting it come down. terry instructed him to get dressed, and he puts on this shirt. and he’s trying to put this carefully constructed mask back on but he’s struggling. and so, he pushes ian away, “kiss me and i’ll cut your fucking tounge out”. there’s no malice in his tone, it’s a threat, but it isn’t threatening.

“you paint yourself white

and fill up with noise

but there'll be something missing”

mickey hiding in the closet, marrying svetlana, being a father to yevgeny, trying to act like the perfect son of terry. he still has this mask on and he tries to hide who he is but alas, he can’t. he loves ian too much and when he gets married and pushes him away, he’s still gay and in love.

“now that you found it

it’s gone”

upon being married, he tells ian that they can still bang. maybe being married to a woman makes him feel a bit more secure because although he despises it and it’s crushing him, he can keep his whole “king of the southside” thing. now that he’s married and unhappy, terry’s satisfied, and that’s all that matters- well, at one point it was. so he tells ian that they can still fuck, but suddenly, ian isn’t as eager and easy as he once was, and he leaves. he’s gone.

“now that you feel it

you don't

you’ve gone off the rails”

he’s out, he’s with ian, he has ian. things are supposed to be fine- but they’re not. ian’s unstable and has been hospitalized, and mickey breaks. he gets shitfaced and cuts his cheek and cries into ian’s jacket. that wall he once built up? the chest he puffed up, the posters he hung, the tattoos he got, they all mean nothing. it’s all gone. the wall and mask are gone, he’s more fragile than he once was. ian’s broken and it’s simultaneously breaking him too.

“so don't get any big ideas

they're not gonna happen”

this line is so mickey in s5, s6, s7, and s10. ian calling him and mickey running to see ian. he has hope. but no, ian breaks up with him, mickey is arrested, and when ian visits he desperately wants ian back. he tattoos ian’s name on his chest, specifically over his heart, and he practically pleads for ian to stay. then, mickey and ian are fleeing to mexico, and for a second, he has hope again. he fantasizes about he and ian at the beach, ian’s freckled skin being sunburnt, them swimming in the ocean together. for once, he can imagine his dreams being true. but they aren’t. he and ian are getting their marriage license, but ian’s hand wavers over the dotted line and he gives mickey that look and mickey breaks (…ian’s leg. lol). he keeps getting his hopes up and everytime he scolds himself for it because he just ends up hopeless.

then finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for,

“you'll go to hell

for what your dirty mind

is thinking”

it’s in the 1x07 scene i’m talking about. terry instructs mickey to get dressed, he does, and he puts on a shirt that says this. and in that shirt, he seems odd. the confidence we see him have in 1x03 is no longer there. he doesn’t necessarily look vulnerable, but he isn’t the mickey he pretends to be. he caves and returns the gun, which was just bait for ian to come anyway, and he refuses to make eye contact with ian, but when he does, it’s almost coy? he’s ashamed. he’s thinking of things he know would get him killed and he hates himself for it. terry will end him if he finds out, and yes, he has the posters, the reputation, the persona, the tattoos, the guns, etc. but in the end, it’s all an act, and we can see it. the way he licks his lips, the way his eyes won’t focus, his body language says so much.

[kiddokori]

but you're so right about everything with totk. you put it in words so well 😭 idk if you found memory 9, so i won't spoil anything, but it was SO GOOFY look up gmod smile after you watch it and explode instantly. loftwings would've made the game infinity better, like skeleehorses can go over gloom (such a silly name btw) and horses are always great, but there's nothing to ride in the sky??? missed oppurtunity imo. i basically play with no tech becuase i hate using it 😔 i have much to say on this game and sadly most of it around the plot isn't thatg nice

SKELEHORSES CAN GO OVER GLOOM??????

but no yeah i dont enjoy the tech lol. i think modern tech in fantasy is a slippery slope from “woah cool its so interesting how this fantastical society developed things we never couldve thought of” to “this isnt even fantasy its just sci-fi with medieval paint slapped over it” thats what botw vs. totk is to me. we went from giant magical mechs and tech that felt more like sentient creatures to a straight up four wheeler. also its just clunky. to me. vexes me.

i am playing it very slowly for several reasons so im not far im only two memories in (trying to do them in order) lol but im not impressed by the writing either again ive only beat the rito “dungeon” idk what to call it. it was fine. really felt like they just tried to replicate the divine beasts but it didnt work. the weird disembodied voice felt forced in totk its just this random exposition guy that felt like he was just there for the sake of mimicking the structure of the champions talking to you where in botw that makes sense because they’re important characters that you learn more about and play a role in the story and also they literally died and their souls were trapped in their beasts. and totk was like ah shit ah fuck we gotta have another disembodied voice throw this guy in there and have him lore drop on you. who is he. who cares.

and then the divine beasts were like interesting involved puzzles there was one i thiiiink the camel you literally had to turn entire parts of it to line up electrical signals to get places and unlock things it was a little frustrating but i had to think about it!! same with the elephant you had to control the entire mechanism to move things and you had to Think about it. the rito ship was just go find these things. ok the divine beasts were also that with the terminals but you had to work for it. totk really just went go walk around for awhile and find them. no real puzzle to it. there was a little bit with the doors/levers but it did not feel nearly as involved or thought through.

i will say i did like the boss fight the ice guy. cool guy. looked cool baller music neat new little thing you had to do to beat it i liked it. that was cool i will give them that they know how to get me pumped for a boss fight

ok but the cutscene with zelda near the beginning was goofy as hell. just straight up like woaaaahh she floated into the sky thats crazy!!! whaaat!!!!! felt extremely silly. i was sitting there like is this a gag is this supposed to be funny i cannot tell. very much threw me off. could not take seriously

also. fucking. got rid of her again. if they wanted to have the same success of botw maybe they should’ve gee idk changed the formula again and let zelda be with us. a two player zelda game would be so cool. even if it was still single player and we could just interact with her and have her with us im thinking kindof last of us/resident evil 4 style where she helps you do certain puzzles or helps you fight like other npcs. even if she just stayed at the base and helped purah with research and you could talk to her thatd be more interesting. GIVE HER TO ME!!

the intro really just felt like oh we have to get rid of zelda again because we need link to be alone so we can copy botw uhhhhh magic rock teleports her to the past yeah yeah that works. they decided they needed this to happen and then made a story to excuse those choices rather than actually construct something cohesive.

im not even halfway through the game so i dont wanna be tooo hard on it or form strong opinions but id rather be pleasantly surprised than disappointment after getting my hopes up. i havent been spoiled for anything but i have seen people complain in general so im kinda leaning towards disappointment lol. like its zelda im still having fun i just also am looking at it from a critcal point of view and i have plenty to say. i used this as an excuse to talk for a looong time anyways. im currently working on getting specific horse colors that i preplaned by looking at this horse chart to name after characters from a book i like ✌️ i didnt pay 70 dollars to not have any fun with this game so help me god i am going to enjoy Some of it

[dimiclaudeblaigan]

Random anime/manga recommendations (good oldies!) I have for y'all just bc I love them and hope you would too! also I just want to talk about them bc I love and miss them all!!!

In the list:

Hikaru no Go

Shaman King

Loveless

Yami no Matsuei

Yu Yu Hakusho

Hikaru no Go:

it's about the board game Go but I promise it's so much more heavy than that and the character interaction/development is top tierrrr. also one of the only series that made me bawl like a dumb baby. also!!! you get to watch the characters GROW UP!!! from tiny baby faces to grown teenagers!!! and the fun of it is that while you watch/read, you don't even notice it happening!!! you just look back and go holy shit they were literal BABIES!!!

85 episodes and one OVA, but the OVA only covers half of the final arc, which is manga only. very faithful to the manga otherwise though.

Shaman King:

uhhh okay hear me out you gotta like, read the manga first or watch the 2001 anime first, then do the other one. then you can read the spinoffs. then you can read the sequel if you feel like it but it's more second gen esque and has been off and on for many years, long story, and it's also cut into two different names, long story, but it's flowers and the super star.

once you've read the manga and watched the 2001 anime, the 2021 anime is the remake of the 2001 anime bc the 2001 anime was concluded bc the manga was on hiatus and had caught up to the source material, so they did an anime only ending while sprinkling in bits and pieces of canon into that. the remake was insanely rushed though and cut a lot of content (including a majority of my favorite characters' content which was already low!!!) and super cut corners so imo it's really not a replacement for the manga, hence why I suggest the manga first.

some ppl have said watching the 2001 anime after the manga kinda made the anime feel less great overall bc of the anime only direction it had to take (if it hadn't, it would've ended up like naruto with filler and if y'all were there for that ride, uhhh... never again lmao), so it may be a better experience to watch it first then read the manga.

the anime is aaaaalmost completely faithful (some changes and alterations, but mainly ones that were meant to develop the main characters more and quicker) up until around episode 25, and then it starts getting... timeline-wonky but does follow canon. it just follows the events somewhat incorrectly, put in anime only aspects and swapped things around. after that point, when the characters reach the Patch Village, it's all basically anime only from there with the very final arc sprinkling in some manga only stuff.

anime ending is pretty standard shounen unfortunately, but the manga's ending was a breath of fresh air where it actually follows its themes and story beats right to the end.

that said, the original series is completed. the sequel is... ongoing... sometimes... when it's not blocked by a wall of hiatus bc of the magazine it gets into going under like every single magazine it goes into... but if you don't care for the sequel (understandable tho since it's very different!) that's not a problem. there are tons of spinoffs/side stories though that are both completed and ongoing. there are... a... lot... so basically SK universe is like forever ongoing, but the main series is completed.

** fun fact: hikaru no go and shaman king ran together in shonen jump!

Loveless:

okay so I promise this one is good, but it does feature trigger topics and overall more mature topics.

general premise is hella cringe, cat ppl with cat ears and a tail until they have sex. generally a shounen-ai but there are also het and wlw relationships. older dude claims to be in love with younger dude but it's actually fake and he was just told to say that, so that part goes from cringe to like, actually having backstory.

pretty much a psychological series with side romance (bc as much as it markets itself as romance, there's no "real" romance between the two main characters and the only confirmed pairs are not them). tackles a manipulative, emotionally abusive person who is yandere toward his younger brother, hence tackling more mature and potentially triggering topics. rape is also talked about/implied, though we don't actually see it in explicit detail.

series is complex though and some enemy characters become friendly with the main characters, some just neutral, and some become very close to them. the relationships and dynamics are all amazing though and I love how the more mature topics are handled (tastefully, in other words. it doesn't make light of them and gives depth to the characters) and how the main villain is handled. some more morally gray leaning villainish without being a villain characters are there too.

unfortunate parts of this is that the anime is only like 12 or 13 episodes and was never brought back. worse part is that volume 13 started and the manga went on indefinite hiatus a very, very, very long time ago and has not been touched since and probably never will be again. still an amazing series, but pretty much in permanent limbo unless the author magically decides to take it up again.

