#especially if it’s anime characters where they don’t have any ethnic features

[solitaireships]

I really wish people would like. Learn more about what east Asian people look like, especially when it comes to fanart. There’s of course a lot of variability and no one right way for east Asian people to look, but it’s rare to find people who do art of them with monolid eyes or low nose bridges or epicanthic folds. Or people won’t realize that east Asian people tend to have lighter body hair, so they don’t usually have as much facial hair or arm hair

[miyulien]

rant.

extremely unrelated post regarding Omori/pjsk or my au!

I am very annoyed by how hoyoverse ultimately refuses to incorporate any kind of melanin or dark-skinned characters in their game(s), especially in genshin, where they take cultures of other people. they take all of the food, the landscapes, the language, and the mannerisms as well as the clothing, (be it over-sexualised at times) but they don’t carry the beautiful ethnic features that the people of those cultures have.

i am aware that hoyoverse is a Chinese company, and its player base is full of Chinese and the standard is very much based on the Chinese standards (pale skin, thin legs, tall stature, straight hair etc.) however, regardless of your country’s beauty standards, you can’t take steal other country’s cultures and proceed to not use the people’s appearances as well, it’s like you say everything they’ve made is beautiful, from the landscapes, the buildings, the cultural traditions and the way they act.. but you. its genuinely so hurtful to see in for example; sumeru,

literally based off of middle-eastern and south-asians, which both of these cultures have predominantly dark-skinned people. but our cultures are being used constantly without our own ethnic features along with it.

the only time I ever see a character with my skin tone in sumeru, is the enemies we have to fight. the disrespect that is, to know your skin tone just isn’t good enough, not marketable enough, so they won’t make you a real character.

the idea that everything we’ve created, things we’ve worked years on, traditions that have been kept and maintained as well as shared over the centuries, is practically perfect and beautiful in hoyo’s eyes.. but, us? we’re not marketable enough, our looks aren’t good enough. the idea of having melanin is jarring nowadays, seeing characters with some sort of “imperfections” like “dark skin” is disgusting. why must we cast away the beauties of others appearance, the way they look in general, but we proceed to be overjoyed at their creations yet not the creators themselves.

it is genuinely super annoying to see how little dark skinned characters there are in genshin, and hsr, I’m not even talking about just adding diversity just to appease others, I’m talking about adding dark skinned characters and just making them normal people, without simply adding melanin just to make others shut up. why can u make every single light skinned character normal, and human, yet you can’t do the same with dark skinned characters? sumeru, natlan are based off of countries/regions that are filled with beautiful different skin tones, and hair types that don’t fit the Chinese beauty standards.

and it’s fine, beauty standards are present everywhere, but it shouldn’t be an issue to not make everything fit your country’s beauty standards, especially when you are profiting off of another country’s culture. also, can we talk about how there is literally barely any proper significance dark skin characters have in their storylines? there is barely any kind of importance that dark skinned characters have in events or even the main storyline, they appear once or twice during the quests but barely matter afterwards? they are constantly shunned and cast to the side, as if hoyoverse is ashamed of including any kind of diversity…? you can take everyone’s cultural backgrounds and their own ethnicity’s creations, but you can’t take their ethnicity’s appearance too? is it so hard to make a character with curly hair, or wavy hair for that matter.. or even make them black? is it hard to have afros, or braids, or make styles other then just exaggerated stereotypical anime straight hair?

I know it is to get profit, and that these characters wouldn’t do as well from what hoyoverse sees..

but, so many people are longing for these types of appearances, so many people want these representations, for dark skinned characters to be seen in media without simply having to be stereotypical or just added for basic diversity, just.. to be normal, like any other light skinned characters are.

It’s like me taking Chinese culture, the beautiful views, the buildings, the food, the mannerisms, and the traditions.. but not their ethnic features. people would be complaining over it and be totally pissed off, but why do we brush off the issue when it’s regarding dark skinned people not getting representation when their literal culture is constantly used in different games, like genshin, but the people themselves aren’t included?

i am not stating that light skinned people aren’t beautiful, in fact they are stunning, everyone is regardless of their melanin or lack thereof, I believe everyone’s features are beautiful, from dark skin, to tanned, to light, or pale. straight hair, wavy hair, curly hair, or coily hair, or even mixes. everyone is beautiful, and that is the truth, they all have features that make them stunning. but it’s just that the representations are so minimal in terms of dark skinned people, that is why I’m making this post.

as u can see, the literal pyro archon has not a shade of melanin, like what? none of the archons have melanin, not a single one of them? literal archons based off of regions that have predominantly dark skinned people, are all pale? huh??

i love hoyo games very much, and I love the stories but i just have noticed a total disregard and practical disrespect of dark skinned people who have stated that they want more representation seeing as hoyo uses their own culture but not their appearances, its just depressing to see what your ancestors have created, the hard work it took for you to maintain your culture, only for a huge company to swoon in and take that culture, and market it, but change your appearances to better fit their idea of ‘attractive’. As if you aren’t good enough, you aren’t marketable whatsoever.

they can easily incorporate inazuma accurately, which is based off of Japanese culture, they can use their ethnic features, and the way that they look, they can use the culture, the food, the traditions and events and the mannerisms and clothing, but they can also use their features? what’s the difference between Hispanic culture, and Japanese culture? why is it easy to use Japanese features but not Hispanic? it’s no coincidence.

