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brucebocchi · 29 days ago

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Summer 2024 anime roundup: ALL IN ONE

hey! i also post these reviews on my ko-fi. this is a labor of love so if you like the stuff i write, i'd really appreciate it if you'd throw a few bucks my way. thanks!

Well, I'm much busier now than I was in the first half of the year, so that means less time for anime and less time for writing about it. I managed to watch only (ONLY?) nine shows this season, so might as well put it all in one post.

As always, each show's OP is linked in the title.

Let's jump in.

Returning anime

NieR: Automata Ver. 1.1a, part 2

After a COVID-plagued production delayed the last few episodes of its first half last year, A-1 Pictures’ adaptation of Yoko Taro’s landmark action-RPG returns to deliver the real meat of the story. And as with the game, the first half of NieR: Automata Ver. 1.1a was something I’d classify as “pretty good!,” while the remainder is what makes the entire endeavor worthwhile.

I’m happy to report that not only did the studio not lose a step, but they improved on the presentation of Ver. 1.1a immensely. The action sequences are superb and expressive throughout, and the CGI integration is actually, y’know, integrated this time out. The score, both original and borrowed from Keiichi Okabe’s contributions to the NieR duology, remains as evocative as ever. They also ramped up the cheesecake more than a little bit, and let’s be real, that was the draw for a lot of people in the first place.

If there’s any one thing Ver. 1.1a can claim as an advantage over the game’s narrative, it’s that the former does a lot more work in building on A2 as a character. There’s just enough to chew on in the game, but having more of her backstory from the YoRHa stage play and manga adaptation integrated into the narrative makes for more of a meal. Having A2’s history and real personality pinned up as a backdrop as she struggles to suppress both really fleshes out her journey and eventual resolve as shit continues to hit the fan. She’s also just a big ol’ tsundere sometimes. And not for nothing, but they gave her an absolute DUMPY for no reason, but I can’t really pin that as a negative.

9S’ whole thing happens too. I really don’t have much to add to that.

When I reviewed this show’s first half at the end of 2023, I mentioned that the initial concern with the anime’s very existence is that it’s adapting a narrative that is functionally being told through the very fact that it’s a video game. The delivery of the game’s true ending, especially, is so innately A Video Game that it’s functionally impossible to adapt directly into a television show. I’m happy to say that although that function is lost, Ver. 1.1a’s ending is still plenty satisfying (and I’m told especially so for Drakengard fans, without giving too much away). Something is still very much lost in the transition, though. In his review of the penultimate episode, Anime News Network’s James Beckett wrote:

What the anime of NieR:Automata has not been able to capture in these critical final moments is the way that the game makes its players complicit in the tragedy in a way that they could never be if they simply sat down and passively watched these events unfold from behind the safe veil of the fourth wall. It would be like if we were each individually guided on stage to place our hands on Hamlet's shoulder and push him gently onwards to his final destination. It doesn't change anything about what happens in the story, but it changes everything about what it means to us.

These acts of “ludonarrative culpability,” as Beckett called it, are the reason why Yoko Taro is considered an auteur in the gaming sphere. Both NieR games are tragedies writ large, and Yoko’s genius lies in making you, the player, carry out the tragedy, often well before you realize what you’ve wrought. And to Beckett’s point from his review, NieR: Automata is a perfectly fine sci-fi story in its own right, but the game puts the blood squarely on the player’s hands and inserts them into the narrative in a way that simply watching cannot. The connection I felt to the story was only there because I’d already played the game myself; I can only imagine how it would feel if this was your introduction to NieR.

So to return to a question I suggested at the end of last year: Do I recommend this to people who haven’t played the game? Eh, not particularly. It’s a well-made show, to be sure, but there’s enough missing from what makes Automata such an exceptional game that I’m not sure I can recommend it wholeheartedly if you’re not already familiar. Then again, I wouldn’t really know how it reads from the other side. To those who know and love the game, Ver. 1.1a isn’t quite the “Rebuild of NieR” some were hoping it to be, but it’s an interesting companion piece that takes surprising strides to tie it even closer to the preceding franchise. If you’re a newcomer? YMMV. Either way, play the game.

Oshi no Ko, season 2

I spent far more time than was necessary in the Discourse Mines following Oshi no Ko’s thunderous debut last year and a controversial (but fortunately inconsequential) turn of events in the manga shortly after the season finale. Though I remain one of the series’ foremost glazers, I’ve had my moments where I worried that maybe I overrated it a bit in my head, that I carried too much water for writer Aka Akasaka, and that I’m still riding the high of the series’ premiere.

Oshi no Ko’s second season completely erased any lingering worry almost immediately and reminded me and the world that yes, it Really Is That Good. The “It’s So Over” switch flipped to “We Are So Back” as soon as best girl Kana Arima and co-lead Taiki Himekawa dazzled their co-stars and one another with literally colorful displays of their acting prowesses. My expectations continued to rise as an active reader of the source material, and studio Doga Kobo continued to surpass them. This adaptation is just that good.

Aqua’s quest for revenge and Akasaka’s continuing examination of Japan’s entertainment industry both lead us into the world of stage acting, specifically 2.5D adaptations of famous manga and anime. Aqua is cast alongside Kana and his sham girlfriend and former reality show co-star Akane in an adaptation of the fictional smash hit shonen manga Tokyo Blade, along with several members of a theater company to which Ai once belonged. While Aqua is more concerned with getting dirt on Ai’s background than he is with acting, Kana and Akane have much more personal stakes as they try to show one another up and still put on the best play they can. Kana can’t stand Akane’s absolutist, matter-of-fact approach to acting (nor the fact that she’s fake-dating the guy for whom Kana’s down abysmal), while Akane, who idolized Kana as a child and is disappointed to see her take a step back as an actress, is trying her damnedest to rekindle the spark that convinced her to pick up acting in the first place. On the fringes, rookie actor Melt Narushima is trying to make up for a heinous performance in the first season that earned him the scorn of his more experienced castmates as well as a mangaka’s permanent ire.

A good amount of this arc does feel like Akasaka was still sorting through his feelings about the Kaguya-sama live adaptation when he wrote it, but he also gave himself some room for reflection on his own side of the equation as a mangaka. Tokyo Blade’s creator, Abiko Samejima, holds her creation very dear and is not impressed with the script. Her friend and former boss, Yoriko Kichijouji, is entirely too familiar with how badly the process can go; her own manga, Sweet Today, was horribly botched in this show’s first season, and she wants to help Abiko-sensei keep a level head. Kichijouji-sensei is the voice of reason this time out as she points out all of the concessions creators may need to take in order to get their work adapted and the unimpeachable truth that mangaka are basically crazy people (and you can practically hear Akasaka screaming through her lines; four months after Kichijouji said this in the manga, Kaguya-sama published its final chapter, marking Akasaka’s retirement from illustrating serialized manga). At her urging, in addition to an all-nighter helping Abiko-sensei make a deadline, the play goes off without any more hitches.

I didn’t much care for the Tokyo Blade arc in the manga but I knew full well that it would translate well to anime just as well as the acting sequences in the first season had. Akasaka’s decision to have the actors treat the stage as a battleground felt a little silly on the page, but experiencing everything again in sound and motion reminded me that this was the same genre of psychological competition that made Kaguya-sama one of my all-time favorites. Doga Kobo is just stupidly good at adapting manga. God, the animation is incredible. Character animation is as deliberate and mesmerizing as always, and emotional moments are punctuated by interpretive splashes of watercolors. Melt’s breakout on stage was a standout moment in the manga, but the abstract, expressionistic depiction of his redemption was so perfectly conceived on screen that life imitated art: Kichijouji-sensei cried in the anime, and manga artist Mengo Yokoyari cried in real life.

I could go on and on and on, but if you’re already this deep into Oshi no Ko I really don’t need to tell you anything else. This season, for all its gorgeous visuals and onstage glory, does not hesitate to remind you at the worst possible moments that this is still ultimately a revenge story and pulls the rug from you just as gleefully as it dazzles. The first season was already exceptional, but the second cements Oshi no Ko as an all-time great adaptation. As a fan of the manga, this is as good of an anime as I could ask for, and then some.

Mixed Bags

My Deer Friend Nokotan

I’m just exhausted.

I’ll admit, I bit a little too hard on the marketing. The preview trailers promised madcap, nonsensical fun on the level of Nichijou or Asobi Asobase, the cast was exceptional, and the OP’s refrain was a total earworm (Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan! Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan! Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan!). It even has the cast jumping in the air! And we all know the Ryo Yamada rule! This was going to set the bar for gag anime!

Oh, how little I knew. Y’know how sometimes you see a trailer for a middling comedy movie and you can tell they already gave away all of the movie’s best jokes? Turns out My Deer Friend Nokotan did just that. I did temper my expectations; it’s not like I thought this was going to be the second coming of Nichijou or anything, but I guess I was still expecting something, I dunno, funnier?

The premise seemed to lend itself to a good comedy either way: Torako Koshi, a former delinquent, has successfully expunged her prior reputation and worked her way up to becoming her school’s student council president. All of that is nearly thrown away when a bizarre new student, Noko Shikanoko, immediately clocks her and almost spills the beans. Also, Shikanoko (who prefers to be addressed as Nokotan) has antlers and can commune with deer. She may even be a deer herself. She hoodwinks Koshi into starting a Deer Club at school, where they recruit Koshi’s upsetting younger sister Anko and the languid, rice-obsessed Bashame. Allegedly, shenanigans ensue.

Take this with a grain of salt, as humor is very subjective, but this show just plain isn’t very funny. Nokotan’s gags hit at least as often as they miss, and a lot of them just feel unforgivably dull. One bad segment can feel like an entire episode. The only reliable gags are gross-out humor, outsized slow-motion violence, or Nausicaä references. Everything else is just Koshi barging into the lower third of the screen to shout about how wacky the joke was just then.

Look, I know that humor doesn’t always translate across cultures. The things I don’t understand about Japanese humor could fill several libraries. I do, at the very least, get the basics of the boke/tsukkomi dynamic (fool and straight-man, basically) and how the reaction to a silly thing is usually the real punchline. I’ve absorbed enough Japanese media to adapt to that momentum. That nearly goes out the window here, because Koshi’s role as the tsukkomi is a straight-up momentum killer. It’s rarely just a “wait, what?!” or a “yeah, that’s rich coming from you;” it’s usually more like “wait, that is so ridiculous! You couldn’t possibly have pulled that off! And what’s that you’re wearing all of a sudden?” The rhythm is just gone. Comic timing? Don’t know her. Even if I thought the joke was funny at first, you could probably see any semblance of a smirk fading off my face by the time she was done. And hey, maybe some of this stuff doesn’t translate. Maybe it’s not that funny in Japan either.

The other characters outside of our main two really don’t help. Anko’s whole “yandere siscon” act isn’t very funny to start with, and she brings nothing to the table otherwise. Bashame is such a nothing character that even Koshi was sick of her by the end of the season. And while I feel like a good narrator can add a good level of je ne sais quoi to a comedy anime (see: Kaguya-sama), an overly intrusive one can actively take away from the humor (see: the Kaguya-sama dub). Nokotan’s narrator comes at it with a sort of winking, nudging “HEY, WE’RE A GAG ANIME” energy that gets too grating, too quickly. What doesn’t help is that he eventually affects a fake-desperate “please watch this show and tell your friends!” bent that called to mind Ron Howard’s narration in Arrested Development’s third season as it was approaching cancellation. Meta humor, as in the latter, can absolutely elevate the level of comedy; 100 Girlfriends in particular wielded it like a machete. In Nokotan, on the other hand, it betrays a clear lack of confidence in the writing, and there’s nothing less funny than comedy that doesn’t even believe in itself.

It’s not all awful, I swear. There are genuinely some very good gags; Nokotan’s cat-and-mouse game with an anachronistic matagi was a blast from beginning to end, and the skin-suit gag got a bigger laugh out of me than almost anything else I saw this season. Any good anime, especially a comedy, lives and dies by its voice cast, and Megumi Han’s performance as the titular Nokotan is this show’s whirring, beeping life support. She makes the absolute most of her considerable range as the jokes call for it, while somehow never stepping on her own toes by dipping into her Kana Arima voice from Oshi no Ko. Koshi shares a VA with Hatsune goddamn Miku. Bashame is pretty much only tolerable thanks to the languid performance of relative newcomer Fuuka Izumi, whom I’m very glad to hear in something that isn’t Gushing Over Magical Girls.

And aside from the music (the OP, to be fair, is infectious), that’s about all there is to like about the production. Did Studio WIT really make this? It looks like it could’ve been made by anybody, and that’s not a compliment. The uncanny CGI deer were the only real visual standout, and even those lost their shine before long. Something attempting to be this audacious needs to have a look to match, and Nokotan falls flat. Again, maybe that’s on me for trying to hold it to the standard Nichijou set.

I’d honestly be surprised if this gets picked up for another season. I’d be hard-pressed to come back for more.

No Longer Allowed in Another World

(CONTENT WARNING for discussion of suicide)

Osamu Dazai was one of the most complex and fascinating figures in Japan’s modern literary canon, right up there with his ideological opposite and real-life rival, Yukio Mishima. Dazai was, frankly, a disaster. He was a serial womanizer, terrible with money, repeatedly disowned by his family, unemployable, a deadbeat dad, and hopelessly addicted to drugs and booze. His magnum opus, Ningen Shikkaku, or No Longer Human, is a stark semi-autobiography, just barely fictionalizing his repeated failures of dignity and self-preservation, including his several failed attempts at double-suicide with his many illicit lovers. The same year it was published, however, Dazai was successful in his final attempt, drowning himself alongside his mistress in 1948.

But like, what if he got hit by the isekai truck instead?

Isekai Shikkaku, or No Longer Allowed in Another World, fully Goes There. The series begins with the legally distinct, unnamed Sensei and his lover Sacchan blindsided by an anachronistic truck along the riverbed. Sensei comes to, alone, in a monastery inspired by the JRPGs from well after his time. He doesn’t know what’s going on and he doesn’t care. All that matters is that he’s still alive, and that sucks for him. Sensei is greeted by Annette, an elf priestess in a virgin killer sweater, who is shocked to discover that not only has he not gained a single stat boost by coming to this world, but he’d also rather kill himself than take her up on the standard offer of an OP cheat skill (and he’d also just rather kill himself in general). So he bounces to go find Sacchan. His refreshing outlook on the new world, as opposed to the other excitable losers who got isekai’d before him, completely melts Annette’s brain to the point of falling in love with him on the spot, so she dons her sluttiest Persona 3 battle armor to chase after him.

