#during one of the greatest emotional climaxes of the series that even people who say the series fell off remember fondly

[fullscoreshenanigans]

Reading these popularity polls and feeling like I'm going lowkey insane

(WSJ Chapter 102 Popularity Poll, released September 7, 2018)

(Official Anime Site's 4th Anniversary Popularity Poll, conducted in August 2020)

(VIZ February 2021 Popularity Poll)

Anna being more popular in fanon that Don illustrates the phenomon of a fandom being willing to do one of their least favorite things (appreciate a female character) in order to avoid doing another one of their least favorite things (appreciate a character of color)

[tobiasdrake]

So, episode 2-1. Overall, I'd say this was a fun one, if a bit spotty. This is a popcorn episode.

What If sometimes plays fast and loose with continuity, ostensibly spinning out of a particular point in the MCU but flagrantly ignoring continuity entirely in favor of telling its own unique story instead. Sometimes this goes well; Sometimes it's just weird.

This was one of those episodes. It purports to diverge from Guardians 1 but makes no effort to shore up its characters or plot points with that film. It vaguely alludes to Guardians 1 moreso than it spins out of Guardians 1. Using familiarity with Guardians 1 to fill the gaps in its plot and worldbuilding but having no solid relationship to the film whatsoever.

More "Somewhere in the Multiverse where everything is different" than "What if?" Sometimes that works out great and sometimes it doesn't.

They play around with a film noir aesthetic and give us some spotlight focus on Nebula, though much like their relationship to MCU canon, they rarely go beyond inferences to the noir genre; This is very much not a noir story, opting instead for a more straightforward and upbeat tale of a hero overcoming adversity to save her adopted planet and people. The cynicism, tragedy, and grittiness of the genre is all absent here.

Rather, in MCU style, the episode manages to be heroic and optimistic, with likable protagonists fighting for a heroic cause and prevailing despite the odds. Its one dalliance into darker fare is a betrayal of Nebula's trust that is meant to be significant, but that fails to land on account of a lack of emotional investment in Nova Prime.

The short run-time and quick pace of these episodes mean the writers need to really think about what they want to spend their time on. This episode spent about a third of its runtime developing and exploring Nebula's relationship with Yon-Rogg, a character who is ultimately unimportant and would be relegated to a funny Hulk Smash gag during the climax, while barely even offering glimpses into the main villain until what's meant to be an emotional gut-punch of a twist.

They touch ever so briefly on an interesting notion, of Nebula being an ex-con and outsider to Xandar who becomes its greatest hero in spite of the other "proper" Novas looking down on her judgmentally (while they conspire to betray Xandar to Ronan). But it never has a chance to manifest as a serious theme.

Nonetheless, Nebula's a neat protagonist who's easy to root for, and it's great to see her in control of situations. Where the episode excels is in its action, its lighthearted antics, and letting its heroes shine. Korg, Groot, and Miek being "Rock, Paper, Scissors" killed me. That might be the best joke in the series.

Overall, I'd say this was one of the better episodes of What If, while nonetheless showing room for improvement. Structurally, it has great ideas that don't come out properly in execution and feels in need of another draft to become what it seems like it wants to be. But for what it is, it's still well-made and a lot of fun to watch.

[shihalyfie]

Kizuna itself vs. the two versions of the novel

Written on request from a friend who wanted to remain anonymous. This is more of an editorial than a meta, and while I usually have a policy of “this is an analysis blog, not a review blog” it goes into more of my personal impressions and opinions than usual, but it’s something I write hoping to be helpful.

There are basically three “official” full versions of Kizuna: one being, of course, the movie itself, one being the Dash X Bunko version of the novel, and one being the Shueisha Mirai Bunko version of it. While it’s certainly not to say that any of the three is an “incomplete” version of the narrative, if you really want as full of a picture of the story as possible, somehow, each of all three versions of the story happens to have really important information that the other two do not. If I had to pick only one of these three versions to recommend to people, I would of course pick the movie itself; it’s obviously the base story everything else is based off of and was the one the production centered around as a priority, but the novelizations have a surprising amount of info that provide a lot of insight into the movie’s story and themes.

I get the impression that the creation of Kizuna involved making a lot more story and background details than could fit in a 95-minute movie, so these novelizations, which were based directly off the original movie script, ended up being an outlet for a lot of these details (and as much as I could be harsh on the movie itself for being a bit “reliant” on extra material, I have to admit that Adventure and 02 were both like this too -- a lot of our current understanding of the series comes from the Adventure novels and drama CDs -- so frankly I’m thankful we at least got this with a 95-minute movie instead of a yearlong series). On the flip side, while I'm not going to say that the novels are completely and utterly inaccurate representations of the movie, in a perhaps too-close approximation of Adventure and 02's writing style, this is a movie where even the nuances in a single line or split-second moment carry heavy implications, which become much blurrier or harder to identify when they’re presented differently (or not even presented at all) in the novel’s context, especially when they emphasize very different things from what the movie itself was emphasizing.

The short version of this is that I believe the Dash X version contains the greater amount of “plot and story” information but significantly misses out on the emotional themes and presentation, whereas the Shueisha Mirai version abridges and cuts chunks of content but is much better at conveying the intended message. More on this below the cut. (Note that the following post spoils Kizuna’s plot events.)

The movie itself

Since the following parts are more “in comparison to the movie”, I’m not going to go too much into this in this section, but one thing I will say is that the official English subtitle translation for the movie is really not great. Even if you take out nitpickiness about the fact it misses several significant nuances (the difference between “unchangeable fate” and “changeable destiny”, or the fact that Gennai refers to partnership dissolution as a “case” and not like it’s something that happens overall) at really plot-important moments, some lines (thankfully, usually not plot-important ones) are just straight-up incorrect. And worse, there’s evidence the official English dub was based on that translation! (I’m not faulting the people in charge of the dub for this, but whoever handed them that translation to work with.)

The dialogue in the Dash X Bunko version is transcribed effectively word-for-word from the dialogue in the movie (or perhaps vice versa, given that the novel is based on the original script), so I highly recommend checking that version as a reference for dialogue or if you want to do any intimate analysis on it. I don't want to go as far as to suggest not supporting the official version of the movie because of this, but at least please be aware that the translation used there is not entirely reliable.

Dash X Bunko

If you talk about “the Kizuna novel”, this is the one that people usually tend to be referring to, for two reasons. Firstly, it was translated shortly after the movie’s release, and due to the unfortunate circumstances of Kizuna being delayed in accessibility outside Japan for several months, this basically served as the only comprehensive source of info about the movie outside Japan for a very long time. Secondly, in Japan, this one was marketed as “the one for adults” in contrast to the Shueisha Mirai one being “for kids”, which meant that a lot of people assumed that the latter one was just an incredibly stripped down version that was otherwise disposable or replaceable. (This is very, very much not the case, and is extremely ironic when it comes to a movie that partially centers around the dangers of looking down too much on things associated with childhood.)

When it comes to “plot and story info”, this is the one that probably serves as the best reference (especially for fanfic writers or those who need a refresher on certain plot events or to look up something quickly), and probably has the most “comprehensive” listing of plot events surrounding the movie. The dialogue in it is a word-for-word recreation of the movie’s script, and actually includes more scenes than the movie itself does, including two that I suspect to be deleted scenes (a detailing of the specifics behind the initial plan to pursue Eosmon, and a conversation between Koushirou and Tentomon) and adaptations of the first and second memorial shorts within their context in the movie. It also contains some interesting background details and extra context for some things in the movie that you might think would normally be animation flair or something, but take a very interesting implication of story importance if they’re going out of their way to write this in the script. (There’s a scene where Agumon and Gabumon appear in front of their partners when they’d been behind them a minute before, and it’s easy to think this might be an animation error, but not only does the surrounding context make this unlikely, the novel itself actually directly states that their positions had changed.) Given that, I think it was very fortunate that this novel was available to us for those outside Japan waiting for the actual movie to come out, because this level of detail was very important to have on hand rather than fragmented spoilers on social media.

However, the part where I think the novel is significantly deficient in compared to the actual movie (and also to the other version of the novel) is that it describes the plot events in too blunt of a manner and doesn’t bring out its themes very well. (It’s kind of like having a long and very detailed Wikipedia article plot summary; it definitely got all the hard facts down, but the emotion is gone, which is still a pretty significant issue when media’s all about the feelings and message in the end.) While “considering the movie to be more cynical than it’s probably meant to be” happens regardless of which version someone’s working from, I’ve talked to perhaps an unnervingly high number of people who started with the novel and were absolutely convinced that the movie’s message was about adulthood sucking and needing to just accept it, until they saw how the actual movie pulled it off and the surrounding atmosphere and realized it definitely was not. (I think one really big factor here is that a lot of the visual imagery makes it extremely, extremely hard to miss that Menoa’s mentality is completely screwed up and her way of seeing things was dubious to begin with; prose descriptions really just don’t capture the way they slam this in your face with visual and musical cues during the climax of the movie.)

You can figure this out from the novel itself, but you have to really be looking closely at the way they word things, and on top of that it’s hard to figure out which parts you should be focusing on and which parts aren’t actually that important -- in other words, the “choice of priorities” gets a bit lost in there. Even the little things lose a lot of value; it’s theoretically possible to use the novel to put together that Daisuke is wearing his sunglasses indoors during his first scene, but you have to put together the context clues from completely different paragraphs to figure this out, none of which compares to the actual hilarity of visually seeing him wearing the thing in a very obviously dimly lit restaurant because he’s our beloved idiot. (For more details, please see my post with more elaboration on this and more examples of this kind of thing.)

I wouldn’t say that the movie itself isn’t guilty of (perhaps accidentally) having some degree of mixed messaging, but I would say this problem is rather exacerbated by the novel’s way of presenting it due to its dedication to dropping every single plot detail and event without much in the way of choosing what to contextualize and what to put emphasis on (as it turns out, treating practically everything in the movie as if it has equal weight might not be a great idea). So, again, for that reason I think the novel serves as a good reference in terms of remembering what happened in it and knowing the movie’s contents, but I also feel that it’s really not the greatest deliverer of the movie’s message or themes at all.

Shueisha Mirai Bunko

The second version of the novel was not translated until several months after the movie first released, and shortly before the Blu-ray and streaming versions of the movie itself came out anyway, so my impression is that on this end a lot of people don’t even know it was a thing. On top of that, even those who know about it often dismiss it as the “kid version” -- and to be fair, it did baffle quite a few people as to why this version even exists (Kizuna is technically not unacceptable for kid viewing and its plot is still understandable regardless of age, but since the movie is so heavily about the millennial existential crisis, it’s not something kids would really relate to). So a lot of people tended to just skip over it...which is really a shame, because it contains some interesting things that actually aren’t in the other two versions at all. For instance, did you know that, as of this writing, this is the only thing that plainly states the specific explanation for why Yamato decided to become an astronaut, for the first time in 20 real-life years?

While there are still some things that weren’t in the movie proper (mainly the Eosmon initial plan and the adaptation of the second memorial short), for the most part, the actual events are somewhat abridged compared to the movie and the Dash X version, and other than a few stray lines, there’s not a lot of extra information that would be as helpful for referencing the events of the plot. The version of the novel here is rather broadly interpretive of the scenes in the movie, so several things are condensed or taken out (and, amusingly, because it’s assuming that the kids reading this don’t actually know the original Adventure or 02, it has to describe what each character is like in a quick one-liner).

However, interestingly enough, it’s because it’s so heavily interpretive that it illuminates a lot of things that weren’t really easy to glean out of the Dash X version. For instance:

Some scenes are described with “other perspectives” that give you info on someone else’s point of view. (For instance, we see more of Yamato’s perspective and thoughts when he has his first phone call with Daisuke, or a bit more detail in the process of how Eosmon kidnappings work.)

We get a lot more information on what’s going through everyone’s heads during each scene, and what emotions they’re feeling at a given time. (This is something that you could at least get to some degree in the movie itself from facial expressions and framing, but would often be a lot blurrier in the Dash X version; here, it’s spelled out in words.)

When things are abridged, you get a clearer idea of what the intended point and theme of the scene was because it’s stripped down to include only that part. In one really interesting case, the scene with Agumon finding Taichi’s AVs has a “censored” equivalent where Taichi’s pushed to a corner because he can’t find anything non-alcoholic in his fridge -- so when you look at the two versions of the scene and what they have in common, you can figure out that the point isn’t that it was a lewd joke for the sake of it, but rather that Taichi’s forcing himself into boxes of “adulthood” that are actually meaningless and impractical.

Some of the descriptions of the characters, scenes, and background information make it a lot more obvious as to their purpose in the narrative (it outright confirms that Miyako being in Spain means that her personality is getting overly enabled there).

The scene where the circumstances behind Morphomon’s disappearance are revealed makes it significantly less subtle what the point is. In the actual movie, a lot of this involved visual framing with Menoa seeming to become more and more distant, but in this version of the novel they basically whack you over the head with the final confirmation that Menoa is guilty of neglecting her own partner, which contradicts her own assertions that “they were always together” (maybe not emotionally, it seems!) and helps clarify the commonality between her, Taichi, Yamato, and Sora in what exactly led to their partners disappearing.

Bonus: this version of the novel really wants you to know that the ending of the movie is about Taichi and Yamato fully having the determination to turn things around and lead up to the 02 epilogue. (The movie’s version of this involves the extended version of Taichi’s thesis and the credits photo with Yamato obviously next to a rocket, while this novel’s version involves more detailed fleshing out of how Taichi and Yamato decided to use their experiences to move onto their eventual career paths and what kind of hope they still have at the end. The Dash X version...didn’t really have a very strong equivalent here.)