I don’t like complaining in general, especially abt this, but honestly I have just seen this happen so much during the updates that I really got tired of cultures being used and praised, but the people themselves aren’t worthy of the same thing because they don’t fit the ‘beauty standard’

at the end of the day, you can do what you want, but if you are going to use a country’s culture, and profit off of it, the least you could do is also include their ethnic features instead of appeasing to your country’s beauty standards constantly.

hoyoverse is a multi-billion dollar company, it really isn’t that hard to include other ethnicites beautiful melanin and natural ethnic traits that they have, like greek noses, flat noses, upturned noses, small lips, big lips, big eyes and small eyes. thick eyelashes, long eyelashes, mixed skin tones, freckles and more, it’s just features that carry beauty, the mesmerising history of a culture to them. it isn’t that hard to include it, if you are willing to steal a culture, and call that culture perfect, except the people that created that culture.

do better, hoyoverse.

[eumenidaes]

3, 6, 10?

3. screenshot or description of the worst take you've seen on tumblr

People call a woman named Yang Xiao Long white because she’s blonde and has light eyes. Like we are in anime world with rwby where people are born with cat tails and you can be born with naturally pink hair and purple eyes. An Asian woman being blonde is not the most unbelievable thing happening genetically here!

But then you say that she’s Chinese and all these people start crawling out of the woodwork going “oh she can’t be because there’s no China in Remnant”. Racial coding in fantasy is a thing. “She can’t be because her mom has a Welsh name so she’s gotta be Welsh, name doesn’t indicate heritage”. Fascinating how you say that while also saying her mom has to be white bcs she has a Welsh name. Also her mom is Japanese coded so what’s the play here. You guys just hate Asian people

And if someone doesn’t initially get it bcs again Yang is a character that is in an anime series with blonde hair, light eyes, and no ethnic features due to the way anime always makes their characters look racist, that’s fine as long as you eventually realize she is Asian. But so many people will double down and refuse to admit that any character in rwby is Asian and it pisses me off so much. How stupid do you have to be a woman named Yang Xiao Long or a man named Sun Wukong are white. Call out the colorism in the show but don’t whitewash characters to do that

which ship fans are the most annoying?

St3phC4ss fans. I used to like that ship but the fans (especially on twitted) started pissing me off so much now that I’ve realized it’s actually very bland. Someone on twitter did a poll for DC ships and someone was mad that Steph and Cass loss to Clois and like. Sorry your boring non canon ship lost to one of the most iconic couples in comic history. Once of them was like “well Steph Cass brings the gays to the table” do they really bcs all I’m seeing is a queerbait that beat an actual real gay couple in the comics

worst part of fanon

Once again talking about DC comics, but all the batfam shit here is the most annoying thing in the world. I was just complaining about people who ship Steph and Cass, but at least they remember those two exist. Average batfam people only know their versions of Dick, Jason, Tim, and Damian. And each of them are boiled down to single inaccurate takes— sunshine big bro, edgy, coffee addict nerd, and violent. God help you if you want to see Duke included in something, they don’t know who that is. I am not convinced that a single person creating batfam fanon has read more than two comics in their life

[yamujiburo]

I'm asking here because you don't allow anon on your other blog; In reference to your recent images of rosalina/peach/daisy (which I love btw), why is it okay to turn white characters black, but if someone turned black characters white its bad? I'm half black and I'd like some insight from another poc!

for sure~ 

on the surface, yes, whitewashing and “blackwashing” seem the same. but they are very different when considering the historical context of black people/poc in media and representation (in the usa especially)

minorities having any kind of representation is a luxury, while for white people, it’s just the norm to see themselves. poc often have roles taken from them because they’re seen as undesirable, not marketable and not worth representing. that’s not to say there isn’t representation for poc, but it is considerably less than white people. 

for example if you can think of a character trope, there are probably several white characters out there that fit the description. but for poc, they’re a lot of the time no more than just side characters or a stereotype. it’s getting better now but we’re still no where close to where we need to be (especially when it comes to animated content).

so, when poc consume largely white media, it’s normal for them to grow attached to said characters and maybe want interpret them in a way that reflects them. when poc racebend it’s usually from a place of just wanting to see themselves as a type of character they really like. it’s harmless! 

however, when a character that is established as a minority is whitewashed, it does NOT come from that place, seeing how there is an endless amount of proper representation of white people anywhere else. I have not seen an instance of whitewashing that wasn’t malicious. It’s always to actively piss people off or to change ethnic features and dark skin to something “prettier” which is incredibly racist. like the nessa situation. people whitewashed her saying, white skin is prettier and she looked less ugly with it and the same redraws of her quickly devolved into people just drawing racist caricatures of her (someone straight up drawing her as a monkey). 