Sensei hates this shit. Contemporary western fantasy hadn’t made its way to Japan yet in his time, so he has zero point of reference in this world, and he sure as shit has no clue what a JRPG is. The level-up jingles give him migraines. He has no self-preservation instincts and the only solace he has in this strange new world is a jar of toxic sleeping pills that he munches like M&Ms. He has no interest in or aptitude for fighting, so when he encounters a big-tiddy catgirl being squeezed half to death by a walking tree’s branches, Sensei sees the perfect opportunity to get himself killed. Unfortunately, his blood has become so toxic from said pills that piercing his skin instantly kills the tree, saving the young lady he incorrectly names Tama. Much to Annette’s consternation, she joins the party, and they set out on Sensei’s quest to find his lover and finally die in peace.

As you can guess, that’s not what happens. For some time, we see Sensei throwing himself in harm’s way, floridly imploring various fantasy monsters to kill him in one shot with their big bats, to the point where they get creeped out. His vaguely-threatening exhortations for death make for a fine formula, but one that can wear thin quickly. Before it gets that chance, though, the seed planted in Annette’s introduction bears fruit: The visitors to this world from our own aren’t here in isolation, and they have succeeded in completing the usual isekai goal of overthrowing the demon king. There’s now a massive power vacuum, and nature abhors that shit, so a cabal of erstwhile isekai protags dub themselves the Fallen Angels and decide to take over.

This turn was, to put it bluntly, the main thing that kept me watching. There’s a fine bit of commentary inherent to this framing that the type of wet-noodle, borderline faceless self-insert isekai protags tend to appeal to antisocial losers who would rather give into their basest impulses than see an opportunity to actually better themselves. This is not at all lost on Sensei; his keen eye for the human condition leads him to interrogate the Fallen Angels his party encounters so that he can write about their own failures as humans, as well as the gaping voids in their previous lives that led to them acting like petty tyrants as soon as they gained a bit of power and treating a brand new world like their own personal playground. Sensei’s writings reveal that he did indeed gain a power when he came over to this world; if he sees fit, a finished book will surround its subject and reanimate them back in their original world and afford them a second chance to right their wrongs or, in one particularly moving case, start over on the right foot.

For as audacious as No Longer Allowed’s premise is and as impeccable its comic timing and voice cast (you will find some absolute heaters completely buried on the call list), I just didn’t find it all that compelling. Isekai as a genre is so oversaturated that it was old hat to call it oversaturated even five years ago, so while I do try to pan for gold, sometimes I just come up with a neat-looking river stone. Hell, I can’t even say this one’s all that neat-looking; there’s nothing that looks all that great about it to begin with. The character designs and backdrops are pretty standard JRPG-style stuff that you’re just as likely to find in the likes of Helck, with lackluster animation to match. Didn’t care too much for most of the characters either. Even for its commentary on the isekai genre and the type of person it caters to, No Longer Allowed just ends up shaking out like another isekai series.

There’s clearly more at play here, and I might just go ahead and read the manga because I didn’t really find myself looking forward to watching the anime. Maybe it just didn’t translate well. No Longer Allowed in Another World does clearly have something to say under its silly premise, but its method of getting that message across is, ironically, buried underneath the usual trappings of the genre it’s trying to say something about.

Wistoria: Wand and Sword

I’m gonna preface this by saying that Wistoria is probably the best anime I watched this year that I’ve classified as a “Mixed Bag,” save for Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night. I’m generally of the mind that excellent production can make up for a middling story (my enjoyment of the likes of Solo Leveling and Wind Breaker this year was pretty emblematic of that), and that is the case here for the most part. Wistoria, story-wise, is nothing special; it’s your standard power fantasy set in a magical school, but the entire presentation is just almost fascinating enough to overcome that hurdle.

Hell, it’s almost not even worth going over the plot. Unassuming boy named Will goes to a magic academy, he doesn’t have any magical aptitude, so he makes up for it by honing his hand-to-hand combat prowess in the school’s designated dungeon. It’s Mashle meets Solo Leveling. Will gets picked on (like, a LOT), but he doesn’t care, because he made a promise long ago to reach the pinnacle of magical society to reach his childhood friend, who happens to be a genius mage. There are duels, there’s a tournament, there’s monsters, you know how this goes.

Will has allies in the school, namely a female friend who’s madly in love with him as well as a professor who covers for his shortcomings in magic-related subjects, but remember that this is a self-insert fantasy: There are also increasingly menacing bullies for him to put in their place. Will is challenged by a Snape-like instructor, a classmate who just hates him so much for not having magic aptitude, and a top performer at the school who’s just flat-out evil (and racist to boot!). And of course the latter two also have goon squads of snickering hangers-on. Will always succeeds, of course, because despite his shortcomings, he’s the strongest and most specialest boy. It’s almost like an isekai without the isekai. Too bad we find out that Will is hilariously shredded, which kinda blows a hole in the self-insert aspect.

Goofy shonen-isms aside, there’s still plenty to enjoy here. Varying types of magic, artifacts, and fantasy races abound, and lore is sprinkled throughout the show in character biographies in the commercial break eyecatches. The story does get gradually less stupid as the season goes on and characters are better fleshed out. And hey, there’s nothing wrong with watching a really strong dude beat the shit out of monsters and assholes.

The only thing that really kept me coming back to Wistoria was that, plainly, it looks and sounds fucking awesome. It’s not the best-looking anime I watched this season (that would either be Oshi no Ko or one of the next two anime on this list), but Wistoria takes such a surprisingly cinematic approach to such an uninspiring story that I couldn’t help but keep watching. The lighting effects are lush, combat animation is bonkers in its best moments, and the score is pretty darn good too. It definitely takes some big swings at simulating camera movements and perspective shots that don’t always accomplish what they set out to do, but I can appreciate the ambition bleeding through. I can see the vision, and that’s what counts.

The actual content is pretty paint-by-numbers, but Wistoria is well-made enough that it’s worth a shaky recommendation. Maybe just turn your brain off until the action picks up. I've heard the manga gets pretty good from here on out, so I'll probably stick it out for another season.

The Gems

The Elusive Samurai

If you’re not already familiar with this series, do me a favor and watch the OP linked right above. Pretty good character animation, right? Expressive, weighty, plenty of personality. The colors pop like crazy too! A lot of the time, an anime series will heavily stylize its OP to attract eyeballs and YouTube metrics, oftentimes bringing in outside animators and directors for a unique feel. In the case of The Elusive Samurai, I cannot stress enough that all that animation is the standard.

Yes, this show looks exceptional. Even putting aside the fact that it’s historical fiction, this show has a truly timeless look to it that I still struggle to put into words. The Elusive Samurai is clearly a modern production but bears all of the hallmarks of what great animation has always looked like when a studio is willing to invest in it: Colors are so bold and saturated that I want to take a damn bite out of them, backgrounds are painstakingly hand-painted even for brief cuts, and there even seems to be a film grain overlay to really sell the classic feel. It’s not perfect (I’ll get into that later), but holy shit is it a feast for the eyes.

Adapted from the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump, The Elusive Samurai is a heavily fictionalized retelling of the fallout of the Siege of Kamakura in the 14th Century. Tokiyuki Hojo, left without a family in a bloody coup of the shogunate, is prevented from committing suicide by enigmatic priest Yorishige Suwa and then thrown right back into the fire of the battlefield. Yorishige, who has prophetic visions of the future, foresaw Tokiyuki’s ascent to leadership and wants to see how he fares in battle. Tokiyuki didn’t bother with his training as a young master, instead playing elaborate games of hide-and-seek with the Hojo clan’s advisors, so in the face of certain danger, he’s left with no choice but to do what he does best and run the fuck away. And as with evading his training, Tokiyuki realizes that it’s way more fun than actual combat, and the future is suddenly even more clear to Yorishige: Evasion, not bloodthirst, will guide Tokiyuki’s path to revenge.

At Yorishige’s increasingly unnerving behest, Tokiyuki goes into hiding at Suwa Shrine and begins building a squad to take down the usurper, Takauji Ashikaga. Along with Yorishige’s daughter, Shizuku, he teams up with young warriors Kojiro and Ayako, and in their travels pick up the crass, kitsune-masked thief Genba and the food-obsessed swordsboy Fubuki. It’s fine as extended casts go, though we don’t get much from a few of them past their introductory arcs. Tokiyuki is an absolute delight, though. He’s a sweet and joyful kid despite his circumstances; real shonen protag material. And most importantly, he’s completely over Yorishige’s shit.

I’m a sucker for magical realism, and The Elusive Samurai delivers. Yorishige really does appear to be a prophet, to the point where he can even predict Dragon Ball Z (yes, really), and he and Shizuku are capable of pulling off acts that any actual person would consider a literal miracle. Mythical beasts roam the land and those that were slain appear to reside on a different realm accessible to the Suwas. All of Takauji’s top soldiers have senses and abilities far beyond anything human or animal, and Takauji himself seems to have borrowed some of his prowess from the devil himself. With this show’s commitment to top-tier visuals and animation, the sky's the limit for what we can see, and it kept me glued to my TV every episode. It almost made me want to watch Demon Slayer. Almost.

The cast has some solid performances from familiar names and voices: Yuichi Nakamura is his usual blusteringly silly self as Yorishige, Aoi Yuuki is a riot as Genba, and Katsuyuki Konishi (Kamina himself!) infuses Takauji with appropriate menace. There’s some Chainsaw Man and Bocchi sprinkled into Tokiyuki’s clan of rookie warriors as well. Good stuff, but what really caught my attention was a surprisingly familiar voice giving life to the bug-eyed villain Sadamune Ogasawara: None other than Yutaka Aoyama, the narrator of Kaguya-sama: Love is War. Nobody could have more perfectly infused Sadamune with the appropriate level of self-serious goofiness than the guy who narrated Kaguya-sama’s balloon game like it was an NFL Film. Perfect casting.

As incredible as this show looks most of the time, the remainder does have a critical issue: CloverWorks didn’t seem too invested in hand-animating horses or any of the show’s characters riding them, so it opted instead for CGI. Very poorly-implemented CGI. I really try to take stuff like this as it comes, but the modeling looks way too video-gamey for the style the rest of the show is going for, to the point where I’m taken out of it. There’s really no excuse for something this uncanny with the high bar The Elusive Samurai set for itself early on (and yes, Uzumaki is airing as I write this, and I’ll talk about the similar problem that show has at the end of the year).

I know I just said this about Wind Breaker last year, but this may be CloverWorks’ other Big Shonen Hit. It certainly has the juice, between the wacky gags and shockingly brutal violence, and CGI issues aside, the studio has clearly invested in it. A second season is already on the way, and I’d say it’s paid off. If the studio can iron out the kinks, this could end up becoming an all-timer.

Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines!

If I haven’t made it clear enough, my anime journey has turned me into a bit of a romcom guy. Couldn’t tell you why. Maybe it’s because Tenchi Muyo was a formative anime for me, or maybe it’s because I got on Kaguya-sama relatively early in my return-to-weebdom trek and I’ve been chasing that high ever since. I could go on and on about the ones I’ve watched and which particularly stood out, but we’d be here all day. At the same time, though, a burgeoning market for the genre, particularly among the shonen demographic, means that there’s gonna be some real slop out there. Plenty of anime, manga, and especially light novels are targeted at the “lonely boy who wishes cute girls would attach themselves to him just because he’s A Nice Guy” type, and while there are some genuinely excellent series that cater plenty to that kind, there’s a well-defined line between the good and the trash.

Makeine is well aware of that line and elects to skip rope with it. Genre subversion is at its best when the work in question shows a genuine care for the milieu it’s satirizing, and Too Many Losing Heroines is to trashy light novel romcoms what The Eminence in Shadow is to edgy isekai and Bang Brave Bang Bravern is to vaguely homoerotic mech warfare. It’ll slap you in the face with every dumb threadbare cliche you’ve come to expect from the genre, and it’ll do so with a smile.

These stories are usually fronted by a total wet noodle and Kazuhiko Nukumizu is the soggiest soba you’ve ever seen. His main interests are water fountains and hey, wouldn’t you know it, light novel romcoms. As far as he’s concerned, he’s a background character with the personality to match. He’s thrust to the forefront, though, when he’s caught staring at his classmate, Anna Yanami, embarrassingly picking up the pieces from being brutally rejected at a cafe. She forces herself into Nukumizu’s booth and helps herself to several courses’ worth of stress-eating on his dime, which he never agreed to. As recompense, Anna decides to cook him lunch until her debt is more or less repaid, and would you look at that, Nukumizu just made a friend!

As the title would suggest, Anna’s not the only lovelorn maiden finding her way into Nukumizu’s school life. He’s exhorted into joining the school’s literature club, where he meets the track runner, Lemon Yakishio, and the lit club’s stammering stalwart, Chika Komari. He also has to bear witness to each of their own crushes backfiring and deal with the fallout. And amidst this chaos, there’s plenty of botched confessions, getting locked in storage closets, boob faceplants, and all the other nonsense you’d expect from the genre. And it’s terrific! And in the midst of all this, even as Nukumizu seems to be a passenger in this journey, you see him ever-so-slowly realize that he has some agency and grow closer to these girls. Makeine is plenty silly and more than a little stupid, but there’s plenty of heart in here as well.

The offbeat character dynamics and clever dialogue are what really make this. Everyone is just refreshingly weird in their own ways. Anna is a complete menace and totally convinced she’s the protagonist of life, and she may not even be wrong. I almost don’t care whether she and Nukumizu get together or not; they’re such a fun “serious guy/goblin mode girl” pairing that I’m not that interested in their dynamic changing. Komari and the lit club VP Koto are a dynamic fujoshi duo, ensuring that the club’s shenanigans aren’t too shonen-centric (and funny enough, Koto has her own idea for an Osamu Dazai isekai). Everyone in the student council has something demonstrably Wrong With Them, the homeroom teacher is a disaster, and the school nurse probably belongs in prison. I love every single one of them. I could’ve done without Nukumizu’s offputtingly-clingy little sister (and learning about her analogue in this season’s other romcom LN adaptation, Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian, was enough to put me off of watching it), but it looks like one of her own female classmates is in love with her, so that could be gold in later seasons.

A-1 Pictures, to borrow an industry term, put its entire pussy into this production. As with last year’s Heavenly Delusion, there was so much love put into the lighting effects, background art, and character animation that I felt like I was watching a Makoto Shinkai film at times. All of those elements working in tandem massaged my brain in such a way that when every episode ended, I was left confused because hey, where the hell is the rest of the movie? Makeine is also loaded with killer visual gags, and I give A-1 a ton of credit for letting those jokes land without calling too much attention to them, unlike a certain other show I watched this season. The opening and endings were real treats, with three different EDs as the season progressed, each depicting one of the titular heroines’ personal journeys (and performed by each respective girl’s VA, no less). This is some real investment on the studio’s part and it absolutely paid off.

I promise that every time I compare a romcom to Kaguya-sama, it comes at a great inner struggle to prevent myself from doing so, but if that anime is truly over and this is where A-1 is focusing its resources, Makeine may very well be a worthy successor. I really can’t say for sure whether this or The Elusive Samurai was the best new anime of the summer season, and it doesn’t help that they aired on the same day and I’d always watch them back-to-back. Just know that they’re easily two of the better anime I’ve seen this year.