In other words, while this version of the novel isn’t the greatest reference for plot or worldbuilding, it does a much more effective job being straightforward about the intended themes and message of the movie, and even if the scenes in it are much more loosely adapted, it’s much better at adapting the emotional nuances of the things that would normally be conveyed via visuals, expressions, and voice acting. (Although I would still say that the movie itself is the best reference for that kind of thing, of course.) If you just want lore or plot ideas, I don’t think it’ll help you very much, but since this series is so much about characters that had their ways of thinking fleshed out in such incredible detail, and about strong theme messaging, this is all still very valuable information in its own way.

[legendoftheghost]

NSFW Headcanon: Jin Sakai 

A = Aftercare (What they’re like after sex) 

Jin believes practicing aftercare will naturally develop closer, more intimate bonds with his partner. After sex, he is particularly vulnerable; they’re naked, they have (hopefully) just had an orgasm, and one of the most intrinsic need for him is that need to ensure that positive state of mind continues. Everyone feels good when he knows his partner cares for him, and what better way to show it than tending to his partner when they both are in a vulnerable post-sex state of mind? Jin is especially susceptible to the post-coital blues, and even when he is seemingly highly independent, somewhat repressed and distanced with expressing emotions, I think this will be the perfect time for him to take a plunge and attempt to cuddle and engage in deeper conversations. 

B = Body part (Their favourite body part of theirs and also their partner’s) 

His entirety? Despite his fears of failure and flaws on his body, Jin Sakai is a man comfortable in his skin. From the crown of his head to the end of his toe, Jin Sakai has a body of a seasoned warrior; as a disciplined samurai, he had learned not only martial arts, but swordsmanship, horse riding, hunting, how to survive in the wilderness with bare essentials, and he literally has zero ounce of excessive fat on his body. 

He’s not the strongest, biggest warrior, a powerhouse who can dominate and overwhelm enemies with brute strength, but he’s compact, sculpted with enough muscle definition, and corded with lean strength that only comes from meticulous care. Younger Jin used to hate the scar that would continue to bleed and bruise due to excessive bullying, but now that he is the Ghost, he thinks it only gives him character. After all, scars build character. And out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars, and Jin Sakai is a prime example of one. 

Jin isn’t very particular when it comes to his partner’s favorite body part, but if his partner has anything that contrasts Jin’s own, he would obsess over that and touch him/her over and over. It could be the sensuous curve of the woman’s narrow waistand widening hips, the budding swell of her breasts and slender neck, or another man’s expansive chest and strong arms and legs embracing and cradling him. 

C = Cum (Anything to do with cum basically… I’m a disgusting person) 

He doesn’t like the mess, and would prefer if he came inside his partner, but the one thing he finds it extremely appealing is coming on his partner’s stomach. 

D = Dirty Secret (Pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs) 

Jin loves talking about sex with partners, friends, whoever. To him, sex in essentiality is a fascinating subject that's different for each individual yet common to people all (in some way), and he finds it endlessly depressing that it's a taboo subject.everybody (for the most part) needs sex and wants to have sex, so Jin believes that people should be able to talk about it openly, and he will sass and awkwardly joke and humor with insinuations of sex in normal conversations. 

E = Experience (How experienced are they? Do they know what they’re doing?) 

He snuck into Clan Sakai and Shimura’s personal archive / library and would sneak in some erotic illustrations of the time in curiosity. Despite the general lack of experience and focusing on his strenuous trainings, he would have fulfilled some curiosity of sexual exploration through masturbation and through secretive excursions with Ryuzo. 

F = Favorite Position (This goes without saying. Will probably include a visual) 

His preferred positions are; The Victory position, Doggy Style, Shoulder Hold, Lifted Missionary, and Lotus

G = Goofy (Are they more serious in the moment, or are they humorous, etc) 

Appearing too serious is Jin Sakai’s greatest flaw; being too serious which is Jin’s principal trait doesn't seem like such a bad thing, but it could create some issues regarding sexual explorations. 

Social anxiety.

Perfectionism.

Social awkwardness.

Fight or Flight responses to most things (Can't laugh inconveniences off or smoothly escape conflicts because of over seriousness, which is likely to do the opposite, in other words escalate minor conflicts to big ones).

Overthinking and not living in the moment.

Not having fun due to exaggerated thinking about the consequences.

Jin may be a sassmaster and likes to throw in some dry humor in between, but that’s his coping mechanism to lesson and ease his insecurity and stress that stems from even the sexual act itself, but in the act, he’s deadpan serious. 

H = Hair (How well groomed are they, does the carpet match the drapes, etc.) 

Judging by the full thatch of his beard, I’d like to think that he’s pretty thick and ample down there as well, peppered with hair below his belly button, and a nice, sizable thatch of his pubic hair. 

I = Intimacy (How are they during the moment, romantic aspect…) 

Jin does crave intimacy during sex, and this is something which becomes very important to him. Jin is at his most vulnerable, candor, raw, and open, and if it’s not a casual sex only to fulfill the needs to get off than anything else, Jin still needs and wants to build some sort of friendship or connection beforehand. Their sexual performance is then more about action than it is about emotions and deeper layers of intimacy, and with more deeply-connected intimacy, he would rather focus on both the physical and mental connection, which could make it much difficult to come with him. Regardless, he is tender, and will attempt to initiate; especially stroking his partner’s back, the side of his/her face, raking through his/her hair, etc.  

 J = Jack Off (Masturbation headcanon) 

Jin likes the stop-squeeze technique, which is a form of ejaculatory control. It allows him to near the point of climax and then back off suddenly by holding the tip of the penis until the sensation subsides. He likes to do this multiple times to make his orgasm much more intense. While it could be a tedious or time-consuming practice, he likes that explosiveness and exquisite high he gets from it. 

K = Kink (One or more of their kinks) 

Shibari (kinbaku), aka rope sex: Contrasts are central to Shibari: intricate geometric patterns with the natural curves of the body, rough rope against soft skin and vulnerability side by side with strength. The practice can also lead to a trance-like experience for the tied partner and a rush of adrenalin for the artist, or rigger.

Erotic Asphyxiation (breath play): This type of sexual activity involves intentionally cutting off the air supply for you or your partner with choking, suffocating, and other acts. People who are into breath play say it can heighten sexual arousal and make orgasms more intense.

Dirty Talk: Jin can have a little trouble getting out of his own mind. However, in this case, it’s less about being able to connect to the body than it is a fear of letting go. A little dirty talk goes a long way in making him forget his fears and let loose.

L = Location (Favorite places to do the do) 

Taking in consideration of his fugitive life, it would be somewhere relatively hidden and private. Especially in nature; against the tree trunk, near the lake or an ocean when the weather accompanies Jin’s mood, and empty, abandoned houses. 

M = Motivation (What turns them on, gets them going) 

Jin is almost always turned on, and has higher than normal sex drive. He’s one of those who craves intimacy and wants to share himself with someone special, even though it doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t participate in any given opportunities when they are presented. It can feel like a chore and not really something he wants to waste their time or energy on if they cannot converse well to begin with. There must be underlying honesty and genuinity in order for Jin to at least partake in a casual sex. 

N = NO (Something they wouldn’t do, turn offs) 

Cockiness – specifically unwarranted arrogance accompanied by a smug attitude. Lack of a sense of humor – unless they’re the one dishing it out. Flaking – because flakes are some of the most unappealing individuals to build any type of relationship with.  Being goalless and content with life — having zero aspirations for the future. Liars – but not even about significant stuff. Just unnecessary lies, made up stories and exaggerations when a fib is pointless. Vulgar language finding its way into every, single, sentence spoken. Baseless cattiness, malicious comments and disdain toward others. Humiliation and degradation.  BDSM for BDSM’s sake without exploration, caution, and mutual respect. 

O = Oral (Preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc) 

He’s much more inclined to receive than give. While Jin lacks the scope of experiences, he is skilled with his tongue, very attentive, considerate, and careful to observe his partner’s reaction. Because he is a perfectionist, he will attempt his absolute best to pleasure his partner and send him/her over the edge. He expects the same when he’s on the receiving end. 

P = Pace (Are they fast and rough? Slow and sensual? etc.) 

The act in itself is viewed essentially as a series of steps to his and his partner’s mutual satisfaction. It entirely depends on their shared needs. As a dominant top, Jin is likely to be a very passionate lover, focused on the connection he gains from this experience. He does appreciate and sees how much closer sex can bring him to someone he loves, and would rather be patient waiting for the right person to share this with, because for him to reach this step, it would have taken a lot of trial and error. He definitely likes things to built up towards the climax, exploring different positions to find their needs satisfied. 

Q = Quickie (Their opinions on quickies rather than proper sex, how often, etc.) 

Jin actually prefers quickie, because it offers a much-needed opportunity to relieve stress, strengthen a relationship, and get off at a time when intimacy, connection, and, well, time, are luxuries (especially with him on the run). Prefers mutual masturbations, than penetrative sex. 

R = Risk (Are they game to experiment, do they take risks, etc.) 

Jin is likely to be a very passionate lover, focused on the connection he gains from this experience. He sees how much closer sex can bring him to someone he loves, and would rather be patient waiting for the right person to share this with. If he’s in a long-term relationship, he will be more than willing to experiment and take risks. It all depends on their shared interest, and Jin would be open to try everything at least once. 

S = Stamina (How many rounds can they go for, how long do they last…) 

From his strenuous training as not only as a samurai, but as the Ghost on the run, Jin has extremely high stamina and will be able to go on for more than a few rounds if his partner is up for it.

T = Toy (Do they own toys? Do they use them? On a partner or themselves?) 

Occasionally will use Geisha balls / beaded necklaces for added pleasure, mostly one another in reciprocated masturbations. 

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease) 

He isn’t very good at teasing, unless it’s with words. He is rather straightforward with his actions, because he doesn’t like to deceive with his affectionate, tender touches. 

V = Volume (How loud they are, what sounds they make) 

On the quiet side, and for most of the lovemaking, he will make soft, gentle moans that turn into animalistic grunt when he’s on the verge of orgasm. 

W = Wild Card (Get a random headcanon for the character of your choice) 

Perhaps one of the simplest, yet most potent sexual fantasies Jin has is just having his partner direct the sex script for the night. Whether it's a full-on dominant or simply a partner who knows what he or she wants and how to get it, he finds the thrill of a confident and sexual partner to be very appealing.

X = X-Ray (Let’s see what’s going on in those pants, picture or words) 

He is uncircumcised, his shaft is curved slightly upward, with veins that snake along the underside. His member is longer than average (around 13cm when erect) and has considerable girth (9 centimeters when erect). 

Y = Yearning (How high is their sex drive?) 

Jin has rather active sex drive. It’s not a particularly powerful sex drive, for he could always resort to, and might prefer his own imaginations. His inner minds are rather rich place, and he doesn’t always feel like outwardly expressing this side of himself.

Z = ZZZ (… how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

All depends on Jin’s condition on that day; judging on the Ghost’s life (on the run, essentially a fugitive ronin), and a slew of traumas and PTSD trailing his back, Jin Sakai suffers from insomnia. While he has high stamina and could go for more than a couple of rounds when he’s in a particularly frisky mood, but one intense round could have him knocked out exhausted. He’s a kind of a guy that sneaks in sleep whenever and however it comes, so he would let himself fade away for an hour or two, before he’s coaxed to awake. 

[distrustedace]

“Apparently Virgil is a better actor than Roman. Who knew?”

AN: I want to make this into a series but its is going to be shorter then the Janus series. Also it might be a little messy since I am improvising the storyline. I hope this isn't a complete and utter disaster. 

“Apparently, Virgil is a better actor than Roman. Who knew?”

Roman found out that his newest lead is going to be a boy. And honestly, he was so excited! Finally, some gay representation in musicals. And this time, Roman knew it was going to be a totally new experience. Yes, the heathers will be girls as always, mostly because the heathers are too iconic to have a gender change. But, the newbie is going to play “Veronica” who’s name change is going to be Verona. Roman, on the other hand, is going to play JD. He wasn’t thrilled about playing a sociopathic kid with daddy issues but he got used to the fact that he had to play the villain. Besides, what's a story without the main antagonist?

Roman strode into the theatre to attend the rehearsals. He didn’t know who got casted for Verona since he missed the auditions for the other character , and completely forgot to check the list of people who got in. So on top of that, Roman was ready to be pleasantly surprised upon seeing his Co star. He suddenly heard a low tone speaking a line out of the musical , “and there is Heather Chandler, head cheerleader and main leader in the trio. And she is a mythic bitch.” Roman, upon hearing that line, immediately knew that his co-star is the greatest fit for Verona, he was instantly thrilled to be working with him. He looked up and saw.. Virgil?

“Wow, I never knew Virgil was the theatre kid.” Roman muttered. He was more than pleasantly surprised at Virgil’s acting skills. His tone of voice was authentic, he stayed on point, saying the words verbatim without the script and…. He looked the part. Especially the emotional aspect, Roman was excited to see that Virgil was better at conveying emotions then he is. It gives him some competition and a fresh new perspective in the world of acting. Roman smiled to himself, “Well, this is going to be a new experience.” He thought.

Virgil, actually felt like a human while playing the part of a fictional character. He wasn’t really antiquated with his emotions. Heck he doesn’t know how anger , fear, happiness or sadness felt like since he barely felt them. The only reason he got into theatre in the first place was because he seemed to only feel them, while playing a fictional character. He hoped to gain a full understanding of his emotions. Sure, he stopped acting by 7th grade in middle school, but he picked it up so he can have a “fun past time.” as his father put it. It was pleasantly enjoyable for him. But his main concern was if Roman would be willing to work with him. He knew that some of the rumors paint Roman to be a massive diva. Of course Virgil wasn’t sold on most of the rumors he heard of in his school, but it gives him small suspicion about Roman. He heard the door open and close and looked up to see Roman. Who was neatly dressed. He had his signature haircut which was combed to the right and gelled. He was always wearing a red jacket with a royal emblem on his chest. It indicated to him that Roman has already committed to pursue a degree in acting in the Chamberlin university, all the way in London , England.