Yami no Matsuei:

uhhh listen it's another shounen-ai BUT it's not just romance. i don't really read purely romance series and always need substance and story/plot.

uhhh listen this one's kinda difficult to explain but basically it's a group of dudes who are detective-like ppl who are all actually dead and they get partners assigned who are also dead. villain is batshit nuts.

story can be pretty heavy on the romance/one-sided romance and stuff, but that didn't deter me.

also, talking bird buddies.

as above, the unfortunate parts are one season of about 13 episodes and not picked back up, and the manga is on indefinite hiatus and probably will not continue.

Yu Yu Hakusho:

uhhh you all probably at least know the premise of this one but im gonna come out and say it!!! ...watch the jp dub. promise. i know ppl say the dub was good but. i don't. rly feel that way??? despite growing up with the dub??? and also the sub sounds better to me???

anyway watch this series (or read it!)! :D

** fun fact again!: this series also ran with hng and sk in shonen jump!

[chevvy-yates]

top five video games! (or movies if you got that one already)

I'll go with both :)

VIDEO GAMES:

1. Red Dead Redemption II

This game, seriously. It will take a while to beat this quality that game has. story line, characters, fights, immersive world, the wild life, ARTHUR!!!!!, the horses, the nature, all the things you can interact with and the dialogues with just random npc's — this game made me speechless. Sadly I got horribly spoiled for the story that I never ever finished the game. My Arthur baby is still healthy. I think he coughed only once. Dunno if I'll ever finish it. There's a lot of story left, but I grazed every part of the map I could reach with Arthur (except for the western part across the river). (Cyberpunk could have been like that, sadly it did not).

2. The Elder Scrolls V — Skyrim

My first game where I had to make own character (before that I only played car racing games or a few Final Fantasy :,D). I got so immersed into the world of TES that I chose to do my bachelor thesis about the dragon language used in Skyrim – so this must mean something alright? Sadly I never came to enjoy playing the game on pc. PS4 provided that mods can be used, tho but at that time I've already beaten out the entire game with my PS3 that I never really played it on PS4. But I love all the memories I've got of it — especially with my thief character. I still love him lots.

3. Cyberpunk 2077

If there wouldn't be Skyrim and RDR2, this game would probably be on No. 1. If you ask me of the story — probably not. But damn it's been a whole while since a game soaked me that deep into it. Maybe it's got to do because you can make own characters again, and I happen to develop them now, with so many head canons + the luck of having a super awesome photo mode and possibilities with mods that make the characters almost alive. It's something completely new and I'm glad I bought a motherfucking gaming laptop — I'd have missed all this. Well aside of this: The setting is just amazing, I love futurisic settings because I'm a sucker for movies like Blade Runner and a chunk of my heart is still in Tokyo (which I've visited 4x and to me is a real cyberpunk city already).

4. Assassin's Creed

The one and only real Assassin's Creed game. Altair is badass and it was amazing to get him back from a novice to a true master assassin. love the setting, love the monotone game play, love that altair can't heal himself, love that he can't swim, love that he has no money. Love the combat, Altair is super brutal. No other Assassin's Creed game could reach this master piece ever. (I'm interested in the new one tho bc back into that time and setting again but I don't like this open world stuff they did since the Egypt part).

5. Thief

Sneaky games are my specialty since I made my thief character in Skyrim. And when I learned about there are actual thief games, and a new one got to be released back in 2014 I was all bats about it. I've watched let's plays of the old Thief games, tho. but the latest for PS4 I enjoyed so much I even found a lot of lore from the old games in it and I can't understand to this day why this game flopped. It makes me still sad, the entire game studio had to close because of the flop. Old fans seemed to hate it as much as new people. For me it's a gem because of all the references to the old games — Story? what story? My soul is still captured deep down under the moira asylum, ugh. Never had a game freaked me out more than this part of it (Okay Alien was worse bc the Alien is unpredictable). But being in an empty asylum with no one but you freaks u surely out and therefore this game alone is a master piece.

______

MOVIES:

1. High Plains Drifter

No sterotypical western and therefore I fucking love it alone. It's art. The people of Lago do not know what is going to happen when that ghostly stranger rides into their town. He turns it literally into hell seeking vengeance. Watching it for the first time can leave you unsatisfied having questions or you're probably going to ask yourself: what the heck did I just watch? Because you expected a western. I'm a sucker for Clint Eastwood movies, especially the 60s and 70s ones. This one is the first - or was it the second one? - he directed and playing in it and I consider it a masterpiece.

2. Magnum Force

Yes, I'm also a sucker for cop movies since I was a kid, so it was no wonder I liked all the five Dirty Harry movies when I chose to watch them for the first time back in 2020. But Magnum Force got to be my favorite (even tho the first one is pretty cool as well). Harry Callahan kicks asses – even in his own ranks. And I love his one liners, alright? Plus the movies are all filmed in San Francisco. It's my favorite city. I'll never get enough seeing that beautiful city, no matter what decade (it used to look prettier back in the days, tho).

3. Indiana Jones 1—3* (there ain't only one sorry not sorry)

Indy is my childhood hero. He's always in my top 5. I rewatched his three 80s adventures so often that I lost count of it. And every character travelling with him is amazing. Willie, Shorty, Henry Jones Senior (aaahh Sean Connery ;_;), Marion, Sallah, Marcus Brody, Elsa – I even liked the stupid nazis bc they are so fun to watch losing all the time against Indy and his crew!!! Settings are amazing (Egypt, India, Italy (Venice my love)) — and no friggin CGI back then. Quality movies no new movie will ever reach again.

*not the 4th tho.

4. For a Few Dollars More

Ugh, I'm just a sucker for Clint as the Man with no Name, alright? But the second is my favorite bc I love love love Manco (Clint) in it. He does everything left handed, he's my hero! (there's way too less left handed characters). And the dynamic he's got with Mortimer (Lee van Cleef) is just AAA+++. Two bounty hunters on a mission. The music underlines the cinematic scenes so good, I'm always in awe (thank you Ennio Moriccone for your music <3).

5. Where Eagles dare

Another 60s movie with Clint alongside Richard Burton in the main roles. This time it's a war movie. The story follows a team of British-American special Operations Executive raiding a castle. Love the plot, fuck up all the nazi scum (probably Clint's highest kill count in a movie ever). Somehow the movie reminds me a bit of Wolfenstein, I bet it was some inspiration for the old games. Amazing action scenes with a lot of fire and explosions.

[stxleslyds]

Dick was in space at the time. Though you can tell how hastily written Brothers in Blood is: Dick literally killed for Jason during Chuck Dixon's run on Nightwing. Jason doesn't know it, but even after everything, it does seem a bit OOC for him to basically say Jason should've stayed dead.

Hey Anon! I think it is safe to say that Bruce Jones just didn’t know who he was writing for. Or maybe he just wanted to give us his very own take on Dick Grayson’s whole character.

Dick killed Joker in Joker: The Last Laugh (by Chuck Dixon) and he indeed did it for Jason. He was definitely going to beat the living shit out of him after what he thought Joker had done to Tim, but as soon as the clown opened his mouth about Jason, Dick completely lost it and finally killed the clown (good for him).

Dick saying that he wished Jason had died that day in the explosion was incredibly out of character for Dick, in that you are also correct. (In 'Brothers in Blood' when Dick says "Jason, god, I wish he had died that night with Batman and Joker", he is referencing the explosion in Crime Alley in UtRH).

If DC really thinks that any of us would actually believe that Dick would actually want Jason to die after the events of UtRH then they really don’t know their characters at all.

Dick was one of the people that we never saw react to Jason being back from the dead, like he probably found out that the Red Hood was Jason through Bruce. Dick had a lot going on at the time so he it would have taken him a long time to find that out, I imagine that when he was finally able to sort his problems out, he would have gone to Gotham to check on Bruce and how things had ended with the Red Hood case.

If Bruce told Dick some of what happened in Crime Alley with Joker and Jason, I think that Dick, first, would have had his world shaken because of the fact that his first contact with his resurrected brother was a fight. And then his emotions would completely explode, “Where is he now, Bruce?”. “Is he safe? Have you tried to make contact?”

If Bruce had told Dick the complete truth about what he did to Jason in Crime Alley, I honestly think that Dick would have punched Bruce in the face with no hesitation.

I know many people reduce what Jason did in UtRH to him going on a horrendous killing spree but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. People need to re-read that comic because Jason had some pretty strong morals going on for him in that event, they are surely different to Bruce’s and even Dick’s but Jason didn’t kill innocent people or people who weren’t warned about what would happen if they didn’t follow his rules (that were basically don’t sell drugs to children).

So, I think Dick, being his mature and understanding self, would have told Bruce that he was way out of line, and while Dick wouldn’t be happy with Jason’s actions (of killing criminals), I still think that Dick wouldn’t hope for his brother to have died at the hands of Bruce while their father was trying to save the clown that had killed Jason in the first place.

People often times forget that Dick has always worked with dubious people, people who have different morals than him or were used to kill. Why would Jason stand out in such a way to him that Dick would actually wish he had died (again). Dick has a frenemy relationship with Slade fucking Wilson! And that man had recently (at that time) shot point blank at Roy Harper (Dick’s best friend) and also destroyed Bludhaven along the Society.

The Brothers in Blood arc started with Jason and Dick not seeing each other for a year, while I do think that Jason wearing a Nightwing suit and killing criminals would have been something that Dick would have been absolutely against, I still think that it wouldn’t make Dick want Jason to have died.

Also, Jason taking the Nightwing mantle and going on a killing spree was stupidly out of character for him too. Like, do they really expect me to believe that a man as meticulous as the Red Hood (with plans that took years for him to execute) would suddenly decide that what New York needed was a blood thirsty Nightwing?

He could have gone after drug dealers and other type of criminals in his Red Hood suit and still catch Dick’s attention. Maybe if they had done that, we could have had some very interesting interactions between Dick and Jason.

We could have seen them talk to each other; Dick could have told Jason that he believed Bruce was on the wrong side of things when he chose to save Joker instead of letting Jason kill him. Maybe Jason could have regained some of his memories with Dick from before he died and from there, DC could have explored the relationship they had as brothers before Jason died. I have been seeing some amazing posts by @bigskydreaming where he says that fandom has always used the lack of information about Jason and Dick’s relationship back in the day, to make it seem that Dick was never there for Jason and that he was a horrible brother, and not to make stories about them actually spending time together and forming a bond.

If 'Brothers in Blood' had explored Dick and Jason’s relationship before his death in a good light, we could have seen some developing friendship and/or allyship between Nightwing and Red Hood. And I am not talking about Jason changing his ways or anything of the sort, I am talking about them coming to an understanding of their different ways of fighting crime.

