#but this was so poorly structured and none of the characters made any sense

[tzimtzum]

cosmos seiusa was ASS they literally just met and immediately transformed in front of each other so there's just no payoff at all for the gender stuff and it literally just isn't discussed. also seiya kissing her all the time even though they barely know eachother but also being like "you have to remember mamoru"??? and everyone is just unprompted like usagi you are the worlds specialest girl. yayy<33 harumichi dying off screen haruka in the girls uniform. but at least yaten slayed

[genericpuff]

A theory as crazy as it is profound in a silly r/im14andthisisdeep kinda way

So there's this conspiracy theory of sorts that's been whispered within the ULO discord and subreddit the last little bit. I don't think anyone's made an outright statement on it yet but it's definitely something people have been casually talking about in the comment sections and chatrooms, mostly as a joke, but also as a thought experiment.

And that thought experiment is concerning the notion that Lore Olympus could very well have become a poorly-made AI comic.

Not necessarily the art, as we've already dissected the art process plenty of times before and it points to Rachel simply being bad at team management and using her mismanaged team as a way to circumvent any real effort on her own part.

But the writing. There's just something about Lore Olympus' writing that's become incredibly stiff, boring, and alien.

Disclaimer before I continue: this is a tinfoil hat theory, and a lot of the points I'm about to discuss can be easily proven with far more reasonable explanations, so take it with mountains of salt. That said, I do think it's something worth talking about as we're currently in an era of mass AI-takeover in the art and writing scene, and let's face it, Lore Olympus nowadays really does feel like it's either being written by an alien, or an amalgamation of possessed animatronic endoskeletons wearing a human skinsuit. So viewer beware, this post is full of speculation and tinfoil hat wearing, read at your own discretion and don't take everything I'm about to say 100% seriously.

Let's get started.

THE TONE OF VOICE

This is where that whole "animatronic wearing a skinsuit" vibe really shines, so I figured it would be where I'd start. Lore Olympus... does not feel human. It's dialogue often feels stilted and scripted, none of the characters have any sense of personal voice, and it often feels like the dialogue is coming straight out of a sterilized Wikipedia article.

There are also often times when characters will say one thing only to be responded to with an entirely other thing. It comes across as randomly generated, like the dialogue is being created based off a script that is only given prompts as to where it needs to end up - so everything between Point A and Point B ends up feeling like non-sequitur filler at best and outright nonsense at worst.

In fact, there can be better tone of voice and dialogue found in the legitimate AI conversations of Lore Olympus themed ChatGPT bots.

And this is a bot that's self-aware it's a bot, so it definitely has that going for it.

The more likely explanation: Rachel's bad at writing. She's planning these episodes maybe 2 weeks ahead at a time at best so she's just throwing dialogue in to keep readers spending money and meet her panel quotas. Her characters have no voice because they aren't, in and of themselves, characters. She hasn't given them any depth beyond their appearance and she clearly has next to no understanding of writing outside her own headspace (and her actual headspace as we've seen is... yikes) so it's not surprising that her dialogue-writing is on par with Shenmue 3. And Shenmue 3 is a game with real human-written dialogue that exists so it's not a stretch that something like LO's bad writing could be entirely the fault of a human either LOL

THE NARRATIVE INCONSISTENCIES

It seems since the start of S2.2 (post-mid-season hiatus which starts us off with the 10 year time skip) narrative inconsistencies and plotholes have become far more egregious, sometimes contradicting itself within the same episode. Almost like scenes are just happening from single idea prompts and no actual structure underneath the surface.

The more likely explanation: Just like the first point about stilted dialogue, this could easily be chalked up to Rachel just not committing to goal-oriented writing. She doesn't have any sort of end point planned for any of these plotlines, she just drags them out until she can finally think of a way to resolve them, if she even resolves them (many often aren't resolved, or are simply left as a "yep, that's it, moving on" type ending, ex. Eros and Psyche).

STRANGE SYNTAX AND CONSTANT TYPOS

This goes hand in hand with the first point about stilted dialogue, but part of what makes everything feel so stiff and robotic is how often the sentences are structured in very... odd ways. From the lack of contractions that make sentences feel less natural-

-to the strange choice of words that no human being in a modern setting would ever use (and LO is, again, set in a modern setting and is trying to portray the gods as being 'just like us')-

-to the numerous typos and spelling errors.

(there are so many I could post here but the "his deam" one always makes me laugh lmao)

It really feels like a lot of these sentences were pulled straight out of Twitter or a Wikipedia article. As a result, it never feels like these characters are talking to each other, but at each other.

As for the typos, at this point, Rachel really has no excuse for how frequent they are. Fortunately, she has hired a copy editor recently which seems to have mitigated these errors, but if there were a bot involved, it wouldn't be farfetched to think that the bot would also make spelling mistakes and stilted dialogue if it's been trained off Rachel's past material which is, y'know... full of spelling mistakes and stilted dialogue.

The more likely explanation: It's a well known fact that Rachel has dyslexia, so I'm not going to fault her for struggling with spelling things right. None of this is to shame people who struggle with dyslexia and reading disorders. But the fact of the matter is, Rachel is a multi-million dollar creator in the year 2023 where spellcheck exists. It's wild that she's only now taken on a copy editor. Literally any of her assistants that she's had for the last few years could have done that for her. It's great that she's hired a copy editor but it feels like too little too late. That isn't going to fix the stilted dialogue, either, which just comes down to, yet again, Rachel being a bad writer. And possibly a series of animatronic endoskeletons hiding in a human skinsuit.

REACTING TO CRITICISM

The irony of this post is that it asks not to take every speculation I write here seriously because it's just that, speculation, and we shouldn't get carried away with conspiracy theories... which is exactly the sentiment we had back when we initially suspected Rachel of spying in the criticism groups, which turned out to be true. It's basically public knowledge at this point that Rachel lurks in the criticism groups, thanks to both testimonials from others who have been in groups who got hijacked by Rachel (see: Broseidon's Palace of Fishposting) and the 'clapbacks' in LO that are clearly meant for the audience.

But it's wild to think that Rachel would really spend time in criticism groups when she's said it herself that she "doesn't like criticism". And considering she already spends an absurd amount of time on social media, it would be really ridiculous if she was still finding time to also lurk in the critic groups and concoct ways to 'get back' at them.

Unless, of course, there was a bot parsing criticism hashtags like #antiloreolympus and #loreolympuscritical. I can personally attest to the fact that Rachel must be subscribed to hashtags in some capacity because I've had Lore Olympus fanart (way back in the day when it was actual fanart and not foe-art) get retweeted by Rachel herself literally seconds after posting. So either Rachel is just constantly refreshing the search feed all day, or she's directly fed tweets and posts with the hashtags she's subscribed to.

The more likely explanation: Rachel literally just spends an absurd amount of time on social media and considering she clearly only involves herself in the beginning and end process of drawing her comic - and only has a buffer 1-2 weeks ahead of time - she's definitely got plenty of time on her hands to lurk and hurt her own feelings in the criticism spaces. She could also just have her mods sending things to her as well. Either way it's icky behavior and I wish she'd do herself and her mental health a favor and just stay out of the fandom spaces, they aren't for her, they're for the fans.

HOW IS IT GETTING WORSE?

Consider everything I've laid out here. Remember that Lore Olympus is a comic that's been in development since 2017, and in the Originals catalogue since 2018. Its Originals version turned 5 years old in March and technically LO is well into the 6-7 year age range in total. It's absolutely absurd that after all these years, not only has the story fallen apart, but the art has lost the quality it once had. Comics are a medium that encourage improvement, you're drawing lots and typically the same characters and settings over and over again, it's natural progression to get better at doing it over time. And yet, Rachel seems to be getting worse at it, and her involvement in the comic seems to be shrinking with each year.

Of course, improvement is optional. Not every comic gets better over time. Which brings me to my final piece on this matter.

The most likely explanation: Rachel is burnt out and not interested in LO anymore. This is the longest project she's ever done, and while it's not the first webcomic she's done on a schedule, it is the first one that's made it further than a handful of chapters (The Doctor Pepper Show ended after about 1-2 years, not even making it to 10 chapters). She even stated herself in the beginning that LO was a project she'd "never finish".

While it is a testament to how far LO has come from its humble beginnings, I think it also serves as a precautionary tale - success can come at the expense of your happiness and integrity if you've trapped yourself in a project that no longer fulfills you.

Rachel's never finished a long-term project, and at this rate, it's hard to say when she will. As well known as it is that she has dyslexia, it's also well known that she has ADHD, and speaking as an ADHD creator myself, I can fully empathize with and understand that webcomics are hard to create, and get more exhausting to see through with each passing chapter. There's a reason not everyone does long-term comics like this, they're incredibly hard to manage and require a lot of commitment. Even I've found my commitment to current projects wavering as the honeymoon phase has worn off and I've sunk into the reality that is monotonous work, panel after panel, episode after episode, deadline after deadline.

If Rachel were a more experienced creator and more self-aware of her own limitations and work methodology back in 2018, Lore Olympus likely would have never been dragged out this long. She may have gotten the chance to finish it while she was still happy with it, or at least leave it behind when she was ready to move on. While I'm sure the allure of signing on with Originals felt worth it at the time - especially when we didn't know yet just how exploitative Webtoons was - it clearly hasn't benefitted her in the long run because it's tethered her to a project that she never felt wholly dedicated to in the first place. A project that's now less about telling a story and connecting with an audience and more about generating clicks and revenue.

She can claim all she wants in her interviews that Persephone and Hades were her "muses" as a child, but the writing is on the wall - LO was a passing fancy that stuck around too long after its heartbeat gave out.

What it's become now is an endoskeleton on life support, made up of statistics and analytics, struggling to stay alive from inside of a colorful but rotting skinsuit that only barely resembles a living thing.

[pygmi-says-hi]

book review:

Wicked Saints by Emily A Duncan

2/5 stars

disclaimer:

the author is not a great chica. she is antisemitic and generally rude. I am reviewing the content of the book as abjectly as possible and won't bias my review with that. But, I do think you should know that.

anyway!

What is this book about?

Nadya (Nadezhda) is a cleric for a pantheon of gods. her country (Kalyazin) is at war with another country (Tranavia) over religion vs blood magic. She is hiding because of her powers but gets ambushed in a raid by Tranavian soldiers. The rest of the story consists of her escaping with Tranavian defects and her fellow Kalyazi clerics, because the Crown Prince wants to usurp her power.

What did I like about this book?

I think it had a really cool vibe. dark fantasy, blood, gore, twisted slavic mythology...the atmosphere was broody and intriguing. It was kind of entertaining, held my interest for a while.

What did I not like about this book?

Well.

Couple things.

The magic was poorly outlined. I read the first book when I was like 13 and then cycled back to reread before I finished the series. I was really only rereading to get a sense of the magic system...but that explanation never came. Nadya can 'communicate' with the gods, but the pantheon is incomplete and poorly researched. (I made a post about writing religions, go check it out!)