“Ay, it's my greatest star, Roman. How was your day, busy?” the director said.

“Eh, not too busy. You know me, I always get my work done on time.” Roman responded. Virgil noticed the easy tone of his voice. He wondered if someday he can be as calm as Roman. But he was relieved that Roman might be open to working with Virgil. Virgil wanted to make sure he avoids any type of confrontation with his crew members. Infighting within a group can only lead to disaster.

I stepped up to the stage to finally talk to Virgil. “Hello, my name is Roman, and I will be playing the part of JD. Nice to meet you, Virgil, I have heard of you around school.” I said as I headed out.

Virgil gave me an firm hand shake before saying, “

It is nice to meet you too, Roman. I am relieved to have a kind person to be the lead of the show. I wonder, how did you  hear of me?” Virgil asked.

“Well, I guess you’re well known for your literary skills. Especially your narrative writing. I am quite impressed by your newest story.” I admitted.

“Oh, I didn’t peg you as the type to read stories like mine. Sometimes they can be too dark for a lot of people. Thank you for reading my stories.” He replied.

Virgil seemed monotonous, but I knew he meant well. I felt excited to work with him.

“Alright, so I assume that you already know the whole script. So, let's skip to rehearsing the “meant to be” number. I want to see how well you can convey Verona’s emotions.” I said

“All is forgiven baby! Come on get dressed. You’re my date to the pep rally  tonight!” I recited, with a low but slightly manic tone. As to establish JD’s mental state in the beginning of the song. I needed to convey that JD feels manic, and morbidly happy, but also had to mask his depressed and angry state.

“What! Why?” Virgil recited with a seemingly calm but anxious tone. That was really

Good considering his first line.

“Our classmates thought they were signing a petition! You gotta come out and see what

they really signed.” I recited, making sure to convey madness in the last part of the quote.

“You chucked me out like I was trash. For that you should be dead!” I sang, pausing a little before saying, “ but,but ,but!”

“Then it hit me like a flash. What if high school went away instead!”

I sang, making sure to enunciate the last sentence to seem like JD is slowly spiraling down to insanity. I remind myself to convey the song in a rebellious tone but to have undertones of morbidity.

“Those assholes are the key,” I belted out, before saying, “They’re keeping you away

from me.”

i announciated since the key words needed to be known to the audience. I wanted to show an obsessive side to JD. Since that is his main character trait.

“They made you blind, messed up your mind, but I can set you free!”

I sang out, I growled when I said  “messed” to show a small snippet of JD’s rage. As I did that, I made sure to build up the tone of the quote, starting from a normal tone, to an angry tone and then ending off with an easy, calm emotion. I also swiped my hand out while saying messed, to show how mad JD gets when he mentions what happened in the highschool .

“You left me and I fell apart for that you should be dead,”I said, while trying to convey a mix of sadness and anger. I hope I executed that correctly.

“I punched the wall instead, BAM BAM BAM!” I bellowed, wanting to show the pure anger dripping from JD’s quote.

“Then I found you fell apart, and set lose all  that truthful shit instead!”I sang out, while chuckling during the truthful part of the quote. I was taking a little artistic liberty with that. I wanted to show how JD is trying to put apart his anger with some humor.

“And so I built a bomb. Tonight,are school is vietnam.Lets guarantee they never see their senior prom.” I finally sang, I loved this quote since it gives me so many creative freedoms. I growled and sang a light but firm tone. After ending with a joyous high note. I noticed that virgil dropped at his knees, shakenly holding his torso with his right hand and covering his mouth with his left hand. Like he was stifling his sobs. I can hear his quiet whimpers. I almost faltered, I was convinced for a moment that Virgil was actually crying. I actually saw slight tears flowing from his eyes. That was an intense add on to the song.And it is magnificent.

“I was meant to be yours, We were meant to be one, Don’t give up on me now,Finish what we’ve begun, I was meant to be yours”

I sang the whole verse, doing the same thing as I did before but trying to improve the emotional appeal bit by bit to build up to the climax.

“We the students of westerburg high, will die!” *gasp!* “Our burnt bodies may finally get through, to you.” *oh-oh god!* “Your society churns out slaves and blanks, no thanks.” *whimper* “Signed the students of westerburg high. GOODBYE!” I ended with a manic tone. Virgil’s head snapped up while I said goodbye. His eyes were wide, his mouth was tightly frowning and tears were still flowing down his face. I instantly felt horrible after saying that. I know full well that this is just a simple rehearsal but, I am honestly worried for virgil. And if he gets me, worried for him. Then I know that I am dealing with serious competition.

After singing the next few verses I got ready to sing the climax to the song. I hope to god I get this right. One flaw of mine was expressing grief and anxiety. Something that can be Virgil’s biggest strength.

“Verona, open the, open the door please, Verona open the door!” I cautiously but anxiously said. I actually felt like trying to get Virgil to look at me.

“Verona can we not fight any more please, can we not fight any more!” I sang, making sure my voice wavered a little bit. I’m actually feeling apologetic. This is the first time I ever felt the way I am acting. I am both confused but excited to use this to my advantage.

“Verona sure you’re scared I’ve been there, I can set you free! Verona Don't make me come in there. I’m gonna count to three!

“One.”

“Two.”

“DAMMIT!”

I sang as I strided to virgil, getting desperate to see him.The music swelled and completely stopped. The bass played a hopeless tune, to convey the pure, raw emotion of my reaction to Verona’s dead body.

“Oh-Oh-” I immediately covered my mouth, vomiting almost lurching up my throat. Virgil’s body lay lifelessly against the wall. His arms were hanging out, his legs were strewn apart and his eyes… Oh god his eyes…  It was blank, it looked lifeless. He didn’t even close them! How- is he fucking ok?!

“P-please don’t leave me alone,” I whimpered out, somewhat crying at Virgil’s parasuicide, “You were all I could trust,”I desperately and depressingly sang out. I feel like my soulmate died. Holy shit.

“I can’t do this alone,” I sang out, building my tone up to the eventual climax.

“STILL I’LL WILL IF I MUST!”  I belted out. I was beyond furious. Emotions were spewing out as my expression morphed into someone that is wordlessly screaming. But thank god I still kept the volume at a normal tone.

The music stopped and my heart was still beating. My chest was puffing in and out as I struggled to come down from my newly found emotions. Virgil stood up and I heard his footsteps stride to me.

“R-Roman, are you ok? You were more intense than usual. Is there anything I can-” Virigil worried before I tackled him into a crushing hug. He staggered back for a bit. His arms falling limply. I took a deep breath, smelling the hood of his jacket. I was desperately making sure that Virgil was actually ok. That he was living. That he was breathing.

“Vi-virgil. Are you unharmed?” I meekly asked.

“R-roman I am completely alright. Did I trigger you?” Virgil assured me.

“N-no, it's just that… you were too believable. I just- for some reason I can’t stand the

sight of you dead.” I breathed out.

Virgil lifted his right arm and awkwardly patted my back. But it gave me comfort.

“It's alright Roman, the song was intense and I bet you were tired for today.Lets just get you to the seat and I will get you something to snack on. You did an exemplary job.” Virgil assured me.

While I was making my way to the seat I realized that my emotions are not a product of stress or burnout.

I think I fell for Virgil.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Pixar Films

I dislike Disney as an entity; it is an evil corporate conglomerate that makes focus-grouped schlock to appeal to as wide an audience as possible at the detriment of story.  That said, Pixar was once the greatest animation studio on the planet.

Keep in mind, these are movies for kids, so anything negative I say will almost certainly be rebutted with “you’re just old and you don’t like Disney because it’s popular and you’re a hipster and you’re not even the target audience anyway so shut up.”  I’m just giving my two cents, whatever that’s worth.

I’m not gonna rate them on a number scale, I’ll just tell you how much I would or would not recommend watching them.  Some are must-see-cinema, others are bland and skippable affairs that you should not feel obligated to watch just because it has the Pixar brand on it.

Let’s start from the very beginning (a very good place to start)

Toy Story (1995) Groundbreaking, the first feature length 3D animated movie, spectacular cast, great story, though a little wonky by today’s standards both in the visuals (though that’s just a product of the times) and in the characterization (Woody is kinda of a jerk in this one; he was worse during pre-production, so this is the tame version).  Pixar started off on the right foot.  Would Recommend

A Bug’s Life (1998) This has some flaws, but is still a really fun movie.  Not as good as Toy Story, but infinitely better than Dreamworks’ knockoff Antz.  Great ensemble, memorable characters and set pieces, really funny.  Would Probably Recommend

Toy Story 2 (1999) An excellent sequel, they knocked it out of the park with this one.  It’s surprisingly deep, exploring concepts like the inevitability of change; nothing lasts forever, you can’t keep kicking the can down the road forever.  The journey is finite, but that doesn’t make it worthless.  Would Definitely Recommend.

Monsters, Inc. (2001) To date, their best original movie, maybe even better than Toy Story 2.  Everything about it is perfect; John Goodman and Billy Crystal have great chemistry, Steve Buscemi plays the perfect sleaze, Boo is just adorable, it’s an excellent movie.  Would Definitely Recommend.

Finding Nemo (2003) This is a beautiful movie; they had to invent new animation techniques to make it look this good, new ways for light to bounce and diffuse through the fishy medium.  Amazing story, absolutely heart wrenching at points, hilarious at others, without feeling tonally dissonant.  Would Definitely Recommend.

The Incredibles (2004) Another home run, they’re just showing off at this point.  This is a much deeper and arguably darker story than any of their previous films.  It doesn’t pull any punches and explores adult concepts like mid-life crises, extramarital affairs, death (oh, so much death; red shirt mooks and civilians alike).  This may be my favorite (definitely top 3; I’ll expand the list below).  Would Definitely Recommend.

Cars (2006) A competent movie, though by Pixar standards it’s not quite up to snuff.  Not bad, by any means, but this one is the most blatant cash grab of them all, just a commercial for hot wheels and die-cast toys.  I have a soft spot for it because this is the one I’ve seen the most; my mom would turn on this DVD to keep my baby sisters occupied, so it was literally always playing in our house.  That said, I’m not nostalgia blind; it has good parts, but it’s not great.  Would Probably Not Recommend.

Ratatouille (2007) C’est Magnifique!  Patton Oswalt does a fantastic job, I identify with Linguini on a spiritual level, the human characters are all perfectly demented and the rats are equally so.  I love this moral; anyone can be successful, it’s about who you are not where you come from.  Funny and relatable, an all around feel-good movie.  Would Definitely Recommend.

WALL-E (2008) Top 3, hands down, this is a true work of art, a modern masterpiece.  A film mostly devoid of dialogue, it expresses so much emotion from how the characters carry themselves and react physically to their surroundings.  The body language, the color choices, the camera work (especially in the space dance sequence), just how RAW everything is, how grounded it feels, how fleshed out these little robots are..  I Cannot Recommend This Enough, Watch it Right Now. Now. Why Are You Still Reading This?  Now! Go Watch it Then Come Back.  Even if You’ve Already Seen it, Go Watch it Again.

Up (2009) Another near perfect installment under Pixar’s belt.  They’ve really nailed the art of opening scenes; Carl and Ellie’s love story moves me to tears, it is so beautifully portrayed.  Some of the characters can be a tad annoying and overly cutesy to sell merchandise, but the story never suffers from it.  The villain actually feels like a threat, there are stakes, and the image of a house sitting by a waterfall and the story connotations thereof are indescribably bittersweet.  Would Definitely Recommend

Toy Story 3 (2010) This is is sort of hit or miss.  It’s a very well made movie, and an excellent CONCLUSION to the Toy Story franchise (Conclusion: noun, the end or finish of an event or process).  I liked it, felt it really wrapped things up in a satisfactory way, but it’s not better than Toy Story 2 in my mind.  I feel like this was a turning point for Pixar; after this, they were never quite the same, never really bounced back.  May or May Not Recommend, I’m on the Fence

Cars 2 (2011) You don’t give the comedy relief their own movie.  That’s storytelling 101; the comic relief bit-character can rarely stand on their own and meaningfully carry a story, though corporations are laughing all the way to the bank as I say this because these types of movies keep making boatloads of money even if they suck.  Minions made bookoo bucks, the Pirates of the Caribbean series is still ongoing despite the loss of Bloom and Knightly (and bringing them back for the last one doesn’t really count because Depp is still the main character), Cars 2 is a corporate cash grab, and devoid of artistic merit; this is my first hard no.  Would NOT Recommend.

Brave (2012) This is not a Pixar film, it is a Disney film that they decided to make under Pixar’s name instead because they knew Pixar had enough good will and positive connotations to get people into seats regardless of story.  It’s not terrible, but it’s not great.  That’s the story of modern Disney; not terrible, not great, just okay because that’s all it needs to be.  People will watch it no matter what, so they put in the bare minimum amount of effort so nobody can say they suck at making movies again (because for the longest time in the early 2000s, they did suck; Dinosaurs, Home on the Range, Chicken Little).  Would Not Recommend.

Monsters University (2013)  Why did you do this, Pixar?  Why did you take one of your best movies and do this specifically to it? Nobody asked for this, nobody wanted this.  I can only applaud them for having integrity enough to NOT give people what they wanted; people wanted a sequel, and that would have bee terrible.  You can’t follow up on Monsters, Inc, it had a perfect ending, it was hopeful and heart warming and definitive.  A prequel is the only thing they could have made without messing up the ending of the original, so I’ll give them some credit for that.  It’s not good.  Would Not Recommend.

Inside Out (2015) Their best one since Toy Story 3.  Not terrible, I actually liked a lot of things about this one.  I like it when Pixar takes on more serious subject matter, and I thought they did a good job exploring how a kid would react to such a drastic lifestyle change.  The cast was good, the animation was fun (inside Riley’s head; outside was generic and samey).  Not bad Pixar, not bad at all.  Would Probably Recommend.