Mayonaka Punch

If “mega-cancelled YouTuber starts up a new channel with a bunch of disaster lesbian vampires” isn’t enough of a hook for you, I really don’t know what else to tell you.

Masaki got kicked off her popular NewTube channel after punching one of her co-hosts, and the internet is letting her hear it. Maybe barging in on the “we’re firing Masaki” live stream and tackling one of them didn’t help either. Rather than film the bog-standard apology video, she figures she can just wing it and start up a solo channel. Masaki decides to start by playing the hits and drunkenly recreate her first channel’s breakout video in a spooky abandoned hospital, and finds more than she bargained for in a vampire named Live (pronounced like it’d be short for Olivia) who really, really wants to drink her blood in particular. Masaki nearly falls to her death in a panic, only for Live to save her and reveal that she has the very filmable ability to fly, so Masaki cuts a deal: If Live can help her get a new channel off the ground, Masaki will let her drink her blood.

This is tremendous content, so Masaki moves in with Live at Banpai Manor along with her vampire roomies to produce a new channel, co-starring the eternal 10-year-old day trader (night trader?) Ichiko, the soft-spoken fujoshi musician Fu, and the heavy-vaping gambling addict Tokage. They name the channel Mayonaka Punch (because mayonaka means “midnight” and because Masaki punched the shit out of her former co-host) and quickly get to work trying to beat Masaki’s former channel to their goal of a million subscribers (and a delicious lunch for Live). Even though they try to pass off their vampire shenanigans as Very Good CGI, they run afoul of a vampiric authority figure for exposing their identities, so they have to get internet famous the old fashioned way: Cute Girls Doing Cute Things.

I can’t quite put into words what a blast this show is. Mayonaka Punch frequently barrels along at a madcap pace, often punctuated by an electro-swing score, as its cast of loud idiots (and Fu) carom off of one another to chaotic effect. The voice cast really sells it, too: Ikumi Hasegawa (Kita in Bocchi the Rock!, Vladilena in 86, Übel in Frieren) owns every ounce of Masaki’s mounting exasperation as she deals with all the vampire nonsense while continuing to avoid the consequences of her own actions. Fairouz Ai continues her MVP-caliber resume for 2024 in style as Live, infusing her with a kind of desperate manic energy as she scratches and claws for Masaki’s approval. This was easily my favorite of her many roles so far this year, and two years removed from Chainsaw Man’s debut, it’s been a treat to hear her once again voicing a feral, bloodsucking loser.

As silly as Mayonaka Punch gets, though, it delivers some serious emotional blows when you least expect them. The fourth episode, centering on Fu’s history, is one of the best of any anime I watched this season. There’s also some very interesting history between Live and the head vampire’s go-between, Yuki, that was told through (though partially buried by) a series of video game facsimiles, and I hope there’s more there someday. And, of course, there’s Masaki’s evolving relationship with Live, with romantic undertones so tantalizing they might as well be overtones. I really thought there wasn’t enough time left in the season to reach a satisfying conclusion, and though it might not have fully reeled in the yuri bait, I was pleasantly surprised at how well everything tied together.

Mayonaka Punch’s ending is open enough that I can only hope it gets a second season, but I’m not about to hold my breath. That’s a tall order for original anime that don’t set the world on fire, but this one has all the right pieces for a future cult classic. Liked and subscribed.

Suicide Squad Isekai

When this was announced, the only reaction it really got out of me was “Sure dude, why not.” As far as what this show is, it does what it says on the tin. It’s an isekai featuring a motley crew of anti-heroes plucked directly from the David Ayers and James Gunn Suicide Squad films. You already know what you’re in for.

Sure enough, this is a straight up Suicide Squad story from the jump: Harley Quinn and the Joker (the latter sporting yet another heinous makeover) try to pull off a heist, it goes sideways, Harley gets arrested and forced into Amanda Waller’s scheme to mine rare resources in another world alongside Deadshot, Clayface, Peacemaker, and King Shark. It’s your standard JRPG-style isekai fantasy world, except the previous Suicide Squad of Enchantress, the Thinker, Ratcatcher, and Killer Croc seem to have run roughshod over tensions between races and kingdoms, leaving Rick Flag alone to pick up the pieces.

And what ensues is pretty much what you’d expect. Everyone looks appropriately anime; Psycho-Pass character designer Akira Amano did especially good work with Harley, to the point where I’m shocked that a billion-yen idea like “anime Harley Quinn” was slept on for so long. All of this makes it even funnier that Peacemaker is still very much just John Cena. Character designs aside, Suicide Squad Isekai only seems to look good when it wants to; most of the moment-to-moment stuff looks a bit muted but absolutely pops off when business picks up. There’s even a flashback sequence of Deadshot and Ratcatcher that has a sort of loose, crumbly Masaaki Yuasa look to it. Despite the genericism of the setting and inconsistency of the aesthetic, though, Suicide Squad Isekai still carries plenty of style with it. The intro and outro are both blasts; I didn’t realize until the season ended that the “Tank!”-style OP was by Tomoyasu Hotei, the composer of the most iconic piece of music from Kill Bill. The ED (content warning: Mori Calliope) heavily features Amanda Waller getting down in ways I can only hope to one day see Viola Davis recreate.

The fusion of American and Japanese styles is definitely awkward at times; the occasional references to other Warner Bros properties like Lord of the Rings and Tom and Jerry feel particularly shoehorned in considering this is a Japanese production, but the voice cast makes up for a lot of faults. Anna Nagase captures Harley’s freewheeling energy perfectly, and her penchant for nicknames is extra cute in Japanese when she’s calling the Joker “Purin-chan” or King Shark “Nana-chan.” Jun Fukuyama is a real standout as Clayface, channeling the flashy spirit of Joker (not this one, the Persona 5 one) to animate Basil Karlo’s irritating showmanship. Takehito Koyasu as Peacemaker doesn’t quite have the self-serious goofy energy we’ve come to expect from the live action version, but it’s such funny casting on its face that I don’t really mind. Can this tradeoff go both ways? I want John Cena as DIO yesterday.

For a Studio WIT production and a story by Re:Zero’s writers, Suicide Squad Isekai may occasionally feel like less than the sum of its parts (par for the course for the property’s recent adaptations, unfortunately, save for the Gunn film), but if you don’t come at it expecting too much you’ll have a good time. Far from my favorite this year, but it’s a crowd pleaser, and those, I like.

#anime reviews #nier automata #oshi no ko #my deer friend nokotan #shikanoko nokonoko koshitantan #isekai shikkaku #no longer allowed in another world #wistoria wand and sword #the elusive samurai #makeine #too many losing heroines!#mayonaka punch #suicide squad isekai

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rzyraffek · 1 year ago

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I never wrote stuff about jjba but i just watched 20episodes of SDC in row and i really need to write something!! Just sfw dating headcanons with Dio, Polnareff, Kakyoin, Avdol.

They/them, sfw, no spoilers and Request open

Dating headcanons with JoJo characters

Dio Brando from part 1

O my god, this guy whole personality is hating jojo, so prepare for him mumbling about how much he hates him a lot

S/o is his and everyones has to know, especially jojo, omg if Dio menages to make jojo jealous he will be so satisfied!

Totally has his hand on s/o evertime they go outside.

Wont turn s/o into vampire, he likes to have control over them

Probably drinks their blood, at start he probably doesn't know s/o limit so he ends up drinking a bit too much of it. If they pass out, he won't apologise but he try to drink from other people for a while.... but s/o blood is the best!

Dio Brando from part3

Much more manipulative and calm

He knows they can't run away, hah he's sure s/o won't even try to run away anyways

Totally has special room for them and anything that they need. Of course if s/o behave

Prepare for lots of headpats, praise, petplay???idk??, totally loves when s/o sits on his lap, also plays with their hair

Loves when s/o takes care of him, yeah he regenerates, and he has bunch of people who will do whatever he wants them do to. But-oh when they check his wounds or brush his hair when he wakes up, or seem genuinely worried about him.... Dio finds it cute, charming, thats why he loves them

He doesnt plan on harming his darling, he has enough of people around him to punish so he deosnt really need to get it all out on them. Unless s/o tried to escape or was rude

Also sadly he kinda ignores the word 'no' or just simply manipulates them into thinking that he is right

Jean Pierre Polnareff

Does a lot of dumb stuff to impress them!!

Gives s/o haircare advices and recomends good products!

Loves to just sit next to eachother and do skin-care stuff, and just talk about some dramas

Polnareff really enjoys watching corny movies with s/o, then falling asleep in middle of movie so he can wake up cuddled up next to them (or when s/o falls alseep first he will turn into pillow)

Silver Chairot adores you too

He is totally planing on asking them to visit France and his home city with him!

Teaches them few french words

Kakyoin

Gaming till 4am

If s/o is a gamer like him, he will spend hours talking about favorite games, characters ect

If s/o never played any games its okay! He will teach them!

He gets very nervous when they sit next to each other on bed

Incredeably antisocial so probably struggles with expressing his emotions and gets shy

Asks jotaro for advice (not the best person to ask about relationships lol)

Avdol

My guy would spend whole day just reading tarrot cards for them if they ask him to lol

He loves meditating too probably

Will totally play board games with them

Also cooking dates are amazing, when both of you have never baked before or just suck at it

Great at giving advices

#jjba part 3 #jjba #kakyoin noriaki #kakyoin x reader #mohammed avdol #jojo avdol #jean pierre polnareff #polnareff x reader #dio brando #dio x reader

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randomfoggytiger · 2 months ago

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How would you rank the seasons of TXF from first to worst. I know canon ends for you at S8 so you don’t have to include the other seasons if you don’t want to. Mine ranking goes like this (first to worst)

3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 7, 2, 1, 11, 9, 10

Hot take (kind of) = S10 and S11 are not canon… I hate what CC did to the mythology, William, breaking up M and S, etc…

Extremely hot take: IWTB > FTF. I have reasons but I’m not going to get into that right now

I have four answers for this: the seasons ranked by mytharc, the seasons ranked by MOTW, the seasons ranked by quality, and the seasons ranked by favorites.

(Beware: I flame all garbage herein, including my own. ...And there are bound to be typos-- will ghost edit later~.)

Breaking down each season by its characteristics, two main strengths stand out: their narrative or MOTW focus. Each season plays more heavily with one facet than the other (except Seasons 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8, which blends them to varying degrees of success.)

In order of consistent theme-- if not, at times, quality:

The Narratively Strong Seasons: Fight the Future, Season 8 (I know, hear me out), Season 6, Season 3, Season 2, Season 4, and Season 9. Each entry is held together by the backbone of one (or several interconnecting) ideas: Fight the Future quite literally functions around the mytharc, and is stronger for it; Season 8 punctuates almost every. single. episode. with one or more characters trying to either find Mulder or the answers to his disappearance; Season 6 rides the coattails of FTF as the leads find a mytharc resolution and begin to iron out the wrinkles in their personal relationship; Season 2 never forgets the duo's loss of the files and Scully's abduction, peppering his and her struggles into most of the episodes; Season 3 mostly deals with Scully's abduction memories, Melissa's death, and the unfolding mytharc; Season 4 is half cancer arc and half well-written filler, only returning to the main theme here or there; and Season 9 supposedly follows cop-style casefiles and Scully's single motherhood (but is really about Scully weeping on and off while events just happen to justify the next surprise twist.)

The MOTW Seasons: Season 1, Season 5, Season 7, Season 9, Season 11, IWTB, and Season 10. Each season is punctuated by its monsters rather than its mytharc, with the latter taking a backseat to the former. Season 1 is the epitome of the MOTW formula, saving mytharc for a whiff here and there but mainly focusing on the monsters always around; Season 5 is chockful of cryptid excellence and mid-to-fleeting mytharc narrative impact; Season 7 pulls its head above water with each good MOTW episode; Season 9 would be solid if Scully's characterization hadn't been so heavily butchered; Season 11 is iffy on the quality of its characterization and its casefiles; IWTB is appalling in MOTW quality; and Season 10 is the worst, with very little making sense, even in the MOTW moments.

Ranking the quality of each season is a hard and nuanced task. Because I am but a mere mortal with only so much time for contemplation, it's one I shall leave for the individual. Objectively-- the total quality of the product, not just one's favorite parts of it-- though, I think we can all agree that S1-S6 were the best, and that S7-S11's writing wheezed a long death rattle. While enjoyable in parts, perhaps even narratively satisfying at times, the latter's execution iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis bad.

Ranking My Favorite Seasons: Season 8, Season 6, Seasons 1/2, Fight the Future, Seasons 4/5, Season 3, Season 7; then descending order of the sloppily written (S9, S11, IWTB, and S10.) For the fun of it, I'm going to go a little more in-depth on my choices.

Season 8 is a HOT mess, and I won't even attempt to deny it. The MOTWS are mid and the mytharcs are worse. Its strengths, however, lie in how tightly wound the narrative is to Mulder's abduction, which forces the characters to introspect more openly on-screen. Which is great. ...However, the writers lose interest in that angle after Mulder's return; and jump right back into mytharcmytharcmytharc without taking a moment for Mulder to process his own trauma, as well. What separates Season 8 from Season 9 is its characterization: Scully and Mulder stand strong as themselves. While S9 Scully wilts and becomes a background character in her own narrative (which began in Essence-Existence, AHEM, ahem) and S9 Mulder breaks his character off the bat by leaving (even if Scully asked him to... which she wouldn't, given what happened in Essence), S8 Scully doesn't put up with anyone's condescension, making her own-- good and bad-- choices based on established personal work and growth; and S8 Mulder keeps the core of his character in tact-- regressively and progressively-- as he works through the fresh angle of abduction PTSD. We can track Scully's determination, fire, doubts, and fears exactly where Season 7 left off; and we can watch her stretch and grow as she's forced into Mulder's shoes-- so much so, that it's harder for her to walk away from the files to an extent, than her former partner. Meanwhile, DD came back to the season fresh from other acting jobs and injected Mulder's (neglected) trauma with as much nuance as he could. (The lack of exploration for Mulder's PTSD is, by far, the season's largest demerit; and that hinders-- read: butchers-- the finale two-parter because none of Mulder's actions and reactions are properly explained.) I thoroughly enjoy Doggett: his introduction as Kersh's operative and his journey to overcome his mistakes was one I would happily rewatch any day. He's a great character that the writers misused, too-- creating one-off, "going nowhere" episodes just to "explore" him more (which were wastes of screentime, by and large.) By far, his best moments were alongside Skinner (who he becomes tight with), Scully (who he advocates for), Mulder (who he keeps trying to understand), Kersh (who he loses respect for), and Monica (who is here-and-gone; but provides an interesting dynamic, nonetheless.) Skinner is gold in every scene (and that stays strong, no matter how badly written the seasons or movies are); Monica is okay, though not a strongly defined character; Kersh is perfect to hate.