When you write a pantheon, it needs to have a complete set of gods for life to exist. There were some gods like the god of silence...but no goddess of the harvest? huh. Also, the 'blood magic' sounded cool but there was never an explanation or consistency of how/why it worked.

2. Characters were boring af. Nadya started as a badass but quickly diluted from there. Obviously, there was supposed to be an enemies to lovers with her and Malachaisz, but he was so edward cullen coded I honestly didn't care. She lost a lot of her personality and the rapport she had with her 'best friend' was like a saltine cracker. None of them had any relatable goals or attitudes I was drawn to.

3. The plot was...somewhere? The plot arc was more of a heart monitor during cardiac arrest. Not a 'main goal' other than escape, which was fine for like 2 chapters, until it started to get old.

TBH, it read like a mid-level fanfiction. Clearly this author had an enemies to lovers plot that she wanted some fantasy with, but only wrote in the other stuff to decorate the love story (which was still meh). The fantasy was poorly researched, the characters underdeveloped, the plot and pacing was confusing and slow. The banter was juvenile and not engaging; the romance read like Twilight but satanic.

4. Politics made no fucking sense. for a book about a political religious war, the religion and politics were complete chaos. No explained structure of how the 'vultures' (aka extremist political group) functioned, how the Crown Prince had anything to do with anything.

This is clearly slavic vs jewish, and is not breached appropriately. This is why you need to be careful when creating a religious war. the jewish people have been stereotyped to use human blood in 'sacrifices' by antisemitic ppl. if you don't carefully research, you could potentially represent an ethnic group crudely.

Summary:

It read like a first draft. Basic plot, still fleshing in the details, roughly outlined structure and basic character traits. It had a lot of potential but did not meet up.

I've read the second and third and it doesn't improve. The same problems prevail.

link to book:

Wicked Saints

follow for more xox

[theloganator101]

Hi there, I wanted to know your opinion about this.

So what I don't understand is how izuku was the only one who was too afraid in fighting the bots but others never had any of these issues considering none of them had prior experience in fighting bots or anyone that can potentially hurt. I mean MHA laws don't allow people to use their quirks freely without licence so these kids wouldn't in their lifetime be trained to take down these bots with their quirks and combat skills at their current level unless they were too rich like momo or shoto which none of these kids were to begin with. I mean 99% of them were regular kids attending junior high so shouldn't they also be pissing their boots off and have some mental blocks like izuku had? The narrative shows as if the other kids had lots of experience doing combat training and quirk training against bots that use weapons or lasers which to me makes sense considering how the laws are structured in MHA and also these kids wouldn't be having access to training facilities that easily. Haven't seen any being available for a middle schooler in MHAverse till now. Not even their middle school is shown to teach them those.

I get that izuku needs to be shown as an underdog but I feel this was done so poorly and made him look more pathetic while making the other kids look better than they actually were. I mean they should've been ahead of izuku in only quirk control.

A lot in the fandom said it was realistic for izuku to act the way he did since it was his first time fighting but shouldn't this be the same for majority of the characters baring shoto, momo and the loud mouth trash considering he picks fights that gives him minimum fighting skills?

Okay yeah this is actually weird when you think about it.

Now this could be chalked up or brushed off as Izuku having anxiety for the upcoming test, but that also begs the question of why weren't there other kids that shared the same feeling? Why is just Izuku?

Now this probably wouldn't be a problem if it was shown or explained that middle schools/junior highs have classes or even an area where students can train their quirks if they want to go into heroics or an occupation where their quirks can be useful.

Why is Izuku always the odd one out? Why is he always the butt of many jokes? The underdog narrative shouldn't even be present anymore since Izuku should fold everyone like a chair at this point.

[maulish]

I'm late to the party (wake?), but I've taken considerable time off from Star Wars. I think it was around season 2 of The Mandalorian that I really felt like this ain't it. Nothing really caught my interest enough to come back to it until The Acolyte which I now just finished watching. I should know better by now than to see what people have been saying about it, given I was around to witness how it was the prequels already that "ruined Star Wars".

While the Acolyte was a painful watch it again points out what should be obvious now. If there is anything at all that's at serious risk of ruining Star Wars (outside of bitter middle aged men on youtube), it's Disney. Disney is to Star Wars what Amazon is to Tolkien.

We all connect with particular characters, storylines and elements within the cosmos of an IP and its lore, but I think what forms the core of those emotional bonds are stories told with heart and integrity. There is something significant that Star Wars shares with LOTR in that sense. The film franchises both started out as passion projects that performed miracles with small budgets. The people working on those films came up with ways of bringing these worlds to life without the guarantee that it would pay off financially. They also created the gold standard of cinematic worldbuilding. The franchises obviously turned out to be really successful and seeing the large bult-in fanbases and now proven profitability attracted corporations which held all of the interest in the potential of financial gain, having none for the source material and core ideas that had originally propelled these franchises to begin with. These corporations instead approach the IPs with a sense of arrogance thinking that the audience will simply lap it up because of a proven emotional connection to the material, and the more they can churn out, the bigger the profit. The initial optimism and interest for a new film or series may even briefly seem to affirm that belief. Eventually the idea of all the money to be made will make the corporations look at how to cut down the costs, how to compress the production timeline. The ambition grows, but the quality of the work put into it suffers and the passion fizzles out. Instead of a dream of bringing a world to life it will become a calculation. This is where we're at. But it's that lack of passion that is always evident in the finished work.

The Acolyte is symptomatic of what corporate greed does to culture and cultural artifacts. It's not the initial idea that is the problem, it's not the main characters, it's not the wokeness. The fundamental problem that set the series on a downward path from the start was that it was planned from the POV of corporate ambition to branch out and generate a maximum amount of product to the widest and least specific audience. And they forgot about the story they were trying to tell in the process.

And on a side note, the way the Disney acquisition pushed a LOT of high quality content out of the canon just for the sake of gaining free reign should have been a clear sign of what's to come.

The Acolyte was destined to fail. It was structured in a way that assumed multiple seasons that it would never survive to see, because the story itself was poorly planned and written. The writing for the series is embarrassing to put it mildly. The series is also giving screen time to random background characters with no actual plot line, and a good chunk to a bunch of others that steal precious time from the main characters, only to all be killed off without any of them save one having made an impact. And so the first season that should have sold us on the idea sold us nothing at all.

There's the kind of 'feedback' that would have us think that there isn't room for everyone in a galaxy far, far away. And then the kind Disney ought to take to heart. But if they've shown us anything then it's that they're not yet motivated to learn from their mistakes. And until then there is no story they can't or won't ruin.

What a waste.

[the-technicolor-whiscash]

Here’s the thing with syndicate. The plot is terrible. There’s just no getting around it. It’s awful. I love the game, I’d take a bullet for any of the characters and I absolutely love running around London, but my christ. The plot is just so paper thin, you never understand anyone’s motivations, everything goes wrong all the time, none of it makes sense and it’s all so poorly explained. Like there’s sparks of good things, the conflict between Evie and Lucy Thorne I think is interesting but it never has the time to go anywhere and then Lucy is killed and it’s like ok glad to see this went nowhere.

I think part of the flaws are because the plot itself is fairly short. If you did none of the side missions you could crank through everything in probably a few hours. It’s structured ironically almost like da2 is except da2 is able to tell a coherent story because the cutscenes are longer. Some of the cutscenes in syndicate are like, seconds long. You don’t have the time to build up these characters or this story or this world. I think they try to do it with the Starrick cutscenes, but all he does is talk in circles and spit out bullshit poetry so you learn nothing.

If they had made the cutscenes longer and given them the time and structure to create a proper story, I think it could have been good. The bones of it are there. It just lacks the meat yknow.

[minijenn]

Alright wait I think I should elaborate on this.

So like Tears of the Kingdom is barely a sequel to Breath of the Wild despite being positioned (in its VERY FIRST TRAILER) as such because its so far removed from botw its not even funny. The ancient shiekah tech? Gone because uhhhhh its disappeared randomly bc Nintendy said so lol. Any of the people of Hyrule recognizing the knight that constantly travels alongside their princess? Nope, Link's just some rando none of them know. Any actual mentions of the champions outside of Mipha because she's the only one related to one of the new sages? Fuck those assholes who had a significant reflection on the present of the last game, they dead af.

But despite refusing to acknowledge Botw even happened, Totk insists upon copying pretty much all of its structure. Shrines and dungeons with four or five mechanisms you need to activiate and korok seeds and armor upgrades and pointless side quests and everything in between. The only difference is that Totk forces you to do these repetetive tasks across not just the surface, but a barren, spread out sky and boring, samey depths too. Totk gives you so much shit to do and none of it feels substantial or worthwhile or interesting in the slightest. Its maximalist game design at its worst. You're constantly just doing busy work in areas that just don't feel like a natural part of the world. The wilds in botw felt real and lived in, the sky and the depths feel like they were made solely for the player to fuck around in.

The hand mechanics are so fucking game breaking its not even funny. You can essentially just ultrahand an air bike to get over any obstacle. Asend and recall are so fucking broken that you can just bypass shrine puzzles completely with them. The game gives you these tools and tells you to "unleash your creativity" with them but ultimately most players aren't going to do that, they're just going to use them to cheat the most convienient solution possible, which begs the question, why design these puzzles in the first place if you've given the player the option to just skip them altogether?

Then there's the story, good good this fucking story. First of all there's the fact that you still unlock it through memories but unlike botw where you could essentially get them in any order, totk decided for a much more linear story but because its so married to how botw did it, you can end up stumbling upon major plot spoilers way later than you're supposed to (And dont give me anything about the forgotten temple telling you the order, if a player happens to miss out on going there early on in the game, they're flat out of fucking luck).

As for the story itself, its badly written, poorly paced, and just plain nonsensical. The fact that Ganondorf is able to even get far enough in his plans to obtain a secret stone is a reflection of how fucking stupid Rauru is for letting that fucker even hang around to kill his wife. Zelda not fucking telling Rauru and Sonia early on that Ganondorf is still alive in the present is absolutely bonkers like girl, what the fuck are you doing??? The ancient sages are all nothing characters with no personalities and no fucking names jesus christ nintendo. And we have to watch them repeat the same fucking cutscene four fucking times (Demon King? Secret Stone?) like we're goddamn babies who can't absorb the most basic of information. Ganondorf is also an absolutely wasted character in this game, with no real motivation or personality outside of "evil", who spends almost all of the present just sitting around underground waiting for Link to fucking kill him. You get the sense that they brought him back simply because he's a Zelda series staple and fans were disappointed that Calamity Ganon wasn't a character either but fuck, at least Botw was honest about that instead of what Totk does trying to pretend that Ganondorf is anything but a fucking dry piece of wood.

The only things I'll always defend this game on are its presentation. Its beautiful to look at, of course, the soundtrack is OUTSTANDING, completely blowing botw's out of the water, and depite how stupid the rest of the story is, anything having to do with the Light Dragon always makes me teary and the ending (epic final boss included) reduces me into a Zelink shipping pile of tears.