The Good Dinosaur (2015) It doesn’t matter what i think because this movie still made hundreds of millions of dollars.  Disney is losing no sleep over this.  Would NOT Recommend.

Finding Dory (2016) Again with the continuations!  This was better than Monsters University, but the original was still such a hard act to follow.  It had potential, and I liked how it respectably handled mental illness in a way that was easy for kids to understand without dumbing it down and underplaying its significance in the lives of those who it effects.  I think Marlin kinda regressed, having to relearn what he already learned in the first one. The hardest I laughed was during the climax, the truck chase scene, “It’s a Wonderful World,” just amazing.  Would Probably Not Recommend

Cars 3 (2017) I hope Disney was happy with this end product.  I hope the producers really enjoyed cashing their toy checks for this one.  I thought it was worse than Cars 2, but I can see why some people might like it more.  Either way, it’s worse than Cars 1, which wasn’t particularly great anyway.  Would NOT Recommend.

Coco (2017) I’m on the fence with this one.  It was beautifully made, and the songs made me cry, but it’s hard for me to look at this movie without judging it as a product made by a focus group of mostly white people.  By itself it’s a good movie, but when you know how the Disney sausage is made it feels disingenuous and calculated.  Might Recommend, But it Had Some Baggage

The Incredibles 2 (2018)  I am Boo Boo the Fool, Pixar suckered me and I fell for it.  I was legitimately enthusiastic for this one because the original is one of their best, and unlike Monsters, Inc it actually left room for a sequel.  It had so much potential, and big shoes to fill, and it did so in the most generic Disney way it could.  Like Brave it wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t great either.  Middle of the road, some things were fun, others made little sense, it was “appealing” in that it literally appealed to as wide an audience as it could without alienating anyone by doing anything particularly risky.  I liked Voyd, I liked how Helen became the main character, I liked the villain twist; I did not like how easy it was to make superheroes legal again.  It felt like it was tacked on at the end, like he just says “and there we have it, they’re legal again, congratulations,” like he was announcing the winner of the Price is Right.  Would Probably Not Recommend

Toy Story 4 (2019) I want to be clear that I made a point not to pay money to see many of the previous films on this list.  If I thought they were going to suck, I waited until a friend bought it and saw it with them for free.  This one, though, I was forced to pay for because my mom insisted on seeing it in theaters as a family.  It wasn’t terrible.  Wasn’t great.  Wash, rinse, repeat.  It was the same villain again; Stinky Pete, Lotso, Gabby-Gabby... I can’t wait for the fifth one where the villain is an old toy who is mad because they weren’t played with.  Buzz was made much dumber for this one, and I felt they didn’t do enough with Forky.  I was excited to see how they handled the existential aspects of the series; what makes a toy? How are toys sentient? Why are toys sentient? In the first movie Woody implied that there were rules that toys were honor bound to follow, so what is stopping Forky from blowing their cover on accident?  None of these questions were answered.  I liked Keanu Reeves, I didn’t like Key and Peele.  Would Probably Not Recommend.

The mighty have fallen.  It’s just sad. 

”Onward” looks kinda dumb, like a kiddy version of the flop Will Smith movie “Bright.”  I have no faith in this production company anymore, but I’m sure it will make hundreds of millions of dollars; the cast are fan favorites, including Disney’s favorite topical pet celebrities (because let’s be honest, Disney basically owns Tom Holland at this point.  Whether they own Spider-Man or not, they own Tom Holland, he is theirs, his soul contractually belongs to them).

Speaking of souls, ”Soul” will probably go over well with critics, though I can’t help but notice that their main character of color is transformed into a non-human for most of the movie.  Again.  I’m also not a fan of this one-word naming convention Disney has fallen into in the last decade.  “Brave” was originally titled “the Bear and the Bow,” but one-word titles seem to test well with kids.  Hopefully this will pass, but I’m not holding my breath.

I’m swearing off Disney movies, firsthand.  I might catch them second hand, through friends or other means, but I refuse to give this corporate conglomerate one more penny.  They basically own Hollywood, so my money will eventually make my way into their pockets, I just want to put as much distance between them and myself as possible.  No more Pixar, no more Star Wars, no more Marvel, no more Disney.  I am one drop in the bucket, I will not be missed, and they will not be affected in the slightest by my absence, but I need to prove to myself that I have integrity enough not to keep funneling my hard earned cash into a trillion dollar snack company.

Disney movies are snacks, not meals.  And I’m going on a diet.

Anyway, here’s my top three:

Monsters, Inc

The Incredibles

WALL-E

[ordinaryoddness]

“OH, DROKK THIS!”

Anyone that knows me will be aware of my love for 2000AD, a sci-fi anthology comic that’s been going for longer than I have been on this earth. Since its inception in 1977, 2000AD has featured thousands of stories, giving birth to some of the greatest comic characters of all time. 

One of which is, Judge Joseph Dredd, a hard-hearted, law enforcement officer in a far flung American future. Judge Dredd featured a cynical new world, where cops (Judges) could execute on the spot and throw people in the slammer for the pettiest of crimes. 

Mega City One, is a mass of ‘Blocs’, entire towns condensed into gigantic, rocket-shaped apartment buildings, usually named after minor British celebrities (There is a ‘Sue Perkins Bloc’ for example) or politicians. This world saw humans, mutants and droids live side-by-side, mostly at odds with each other, or the various (sometimes surreal) criminal elements that threatened an already shaky and paranoid city.

 Judge Dredd is not a hero, not in the conventional sense. He is a mostly cold, blank slate of a man whose sole purpose is to uphold the law and literally nothing else.

 Dredd has killed MILLIONS of people in the years he has been active. In one story, Dredd dropped a nuclear weapon on Russia, ending a war but killing millions of innocent people in the process. He is a machine of little sympathy and patience. Dredd is so infused with the law, and the upholding thereof, that he NEVER TAKES HIS HELMET OFF (Please, remember this) and he literally has no time for friendships or human things like emotion. Judges are sworn to not have romantic relationships and Dredd is above all of that. He doesn’t even think about it. Love is for creeps. 

In the comics, Dredd may as well be a robot, or a Robocop. (Dredd inspired that classic film) but, unlike Alex Murphy, Joe Dredd has no family (Well, not in the conventional sense but we’ll get to that in a wee while)

 Basically, Judge Dredd is awesome. I advise you to dig out the books and throw yourself into a world I’ve been enjoying since I was 8. Also, check out the 2012 film adaption called ‘Dredd’ because it NAILS the comic, the world and the character (with loads of cool references for longtime fans). It also features Judge Anderson, my absolute favourite female comic book character. 2000AD has, for the most part, featured strong female characters and the Dredd universe is no exception. 

1995 then. ‘Stallone IS Dredd’

Sly Stallone. Is. Dredd. Judge Dredd. A unfeeling, facially unknown, killer for the law. A character to be booed as well as cheered.

I was 15 when Judge Dredd came out. I was pretty excited. Didn’t last.

In less than ten minutes in, Judge Dredd takes his helmet off and by the end, he’s smooching Judge Hershey.

I get why fans get annoyed when films mess up their characters. Sometimes, it’s a little off kilter. I care not for changing the race of a character. Who cares as long as they embody that person? I would have taken a non-white Dredd. All the actor had to do was live by the code of the character, to be best representation of the man on the big screen. (Yes, Dredd has to be male. It kind of doesn’t work if he isn’t)

Stallone was not that man. The only thing that made him remotely qualified to be Dredd was that they both have distinguishable chins. 

Judge Dredd: The Movie was a cynical cash grab for a character that was kind of niche. Dredd wasn’t huge in America, even when he fought Batman. He was cult, through and through. It was a film that needed to be made by people that KNEW the material, that honoured the little/big things. Karl Urban, who played ‘The One True Dredd’ was a fan of the character and you can tell he was having a blast bringing him to life. When you watch Sly, you can see that one eye is on the scene, and the other is on the sack of money in the corner. 

The film, to delve into the travesty, is mostly harmless to those that just want to watch Sly wobble about like he does. For fans (I’d go as far to say that I’m a ‘super fan’, I’ve paid my dues) it’s like watching a shit cover of a great song on ‘X-Factor’. It’s soulless, lifeless and so lazy. No one wins in this, even 2000AD who, after it came out, could barely hide their dislike for it. 

It takes an old story and adds a few things to it. To give the film one single positive point, it looks the business. Chris Cunningham did a great job of the special effects, The Angel Gang and Hammerstein look awesome. THERE was the love and passion, all around people that couldn’t care less.

Judge Dredd: 1995 Edition worst crime is that it’s boring. It’s really, really boring. It tries to be funny, even drafting in Deuce Bigelow in as ‘comic relief’, again playing a character that’s completely different to the original material. Judge Anderson isn’t in it, which is a blessing. They would have probably re-imagined this cool, smart and female hero into a ditzy, blonde bimbo who keeps going all ga-ga over Rambo. 

They would have cast  Pamela Anderson, wouldn’t they? 

Diane Lane is in there, playing an equally iconic female character, Judge Hershey. She does, indeed, go ga-ga over Rambo and they have a kiss at the end. No real reason why. It doesn’t even make sense in the film and in the comic, they would never do that for about a million reasons. 

While they do use the famous ‘I AM THE LAW’ catchphrase, they also give the helmet-free, happy-go-lucky Dredd a new motto. In the film, he keeps saying “I knew you’d say that”, which is like something a sales manager would say, not an action hero. They really try to ram it home during the film. I bet Sly thought it was great, probably because when he says “Law” it sounds like he’s about to shit himself. 

When Armand Assante (playing Dredd’s ‘brother’ Rico) says ‘LAAAAAAAAAAAW’ to mock Dredd, it sounds like he’s reached a climax. Maybe he was channelling hopeless directer Danny Cannon who was hoping that this shit show would be that years ‘The Fifth Element’ (The film seems to take more cues from that movie than it does the comics)

Films are just fluff though, aren’t they? It’s kind of pointless to get all wound up about what is ultimately fleeting. I feel bad for feeling anything towards it. It’s probably the last time I was ‘angry’ at a film. Although, that being said, I saw ‘Batman Forever’ not long after and watched another favourite character be reduced to a dancing bear. Embarrassingly, I came out and, annoyed about a two-punch combo of crappy comic movies, I booted a cardboard cutout of ‘Batman Forever’ and declared, overly loudly, that I would never go to the cinema again. I did, about a year later but by then I was getting into indie-films and just wanted to watch people talking for 90 minutes.

Judge Dredd is a bad film, whether you love the source material or not. I’m more annoyed at it for tarnishing the later, superior Dredd film. A sequel and a series is so long overdue and it bothers me that the best representation of Judge Dredd and his universe is ‘I knew you’d say that’

As a little caveat, I did manage to get a measure of ‘revenge’ (probably too strong a word but there you go) with regards to JD 1995, In 2006, I ended up working on a film (didn’t come out) with a producer that knew Danny ‘Judge Dredd’ Cannon. He had actually tried to get his friend involved, giving him a copy of the film I wrote. In one of my many, many phone calls from sunny L.A to shady Quarry Bank, I was picked up on an exchange within in the film, where the two main characters, briefly take about Judge Dredd being terrible. There was a line (I won’t repeat it here) that, apparently, Danny Cannon was very offended by and I was asked to remove it. I was 26 at the time, sat on the stairs of my shared house, and it felt like a one in the eye for Hollywood. I am the law, thank you very much.

[animation-recaps-by-sean]

DuckTales- Timephoon-Moonvasion Recap

Time breaks during a storm, Glomgold makes his own family, a monster hunts the richest duck in the world, and the invasion comes. Spoilers below.

Timephoon

Louie tries to steal lost treasures from the exact moment they disappeared so he doesn’t hurt the timeline. Spoilers he does. By stealing treasures he breaks time, bring past figures into the present.

Beakley is trying to teach Della with how to be a Mom. She thinks Della is being too lenient. Della thinks their good kids who does dumb things. And Beakley agrees but says that dumb things can become bad things if the kids don’t learn. This is also the first time we Della without her pilot hat. She looks cute.

I also love how Scrooge and Beakley jus know it was one of the kids

A ninja appears with the other time displaced people. I only bring this up as I am amused as the obscure Naruto stuff like hand signs and replacing themselves with logs.

The big selling point of this episode was the appearance of Bubba. He was a widely unpopular character from the original DuckTales who had a big five partner but never did much after that. He doesn’t do much here, other than to give Dewey and Huey something to do. The joke is that he does something modern and Huey freaks out because caveducks don’t work that way. It kept to a minimum enough that the joke doesn’t get old, but I’m not in a hurry to see him again.

Everyone figures out that it’s Louie and after the problem is solved, Della grounds him. After all she knows that stealing and using technology that you don’t fully understand can destroy their family. The grounding is awkward and uncomfortable and it needed to be. It’s really interesting to see Louie and della call other out like that.

3 ½ out of 4

GlomTales

Glomgold recruits other villains to his family in a dark on the nose mirror to the McDuck family. I love everything about this. Ma Beagle is Beakley, her sons are the triplets, Don Karnage is Launchpad, Mark Beaks is Gyro, who they don’t even find which Beaks complains about, and Magica gets tobe Webby.

Magica has been reduced to working as a children's magician at Funzo’s. It might be the best scene in the whole series.

They attack the mansion which is almost empty since Scrooge and gang are out on another adventure, except for Louie who is still grounded. Louie agrees to take them to Scrooge and help them win the bet if Golgold makes him a partner.

He agrees and Louie has the villains give Glomgold their own fortunes which just pushes him past Scrooge’s. Thus winning the bet. But he signed the contract as Flintheart Glomgold, not his real name. So all the money goes to his partner, Louie.  He and Della reconcile while Scrooge asks for his company back. Louie thinks about it.