But I guess that was never the plan, having Dick say horrible stuff about Jason and Jason being completely out of control was more important or a better story to tell, according to DC.

The opportunity that was missed there was huge and that’s sad.

Anyway Anon, thank you for sending me the ask, I hope you have a fantastic start of the week!

[waheelawhisperer]

Jesus Christ dudes like this are 50% of the reason I don't like expressing my belief that Yang is bisexual or posting M/F Yang content. So much to unpack for a tweet that's like 3 sentences at most holy shit

Like I don't even think there's anything wrong with asking "which male character would make the best partner for Yang" in a vacuum, but the way this whole tweet is phrased just makes my skin crawl. There's just... so much obvious anger at Yang for both not being a perfect fuckable waifu and for being attracted to a woman. Like imagine if this tweet was respectful in any way instead of dripping with misogyny

I love how we still have people arguing over whether Bumbleby was planned from the beginning and insisting that the writers changed it because the shippers wanted it, like who even cares lol. All that matters is whether they execute it well. Not like any shows have ever looked at what fans liked or wanted and decided to incorporate more of those elements to appeal to the fanbase, but apparently this is only a problem when it might result in same-sex romance. They could plan it from the beginning and do it well, they could plan it from the beginning and fuck it up, they could change their minds halfway through and make a mess, they could change course in the middle of the show and handle the transition effectively... Like it honestly doesn't matter to me what the decision stems from. I could not care less whether they decided Bumbleby would be a thing the moment they started work on character concepts or if they chose to make it the endgame in Volume 5 as long as it's competently written and will never understand why this specific argument is a thing.

Ah yes the standard "Yang is a grumpy bitch for... having PTSD and a backbone and experiencing character development instead of being the collection of tropes and stereotypes she was initially presented as and that her fucking trailer explicitly warned us she was more than" argument that's more worn out than I am after a 50 hour work week. Funny how the people who trot it out seem just as angry and resentful as Yang has ever been. Like I don't think there's even anything wrong with liking Beacon-era Yang, I too miss the days when she was happier and not hurting so much and the urge to protect her from that trauma is enormously powerful, but the people who whine about her being a bitch really seem like they're just upset because they thought she was built in a factory to be fuckable and now she isn't anymore. Funnily enough, it is possible to write M/F ships while also treating women like people instead of objects to be used and possessed by men

So weird to me how this tweet seems to equate Yang being interested in a girl instead of having a male love interest with bad writing, like there's nothing wrong with enjoying hetero ships but the presence of same-sex attraction isn't a sign of poor writing, bro your homophobia is showing lmao. Like just ask which M/F Yang ship people prefer and go on about your day without structuring your post to make yourself sound like as much of a dickhead as possible, that way the people who care can participate and the ones who don't can just ignore you and move on

Anyway the correct answer to this poll is Jaune, at least he has an actual dynamic with Yang, there's genuine friendship there that we've seen on-screen that could theoretically blossom into romance or whatever. I literally can't remember Yang interacting with Ren directly between Volumes 2 and 8 besides one obviously platonic hug in Volume 6, she snarks at Sun a couple times and seems generally unimpressed by him, and really has no time or patience for Neptune at all. I think if you stretch she could have chemistry with Ren but there's precisely none at all with Sun and Neptune lol. Bumbleby and Freezerburn both beat out Dragonslayer pretty handily on my list of Yang ships but at least I can see how that one would work, she'd dump Sun or Neptune in the space of a week

Sorry for clogging up your notes with this rant, I just tend to get heated when people fling shit at Yang and it happens all the freaking time.

Also 60 responses lmao, I got more than that asking if I should write porn about a gacha game and all I do is shitpost

Lmao this guy (if y'all are on twitter you know who it is)

First of all, “devolved into a grumpy bitch”. Like lmao the misogyny jumped out. Sorry Yang has more character traits than just being a blonde funny party girl with big tits and that she actually has a personality and a backstory.

Also his great idea “hey guys! If instead of having the bad idea of Yang getting with Blake—her teammate and a character whose arc is directly connected with hers—the writers were good and Yang got with one these clearly better choices, who would it be?” *Proceeds to put two of Yang's friends who already had love interests in the show and two other guys with whom Yang has interacted maybe twice in the show*

Also, I really like the implication that it would only be good writing if Yang dated a guy! Like, obviously, even if it wasn't Blake, Yang dating another female character, like Weiss or Nora, would be terrible writing too, because what's really bad about the writing apparently is that Yang is sapphic and not dating a boy.

Like lmao.

[bibiana112]

Okay something that was stuck on my drafts was just rambling thoughts from when I first finished aini so I'm gonna summarize what I had going on there

Biggest first impression was, surprisingly, just how weird Kizuna was about Mizuki- okay now we get why and I did guess it halfway too that she literally was just like Kizuna's big sis and such but still... Makes sense I got hung up on that, I related to her in a very specific way and this whole situation was so weird to me who does have friends with about the same age difference that I look up to, but the way it develops here it just enables Mizuki to feed into the mindset that she's just not allowed to be a kid anymore because of all the stuff she's gone through but that sucks she's still freaking twelve and all these adults around her don't treat her like it and it's not supposed to be something you question at all like :/

I like the collectables! Silly clothes! I'm glad the dlc ones weren't the only customization, fun unlockable dress-up things are nice and a plus on the experience- the whole gameplay in fact I had a blast with and had no significant complaints to make

The theme of someone needing to be reunited with their "other half" to be "whole" was just never going to be a theme that appeals to me. Everyone being incomplete until meeting someone else is simply not the kind of idea I subscribe to and especially not like romantically, the couples and relationships I have more words on despite being bad at talking through these concepts but one or another it's just not to my tastes so again- was never gonna resonate with a game with that core message all that much is all

Uchikoshi is allergic to sequels, can't embrace a whole new cast nor stick to the original and just follow up on where the last game left off, nope, always a far less satisfying compromise between he two- I wish aini had absolute minimal participation from the old cast, no Mizuki fake out just a flat out new character honestly I would have loved Bibi so much if her story didn't muddle Mizuki's pre established one, stick to an anthology format of new cases or at least keep the dynamics and personalities consistent with the conclusion of the first game I wish Date wasn't annoying I wish he was just Falco chilling out in the background of a random scene where you can interact with him only if you want with no bearing on the case at all hell if you're gonna commit to them still interacting with the story as coworkers have him actually die! Or at least give him and Mizuki an actual reunion!

Entirely up to personal taste again with this one but I miss the slight tinge of horror, the gross gouging out eyes kind of violence because the action flick kind of violence? Bores me to tears. Ryuki got shot and I knew he'd be back- they did a whole all is lost moment actually I think they did that twice with Mizuki nearly losing the battle and getting all beat up and I looked at it and I knew they wanted me to have A Feeling™ over it but it went by so fast, I knew the next beat was her getting back up, none of the lead up to it connected with me enough to make up for the predictable nature of this scene structure, there was very little weight to it and I miss that grim ass feeling that the first game sometimes captured with Saito and the way he operated especially in the paths where he's still in Iris' body by the end and still poses a threat to the cast (this point in my drafts also ended with "man I'm feeling unfulfilled by this piece media I think I'll go finally read Higurashi hopefully that'll make me feel better" and lmao I still haven't and still really want to)

[erazonpo3]

WOWM

so What Once Was Mine came out and I read it.

My General Thoughts are that this book was something of a rollercoaster but in like a pop up carnival with dubious safety regulations and diseases in the DIY log flume water kind of way. I had some fun reading it but I also feel like I picked up a rash.

If you're like me and you enjoy picking a book apart for morsels of interesting concepts then you might enjoy it, if you think holy shit why the fuck is a literal real historical serial killer in this book I need to see this then you might enjoy it, if you care about engaging plots and character beats then you probably won't.

If you want to ask me anything specific go ahead, but otherwise for more in depth thoughts: spoilers ahead

Basic Summary of the Plot

Okay so here's the deal. The story has the framing device of two siblings in a cancer ward, where one tells the other a story. I'll get into that later, but that's how it starts. Our actual story starts with a pretty long prologue: We learn that the King & Queen got the Moonflower thinking it was the Sunflower, Rapunzel was born with silver hair, and then baby Rapunzel kills a maid who accidentally hurt her when brushing her hair.

Oh, by the way, Max is a human man named Justin Tregsburg. Yeah.

Anyway, the royal family puts out feelers for legit witches who can safely take care of Rapunzel because the baby is too dangerous, and Gothel shows up to take her away. Queen Arianna visits Rapunzel once (but is only allowed to watch through a peephole) and decides watching another woman raise her child is too painful and throws herself into restoring the kingdom's orphanages instead.

Now we're in the present. Rapunzel is nineteen and she wants to go and see the lanterns (a mourning tradition of the Dead princess in this story). She tries to argue with Gothel but gets shut down, and Gothel makes her kill a chicken to prove the point that she can't go outside because she's too dangerous. However we as the audience already know Gothel plans to sell Rapunzel off as a bride or a servant or a weapon to some other nobles, because she's evil.

Also by the way Gothel still has access to our Sundrop Flower and is using it to live forever that's just a thing that happens in the background.

When Gothel is gone Rapunzel watches as a man (Flynn) stores a satchel in a tree outside of her tower, and that motivates her to leave the tower for the first time. Then she goes back inside the tower with her prize of a crown, and a skink she found and named Pascal. Rapunezl and Gothel have another spat, and Rapunzel decides she will run off to see the lanterns and she will find Flynn and make him her guide.

She ends up at the Snuggly Duckling and she doesn't find Flynn but she does find Gina, a young career criminal girl looking to break the glass ceiling. Gina agrees to help her find Flynn. They find Flynn, and he agrees to help guide Rapunzel to see the floating lanterns for a split reward of the crown with Gina.

The Snuggly Duckling gets burned down by Countess Bathory (yes that Elizabeth Bathory) and the Pub Thugs are pissed about it and also they're helping Rapunzel even though she didn't sing the I've Got A Dream song don't worry about it. We learn that the nobles that wanted to buy Rapunzel are now hunting her down so she can go to auction.

Gina takes them to her adopted mother's cottage. Gina's mother is a white witch, who goes by the name of Goodwife. She doesn't get an actual name she's just The Goodwife. Anyhow, the cottage is a magic safe space (for now) and Goodwife teaches Rapunzel that her hair isn't inherently evil and may not even be all that deadly! Rapunzel learns that her hair has other powers too, like the ability to turn skink Pascal into a sentient Chameleon. Yeah.