But everything else surrounding it? Fuck, man they spent six years developing this game, with one of those years apparently spent on "polish". What the fuck were they doing all that time? Why couldn't they fix the obvious problems with the games structure or plot? Why the hell does a game that essentially feels like BotW DLC cost 70 fucking dollars? Why does it feel so unfinished and underbaked despite that cost? Why is it so bad?

I wanted to love totk so much and upon my first playthrough, I did. But when I actually sat down and thought about the overall experience, I realized, this... just ain't it, fam. It's not the sequel to my favorite game of all time that I wanted. It's not even that great compared to other Zelda games that have far better plots and more unique gameplay structures. It's just... disappointing. And I think that's what's the most heartbreaking thing of all.

TLDR: Tears of the Kingdom is Bad and it should feel bad.

Its been over a year and I think I've finally come to terms that Tears of the Kingdom makes me irrationally angry the same way Kingdom Hearts 3 did because Oops The Highly Anticipated Video Game Was Bad, Actually

[bringerofplagues]

A Defense of Mortarions Fall to Chaos

I feel like it is a fairly common opinion in the 40k fandom that Mortarions turn to chaos was poorly handled and dumb. Now i just so happens to disagree with this take. Now i gotta say, i have a weird obsession with plagues and diseases that definitely makes me biased towards the plaguey moth boy, so do take what i say with a pinch of salt. Now let me start by expanding the opinion i am trying to argue against. From what i have seen most people think the way Mortarion fell to chaos was dumb, because one of his main character traits is hating psychers, due to his adoptive dad being an evil and tyrannic necromancer psycher, and yet he chose to join the traitors and chaos. My plan is to go through Mortarions story during the great crusade and start of the Horus Heresy to show why i think his fall makes sense, or at least deserves more credit. Now lets start with one simple fact, Mortarion is a self-centered, self loathing edgy asshole. During a conversation with Malcador Mortarion claims that none of the primarchs had a worse childhood than him. While it is true that Mortarion had a really shitty time on Barbaros but to completely ignore the suffering of people like Angron, who had nails jammed into his brain that made it so he would be in pain if he felt anything other than rage shows just how self centered Mortarion is. He does however have a point in so far as he without a doubt had it worse than someone like Guilliman. Now there were other primarchs who had shitty childhoods but still stayed loyal. Corax grew up amongst slaves and started leading a rebellion against the slavers, much like how Mortarion would rebel against his adoptive dad. However the difference there is that while Corax definitely found himself in a shitty situation, he was at least admired and loved by the people of his home world. Another loyalist primarch who shares a lot of traits with Mortarion is Russ, especially their hatred of psychers. Here a big difference is their relationship to their father, the god emperor of mankind. When the emperor met Russ he engaged in the culture of his world, they had a drinking contest and he won Russ’ respect. But when the emperor met Mortarion he let him go on a suicide quest against his adoptive dad, only to swoop in and save him in a way that Mortarion absolutely hated, feeling like he got his kill stolen. My point is, if the emperor had been more understanding of Mortarions situation and tried to work with him in a way he wouldn’t have seen as condescending their bond could have been a lot stronger. And again we can see this with Corax. When Corax met the emperor they discussed whether or not Corax should nuke the slavers, and while we don’t know the emperors response what matter is that Corax was ultimately allowed to make his own choice. So, Mortarion hated the emperor from the start, but this only grew worse after the emperor lied to him. See at the council of Nikea it was agreed that the emperor would heavily limit the amount of psychers that would be allowed in the imperial army to only the most nescesary, but as it turns out this wasn’t entirely true, and it also just so happened that the emperor turned out to be the mightiest psycher in the galaxy. So when he finds out Mortarion gets pretty pissed, which definitely wasn’t helped by Horus’ manipulation. Many of the primarchs seem to have supernatural abilities,and Horus’ was the power of the charisma, he was able to manipulate people, even other primarchs into doing much of what he wanted, which combined with the fact that Horus was the only primarch to show Mortarion any respect or brotherly love made him easy to manipulate. However the defining moment for why Mortarion betrayed the empire is his confrontation with the Khan. Here Mortarion tells the Khan about the emperors lies, and that he no longer belives that the empire can be rid of psychers. Now this is a reasonable belief given the fact that he had clearly tried reach his goal within the structures of the empire and that he was lied to. However Mortarion argues that wile many people within the Heresy are pro psycher, here he will at least have a chance, a chance he could never have in the imperium. He also wants to recruit the Kahn to get more anti psycher allies within the Heresy. Now is Mortarions hatred against psychers wrong? yes. Is his belief that he can turn the heresy against psychers wrong? yes. But that is the funny little thing about people, they can be wrong, especially when manipulated. Now Mortarion does end up becoming a daemon primarch, but that is only after being betrayed by Tuphus, the first person he saved upon Barbaros, an action that led to him reveling against his adoptive dad. Typhus betrayal led to Mortarion and his sons being infected by Nurgles diseases, and them having to turn to chaos to survive and escape the pain. My last point is that while Mortarion became the thing he hated more than anything, that is a very common trope in media, and the Horus Heresy series as a whole has a theme of fall and corruption. Horus, the favorite son is the one who kills Sanguinius and almost kills the emperor. Lorgar the man who worshipped the emperor like a god ends up being the one who starts the heretical faith that will lead to the entire Horus Heresy, meanwhile it is only after the Heresy that Lorgars religion about the emperor gets accepted, tho at this point he will never be credited for it. Fulgrim is obsessed with perfection, and yet his vain search for perfection is part of what leads him to be corrupted and become a disgusting version of the man he once was. And then there is Mortarion, arguably the most hateful of the primarchs, a man motivated out of spite and anger at his adoptive father, a father figure who abused him for all of his childhood. A hatred that was not and could never be quenched just by getting revenge, a hatred that would projected on to all psychers, and a hatred that would in the end lead him to become what he hated so much.

[misterbitches]

being a fan of chengren is a death sentence it seems like bc this story is so poorly written and disjointed that we get NO FUCKING TIME WITH THEM and im not joking but xing si and the rapist dude and that awful family take up way too much time in the sense that it honestly sours your feelings for a bit. i skip around a lot but sometimes i want to laugh at how stupid and mind-boggling it is but i realize how much that dampens my feelings when i get to the people i want to see. and a show shouldnt be like that, even with questionable characters. it just sucks and i think a big part of it is how contradictory the message of the show is as well. you have this imperfect couple in a really weird genre and a horrible series but they can get their main relationships (usually) uh i wouldnt say right. but they are there.

everything about chengren is so fucking opposite? there's also just how fucking awkward they made the writing when their conclusion was of course what they were hinting at (sometimes i'm like so did half of you like go to film school or are experienced in the field if you didnt—cos it's a fucking racket and a scam—because sometimes it's like oh gee some decent production but mostly it's like did ANY of you read the LAST SCENE you JUST WROTE?) like imagine how much better of a time we could have spent without the top/bottom discourse particularly since htey directly tied it to rape.

which is another thing, i get that this is fetishization and projection of patriarchy and bullshit of the highest order but for the love of god it literally harms every single group you're purporting to support with the constantly conflation of sexuality with LITERAL SEX especially especially when it comes to consent. people aren't gay or attracted to people on the spectrum or same-sex or whatever because of trauma nor do they have to be set in stone. i mean i have to critique the genre as a whole when i comment because without the whole shitty structure it could be different but it isn't and that's what happens when shit is appropriated and removed from its owners so the people in these groups want nothing to do with it mostly, which is evident.

as a woman/as women it's okay to acknowledge that too like we are being voyeurs in a sense watching this, i mean we are participating in the shit, but like exploitation is par for the course. the thing is it rests on OUR exploitation as well because it is about women and yes that's fucked up and strange but that is literally capitalism at work. that's why this is so easy to spread and it's soft power.

but then to get to the point after 8 episodes about a dick going in a butt the writers are like "oh these grown men actually know how to have conversations we totally forgot that they can talk about sex and be done with this convo in two seconds"

TO BE FAIR....that was a good convo and it was a good conclusion since they included it at every turn in the worst way possible. i have one more complaint (probably more) but when muren is drugged or whatever the frame of anson chen's body / his back when teng teng sees him gives me nightmares. it is so visually unappealing and i'm angry that someone looked at that frame and the blocking and went "this is good yes" his body makes no sense in that shot and it isn't sensual he reminds me of a fucking titan and i don't like it. UGH THEY SHOULD HAVE RAISED THE CAMERA OR SOMETHING. IT GIVES ME NIGHTMARES.

we all need to talk to the production team. i don't know how much credit i can give them (i'll go with none until they pay off my film school debt) because the actors carry so much weight for why we like chengren. i think because they are older, more comfortable as actors, so the stupid shit they say seems more plausible. and because the two can play off each other and have that comfort it really seems like them. they also make these stupid lines of dialogue their own. there's lots of room for improvement, i think on anson's part especially, but even if they say things that are just ridiculous, we don't have so much cringe. idk because i know that the rest of the show is just so fucking dumb and im like....idek i cannot give anyone but them (anson, charles) credit (oh and the poor crew members like lighting and shit who had to stand around for this garbage my god)

sadly i think they may be my fav couple from history. which is really saying something because this is an ACTUAL nightmare.

[colorseeingchick]

The Inevitable Dystopia of My Hero Academia (WITHOUT manga spoilers)

As noted by your local political science anime lover.

(This is a summary/rambling about a political science paper I wrote on My Hero. This is only based on the anime. I’m not caught up on the manga)

Warnings: Vague reference to abuse (Endeavor), discussion of political theory, discourse.

A/N: It’s lengthy and all over the place. It also might be impossible to follow. So I’m sorry in advance lol.

THESE ARE JUST MY OPINIONS AND A FORM OF DISCOURSE. I’m open to discussing if you have thoughts! Political science is about understanding policy and structures, not taking a stance. Any comparisons to ‘modern society’ are in reference to 1st world/developed societies, as those are the governments that parallel the My Hero Academia government. 

The politics of My Hero Academia is... pretty morbid if you ask me. It’s not worse than the real world, sure, but maybe that’s why it’s all the scarier. Even with quirks and super powers, the impossible becoming possible, it isn’t enough to save them from the undesirable. Their society seems to have fallen into a cycle of suffering and oppression that has no end. 

Now, I know no one really gets excited about political theory (unless you’re like me, then please be my friend), but there are some concepts that you’ll need to understand in order to follow along with my argument. So bear with me. 

First, utopia. Utopia is probably a term you’ve heard casually, but the definition political theorists hold it to is simply- “a good place.” Often times it is depicted as a far away dreamland, only possible in the realm of fiction (and this makes sense given that My Hero is fictional). It is very important to understand that utopia is not necessarily perfect. It’s just better than average. There are a few standards that characterize utopia, one being the utopian focus on having very strict laws to repress the unstable nature of mankind [1]. I’ll come back to this. 