4/4

The Richest Duck in The World!

Louie decides to keep the money and the company for himself. Scrooge isn’t worried as he figures running a multinational company will be too much for Louie before too long. But Louie keeps spending company money on stupid stuff much to the annoyance of Owlson and the board of directors. They get Louie to cut magical defenses budget, which unlesses the Bombie.

Bombie is a character I did not expect to see. He’s from Scrooge’s third appearance but in the late 40’s. In the comics, it’s a zombie made by a African VooDoo wizard to get back at Scrooge for destroying his village. The Bombie design was a super racist too by the way. No way that would fly away. He’s been redesign was more of a Frankenstian creature. He’s back story has been changed so that he just hunts the richest duck in the world. Which is now Louie.

The nonsense causes Owlson to turn in her two week notice so she can train her replacement. After a lengthy battle a fearful Louie admits that he shouldn’t be the richest duck in the world. This breaks the curse.

A great episode, with a strong emotional climax. 4/4

Moonvasion

I don’t know how this show keeps toping itself but it does. This might be the greatest episode yet. Lunaris makes his move and Scrooge is on the defenses. Della takes the kids away, save for Lena and Violet who help with the battle. I don’t know why it’s okay for them to fight, but Lunaris is targeting the triplets and Webby directly.

I do wish Darkwing Duck did more than serve as a distraction tough.

Della and the kids crash on an island were Donald been living with a melon Mikey. Louie and Della have a good talk about dealing with things going wrong. Meanwhile Scrooge teams with Glomgold to scam the aliens by dressing up as Santa Claus. I was worried that after the bet storyline wrapped up, the alien invasion finale would feel tacked on. But thes how does an amazing job of pulling the theme of the plot.

I can not get over how funny this episode was. After the invasion was thurted the board of directors are sick of Scrooge’s family almost causing the end of the world. How can they steal from people! It turns out they’re head of F.O.W.L.

The call upon Gandra (I thought her working for Beaks was hypocritical), Steelbeak (F.OW.L’s main agent of the old Darkwing Duck show), the Funzo mascot who might be the Phantom Blot (A villain from the old back and white Mickey cartoons), Black Heron, and a frozen Rockerduck. It’s time to take down Scrooge.

An amazing end to an amazing season.

4/4

[vreugd-madelon]

The Inheritance Cycle Series Review

The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini is a 4 book long YA Fantasy Series. Eragon, Eldest, Brisingr and Inheritance are the names of the individual books. I listened to the books in English on Storytel, but I know that all together they are 2,894 pages.

It all begins when Eragon is walking through the woods looking for food and finds a mysterious stone. Being poor, he thinks that he may convice someone to buy the pretty stone off of him or trade it for some food. He brings it into town, but no one seems to be willing to take it from him since he found it in the Spine. Suddenly, one night at home, a screeching sound are heard, and the stone begins to crack.

I rate Eragon 4.5/5 stars, because it was an amazing introduction into the series. We are just as new to the world Eragon sets foot in as he is, and those book in my opinion are the best. We learn all of the thing he does at the same time. We never break from Eragon's POV, so with all that is happening in the world, the reader is just as clueless, and shocks of revealing come at the same time. To me it's stunning at how well Eragon is able to learn while on the road. And there is one death in the book that actually already made me cry as I cared for him. One thing I disliked in the beginning was Saphira's voice, since she is a woman I expected it to be more graceful instead of gravelly. But than again she is who she is.

I rate Eldest 5/5 stars, because while with most series there is a second book syndrome where it's of less quality, I didn't find it with this series. I just wonder where the story will take me. One of my dislikes is that I can't see the names of places and ancient language written down. So this makes it much harder for me to connect places to races and see how they are travelling across the world. I do like the detail in the training Eragon and Saphira get from Oromis and Glaedr, all while other POV's are introduced which makes the story move forwards even more; namely Roran and Nasuada. Both Eragon and Roran experience great character growth in this book, and it pleases me greatly. Another thing I find quite interesting is how both this book and the first have major battles as their climax. While in the first it seemed like a natural course for the plot, in this one less so. Nonetheless I must say the end and the battle that takes place, are incredibly well written, and made it the rating that it is. Now that I have listened to over 20 hours of audiobook, I must say that all together I don't find Saphira's voice as troubling as I did in the beginning of this venture.

I rate Brisingr 4/5 stars, because I had to take two breaks while listening to the books. I don't know why, but continuing after Eldest just didn't feel right. I foccused on other series before coming back a couple of weeks later. I must say that the beginning was really interesting with Eragon and Roran on their own journey to hellgrind. It really showed their brotherly bond and Eragon's resourcefulness. There were also a couple of scenes that stirred my emotions; 1. When Saphira mends Isidar Mithrim, the rose saphire of the Dwarves, it gave me chills. They way the mending and the result was described was so beautiful. 2. When Glaedr shares the dragons most valued secret, it brought me close to tears. It was described earlier as the most powerful and unique things, and to hand it over was such a deeply personal gesture of trust. Near the end many important backstories are revealed, which still keeps it all interesting and it gives an understanding for certain characters. The deaths at the end made me ugly cry, and the worst thing; I sat on a train with people looking at me. Awkward.

I rate Inheritance 5/5 stars, because this was the most amazing ending to a series I had in a long while. First of all I think Roran and Katrina are so cute together, and they are truly a relationship goal with how far they are willing to go for each other in their love. The battles and the seiges of Aroughs and Dras-Leona, and eventually Urû'bean as well, are describes with such detail that it feels real and dangerous as we get both the POV of Roran, the human with a hammer, and Eragon, the Rider with a flaming sword. They are Aroughs is full of ingenuity from Roran and Dras-Leona is full of fear for Eragon. Even while this is the last book in the Series, we get to know so many new detail about Alegaesia. Creatures like Snalglí and the Nïdwahl make their first appearance. We see Saphira's POV, where she calls humans round-ear two legs and Elves point-ear two legs. And Urgals call humans, the hornless. I found the best name for a sword ever and it belongs to Angela, the herbalist. Albitr, or as she likes to call it; Tinkledeath. I laughed every time when that name came up. Later on we get to see Galbatorix in the hall of the Soothsayer, where he tells Nasuada his past plans and actions. We get to see a glimps of his mind, and it's both terrifying and enlightening.

The ending is what I likes most. And I don't want to spoil too much, but for the last couple of chapters we see the aftermath of the battle of Urû'bean. A new monarch chosen, cities claimed, trades made. The new problems that arose are dealt with and resolved. The last thing we know is that Eragon travels east, with the greatest treasure Alegaesia has ever known.

The Inheritance Cycle - 4.5 Stars.

I give it this because while many aspects of the series is amazing; plot, side plots, characters, world building. There are somethings that bothered me, especially in the beginning and even throughtout; the dragons voices. They are rough and coarse while I somehow expected them to be smooth and elegant. Yet it always fit their character. The pacing was incredible. Even while I still don't know exactly where one book ended and the next began, because I read them all so shortly after another. My favorite main character is Saphira. The scenes where she dis extraordinary things were incredibly well writing and her POV's made me laugh. My favorite minor character is Sloan, because he got exactly what he deserved. The covers are absolutely incredible as they each depict a dragon alive during the series. Eragon: Saphira. Eldest: Thorn. Brisingr: Glaedr. Inheritance: Fírnen. The only one left out is Shruiken.

If you have any questions send me an ask here on tumblr or tweet me. If there are any books that you want to recommend, be sure to let me know!

P.S. There is a companion book for this series, Eragon’s Guide to Alegaesia. It addresses the reader as a new rider and it has some facts about Alegaesia. It has 3d elements in it, such as fur or cloth. Fold open notes and even the future predicting knuckle bones. It’s not a must to have, but a nice addition to your bookshelf.

P.S.S. There is talk of a 5th book in this series. Can’t wait!!!

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 146: Why Are We Still In This Basement

Previously on BnHA: Flashback!Kirishima nearly gave up on his dream of becoming a hero after freezing up during a sudden villain encounter. But then he watched an old interview with his hero Crimson Riot, in which Crimson admitted that he felt fear just as much as anyone. He said that having a manly spirit doesn’t mean being confident or not feeling fear; it means doing your best to live your life without regret. After hearing this, flashback!Kiri had a quick montage and turned into first-day-at-U.A.!Kiri, dyeing his hair and spiking it up and declaring that he was saying goodbye to his former self. Back in the present, our current beat-up Kiri thought to himself that he still gets afraid regularly, but that what he fears most is reverting back to the way he used to be. Hot Gum -- who, you will recall, had charged up an attack by absorbing the energy from the villain’s punches -- told the bad guys they had underestimated Kirishima’s manly heart, and then punched the shit out of them.

Today on BnHA: Hot Gum flashes back to when Kirishima applied for an internship at his agency. He was excited to have someone with Kiri’s “can-do energy”, but Kiri admitted that that was all he had, and that he wants to be more than that and be someone who can protect people. Back in the present, Chance the Rappa is all “I’m not dead yet!” and gets back to his feet. Hot Gum is all “oh shit”, but then Rappa directs him toward a room with first aid supplies and tells him to tend to Kiri’s wounds. He says that both sides are basically all out of strength, but he wants to continue the fight because he really!! loves!! fighting!!!, and so he wants the others to heal up because he’s taken a personal interest in them -- Kiri especially. Hot Gum heals Kiri up and congratulates him on being acknowledged even by the enemy. We then finally! cut to Overhaul, who’s headed down a corridor with Eri and one of his minions. He’s holding the finished quirk-be-gone serum, and he tells his new “temps” -- Toga and Twice -- to get to work.

I may or may not have lost my patience completely and started ranting and raving halfway through this chapter. Just giving y’all a heads up. I kind of hit my limit lol.

(As always, all comments not marked with an ETA are my unspoiled reactions from my first readthrough of this chapter. I’ve read up through chapter 176 now, so any ETAs will reflect that.)

OHHHHH SNAP YOU GUYS LOOK AT THIS

LOOK AT ALL OF THESE LOSERS

OH I SEE, DEKU, SO YOU STILL CAN’T TIE A FREAKING HALF WINDSOR, BUT YOU CAN TIE A BOWTIE HUH. OR IS THAT A CLIP-ON?? OH MY GOD IT’S A CLIP-ON ISN’T IT

MEANWHILE BAKUGOU WILL STRAIGHT UP JUST NEVER WEAR A TIE NO MATTER WHAT. BUT OH MY GOD LOOK AT HIM ALL DRESSED UP LIKE A KHR CHARACTER, YES, GOOD, I LIKE THIS

BEST JEANIST IN THE BOTTOM LEFT CORNER I SEE YOUUUU

AIZAWA DIDN’T BOTHER TO DRESS UP EVEN THOUGH WE KNOW HE’S CAPABLE OF IT. JUST WORE HIS NORMAL PAJAMAS UNIFORM LIKE USUAL. LAZY ASS

MIRIO I MISS YOU ARE YOU DEAD

ALL MIGHT WEARING A SUIT THAT FITS OH MY GOD. EVEN WITH IT BEING SCHOOL BUS YELLOW IT STILL LOOKS GOOD

TODOROKI’S BODY LANGUAGE IS MYSTERIOUS AND HILARIOUS

PRETTY MUCH ALL THE CHARACTERS FROM U.A. AND THE INTERNSHIP ARC ARE HERE, BUT THERE ARE OTHER CHARACTERS MISSING SUCH AS RECOVERY GIRL, NAOMASA, AND THE STUDENTS & FACULTY FROM SHIKETSU AND KETSUBUTSU. AND OF COURSE ALL THE VILLAINS

AND YET BEST JEANIST STILL GOT TO BE THERE EVEN THOUGH HE’S NOW LAID UP IN A HOSPITAL SOMEWHERE. GOD BLESS YOU

the hype text is talking about the climax of the battle against the Eightfold Cleansers. dare I hope?? this arc has gone on for a bazillion years. and it feels even longer due to me taking such a long time to read it. but I recently passed chapter 100 in the tumblr recaps, and I thought to myself that I’d better get going again or before I know it I’m actually going to catch up and not have anything new to post lol

all right! so Hot Gum just finished punching the shit out of those two villains and now they’re KOed. thank fuck

but Kiri isn’t looking good omg

GET HIM SOME HELP

Kiri’s weakly mumbling “who’s there” and Hot Gum is all “IT’S ME, FAT GUM, I’M JUST HOT NOW”

Kiri’s really out of it and muttering that he’ll protect him. “gotta do... what I can...”

and wow. are you guys really gonna do this to my emotions right now. really. really

now we’re flashing back to the first time they met, I guess! they’re at FG’s office and FG is all “wow Tamaki you actually brought a friend”

and he recognizes Kirishima from the sports festival and he likes the cut of his jib!

he’s complaining that Tamaki always gets too nervous at the festival “and ends up in last place every year!”

then how did he land this internship with you I wonder

(ETA: ??? mystery)

Kiri says that Fourth Kind said the same thing at his previous internship (about liking rambunctious guys with guts and a positive attitude)

but he says that’s all he has

oh shit Eijirou I thought we were done with your angst. this isn’t fucking fair, I yield already

YOU’RE NOT SWEETIE, YOU JUMPED IN TO PROTECT HOT GUM LIKE A CHAMP. JUST HANG OUT THERE AND REST NOW

-- ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME

BUT THE HYPE TEXT. SAID. WE WERE REACHING THE GODDAMN CLIMAX

THEN FUCKING DIE ALREADY!!!