Also Goodwife tells Rapunzel she's the dead princess but this isn't like, an immediate call to action. Not a lot happens until we get this story's version of the Mother Knows Best Reprise where Gothel finds Rapunzel again but has to flee, but this Rapunzel has a bigger support network and isn't buying it. Flynn and Gina decide the safest course of action is to bring Rapunzel to the castle, but along the way she gets kidnapped by the Countess.

Gothel is pissed because she still wants the money for Rapunzel, so she rallies the armies of all the opposing bidders. Flynn and Gina convince Max the Man to send for his troops, and he joins them in going to the enemy castle. Flynn tries to sneak in, gets caught, and meanwhile there's a bloody battle out the front between the noble armies. Max jumps into the fray, Gina turns around and rallies the Pub Thugs.

Rapunzel uses her shrinking magic (!) to disappear half the castle and escape with Eugene, and the Pub Thugs arrive and basically end the battle. The Captain is dying but it's okay! Rapunzel turns him into a horse :) Also Rapunzel sees Gothel and tells her to fuck off.

The story ends with a tearful reunion between Rapunzel and her parents, Eugene and Gina are implied to be biological siblings, and things are good but of course in direct parallel to Cass Gina leaves at the end to become an adventurer. The end.

(There are a few other smaller plot beats, but you get the idea.)

MY THOTS

So here are my thoughts™.

Framing Device

I'll just state that I didn't like that the story was told via the vehicle of an older brother telling his 16 year old sister a different version of the Tangled Movie in a cancer ward. From what I've heard it also isn't normal for the Twisted Tales series to use a framing device for the AUs either.

I sympathise with the author's personal story, of course I do. That doesn't mean I'm stirred with compassion every time the flow of the story is interrupted to remind you to be sad because this is a story being told to a girl sick with cancer. It feels more than a little tragedy-porny rather than emotionally touching, and maybe that's because I'm too burnt out on real life tragedy to waste emotional energy on fictional cancer patients but we don't need to do Fault In Our Stars discourse again.

Real World References

This story goes heavy with Real World references. And another issue with the framing device as above is that you do feel like this is a story being told by someone namedropping every historical figure they know which makes it harder to get into the story.

There's like... a lot of references to Christianity, particularly in the prologue. There's a priest that thinks Rapunzel's hair is the work of the Devil or whatever. It's a lot. The Patriarchy is a thing. And that's not even getting into the Countess. I put it very succinctly in my notes so I'll paste it here:

I wish she’d just been an OC who could exist to chew scenery because the fact that she was a literal historical serial killer is super. Off putting. Like, she could have been an obvious reference to Bathory, but it feels like Miku Binder Hamilton levels of uncomfortable to me.

I miss Lady D.

Which basically sums up my problem with trying to take the setting of Tangled and put it somewhere in the Real World and somewhere on the Timeline. Who thought this was a good idea.

Misc. Thoughts

So, I used the five highlighter colours my ipad allows to organise my thoughts and organised them accordingly: Yellow for out of place IRL references, Blue for worldbuilding/character points that aren't plot relevant but still interesting, Pink for when something I find personally amusing happens, Purple for when the story feels like it's trying to 1-up the movie in some kind of way and Green for Heterosexual Nonsense. I'll touch on those last two in the Character sections but be prepared.

Also: for a book about giving Rapunzel killer hair, her hair isn't very dangerous. I wanted to see Rapunzel kill someone, and I'm disappointed that I didn't.

Characters

I'll do a deep dive into my thoughts about the characters before wrapping it up. I'm starting with Gina because she's honestly the easiest to get through.

Gina

Gina is a new character introduced for the story. She's a young woman trying to make it as a career criminal but keeps hitting that glass ceiling. So here's the down low, for all those who want to know: Gina is basically Cass, only not really. She's implied to be Eugene's biological sister, as previously mentioned, but you can imagine she's Cass the entire way through without breaking your immersion because if you imagined Cass if she were adopted by a Goodwitch rather than the Captain and had a looser, more wilderness survivor than trainee guard upbringing then you get Gina.

I liked Gina! I think she's fun as her own character too, and her best moments are when she's interacting with her mother Goody Goodwife, and she of course picks up a natural sibling rivalry with Eugene, but I was disappointed with how little she really bonded with Rapunzel because she needed to make room for Eugene and Rapunzel's romance.

Rapunzel

Okay, here's our protagonist. There's a notable effort to make Rapunzel more active in her destiny and whatever, and sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn't. I was worried they'd try to go full butt-kicking girlboss with her but I was pleasantly surprised that Rapunzel was pretty useless in most scenes, genuinely love to see it.

With a more intimate look into Rapunzel's psyche through the medium of prose, we see Rapunzel really questioning Gothel's behaviour even before she leaves the tower, and while I appreciate that she can develop her own cynicism I feel it starts unnecessarily early. This is my purple colour; the movie needs to be "fixed" by showing the readers that this Rapunzel is quicker to distrust Gothel. She's also quicker to hatch a plan to go outside of the tower on her own, and she makes a plan to make Flynn her guide for the lanterns even though he never stumbles upon her in the tower- and even though she has a perfectly rational reason not to trust him which is that he is a stranger and a Wanted Thief.

In the moments where it does work is when Rapunzel is surrounded by her new support network: Flynn, Goodwife and Gina, who encourage her to question Gothel's sincerity, and Rapunzel comes up with her own defences for Gothel so that she can poke through them herself.

I have some other thoughts about Rapunzel's hair and her powers, like how the story provides the interesting concept that her hair gets different powers with the different phases of the moon, but a lot of the powers are uhhh stupid and also I feel like it really robs the story of the whole gripping conflict of "Yes I'm Rapunzel Yes my hair kills people what of it".

In as far as just Rapunzel herself though, she still felt pretty in character nonetheless, and maybe that's all I can ask.

Flynn Rider / Eugene Fitzherbert

My boy I am so sorry. They neutered my boy.

Long story short: Eugene in this story is the sexy lamp. He contributes nothing to the plot except to be there for Rapunzel to drool over. And of course because he won't get any character development, he starts from the very beginning as a sweet soft boi with none of the Flynn Rider characterisation from the movie because we don't have time for that, he needs to be husband material stat.

His whole character is the colour green for Heterosexual Nonsense.

So, here's the problem. In the movie, there's not a lot of time for ~friendship~ between Rapunzel and Eugene because they kind of immediately see each other as a romantic prospect. And whatever, it's a movie and there's only so much time. But this book had the opportunity to take things a bit slower and instead chooses to make Rapunzel get jealous whenever Eugene and Gina interact and for her to be constantly wishing he was holding her hand.

Say what you will about Lost Lagoon, but it tells a good romance story just by virtue of not intending to be a romance story, because the author is trying to convey a strong bond between Rapunzel and Cassandra without using "and they kiss" as a cheatcode. What Once Was Mine says "he was a boy, she was a girl, could it be any more obvious?" and leaves it at that.

Now as for how this all pertains to Eugene's character? Well, it just robs him of any flavour. In the movie there's a clear distinction between Flynn and Eugene, when we learn Eugene's real name about halfway through. We see a clear difference between the Flynn we knew- kind of an asshole, wanated to drop Rapunzel off at the Snuggly Duckling and get rid of her- and Eugene, who is sincere and chooses Rapunzel as his New Dream in opposition to his Old Dream of living alone on an island with a bunch of money.

This version of Eugene is basically Eugene all the way through, because the plot doesn't really need Eugene there but he has to be there because it's a Tangled AU so there's no Rapunzel rescuing Flynn from the guards and healing his hand scene, he just loves her immediately and that's that. They have a little spat at one point but it's cleared up later and not because they actually communicate but because they kiss.

Rapunzel only learns Eugene's real name at the very end of the story, and gives a speech about how Eugene is the real him, but it's just so flat because 'Flynn' has been sincere this whole time? Anyway he does nothing of value for the entire story except be there for Rapunzel to lust after. Eugene I'm so sorry.

Gothel

Gothel's sort of the Big Bad and is characterised as an abusive asshole, the usual. I wish there were a bit more nuance to her character but then again in this story she's not just being passively evil- taking care of Rapunzel for selfish reasons but nevertheless maintaining the status quo- she's being actively evil in trying to sell Rapunzel off.

It's notably funny that Gothel sees the Countess Bathory and is like "what the fuck".

Anyway Gothel in this story also feels very weak in part because this Rapunzel is more critical and in part because this Rapunzel has a new support network. It's for that reason the Mother Knows Best Reprise scene doesn't really work, because the original has Gothel pit Rapunzel against Eugene, whereas she can't do that here so it remains a Gothel vs Rapunzel thing.

She gets a boring death as an epilogue addendum that someone rips out the Sundrop flower, which tbh? lame. It would be a lot more fun if it were open ended but I am also preferential to Rapunzel actually using her killer hair to kill someone. Please

Captain Justin Tregsburg

It's Max. He was a human but then he got turned into a horse. what the fuck you guys

[addictedtostorytelling]

CSI Vegas Season 2 is getting 21 episodes. 🫠

Kind of feel hard done by here as a GSR fan - I feel like the reason so many people watched s1 was for Grissom and Sara.

If S1 had as many episodes the whole hodges storyline could have been done so much better - it was rushed towards the end. Not to diss on S1 too much but from what we got I don’t think the writing is worthy of 21 episodes 🫣

hi, anon!

warning: here be salt about the writing from s1 of the reboot. read at your own risk.

__

i think you hit the nail on the head when you said that the writing from s1 wasn't worthy of twenty-one episodes.

like.

i'd be more upset about grissom and sara being "shortchanged" of time in s1 if i actually thought that having more episodes throughout the season would have resulted in better storytelling surrounding them—but the thing is, i don't think that it would have.

they were, a few cute scenes/interactions aside, pretty much wasted in the ten episodes they appeared in, not due to lack of screen-time but due to weak storytelling.

considering that at a most basic level, during s1, the reboot writers didn't even attempt to develop any of their characters, new or old, to say nothing of the fact that they dropped plot threads and created plot holes left and right, they just seemed to lack mastery over the fundamentals of their craft, to the point where i'm not actually sure that even having twice as many episodes to work with would—or, i guess, now will—help them.

like.

even having all the runway in the world won't allow a plane to take off if there's no gas in it.

the writers of the first seven seasons of the original csi could have done all sorts of wonderful things with grissom and sara over the course of twenty-episodes, using the same basic premise of the hodges case.

but i get the sense that even with all of the time in the world, the reboot writers just don't know how to tell a good story.

their instincts just seem poor.

they focus on the wrong things. omit crucial details. fail to achieve any kind of dynamism.

take grissom's landsickness, for example: that plot point was the closest thing either grissom or sara got to experiencing any kind of "personal development" throughout the season, and it was essentially both introduced and resolved in the course of a single episode—not because the writers lacked the time/space to expand it, had they wanted to, but because they literally had no idea where to run with it. there were plenty of scenes where it might have made sense to raise the issue again, showing it getting worse before it got better, actually affecting the course of the hodges investigation and challenging grissom and sara in new ways, etc., but after episode 01x03 "under the skin," it never came to bear in the narrative in any significant way again. it was a totally wasted beat.