Next is dystopia. Dystopia as an idea was actually made in response to utopia. It’s the ‘not-utopia,’ and is lumped with ‘anti-utopia’ (this comment is in reference to the semiotic square, if you would like to develop a further look into it). The simplest way to understand dystopia is to know it’s ‘a not-good place.’ [2] But that’s surprisingly broad. Dystopias can be a failed utopia, or they could have developed on their own as a result of any number of reasons. You’ve probably seen all sorts of depictions of dystopia (climate dystopias, medical dystopias, technology-based dystopias, literally any YA novel from my childhood, you get the idea). Its key to note that unlike an apocalypse, where there is utter destruction and it ends with complete annihilation of humanity, there is hope* inherently written into it. 

*Hope here meaning there’s theoretically a way for the government to be changed/overthrown without death of the majority. 

Now that all that boring stuff is out of the way- let’s talk about My Hero Academia. 

I’d argue that, at first glance, Hero Society seems to be working towards utopia. When reading from Deku’s perspective, especially in the beginning, you would think that their society is close to becoming utopian. The impossible is possible, being a hero is a reality, and a symbol of peace tangibly and definitively exists. When you compare it to pre-quirk society, these changes would appear to be developments. As for the ‘in progress’ aspect, I think Hawks verbalizes it best when he says his goal is for heroes to have too much time on their hands. They aren’t there yet, but if that goal is achieved, it would be a mark of utopia. 

They’ve achieved some level of utopian standards by meeting the ‘strict laws to repress the unstable nature�� standard. Think about the concept of licensing quirks, quirk regulation, and the government institutions that regulate quirk society. Remember when Tomura cornered Deku at the shopping mall and mentioned something along the lines of, ‘all these people could wield their quirks at any moment they want, but choose not to? Instead they smile and laugh.’ 

He has a point. Why is that? From a political theorist point of view, it’s honestly very shocking. For centuries, theorists have argued about how to manage human nature. It’s a difficult task as is. Give everyone superpowers? That would have to be 10x as chaotic. But in the My Hero world, it’s not. It’s well organized. The government took action to regulate the physical instability of humanity which arose from quirks. What’s so impressive to me is that they managed to mitigate (not eliminate) the instability of human nature/behavior along with it.

But if you take a step back to look at My Hero Academia, slowing down and stepping out of Deku’s shoes, I don’t think the instinct is to classify it as a utopia in progress. Of course, its superpowered with quirks- adding to the realm of possibility. But crime of all sorts is superpowered, just as the justice systems/law enforcement in the country. 

When I made this realization, I understood I had kind of been drawn into the propaganda the society puts out. It’s a sort of cloak built up by the positive media around the heroes, the narrative being focused on young heroes and their great mentors, and the universal title of ‘villain’ being put on everyone that breaks the government’s laws (this really bothers me, and maybe I’ll discuss it another time). Things aren’t better. Crime rates have gone down I believe, but the anti-hero sentiments being harbored are more intense than in certain real world societies. Hero society hasn’t necessarily resolved any of the problems that our society would have. The balance is the same, but the possible actions people can take, or the behaviors that are exhibited, are scaled up on both sides of the law.

What’s worse is that- even if its not a universal experience, this society is also a dystopia for many people. The first hint of this society being less than perfect is when we hear from Stain and his pursuit of a ‘just society’ by eliminating fraudulent heroes. His ideals are surprisingly level-headed, and very rigorous in standard, even if it is based in questionable morals. But it’s easy to brush it off. However, its less deniable as you learn more about these characters. 

Shigaraki was abandoned and waited for heroes to save him, but they didn’t. Overhaul was also an orphan living on the streets. Eri was abandoned by her mother because of her quirk. Twice was villainized, when in reality he has mental health issues (dissociative identity disorder I believe). It broke my heart when Twice said “heroes only save good people.” Who decided they were bad people? Why weren’t they saved?

Also, can we talk about the quirkism? (Which I don’t know if that’s a real term within this fandom yet, it might be, but just to be on the same page, I mean quirk-based discrimination) You have people like Shinsou, who’s treated as villain even though he wants be a hero- solely because of his quirk. I believe Toga was also treated poorly because of the nature of her quirk as well (correct me if I’m wrong). And then you have Midoriya, who was harassed and bullied for not having a quirk at all. Clearly none of them have control over the way they were born, and yet they all had to deal with how society treats them because of the uncontrollable. (At this point I’m sure its clear there are a lot of parallels with the discourse around quirkism, racism, and sexism, which is a whole nother conversation).

Having good quirks also seems to get you a pass, or puts you outside the reach of the law. The only example I need for this is Endeavor and his children. Despite all the abuse he’s done that makes him a villain in my book, he stays the number 2 hero. That’s all I need to say. 

The suffering of all these individuals is a direct result of the failure of the government. And this isn’t a ‘government should have taken extra steps to help them.’ This is a situation where the government’s structure, including the sensationalized media and monopolization of quirk use, has actively attacked and oppressed people who otherwise would have been untargeted. 

This is a world of misery for them- the people who make up the underworld. We call them villains and criminals because they are- but I don’t think its fair to call all of them bad people. They definitely didn’t start out that way. They are the results of suffering. They are created by a society that solely aims to remove them from existence. This hero society is so unjust that its faults create its own villains. The villains they aim to stop came to be because of the ‘heroes’ in the first place. The irony there is painful, and I hate that it’s a sort of self fulfilling prophecy. 

The reason why I think it’s morbid is because there is no escape. Quirk society in its current state is undeniably a dystopia for many. But the issue is (and this was the crux of my argument in my paper) dystopia and utopia inevitably and consistently coinhabit space. What is utopia to one will be a dystopia to another. There is no way to get everyone to uniformly view society. 

What that means is, somebody will always be suffering in this society. At least, that’s the cycle that’s been set up. In the episode where Tamaki got shot with a quirk erasing bullet and Kirishima fought the gangster on quirk enhancing drugs, that gangster did say that this was ‘their time’ to rise. “It’ll be the age of those who live in the shadows.” They’re not looking for resolution. They’re looking for revenge. They want to flip the script and be the ones living in utopia while everyone else is subject to suffering. The concept of everyone living happily in harmony and true peace isn’t even in consideration. 

There seems to be no middle ground, no solution to the push and pull between the ‘heroes’ and ‘villains.’ The unfairness will continue to be passed around, and unless someone can break the cycle, attack the corruption of the system at its roots,

the problem is not going to go away. 

Sources!

[1] Claeys, Gregory, and Fatima Vieira. “The Concept of Utopia.” In The         Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

[2] Robinson , Kim Stanley. “Dystopias Now.” Commune, November 17, 2018.            https://communemag.com/dystopias-now/.

Copyright © 2020 Colorseeingchick. All rights reserved. 

[cannot-decide-on-a-fandom]

I think what has become, or possibly has always been, a big problem in regards to criticisms directed towards creators and works is that perfectly legitimate and understandable complaints get mixed in with things that are really not their fault or not worth criticising or it’s sometimes actual hate and abuse for things not deserving.

A couple examples from fandoms I am in/have been in (these are by no means the only critiques that these things get, I’m just not going to list every single thing):

It’s perfectly understandable to critique Horikoshi Kohei/My Hero Academia for  how he writes his protagonist, as he pretty much keeps giving him power ups every time he needs a new development (deus ex machina) or have issues with him describing Momo’s costume as sexy. However, sending abuse to him about something like a character’s birthday, when there’s only so many birthdays in the world that someone could have and some of them are going to share dates with bad people from history, is really weird and unnecessary.

Criticising and having issues with the way Rick Riordan has written some minority characters is legit and valid and understandable and if someone misrepresents characters, even if it’s not out of malice, it is something that’s more than okay to comment on. I have heard from people about mistakes made regarding Piper quite a bit, and I fully understand that there does need to be work done to not incorrectly portray people of marginalized communities, I have no issues there. It’s also more than okay to discuss the issues you feel the story had in regards to the plot. But before Tower of Nero came out (I won’t spoil anything that happens in it, don’t worry) I saw a lot of hate and abuse, and I do mean actual abuse not just disagreements, because people believed that Will was going to die, and saying that he was doing the bury your gays trope. Whether that happened or not doesn’t change the fact that a) it was prior to the books release when nothing was really known, b) it was based entirely on fan theories, and c) he’s had several LGBT characters in ToA alone (Apollo himself is bi, Jo, Emmie, Lavinia, Nico, Will) and none of them had died before, so there was no basis for this. Even if he did kill one of them, out of the main 5 in ToN who we spent a lot of time with throughout the story, 3 were LGBTQ+, and if people believed someone would die before the book got published, then the only possible reason to think that is if they thought it made narrative sense, in which case hating on it is really strange and incredibly unneeded.

There’s a lot to criticise Supernatural for, and I recognise that. The ratio of white people to people of colour (in the shows run, I believe they went through 6, maybe 7, actors who were billed as main characters and all of them white), the lack of main LGBT characters, aside from the representation perspective there’s the story’s lack of commitment when it comes to keeping characters dead, and some kind of weird and subpar plots throughout the years being a few. But hating it purely for running long is just kind of like hating something for being successful. It’s fine to say that you think it should have ended earlier because it’s gone downhill in your opinion, but I’ve seen a lot of complaints purely about the fact that it’s gone on too long, when just the act of something running a long time is not bad in any way.

The issue with this is that not only does it give unnecessary stress to people (some of whom are trying to be better) but it also dilutes the perfectly legitimate critique that is directed at these creators and their creations. It’s very serious to say someone has poorly represented certain people, and it’s constructive to say a story is badly structured, but it gets confusing what to take seriously if both things like “this ___ keeps killing off every minority character that exists and misrepresenting and treating them poorly” and “one character who was LGBT/a person of colour died among several other important ones who didn’t, so that means they’re homophobic/racist” are treated as the same level of problematic.

It very much isn’t “this thing has never done anything wrong ever” but rather “let’s hate this for the things it has actually done”. Even with someone like JKR (who I do not like, I need to state this right away), saying that her stories are inherently badly written because she’s a crappy person is not going to achieve what was intended. What that is going to do is make people who have similar writing styles feel bad, make people who enjoyed the stories, even well before being aware of her beliefs, feel bad, and it’s also taking to spotlight away from what’s so serious about her attitudes to certain communities.

[mediaeval-muse]

Book Review

Beasts Made of Night. By Tochi Onyebuchi. New York: Razorbill, 2017.

Rating: 2/5 stars

Genre: YA fantasy

Part of a Series? Yes, Beasts Made of Night #1

Summary: In the walled city of Kos, corrupt mages can magically call forth sin from a sinner in the form of sin-beasts – lethal creatures spawned from feelings of guilt. Taj is the most talented of the aki, young sin-eaters indentured by the mages to slay the sin-beasts. But Taj’s livelihood comes at a terrible cost. When he kills a sin-beast, a tattoo of the beast appears on his skin while the guilt of committing the sin appears on his mind. Most aki are driven mad by the process, but 17-year-old Taj is cocky and desperate to provide for his family. When Taj is called to eat a sin of a royal, he’s suddenly thrust into the center of a dark conspiracy to destroy Kos. Now Taj must fight to save the princess that he loves – and his own life.