Season 6 is great, great fun; but, unlike Season 7, it doesn't lose focus on what beats are important to maintain (and DD hadn't burnt out completely, so there's that.) My preferred cup of tea is MOTW over mytharc; and this season wraps up the latter decisively. (Perhaps that's factors in this decision.)

Seasons 1 and 2 are just wonderful; and, lo and behold! The mytharc is kept to a minimum-ish. Season 2 mostly revolves around the narrative of Mulder and Scully working through their issues on-screen (...and, now that I think of it, I'm beginning to see a pattern.)

FTF is spectacular, no notes.

Seasons 4 and 5 aren't a particular favorite-- angst isn't my preferred rewatch material-- but I do love their early (and one or two middle) MOTW episodes. I acknowledge, however, that the episodes are in these seasons are incredible; but, again, objectively great, subjectively eh. (Great fodder for analyses, though. ;)) )

Season 3 is so tightly knit to the mytharc that it falls into a greater "meh" category for me. (It's not incredibly satisfying when I know said mytharc falls apart, reinvents itself stupidly, then self-destructs only to reinvent itself even stupider. Over and over and over.)

Season 7 is the slapdash "we're almost done!" season. It has some great-- though cracked here-and-there-- moments; and Mulder and Scully had fun having fun. But the MOTW quality really suffers, and that's the bread and butter for this season. Not to mention the mytharc quality, which really suffers; and if not for the acting, S7 is narratively unsatisfying.

The Slop, as I shall call Seasons 9-11, are just so, so poorly handled. Most agree Season 9 has some great MOTW; but Scully's characterization is broken, and she becomes a sidekick to the Doggett and Monica Show instead of a lead on The X-Files. (I'll forever wish GA had stuck to her guns and not renewed a contract for Season 9; but CC kept asking her to, so, here we are.) I put this before Season 11 only because I haven't watched it (though I know each plot point in its entirety.) Season 11 is incredibly hit-and-miss. The good MOTWs always run into a snag that unravels the logic of the episode; and the bad MOTWs (and both mytharc episodes) are bad. Mulder and Scully haven't grown or progressed as characters, despite their age and relative experience-- in fact, they become less intelligent; and are given impossible abilities and impossible chances to escape death without proper explanation. (The main series put Mulder and Scully in impossible situations many a time; but always set up another logical factor or explanation to get them out of it. When they didn't, that was a pronounced failing, too. The main series, however, did not dim their established intelligence for plot-convenient reasons.) IWTB's MOTW is abysmal (my rants are here and here); and Mulder and Scully whiplash between in-character hesitations and mean-spirited unintelligence. Season 10 is by far the worst of the batch: no internal consistency, be it characterization, plot, or narrative follow-through. (You can find my rants under the Revival Reviler's first-time watch through hashtag.) A failure on all levels. Sidenote: but let me be clear-- if we compare Season 10's worst episode (one of the Struggles) to Season 11's worst episode (My Struggle IV), the faultier season for characterization would be 11, hands down, because it has a higher fall from grace.

Anyway! Those are my thoughts. :DDD Always open to change them if I hear better alternative reasoning~.

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parachutingkitten · 11 months ago

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Plastic Women: So, what is my point?

A note for those who somehow would like to hear more from me about the video

The mega video started out as a final essay assignment for a children's media college class. The prompt was ten pages on a topic related to children's media that tied into one of our weekly discussions. Being as obsessed with ninjago as I am, I was obviously going to write about it, and one of our weekly topics had to do with children's media's relationship to gender. I had a lot of thoughts on the female characters of the show, so I decided this essay would be a good opportunity to get those off my chest. Plastic Women: Female Representation in Lego Ninjago was the end result. It was a good essay- maybe I'll post it some time. The only problem was that my initial first draft was nearly a dozen pages long- and I had only just finished my thoughts on Nya. I decided that a paper analyzing the arc of the central female character would be perfectly adequate for the assignment, tightened things up a bit, and submitted it. I knew as soon as I did that the rest of my thoughts would have to come out- and that's what the four hours you've(presumably) watched is.

Being that the original point of the essay was to fulfill an assignment requirement, pinpointing the end goal of the video was a weirdly difficult struggle in the production process. I knew I had a lot of thoughts about the women, I knew it felt important that they get out into the world, but I couldn't quite put my finger on why. Why is this so important? What's my point in making this? Why do I have this drive behind things? I offer up a couple explanations in my video. Part of it was to help improve consciousness of these issues, to stress that female representation is actually important in male targeted media. To help encourage better practices for the show's future, to get people think analytically about the media they consume. These explanations seemed to satisfy me, and I still think they're all very important and valid, but even as I sat down to record the outro, there was this nagging feeling that I hadn't quite gotten to the core of why I was making this. What was driving me to put in a year and a half of effort, scripting, refilms, and endless, endless editing in order to get this out? Because while I do care about all of those things, it doesn't ignite that same passion source of where this video is coming from.

Unfortunately, the realization only really hit me after posting the video- after reading the comments. Unfortunately, the negative ones. I don't want to overstate how much hate the video has gotten, it has been widely well received, but I have my fair share of suspected (or self described) children and pre teens calling me an idiot for overthinking things in the comments. Some of these are obviously only responding to the title and thumbnail, and it's quite fun to scroll through the comment section and point them out. But of the people who have the most plausible deniability for actually watching at least part of the video, the most common criticism was by far the run time. Why am I dedicating this much time to a show which is obviously not a raging hate letter towards women? I'm labeling this thing as sexist when there's a whole season of the lead female fighting sexism. There are so many worse things that might deserve this run time, but ninjago can not be that bad. This is obviously ridiculous.

Now there are a couple of responses I have to this sentiment. First of all, the series is insanely long. I have to not only analyze, but explain all 15 seasons for those who (understandably) haven't watched it all or aren't as obsessive as I am. That's gonna take some time regardless of what angle you're doing a deep dive on. Have you seen the length of some of the show recap videos alone? Second, the video as a whole is a retrospective, not purely a criticism. I spend quite a bit of the run time praising the things which I do like and shrugging at things I think are passable. Third, I state up front that I am purposely looking for all interpretations of the text, because they are all interpretations that a young audience could potentially take away. Even if it's not surface level, if it's one or two layers down, I'm still interested. That means it's not logical to blanketly call the show sexist, because it's not openly promoting these ideas, and that was never my goal, I think I made that clear. In many ways I believe that if this were a "Ninjago is sexist" video it would be a lot shorter. Part of why the runtime is so long is because there is a great deal of nuance to how this show treats its female characters, and nuance takes time. If it were as simple as "Ninjago is obviously misogynistic" I would point to the problem spots and we wouldn't need a discussion. I wouldn't have to analyze. It would just be a statement of fact. But that's why the video's title is much less specific and accusatory. "More misogynistic than you remember" is a lot more open ended. It has some misogyny in there, and it's more than your child brain likely noticed. That doesn't mean it's necessarily overwhelming or defining for the series, it just means that it's there- and that amount is going to differ depending on the viewer and their personal interpretations of the text. I for one thought that the Racer 7 plot line was an obvious dismissal of female struggle, but apparently it's not as clear a universal a reading as I thought. Maybe it's my life experience as a women in a male dominated field that put that front and center under a undeniable spotlight for me, but that doesn't mean that's the universal experience of the show, nor should it count against the show so strongly as I feel it.

But this criticism is finally what made it click for me. I'm not criticizing the show because it's obviously sexist. Quite the opposite. I'm criticizing it because it is trying to not be sexist. I'm criticizing the show because it wants to be progressive, it's trying to include female characters, it is including messages and plotlines specifically to try and uplift women- and it's failing.

I am past the point of feeling the need to point out that andrew tate is wrong for seeing women as lesser. That's not an interesting take, that's not a new idea, and if you need that told to you, you are likely beyond help from a youtube video. I am not here to dabate if female representation is valuable, I am taking that fact as a given because it is a conclusion which I feel is inherently correct. If you have not yet come to this same conclusion, the purpose of this video is not to convince you that it is. That can be someone else's job. This is not a 101 class, it's got some prerequisites, because without them, you aren't going to appreciate my points. I am interested in giving ideas to people who already know their basics. It's not my fault if you're a few decades behind in your ideas on film theory. The efficacy of what constitutes positive female representation has already been debated and outlined for decades by people much smarter than me. I am not here to make their points, I am here to make my own.

I'm not here to point out the problems of blatant sexism, because that has been litigated to death; I'm interested in the problems of sexism today- because yes, even when sexism isn't blatant, it's still a problem. I am interested in breaking down subtle sexism. Accidental sexism. Systemic sexism. Sexism from people who are trying to be inclusive, because they are the ones who will actually take feedback. The sexism that is baked into our media culture, so deeply ingrained that it seems rather acceptable to show sexual assault on a kid's show. I am interested in why a show which so obviously repeatedly tries to incorporate feminist ideas into its plot can so easily rid its female characters of agency. It's not that I made the video to say something about ninjago, it's that I made the video to say something about sexism in media, and used ninjago as my example. It. Is. Everywhere. And perhaps even worse, it is ridiculously easy to accidentally end up in your work.

I do hint at these ideas throughout the run of my video, but I really wish I had known this was where my drive was coming from at the outset, because if I had, this idea would be pressed constantly. Tropes older than the film medium seep into the most basic of plots and position females in passive roles by default, and if you don't know that, you are going to ingrain these ideas into your work. It might not be blatant, it might be quite subtle, but it may also snowball into something egregious, like happens in skybound. It was supposed to be a season (partially)about fighting sexism, but ends up framing our lead female as an object, removing all her agency, and turning our leading man into an extremely objectifying character who never grows out of his possessive behaviors. Like I say at the beginning, this is a cautionary tale. It's active proof that doing the bare minimum in not being offensive in female representation requires an amount of effort that many people don't realize is necessary. It is almost never that the show outright says something sexist, it's that the plot structure and character progression do not think to include its female characters. It is not the text, it's the subtext. And you might not think that subtext is influential, but the very fact that you think it's not is the most terrifying thing about it. Our brains absorb so much more than we know, and the fact that these patterns and stereotypes are seeping in subconsciously without our recognizing it, is perhaps even more dangerous than outwardly sexist media in some cases. Consistency in these patterns is bound to rewire your brain- and you won't even notice.

That's the point I think I failed to emphasize throughout the run. How easy it is. How ridiculously easy it is to fall into these problems. "it's like you see sexism everywhere!" well, yes. It is everywhere. That's the point. It's baked into our culture. It's a corner stone in our media. It's systemic. That's the problem- that it's near impossible to find something that doesn't have it because it's a founding principle of most of human culture. That's why reverse sexism is not nearly as big a deal btw. Sure, shows aimed at little girls have a lot of underdeveloped male love interests, but they also haven't been stuck in that position for centuries upon centuries of human storytelling.

I don't feel the need to prove that the label of misogynist or sexist is befitting of the whole series, because for one, it's not, and for two, that wouldn't do anything. Ninjago is a symptom of the problem. It is not the problem in and of itself. Blacklisting it for being bad doesn't help anything, and I think I made it abundantly clear that was never my intention or desire. My intention was to show you just how prevalent this casual sexism can be. How this subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) undercurrent can be found in something as unexpected as a children's show which actively brags about the strength of its female characters. The goal was to open your eyes to how consistent it is, even if it's not potent. It was to lay out how the patterns tend to present themselves, so that maybe you'll be able to better identify them elsewhere. Because they are elsewhere. They're everywhere. It may not be in as high a dosage as it used to, but collectively it is still a staggering, saturating amount. And if you are an artist looking to make something that doesn't have this subtext, I'm here to warn you that it is likely a steeper up hill battle than you initially presume.

Misogyny is everywhere. I just happen to know a lot about ninjago, so that's where I chose to go in depth in breaking it down. It's a case study- and I think a quite interesting one with a lot of nuance at that. It's what I felt I could contribute, and I have to believe that's enough to justify its existence.

#ninjago #mega video #parachuterants

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da-mous · 11 months ago

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How did you get the motivation to make games? Or the discipline and determination to actually go all the way thru?

I am just a bad developer, but i have some nice ideas and i actually write them down so I don't forget, like a mix of tunic and minecraft, but with a actual conlang for you to learn and not a english cypher

following through is actually something I really really struggled with for years, but I'm much more productive than I used to be, and I have a few strats that help

1: Structure!! The structure that works for me is working on weekdays (even if it takes time to get going!) and strictly taking weekends off, even if it means not working when I really want to. I don't have strict hours during weekdays, but I try to start early enough in the day so that I can work for 6-8 hours before I get sleepy. I always end up filling the time I give myself! Time tends to fly after the first hour or so

My weekends off are super important, too. I think periodically forcing myself *not* to work on my projects makes me enjoy working on them that much more. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I really feel that in how much I tend to spend my Saturdays, surprisingly, wishing I could be working!! It also helps prevent burnout and offers guilt-free time to play other games, do other hobbies, take care of household chores, etc

2: Thinking time!! It's important to give your mind time to wander, undistracted. That's when inspiration will strike and you'll do your best thinking and planning. I think that's why "shower thoughts" are a thing. Showers are good for this, but they're short! I take daily walks that are between 40 and 120 minutes during which I only listen to music with no words in it--especially music that fits the vibe of my current project! I don't actively try to force my thought process to go anywhere in particular, but it often wanders excitedly to my projects anyway (By the way, I also listen to the same music while I'm working! It's the perfect way to get in, and stay in, the right mindset)

3: Deadlines!! Even soft ones! My roguelike is coming out in 2026. The more I work by then (without overworking myself!), the better the final product will be! The desire to make something really good really drives me

4: Making something you want to play!! Playing my own game is one of the most important parts of my process. The first thing I do every day when I sit down to work is play the game. This naturally drives me toward finding areas I can improve and polish, coming up with features I want, and being motivated to implement those things. The ideal is to feel like a fan of my own work, eagerly awaiting every little update. The more I play, the more I'll tailor the game to my own tastes. This leads to me enjoying it more, so I'll be even more motivated to improve and add to it!

My current project is actually perfect for this, because it's a roguelike (highly replayable, a genre I know I can enjoy for a long time. Binding of Isaac is one of my most played games ever) platformer (one of my favorite genres in general. immediately kinetically satisfying) with a high level of randomization and variety, meaning even I can be surprised by my own game!

The strategies that work for you will likely differ from mine (especially if you have a day job or something!) but hopefully that helps :)

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trubbishrubbish · 11 months ago

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Happy Last Day of 2023. Here's a long overdue update over how I have been.

As you recall, Jabberwock Genocide Part 2 was uploaded 3 weeks ago. And the only thing I did this whole month of December after Part 2 was uploaded was that I went to Canada to climb a huge mountain and confront my other self because it’s cheaper than going to therapy.

Just kidding, I just worked on more Jabberwock Genocide, nothing else.