—and even if they'd had eleven more episodes available to them, i'm not sure the writers would have done anything differently, just because they didn't seem to know how to "dig in."

having more episodes might help with some of their pacing issues, but it's not going to (necessarily or absolutely) help them write dynamic characters or develop good instincts in terms of what aspects of their narrative merit focus. that's a skillset unto itself, and it's one that, so far, they've not proven that they possess.

i mean, i guess there's a chance that the writing on s2 will be leaps and bounds better than the writing in s1 just because there's more "room to breathe," but i kinda doubt it.

and i'm not watching s2 to find out.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

unless the writers change their general praxis, it's just gonna be more of the same: flat characters, incohesive plotting, and lots of missed opportunities.

/end salt

thanks for the message! please feel welcome to send another any time.

[willinglyghoulified]

I agree with literally every bit of this. EVERY. BIT. OF. THIS. There are points I want to make about this, too.

Hancock - when I wrote my fanfiction series (which you can find here), the pre-sequel is nothing but Hancock’s backstory, mostly headcanon of mine mixed with what little bit of canon backstory Bethesda gave us, and in book 2 when my SS takes Hancock on the wild ride to kill McDonough, it was a TRAGIC REALIZATION and a MENTALLY AND EMOTIONALLY TAXING ENDEAVOUR FOR HIM LIKE IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN. He beat the synth imposter bare-handed, then practically had a panic attack at the end of it, Sole patches him up, then they go drinking at a bar, get shit-faced, and get into a bar fight with the city guard.

MacCready - yes it would suck to lose a follower and I’d miss him if this really happens, BUT it would have made more sense for MacCready to be like “I’m gonna go fuck off to the Capital Wasteland now, bye,” instead of giving the cure to Daisy like “Hey can you ship this to my son?” and then never mention his son again. WHAT?! Providing for your child is only half of what makes you a good parent. The other half is actually being there for them.

Minor characters - Tbh I always forget about Cate (and Curie) because they barely had anything to do with the story, they didn’t get a lot of closure, they weren’t in-depth, etc etc etc. And don’t even get me started on Strong. I can live without him. And X6-88, fuck that guy. (sorry to those of you that love him, I just think he’s boring asf)

As far as personal headcanons go, I believe that most people don’t know about the brother thing with Hancock and McDonough. But Piper probably knew about the anti-ghoul crusade McDonough went on as his campaign because it’s a pretty well-known subject. Hancock wasn’t a ghoul when he left Diamond City, he just left because he knew it was wrong. 

Tbh if I wasn’t forced to interact with Piper and Preston, I probably wouldn’t be that interested in them either. I’m mostly enamored with Hancock and Nick because they were the best characters (to me) and then Danse is pretty interesting as far as character development goes, but if you’re not careful he’ll be stuck at that fucking bunker alone forever rofl

Random HC moment:

Piper hates Goodneighbor and isn't too fond of Hancock, but, like any good reporter, she'll go where the stories are. I mean, it stands to reason that she isn't a stranger in Goodneighbor by an stretch.

I also feel like Hancock put the word out that no one has to talk to her, but no one needs to fuck with her either. At least, not physically. There's no way that he doesn't yank her chain every chance he gets because she's just so damn easy to infuriate. And, he likes her. She's got moxie, and she genuinely gives a shit about people, which is more than he can say about anyone else in Diamond City - other than Nick and Ellie.

But, I think he's also a little afraid she's gonna figure out who he is. I don't think she knows he's McDonough's brother. They never say when she and Nat got to Diamond City. I figure it's sometime after the Ghouls were kicked out, because, otherwise, I think she'd have a lot more hatred for McDonough than she already does. So, there's a high chance she never knew Hancock before he became Ghoul.

So, I think he fucks with her, not only because he finds it funny and he's a damn imp, but also because it's to keep her from ever digging too deep. He respects her and what she does even if she doesn't return it, but I think he just doesn't want to have to deal with her if she ever got a hold of a story that big.

.

.

------------------- Gods, could you imagine? She'd never stop banging on his door. He would have to start finding creative ways to get rid of her without hurting her. There would be a whole fucking lottery, a suggestion box for "How To Get Rid Of Piper This Week (No Killing Or Maiming Dammit)!" Winner gets free food and drinks at the Third Rail and a discount at Daisy's. KLEO is banned from entering.

[ot3]

i watched red vs blue: zero with my dear friends today and i was asked to “post” my “thoughts” on the subject. Please do not click this readmore unless, for some reason, you want to read three thousand words on the subject of red vs blue: zero critical analysis. i highly doubt that’s the reason anyone is following me, but hey. 

anyway. here you have it. 

Here are my opinions on RVB0 as someone who has quite literally no nostalgia for any older RVB content. I’ve seen seasons 1-13 once and bits and pieces of it more than once here and there, but I only saw it for the first time within the past couple of months. I’ve literally never seen any other RT/AH content. I can name a few people who worked on OG Red vs. Blue but other than Mounty Oum I have NO idea who is responsible for what, really, or what anything else they’ve ever worked on is, or whether or not they’re awful people. I know even less about the people making RVB0 - All I know is that the main writer is named Torrian but I honestly don’t even know if that’s a first name, a last name, or a moniker. All this to say; nothing about my criticism is rooted in any perceived slight against the franchise or branding by the new staff members, because I don’t know or care about any of it. In fact, I’m going to try and avoid any direct comparison between RVB0 and earlier seasons of RVB as a means of critique until the very end, where I’ll look at that relationship specifically.

So here is my opinion of RVB0 as it stands right now:

1. The Writing

Everything about RVB0 feels as if it was written by a first-time writer who hasn’t learned to kill his darlings. The narrative is both simultaneously far too full, leaving very little breathing room for character interaction, and oddly sparse, with a story that lacks any meaningful takeaway, interesting ideas, or genuine emotional connection. It also feels like it’s for a very much younger audience - I don’t mean this as a negative at all. I love tv for kids. I watch more TV for kids than I do for adults, mostly, but I think it’s important to address this because a lot of the time ‘this is for kids’ is used to act like you’re not allowed to critique a narrative thoroughly. It definitely changes the way you critique it, but the critique can still be in good faith.  I watched the entirety of RVB0 only after it was finished, in one sitting, and I was giving it my full attention, essentially like it was a movie. I’m going to assume it was much better to watch in chunks, because as it stood, there was literally no time built into the narrative to process the events that had just transpired, or try and predict what events might be coming in the future. When there’s no time to think about the narrative as you’re watching it, the narrative ends up as being something that happens to the audience, not something they engage with. It’s like the difference between taking notes during a lecture or just sitting and listening. If you’re making no attempt to actively process what’s happening, it doesn’t stick in your mind well. I found myself struggling to recall the events and explanations that had immediately transpired because as soon as one thing had happened, another thing was already happening, and it was like a mental juggling act to try and figure out which information was important enough to dwell on in the time we were given to dwell on it.

Which brings me to another point - pacing. Every event in the show, whether a character moment, a plot moment, or a fight scene, felt like it was supposed to land with almost the exact same amount of emotional weight. It all felt like The Most Important Thing that had Yet Happened. And I understand that this is done as an attempt to squeeze as much as possible out of a rather short runtime, but it fundamentally fails. When everything is the most important thing happening, it all fades into static. That’s what most of 0’s narrative was to me: static. It’s only been a few hours since I watched it but I had to go step by step and type out all of the story beats I could remember and run it by my friends who are much more enthusiastic RVB fans than I am to make sure I hadn’t missed or forgotten anything. I hadn’t, apparently, but the fact that my takeaway from the show was pretty accurate and also disappointingly lackluster says a lot. Strangely enough, the most interesting thing the show alluded to - a holo echo, or whatever the term they used was - was one of the things least extrapolated upon in the show’s incredibly bulky exposition. Benefit of the doubt says that’s something they’ll explore in future seasons (are they getting more? Is that planned? I just realized I don’t actually know.)

And bulky it was! I have quite honestly never seen such flagrant disregard for the rule of “show, don’t tell.” There was not a single ounce of subtlety or implication involved in the storytelling of RVB0. Something was either told to you explicitly, or almost entirely absent from the narrative. Essentially zilch in between. We are told the dynamic the characters have with each other, and their personality pros and cons are listed for us conveniently by Carolina. The plot develops in exposition dumps. This is partially due to the series’ short runtime, but is also very much a result of how that runtime was then used by the writers. They sacrificed a massive chunk of their show for the sake of cramming in a ton of fight scenes, and if they wanted to keep all of those fight scenes, it would have been necessary to pare down their story and characters proportionally in comparison, but they didn’t do that either. They wanted to have it both ways and there simply wasn’t enough time for it. 

The story itself is… uninteresting. It plays out more like the flimsy premise of a video game quest rather than a piece of media to be meaningfully engaged with. RVB0 is I think something I would be pitched by a guy who thinks the MCU and BNHA are the best storytelling to come out of the past decade. It is nothing but tropes. And I hate having to use this as an insult! I love tropes. The worst thing about RVB0 is that nothing it does is wholly unforgivable in its own right. Hunter x Hunter, a phenomenal shonen, is notoriously filled with pages upon pages of detailed exposition and explanations of things, and I absolutely love it. Leverage, my favorite TV show of all time, is literally nothing but a five man band who has to learn to work as a team while seemingly systematically hitting a checklist of every relevant trope in the book. Pacific Rim is an incredibly straightforward good guys vs giant monsters blockbuster to show off some cool fight scenes such as a big robot cutting an alien in half with a giant sword, and it’s some of the most fun I ever have watching a movie. Something being derivative, clunky, poorly executed in some specific areas, narratively weak, or any single one of these flaws, is perfectly fine assuming it’s done with the intention and care that’s necessary to make the good parts shine more. I’ll forgive literally any crime a piece of media commits as long as it’s interesting and/or enjoyable to consume. RVB0 is not that. I’m not sure what the main point of RVB0 was supposed to be, because it seemingly succeeds at nothing. It has absolutely nothing new or innovative to justify its lack of concern for traditional storytelling conventions. Based solely on the amount of screentime things were given, I’d be inclined to say the narrative existed mostly to give flimsy pretense for the fight scenes, but that’s an entire other can of worms.