***Full review under the cut.***

Trigger/Content Warnings: violence, blood, body horror

Overview: There were so many things about this book that I would have usually been very interested in: a Nigerian-inspired fantasy, an intriguing magical premise, a political drama, etc. I was very excited to pick it up, and I was looking forward to a something a little different from the run-of-the-mill YA fantasies I’ve been reading lately. While I think the story started ok, I quickly found that the book as a whole felt more like a draft than a finished piece. There wasn’t much attention paid to building a plot; everything seemed to meander until the last third, when suddenly, all the action was dumped on us all at once. I would have been able to appreciate it had more care been given to setting up stakes and having scenes build on one another earlier in the book, but unfortunately, it didn’t feel like Onyebuchi had a plan from the get-go; he seemed to have been writing without a sense of what his story was going to be until the very end. While I really enjoyed the idea of “sin eating” and all the potential stories that could arise from that premise, the book as a whole just didn’t come together in a way I found satisfying. Thus, this book only gets 2 stars from me.

Writing: Onyebuchi’s prose is fairly typical for a YA novel in that it describes things in a straightforward way, focusing on actions more than emotions or complex nuances within the fantasy world. Beasts Made of Night is also like a lot of YA fantasy in that it is told in first person, which means that, by nature, some descriptions and narrations feel awkward or unnatural. First person is tricky because humans don’t consciously register certain things that need to be included in a novel in order for a reader to understand the action, and I think Onyebuchi falls into this trap sometimes. This isn’t necessary his fault; I think all first-person narration has this hurdle, and some writers overcome it better than others.

Plot: The main arc of this book follows our hero, Taj, as he attempts to navigate the political world after eating the sin of the king of Kos. I found the premise incredibly compelling, but unfortunately, the execution didn’t quite click for me. The main conflict doesn’t take off until around page 80, which means that for nearly the first third of the book, we spend a lot of time following Taj as he just lives his life in Kos. To some extent, following a character’s daily life can be a good way of orienting a reader in a fantasy world, but after a time, I wanted the main conflict to start.

Once Taj ate the king’s sin, it seemed like the story was finally going to start, but unfortunately, it didn’t. Taj doesn’t really disclose what the sin was or how his knowledge of it affected his status in the kingdom. I would have thought that will such an abnormally giant sin-beast, there would be some kind of political plot revolving around the king, but instead, Taj is simply taken into the palace as the royal family’s personal aki, and he spends the next third of the book not doing much of anything.

After a while, he is sent away from the palace so he can train an army of aki, and even that plot starts to drag until the final 60ish pages, when Taj is involved in a plot to take over the royal palace. The last third or so of the novel seemed to dump all the action on us at once, and most of that is conspiracy that has already taken place off-page - Taj just gets invited along for the ride (because he develops some new abilities? Because he’s the chosen one? I don’t know). I personally didn’t find it very compelling because none of the major events were set up in the first two-thirds of the book, making everything feel as though it were happening at random for plot twisty reasons. I also don’t think the plot was a very smart one, which made the plan to take over the palace seem poorly-planned.

Characters: On the whole, the characters were a mixed bag for me. Taj, our protagonist, is interesting in that he’s a little cocky and has that fun attitude of “I-hate-that-I-care.” I was really looking forward to seeing how his character would develop over the course of the novel, but he didn’t seem to change all that much. I also wish Taj had had some kind of deeper motivation that affected his actions throughout the book.  For example, we understand that Taj wants to send money back to his family, but we don’t get a lot of descriptions of him being homesick or feeling lonely - things that would make this goal feel more important and which would hit differently when we read about him being essentially alienated from his fellow aki because of how successful he’s been at sin-eating. Instead, Taj feels rather aloof and disinterested in trying to form a found family, and I couldn’t quite understand what it was that was driving him other than mere survival (which is fine, but survival on its own in insufficient for me).

Taj also seemed to act in ways that didn’t quite make sense; for example, he seemed unfazed by the “Baptism,” an event in which the government razes an entire neighborhood to the ground if it feels the area is too sinful. In the first 80 pages, Taj gets caught up in a Baptism, but afterwards, brushes it off and goes smoking with his friend, Bo. I would have understood if Taj had gone to cope with the horror he saw, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like “oh, well, time for a night out.” Absolutely no exploration of how witnessing the Baptism affected him afterward.

Many side characters also didn’t seem to have a clear arc; they merely drifted in and out of the story as needed. Bo was supposedly Taj’s close friend, but he and Taj don’t have that many scenes together which showed that (I was told more than shown). Arzu, Taj’s bodyguard of sorts after he enters palace service, is kind of fun, but her arc isn’t really that important to the plot. The king is barely involved except for the sin-eating and the very end, and the princess (Taj’s love interest? Maybe?) is awkward without clear motivations. Even Izu (a mage), Aliya (another mage), and Zainab (a fellow aki), who have direct influences on Taj’s life and are major players in the big plot, don’t seem to be given much room to shine. Perhaps this was to keep the plot twist of the last third of the book secret, but it felt like they didn’t really have a use until then.

It also didn’t feel as if Taj was truly bonded to any side characters. Despite scenes of joking around with Bo or protecting Omar, a young aki that is discovered on the day another aki dies, I didn’t really feel that these relationships were important. I was told that they were, but because we get so few scenes where Taj builds trust or confides in people, I never got the sense that he truly connected with anyone - not even the princess, who he supposedly falls in love with (or in lust with?) for no reason.

I think more work could have been done to solve the problem of useless side characters by making their motivations or goals more clear (or at least sprinkled more hints and seeds) throughout the entire novel, not just all at the end. As the book stands, Onyebuchi spends a lot of time describing the setting and characters’ actions, and while he makes clear that the aki are second-class citizens and some people in the palace want things to change, he doesn’t really tell us what his characters want, how they act to achieve these goals, and how the events of the book (or how Taj himself) threaten those goals - at least, not until the end. I think if more was shown to us instead of told, with scenes more clearly building on one another, characters would have had more fulfilling arcs and the plot as a whole would have felt more suspenseful.

Worldbuilding: Aside from the sin-eating, Onyebuchi creates a magical world full of sensual experiences. It seems like gems and precious stones are everywhere, but aren’t necessarily valuable as currency; instead, they symbolize family ties and add splashes of color to an impoverished world. There is also a kind of smoking lounge with aromatics such as apricot and mint, while the sounds and smells of the markets bring Kos to life.

While all these elements captured my interest, I think the book would have benefited from a bit more structure when exploring the relationship between the outcast aki and the people around them. It seemed to me that the aki were a necessary scapegoat in that they were simultaneously needed and shunned by society. They are kept in poverty and often suffer from exploitation, with no way of demanding fairer treatment. While this was all well and good for establishing class dynamics, I did want some more explanation of why the aki were so powerless. Why couldn’t they, say, form some kind of union and refuse to eat sins unless they were paid fairly? Seems to me that threatening to kill them could work, but eventually, the royals would run out of aki, and without their services, things could go downhill pretty fast.

I also wish figures like the inyo or the arashi had been more integral to the story, as I kept forgetting what they were until the very end. These figures are mentioned a lot, but I never really felt like they were part of the world because they don’t really make an appearance, nor does belief in them seem to affect the action.

TL;DR: Beasts Made of Night has an intriguing premise and is set in a marvelous fantasy world, but unfortunately suffers from poor plotting and characters with unclear arcs and motivations.

[scientistowengottlieb-newtkelly]

Thoughts and feelings about Pacific Rim 2?

you sure you wanna open up that particular can of worms?

movie review time! be warned i'm not in a good mood as i am shaking in pain, however this review would have been scathing regardless. and none of this is to say pacific rim is perfect, it's not, but... aye, i have no words for the world of difference there. oh wait! i do:

so. first and foremost, i hate it. as both a movie and a sequel. did i find it entertaining? yes, mildly, so i suppose it did its job, however the only thing that keeps me watching it is because, simply, it's part of the pacific rim franchise whether we like it or not. therefore, i squeeze as much salvageable content from it as i can, such as how one might analyze the precursors, how we are to view hermann and newt as characters pre-, during, and post-uprising, what we are to expect from drifting (though this one i take with a grain of salt, there is a whole other rant preserved for the joke of an attempt to develop that shit within the movie)

one of my biggest issues with pacific rim is really simple: it plays out like DeKnight did not watch the first fucking movie or was scrolling through twitter while doing it and decided he'd make a cash grab since the first one was relatively popular. "haha the kaiju were going for mount fuji the whole time!!" bitch no they weren't!!! why the fuck did they end up anywhere near sydney, australia, then!!! why did they turn tail on places like manila and san fran instead of heading straight for japan!!! WHY DID THE ONE THAT WAS IN JAPAN NOT SUCCEED, THERE'S NO WAY WITH THOSE MARK 1 JAEGERS THEY'D HAVE BEEN ABLE TO REASONABLY FIGURE OUT THEIR PLAN AND WHERE THEY WERE GOING IN TIME TO STOP THEM!!! newt literally lays out what they are doing in the first movie and they completely ignored that!!! not to mention, if the destruction from elements found in mount fuji would have been enough to terraform the earth, WHY DIDN'T THEY JUST FUCKING DO THAT WHEN THEY WERE SUPPOSEDLY ON EARTH AGES AGO??? THERE WERE VOLCANOES WITH THOSE SAME ELEMENTS BEFORE RIGHT NOW, VOLCANOES ARE NOT A RELATIVELY NEW THING EARTH CREATED SUDDENLY AND I WOULD IMAGINE NEITHER ARE THOSE ELEMENTS!!! IT MAKES NO SENSE!!! and.... okay the fucking drones. how did those bitches make breaches??? we know the breach is some result of precursor/kaiju technology, apparently they know the breach's atomic structure as hermann said in the first movie, but how tf some kaiju organs and tech from earth only is ALL it takes to open a breach... illudes and confuses me... why were no more breaches made by the precursors once they realized how long and how many resources it was taking to kill the humans off??? if it's??? shit they could do with simple earth materials + their own biology??? they could have ended things much faster??? shit just doesn't add up, idk, that was Vague and Annoyed Me

and the jaegers.... were....... strange? the fight scenes were so underwhelming, i could count on one hand the number of maneuvers—NOT SCENES, MANEUVERS—i thought were badass and moved well. their fighting was confusing and paced really weird and some of the moves they pulled... don't... work like that... like some of those scenes were just hand-to-hand combat but in big robot form and they didn't sit right with me at all.