Hot Gum is thinking a bunch of “oh shit why isn’t he dead, I used up all my shit, we’re screwed” thoughts, and meanwhile I’m wondering if this arc is actually going to end, like, ever

can we please rescue Eri already please!! the Kiri flashbacks were good but even those went on for so long, and why the fuck is this stupid basement arc being dragged out like this?! WHY. I GIVE UP

Chance the Rappa is telling Hot Gum to tend to Kirishima’s wounds. at first he refers to him as a kid, but then he changes it to “man”

whatever dude I don’t even care. that’s so nice that you respect him, now could you please LIE DOWN AND DIE ALREADY so we can save Eri!! and find out what happened to Mirio! and see what Aizawa and THE GODDAMN MAIN CHARACTER are up to jesus christ

but no we’re still in this scene! Hot Gum’s staring at him like “are you serious”

all of this happened because Horikoshi started working on that fucking movie. that’s it, isn’t it. all his energy was going into that and he started neglecting the actual series. and we get stuff like this that no one fucking cares about and it should have ended five chapters ago

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m actually starting to look back fondly on the damn Hosu arc. remember Stain?? he may have never shut up, but at least he was defeated within a reasonable amount of chapters, and didn’t lead a bunch of heroes through a boring maze to take on a bunch of fifth-tier villains. who don’t even have interesting character designs because they’re all wearing THE SAME GODDAMN MASK. AND IS THIS SOME SORT OF PURGATORY, OR WHAT

but fine! gotta power through! so now Tengai is also sitting up because OF COURSE HE IS, and he’s telling Rappa not to act so selfishly, and to remember his duty, and blah blah blah

aaaaaaand Rappa’s stomping on his face

THEN FUCKING DIE!!! HOLY SHIT I’M GOING FULL BAKUGOU HERE. IS THIS HOW HE FEELS ALL THE TIME. NO WONDER HE CAN’T STAND ANYONE

Hot Gum’s asking wtf does Rappa want, and Rappa says he wants them to kill each other

now he’s telling us his life story!!

he came from an underground fight club where people were allowed to use quirks

did he actually kill all of them. psycho

now he’s screaming at Hot Gum that he really wanted a good fight that actually challenged him. “the kind of power that only comes from putting your life on the line”

he says the two of them met his challenge, “especially the red-head”

please leave him alone. you’re already well on your way to becoming my least favorite character in the whole fucking series, which, wow

he’s shouting for them to heal up so he can continue their death match

you... do realize that’s not the greatest incentive, there

Rappa’s walking to the fucking door

Hot Gum is all “you know you lost the fight and you’re gonna be arrested, right?”

but Rappa says he didn’t lose and that if nobody dies then it’s a draw

and Hot Gum’s just watching him like “wow what a weirdo”

and now he’s picking up Kirishima who looks so small in his arms! :/

:|!!!!

Rappa is STILL there for some reason, and he’s all “I want another proper go at killin’ him!”

WE KNOW. YOU WON’T FUCKING SHUT UP ABOUT IT AND THIS ENTIRE CHAPTER HAS JUST BEEN YOU NOT SHUTTING UP. AND IT’S PROBABLY ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE FOURTEEN-PAGE CHAPTERS, ISN’T IT. IT IS, ISN’T IT

EVEN KIRI’S SLEEPING FACE CAN’T SOOTHE MY FRUSTRATION

EVEN THOUGH IT’S SO PURE AND SWEET AND OH MY GOD PLEASE HELP HIM

jesus fuck, we finally cut to another scene, and just for a moment I dared to hope we were finally cutting back to something else relevant

but no

I mean, I won’t complain that they’re taking the time to show how Kirishima got treated so he didn’t fucking die. that makes me feel a little better. but if they don’t cut back to Deku and co. within the next page, I’m about to full on lose it

what the fuck is this guy doing here??

so we’re just best friends now. he’s just gonna hang out with you all for the rest of the arc

and why not, let’s ask him all about his past, because it’s so fucking interesting. fuck

and with that, we cut to another two-chapter flashback all about Rappa’s fight club. and it features no fewer than seven new side characters, several of whom end up getting their own flashbacks. because that’s all life is anymore. it’s flashbacks and side characters all the way down

but really he’s just answering that he became a villain because Overhaul’s the only guy he ever lost to

Overhaul why couldn’t you have just kept him disassembled

ooh we’re actually gonna see it

if only

god damn it Overhaul

(ETA: so how come he remembers all this anyway? when Overhaul did the same thing to the Tarantino gang, they lost all memories of their encounter with him. his control over his quirk is so great he can even control whether or not a person’s memory stays intact?? damn, Overhaul)

lmao since then he’s gone on to challenge him five additional times. wtf. what did you expect to change

Hot Gum is like “um so you’re telling me Overhaul could take on this guy with all his speed and power like it was nothing?”

well, yes. since all he has to do is touch him, and poof, dead

so he’s wondering why Overhaul is making his underlings do all the fighting for him while he runs and hides

because that’s what underlings are for, Dumb Gum

he asking what does Overhaul want to do

(ETA: yeah you stfu Tengai)

that’s not very specific or helpful

oh shit. but he’s adding that he overheard him talking about how he’d be “spreading” something, “and lots of it”

ERIIIIII

WHOSE HAND IS THAT ON HER ARM, IS IT HIS?? YOU FUCKING CREEP

oh my god finally finally finally we’re getting back to the fucking plot

I’m not even relieved. I feel more like someone who just weathered a natural disaster and is all “how am I even still alive”

so we’re going back in time a bit to right after the invasion started

don’t think about how they could have cut right to this and shrunk the cast down to just the essentials and cut Kiri’s fight time in half without losing any impact. don’t think about how we could have been done with this arc already. don’t think about

okay so the guy in the hooded cloak (I straight up forgot his name, it’s been ages. future me will have to pick up my slack) is carrying Eri, who looks terrified

(ETA: oh is that how it’s gonna be. lol. this is Chronostasis, everyone. and I’m pretty sure past me thought this was still the bearded babysitter guy tbh. but just wearing a cloak now. in my defense, there’s literally no way to tell that it’s a different guy)

they’re talking about the future of the Precepts

Hood says this is the end for them, but Overhaul says that as long as he and the boss are around, the Precepts won’t die

apparently most of their henchmen are loyal to the boss and not Overhaul

oh snap look at this

“finished” product???!

holy shit. it may have been a while, but you can bet I haven’t forgotten the most intriguing thing about this arc

-- HOLY SHIT?!

VILLAINS THAT I ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT OMGGGGG

TOGA!! AND TWICE!!! MY TWO FAVES!

YOU GUYS AREN’T ALLOWED TO DIE JUST FYI!! I SWEAR TO GOD IF ANYTHING HAPPENS TO YOU GUYS AND FUCKING RAPPA STICKS AROUND INSTEAD, I WILL RAGE QUIT THIS SERIES

fucking finally something interesting is happening omg

so I guess next chapter will be what I was hoping for from this chapter. lol this was almost a complete waste of time. talk about last minute saves

BONUS:

Bakugou out here saying what we’re all thinking

why are Sero and Kami so damn zen. you guys are MIA too, you know. is it really so funny to see Baku all pissed off that it’s worth not being in the story yourselves for 40-something chapters? ...okay, fair enough. you trolls

but I’m sorry Horikoshi, it says a lot that even you acknowledged this in an omake, joke or no joke. it means he definitely noticed how the arc reads in hindsight and how long it stretches on for

thankfully I’m pretty sure this is the last of the really dull chapters. League of Villain antics are just around the corner, and then our best boy Mirio will finally be up to bat. finally a light at the end of the tunnel y’all

[junker-town]

Watching ‘Uncut Gems’ is sports

Adam Sandler as Howard Ratner, awful human. | A24

‘Uncut Gems’ will make you feel absolutely filthy. In a good way. I think.

In theory, Uncut Gems shouldn’t be so stressful. It is both a gambling movie and a sports movie, and that means you should know from the start that the climax will hinge on One Big Bet that is either going to score or not.

It should be clear that because Adam Sandler plays a degenerate gambler, things wont be going well for him. That even when he wins a little, he’ll soon lose a lot. The directors, the Safdie brothers, signal from the start that they aren’t interested in romanticizing any part of Howard Ratner’s life. The camera opens on an Ethiopian mine, travels through shafts into an opal’s crystal structure and then, quite literally, out of Ratner’s bowels to reveal that Sandler’s Ratner is undergoing a colonoscopy. That’s what they make of their main character.

Ratner is a purveyor of shiny things, all of them cursed to drag him deeper into agony and loneliness. His stuff — his apartment, his jewelry store, his clothes — clutters the screen, suffocating him even as he spends the entire movie trying to secure the means to accumulate more. He’s a miserable human who can only put himself in circumstances that make him more miserable, and by the end you won’t understand why you want to root for him, even though you will.

If you stop to think, you might guess where everything is headed. There’s no time to think about anything. Uncut Gems will make you empathize with a lying, philandering scumbag because everyone in this movie is a lying, philandering scumbag to some extent. And the movie starts like a train leaving the station and Ratner’s the caboose, and that train gets going too fast to change cars so he’s the one you hitch with. And everything that might get him out of his jam has a caveat attached to it. In Uncut Gems, Ratner’s cycle of self-destruction is perpetual and predictable and god it hurts so bad to watch him zoom past every off-ramp to safety.

And also captivating. I can’t emphasize enough that this extremely painful, ostensibly predictable movie is also transfixing, and not in the car wreck sense. This movie will make you hope for the best like a stupid idiot. Every moment is spent waiting for some score or scheme to pay off, and every once in a while one of them does, reigniting hope for this awful, doomed man who is VERY low on the list of people who deserve to have their happiness fulfilled. Because yes, if Ratner can just get his precious stone from Demany, who lent it to Kevin Garnett, at The Weeknd’s show and get it to auction where, if it even gets a quarter of the money he thinks it’s worth, it might stave off the men who have made it abundantly clear they will break his fucking legs if he doesn’t pay, then everything might turn out OK. And Ratner really doesn’t seem like the type of guy who would just run away to Alaska, even though you, the viewer, would have done so an hour ago if you were in his place.

Yes, the cast is a Mad Libs of actors, but they’re also brilliant. Sandler might get an Oscar nod, but he isn’t the pulse of the movie. It’s everybody else. It’s Kevin Garnett, who plays Kevin Garnett better than anyone will ever play Kevin Garnett. It’s Mike Francesa, who sadly only has two scenes but looked eerily comfortable as an overworked, old school bookie/restaurant owner. It’s Julia Fox, who stole almost every scene she was in as Ratner’s mistress, and whose real life was somehow more badass and batshit crazy than her character’s, and who should be showered with awards as much or more than anyone in this movie that is giving me heart palpitations even as I write about it.

Maybe Ratner would move to Alaska if the people around him weren’t so sickeningly good at being alternately terrifying and sweet and manipulative of a man who they would leave in the gutter if he didn’t owe them or they didn’t owe him. That’s the other thing you should know about this movie: there’s nothing to it, really. No one wants anything more than what Howard wants, and all Howard wants is to get out of gambling debt so he can be free to rack up a gambling debt again. His motivation is that money is his sustenance. There is nothing you should be learning from this film, except that people are largely selfish, and that betting on anything is probably stupid.

Uncut Gems is series of limbic manipulations with pinpoint accuracy. If any part of it can be described as “feel good,” maybe it’s that: you don’t have to invest any mental energy into it. Unlike some other Big Deal movies this year, it won’t make you re-examine the edifice of marriage, or expose economic inequality’s corrosive tendrils, or anything like that. It has no place in a canon to consider. If there is an Uncut Gems 2, it would and should be illegal except in international waters.

Perhaps the greatest trick that Uncut Gems pulls is that climax, which centers on a 2012 playoff game between the Celtics and the 76ers, so that during a white-knuckle movie’s whitest knuckle moment we’re watching Howard watch Garnett shoot long two-pointers through a CRT TV and yelping every time the ball bounces on the rim and either falls or doesn’t. That is to say, Uncut Gems makes a game we might already know the outcome of just as exciting as it was was when we might have watched it live.

This may be the most accurate sports movie I have ever seen. Whereas a conventional sports movie throws what feels like insurmountable challenges at the protagonists, only to resolve them neatly, in Uncut Gems, the outcome is unnecessary. The point is that you’ve become an emotional hostage. And you don’t have to be a degenerate gambler to know the feeling; any sports fan understands, because what is our favorite sports team if not our very own lying, philandering scumbag who we’ve tethered ourselves to arbitrarily and imbued with unearned loyalty and hope that may never be repaid, and whose feelings we’ll never feel reciprocated?

By the end of the Uncut Gems it dawns on you that you’re just figuratively and literally watching sports, and even in realizing what a dummy, a rube, a sucker you must be to get duped into watching a rerun, you can’t look away as a ball that boing-boing’d in real life during a basketball game years ago boing-boings again, menacingly, because the life of a man you hate is on the line.

A man, mind you, whose colonoscopy you were forced to witness two hours before. Uncut Gems isn’t subtle. From the moment the camera crawls out of a man’s bowels, that filthy feeling is exactly the point. So consider this a warning and an endorsement: you will walk away from Uncut Gems both horrified and impressed, and you won’t be a better person for it. Worst or best of all, you’ll discover that you can empathize with it.

[britishnation-archive]

[ So. Well. After months of quiet simmering, I finally need to get this off my chest and I fully expect to lose followers over it. By all means, do go on. But I must say: the way the fandom handled the entire Eurus ordeal has taught me rather a lot about victim blaming - and the victim I am talking about here is not Eurus. Everyone that has been following my blog for a while knows that I intensely dislike the way Eurus was written: I dislike the way they handled her sexuality, her mental health and her intelligence; it was like an ignorant throwback into the values of gothic literature that hundreds of years of writing have tried to improve. And just as in gothic literature, Eurus, the apparent “climax” of the series, was written for little more than the shock factor, without paying any attention to the effects on the main characters of the show. 