some people will argue, “well then go make your own show with black people and poc then” and what they don’t understand is that people are CONSTANTLY. TRYING. but like i said before, a lot of people don’t see black characters or characters of color as marketable enough so their ideas are either shut down or whitewashed to hell in order to make them more “appealing”.

this doesn’t just go for racebending either. this goes for any minority or underrepresented group. making LGB people straight, making trans people cis, making disabled people abled, making fat people skinny, making dark skinned black people light skinned black people etc. all are harmful and put out the message that these groups are undesirable and should be “fixed” which is just not true. “well wouldn’t this make white people feel the same way?” No. because they are very clearly desirable given that they have been “the standard” for centuries, they have been respectfully represented for centuries and still are.

if we lived in a world where white people didn’t decide to create the concept of race, didn’t use that concept to portray themselves as superior than others and didn’t reinforce racism, we might be having a different conversation. maybe we’d have equal representation if that was the case. but we very much do not. 

[renaroo]

Other History? More Like Other MYSTERY

as in it’s a MYSTERY how the hell this got past an editor the week before Pride Month are you fucking kidding me?

I was kind of hoping for more than like... a week of being back on tumblr before I breathed fire and ripped a comic book to shreds. But we all know why I’m here.

There are so many preemptive things to get out of the way before I rip into this thing...

John Ridley as a writer in other forms of media has been incredibly accomplished and an important additional voice to entertainment industries. I do not wish to take away from that or to minimize the impact of voices like his.

But, you know, he’s a voice in media. Not the end-all, be-all to all marginalized people worldwide who can substitute his perspective for any nonwhite straight male voice. And I don’t think that has ever been more apparent than the continued spiral down the drain that has been every issue of The Other History of the DC Universe since the first. 

DC’s “new” approach to everything being canon and everything mattering is dumb and filled to the brim with ways it’s going to backfire and reveal itself to be the eye sore of publications that it’s aiming for, but I was curious to see how they would try to incorporate these characters’ long and contentious histories in the comics with the real world issues they often were billed to tackle, and try to fit it into the current pop culture landscape. That was the whole reason I had my eye on this comic to begin with.

By the second issue we were getting some stark warning signs because as much as I appreciated hearing an authentic perspective on how the Teen Titans brand carried on while neglecting its landmark Black teen heroes (Mal Duncan and Karen Beecher), there was a note of cruelty added to the issue that felt otherwise misplaced and uncharacteristic of the tone being set. 

There was no reason to have a significant portion of that issue dedicated to Mal and Karen’s monologues taking some aggressive words out on Roy Harper specifically for being an addict. 

Perhaps it was a quirk of writing from a flawed perspective or a show of how righteous upset and anger could be turned outward to other people suffering in a vy for your own empowerment. 

I’m now pretty sure that wasn’t it at all. I’m pretty sure because it kept getting worse every issue and it’s culminated in today’s issue where the retelling of Renee Montoya’s story managed to be petty, cruel, shockingly pro-police brutality int its adulation of Jim Gordon and especially Harvey Bullock, and managed to make a well-rounded and very beloved Latina lesbian and just retrofit every stereotype she never had before to her without regard for what it did to her story or to the stories of people around her. 

Honestly, lapsed faith and a poke at the damage that Catholic guilt can have on especially queer believers is kind of my jam, so it’s not that I wouldn’t be down for a story with that perspective. I could even understand exploring that with Renee. But not at the expense of her established history.

Which is a question all of its own. Here we have the skeletal structure of Renee’s life events that we have read before (in much better stories), but they are surprisingly out of order and also shockingly twisted in a way to make EVERYONE as unpleasant as possible. 

And in a way that has convinced me that either John Ridley has never read comics featuring Renee, or that he was mandated to change things that had no business being changed.

According to this issue Renee hated Batman and other superheroes? Which, ah, I don’t even know where that could come from. Ever since the animated series where she got started, Renee’s whole bag has been “the acolyte of Jim Gordon, only other cop who supports Batman”. Like I don’t even know how you get around that.

But according to Ridley she’s hated them all along as an extension of her internalized homophobia and self-loathing. Great.

What follows out of that is that apparently? Renee and Batman specifically butted heads over wanting to rehabilitate Harvey Dent? As in Renee wanted to help him and BATMAN was the one flipping out and saying Harvey was a sociopath and couldn’t be helped.

Like. I’m starting to question if Ridley has read Batman comics before. I don’t know where that interpretation could possibly come from? Bruce and Harvey were friends? Bruce has always held out hope for saving Harvey from his psychosis? It’s like. THE storyline for Two-Face.

The cop stuff... I don’t really know how to talk about the cop stuff to be completely honest. If you mention the LA Riots on one page and a few pages later try to frame it so that over policing and methods of brutality weren’t a thing until 9/11... I don’t know what to say to you. 

I’d say maybe I was being ungenerous here except there were two characters who got entire full page spreads about what good cops they were. And one of them was goddamn Harvey Bullock with the explicit commentary that Renee USED to be uncomfortable with his torture methods and general brutality but figured it was “okay” because he knew how “innocent people screamed different” and that he “never collared someone and it didn’t stick” because. Y’know. Police violence and falsifying evidence never go hand in hand. what the actual fuck ever right?