and the characters......... oh my word, the characters. look: i love jake pentecost with all of my heart and soul and john boyega's beautiful acting just barely saves the movie from its poor writing. i do love him as a character. but can someone explain to me why in the world they thought it was a good idea to make the only black guy a black market thief/runner, deep-record criminal with daddy and authority issues, and who they dare try to play off as some kind of lazy??? they made him every stereotype they could and said "yeah let's go with that". i'm- aaaaaaaaaaaaaa and what was with the child soldiers??? ROBOCOPS?????? mako....... character assassination at its worst........ my baby......... but the movie was paced so GOD DAMN POORLY I GOT BORED AND LITERALLY MISSED HER DYING THE FIRST TIME I WATCHED IT. and i couldn't tell you the names of half of those poor damn kids, i really couldn't. and can i also say they killed off one of the only two darker skinned kids?? like y'all???? the other darker skinned kids (one of the children i can't remember the names of because it was uttered ONCE in the entire movie or some shit) didn't even GET characterization. my whole heart goes out to her and those other underdeveloped fucks. speaking of...... i am ashamed about jules. from the movie that brought us the mako mori test, they threw in a girl simply for the sake of some shitty, awkward, and unexplained love triangle between jake and White Angst without much else to put to her name. she deserved better. amara was... a decent shot, but very hit or miss because of the writing. i, personally, am very neutral about her leaning towards liking her, but i know people who swing love and who swing hate. liwen was like,,,, they tried really hard to make her unlikable at the beginning because "oh no, she must be the villain! GOTTEM plot twist!!!" and then suddenly she's no longer. threatening everyone except newt. idk i feel like they leaned to heavily one way and i got whiplash when she's actually another but there was nothing to... portray that. at all. i do like her character, and that says a lot because they got me to sympathize with a capitalist without actually regretting it later, but there could/should have been More there. she was powerful, though, in multiple different aspects, and we saw that from her CONSISTENTLY and i 😳🥵👀💕 mako mori test pass for her

now, let's talk about hermann (and by extention, newton, however he'll be getting a section all his own the rat bastard). that man is one of the single instances of decent cross-movie characterization i saw in the whole god damn film. the idea that he takes on newton's roles, that he is more outspoken for himself, that he is just slightly more unhinged after his drift with newton: THAT is on point. he's himself, you can see it, you still know that he's hermann with ever step, but there's something that has shifted in him in those 10 years and it's good without being too much. the "i still get nightmares" scene, the way he presents himself, that scene gives me chills because god bless burn gorman and his acting ability. every face and intonation of his voice is just wonderful and i think his performance was great for what he was given. king shit.

the biggest disappointment of my life came in the form of a kaiju vest wearing bitch at work. at his corporate job. as a boss. for a tech company that undermines all of his and, frankly, hermann's work over their lifetimes. 10 years older and exaggerated to the teeth. newton "move you fascist" geiszler. let me preface this by stating for all to see that i do not hate the idea of newton being the villain. story wise it was a bold move and there was something possible there. BUT THE IMPLICATION THAT ONE OF THE MOST OBVIOUSLY NEURODIVERGENT CHARACTERS IN THE WHOLE FUCKING FRANCHISE, ESPECIALLY GIVEN THAT HE HAS BEEN CHARACTERIZED AS HAVING A "BORDERLINE MANIC PERSONALITY" AKA HAVING ONE OF THE MOST DEMONIZED MENTAL ILLNESSES OUT THERE, ENDS UP ACTING AS THE GOD DAMN VILLAIN OF THE STORY IS A HOT GARBAGE TAKE WHEN YOU FACTOR IN THINGS LIKE POOR WRITING NOT MAKING IT CLEAR WHETHER OR NOT NEWTON IS EVEN IN CONTROL OF HIS OWN FACULTIES AND THE VAGUENESS OF "WILL HE BE 'REDEEMED' OR NOT" BEING UP IN THE AIR LIKELY NEVER TO BE CANONICALLY FUCKING ANSWERED BECAUSE BECKHAM AND DEKNIGHT SHAT OUT A MOVIE THAT BOMBED IN THE BOX OFFICE. we aren't even gonna TALK about the fact that this bitch got AWAY with it despite not even acting in a remotely stable way comparable to himself in the first movie in the 10 years he supposedly dropped off the map from all of his friends because, clearly, hermann hadn't seen him or he wouldn't be so excited with a picture of the two of them on his desk, nor would he have to tell newton about his idea for rocket thrusters with kaiju blood fuel because he would have simply written to him about it. for some strange reason people see his ass show up decked out in a suit he wouldn't even wear for Stacker Fucking Pentecost and a behavior of "Haha Gotta Listen To The Boss" and think "ah, yes, well, time changes a person. THIS BITCH HAS APPARENTLY BEEN LIKE THIS THE WHOLE TIME, YOU THINK HE GOT A JOB WITH LIWEN LOOKING AND ACTING LIKE HE DID BEFORE AND THERE WAS A SHIFT OVER TIME? NO, HE HAD TO HAVE CHANGED IN A SPLIT DECISION AND LIED ABOUT HIMSELF THROUGH HIS TEETH AND NO ONE CONTACTED HIM, OR WAS WORRIED ABOUT HIM, OR DECIDEDLY THOUGHT "YOU KNOW, HE MAY BE EMBOLDENED THAT HE SAVED THE WORLD, BUT I THINK SOMETHING LIKE THAT WOULD HAVE THE EXACT OPPOSITE EFFECT ON HIM AND HE WOULD DO HIS BEST TO AMPLIFY HIS CURRENT STANDING TRAITS. LISTENING TO AND KISSING THE BOOT OF AUTHORITY FIGURES? DIVORCING HIMSELF FROM HIS WORK WITH KAIJU XENOBIOLOGY THAT EVEN HERMANN PICKED UP? TO BECOME THE THING HE HATES? AND FOR WHAT? MONEY? FAME? BITCH WHO ARE YOU?" unreasonable. ridiculous attempt to do this just for a plot twist that was underwhelming at best. i've decided to stick to the fan theory that he was not in control 99% of the time but literally that movie causes such a hellfire path to appear in my wake as i think about it because i know people who don't take it like that and think newt wants what's happening because "haha horny kaiju man" and i wish to scream at the top of my lungs because this is exactly WHY you CANNOT spare ANY EXPENSE to the GOOD, PROPER, INTRICATE directing and writing of a character who is neurodivergent and also ONE OF THE CENTERS OF NOT JUST THE MOVIE YOU'RE WRITING, BUT THE FUCKING MOVIE AFTER THAT. i could go on but i sincerely don't fucking want to, despite how long i've been waiting for someone to willingly hear me out on all of this. all i'll say is if by some miracle they are greenlit for a third film and deknight's working on it and i see ANY sign of a bury your gays end for newt, i'm going to commit the first hate crime against a cishet white male.

to end, the only valid kaiju in that movie was the mega-kaiju, i don't remember the appearance or the names of the three that got through the breaches but the mega-kaiju could kill me and i'd die happy 🥰 beautiful design, that scale comparison when it came face to face with newt? amazing, chills, *chef's kiss* there are exactly two things i liked about uprising and that bitch is one of them.

sorry if this isn't what you wanted, but as i said i am in a bit of a bad mood and have been curled up in bed trying not to think that i'm dying and i've repressed all of this for a couple months now and very few people have actually heard PORTIONS of my frustration so. here it is.

[pass-the-bechdel]

The Good Place full series review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

96% (forty-eight of fifty).

What is the average percentage of female characters with names and lines for the full series?

49%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

Forty-four.

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 50% female?

Twenty-eight.

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Zero.

Positive Content Status:

Good - you might even say, strong - in the sense that it’s all there, pretty much all of the big representation bells are ringing, particularly the ones for women and racial diversity. That said, the show is generally content to sit pretty and not push the envelope on inclusivity, so if you’re looking for inspiration in-text instead of just in casting, you might be disappointed. At any rate, it’s a solid feel-good time, and not likely to make you mad (average rating of 3.01).

Which season had the best representation statistics overall?

The numbers stay pretty consistent across the whole series, but if I had to call a winner, it’s season four, which has the highest percentage of female characters and the only above-average positive content rating (though that was awarded somewhat cumulatively, and so doesn’t feel particularly well-earned by that season above the others). 

Which season had the worst representation statistics overall?

It’s such a close call, but season three must be the loser here by virtue of the lowest ratio of female to male characters; it also had one of the series’ two Bechdel fails. Like I said, it’s...a really close call.

Overall Series Quality:

There’s so much about it that is fresh and original and interesting, I wish I could love it more. After a magnificent debut season, the show suffers immensely for a lack of pacing and the absence of coherently-planned plot, and at times the stagnating characterisation and pointless filler caked into the cracks in the storytelling can be frustrating and/or tedious. I’m only as disappointed as I am because the potential for greatness was so strong. That said, even at it’s worst The Good Place is still entertaining, and most of it is better than that. It’s irreverent, it’s fun, it’s surprising, and sometimes it’s even as poignant as it is remarkable. I have my gripes, in droves, but that doesn’t mean this show is not worthy.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

Imagine. Imagine a version of this show where the first season is basically the same, and the second season is...somewhat similar to how it is, but with more focus and direction, less time-wasting; a second season where figuring out that some fundamental change to their circumstances is necessary comes early, and instead of faffing about with ethical lessons in the fake neighbourhood again while Michael pretends he can get everyone to the Good Place, we get down to business with going on the run and into the Bad Place to find the judge and petition for help. Imagine this show, but the third season has none of that return to Earth crap, and instead, is the neighbourhood experiment from season four, properly fleshed out. And then season four is all about going to the Good Place and solving the problems there, addressing issues with the concept of utopia and the ineffectual bureaucracy of obsessive niceness (used for comedic effect in the actual show, but c’mon, there’s a whole untapped reservoir about morality there). Each season could have (gasp!) a properly-planned and plotted arc, dealing with a different school of ethical considerations, and I dunno, maybe the characterisation could have trajectory too, and the characters could vitally shape the storytelling, and maybe not get their personalities and experiences erased and rebooted over and over again, nullifying large swathes of the narrative which came before? Ideally, they could be reset zero (0) times, or at least have all their reboot experiences dumped back into them in the first few episodes of season two, so that they could proceed from there as whole people. Rebooting everyone’s personalities is not actually necessary to the plot in any way, and is, actually, incredibly detrimental to storytelling and especially, character development. Imagine this show, but just chilling out and actually telling a coherent story? 

I am all the more annoyed by how things turned out on this show because I know that the four seasons were planned for, rather than being the result of cancellation; the idea that the creators sat down and ‘plotted’ (using that term loosely) to make this mess drives me a little wild. The (attempted) avoidance of the dreaded ‘stagnation’ seems obvious, and it leads to major narrative shortcuts and jumps and instances where the show spends an episode or two on what should have been a half-season’s development, minimum, and yet at other times all momentum grinds to a halt for a bizarre bottle-type episode where the characters just talk about a concept for a while or work on some unimportant romantic subplot. The various ethical concepts that the show heavily incorporated as its bread and butter in the first season start to stick out like sore thumbs in season two, seemingly wedged into one episode or another for no real reason other than just to be there, and the fact that the show lets go of the idea of moral choices in the life mattering at all in the end leaves the backbone of the show in a very strange shape. I said in the season four review that I didn’t expect the show to come up with some One True Answer about how people should live their lives, but that I was baffled by the fact that the show side-stepped that altogether; what I expected them to conclude was something in the line of ‘we recognise that life is complicated, not all situations are created equal, and it can be hard to know how to proceed ethically or even to access ethical options within one’s circumstances. Still, it is important to do your best, not only for yourself but for your community, because the more good you put into the world, the more there will be to go around and come back to you. What matters most is that you are doing your best with what you’ve got’. The fact that the show distracted itself with fixing how the afterlife rewards people within the afterlife means that it suggests no incentive to perform moral actions in life, and frankly...who gives a fuck? The real world is the place we’re all living in, and there’s no point starting a conversation about morality in real life if the conclusion is just ‘guess we’ll straighten out all the fascists and bigots and the other pieces of shit after they die, so don’t worry, everyone gets to Heaven eventually!’