Ever since TFP was broadcast, I have come across sentences such as these: Mycroft was so stupid. Mycroft was so out of character. Mycroft is abusive. Mycroft treated her terribly. Mycroft is the true villain of the show. Mycroft does not deserve Sherlock’s forgiveness.  And the best thing is - Mycroft would probably agree with all these opinions. TFP didn’t end on a good note for him. It has left him in a place that might actually be fatal for his mental health and his career. He has a clear, very distinct childhood trauma that still haunts him and suffers from PTSD. His sister is his greatest fear, to the point where he consciously banned most childhood-related memories from his mind and his home. The childhood flashbacks actually show us some very interesting information: Mycroft was an extremely troubled, very unhappy boy who, nevertheless, had a close, loving relationship with Sherlock. He was charged with the tasked of taking care of his siblings, being the eldest and most responsible (a role into which he has been forced by circumstance. Mycroft has been made to grow up far too fast), and he felt that it was his duty to deal with Eurus’s destructive outbursts. He was the one that asked her sensible questions, tried to understand what was going on and how to help her. I often see people pitying Eurus because she had “nothing” - what did Mycroft have? He didn’t have friends. He only had his books. Mycroft, too, was left without his little brother whenever Victor came over to play (which is not, I repeat, not a reason to resort to murder). Mycroft didn’t have being the family favourite, he didn’t have being the most intelligent, all he had was being ... just Mycroft. Isolated and trying to drown himself in food.  What happened then was that Eurus systematically destroyed all their lives. She burned their childhood home to the ground (and again: hello overused gothic stereotype). She delighted in making Sherlock, Mycroft’s passionately beloved little brother, suffer. And she killed a child. A child Mycroft could not save. Sherlock was unable to overcome his trauma, so Mycroft, essentially still being a child himself, developed a strategy to make him forget, to pull him out of his misery and help him cope. The fandom likes to call this “emotional abuse” and “gaslighting”. Where were the parents? Where was the mental healthcare? Mycroft did all he could, and he did it well, considering the intense emotional pressure that rested on him during the entire time. He encountered the first death to be blamed on him at the age of what - thirteen, fourteen? And it is at this age that an older, more experienced family member decides to take matters into his hand and entrust Mycroft (tiny! teenage! Mycroft!) with the responsibility of keeping Eurus’s fate a secret. Mycroft is not the one that locked her in - he was forced into this situation by a relative he viewed as authority. And for all these years, Mycroft has had to live with the knowledge that Eurus still wants to destroy him, that Sherlock will never be safe from her, that the psychological help she receives remains ineffective, that she violently rapes and disfigures staff members, that she is his to care for, that he is the only one that will be made responsible for her crimes.  And that is what actually happens when things get out of hand. Mycroft handled many things poorly. He made decisions that can not be excused, but then, how could he be expected to remain logical and rational in this matter? Mycroft is a victim. He was an actual child when this happened and he nearly lost his life over it. More importantly, I believe he also lost a good deal of his already crackling self-worth. Am I trying to say that people should not relate to Eurus, a mentally ill, tragically misrepresented, incarcerated woman that ought to have been handled much more adequately by the writers? No. But stop blaming Mycroft for everything. There is too much suffering that needs to be recognised. All things considered, it’s not a surprise at all that he was puking with fear and guilt once the situation escalated. And what did he get in exchange for years of trauma, terror and loneliness? Nothing but an Idiot boy. You should have done better.  And let’s not even talk about Sherlock.  Honestly, just save Sherlock and Mycroft from the terrible, terrible Holmes household. They should and could not have done better. But they deserve better. Much, much better than this. ]

[lordwaffleking]

Stop Holding My Hand And Let Me Masturbate Already

Official review of Pokemon Sun and Moon via Lord Waffle King Dot Com.

www.lordwaffleking.com is still currently down and under construction so I’m just gonna post this here for now.

The Pokemon series has come quite a long way. From the very first games for the Game Boy, all through the many sequels and spin-offs, the world of Pokemon has grown exponentially and touched many, many lives. I’ve been a huge Pokemon guy ever since the first games, and whenever a new one is announced, I’m always nothing less than enthralled.

They’ve been with me through it all, man. When I was learning to read? There’s a lot of reading in Pokemon. When I was learning to make friends? Pokemon was what brought us together. And when I started touching myself for the first time? Yeah, I busted some fat nuts on Pokemon.

And then Pokemon Sun and Moon came along. I followed the news all the way up until release. I reported it all, right here on WWW Dot Lord Waffle King Dot Com. The designs looked great. The game looked perfect. I was sure this would be the greatest one yet, beating out my previous favorite that was Black and White.

I was very, very wrong.

Pokemon Sun and Moon have to be the greatest train-wreck of a Pokemon game I’ve ever played. To simply call the game “bad” wouldn’t quite explain the situation well enough, but I wouldn’t hesitate to call it my least favorite Pokemon game. And it really breaks my heart.

In my time playing Sun and Moon, I lost interest several times. Something that’s never happened to me before in a Pokemon game. I had to force myself to complete it, and only because I wanted to know who all the characters were so I could jerk off to hentai of them.

I mean, you can’t just whack it to a girl you don’t know. What kind of animal does that? Someone that doesn’t respect women, that’s who.

Pokemon games have slowly become more and more bloated over the years, but Sun and Moon are the first to ever truly be weighed down by it. Sun and Moon doesn’t know who it’s catering to anymore, and in an attempt to please everyone, they’ve really only succeeded in providing a clusterfuck of things that really don’t mesh well.

It’s an incredibly ambitious game, don’t get me wrong. Graphics are great for a 3DS game, and the presentation is phenomenal. A great soundtrack like always, and the Alola region has to be one of the best out of all of them. The Pokemon designs are fucking fantastic, all of the characters are likeable and well-developed. And surprisingly, even the story is great. The writing potentially rivals Black and White, actually. There’s real character development and everything. Not just a fat kid that likes to dance. In that sense, I’d actually rank it as one of the best Pokemon games. Possibly the best.

And yet the promising plot and world-building is held back by what I can only assume was corporate meddling on the Pokemon Company’s part to try and make the game appeal to the little shits sucking their glue through a straw because their negligent moms let them play Pokemon Go in the fucking street. Maybe they felt like they had to compete with Yo-Kai Watch and try to make the whole game into one long cartoon episode.

Fuck that shit though.

I wanted to explore Alola. I wanted to catch Pokemon and immerse myself in this world. I wanted a grand adventure. What I got was a special ed class Easter egg hunt. Getting lead by the hand to all the conspicuously placed Easter eggs, and having them all pointed out to me and placed gently in my basket by an adult so that I wouldn’t accidentally shove them up my ass by mistake.

It’s like going to Disney World with gassy Uncle Boris. No, don’t go on ride. Uncle Boris no feel good. Uncle Boris eat too much asparagus. Please, keep walking. We walk around park and go home.

Elsa and Snow White could be flashing their tits and beckoning you to join them on the fucking tea cup ride, but no. Keep walking. Look, there’s Mickey Mouse over there. No, you can’t go say hi to him. That’s not a part of the fucking tour. Keep walking.

The entire first half of the game feels like one long tutorial. It doesn’t at any point let you go to explore on your own time. You go where it tells you, you explore the way it wants you to. Read all of the dialogue, do the battles it presents to you, watch all of the completely unnecessary cutscenes. Why so many cutscenes? Pokemon doesn’t need that many. The cutscenes are done very well, yes. They help to build up the characters and make the emotional impact they deliver in the end that much more powerful. Sure. But the same was accomplished with N in Pokemon Black and White, and it didn’t require stagnating the whole fucking game.

When the action does open up, during that entire first half of the game that spans two of the region’s four islands, it hardly even makes a difference. The islands are designed in such a linear fashion, there really isn’t even a need for the map that takes up the bottom half of the screen. It’s a straight, Point A to Point B map. There are no “dungeons” in the same sense that older Pokemon games have had. Caves, forests, and other places to explore are kept to a minimum, and when there are some, they’re usually presented as part of the game’s “trials” which replace the gyms from older games.

Which would be fine, if it didn’t hold your hand through trials just in case battling a singular wild “Totem” Pokemon with slightly higher stats than usual was too hard for you. It tells you very clearly where to go, what to do, and how to do it. The mini-map on the bottom screen, which is an unfortunate waste of UI space, always has a very clear marker point of where you’re supposed to go. It’ll even offer you little hints. Say, didn’t the professor go that way, you know, where the little red flag is? Gosh, there might be something important there. Let’s go there.

There’s genuinely a point in the game where the map will present a goal for you, and then instead of just letting you go there, you’ll walk out and find that an NPC was out there waiting for you with a brief cutscene telling you which way the mini-map, that’s always on the bottom pointing you in the right direction, wanted you to go. And then it’ll proceed to lead you there, having you follow the NPC all the way to the trial site. You know, in case a giant red flag on the bottom screen was too hard to find.

And that’s after the fucking two island-long tutorial.

This was a big step in making the game autism-proof, I get it. It was to make sure that the generation of kids raised on Angry Birds and fidget spinners could play the game just like everyone else. But there’s no way to turn it the fuck off? I wanna play Pokemon games too. Come on.

Pretty much every older DS Pokemon game used the bottom screen in a better way. Even Pokemon Ranger. I’d rather draw fucking circles than put up with this bullshit. Sure, make the completely redundant mini-map the default. But there’s so much more you could’ve put there.

The incredibly promising Poke Pelago, a touch screen-based way to interact with your Pokemon, is locked away in menus when it could’ve easily been at your fingertips at all times. And on top of that, every time you want to use it, you need to watch an unskippable cutscene of your trainer traveling to the fucking Poke Pelago just to use it.

The touch controls are also fairly sloppy with Poke Pelago, something surprising considering Pokemon’s years of slowly perfecting its touch screen UI. There’s so many tiny sprites on the bottom screen moving around, it’s easy to accidentally tap the wrong thing when you’re just trying to collect some God damned beans.

So many strides have been made in eliminating annoying quirks that the games have had for ages, and yet all the tiny steps towards progress are fucked up by glaring bad design choices.

It’s really sad, it really is. It’s like a Miss America pageant contestant in Pokemon game form. It’s really fucking gorgeous. I’d fuck it. And the script, clearly, had had a lot of work put into it. But in the end, it’s just really fucking stupid. If you asked Sun and Moon what it meant to them to be a Pokemon game, they would ramble on incoherently about Pokemon games bringing people together for ten minutes, and then point to an Alolan form Pokemon and say “Kanto, remember?” You can get your favorite Pokemon from the first games, but now they have a much more exotic penis.

And yet even with the shitty execution, I still felt the emotional climax at the end of the game. Which made it so hard for me to accept how much I hated it. By the end of the game, I wanted to love it, I really did. But now all I feel is the disappointment of how much better it could’ve been if they didn’t butcher it.

A Pokemon Sun and Moon where I get to explore all of the islands without cutscenes every couple steps. Where there aren’t ten different forms of point markers to tell you where you’re supposed to go at any given point, and I can play the game to its fullest without worrying about accidentally overpowering myself. Almost every cutscene ends with someone giving you ten Max Revives. And they heal your Pokemon for you on top of it. There was really no reason to ever use healing items or Pokemon Centers, which are now conveniently located on almost every route now instead of only towns, because everyone would heal you before every major battle anyway. There was a time where I actually used healing items, because I was towards the end of the game. But no, they were wasted. As soon as I approach this powerful, endgame trainer, someone steps in and pitches me an entire medicine cabinet and heals my Pokemon for me.

There’s a difference between “Oh, just turn the Exp. Share off, then it won’t be too easy” and “Oh, just don’t talk to anyone, don’t buy anything, don’t battle too much, don’t explore the miscellaneous side-quests on each route, don’t use the Poke Pelago, turn Exp. Share off, don’t look at your bottom screen, ignore all of the cutscene dialogue, and don’t do any of the StreetPass Festival Plaza shit or whatever. Come on, it’s not too easy”.

It’s like if they made a reality TV show where you have to live in the same house as 8 different grandmas, but try not to get fat from them stuffing you full of food. You can refuse all you want, but they’re gonna get you. Even if you eat only three times a day, you’re gonna die of cardiac arrest. And you’re only allowed to murder one, the rest have to go from natural causes. There’s no way you’ll take home the million-dollar prize. You have better chances of beating the robot from Jeopardy.

Even the obnoxious feature where Pokemon call for help doesn’t do anything to balance the game, it just makes it more of a drag.

“Too easy” or “for casuals” would be the cop out verdict. The truth is that the game is just miserably balanced, relying on an instant gratification-style of gameplay and a slow-paced narrative that makes the game intolerable. The point where things start actually getting good is the brief half hour before it cuts to the credits, and then the game is over before it even starts.

It’s like not being able to get your peepee up and then when it’s finally up you blast your load immediately.

I think a lot of people did not actually like Sun or Moon, despite the overwhelmingly positive reviews. I don’t think a lot of people played it all the way through, actually. It’s a lot like when No Man’s Sky launched, and everyone was pretending to love it until someone said something about it. Several people told me Sun and Moon was just fantastic, and then they’d say “yeah, I’m on the second island now” and then they’d just leave the game for something else.

I think a lot of people just watched all the leaks and then beat off to hentai of the new characters and then just pretended like they finished the game. Not saying that no one at all enjoyed the game, I’m sure a lot of people did. A lot of people could’ve looked past the glaring flaws and loved it for what it was.

That doesn’t stop the fact that it’s still the only Pokemon game I’ve ever played that I didn’t have fun with. And that will be a mark of shame that the game has to wear. I almost wish that all I did was watch the leaks and never play the game. I could’ve lived with the illusion that Pokemon could do no wrong.

But no. I had to be a gentleman and learn the names of all the trainers before looking up hentai of them.

This is why chivalry is fucking dead.

[thenfnotebook]

In Wrestling, It’s the Journey, Not the Destination

Last month, Kurt Angle was on the Statement Show podcast and discussed a number of WWE-related topics. The one that stood out to me regarded Roman Reigns, who Angle praised as a talented worker. However, he criticized that WWE, “didn’t have him go through the ringer.” Instead of overcoming smaller trials as a single star, such as the Intercontinental Title or King of the Ring tournament, he was thrust into the main event scene. In other words, he’s pushed at a rate that many fans can’t get behind.