The timeline for Renee and Kate’s relationship is also completely changed which means that we get to add a trope I just LOVE as a lesbian personally, which is that lesbians can’t keep relationships and can’t keep from cheating on their loving partners. Especially when they are butch. 

And I’m not talking about Renee cheating on Kate. Oh, no. Ridley decided Kate was the Other Woman during Renee’s relationship with Daria. 

And just.. the cruel commentary that Renee had about both Kate and Daria throughout. It made my skin crawl. The way she talked about other women in general made my skin crawl. “Uncomplicated women” “Broken souls” “Can’t be with someone better than yourself”

So I actually planned to go into a full rage post about just the queer content because 1. my lane and 2. it honestly affected me so bad I was shaking and tearing up in anger a bit. Every single friend I know who loves Kate and Renee, see themselves in Kate and Renee, have been the same kind of mess I am after this.

The NASTINESS of the internal monologue. I don’t know how to explain it more than this is how poorly men think of flf and to have one use a character so meaningful to the community to spout this hatefulness has revolted me in a way I... haven’t had happen to me for a while.

I was going to talk about the weirdness of just... randomly deciding to retcon Renee’s parents into being undocumented when that’s never been a thing before and just doing NOTHING with it the whole while after. Or how it’s pretty questionable how Renee suddenly became so adherently Catholic when it’s never been portrayed like that before (that’s Hel B’s bag, JPV if you squint) but it’s entwined with any of her commentary on her ethnicity p sus too but I don’t have the nuance for that discussion right now.

Rena Rants are back and what a fucking JOKE this comic was. 

I didn’t pay for it and neither should you.

P.S. bringing back Tim Fox and calling him “Jace” is dumb as fuck too

[unwhitewashthebadbatch]

Disney Email Draft 2

(going under a cut because it's much longer. Here is the Google Doc link for anyone who would like to comment directly)

Reminder that we are encouraging critiques and comments regarding this email!

To Bob Iger, Kathleen Kennedy, Dave Filoni, Jennifer Corbett, and the creative team of Star Wars: The Bad Batch:

We hope this email finds you all well. We are fans of color, disabled fans, neurodivergent fans, and Jewish fans writing out of concern for the portrayal of our communities in the Disney+ series Star Wars: The Bad Batch. For several months now, we have been campaigning on social media to spread awareness about these concerns through #UnwhitewashTBB, a movement we began to raise awareness about the ways in which the series has poorly represented several minoritized groups of people.

Just like the creators of Star Wars: The Bad Batch, all of the creators of #UnwhitewashTBB grew up with Star Wars as the backbones of their childhoods, and for many of us, Star Wars: The Clone Wars was crucial to our development as artists, writers, creators, and lifelong Star Wars fans. We are all firm believers in the phrase “Star Wars is for everyone”, and we would like to see Disney support that message by hearing our plea.

As fans of color, as disabled fans, as neurodivergent fans, and as Jewish fans, we’ve seen ourselves on screen in both good and bad ways, but recently it has been more the latter than the former. One such reason is Star Wars: The Bad Batch, a show whose premise piqued many fans’ interest, but whose main cast has left an increasingly sour taste in the mouths of those who watched.

The series follows an elite squad of clone troopers who have named themselves The Bad Batch, due in part to their series of mutations that gives them an edge over regular clones on the battlefield. These mutations drastically altered the appearance of each of the members to a generally lighter, more Caucasian appearance--one that is inconsistent with how the original Jango Fett actor Temuera Morisson looks. Fans take issue with the implications in the writing and design of The Bad Batch: that in order to be elite, special, and better than one’s contemporaries--in order to have a story worth telling--one must also be white or as close as possible.

Merriam-Webster defines whitewashing as “to alter (something) in a way that favors, features, or caters to white people: such as to alter (an original story) by casting a white performer in a role based on a nonwhite person or fictional character” The #UnwhitewashTBB movement comes with two carrds explaining the grievances of the fans. A summary for each character is given below:

Sergeant Hunter, the leader, closely resembles Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo character, despite being a clone of a man of color. The importance of his character, the fatherliness he has with Omega, and his centrality to both their Season 7 appearance in The Clone Wars and the series itself sends the message that important people look

Wrecker is the demolitions expert, and he’s the only member of The Bad Batch with features similar to that of a Maori man’s, like Temuera Morrison/Jango Fett. He’s large with broad features, brown skin, and is a stereotype of men of color. His personality as first introduced to the audience was that of a loud, aggressive, impatient, slow man who called frequently for violence/destruction. He falls into the “Loveable Brute” trope, an observation that is supported by statements from supervising director Brad Rau and voice actor Dee Bradely Baker that Wrecker is like a little boy and has a heart of gold.

Crosshair is the sniper on the team, and he’s the most derisive of the “regs”--the regular clone troopers. Taken in conjunction with his appearance (inspired by Clint Eastwood), the various messages being sent by the writing and appearance of the other team members, and his comment about the regular troopers--the he and the Batch are superior and thus should join the Empire--his character pushes forth a message that there is superiority inherent in whitened or fully white features.