Anyway, if that seems like just a reiteration of what I said in the season four review, well. I’m still baffled by it. The other thing I was going to talk about in the season four review but held for the full series instead was that one big thing that I have railed about all the time since season one, and that’s PACING. For all ye wannabe-writers out there, please understand how important pacing is. Even vital plot or character beats can seem like meaningless filler in a poorly-paced story, because your audience’s mind is hardwired to try and follow narrative cues that are being incomprehensibly muddled. Standard structure can be played with, but if you toss it out in favour of ‘stuff just happens, ok? Except when it doesn’t’, you just end up with a soup of disconnected story ideas, and nothing threading it together. Character interactions and especially developments can help to create the through-line you need to keep the story functioning despite itself, but as variously noted with The Good Place...initial characterisation? Strong, excellent. Development? Not so much, not least because they kept getting deleted and rebooted. Also, time skips kept happening, and that’s a great way to fuck over your narrative coherence even more: remove the recognisable constant we call time! It’ll be fine! As with all things, it is perfectly possible to play around with this stuff, but you have to know what you’re doing and be doing it for a good reason, and that’s not what they had going on here. This was narrative soup, and when you have a soup, the pieces all kinda meld together and lose any individual purpose, meaning, or power they may have had. The result in this case was not bad, but it really could have been so much better, and literally all it needed for that was some attention being paid to the story structure via pacing.

So. The good news is, I think I have pretty well exhausted all of my complaints by now, and that leaves us with the good stuff, of which there was no paltry amount. The show was not a hit by accident (even if I do feel that it’s success had a lot to do with people sticking around after the spectacular first season, and not because it stayed strong throughout), and even if there was a lot of soup going on, what comprised that soup was all really fun and unique, and this made for a wonderful piece of light-hearted television that could be as hilarious as it was insightful. It still had a lot of great takes on things, the commentary was strong (even if it pulled all its punches towards the end), and whether the storytelling was ebbing or flowing, it was always delightful. The show also managed to pull a miraculous finale out of its hat, and that’s a rare thing in television; however the story wobbled over the course, the ending provided enough satisfaction to forgive just about any sins, especially if you don’t happen to have been watching with a deliberately critical eye. Do I wish that Eleanor got to hook up with a chick on-screen some time instead of just making a lot of bi remarks? Yes. Do I consider the show to have queerbaited instead of providing genuine rep? No. Is the underselling of the queer content my most significant representation complaint? Yes, it is, and that's good news considering the world we live in and the dearth of quality representation that the industry has brought us to expect. 

There's an important distinction to be made there, regarding the tokenistic representation that is very common these days in tv trying for brownie points and good publicity, exactly that kind of 'political' inclusivity that conservatives are always bitching about. It should not be surprising that I support that tokenism over the alternative of having no representation at all, but it can still be quite disheartening to feel like your identity or the identities that you value are being referenced as nothing more than an opportunity for some shitty producer to perform wokeness for attention, praise, and the almighty dollar. I bring this up because - even though The Good Place never really worked up much of a boost to its content rating - one thing I felt that it did really, really right was providing representation without it feeling tokenistic at all. Eleanor's bisexuality wasn't as prominent as I might have preferred, and as noted through the course of the show, there were times I feared it was more bait than real rep, but reflecting on it at the end, the way it was included feels organic, it never gets in the way in order to ensure the audience notices and is dutifully impressed. The number of women around and the multicoloured casting plays out even better; I never once felt cynical about the gender balance I was seeing, and I've said it before but I'll say it again: the fact that the show was packed with names from across the world gives me so much life. I'm still a little salty about Chidi's Senegalese origins getting the shaft (and we won't talk about 'Australia'), but the nonchalant diversity of naming goes such a long way to embracing the idea that this is a world for everyone (and an afterlife for everyone, too). And where anything else might fall apart or lose its way, that is an affirming thing. If you want feel-good tv, it’s here. This is the Good Place.

[arsonsara]

Acknowledging The Ostrelephant In The Room: A Breakdown of The Mag*psies, The Mistakes They Made, And How They Could Be Improved Upon.

(TW: Slurs [G*ypsie]. & Negative Representation of those in the LGBT+ Community)

[The Following Essay also contains spoilers for the game Mother 3.]

Mother 3 is my favorite game of all time. If anyone has known me long enough to talk about what games I enjoy or followed me on Social Media to see my occasional bouts of reblogging fan-made content for the series, this is an obvious talking point. I’ve been a part of the community surrounding Mother 3 ever since I was about 10-12 years old, with my old Acer Laptop playing through the Fan-Translation on a GBA Emulator. While I wouldn’t consider myself a Mother 3 Veteran, I have been around long enough for me to see how the community has changed and shifted through the years as well as how I myself changed through my perspective on the world around me and myself. 10 or so years later after having played Mother 3 for the first time I still stand by my statement that it is my favorite game of all time, without question.

However, I would be lying if I were to say that Mother 3 was not a flawed game. Arguments can be made that games inspired by the Mother Franchise have gone leaps and bounds above the original series in terms of narrative structure and gameplay. However from what I've seen from the community of Mother 3, none of that tends to bother them enough to hamper the experience of the game itself. Except for one thing. One group of characters that has the community tugging at their collars or just straight up ignoring their existence. While I can understand and even empathize with the idea of just straight up mentally retconning something, especially when said thing directly affects you emotionally due to any personal connections you might have with the connotations, there’s a certain level of unease I garner when I see people clearly side-stepping the situation. Choosing to pretend it never happened as opposed to acknowledging it for it’s flaws, properly criticizing it and even potentially putting ideas forward as to how the situation could’ve been improved. Time to stop beating around the Walking Bushie: Let’s talk about the Mag*psies.

Now let’s start off with what’s right in front of us. The first thing that hits you in the face as soon as these characters are mentioned by name, the thing that unequivocally is a black mark against Mother 3 as a game. Mag*psies. Yeah, it’s bad. Now for those unawares on what I mean let’s clarify something right off the bat: The term Gy*psy is a slur. Specifically a slur against the Romani people, a slur that originated in Europe upon the rising population of Roma migrating from their homeland to European nations. The slur came from an uneducated perspective that the Romani hailed from Egypt. With this slur comes the negative stereotypes that came from that same origin point: That Romani people were a nomadic people that consisted of criminals, ne'er do wells, and the dregs of society. Sometimes, mostly in media, they were even seen as wanderers who practice unsavory and unholy acts of magic. As well as the more uninformed, sensationalized version of “Voodoo” (which, when you put into perspective of how the Romani were mistaken for Egyptians and that Voodoo originated from Hati, really puts into perspective how xenophobia is born on blatant misinformation, scapegoat tactics and a really shitty grasp on geography.)

So with that in mind, the fact that this is the name that was chosen for this group of characters is bad. Although for most people, (I hope) this goes without saying. So why am I bringing this up? Because for a group of characters whose entire troupe are named after a slur that has real world connotations, the Mag*psie don’t outwardly express any malice or xenophobia against the Romani people. With how they’re characterized and presented, there aren’t really any clear connections to the stereotypes for those of Roma descent outside of a connection to magic, in this case PSI. And even than the Magy*psies being proficient in PSI seems more like it was intended as a genuine plot point then as a racial stereotype. So if that’s the case, why was that the name that was chosen? Simple: It was a case of misinformation.

One common misconception regarding the term G*psie is that it means being a free spirit, a wanderer, one with the world around you and mystically inclined. Of course this is all false and mostly stems from taking a negative racial connotation and turning it into a marketable buzzword for anything that seems ‘Mystical’ or ‘Free-Spirited’. In the same way that a Ouija Board is a tool for summoning and contacting spirits and demons that was manufactured by Parker Brothers for about 20$. So, it’s easy to surmise that the reason the name Mag*psie was chosen is because the developers of the game believed it to be an old-world term for someone of magical expertise or connected to the Earth spiritually. It also helps to keep in mind that Mother 3 was developed in Japan, and most people were more than likely unaware towards it’s true connotation. Hell, it wasn’t until a few years ago that people in the United States started to call people out on usage of the term and considering that Mother 3 was developed in the early 2000’s it’s easy to understand the confusion. Now, i’m not saying that this to excuse the use of G*psie in the game. Point blank, it shouldn’t have been used and is a legitimate flaw and mistake on part of the developers. But it also helps to keep in mind that the choice of word wasn’t out of malice, just ignorance. Does that make it better? No, but i’d like to imagine that if way back when, if someone on the development team found out what G*psie actually meant that it wouldn’t have gone into the game. Considering the core messages of Mother 3 and it’s tennants on the importance of companionship, family, community and love, It doesn’t make sense to have such a vile slur used within it’s context.

So what do we do with this information? Well, the Mother 3 community is oddly enough in the best state it’s ever been to fix this problem. Why do I say that? Because the game hasn’t been internationally localized yet. And let’s face it, the Mag*psies are one of the biggest reasons the game hasn’t seen an official English release. And maybe it’s just my overly-optimistic, dare I say, Pollyanna-esque point of view, but if a discussion were to start about the positive changes one could make towards the Mag*psies as characters and a narrative concept, the right people might just be listening in on the conversation and make the right changes for an international release or even a remake.  Now, considering how it’s been 14 years since it’s Japanese release, and soon to be 15 years in a few months, I can understand if you just groaned or rolled your eyes reading that. But on the same merit, what’s the harm? Let’s say we do have this conversation and Nintendo just doesn’t pay attention and Mother 3’s International Localization continues to be a pipe-dream. What do we lose? That’s the fun thing about Fandom, sometimes you can just toss out the bad things about something you enjoy and make it better and overall more positive for the community. We toss out the old Mag*psies with their slur-using titles and uninformed, sloppy concepts of gender expression (trust me, we’ll get to that second point later.) and have newer, better ones that we can use for fan-content! So in the end, we either change the tide of the franchise itself and turn them around, giving us a greater chance at localization than we ever did before on top of a group of characters of positive representation! Or we just have these nicer, more appealing versions of the characters for our own uses now that the franchise is pretty much finished. It’s a win-win.

So with that, I'll start by making what’s probably the easiest change to these characters anyone could ever make.

Mag*ypsies. Mag / ypsies.

Magi.