Angle’s words have merit, as expected from a legend of his caliber, and it got me to thinking about the importance of the journey in professional wrestling. In the digital age we live in, where it seems like information is only a few smartphone taps and swipes away, we crave immediacy. I’ve been guilty of this as well, being a wrestling fan for close to 20 years. If I don’t get the desired result sometimes, I’m left disappointed. However, as I grow older and see how the industry changes, it reaffirms the notion that it’s not the destination that fans should focus on. Instead, it’s the journey that they should enjoy.

To frame this idea, think about some of the greatest underdog stories in movies. If you’re anything like me, the first name that comes to mind is “Rocky.” This series of movies, which focuses on a working-class hero who slowly works his way to the heavyweight title scene, is nothing short of beloved. One of the reasons for this that Rocky Balboa isn’t given the victory in the first few scenes. We have to see him struggle to get there. When he struggles, we, as viewers, empathize with him. The trials that he’s greeted with, over the course of several movies, only makes his happy endings all the more satisfying.

The story of a fighter clawing his way to the top, through hard work and skill alike, applies to pro wrestling as well. Reigns, despite his talent as a wrestler, hasn’t been booked in a way that should elicit cheers. Even though WWE may claim that he’s on the Authority’s bad side, the events that unfold on television are inconsistent. If the likes of Stephanie McMahon and Triple H loathe the idea of Reigns becoming a world champion, why is he granted opportunity after opportunity? For viewers, this example of mixed signals makes it difficult to root for the hero.

Compare this to Daniel Bryan, who had the best year of his career in 2014. Even years before then, face or heel, it was clear that the leader of the Yes Movement had a connection with the fans. He might not have been the biggest or strongest dog in the fight, but his bite couldn’t have been understated. Despite this, he was constantly on the offensive. Whether it was the nefarious Randy Orton dashing his dreams of success or Stephanie McMahon referring to him as simply a “B-plus player,” Bryan was far from the prototypical face of the company. To the general public, though, it didn’t matter.

As a matter of fact, it wasn’t just wrestling fans that got behind him. People around the world loved the bearded underdog, and the support built to the point where he found himself in two of the marquee matches of WrestleMania XXX. If Bryan’s career was like a storybook, the result of that main event would have been the perfect ending. After working through the independent scene for years, overcoming trial after trial in WWE afterward, standing tall at the end of the biggest wrestling show in the world is utterly perfect.

On a smaller scale in WWE, Sami Zayn’s quest to become the NXT Champion goes back all the way to 2013, when he took part in a battle royal to determine the number one contender for the title in question. To say that he struggled would be an understatement. When it seemed like he was so close to becoming champion, his opportunity was routinely taken from him. At TakeOver: Fatal 4-Way in 2014, I wasn’t the only one that groaned in despair when Zayn was on the cusp of a 3-count, only for titleholder Adrian Neville to drag the referee out of the ring. After a while, the goodhearted Canadian started to show more fire, which created a trail that lead to TakeOver: R-Evolution.

The emotion during Zayn’s final encounter with Neville was nothing short of epic. As a matter of fact, many fans considered it 2014’s Match of the Year. The wrestling itself was exciting, but the fact that fans finally received the ending they wanted made it all the more satisfying. To see Zayn standing tall with the NXT Championship, after failing to claim it time and time again, filled fans with pride. Once again, this is an example of pro wrestling giving fans the joy of the journey. Zayn’s title victory wouldn’t have been nearly as sweet without it.

The underdog story in wrestling doesn’t apply to WWE alone, either. New Japan Pro Wrestling, for a few years up until Wrestle Kingdom 10, told an excellent story featuring company “ace” Hiroshi Tanahashi and cocky yet skilled youngster Kazuchika Okada. Their feud centered on their Tokyo Dome encounters. In 2013, Okada lost to Tanahashi in the main event of Wrestle Kingdom 7, failing to secure the IWGP Heavyweight Title. Two years later, at Wrestle Kingdom 9, Okada once again fell short against the company’s biggest star. The latter loss effected Okada so much that he openly wept while making his way back up the ramp. What could the Rainmaker do to defeat the “ace” of the company?

While this feud always existed, it wasn’t like Tanahashi and Okada only faced each other. If Okada wasn’t at Tanahashi’s throat, he was battling Bullet Club, overcoming roadblocks like Bad Luck Fale and taking AJ Styles to the limit. Meanwhile, Tanahashi found himself in a number of programs, including a silly yet enjoyable one against NJPW funnyman Toru Yano. In any event, even if they took different paths during their careers, they would meet up again. This was especially true when Okada was the defending IWGP Heavyweight Champion against G1 Climax winner, Tanahashi. The stage for their final encounter? The Tokyo Dome, Wrestle Kingdom 10.

In 2016, Okada was prepared. He was a more seasoned wrestler than he was a few years ago and it showed during this Tokyo Dome encounter. The ending of the match was especially dramatic, as he didn’t let Tanahashi’s wrist go after a devastating Rainmaker lariat. Instead, he connected with another to the roar of a Tokyo crowd that was utterly sucked into a killer main event. Finally, after years of coming up short against Tanahashi in Tokyo Dome encounters, Okada reigned supreme. Even if you’re a non-Japanese viewer, this story proved to be engaging and NJPW deserves credit for allowing it to be told over the course of several years. Simply put, it’s one of the best told wrestling narratives in recent memory.

As wrestling fans, in this day and age, we’re conditioned to receive the best possible outcome as soon as possible. Is it necessarily for the best? In this writer’s humble opinion, if this was the case, we would miss out on a number of thrilling stories. Tales like Bryan, Zayn and Okada’s are just a few examples. Even to this day, I have to stop and tell myself that the destination is just that: a destination. What matters, more than anything else, is what it takes to get there.

For this reason, as well as many others, pro wrestling should be enjoyed for the journeys it takes us on.

[leonorakidd93]

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HENRY BLOFELD: My dear old things, it was the greatest cricket match of all time

What drama, what tension, what heroic deeds.

I have never seen anything compelling on television in my life, I cannot remember any competition that has kept me on my guard as the final of the World Cup yesterday. my life Wasn't it amazing?

It is a glorious achievement to rejoice the heart and bring a loom to the eye.

The triumph was all the more emotional because The triumph was all the more emotional because it was so close. My wife and I watched it at home in Norfolk with a bottle of very decent bordeaux. It became so tense, we felt the need to open another.

Henry Blofeld (depicted on Lord & # 39; s in 2017) says the triumph of England on Sunday with one of the major milestones of the English cricket

<img id = "i-1ad5109420798b57" src = "https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/07/14/ 23 / 16043864-7246919-Top_of_the_world_The_England_cricket_team_celebrate_after_one_of-a-20_1563141607988.jpg "height =" 420 "width =" 634 "alt =" Top of the world: The English cricket team celebrates after one of the greatest days in their history – winning it WC "

<img id =" i-1ad5109420798b57 "src =" https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/07/14/23/16043864-7246919-Top_of_the_world_The_England_cricket_team_celebrate_after_one_of_a- 20_1563141607988.jpg "height =" 420 "width =" 634 "alt =" Top of the world: England's cricket team is celebrating after one of the greatest days in their history – winning the World Cup "

[1] 9459 012] Top of the world: the England cricket team is celebrating after one of the greatest days in their history – winning the World Cup

I really felt for New Zealand.

Of course it was great for England and, I know, it is a great word, they deserve their congratulations. The side of Captain Eoin Morgan kept his cool, to quote Kipling, most of the spectators lost theirs.

The Duke of Wellington, the hero of Waterloo, was born in Dublin, while Field Marshal Montgomery was an Ulster tribe.

Cricket has been a kind of marginalized sport in recent years, with a shrinking audience. But this spectacular one will have caught the audience's imagination. Parks and gardens will be full this summer with young children imitating Ben Stokes with the bat and Jofra Archer with the ball.

The triumph belongs to one of the major milestones of the English cricket, including the pulsating Ashes series of 2005,

And how could Ian Botham's Ashes from 1981, when the dear old Beef, when in its invincible splendor, the Aussies struck. Mind you, Ian was not the only cricket player who could reject the Australians. The Zimbabwean Eddo Brandes, never the smartest guy, ever took action against the men of Down Under, but was only greeted by one of the Aussies with the question: & # 39; Hey Eddo, how come you are so fat? & # 39; Without missing a trace, Brandes replied: & # 39; Because every time I go to bed with your wife, she gives me a chocolate cookie. & # 39;

Beyond cricket, the world cup triumph of yesterday is up there with the great landmarks in our sports heritage that have enchanted the nation.

<img id = "i-329e5f86af8a4f35" src = "https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/07/14/22/16046400-7246919- image-m-19_1563141584878.jpg "height =" 420 "width =" 634 "alt =" Winner moment: the English Jos Buttler breaks the stumps to win the Cricket World Cup in the most dramatic way imaginable "

<img id = "i-329e5f86af8a4f35" src = "https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/07/14/22/16046400-7246919-image-m-19_1563141584878.jpg" height = "420 "width =" 634 "alt =" Winning moment: the Englishman Jos Buttler breaks the stumps to win the Cricket World Cup in the most dramatic way imaginable "

Winning moment: Jos Buttler of England breaks the stumps to win the Cricket World Cup in the most dramatic way you can imagine

But the closest parallels are with our others.

Bedlam: England players drive away after they have won the Cricket World Cup for the first time at national team sports, in particular the Rugby World Cup victory of 2003 and the even more resounding football victory of 1966 in Wembley, inspired by Geoff Hurst & # 39; s hat trick

Alf Ramsey, the manager of the 1966 squadron, was rewarded a knighthood after the defeat of West Germany, while the skipper Bobby Moore received the OBE. Captain Morgan must stand in line for a gong after yesterday's drama.

He will certainly be greeted with more prominence than the unfortunate English skipper Mike Denness, whose Ashes team from 1974-75 was destroyed by Aussie firepower. ]

One morning after Denness came home, he received a strange envelope, simply addressed to & # 39; Mike Denness, cricket player & # 39 ;. No address, no house name or zip code. Inside it was a briefly worded message: & # 39; Dear Mr. Denness, if this letter ever you, the post office thinks much more of you than I do. & # 39; In a time of political crisis, this victory will be a huge injection for the nation. There is nothing like a triumph of high octaves to fuel a mood of patriotism. The triumph of the Morgan men has a very modern look. Compared to the way cricket was played when I first went to Cambridge University in the late 1950s, the sport is now much more aggressive and faster. Hitting is less defensive, field work much more dynamic.

The deceased American comedian Robin Williams once said & cricket is baseball on Valium & # 39; but it would be absurd to make such a comment today about the one-day game

<img id = "i-d4082d0a6fa55976" src = "https: //i.dailymail .co.uk / 1s / 2019/07/14/23 / 16043870-7246919-Making_a_splash_Cricket_fans_in_Trafalgar_Square_cool_off_in_the-a-25_1563141628953.jpg "height =" 436 "width =" 634 "alt =" Making a splash: cricketgarans in Traf Square in traf the fountains, the competition reached a gripping climax on Sunday

<img id = "i-d4082d0a6fa55976" src = "https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/07/14/23 /16043870-7246919-Making_a_splash_Cricket_fans_in_Trafalgar_Square_cool_off_in_the-a-25_1563141628953.jpg "height =" 436 "width =" 634 "alt =" Make a splash: cricket fans in Trafalgar Square cool down in the fountains conquering the climax im reached the climax Sunday climbed the climax "i-d4082d0a6fa55976" src = "https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/07/14/23/16043870-7246919-Making_a_splash_Cricket_fans_in_Trafalgar_Square_cool_off_in_the -a-25_1563141628953.jpg "height =" 436 "width =" 634 "alt =" <img id = "i-d4082d0a6fa55976" src = "https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/07/ 14/23 / 16043870-7246919-Making_a_splash_Cricket_fans_in_Trafalgar_Square_cool_off_in_the-a-25_1563141628953.jpg "height =" 436 "width =" 634 "alt =" <img id = "i-d4082d0a6fa55976ps sicail" https://sicail.mail.exe .uk / 1s / 2019/07/14/23 / 16043870-7246919-Making_a_splash_Cricket_fans_in_Trafalgar_Square_cool_off_in_the-a-25_1563141628953.jpg "height =" 436 "width =" 634 "alt =" Making a splash: cricket fans in Trafalgar Square In the fountains the competition reached a gripping climax on Sunday

In another sense, the victorious England team is very modern because it closely matches the diverse nature of modern British society. Fast-paced bowler Jofra Archer, some of the express deliveries in the tournament reaching 95 km / h, was born in Barbados, while magical leg spinner Adil Rashid comes from a Bradford family of Pakistani migrants.

Morgan herself, raised on a council estate north of Dublin, is of mixed descent, with an Irish father and an English mother. As a prodigy in his youth, he decided to play for England at the age of thirteen.

Yesterday's victory strengthens the place of the game in the center of our national identity and story. Whatever cynics think, cricket is synonymous with the English character and what it means to be English. As great writer Neville Cardus once said: & # 39; There can't be a summer in this country without cricket. & # 39;

Inevitably, the very English trait of humor associated with cricket has never been shown to be more hilarious than in the episode during a 1991 test, when my old friend Brian Johnston was caught by a smile when his colleague Jonathan Agnew described how Ian Botham lost his wicket because & # 39; he couldn't quite get his leg & # 39;

In 1882, when Australia defeated England with only seven points in the Oval, a spectator was so excited that he chewed through the handle of his umbrella. Yesterday's final was more fascinating. People who have never seen the game are now addicted. The dear old sport that I love can be about to be revived.

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