2. The Visuals + Fights

I have no qualms with things that are all style and no substance. Sometimes you just want to see pretty colors moving on the screen for a while or watch some cool bad guys and monsters or whatever get punched. RVB0 was not this either. The show fundamentally lacked a coherent aesthetic vision. Much of the show had a rather generic sci-fi feel to it with the biggest standouts to this being the very noir looking cityscape, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like something from a batman game, or the temple, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like a world of warcraft raid. They were obviously attempting to get variety in their environment design, which I appreciate, but they did this without having a coherent enough visual language to feel like it was all part of the same world. In general, there was also just a lack of visual clarity or strong shots. The value range in any given scene was poor, the compositions and framing were functional at best, and the character animation was unpleasantly exaggerated. It just doesn’t really look that good beyond fancy rendering techniques.

The fight scenes are their entire own beast. Since ‘FIGHT SCENE’ is the largest single category of scenes in the show, they definitely feel worth looking at with a genuine critical eye. Or, at least, I’d like to, but honestly half the time I found myself almost unable to look at them. The camera is rarely still long enough to really enjoy what you’re watching - tracking the motion of the character AND the camera at such constant breakneck high speeds left little time to appreciate any nuances that might have been present in the choreography or character animation. I tried, believe me, I really did, but the fight scenes leave one with the same sort of dizzy convoluted spectacle as a Michael Bay transformers movie. They also really lacked the impact fight scenes are supposed to have.

It’s hard to have a good, memorable fight scene without it doing one of three things: 1. Showing off innovative or creative fighting styles and choreography 2. Making use of the fight’s setting or environment in an engaging and visually interesting way or 3. Further exploring a character’s personality or actions by the way they fight. It’s also hard to do one of these things on its own without at least touching a bit on the other two. For the most part, I find RVB0’s fight scenes fail to do this. Other than rather surface level insubstantial factors, there was little to visually distinguish any of RVB0’s fight scenes from each other. Not only did I find a lot of them difficult to watch and unappealing, I found them all difficult to watch and unappealing in an almost identical way. They felt incredibly interchangeable and very generic. If you could take a fight scene and change the location it was set and also change which characters were participating and have very little change, it’s probably not a good fight scene. 

I think “generic” is really just the defining word of RVB0 and I think that’s also why it falls short in the humor department  as well.

3. The Comedy

Funny shit is hard to write and humor is also incredibly subjective but I definitely got almost no laughs out of RVB0. I think a total of three. By far the best joke was Carolina having a cast on top of her armor, which, I must stress, is an incredibly funny gag and I love it. But overall I think the humor fell short because it felt like it was tacked on more than a natural and intentional part of this world and these characters. A lot of the jokes felt like they were just thrown in wherever they’d fit, without any build up to punchlines and with little regard for what sort of joke each character would make. Like, there was some, obviously Raymond’s sense of humor had the most character to it, but the character-oriented humor still felt very weak. When focusing on character-driven humor, there’s a LOT you can establish about characters based on what sort of jokes they choose to make, who they’re picking as the punchlines of these jokes, and who their in-universe audience for the jokes is. In RVB0, the jokes all felt very immersion-breaking and self aware, directed wholly towards the audience rather than occurring as a natural result of interplay between the characters. This is partially due to how lackluster the character writing was overall, and the previously stated tight timing, but also definitely due to a lack of a real understanding about what makes a joke land. 

A rule of thumb I personally hold for comedy is that, when push comes to shove, more specific is always going to be more funny. The example I gave when trying to explain this was this:

saying two characters had awkward sex in a movie theater: funny

saying two characters had an awkward handjob in a cinemark: even funnier

saying two characters spent 54 minutes of 11:14's 1:26 runtime trying out some uncomfortably-angled hand stuff in the back of a dilapidated cinemark that lost funding halfway through retrofitting into a dinner theater: the funniest

The more specific a joke is, the more it relies on an in-depth understanding of the characters and world you’re dealing with and the more ‘realistic’ it feels within the context of your media. Especially with this kind of humor. When you’re joking with your friends, you don’t go for stock-humor that could be pulled out of a joke book, you go for the specific. You aim for the weak spots. If a set of jokes could be blindly transplanted into another world, onto another cast of characters, then it’s far too generic to be truly funny or memorable. I don’t think there’s a single joke in RVB0 where the humor of it hinged upon the characters or the setting.

Then there’s the issue of situational comedy and physical comedy. This is really where the humor being ‘tacked on’ shows the most. Once again, part of what makes actually solid comedy land properly is it feeling like a natural result of the world you have established. Real life is absurd and comical situations can be found even in the midst of some pretty grim context, and that’s why black comedy is successful, and why comedy shows are allowed to dip into heavier subject matter from time to time, or why dramas often search for levity in humor. It’s a natural part of being human to find humor in almost any situation. The key thing, though, once again, is finding it in the situation. Many of RVB0’s attempts at humor, once again, feel like they would be the exact same jokes when stripped from their context, and that’s almost never good. A pretty fundamental concept in both storytelling in general but particularly comedy writing is ‘setup and payoff’. No joke in RVB0 is a reward for a seemingly innocuous event in an earlier scene or for an overlooked piece of environmental design. The jokes pop in when there’s time for them in between all the exposition and fighting, and are gone as soon as they’re done. There’s no long term, underlying comedic throughline to give any sense of coherence or intent to the sense of humor the show is trying to establish. Every joke is an isolated one-off quip or one-liner, and it fails to engage the audience in a meaningful way.

All together, each individual component of RVB0 feels like it was conjured up independently, without any concern to how it interacted with the larger product they were creating. And I think this is really where it all falls apart. RVB0 feels criminally generic in a way reminiscent of mass-market media which at least has the luxury of attributing these flaws, this complete and total watering down of anything unique, to heavy oversight and large teams with competing visions. But I don’t think that’s the case for RVB0. I don’t know much about what the pipeline is like for this show, but I feel like the fundamental problem it suffers from is a lack of heart.

In comparison to Red vs. Blue

Let's face it. This is a terrible successor to Red vs. Blue. I wouldn’t care if NONE of the old characters were in it - that’s not my problem. I haven’t seen past season 13 because from what I heard the show already jumped the shark a bit and then some. That’s not what makes it a poor follow up. What makes it a bad successor is that it fundamentally lacks any of the aspects of the OG RVB that made it unique or appealing at all. I find myself wondering what Torrian is trying to say with RVB0 and quite literally the only answer I find myself falling back onto is that he isn’t trying to say anything at all. Regardless of what you feel about the original RVB, it undeniably had things to say. The opening “why are we here” speech does an excellent job at establishing that this is a show intended to poke fun at the misery of bureaucracy and subservience to nonsensical systems, not just in the context of military life, but in a very broad-strokes way almost any middle-class worker can relate to. At the end of the day, fiction is at its best when it resonates with some aspect of its audience’s life. I know instantly which parts of the original Red vs Blue I’m supposed to relate to. I can’t say anything even close to that about 0.

RVB is an absurdist parody that heavily satirizes aspects of the military and life as a low-on-the-food-chain worker in general that almost it’s entire target audience will be familiar with. The most significant draw of the show to me was how the dialogue felt like listening to my friends bicker with each other in our group chats. It required no effort for me to connect with and although the narrative never outright looked to the camera and explained ‘we are critiquing the military’s stupid red tape and self-fullfilling eternal conflict’ they didn’t need to, because the writing trusted itself and its audience enough to believe this could be conveyed. It is, in a way, the complete antithesis to the badass superhero macho military man protagonist that we all know so well. RVB was saying something, and it was saying it in a rather novel format.

Nothing about RVB0 is novel. Nothing about RVB0 says anything. Nothing about it compels me to relate to any of these characters or their situations. RVB0 doesn’t feel like absurdism, or satire. RVB0 feels like it is, completely uncritically, the exact media that RVB itself was riffing off of. Both RVB0 and RVB when you watch them give you the feeling that what you’re seeing here is kids on a playground larping with toy soldiers. It’s all ridiculous and over the top cliche stupid garbage where each side is trying to one-up the other. The critical difference is, in RVB, we’re supposed to look at this and laugh at how ridiculous this is. In RVB0 we’re supposed to unironically think this is all pretty badass. 

The PFL arc of the original RVB existed to show us that setting up an elite team of supersoldiers with special powers was something done in bad faith, with poor outcomes, that left everyone involved either cruel, damaged, or dead. It was a bad thing. And what we’re seeing in RVB0 is the same premise, except, this time it’s good. We’re supposed to root for this format. RVB0 feels much more like a demo reel, cutscenes from a video game that doesn’t exist, or a shonen anime fanboy’s journal scribbling than it feels like a piece of media with any objective value in any area.  In every area that RVB was anti-establishment, RVB0 is pure undiluted establishment through and through.  

[rrandomtthings]

Bakugou Katsuki and his development throughout the series (Part 1 of 2)

His fall

Note: none of this is excusing things Bakugou has done in the past. He was completely in the wrong for that. Explanations ≠ Justifications.

There will be no manga spoilers in this part, but in part 2 there will be!!

Part two link: (will be added)

Bakugou Katsuki is a very hit or miss kind of character. He is brash, loud, and everything in between. If that is not your type of character, then the chances of you liking him are very low. Hence why his character has been deemed as very controversial.

Not to mention, Bakugou was a bully.

The first scene of the series starts with younger Bakugou bullying a kid with younger Midoriya Izuku, his childhood friend, protecting said kid. This is the first impression that we are given of not only Bakugou as a character, but as society as whole.

People are not created equal

As we continue through the beginning of the series, we find out that Bakugou was a huge bully, especially towards Izuku. With the two being childhood friends, they were really close when they were younger, as they were shown to hang out relatively often.

However, as soon as Bakugou got his quirk things changed for the worse.

It’s important to recognize what quirks mean to hero society. The better your quirk is, the more you’re looked up to. The worse your quirk is, the more you’re looked down upon. This is something that has been ingrained in children at the young age of 4, when they receive said quirks.

Bakugou was born with the jackpot quirk of Explosions while Izuku was born with nothing.

From the young age of 4, your place in society has already been drilled in.

Continuing on from when they were just children, Bakugou already having his quirk and Deku still not knowing what his is (at this point Izuku didn’t get himself checked out), the two head to a lake with their friends. Bakugou, having the best quirk out of all of them and being the “leader” as they walk on a log and he falls off and into the river underneath them, his friends watching as he falls in the water, expecting him to get up all on his own because of the power he holds.

All except one.

In this moment, because of societal standards, Bakugou was expected (even by himself) to be able to get up on his own after that fall. Seeing someone like Izuku, who he calls “Deku,” which to him literally means “worthless,” who is seen as weak and not-powerful by societal standpoints wanting to help someone as powerful as Katsuki, it made Bakugou feel like Deku was looking down on him.

He refused Dekus hand, he refused Dekus friendship. He didn’t like that this “attitude” that Izuku had that Katsuki was so unfamiliar with.

As years go on we are not informed about how consistent Katsukis bullying was towards Izuku. We can only assume that it was something that was somewhat common, however that is only an assumption. This is not canon.