And there we go. Good as new! Plus, it still works as a title for a group of people who specialize in mysticism and PSI as Magi is the plural for Magus! So, from this point forward, I am going to be referring to these characters as The Magi. Baddabing, Baddaboom.

Now with that out of the way, it’s time we address the second issue regarding The Magi: Their presentation of their gender identity and the problems those bring. In Mother 3, The Magi are referred to by Alec as being “neither male nor female”, and it’s heavily implied that The Magi aren’t even human. That due to them being so ancient, wise and strange they can't fit into the binary of male or female, so they have the traits of both. This results in the characters looking like they’re all men in drag, acting overly flamboyant and flirtatious. This results in The Magi being seen as a negative representation of people who identify as Genderqueer or Non-Binary. The stereotype of being loud, obnoxious, overtly sexual and all placed under a single umbrella of a flawed perspective which just results in them all being poorly written “”Drag Queens””. Now that isn’t to say a character who dresses in drag is a bad thing. If anything I encourage the idea of a Post-Modern RPG having a Drag Queen or King as a plot important ally or even a party member! The issue lies in that, because all of The Magi are presented like this it implies that those who don’t fit within the gender binary of male or female are all like this. Even if that wasn’t the intention, that is what the subtext implies.

Part of the intention behind the creation of the Magi was to balance out the more gritty, action-oriented and “Macho” tone that Mother 3 had compared to Mother 2 and 1. The idea was that The Magi would be at the center of the conflict between Tazmilly Village, The Main Party and The Pigmask Army and to balance out the darker tones of the story they would be aloof, androgynous and accepting of the fact that they would pass as the story progressed. This way the characters would be able to balance out the darker story beats and lighten the mood. Although it’s easy to see how this viewpoint would result in a less than stellar outcome. While on paper, the idea of a group of characters hearkening back to the more light-hearted and out-there tone of the previous games to make it so the game is less bleak is a fantastic idea, the execution was botched due to how sloppily it was handled.

The Magi in Mother 3 are represented in such a dissonant way, especially at the start of the game upon their introduction. Not only are you slapped in the face with their appearance and unfortunate name choice, upon asking about the whereabouts of Claus after he went up to the mountains to fight a Drago as revenge for the death of his mother, almost all the Magi basically respond by saying “Eh, who cares, humans live such short lives anyways so what does the life of one kid mean in the grand scheme of things?” Seeing as the players are meant to see The Magi as sympathetic characters and eventually team up with them in the end game to arrive at the locations of all of the Dragon Needles, the fact that this is their introduction is not only a slap in the face to those who are being negatively affected by how their presented but is also just...crappy writing. And don’t even get me started on the scene where Ionia teaches Lucas PSI, that is just BAD. Like point blank, bold text, red color, size 46 font BAD. Like even if The Magi didn’t have their original name and weren’t sloppy representations of non-binary/genderqueer folk that scene would still be really uncomfy.

And yet with all of this going against The Magi in terms of their presentation, it’s still hard to pin them down as having any ill-intent behind them because of their importance at the end of the game and what they eventually stand for. Once the race for The Dragon Needles begin, not only do all of The Magi support you on your quest and show levels of genuine concern and compassion for the protagonists, but also end up fleshing out the world around them in a way that gives the player a sense of hope in a time of hopelessness. Whether it be Ionia and her boundless compassion for the party and Kumatora especially, acting as her surrogate parental figure and doing everything she can to support the party in a time of crisis. Or Lydia, taking care of a wounded Pigmask Soldier, someone whose job it is to rip the life from The Magi in hopes of awakening the Dragon to shape the world in their master’s image. That despite their motivations, they wouldn’t let a wounded man die in the frigid cold of the mountains. These characters are meant to be beacons of hope, characters to lighten the mood during dark times and become characters you genuinely feel for. And yet, the execution fell flat due to a shoddy introduction, sub-par writing and misinformed representation.

So, where does that leave us? This is obviously an issue that’s a lot more nuanced than just changing their name so where do we start? While I don’t claim to have the perfect solution for this, and encourage others to throw their hat in the ring and keep the discussion going, I do have a few ideas: First things first, remove the concept that The Magi aren’t human and are incomprehensible to “Mortals”. Instead, make it so The Magi are just humans from the past who were so proficient in PSI and Psychic Abilities they were able to survive the cataclysm from milenia’s past and are more akin to Buddhist Monks in how they’re perceived. That being said, I do still like the idea of their style being tightly connected to that of Magicant from Mother 1. Spiral Shell houses, pink hair, very sparkly and pretty, we can keep that aesthetic. It makes sense for them! By making this change, we humanize The Magi a lot more and make it so the players can connect with them better and empathize with them easier as opposed to them being the off-the-wall weirdos that the game tries to represent them as. Plus, if the game really wanted an off-the-wall weirdo that ties back to the previous games, just give Dr. Andonuts more screentime. Along with that change, make them more empathetic without sacrificing their all-powerful mysticism. For example, when Alec and Flint arrive at the party at Aeolia’s, instead of having them nonchalantly shrug off the potential of Claus’ death, have them actively participate in assisting them in finding their lost child. Instead of it being “We’re all powerful so the death of one person is meaningless in comparison to how we perceive the world.” it’s more “We’re all powerful, so assisting you in your journey to save your loved one is a simple task that will require minimal effort. If such a simple request can result in a good outcome, it shall be done.” Of course that begs the question of why they don’t just take care of everything, but I think that can be circumvented with the idea that they can’t intervene with the lives of others too much. That using their immense psychic powers too often would result in them misusing their powers and that they have to practice a certain level of restraint, or even that they’re so strong an overuse of their powers would result in devastation. Sort of like how a knight in a medieval fantasy story would seek guidance from an all powerful wizard, but the wizard can’t just solve the problem for them.

Now my next suggestion is turning a negative into a positive: Instead of having The Magi all represented as men in drag, The Magi are now all represented as different type of people that could fall under the non-binary or genderqueer spectrum! Now instead of all of them falling under the same umbrella, Aeolia can be purely androgynous and agender going by they/them pronouns, Doria is now demigender, partially identifying as male but going by xey/xem pronouns, having a big old pink lumberjack beard and a heartwarming smile, Lydia looks older and more aged with their physical appearance looking like that of an older man but using she/her pronouns and identifying with female presentation whilst feeling that they don’t have to be rescritced to said female presentation, Phygria could be genderfluid and upon each appearance they have they transition between genders, and Mixolydia falling under Genderqueer, having their own personal presentation of themselves and who they are! As for Ionia, I would actually argue keeping her the same! I say this because, if all The Magi are under the same umbrella representation of a stereotyped drag-queen, it’s a problem. However, if all The Magi are comprised of different, varied representations of the non-binary/genderqueer community it would make sense to have one of them fall under the representation of someone who dresses in drag!

Of course, these are all just my ideas. Whilst I have done as much research as I could while writing this, I understand that there are certain aspects behind those of non-binary expression that I am unaware of and ways that I could improve upon this idea. Like how changing The Magi in this way would still result in them all basically being a part of a big “Bury Your Gays” Trope due to them all passing away upon pulling their respective Needles, so i’m sure that there are plenty of other ideas other people could throw in! And I encourage that, I encourage people to look at this and tell me how this concept can be improved upon to create a more inclusive and positive representation of The Magi! Because that’s what we deserve! I can look at this years in the future and admit that there may have been something I missed out on or was just blatantly unaware of! But I’m hoping at the end of the day that this discussion can not only lead to a critical analysis of the wrongs behind the original Magi in Mother 3, but how they can be improved upon and made better. If not for Mother 3, or the Mother 3 community, for those who plan on making their own stories, their own games, so that they know to not make the same mistakes the developers of Mother 3 made and make something even better.

[theladyragnell]

10 and 48. (Also would be interested to hear why you disliked the over arching plot of person of interest?)

10. what’s one show you thought you’d love but turned out to really hate?

I wouldn’t say really hate, but sometimes I try something and just don’t end up enjoying it for one reason or another! Like, I’d been meaning for the past year to watch the Dark Crystal TV show, but I made it about twenty minutes into the first episode a few weeks ago and just had no interest in it at all, tragically. Not a fault of the show, just a fault of me not being a fan of prequels as a rule! I stalled out about five episodes into Schitt’s Creek, but I hear that’s a common problem and that it gets way better later, so I’ll probably be giving that another shot at some point.

48. are there any shows your friends love but you aren’t interested in?

Sure! I don’t know if we’re counting Critical Role as a TV show, but it’s the biggest canon that my closest friends are into that I’m not--same with The Adventure Zone, though again, not a TV show. There’s just too much canon, in both cases, and in a format that I find really hard to consume! And then there’s The Untamed--none of my particularly close friends are into it, but it’s everywhere, and the oversaturation and my contrariness mean that I am unlikely to watch it. (Again, I do not need to be convinced on this, I promise. Just trust my word on it.) Also, I have tried several CW shows as fandoms and they all have a certain Inescapable CWness about them, so I tend to steer away from those ones, which means I am missing out on the Roswell fad.

Person of Interest:

Oof. Going under a cut because I’m too tired not to be wordy.

So, I write this from the early back half of season four, to give you some context. And I write this as a person who would prefer that the overarching arcs in case-of-the-week shows take up ~20% of the show tops. That’s not an objective prescription, it’s a personal preference! I’m not about to drop some tea about how this show is Structurally The Worst because I do not like to prescribe other people’s media experiences to them.

Also, spoilers for Person of Interest? You’ve been warned, if you care about years-old spoilers for a show leaving Netflix in three weeks, scroll past this post now.

The only things I’ll say are objectively bad are Carter’s death (they had options. They had so many options. And the one they chose is forcing romantic chemistry and killing a black woman after having her act completely out of character) and Root’s, which I’ve been spoiled about but which is way too Bury Your Gays for my taste. I’m not wild about the one that’s coming in the finale, but it makes more narrative sense and I’m probably stopping before then because I don’t need that kind of energy in my life.

But mostly, I’m just finding it equal parts exhausting and enraging. The organized crime wars, Elias vs. the Brotherhood, are dull and poorly integrated, and the HR and Elias stuff earlier on bored me too. They’re trying to do organized crime and the surveillance state stuff at the same time, and it’s too much Big Plot for a show that’s at its strongest in one-off mysteries.

And then the surveillance state stuff, considering the state of the world ... oh boy. It’s just too much. I find myself wanting to hiss at the screen like an angry cat whenever we see Greer, or Control, or any other recurring villains. They tried to make me feel sympathy for Control a few episodes ago and I am having precisely none of it. I have strong feelings on surveillance, and it makes all of it so distressing, plus it takes time away from the characters and plots that I actually enjoy. And I know I’ve got a lot of Shaw torture coming up, and I’m just tired. When this show is good, it’s fun, and clever, and pointed! When it’s not, it’s really not.

I mean--one of my favorite shows of all time is Leverage, and it’s not a coincidence that in every single episode of Leverage, they win. Whatever the personal cost, they win. And on Person of Interest, they’ve been losing by inches for so long that at this point it’s just disheartening.