This is a positive as I have made so much forward progress in the animation and the upcoming part 3 that you guys won’t have to wait 9 months for more Genocide Jack fun time. However, there is a cost to just working on Jabberwock Genocide, one that I’m currently struggling to find a way to deal with.

Basically, all my free time, focus and thinking has been dedicated to Jabberwock Genocide, but other stuff I do and create I have left to the dust.

My output in making Genocide Jack posts has just stopped.

I keep neglecting to share updates to my Sho Shrine. I am still getting new stuff for it but I have not yet organized it and taken picture of it.

I have barely played any new games. The last game I have beaten that is new was Super Mario Bros Wonder. I loved that game, but I had a hard time sitting down to play it for long sessions as I wanted to work on Jabberwock Genocide.

And tragically, I have really neglected interacting with my online friends. This I feel the most guilty of as I have no excuse for it. I know there are friends I used to talk to a lot before that I have now stopped engaging with for a really long time. If you are one of those people I just to say that I am sorry for ghosting you. I still consider you a friend I don't want our friendship to slowly die out due to lack of communication on my end.

This is my struggle. I love making Jabberwock Genocide. It’s honestly the most enriching thing I am currently doing in my life. I’m creating a story with my favorite character, Genocide Jack. I’m developing my skill as a sprite animator. I’m constantly thinking about how to create a particular scene with the limited resources I have. I get a real kick of joy when I am creating a scene and suddenly an idea comes to mind that I love and I put it in the animation.

I feel so satisfied when the ideas I have for a scene that I see in my head are transmitted into actual animation on my editor. More often then not, what I make in the final product is better than what I imagine in my head. Every single line, every single detail, every single joke, it all feels so amazing to craft them into a video.

It’s crazy to think that just a few months ago, I was at a low point in the animation where all of my motivation was drained and I struggled to make progress for weeks. But now, I feel so freaking happy and elated just thinking about the animation. Heck, even doing really tedious tasks like making every single sprite jump a little is still enjoyable to me. I’ve been working on this project since August 2022. I never expected this to be what is now when I first started writing down ideas. But I am happy the project did turn into this, because I really, truly enjoy working on this.

But… That’s the problem. I enjoy working on Jabberwock Genocide so much that any other hobbies, I find less fun. I rewrote my brain to dedicate huge parts of it to think about Jabberwock Genocide. I’m fully being this attached to a project like this isn’t healthy. I should be consuming different media and doing other activities and talking to my friends. I know this but I find it difficult to summon the energy to do it.

I’m still trying to find a good balance between working on the project and doing other leisure activities that I enjoy doing. I’m going to make this a goal for 2024, it might take me a while to find that balance but I will try to. Hopefully when I do, I can slowly rekindle friendships that I have abandoned.

That’s what I wanted to say. Thank you for taking the time to read this. See you in 2024.

#Kirby's Text Time #Jabberwock Genocide #Sho SDR2

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lieutenantselnia · 1 month ago

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Me seeing everyone posting their selfshiptober things like how do you manage to crank out something new every day😭 /nm Meanwhile I don't even find the time to sit down in peace to read them🥺 I hope I can eventually but it will probably be more or less belated

I started my master's programme a few weeks ago and most classes have been really fun and interesting so far! But I'm also trying to keep up with assignments from the beginning on, so my hobbies get pushed back a bit🥲 (Plus I still have my bachelor's exam to do at the end of this month so yay that'll probably be some additional stress too) Unfortunately though my usual train route got completely fucked over in the floodings last month (and the repairs will likely take literal months which sucks massively💀), and although they finally set up a replacement bus line it doesn't help that much because the times are super inconvenient for most of my classes, because I'd either be late every time or like almost an hour early (but not enough to actually use the time productively) and it would just waste so much time - same for going home because the bus usually leaves like <10 minutes after my classes and and that's not enough time to walk to the station. Unless I want to waste a lot of time I have to drive on most days now and although I can manage it just annoys me because it was usually much more comfortable to go at least part of the way by train before all of this (plus more driving = more fuel usage = more costs💀).

At least I think I'm starting to get better again with my time management though; I struggled quite a lot with it during the past year which I believe was mostly caused by my overall mental well-being not being great, mostly due to stress, and that kind of spiralled a bit because the less I worse I could manage my time the more stressed I became🫠 Now I started again to write time plans for every day, like the evening before I sit down and think about everything that I need to do and time-block things (eg from 9:00 to 11:00 I'm working on my compositing assignment, from 11:00 to 13:00 I have time to draw), and it's been helping me so much like holy shit?? I actually already used to do this like 2 years ago or so and I honestly don't understand why I stopped because when I did everything kinda turned to worse. I try to not overdo it though, like sometimes I'll also just write something like "free time" or "chilling" so I can decide more spontanously depending on my mood, but overall it just helps me so much because otherwise I'm way too stressed thinking over all the things I should do or could do, and I just sit there thinking about doing things but not actually doing them. But having a prewritten plan where these thoughts are actually sorted and that I can also look up anytime just makes it so much easier, plus it's very satisfying to click that little checkbox every time I'm done with something :)

#plus for university assignments I have an actual kanban board to where they're sorted by due date and I see how much time I've got left #and I love moving them to the next section every time I make progress until they finally end up in 'done' :D #okay this got a little bit long I think I wanted to ramble a bit too much about my time planning #and rant about the stupid train route being flooded it sucks so much I hate it it's a nightmare for all commuters on that route tbh #like bro I paid over 700€ for my annual ticket if I didn't also use it for getting to work it would be so useless and a waste of money rn #selnia talks

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servicereward · 9 months ago

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Do you have any top favourite scenes from the show/comics?

First, anon, thank you for your patience while I thought long and in-depth about this. I love the show so much, it's easy for me to come up with 30 different examples of moments I love but that's not very exclusive ^^;

Some of my top scenes, in my rewatch of season 1 I'm undergoing at the moment, have been the little character-building moments between the Manhattan clan. For all of it's behind-the-scenes production struggles, "Enter Macbeth" has some very nice character interplay between Lexington, Brooklyn, and Goliath. "Sorry I was too busy WRITHING in AGONY to notice," and *DISTANT ROARING* "Looks like Bronx found Goliath," come to mind as moments that make me smile.

Another of my top favorite moments, (putting aside all OwenPuck scenes because otherwise this answer would be all about him, lmao) is the scene where Coyote and Dingo break The Pack out of jail. Fox reading Jean-Paul Sartre. "Nietzsche's too butch and Kafka reminds me of your little friends over there." The excellent sequence where Dingo breaks into the building with his powersuit and unleashes high-key horror imagery on the prison guard. It all fits so neatly together, and is such a well-paced scene it feels so luxurious in what it gives you. It's a top-tier scene for a season opener.

I've talked previously about "Kingdom," and what a great episode it is - I think what it really comes down to for me for "favorites" is how lived-in an episode feels. There's a lot of great character work in Gargoyles, which is one of the reasons people keep going back, in that it feels like a tangible world. When Matt comes back home to his tiny little apartment and loosens his tie and then gets startled by Broadway waiting for him. They way the clan collects Cagney to take care of back at the clock tower once it's apparent Elisa isn't coming back (an small but important detail not to forget, from a writing perspective - she's got a cat!) The dramatic but relatively domestic drama of the mutates in the Labryinth (oh no, someone in your underground collective is a major asshole!) Owen also sitting at David's desk with his jacket off and his tie loose. The little details like this make the show feel less like a cartoon where someone opens their closet and has ten of the same outfit as a gag, but like a world that belongs to the characters who live in it. If that makes sense?

Truly, the list does go on, but I'm going to transition to the comics now :)

I need to read the SLG run again; I've read it multiple times, but sometimes the more disparate quality of it's narrative and artistic elements distract me from forming a coherent opinion. But I adore the following moments:

Owen and Delilah bring Free Will to the Table

This is an interesting little interplay that frustrates me on the whole because I'm not entirely sure the Goliath / Thailog part of it is earned, but it does develop Delilah's sense of personhood in the narrative and also gives us a window into Puck's code-of-ethics-as-Owen. Goliath makes a mistake (girlfriends can be won like a prize) but Owen says essentially "Aren't you going to ask her what she wants? Doesn't she have free will?" which is a fascinating conk-on-the-noggin for the faerie-stuck-as-a-mortal-and-is-your-part-time-nemesis to deliver to the protagonist of your story.

And it does deliver in that Delilah says, "Fuck all this" (i wish she literally said that) and ends the party without being hitched to either Goliath or Thailog. She itches something in me because she's claiming some agency. She didn't ask to be here (who does, tbr) and was created from the DNA of two very complicated, very different women (who were unwilling donors to top it off) for the purposes of satisfying Thailog's desire for a romatic partner. NOT OKAY! What does Delilah want? For so much of her existence, what she's wanted has been a foregone conclusion (in that, it doesn't matter) and any move she makes in the narrative on her own agenda is one more step towards actualizating her sense of self. That being said - I would like more Delilah.

Shari = Shaharazade

Shari is such an interesting, stand-out character to me, and I wish she'd been around in the show because I'd love to see her animated. She's mystery wrapped in mystery - her motives are so opaque! She's a high-ranking Illuminati member who has presumably been alive for thousands of years - and she's helping Thailog for some inscrutible reason. I get really excited when she shows up. I'm also interested to see how Thailog and Shari pose as narrative foils to Xanatos and Co in the future, given their parallel but opposing structure.

Mary, Finella, and Brooklyn's timedance adventure begins

I think the last two issues of the SLG run were the strongest, and the content in them literally made me shriek when I read it. For one, you've got delicious interplay between Brooklyn's existence in the narrative. He's from the past in the future in the past in the present. Mary and Finella's relationship is great (and for the part of me that reads with shipping goggles - gay, please? they can bond over missing their kids and then kiss about it....a fine lady and her handmaiden, nothing to look at here boss, no sir!) Truly I want more Mary, Finella, and Brooklyn adventures. I think the beginning of their story was the best thing to come out of the 2006 comics run. Also, "You named the horse Magus?" "Something about his face...." (Magus confirmed horsey face🐴✨ ✊😔)

As for the new runs, I'm soaking it all in. I'm very excited for Quest - I don't have a "Top Favorite" scene from it yet, though I very much enjoy the fact we're getting a fleshed out picture of the NYC world of organized crime as it exists in Gargoyles. I like that they're all scared shitless of Uncle Dracon and I want him to show up more, he's been a very interesting player in the plot. I also really like the sequence where Renard says his goodbyes to his friends and family, even if it does implode ~10k words of unpublished fic I have on my Google Drive. But that's what the canon non-compliant tag on AO3 is for 👍! This is the short way to say I think Titania should be scarier. Like, shit-your-pants scary. I love women.

I love them so much, I married one! *ba-dum**tiss* 🥁🎶

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benwvatt · 2 years ago

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my 2022 writing year in review!

Thank you so much to @feeisamarshmallow for the tag!

1. Number of stories posted to Ao3: 32 separate stories! I was very fortunate to have a productive, joyful writing year, and I also started writing shorter stories rather than longer ones this year.

2. Word count this year: 74,396

3. Fandoms I wrote for: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Gilmore Girls, Grey’s Anatomy, Heartstopper, Murdoch Mysteries, Severance, Supergirl, The Fault in Our Stars, The Martian, Virgin River

4. Pairings: Aang/Katara, Sokka/Zuko, Jake Peralta/Amy Santiago, Rory Gilmore/Logan Huntzberger, Charlie Spring/Nick Nelson, William Murdoch/Julia Ogden, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor, Hazel Grace Lancaster/Augustus Waters, and Beth Johanssen/Chris Beck.

5. Stories with the most:

Kudos: i’ve been around the globe, found a diamond wrapped in gold (but it doesn’t shine like you) which is my Supercorp friendship bracelet story! I just finished it and I was so happy to be able to give it a satisfying, cute ending.

Bookmarks: same thing as above! this was a really popular story :)

Comment threads: to know you like the back of my hand, which is my collection of a dozen one-shots I wrote for Supercorp.

Word count: same thing as above! this fic was my longest this year, at 9,100 words total.

6. Work I’m most proud of (and why): I’m going to go with memories painted in much brighter ink, the Heartstopper fic I wrote about Nick and Charlie dealing with their negative relationships with Harry, who decides to apologize to them both for being a bully and a bad friend. That fic is also tied with please remind me to forget you for the story I’m most proud of (this one is my Murdoch Mysteries story about William and Julia reconciling after she marries the wrong guy.)

They were both really interesting missing-moments stories that included letters (I’m a big fan of epistolary communication! letters are so intimate and personal!) and I don’t think most other writers would have published something like this. It felt exciting and special to focus on these parts of canon and expand them, exploring the characters’ curiosity and heartbreak at the same time.

7. Work I’m least proud of (and why): Definitely i strung you a halo of stars, which is a collection of 4 stories I wrote for Supercorptober. I was really anxious and stressed when I wrote these stories, and I felt like I kind of had to “keep up” because it’s a fandom holiday and we had daily challenges. The writing became more about maximizing word count rather than enjoying writing, which is why I only did Supercorptober for about 5 days before quitting. I was just too busy and uninterested in the end.

8. Share or describe a favorite review you received: Oh, I have so many! @nostradamus0 is kind enough to leave screaming reviews on many things I write (thank you for that, friend) and I also got a lot of really lovely reviews on Supercorp stories I wrote about parental trauma or forgetting your native language or struggling with anxiety.

I really like to write hurt/comfort and fluff combined, and it was so nice to see that my stories were able to comfort other readers who were also dealing with stress and hurt.

Aaaaand I got so many lovely reviews on the fics I wrote for Kataang or Heartstopper. I love being able to write things that entertain and make people happy. I’m quite good with banter (it’s my main thing and the easiest thing for me to write) and I insert it wherever possible.

9. A time when writing was really, really hard: Supercorptober! I was pushing myself to do a monthly challenge when I had schoolwork and other stuff to deal with, and it just didn’t work out for me. I’m glad I quit so early. Quitting is good and quitters deserve hugs and chocolate. If you can’t sustain something, taking a step back and interrogating why is a good idea.

10. A scene or character you wrote that surprised you: Helly R from Severance. She is amazing. I would die for her. I wrote about her in my reputation precedes me, a ficlet about her character growth, and I can’t say anything more without spoilers. Severance is the best tv show I’ve ever seen. I don’t usually like thrillers/horror but Severance is light on both and it’s just so GOOD at exploring the ways that capitalism will devour you from the inside out.

11. A favorite excerpt of your writing:

this is a scene from (whoever said I would find someone new) must’ve never met you, a Supercorp fic set at a southern bar where Supercorp have broken up in the beginning and they get back together by the end.

I really loved writing Lena’s experience at this bar, The Great Beyond, and creating OCs who are all friendly and loving. I’m also just ... weirdly excited to write the OCs falling in love with each other because they are all gay? And I love a good queer southern love story.