One day, Izuku gets outed out by his teacher about wanting to attend UA. This being Katsukis dream school, it’s interesting to note that while everyone in class was laughing at Izuku, Bakugou was not.

Almost as if he considered Deku, “a quirkless nobody,” a threat.

However, he took that threat and turned it around and bullied Izuku for it, leading to the infamous “swan dive” scene where Bakugou tells Izuku to khs.

This is arguably the worst, if not one of the worst things that have been shown that Katsuki has done. As mentioned at the top of this post, there is no justification for this. Bakugou was completely in the wrong. Just because he felt threatened does not in any way shape or form excuse the way he treated Izuku, especially in this scene.

Then, the sludge villain attack happens.

Here, Bakugou is shown to be in a vulnerable state as he is being consumed by the sludge villain. After Izuku comes in and save him, it is said that Katsuki had’nt bullied him since.

Now Bakugou is in UA. He was used to being the highest of the food chain. Being at the top of everyone so easily. However, when he entered UA, reality hit him like a ton of bricks after realizing that he is not special.

Starting off with one of the most prominent fights, Deku vs Kacchan (1).

The teams are Deku & Ochako (the heroes) vs Iida and Bakugou (the villains) as they fight with each other with their own respective tasks.

Throughout the fight however, even though they were in teams, it was mainly Deku vs Kacchan (as the title suggests.)

In this fight, we see Bakugou at a bit of a breaking point. He practically panics as he comes to a realization that this kid infront of him who he thought always looked down on him could possibly be on the same level as him. To him, the “worthless Deku” was starting to shine through and past the negative connotations of that name.

After he aimed his quirk towards Izuku (NOTE: in this scene he did not try and kill Izuku. He even states that he purposely aimed away so it wouldn’t harm him. However, this is still not an excuse) and saw that Izuku did and could take him after he had one, Bakugou went into full panic mode.

Note: it’s also important to recognize that he showed fear for Deku. He was scared to see how far he was willing to go.

Later on, we are shown Deku spilling the beans to Katsuki about his quirk, to which Bakugou does not believe and continues to claim that he is and will be stronger than him as he walks off, completely vulnerable and with teary eyes.

The next time we are shown Katsuki in a vulnerable state, it’s at the sports festival.

After his fight with Uraraka, who he claimed to be a worthy opponent (wooo some sort of development!!), he immediately put the blame on Deku, thinking that he was the reason why she had such a great plan (aaaaand there that development goes) to which Izuku replies with him not being involved in the plan.

Then, he has his fight with Todoroki to which he starts getting mad about as Shouto was not using his full power on him. Bakugou wants to be shown that he was best with Todoroki using his full power, so he felt like he was being looked down upon and seen as weak in his eyes.

They had to chain him up because he was so furious about the fight, this fight only adding to his very prevelent inferiority and superiority complex.

The sports festival ends and they all go off into internships and Bakugou has chosen to go with Best Jeanist. Here, he grows to respect Best Jeanist, even going as far as to making sure that he is the first one to hear his hero name when he comes up with one.

Now after they come back from their internships, the students are tasked with fighting one of the teachers with a partner not of their choice.

Katsuki and Izuku were paired together.

At first, this was hard. Bakugou was not interacting with Izuku. He wanted to do things his own way, even going as far as to say that he would rather lose than work with Deku. To which led to Izuku punching him to snap him out of it.

Bakugou eventually let up and attempted to start working with Izuku. He even goes as far as using himself as bait so Deku can turn around and win for them (however, Izuku being himself didn’t leave Katsuki behind).

They both beat All Might bc Katsuki had pushed away his pride and finally allowed for them to start working together.

This was arguably Katsukis lowest point in the series. He was so full of distrust, non-compliance, and just,, wanting to stay away from Izuku that he was willing to lose this fight. The same guy who always wants to win was okay with losing.

Then all of class 1A goes to the training camp and it’s being attacked.

Their target? It was Bakugou.

Izuku and others desperately try and protect Bakugou as they try and take him as far away from the attack as possible to avoid any mishap.

However, they failed and Bakugou was taken.

In the moment as Bakugou was taken, we see him show genuine concern for Deku as he runs for him, telling him not to come after him at that moment.

Dekus scream after this scene in the anime will never not make me teary eyed,,

While held in captivity, it was revealed that he was kidnapped because the villains thought that they could turn him over to their side after seeing how upset and unfairly treated he was at the sports festival. However, Bakugou confirms to the viewers that he has no villainous intentions whatsoever.

After he was kidnapped, there was a rescue team created by some of the students so they can get him back.

As they created a last minute plan, they devised a strategy to which they would use their quirks and Kirishima would be the one to reach out and grab onto Bakugou and save him, to which they go through with and succeed in.

This, as revealed by Horikoshi, is a very bittersweet scene. It shows that Bakugou was starting to trust and become friends with others. However, it also showed his stubbornness in knowing that if it were Izukus hand being reached out then he might have not taken it.

After they get out of the spot they were in, they find that All Might was currently fighting AFO and it was being live broadcasted. After AFO, and ultimately, All Mights defeat, All Might sends a message “to the world”(it’s directed at Izuku) saying that “you’re next.”

Bakugou looks over to Izuku, confusion and concern on his face, seeing as he is the only one crying in a sea of cheering people.

Once they get back to UA and time has passed, Bakugou starts doing smaller things to show his appreciation (i.e. trying to pay Kirishima back, etc.)

After All Might and Aizawa come to his house to talk about dorming with his parents, Bakugou asks All Might his relationship with Izuku, to which he didn’t get the response we wanted and brushed it off as he thanked All Might for saving him.

At this point, the students are out to get their provisional license. Bakugou being bakugou failed in the saving part of the exam and failed to get his license.

After they get back, Bakugou confronts Deku and tells him that he wants to meet with him outside. Deku complies as Bakugou takes him to where they first fought, at ground beta.

This fight is full of emotions. With years of anguish and confusion from Bakugou, trying to understand why and how Izuku was slowly rising up to his level. How he feels guilty for being the one to “end All Might.”

Years upon years of emotions are being fought out as Bakugou tries to seek some sort of comfort and understanding about everything that had just recently happened.

Izuku was the only one in Bakugous eyes to be able to accept and understand his feelings.

After they fight out for a little while and get pulled apart by All Might, the secret about OFA is officially revealed to Bakugou.

When asked to keep this a secret, Bakugou claims that he’s not doing it for All Mights sake (hmmm,, Dekus 👀) and goes as far as to encourage Deku to be better so they could be proper rivals.

Bakugou looks over to Deku and tells him that things will be different between the two. That Katsuki will change and accommodate for this new knowledge that he has.

This is the start is his rising.

[end of part 1]

[kitkatopinions]

There's no comparing RWBY 'weapons are part of our souls' to LOTR 'I love not the sword for its sharpness, the arrow for its swiftness or the warrior for his glory, I love only that which they defend'. Ruby fetishizes weaponry so much it's practically a meta gag, while Faramir and Sam long to set their swords aside for gardening trowels. Rwby simps can eternally BTFO making comparisons between them

If RWBY was still back in season three, I'd say comparing it to something like LOTR just isn't fair, that just because there was a lot more big, significant moments in season three didn't mean it was suddenly meant to be taken that seriously. It'd feel like comparing Steven Universe and Phineas and Ferb, because Steven Universe is meant to be an emotional, story-based show with a lot of depth despite it's comedy and goofiness, and Phineas and Ferb is meant to be an episodic show based on comedy and goofiness that still manages to have moments that lean towards being more emotional. Incomparable, really. Steven Universe obviously beats out Phineas and Ferb in terms of character development, emotional beats, story beats, plot consistency, etc, but it's because Phineas and Ferb was never in that ballpark, they were playing in the ballpark in the mall across town with Spongebob and Hey Arnold.

RWBY back in volumes 1-3 had it's incredibly messy things that screwed up the flow and narrative (like for instance the White Fang arc, which was horrible for a number of reasons and always a major blight on the show.) But it was still essentially a school-based, anime inspired, funny web cartoon with great designs and combat choreography that was the highlight of the show, while the plot was there to hold it up. But volume three heralded in a big change in the show (which don't get me, isn't inherently bad, just badly handled imo.) All of a sudden, RWBY as a show was asking to be taken really seriously in volume four. All of our main characters were traumatized, separated, suffering, in over their heads in a world they no longer understood and dealing with deeply personal problems like abusive home lives, PTSD, and self-hatred causing them to push away loved ones. It reminds me in a way of the Harry Potter books changing from 'fun and whimsical adventures in a magic school with writing and style choices a bit reminiscent of Roald Dahl that also has some darker background tones' into 'Harry is fucking traumatized and keeps getting more traumatized, everyone keeps dying around him, the person he once was at eleven now felt like a little brother that had died long ago, his pet owl has been murdered.'

But while they introduced darker themes, it's like they had no idea how to handle them. They started out okay with it, but instead of giving these important topics any depth and world building and moral messages and the focus they deserved, they either sloppily tied up 'resolutions' that were unsatisfying or have just piled on more and more stuff they don't seem to want to deal with. A good example of this is Penny. Her death was hugely significant in volume three, and yet Ruby's grief took a backseat for the majority of season four. After a mentioning in season five, Ruby doesn't mention her again. Then when Penny returns, Ruby doesn't give much reaction, there's no emotional depth, it feels like she barely even cares that Penny's back from the dead. She then decides for Penny that she's going to get a flesh body (I don't wanna hear anyone say that isn't what happened,) while acting totally confident and unaffected by it. She watches Penny's robotic body die while looking like it's reaching out for help while that Penny's eyes do the exact same thing her original body did before the Fall of Beacon, and Ruby doesn't react to that and just goes about her business. (Those scenes are literally triggering for people and I myself don't fully know why, but it's hard for me to even type about it, and the show treated it like just another Tuesday.) Then, Penny chooses to die and frames it like the only choice she's ever made (ignoring all previous content,) and is murdered by a character she's barely spoken to 'for the Greater Good,' while Ruby has no freaking clue about any of it because she already had been removed from the story.

I could talk more about this, but it's running on in length and I want to get to the next point.

Which is that RWBY's attempts at featuring war, loss, trauma, etc while under the banner of hopepunk and presenting itself as serious invites comparison to stories that are more serious like Lord of the Rings. And if not that, than at the very least it invites comparisons to other hopeful but serious story based cartoons like Steven Universe and Avatar the Last Airbender. But the problem is that when comparing them, RWBY does not hold up! Like, at all!