Tech, the technology specialist, has incredibly light skin and hair compared to the regular clones. His mutation made him a genius, with an IQ that outpaces that of any other clone in the Republic. Fans of color are upset that Tech’s genius mutation apparently also affected his skin color, as now this creates a direct link between intelligence and appearance/race. Contrast Tech with Wrecker, who is the exact opposite in every way, and this harm becomes only more apparent. In addition to this, many Autistic fans of The Bad Batch have noted that Tech, being “on the spectrum” (according to Dee Bradley Baker) is a popular stereotype of Autistic people: a nerdy-looking white man with a formal way of speaking who’s a genius but dismissive of others’ feelings. Baker also plays Tech with a British accent, further cementing the harmful message that intelligence is in some way connected to ethnicity.

Omega is the newest member of The Bad Batch. Despite being a pure Jango clone, she’s come out looking nothing like Boba Fett--she has lighter skin than he does, as well as blonde hair. Fans are concerned about the connection between genetic purity and light skin/blonde hair, as this is directly harmful to the people of color who don’t sport those features.

Echo is the ARC Trooper of the team, but many fans--disabled fans especially--fear that his series of disabilities have reduced him to the “droid sidekick”. Echo does not have a prosthetic, instead sporting a scomp-arm attachment that allows him to plug into computers but would otherwise hinder him greatly in daily tasks. He rarely is the focus of an episode, and the series has not given him as much attention as it has given characters like Hunter and Omega. Disabled fans worry about the lack of attention given to his medical trauma, and fans of color note that his skin color goes beyond what a brown man who’s been without sunlight for a few months would look like.

The issues do not stop here. Asian fans noticed and were harmed by a Tiananmen Square parallel in 1x10, “Common Ground”--a recreation that was led by an Eastern Asian-coded woman. Jewish fans are hurt by the antisemitic stereotype in Cid the broker, a greedy lizard woman who speaks with an accent commonly associated with New York Jews--and who is played by Jewish actress Rhea Perlman. Black fans were harmed by the whitewashing in Saw Gererra and the one other Black character in The Bad Batch being a Black woman who works for the Empire and burns civilians alive.

The full analyses can be found in the official #UnwhitewashTBB carrd: unwhitewashthebadbatch.carrd.co. We respectfully ask that you read this carrd and give a public statement in response to these criticisms.

Our movement has only gained traction since its inception on March 30th, 2021. A few months later, we wrote and released an open letter on Change.org to be signed by supporters of #UnwhitewashTBB, and every day it gains new signatures and draws nearer to the next milestone. A survey we released over a month ago has received over 1,100 responses and also continues to climb. The latter displays a range of opinions regarding The Bad Batch, but one sentiment stands out: Hunter, Crosshair, Tech, Wrecker, Omega, and Echo are written in stereotypical and actively harmful ways. Respondents were shocked at outdated portrayals of Autism, sickened by antisemitic stereotypes, and confused at how, in this current social and political climate, a family-friendly corporation like Disney could greenlight a series that sends a message that is the complete opposite of “Star Wars is for Everyone”. Some sample responses are below:

“I would just like to elaborate on the ableism aspect. As a amputee myself, I don’t like how Echo’s trauma has been ignored. The whole reason he is with the BB is because of what he went through. Losing one limb, never mind multiple, it’s extremely difficult. They made it seem like just because his prosthetic can be of use on missions, that means he isn’t grieving the loss of his actual hand. There is no healing or evolution. It also feels wrong to only address the fact that echo uses prosthetics for the sake of hacking into machinery. Prosthetics are so personal and become a real part of who you are as a person.” - Respondent 130

“...I can't believe Star Wars is still doing this, and that an entire team of animators with a huge budget can't get skin tone right. I didn't even know the clones were supposed to have a NZ Māori accent until a friend told me. That's a big deal, since I live in NZ and hear it every day…” - Respondent 209

“As someone who is neurodivergent myself, Tech and Wrecker just. sting, you know? in a “is that really what you think of us” kind of way. I grew up in an environment where intersectional equality was heavily discussed, and I can still miss things. Having Jewish friends does not mean that Cid’s antisemitic implications can’t go right over my head until someone points them out (thank you).” - Respondent 87

“As a fan of color, its irritating and painful to watch and be brushed off as "lighting issues" and see justifications made by white fans and producers...It also feels very bad to me that TCW spent 7 seasons with several arcs emphasizing that the clones were all as individual as a 'normal' person, but then undo all that with TBB, which centers a group of "special" clones (who are suspiciously white) and have them treat the "regs" as a homogeneous group who are lesser than them, and then expect us to find it within ourselves to put that aside to enjoy the MCs. The way the treat "regs" is very offputting and it made me dislike them since their introduction...Star Wars is no stranger to racist and antisemitic media, but I must say, the blantancy of Sid, a greedy lizard who essentially financially enslaves the protaganists, being Jewish-coded and being protrayed by a Jewish voice actress is really next-level even for Star Wars. As a Jewish fan, it really grates on me.” - Respondent 40