Fuck. She should’ve just turned into bed early instead of driving out here to the bar, The Great Beyond, to say hey and good evenin’ to the regulars. Tim probably groaned when he saw her. Marcie in the corner cheered gently when she walked in. Lena always dances with her when it’s eleven and they don’t wanna go home yet. And then there’s Lucas, about to get his first tattoo, and Connor who keeps his guitar in the backseat. Just in case he figures out the bridge of the song he’s been writing since last year, y’know. He and Tim came up with the chorus together.

Connor won’t tell you he plays but he can sing you a story, rock you to sleep, take you on an old-timer’s tour of dreamland. Lena’s been before. She’s seen the milestones and skipped them across the pond. The road on the way there’s a little rocky, but it’s nothing she can’t handle.

Ashley sits front and center, welcoming the warm glow of orange light. Steph tilts back in her chair and offers once again to braid Ashley’s hair, or perhaps Lena’s. Steph had been laid off from the beauty salon last month. No luck since.

Lena said yes once, on a Saturday when she found an old receipt from the time she and Kara went and got ice cream at Braum’s, and Steph wiped her tears away with a ratty napkin before twisting Lena’s hair into a Celtic knot.

“No, I’m Irish,” Lena blurted, “and I dunno if I’m a Celt-”

Steph laughed. “Who’ll ever know ‘cept for you?”

12. How did you grow as a writer this year: I started writing for different fandoms instead of being strict with myself about “the core fandoms” that I had to stick to! I wrote shorter stories (like, 1500 words or less) because I liked it and I didn’t have time to do a big multichap fic. I branched out. I had fun while writing. I wrote meta for Grey’s Anatomy and Virgin River. I quit writing for The Resident because that show took a SERIOUS downturn in quality recently, and I don’t ever want to watch it again (if you know, you know.)

This was a good year and I had so much fun writing shorter stories, and different stories for various tiny fandoms.

13. How do you hope to grow next year: I want to get better at not defining success through the number of hits/words/comments/etc. a story has. Stories are allowed to exist just as they are. Less popular stories aren’t “bad” or “not worth my time.”

I also hope to finish up some of my unfinished multichap stories, and mayyyybe write more for B99 (I only wrote 1 B99 story this year, and it was meta rather than fiction, which is a big change from previous years when I wrote a lot of peraltiago fic.) AND I want to keep writing whatever I want, even if that means writing for new fandoms that I’ve never tried before.

I like writing things out of love I’m not a good visual artist; I’m not good with textiles or gifs or drawing, and I often wish that I could translate the images in my head to art on a page. But fic is one of the ways that I like to give back to fandom, collaborate with fandom, meet people in fandom. I love that I can have a fleeting idea and publish a story about it in the next 12 hours.

14. Who was your greatest positive influence this year as a writer (could be another writer or beta or cheerleader or muse etc etc):

@nostradamus0. It’s not even a question. He is lovely, and lets me scream at him about Kataang even though he’s never seen ATLA, and I can send him excerpts of my stories anytime.

15. Anything from your real life show up in your writing this year: EVERYTHING from real life shows up in my writing.

must’ve never met you was inspired by neotraditional country music of the 2010s/2020s (it’s great! it’s making a comeback!!!)

many of my supercorp fics are inspired by my cats and my narwhal painting (technically, it’s a poster of whales, but there’s a narwhal in there) and my desperate desire to have a lamp shaped like a jellyfish.

I constantly write scenes where people bake because I get frantic if I don’t bake for several days. Oh, and I also constantly write scenes where people daydream and write letters/letters and cherish the softness of their homes because I’m a gentle person.

16. Any new wisdom you can share with other writers: Uh, overusing italics is a really bad idea because it ruins the flow of your sentences. Getting a good flow often involves reading your work in your head so you can imagine the ups and downs of the words.

Writing takes time and you’re allowed to be frustrated that you’re not “better.” Give yourself time and space. Write as often or as rarely as you want.

Write down fic titles and AU ideas in a list in Google Docs because you may want them later. Don’t be afraid to be silly or gloomy or whatever; this is your blank page! Your words are the ink!!!!

Reading other people’s work, whether a published book or a fic or stuff like poetry, is a great way to get better at writing. Offering to be someone else’s beta reader, such as on AO3, is often a great way to make friends and learn more about writing. Oh, and try not to judge your writing too harshly. You still have so many good things waiting for you.

17. Any projects you’re looking forward to starting (or finishing) in the new year: hmmmmmm I do have 2 peraltiago AUs (the you’ve got mail AU and the Jake-is-undercover AU) that I want to finish sometime in the future.

I also have several ATLA stories that are random memory-tangle-ideas (the Aang-Spiderman AU, the Katara is undercover as both a Kyoshi Warrior and the Painted Lady AU, the Kataang Mulan AU, the Zukka turtleduck petting zoo AU, the Zuko-emotional-support-dragon story) that I hope to write eventually! Or, at least, they will stay good dreams.

18. Tag some writers whose answers you’d like to read:

@nostradamus0, @chocomd, @flameohotwife, @dearestpartnerofgreatness

and anyone else who wants to participate! If you see this, you are free to do this tag if you like! <3

#benwvatt #fanfic #ao3 #tumblr #supercorp #supergirl #Lena x Kara #writing

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wowzerwyrm · 2 months ago

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I’m thankful you take me as coming from good faith, as I’m doing my best to do exactly that, listen and respond and get your thoughts on the matter. I hope that my thoughts can be analyzed the same way!

And to be perfectly clear, I do agree with you on a lot of these things! And some of them, I admittedly have less information on, and I’ll try to be clear when that is the case.

In terms of economy, I don’t really think the cost is an object, to me. Everything costs time and money and labor to make, and lots of it isn’t going to show any results for a long time. The Large Hadron Collider cost $4.5 Billion to make, as one of thousands of particle accelerators around the world. That’s a lot of money just to smash atoms together, but the research in those eventually led to some of the techniques that we use to treat cancer.

AI, just like most technology, will also get more efficient and cheaper as it is developed. Unlike Bitcoin, where the whole point was that each subsequent coin ‘mined’ took more and more energy and computing power, AI will shift and change with all the other computers around the world to take less energy and less space and less labor. Compared to, say, the amount of energy used by everyone who plays video games, I’m not even sure that AI uses that much energy.

Either way, I personally would rather direct my own energy toward something like the US military, which I would very readily call a black hole, in the way that it gobbles up time and energy and money and labor in magnitudes more than anything else the US does, while the main product it provides is death.

And… okay so there’s just a LOT to go into about everything regarding AI and how it impacts and is impacted by everything we do. We don’t even have the numbers for energy here, and that would probably help a lot for that discussion. And I’m totally up for going into the details on economics and ethics (I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to use art from the internet to train these models, for example, and I think that could be an interesting discussion as well?)

But I also get distracted easily (we both get a little off topic it seems) so I’m gonna do my best to focus on one thing at a time. This one being the original thought I was trying to get to, that being it’s possible uses in the creative process. And mostly not as the companies want to use it, but just on an individual basis.

The main first thing is that, yes, time is a resource. But not everyone wants to spend their time on learning illustration specifically, and I personally think that’s okay. If an author wants to create an interesting cover for their book, if a video editor wants to take a crack at making graphics, or if a seasoned quilter wants to make a comic about some of her experiences in the quilting community, AI as a tool might be an easier and faster way to get what they want without spending possibly years of effort learning how to sketch and ink and manage perspective and line weight and color theory and shading and shadow color theory and more.

And that doesn’t mean it would be effortless, or even easy. Getting a quality piece of art will still take learning and effort. (This post I think shows both some of the capabilities, and also part of what it takes to learn how to use them.) But it’s a different type of creativity and technical understanding, a type that might be more accessible to certain kinds of people, with different interests and ability.

Now, like you said, if you’re entirely lacking in a basic understanding of art, you’re still going to struggle. The more you know in general, the better the end product is going to be. Understanding the rule of thirds or speech bubble layout will help anyone make better art. But it all depends on what someone is satisfied with making.

Having studied essay-writing in school likely made both of us better at this sort of discussion, and that’s a good thing! But I wouldn’t argue that having an intimate understanding of the Epic style of prose and poetic meter is essential, even if it would likely make our cadence or somesuch a little better and more understandable and pleasant to read.

It’s true that I don’t think time should be an issue. But it’s not just big companies pushing people to work faster for less money that makes time a burden. Sometimes, someone just has a different hobby that they want to take up more of their short life on this planet, and giving them a way to dip their toes into a different type of creation without having to commit too much time to it is not inherently a bad thing, I think. Not everyone who wants to make an illustration wants to be an Illustrator, and that’s okay.

I, personally, am learning from first principles, and it is satisfying and rewarding for me to see my art improve in that way. I like to draw and I like to learn to draw.

But I also like pretty clothes and nice outfits. And even if learning to spin yarn and use a loom and sew clothes from the ground up might give me a better understanding of cloth and how it hangs and even make my outfits more tailored and perfect for myself, I don’t have the time or will to do something like that. So my outfits aren’t anything special, just good enough for how I want to look.

one thing that irks me about tech bros is that they fundamentally misunderstand how artists seek out tools to help their process

the thing about creating innovations and tools is figuring out how to streamline an annoying part of the process so you can get to the fun part of the process.

If I don't have to worry about drawing every strand of hair on a cat, that makes it easier for me to draw a cat: and so people in the community have made so so so many hair texture brushes with all these different and shapes to help me create that cat

in motion graphics animation, it'd be a massive time sink to manipulate a model Frame By Frame without keyframe interpolation. Keyframe interpolation is where you tell the computer to move an object from point A to C and the computer fills in what point B is. Its a feature and a tool that reduces the workload of a project and allows you to focus on what you really want to do instead!

which is why anytime I read and hear about a tech bro going off about the wOndERs oF Ai I wonder if they actually have any knowledge of the field they're trying to solve problems for, or if they're just moonlighting as Explorers of the New World granting Savages new technologies that they're too dumb to understand

#I hope that all made sense.#let me know if anything didn’t or if there’s a different topic that would make this one easier to discuss if we went over that first #thanks for chatting #the artificial condition

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criminalmindzjunkie · 4 years ago

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The More Loving One

Masterlist

Summary: Professor Reid finds himself falling for a student.

A/N: This fic is based on this request. I changed a few things up, but I hope you like the finished product!

Long time, no see! It seems like forever since I got to sit down and just enjoy writing something. And enjoy this, I did. I approached this one a bit differently than I usually do, but I like how it turned out none the less. I hope you all enjoy my take on the Professor Reid arc. The first poem I use in this fic is titled The More Loving One by W.H. Auden, and the second is from a collection of Perry poetry.

Also, I recently hit 2k followers, which is absolutely unbelievable. I can’t even begin to explain how thankful I am for each and every one of you. This fic is my love letter to you. Thank you all so much.

Pairing: Professor!Spencer Reid x Fem!Reader

Content Warnings: a few swear words maybe?, teacher x student relationship, age gap, exhibitionism (sorta?), vaginal fingering, unprotected sex

Word Count: 4k

For as long as Spencer can remember, he’s always had a predilection for the finer things in life.

Spencer attributes the origin of his preferences to his upbringing. In his childhood, before his mother’s disease got the better of her, she exposed him to all sorts of literature. While he ventured to read all types of writings, he’d always been partial to tales of extravagance. A young Spencer Reid sought refuge in the profligacy of it all, as it was so starkly different from his own reality. Forced to bear the burden of household and a sick mother from an early age, Spencer’s own life left little room for reckless indulgence.

Now, as a single adult male, Spencer makes it a point to give himself up to the finer things as often as he can. Spencer isn’t a rich man, nor is he careless with what hard-earned money he does have. He simply likes to treat himself to the occasional five-star meal, and even more frequently, posh clothing and rare books. Walls lined with hundreds of antiquarian novels and a closet full of Comme Des Garçon cardigans are where the indulgence ends, however, and until recently Spencer was content with this.

But when she strolls into his life on the very first day of his teaching career, Spencer knows that his small luxuries will no longer be enough to keep him satisfied. The part of him that longs to have only the very best roars to life as he takes in every perfect inch of her. She stands before him, the embodiment of divinity and grace, looking like every fantasy he only dares to conjure up in the late hours of the night. A litany of cliches from every piece of romantic literature he’s ever read spring to the forefront of his mind in the instant that her eyes met his, but there is nothing stereotypical about the way her gaze banishes the air from his lungs. It is as jarring as it is intoxicating. He never wants to look away.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t feel the same. With a light flush of her cheeks, she turns away from him, and in an equally unfortunate turn of events, she proceeds to shuffle down the aisle and into the second row of seats to the right of the podium. The realization that washes over him feels like ice water in his veins.

She’s a student. Worse even – she’s his student.

Spencer wrenches his gaze from her as if he’s been burned, and the fiery shame of his embarrassment makes him tug at his collar. As he struggles to stave away the lingering heat in his chest and even more embarrassingly, the tightness in his trousers, Spencer chastises himself. His own carnal urges often go ignored, a fact that is glaringly obvious as he cowers behind his podium in an attempt to hide his arousal. He feels more than a little bit pathetic. No self-respecting thirty-five-year-old man gets hard just from gazing upon a beautiful young woman.

When Spencer pulls himself together enough to start his lecture, he positively forbids himself to look her way. It is hard to fight the urge, but every time he catches his eyes wandering to her, he reminds himself that she is an indulgence he simply cannot partake in. No matter how badly he wants to.

It doesn’t take long for her to notice him noticing her.

In the early days of the semester, she manages to convince herself that the stolen glances are but a figment of her overactive imagination. That, or an unhealthy dose of wishful thinking. But as the semester stretches on and the professor’s eyes linger more and more, wishful thinking gives way to a startling realization that she isn’t alone in her attraction. Professor Reid is, to her complete and utter astonishment, just as taken with her as she is with him.

This is all but confirmed when a slight brushing of the hands during an exchange of papers leaves them both with flushed cheeks and pounding hearts. Both of their heads snap up, two sets of eyes meeting in a prolonged stare that results in an understanding of sorts. It’s mutual, this thing blossoming between them. She can see her own hopes reflected in two velvet pools of brown – can see the longing, the desire that burns within them. Her heart soars, as she imagines his does, and she accepts the papers with a smile.

She also imagines that, if he could, he would tell her to wait for him. He would tell her that, for now, their relationship must stay strictly professional.

This doesn’t stop them from sating their cravings in other ways.

She makes it a point to stop by during office hours at least twice a week. Her visits always fall under the guise of her studies, but within minutes their hushed conversations stray from the professional and towards a more personal nature. She learns of Spencer’s mother and her condition, of his unusual job and his coworkers that were more like family. In return, she tells him about her upbringing in southern California, as well as her dreams of becoming a criminal psychologist. They never go as far as to discuss what will happen when the semester comes to a close. It is an unspoken agreement that the end of the semester will find them in each other’s arms. All they have to do is wait.