That's what drives me nuts with seeing people compare RWBY to Avatar and Lord of the freaking Rings, because they clearly missed something important when they say that RWBY holds a candle to these things that are both held up as great examples of good writing and world building, two areas that RWBY really falls short in. It's so out of left field, so outrageous. RWBY has always operated under writers that flew by the seat of their pants, brushed off sloppiness, retconned at will, dropped plots, added in things last minute, struggled to make their characters interact in meaningful ways... To compare that to well thought out and beautiful stories like Lord of the Rings, Avatar, or even Steven Universe (the last season rushed against Rebecca Sugar's wishes,) and say that RWBY is in the same league is so weird.

Which like, if people like RWBY just as much as these other shows, that's great for them! If they love RWBY even more, that's also great for them! There's plenty of things I will love and treasure that just aren't as good as other things in the same category. I'm not trying to crap on people who just love RWBY, just... Commenting on the whole 'compare RWBY to Lord of the Rings' thing. One of these stories was prepared to portray serious, real world topics like trauma and the effects of war, and another story... Should have stayed in the lane it was willing to explore. Those are my thoughts on it, at least.

[chalkrevelations]

OK, I’m a little behind on the Youtube subs of Word of Honor but will be catching up this week, because it’s my birthday week, and I used some vacation time at work (which is a tradition, because if I have a bad day at work on my birthday, it’s just salt in the wound, and then why not take the week as one of the weeks off I do every 4 months or so?). I do still have school stuff this week, including finishing a couple of papers, so I can’t just sit around and catch up on teevee, unfortunately.

ANYWAY, Ep. 22 of Word of Honor, and as prologue to my keysmash emotional flail for this one, I was rummaging on AvenueX recently and watched one of the videos in which she talked about WoH losing its original cast because of the Covid lockdowns and how Zhou Ye was the only actor who stuck with the production until it could finally start filming, even though her career was already pretty hot at the time, and she could have done any number of other things. And I offer that bit of background because this episode’s keysmash flail is a lot about HOW HAPPY I AM TO HAVE A-XIANG BACK INTERACTING WITH THE WHOLE FAMILY FULL-TIME, and how grateful I am that Zhou Ye was so adamant about this because Gu Xiang, in her hands, is a FK’N GIFT. Y’all. A-Xiang’s developing relationship with Zhou Zishu - the way he teases her with that little head tilt(!), and the rough-edged protective streak she’s developed for Zhang Chengling, and the way she and Wen Kexing so clearly care about each other, despite what their lives must be like in the Ghost Valley - the fact that kind of caring could survive in each of them, and that it probably has something to do with their relationship, in addition to her relationships with the women in the Department of the Unfaithful (as an aside, oh my god, I love that there are multiple women in this show, and that we get to see their relationships with each other). Her increasing struggle as she tries to confront whether she can fit in the world of humans (despite everything she’s been told) vs. the world of ghosts, and her ferocity - the way she literally bares her teeth at ZZS when they argue! And then, the push-pull between her and Cao Weining is just delightful - the way she keeps running away (lit. or fig.) the moment she feels vulnerable, including the water splashing scene when she chases him away in this ep as they clean up, and the way he respects her boundaries and stops at the distance she indicates in that scene, even as he encourages her to open up to him. I love them SO MUCH. They’re a reflection of the relationship between Wen Kexing and Zhou Zishu, with a lot of the same beats, that really makes more explicit what censorship keeps from happening in some cases with ZZS/WKX, but more than that, they’re fantastic to watch as themselves, as their own characters and their own couple.

ALSO, this ep was just a wallow of found-family feels - I was clutching at my shirt hem in delight during the restaurant scene at the beginning, and then. Then! The family that fights assassins together, stays together! And further to Cao Weining, don’t think I missed that little acting grace note, show, when he steps up and holds Zhang Chengling’s shoulders in protective support during the confrontation with Shen Shen.

Also also, I am SO GLAD that ZZS continues to be as smart as he should be, as the former leader of Tian Chuang. The little moment when he catches WKX’s comment on Long-Tongue Ghost! The almost immediate payoff we get with that! The way he backs off, just as he constantly continues to respect Wen Kexing’s boundaries and stops at the distance(s) he indicates, even as he encourages him to open up.

Finally, yes, yes, WKX’s emotional confrontation with Shen Shen, but more than that, the way ZZS insists on Shen Shen using the name that Wen Kexing has chosen for himself, NEVER gives away the truth of WKX’s disappearance but continues to let Shen Shen believe that WKX grew up in Four Seasons Manor to give WKX the choice of how much he ever wants to reveal to anyone of his personal history, and the way he finally chases Shen Shen away to stop him from badgering his shidi. My HEART. I CAN’T, ya’ll.

I want to live here at Li Manor forever, show.

[mcd-ms-rants]

I wrote the whole post and TUMBLR DECIDED TO DELETE THE WHOLE THING

anyways it’s finally here

take

STUFF I DIDNT LIKE ABOUT MYSTREET SEASON 4:

• ok but the animations here are great. actually tho they're so fluid and clear. Credits to whoever made them!!

• and now let’s do the real thing

• ok so first off this is where the actual plot starts. I know that some people were getting bored of the monotony of the slice of life episodes so they liked it. Again there’s nothing inherently wrong with having it but you have to remember that these characters most likely weren’t written to be in a plot and I say this because their personalities are funny and lighthearted. Their clearly meant for comedy. This also makes them redundant for plot since most of them a few characters barely have any development which is probably why like half the cast was dropped. im not sure how far back jess had planned the plot but needless to say most of the characters wouldn‘t be able to fit there. Travis, Katelyn, KC and the sk’s just dipped for the whole season and even when kc, Travis and Katelyn do show up in s5 their personalities really took a beating

• WHERE DID LAURANCE AND DANTE GO?? We never see them after s3. its probably because their personalities were too funny for plot but laurance was a shadow knight in mcd and since the whole of mys is so hyped up on the whole ‘mcd and mys are connected’ thing by all means he should’ve been there too

• it makes sense that since the lodge is jointly owned by the Ro’meaves and the Lycans, Garroth, Zane and Aaron- and by extension, Aphmau- would come along. it make sense that they would ask Lucinda for help- she’s a skilled witch and has been their friend since high school. theyre literally neighbors. it makes NO SENSE to being Kim- a girl whom they’ve barely ever interacted with and whom they barely know- to a place meant for close family to go to. Ok from a plot perspective yes Kim needed to be there but Aphmau logically doesnt know that yet.

• how does ghost/emmalyn even exist?? We’ve seen emmalyn and kenmur in s1 and they’re ok. not dead or anything. Yes I know that this is mcd emmalyn and she is directly referencing mcd Zane when she says that’s the only name she remembers from when she was alive but that raises two questions- first, how can both mcd and mys versions of her exist at the same time?? and second, what exactly happened between her and mcd zane?? It sounds like she either hates him way more than she loves kenmur (or she’d remember him too) that it’s the only name she remembers or its Stockholm Syndrome.

• I feel that since the plot demanded a ghost vessel thing that was the only reason Aphmau brought Kim. it’s pretty clear that Dante and laurance wouldn’t fit the role because of their personalities so she just remade an older character and changed her completely right down to her skin to fit the plot. her whole personality changes with it- look at her I mean she even becomes more open when she talks. Again this only happened because none of the existing characters could fill that role because IT WASNT MEANT TO HAVE PLOT

• no one likes you michi girl take the hint

• seeing liochant brings back meMoriEs

• what was that potion that lucinda made and which Garroth threw on Zane?? its clear that it cured him from the effects of the forever potion but the bigger question is WHY DONT THEY USE THIS IN S6?? Ok yes in s4 Aphmau gets freed by the power of love(TM) but that doesn’t mean you do that for everyone

• as someone who liked Laurance’s character I miss him :(

• ok there’s WAY TOO MANY PROBLEMS with Ein and his villain shtick. Ein is basically some obsessive werewolf yandere boy who has an unhealthy obsession with aphmau and hates Aaron. and the cherry on top is that Aphmau is his HALF SISTER. THATS INC*ST. That’s GROSS. What is it with Aphmau antagonists and not having a clear motive or backstory?? mcd Zane and Ein both suffer from this and it shows. there were definitely better motives to give him- he doesn’t have to be centered around Aphmau all the time!! And even if you don’t want to go to all the trouble of rewriting the plot you could at least make it so that Ein knows that he and Aphmau are related. Maybe he wants a perfect sister instead and he’s willing to go to any lengths to get her there. it would still be dark and serious but it would be SO MUCH BETTER than the current plotline. Also showing the contrast between his pdh and s4 self and then not giving any semblance of an explanation really makes it difficult to imagine where it all went wrong. yes Michael definitely had something to do with it but to what extent?? How much is Ein actually in control of?? Is he under the influence of a forever potion when he turns Zane, Lucinda and Aphmau to his side?? Is he still under its influence when he fights Aaron?? look I get that they can’t reveal everything but leaving out THIS MUCH and not even revealing it in s6 makes it very difficult to accurately nail Ein’s character.

• how is Aaron even revived?? is that Irene?? how is she here and what is she doing here?? Can we have answers pls. also it makes no sense that she saves Aaron TWICE- once in s4 and second in s6. How does death even work here if Irene can just swoop in and bring them back to life. i feel like none of the villains ever count as threats then because you know that a cryptic mysterious goddess who somehow looks just like your girlfriend will revive you.

• how did Aaron even survive?? No seriously how?? We know that there’s no service or wifi up there at the lodge so using their phones is out of the question. i don’t think Lucinda would be able to conjure up a whole medical team for Aaron. and they're on a MOUNTAIN. It takes precious time to get down from it. for context, even if they sent Garroth (since he’s the fastest) down to get help they’d have to wait for him to reach the village area at the base of the mountain, get a phone, call for help, wait for said help to arrive and get Aaron to a hospital. meanwhile Aaron is bleeding out from multiple gashes on his chest made at like point black range that are critical at best and fatal at worst. (his only saving grace is the snow he’s on which would help to numb the wound because its cold but he has like FIVE deep chest wounds and the snow isn’t even on his wounds.) Ya sorry I don’t see how he manages to survive.

• did I mention that I miss Laurance?? • Why is Aaron not at a hospital I don’t even see a ventilator or oxygen mask near him. Listen I’m not a medical expert but those gashes landed straight on his chest which means straight on his lungs and dangerously close to his heart. how is he alive. how is he not choking on blood right now. we know he’s bleeding out- I’m pretty sure one of the doctors even says “Mrs Lycan, we need to draw more blood for your son.” yes he’s bleeding out why is no one trying to idk stop the wound through pressure with a cloth or something?? (Note: it’s been a while since I’ve watched s4, so if I do get anything wrong thats why!!) also why are the werewolf doctors so chill about Aaron’s ultima eyes? like yes they’re doctors they could’ve been sworn to secrecy or maybe they work for the Lycans but Derek is shown to be really paranoid about anyone finding out about Aaron being the ultima. how does he know they won’t tell it to someone else??

k imma head out now-

thanks for reading!! <3 <3