“I’m disabled and autistic, and the ableism is appalling to watch. Watching Echo be treated as subhuman for needing machinery to survive makes me feel like having implants to keep my spine from breaking itself would have me be the pitied member of any group. I am disgusted by the blatant antisemitism, as a fair number of my friends are Jewish and it hurts me to think that people can so easily hate others based on internalized stereotypes. Me and my friends have also critically analyzed the fact that, despite being clones of a character portrayed by Temuera Morrison, for some reason the bad batch look nothing like him in any way. No resemblance in any way: just a bunch of someone’s badly worked characters fraught with disgusting writing decisions and design choices that make no sense. It makes me angry to think that the writers for this show, and to an extent any modern writer, would believe that using harmful tropes to make a story is acceptable and someone brings in profit. I tried to watch it out of fact that my family likes Star Wars and we all grew up watching it, but all of these unhealthy assumptions and terrible choices in terms of writing and design leave a bitter and nauseating feeling.” - Respondent 605

In the survey, various questions were asked about fans’ feelings about The Bad Batch. Before reading the carrd, 34.7% of fans answered that writing was their least favorite aspect of the series, with the next being the main characters. Elaborations in the following free write made clear that the whitewashing and stereotypical writing were huge factors of these opinions. One a 1 to 5 satisfaction scale, 68.1% of respondents rated their satisfaction at a 3 or lower--again, due to the whitewashing and other issues respondents perceived in The Bad Batch. When asked to analyze pre-post carrd-reading feelings regarding the above issues, every category saw a marked increase in awareness of the issue at hand. The perceived prominence of the whitewashing went from 81.3% to 91.4% in respondents. The awareness of ableism jumped almost 30%, from 52.6% to 84.4%. The majority of respondents (59%) were not aware of the antisemitism in the series, but after reading the carrd, that statistic flipped to 80.5%, a near 60% increase from the original 26.7%. Regarding the other racist issues, the respondents went from 63.1% to 83.7%.

Fans of color, neurodivergent fans, disabled fans, and Jewish fans have been waiting for the day where we can see ourselves on screen a level of attention and care that makes us feel even more at home in the Star Wars community . If Disney’s message is truly family-friendly, if Star Wars is for everyone, then Disney needs to support these views with not just words, but with actions. Resolve the racism in Star Wars: The Bad Batch, take out the antisemitism, and treat your nonwhite, disabled, and neurodivergent characters--and fans--with the respect and dignity they deserve.

This will not be a benefit solely to the fans who are asking to be represented properly. In today’s time, popular media is facing a reckoning; media that is inclusive of and respectful towards minoritized groups ends up with leagues more popularity, high ratings, and good reviews than those that don’t. A recent and prominent example is Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, a movie for which the inclusion of Asian-Americans at nearly all levels of production boosted its image and aided in its successful box office release. Black Panther is another prominent example--a movie spearheaded by Black people that completed its box office run at more than five times its initial budget in total revenue. The proper representation of people of color is a two-fold benefit.

Star Wars: The Bad Batch already has beautiful animation that reminds many longtime Star Wars: The Clone Wars fans of their childhood.

It is our hope that you will take our concerns as well as the concerns of others into account, and address the issues that we have outlined in order to better reflect the Walt Disney Company’s commitment to inclusive, diverse entertainment for audiences of all ages. Thank you for your attention to this issue.

Respectfully,

Fans of The Bad Batch

[clonewarsarchives]

KEVIN KINER SCORE WARS (#126, JUL 2011)

Kevin Kiner creates epic, exhilarating music that plays such an integral part in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The composer, whose career also includes Star Trek: Enterprise and the Warwick Davis horror-comedy film series Leprechaun, tells us how he set about following the footsteps of John Williams. Words: Jonathan Wilkins

How did you get the job on The Clone Wars?

I don’t know how the production team got my show reel, but they chose several people to score one act from the first show. I met with Dave Filoni (The Clone Wars’ supervising director) beforehand and he gave me his thoughts. I then went back to the studio and recorded an audition tape.

How did you approach adapting the Star Wars theme for TV?

George Lucas had quite a bit of input on that once I’d gotten the gig, but initially I was apprehensive about changing the arrangement. I think I made the comment that John Williams did it correctly the first time. It’s such a memorable piece of music—in fact, it’s probably one of the most famous pieces of music of all time! To start altering it is, I think, really dangerous especially as I’m a huge fan of Williams’ original. I think everyone on the show wanted something fresh and different —not necessarily better or worse but something that you can identify as our show. It was a tough process —probably one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do in my 25-year career. Just the thought of it would make any composer break out in a cold sweat! After I got over that, I really set about trying to do something great.

There were a couple of musical problems that I ran up against. A lot of the influences throughout our score are from ethnic percussion—big drums with big beats. John Williams originally wrote the theme as a march in the time signature of 2/2. Once you add big beats to that it starts to get all disco on you. I hit upon the idea of changing the time signature to 5/4, and that breaks it up and takes it away from disco.

That was one of the key insights for me. It was a great relief because I thought, It’s going to work. I’m not going to have to hide in Siberia for the rest of my life!

At what stage do you get involved in scoring each episode?