Spencer can’t voice his affections with words, but he more than makes up for this with his actions. Without fail, every Monday following the very first clandestine brushing of hands, lavish bouquets of flowers arrive at her workplace. Each bouquet is always paired with a notecard inscribed with a brief explanation of the meaning behind that week’s flower of choice. Cherry blossoms to pay homage to her beauty, plumeria to symbolize their new beginning, agrimony to convey his thankfulness that she is willing to wait for him.

Her favorite bouquet arrives four weeks before the end of the semester. As she steps through the doors of the bakery, a vase full of nine red roses sits atop the counter. The sight of them nearly takes her breath away. She pauses for a moment and runs her fingertips across the velveteen petals before plucking the notecard from its place.

This week, Spencer chooses to forgo the explanation in favor of a messily scrawled poem;

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well

that, for all they care, I can go to hell,

But on earth indifference is the least

we have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn

with a passion for us we could not return?

If equal affection cannot be,

let the more loving one be me.

That evening, Spencer receives his first bouquet from her. On his desk sits an arrangement of pale pink ambrosia.

The meaning isn’t lost on him, but if it were, the note that sits next to the vase makes her intentions clear.

We never had to force love.

We were drowning in it from the moment we met.

Spencer is horribly frustrated.

A mere twenty feet away from where he stands, the notoriously garish and wholly unprofessional PhD program director is gesticulating wildly to the young woman that stands trapped between him and the hors d’oeuvre table. To find Professor Van Wesep in such a position is not uncommon, due to his penchant for trying to charm (terrorize) the prospective female doctoral candidates. The man is practically a walking harassment complaint waiting to happen. Spencer would abhor Van Wesep even if he weren’t the only thing standing in the way of him and his lover.

At long last, the semester has drawn to a close. The lonely nights spent longing to hold her in his arms are a thing of the past. By the time the sun rises again, Spencer will no longer have to wonder what her body will feel like pressed against his. He’ll be thoroughly acquainted with every inch of her, and she with him. The thought sends a thrilled chill down his spine.

The torturous foreplay they’ve been engaging in for the last four months would have surely broken a lesser man. Spencer would be lying if he said he wasn’t tempted on more than one occasion to have her during one of her frequent visits to his office. Some days, when her visits came later in the evenings, just as the sun began to dip low in the sky, her eyes would glisten in such a way that told Spencer her thoughts were none dissimilar to his own. That glimmer of lust had him holding on to his restraint by the skin of his teeth.

And here they were, on the last evening of the semester. Final grades had been submitted and were released hours prior. Spencer would have been content to skip this event altogether, in favor of more… recreational activities, but his lover insisted on attending.

Initially, Spencer assumed her insistence lay in her desire to mingle with her future peers and mentors. Her true intentions come to light when she breezes into the room clad in a pair of sleek, designer pumps. Her lips, painted fire engine red, curl up into a playful smile at the sight of a slack-jawed Spencer Reid. The devious glint in her eye twinkles sinfully in the light.

Tonight isn’t a social call at all. Tonight, she wants to play with him.

And play she has.

From the second she arrives all eyes are fixating on her celestial beauty. Peers and mentors alike trip over themselves in their haste to capture her attention, if only for a fleeting moment. She works the room flawlessly, leaving a trail of smitten men of all ages in her wake.

The most smitten is Spencer himself, because he’s the lone recipient of countless heated glances, as well as more than a few knowing smirks. She well aware of what she’s doing to him, and she takes pleasure in watching him squirm.

Spencer intervenes when Van Wesep makes the ill-advised decision to reach a hand up to tuck a piece of hair behind her ear. He barely has the time to withdraw his hand before Spencer is upon them.

“I apologize for the interruption,” Spencer casts a faux apologetic glance at his colleague, before settling his gaze on his target. “Ms. Y/L/N, may I speak to you for a moment?”

She looks positively gleeful. Perhaps Spencer should have intervened hours ago.

“Absolutely, Professor Reid.”

The honorific sends a jolt of heat straight to his groin. He definitely should have stolen her away earlier.

The two of them say their goodbyes to a confused Professor Van Wesep, whose imploring eyes follow them as they hurriedly slip from the party and down the hallway.

“Where are we going?”

Spencer leads her down a long corridor, far beyond earshot of the other guests. Pushing her into a dark corner, he positions her between himself and the cold wooden door of an unoccupied office. The only sounds that can be heard are the distant thrum of the music and the eager pants falling from his lover’s lips.

Spencer pulls her into a searing kiss, one hand tangling in her hair and the other finding purchase on her waist. He worries for a moment that he’s being too rough with her, that he should have taken a more careful approach to their first kiss, but she assuages those worries when she kisses him back with equal enthusiasm. Her hand reaches between them and clutches his tie, then she’s pulling him closer and whining wantonly against his lips. Spencer takes this as an invitation to slip his tongue inside and he finds himself letting out a low groan when he tastes a hint of strawberry.

Spencer pulls away to catch his breath. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that.”

“Oh, I think I do, Professor,” she laughs, breathless. “Probably just as long as I’ve wanted to do this.”

Spencer jolts forward when her hand slides down to cup him over his trousers.

“Could’ve done that a lot earlier if you hadn’t insisted on teasing me for the entire night,” Spencer growls through gritted teeth. He’s more than a little proud of his ability to string together a sentence with her hand working him over with slow, steady strokes.

He trails a line of kisses across the underside of her jaw, before taking her earlobe and nipping it lightly with his canine. Spencer’s actions are rewarded with a full body shudder. He dips his tongue in the hollow at the base of her throat and her hands ball into fists against his dress shirt.

“Spencer, please.”

Spencer hums and pulls back to look at her. The hand in her hair lowers, and he trails a thumb across where her nipples are hard against the fabric of her dress.

“Yes, my love?”

Her eyes flutter against the weight of her arousal, and Spencer twitches in his pants. The sight of her with her hair disheveled and her lipstick smeared on account of him is a heavenly thing. He doesn’t know how he ever deprived himself of such a splendor.

“I want you. Right now.” She punctuates her words by pulling him down into a frenzied kiss. One of her hands tangles itself in the hair at the nape of his neck while the other busies with tugging his shirt out of his pants.

“Right now?” Spencer taunts, mouth against mouth. His hand trails down the side of her breast, caressing her rib cage and her hip before stopping at her upper thigh. Spencer’s fingertips toy with the tops of her lace thigh highs. “But anyone could walk by and see us.”

“I don’t care,” she argues, fumbling clumsily as she struggles to undo his belt buckle.

Spencer’s wandering hand dips below the hem of her dress to explore the silky-smooth skin of her inner thigh. She’s soft here, too, he thinks to himself as his hand travels up, up, up. He stops just short of where she wants him most and she lets out a despairing cry.

“You wouldn’t mind someone walking by and seeing you with your pretty legs spread wide for your professor?”

Spencer brings life to his words by lifting her leg up, hitching her thigh around his hip and pressing into her. The silk fabric of her dress rustles as he pushes it up and out of the way.

A breathy moan tumbles from her lips as he rocks against her, dragging his arousal up and down the front of her lace panties. The friction is maddening in that it provides only the smallest bit of relief. It’s not enough for Spencer, and judging by the way she desperately pushes down the fabric of his pants, it’s not enough for his partner, either.

“Need to get these off now,” she murmurs against Spencer’s mouth. An eager hand tugs at the elastic band of his underwear.

Spencer places his hand on hers, stilling her movements. “Not so fast, baby. Gotta make sure you’re ready for me first.”

Her fingers clamp down on Spencer’s wrist, guiding him to the sodden lace between her thighs.

“Don’t think that’s gonna be a problem,” she whimpers as Spencer’s fingers take appraisal of the drenched cloth. “In fact, I think four months of foreplay is sufficient enough. Wouldn’t you say?”

“Maybe so,” Spencer muses, voice muffled as he sucks at the skin of her neck. “But I’m not willing to chance hurting you our first time together. You’re entirely too precious to me.”

Spencer captures her lips in a kiss so sweet it has her sighing into his mouth. When he pulls away, he fixes her with a smile.

“You’re not particularly fond of these panties, are you?”

Her eyebrows pull together. “No, why?”

Spencer pulls at the flimsy fabric harshly and it gives way under the force of it. He reaches back to stuff the thong in his back pocket.

“That’s why.”

Spencer’s lips come down against hers at the same time his middle and index fingers drag across her slickness. His foresight pays off when his mouth muffles the sound of her cries. As confident he is that they won’t be found, a cry like that would certainly have drawn unwanted attention.

The swipe of his thumb across her crest paired with the gentle pressure of his fingers dipping into her heat is enough to make her legs buckle. Had it not been for Spencer pressing her against the wall, she surely would have fallen to the ground in a trembling heap.

“I could get lost in you for hours,” Spencer groans, curling his fingers inside her in such a way that makes her clutch desperately to his shirt.

“Spencer, oh my God,” she keens. “I need you, please.”

“You have me, my love,” Spencer whispers the promise against her parted lips. “You’ve had me since the first moment I laid eyes on you.”

Spencer speeds up the onslaught of his fingers until the telltale tightening of her heat warns him of her impending climax. He has to bite down on his lower lip to regain his own composure. The feeling of her tight and wet around his fingers is almost too good.

“Spencer, I’m getting close,” she whimpers.

Spencer continues until she’s on the cusp of tumbling over the edge, until one more pass of his fingers against her crest would surely seal the deal, and then he’s removing his hand and taking a step back.

“Spencer, what the fu-,” she pauses when he promptly shoves his pants and underwear just enough to free himself from their painful confines. “Oh.”

A dazed smile makes its way to her face as Spencer presses himself against her once more. He sweeps her up into a kiss comprised of pure, unadulterated desire, before pulling away and smirking deviously at her.

“Jump.”

It takes a moment for her pleasure fogged brain to make sense of the request, but as soon as it does, she complies without question.

Spencer’s hands grip her thighs firmly and in one swift thrust he sheaths himself into her fully – an indulgence so grand that all others dull in comparison. Now that he’s had the finest, felt it wrapped around him like warm velvet, he can’t imagine a world in which he must live without it.

“Spencer!”

Spencer swears he’s never heard a sweeter sound than her crying out his name as their bodies come together for the first time. It’s synonymous with a siren call, he thinks, because in that moment she could lure him to certain death and he knows he would go with a smile.

His lips seek purchase on the exposed skin of her chest as he buries himself in her paradise again and again. The sharp sting of her heels digging into his back with every thrust brings out a sort of primal urge in him, spurring him to rut up into her like a man possessed.

“You feel perfect,” Spencer groans out against the flushed skin of her neck. He presses a soft kiss to where her pulse bounds just beneath the skin before pulling away and locking eyes with her. “When I’m old and gray and can remember nothing else, I’ll remember this. I’ll remember how it felt to kiss you for the first time – how it felt to touch you. How it felt to worship you and make love to your body.”

Spencer’s voices catches, thick and overwhelmed with emotion.

“I’ll remember how it feels to love you.”

Her breath catches in her throat and sharp pang of panic burns hot in his chest. Had he misinterpreted her affections? Did she not burn for him in the same way? Perhaps the ambrosia meant nothing. Spencer’s movements falter, and for several torturous seconds he’s nearly paralyzed with fear.

She silences those fears with a kiss.

“Oh, Spencer,” she sighs as she presses her forehead against his. “I love you, too. More than you could ever comprehend.”

Spencer resumes moving in and out of her, but the frenzied feeling from before is replaced with something else now. Something softer, but no less passionate.

“Yeah?” he inquires, searching her eyes for any trace of insincerity. He finds none, and it’s a relief. Any hint of falseness in her claim would surely lead to a heartbreak he could never recover from.

“Yes.” The word trails off into a moan. “I love you, Spencer Reid. I don’t imagine I’ll ever stop.”

Spencer’s heart jolts and he whines pathetically against her mouth. “I’m counting on that.”

“I’m close, Spencer,” she pants, her breath hitting his face in warm puffs. “Don’t think I can last much longer.”

“Me, too.” Spencer nudges her nose with his own. “Reach between us and touch yourself, my love. I want us to cum together. Can you do that for me?”

She nods, and the hand that clung to his right shoulder dips in between them to rub tight circles against her crest. Spencer doubles his efforts when he sees her eyelids flutter closed, and the resulting tightening of her core leaves him panting hard.

“Spencer, I-” her breath catches in her throat as Spencer delivers a particularly strong thrust. Her head falls against his shoulder, her soft moans of his name like heaven to his ears.

“Cum with me, baby,” Spencer grunts out desperately. He needs it like he needs air to breath and water to drink. And once he has it, he knows he’ll need it again and again.

She gives it to him with a muffled cry of his name and he’s instantly swept away, drowning in the blissful way her body sings for him. His body follows her lead, shattering completely under her fingertips.

While he’s been through similar acts with previous partners, those instances always felt impersonal and clinical. The caresses and whispered words were all a means to an end, an end that usually left him feeling lonelier and emptier than when he started. But right now, as he feels the beat of her heart pressed against his own, he swears he couldn’t feel fuller - full of adoration, full of affection, full of love. It’s beautiful and overwhelming and everything Spencer didn’t know he was looking for.

A raucous round of applause erupts from the direction of the party, startling the two of them. Spencer feels her laugh against his neck.

“It’s almost as if they were applauding us for a job well done.”

Spencer presses a chaste kiss to the crown of her head.

“As they should. That was sensational.”

Spencer carefully pulls out and lowers her to the floor. He wastes no time in tilting her chin up and capturing her lips in a reverent kiss. Spencer hopes his lips convey his gratitude.

The two of them pull apart and set to making themselves presentable. Their efforts prove to be in vain when Spencer points out a dark purple love bite nestled into the crook of her neck. She counters this by taking note of the smudge of red lipstick on his collar.

“What an adulterous pair we make, Professor.”

Spencer rolls his eyes good-naturedly. “I’m not your professor anymore.” He bends down and places a kiss to her lips before taking her hand in his.

“I suppose you’re not,” she muses as they meander down the corridor. “Whatever shall we do now?”

As the two of them step out of the dark hallway and reenter the party, Spencer smiles to himself. Visions of wedding rings flit through his mind. Spencer supposes he’ll have to take a break from the posh clothing and rare books in favor of saving his money. He’ll buy only the finest ring for his future wife, after all.

“I have a few ideas.”

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agent-cupcake · 2 years ago

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hellooo! i admire your writing so much and would love to hear more about your ~process~. how much do you plan, what do you like to know before diving in, that kinda thing <3

Oh I love talking about myself you really shouldn't have opened up the floodgates

(but since you did...)

I don't really have a process I follow. Even if I do plan things out, I can't ever stick to it so mostly it's not worth the effort. For the most part, everything begins by taking story concept and character and writing down little scene snippets in an empty doc, or on my phone. Usually this is dialogue or sensory stuff, and a lot of times it doesn't make it into the final draft because my obsession with keeping to what I feel is more character accurate. The point is to set the tone, I guess.