Sometimes I’m brought in early in the process—if a character has to sing, or if there’s a musical piece that has to be animated—but only rarely. Most of the time I see a nearly completed show, and that’s the first time that I’m exposed to it. I watch the show all the way through with a temp track [music used as a placeholder to signal the tone of each scene] on it. Sometimes it’s my music from a previous episode or music from different films; we occasionally use music from the Star Wars features. Then I react to the temp track. In Hollywood that’s generally become a very good way for a director to communicate with a composer. Talking about music can be very difficult for someone who isn’t a musician. You can talk in adjectives and say things like, “Make it dark, make it angry,” but “angry” can mean a Bach cantata or Ozzy Osbourne! Once you have the temp track it can give you a much better jumping-off point.

A temp track is even good if it’s bad. That gives you a point of conversation, and you can say, “Oh, this certainly doesn’t work!” So it doesn’t always have to be spot on. Dave Filoni is an extremely creative guy. I just received an email from him this morning about an idea for a future episode. A minor character in the episode dies, and Dave had this idea of having a solo trumpet play, which is a very lonely sound. It’s fantastic to have that kind of input from Dave.

How much music do you create for each episode?

I write the episode wall-to-wall, so that’s 22 or 23 minutes. There are places where the music features more prominently and places where it’s taken out in the final process of the mix. When we were mixing the The Clone Wars feature film, I went to Skywalker Sound and was taking out more music than anybody! Sometimes you think you need more music than you actually do. If the situation is appropriate, it’s really great to take a breath and not have any music. That really gives the music an impact when it does kick in. But just so that we’re covered, we write it all the way through. Dave can choose in the final process how prominent it will be in each situation, because by that time he’s also got all these marvelous sound effects. It takes about two weeks to complete a score.

The episodes have many different tones, from political drama to horror to non-stop action. Do you have a favorite type of episode to score?

Those different types of episodes give an indication of why the show’s so much fun to score. If it was always battles I think I’d be worn out by now. If it was always political themes I think I’d have tired of that too. So it’s really great, as in life, to have variety, and that’s one of the great things about the show.

Which composers have had the biggest influence on you?

John Williams will always be my favorite; he’s probably the reason why I’m a film composer. Jerry Goldsmith, Ennio Morricone, and John Barry are also fantastic. They were my early influences and they’re all big melody guys. In terms of modern composers, I love what Hans Zimmer is doing, and I think John Powell and Harry Gregson-Williams are enormous talents. In fact I lost out on an Annie Award to John Powell; but he’s so good I didn’t want to punch him! One of the things I have fun doing is keeping my scores modern, so I very much respect those people.

You've held back from using John Williams' themes. Is there a particular reason for that?

We’ve felt like this show should have its own identity. There are themes that I have developed, such as Ahsoka’s theme, the clones’ theme, and the battle theme that have become part of the show’s identity. The themes from the movies are iconic and wonderful, but they were part of that series of six films. We do use them occasionally, but extremely sparingly. As a result they really have an impact when they do come in every so often. But Star Wars is progressing and evolving with this show, and the music reflects that.

Of all the scores you've created for the series, do you have a particular favorite?

The themes I wrote for the Nightsisters trilogy were among my favorites. It was really great material to work with. There was another one where we used an ethnic flute: it was the episode in which they found a little girl trapped in a cave [Innocents of Ryloth]. It was a really delicate episode, and we had this fantastic musician playing a bamboo flute; I was really satisfied that we captured the innocence of the character.

Will we ever see a soundtrack album of your work from the show?

Oh, somebody else has the first say on that! I haven’t actively pursued it because I’m so busy working, but yes, I would love to see it!

[aces-to-apples]

Your Reputation Precedes You

A response to “On Fandom Racism (and That Conlang People Are Talking About)” because lmao that cowardly bitch just hates getting feedback from people that she can’t then harass into oblivion

i.e. God I Wish I Could Use The Tag Fandom Wank Without The Titty Police Nerfing My Post

-

To be frank, I'm not here because I think you or any of your little cronies are going to change your minds. If the 'name' wasn't a giveaway, your group of ~likeminded individuals~ have quite the reputation for espousing ableist, antisemitic, and, yes, racist views under wafer-thin the veneer of "calling out racism." I think we both know that what you're actually doing is using the relative anonymity of the internet and progressive language to abuse, harass, and bully fans that you personally disagree with. You and your group are toxic, hateful, and utterly pathetic, using many peoples' genuine desire to avoid accidentally causing harm and twisting it into this horrid parade of submissiveness to You, The One And Only Arbiter Of Truth And Justice In Fandom. Never mind that you have derided autistic people as lacking compassion and empathy, that you've used racist colonizer dogwhistles to describe a fictional culture based heavily on real live Maori culture, that you've mocked the idea of characters having PTSD, or that vital mental health services are anything more than "talking about your feelings with friends uwu." Let's just ignore that you have ridiculed the idea of adults in positions of power exerting that power over children in harmful and abusive ways, that creating transformative fan-content that doesn't adhere to the spirit of canon or wishes of the original author garners derision and hatefulness from you, and that you've used classic abuser tactics in order to gaslight people in your orbit into behaving more submissively towards you in order to avoid more verbal abuse.