Not that its relevant, but some of my favorites of these starting snippets that were in the final product is Junpei showing reader her own funeral and Emet-Selch dunking on reader's hopes and dreams at the end of Devil's Bouquet.

Anyway, from there, I flesh out that starting line, add more little snippets or even ideas for other scenes, and almost always write the ending, or at least write out the portion of the ending that I see as "the point" of the fic. This can be a segment of dialogue, a paragraph of emotional language, or even just a sentence to remind myself of the moment that every word I write is building up to support. That's the break of tension between the characters which, in my case, is usually the part right before or around the smut (but usually not the smut itself, as I see that as the tension builder or tension release rather than the "climax" ((haha)) itself). I didn't used to do it this way, but it's so much easier to write when you have a working knowledge of the core of your story.

You know, like your basic moral lessons: Make sure your mother doesn't marry into a family with a stepbrother who is a bully and pervert. Don't engage in a power struggle with Claude. Think twice before being too friendly with old British men.

Obviously this is a joke but yeah, I definitely could come up with single sentence explanations for any of my fics. No matter how far along in a story I am, before I decide on "the point", it's kinda a mess. Often times when I am cutting scenes, it's because it doesn't fit this specific vision. In cry foul, Sylvain and reader originally met at the wedding and he was a lot more honest about his intentions throughout, but rewatching scenes with him made me realize that my starting premise was flawed and so it all got cut and my focus shifted more onto the games he was playing with her. In Asteria, I have the scheme between Yuri and Aelfric set, but reader was going to be more of a sleuth about it (the original plot of this fic was unhinged ngl) but then I changed to make her a lot more of a charming country bumpkin sort of character so it could be smaller scale and more self contained, more focused on how reader feels about Yuri. I want to account for as much of the world and setup as I possibly can to make the payoff more satisfying. Somnambulant exists as it does because I kept adding little notes for scenes I thought were necessary which then saw a lot of elaboration to justify itself. Also characters have a tendency to run away from me. I'll add scenes or segments simply because the characters demand it. Sylvain wasn't supposed to take reader's panties but then it happened and I had to deal with it. There are a lot of small things too. In heavensent, I added in that she was sitting in a chair last minute because I felt like it smoothed out their movements and the DP thing just happened because I thought it was... Not funny, but contextually... Yeah. Forever ago when I wrote Welcome to Dead House, I straight up retconned reader's personality entirely because she was too well adjusted, so I added the therapy scene and mental breakdown.

Um. Yeah. I think the point of me saying all of this was just to say that I don't really go in with much of a plan or anything as I maybe should, I just live my bliss and see what happens. The stuff that I love the most in anything I post is usually the unintended things that spring up when I'm "in the zone" because that's when I feel like I get the best banter/dialogue and most intense scenes.

Anyway thank you for coming to my TED talk

#personal #pls don't ask about me i'm a raging egomaniac #you're really only hurting yourself

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not-poignant · 4 months ago

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I find myself in this position all the time, and it's further compounded by ADHD paralysis. So ways I've developed to work on this are (and these may/may not work for you!

Work on more than one project at once. My sweet spot is about 2-3 projects. I'm currently overrun lmao, but generally 2-3 projects at different paces usually satisfies 'business/financial writing' vs. 'for fun fanfiction writing' vs. 'some other third thing that annoyed me.'

Give your stories 'boundaries.' As in, if you have a really great idea you want to write but the worldbuilding is huge, or you're not ready yet skill-wise, or you just know it needs to wait, give the story something concrete: 'You will get two hours of my time on Sunday' or 'I will work on you in 2025' or 'Is there something about this distraction that is telling me that there's something wrong with my current work/s re: inspiration.'

Have a masterlist of plot bunnies. Shove all the ideas into a single document, arrange by genre or character or plot if you like. Give every idea a sentence / paragraph / page but try not to give it too much. Just enough to know that when you check in again, those ideas don't disappear and are always there.

Sometimes ideas for lots of different stories can be funnelled into projects you're currently working on. Unless the genre/s are all wildly different, often new ideas show us plots or character types we're very excited to write. The good news is that in most projects and story types, you can fold those in! This is especially true if you're working on a series.

It's good to get zen about never being able to write all your ideas. It will never happen. Some people struggle to think of ideas, but for those of us who have too many, you will never write them all. It's good to gently learn how to make peace with that, whether that's a grief process, an anger process, the sooner you accept it, the sooner it becomes easier to let ideas drift by without feeling like you have to snatch at every single one 'just in case.'

Pick two of the ideas that bother you the most, start with those. The ones you think about, make playlists for, already have a vague idea of an ending, or character names. Ideally they will be: Different genre/s and/or have a different 'feel' to each to satisfy the different parts of your brain that are ideating in this way. Now ymmv, but I am pretty strict on sticking to the stories I pick. I have what I call high fidelity to the ideas I choose, because I begin to trust that I can fold new characters and/or plots into these stories (I don't write short novellas or standalone novels for this reason, I write long serials which really suits this kind of ideation process).

Be careful of idea generation distracting you from the hard parts of writing. Idea generation for those of us who find it easy and exciting is actually very good at seeming 'productive' when sometimes it's taking us away from editing, or character work, or plot work, or worldbuilding. But on the other hand...

Enjoy the adrenaline rush and exhilaration that comes from story idea generation. For those of us who find it relatively easy, it can be extremely exciting to be in this mode. Sometimes stepping back and observing the feelings that come up with this can help a lot, like, does it feel anxious, frantic, fun, exciting, scary, upsetting, etc.

If you don't trust yourself to pick two ideas, go to that masterlist that I've suggested writing up above, and put those ideas in a jar and then literally just pick two. You will generally know in your gut if a story isn't 'right' for right now. You may also know which ideas can be combined. Some ideas will be very 'character' focused, others will be 'worldbuilding' focused, others genre, others plot. The ones that have a bigger combination of things (character and worldbuilding and ending / worldbuilding and plot and title) are generally the ones that are going to be better to start with.

As annoying as this sounds, it really is a matter of choosing your most solid idea at random, and the only way to know if it's solid is to start that masterlist and see which ideas excite you most to write and feel the most 'robust' and strong.

From there, you just pick that one. (Or more than one, I love working on more than one project at once). Until you write them down, they're all just amorphous dreams that are often fun to think about, but once you start putting them in a masterlist, it's amazing how different 'that one about the vampires' vs. 1000 words about a science fiction novel with two frenemies at the centre seem as prospective projects!

Ok, genuine question for other writers;

I am in a place where I have so many ideas I want to work on and I love them all and I can't choose so as a result I have written nothing.

I know I'm not alone in this, so I won't insult the hellscape we live in by asking if any of you have been here, but I will be wildly optimistic and ask if and how any of you got out of this position?

#pia on writing #on writing #anyway feel free to dismiss anything that doesn't work #i've been writing serials for 10 years #and it's my job #so learning how to discard and pick up ideas #has been one of the hardest and most vital parts of my process #the other hardest part is editing dear god fadlskfjas #also enjoy!#some people really struggle with idea generation!#in dog training we would call this 'a good problem to have'#but no problem is that good when it's causing decision paralysis #aslkfsda

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allthefilmsiveseenforfree · 3 years ago

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Dear Evan Hansen

You may have seen some ~online discourse~ about the film Dear Evan Hansen, an adaptation of the 2016 Broadway musical, and you might have wondered what all the hubbub is about. I mean, it’s a feel good story about a senior in high school, Evan Hansen (Ben Platt), who has some pretty severe anxiety and depression. While trying to fulfill an assignment from his therapist to write a letter to himself, his letter gets picked up by another student, Connor (Colton Ryan) - and later that day, Connor kills himself. Connor’s grieving parents and sister Zoe (Amy Adams, Danny Pino, and Kaitlyn Dever) are desperate to learn more from the boy they think was Connor’s best friend - after all, Connor’s suicide note was a letter addressed to “Dear Evan Hansen.” And, as you can imagine, Evan tells them about the unfortunate mistake and sits with them in their grief as they struggle to pick up the pieces of their lives.

Just kidding! He lies to them, repeatedly, elaborately, expansively for months, constructing an entire false friendship with Connor that never happened, and ingratiating himself into the wealthy nuclear family he never had, in large part because he wants to get into Zoe’s pants! THIS IS THE PROTAGONIST OF THE STORY. Oh, and it’s a musical so there is a lot of singing and crying and singing WHILE crying and sometimes crying and not singing at all. But the #inspiration, you guys.

Things I liked:

Pretty much everything but the story and Ben Platt’s performance. The supporting cast is stacked, and all of them do a great job at elevating material scraped directly out of a diaper worn by someone who just chewed their way through a copy of the DSM-5.

A couple of the songs are damn catchy - “Waving Through a Window” and “You Will Be Found” are standouts for a reason - and here’s the thing, Platt sings them well. But as you’ll discover, there’s a lot more to a movie musical than just singing your part.

Stephen Chbosky, the man behind every deep thought I and a lot of people in my generation had in 2006 after he wrote The Perks of Being a Wallflower, is a pretty good director. I particularly enjoyed the fanvid-type cuts in “Waving Through a Window” in conjunction with the lyrics, and his use of interstitial shots to flashbacks (and sometimes flashforwards!) is a neat little bit of shorthand that I thought was used sparingly enough to be effective.

Amy Fucking Adams. She’s holding on so hard, so desperately to the idea of who her son could have been, rather than the reality of who he was, and she is full of such deep pain that is masked by an almost endless supply of patience with Evan and relentless positivity. All this made me want was Enchanted 2 even worse than I already did.

Super into everything Zoe wears - the costuming department did a great job, and now all I want to do is live in mom jeans and baggy sweaters.

Did I Cry? I teared up a couple of times because I’m not a completely heartless bastard and when Amy Adams offered Evan Connor’s college money, my heart broke for the lie Evan had thrust upon her, and Julianne Moore’s song got me good, because she’s just a single mom to Evan who is doing her goddamn best.

Things I hated more than the time I dropped a frozen gallon container of fruit cocktail on my pinkie toe in my parents’ garage and it turned black and I thought it was gonna fall off:

Ben Platt is 28 years old. He originated the role of Evan Hansen on Broadway, so in many respects it makes sense that he plays the role in the movie, except for the one kinda sorta important thing where he looks like a wizened old crone standing amongst a sea of children doing his best twitching, cringing Hunchback of Notre Dame impression. If you want someone to convincingly play 20 years their junior, hire Paul Rudd. Otherwise, please don’t ask me to believe that this supposed 18-year-old has crow’s feet.

And that twitching nervous energy is a huge part of the black hole at the center of this film - he’s playing to the cheap seats and walking through the halls of his high school like a wet chihuahua. It’s an excruciating acting choice to watch - he doesn’t just have anxiety, he is on the verge of a nervous breakdown seemingly every second of every day. Like honestly, where is only-mentioned-never-seen Dr. Sherman, because this young man’s meds are NOT WORKING DR. SHERMAN.

There’s such a lack of self-awareness on behalf of the writing, directing, and performance by Platt. There’s one song, “Sincerely, Me,” that offers the only glimpse of commentary about what Evan is doing, by pointing out the malicious ridiculousness of him writing a series of fake emails as proof of his and Connor’s friendship.

Also what high schoolers email this much?? I know this was written in probably 2014 or so, but has a bitch never heard of a text? Even a DM? This whole plot is constructed around the premise that high schoolers are just constantly, constantly emailing each other.

Everything - and I mean EV-ER-Y-THING - about Evan’s relationship with Zoe is so creepy and disturbing that with a soundtrack change, this could easily be a horror movie. He attempts to get her to like him by describing to her all the things her brother noticed about her - oh wait, I’m sorry, all the things HE noticed about her while he was skulking in the shadows following her around for years, watching every move she made, and it ends with him singing repeatedly “I LOVE YOU” because following a girl around and never having a conversation with her or knowing her at all is love, right? This was clearly written by the same people who chose “Every Breath You Take” as their wedding song because Sting is hot and they never actually listened to the damn words.

And it gets about 10 billion times worse when Zoe goes to Evan’s house alone, takes him up to his room, and sings “I don’t need reasons to want you” and that was the moment I was that person I hate in a movie theater and I pulled out my phone to Google who wrote the music and lyrics to the musical (we were in the back row of the theater no one was behind me THIS WAS AN OUTRAGE EMERGENCY) and of motherfucking course it was written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, 2 men who heard about meeting an actual human woman from a friend one time but otherwise are unfamiliar with the concept.

Lastly, enormous serial killer vibes from Evan sending unlabeled flash drives anonymously through the mail with no note in an attempt to right his wrongs. That’s not catharsis, that’s how the next installment in the Saw franchise starts, with Evan in a Billy the clown doll mask showing up on the screen and asking if you want to play a fucking game.

Also, I know it’s not possible for the narrative to justify this in a way that could be satisfying based on Evan’s actions, but what is with this thing where single working-class mom Julianne Moore is turning down rich people’s money for Evan to go to college? Like, obviously we can’t have that happen in the movie but in real life, fuck your pride! Take those rich people’s money!

I also know how movies work but nothing annoys me more than a giant group of high schoolers all getting beeps and boops to indicate text notifications all at the same time because I don’t know a single person under the age of 55 who keeps their ringer on. That shit is on vibrate AT MOST, and I feel like that’s a millennial thing.

The emotional climax of the film is obviously Evan’s WAY TOO LATE confession, but the idea that it’s prompted by Connor’s family suddenly getting a lot of internet hate is, frankly, laughable. If Sandy Hook taught me one thing, it is that no tragedy is immune from trolls who live only to cause other people devastating emotional pain on the internet. That shit starts day 1. Apparently no one involved in this production has ever been on Twitter?

Also it feels like there should have been a dog somewhere in this movie and there was no dog, so points off for that too.

Perhaps Dear Evan Hansen isn’t nearly as deep as it aspires to be. Perhaps it’s a morality play, a simplistic message of “Don’t lie, kids, lying is bad!” Major studio movies wrap themselves up with a nice bow at the end so everyone can feel good about themselves and leave with a happy ending, but the moronic cruelty on display here makes that feat feel impossible. We’re left with Evan in an orchard, reading Connor’s favorite books and staring into the big blue sky with all the self-actualization he’s earned now as a lil treat. And if Evan Hansen looked like an actual 18-year-old, it would be a lot easier to extend more empathy to him and his not-fully-developed prefrontal cortex, but it’s a little harder with this fully-grown, weathered man who was old enough to remember seeing Liar Liar in theaters.

Dear Evan Hansen,

Get some actual help and a haircut and maybe you can grow up enough to have an actual healthy interaction with any other living person, ever.

Sincerely,

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#121in2021 #dear evan hansen #dear evan hansen review #dear evan hansen 2021 #ben platt #amy adams #kaitlyn dever #julianne moore #colton ryan #danny pino #movie reviews #film reviews

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