Let's toss all of that crucial context aside in favor of only what you've written here.

What you've written here is nearly 3,000 entire words based on, at best—though, admittedly, based on your previous behavior, I am actually not willing to extend to you an iota of good faith—fallacious reasoning. You posit that a constructed language, to be used by a fictional religious group located in an entirely different galaxy than our own, is othering, racist in general, and anti-Asian specifically. This appears based in several suppositions, the first being that a language unknown by the reader will, by nature, cause the reader to feel alienated from the characters and therefore less sympathetic, empathetic, and caring towards the characters. That idea is patently ridiculous and, I believe, says far more about your ability to connect to a character speaking an unfamiliar language than any kind of overarching truth about media and the human condition. New things are interesting; new things are fun; the human brain is wired from birth to be fascinated with new things, to want to take them apart, find out how they work, and enjoy both the process and the results.

The second supposition this fallacy is based upon appears to be that to move away from the blatant Orientalism of Star Wars is inherently anti-Asian. While I find it... frankly, a little bit sad that you cling so viciously to the Orientalist, appropriative roots of Star Wars as some form of genuine representation, that's really none of my business. If you feel that a Muslim-coded character bombing a temple and becoming a terrorist and a Sith, a white woman wearing Mongolian wedding garb, a species of decadent slug-like gangsters smoking out of hookahs and keeping attractive young women chained at their feet (as it were), a species of greedy money-grubbers with exaggerated features and offensively stereotypical "Asian" accents, and an indigenous people wearing modesty garb based on the Bedu people and treated by most characters as well as the narrative as mindless animals deserving of murder and genocide are appropriate representation of the many, varied, and beautiful cultures around the world upon which they were "based," then that is very much your business. Until you pull shit like this. Until you accuse other fans, who wish to move away from such offensive coding and stereotypes, of erasing Asian culture from Star Wars. Then it becomes everyone's business, especially when you are targeting a loving and enthusiastic group of fans who are pouring their hearts and souls into creating an inventive and non-appropriative alternative to canon.

Which leads into the third supposition, that a patently racist, misogynistic white man in the 1970s, and then again in the 1990s, intended his universe to be an accurate and respectful portrayal of the various cultures he stole from. I understand that for your group of toxic bullies, the term "Death of the Author" holds no real meaning, but the simple fact of the matter is that George Lucas based his white-centered space adventure on Samurai movies while removing the cultural context that gave them any meaning, because he liked the idea of swords and noble warriors in space. He based the Force and the Jedi Order on belief systems such as Taoism and Buddhism, but only on the surface, without putting any real effort into into portraying them earnestly or accurately. He consistently disrespected both characters of color and characters coded to be a certain race, ethnicity, culture, or religion, and likewise disrespected and stole from the cultures upon which he based them. He was, and continues to be, a racist white man who wrote a racist story. His universe has Orientalism baked into its every facet, and the idea that fans who wish to move away from this and interrogate and transform the text into something better than what it is are racist is not only laughable, but incredibly disingenuous and insidious.

As I said, I am not writing this to change your mind, because I truly believe that you already know that "cOnLaNgS aRe RaCiSt" is a ridiculous statement. The way you've comported yourself in fandom spaces thus far has shown to me that you are nothing more than a bully who knows that the anti-racist movement in fandom can be co-opted for your benefit. If you tout your Asian heritage and use the right language, make the "right" accusations and take advantage of white guilt and white ignorance, you can have dozens of people falling at your feet, begging for forgiveness, for absolution. And I think that gives you a thrill. So, no, none of this will change your mind because none of this is genuinely about racism—it's about power, it's about control, it's about fandom being the only space where you have some.

So I'm writing this for the creators of this wonderful conlang, which has been crafted by multiple people including people of color, who don't deserve this nonsensical vitriol, and for the fans reading this manipulative hate-fest, wondering if they really are Evil Racists because they don't participate in fandom the way you think they should.

Here it is: fandom has a lot of racism, antisemitism, misogyny, queerphobia, ableism, etc. baked into it. Unfortunately, such is the nature of living and growing up in societies and cultures that have the same. The important thing is to independently educate yourself on those issues and think critically about them—not "think critically" as in "to criticize" them, but to analyze, evaluate, pick apart, examine, and reconstruct them again in order to come to a well thought-out conclusion. Read this well-articulated attack on a group of fans who have always welcomed feedback and participation, are open about their backgrounds, their strengths and weaknesses, and wonder who is actually being genuine.

Is it the open and enthusiastic group who ask for the participation of others in this labor of love? Or is it the ringleader of a group of well-known bullies who have manipulated, gaslit, and then subsequently love-bomb people who did not simply roll over at the slightest hint of dominance? The ones who spent hours upon hours tearing apart, mocking, deriding, and falsely accusing authors of fanworks and metatextual works of various bigotries and -isms, knowing that those evaluations were spurious and meant only to cause harm, not genuine examinations of the works themselves or even presumed authorial intent. The ones who made their own, quote-unquote, community so negative and toxic that even after the departure of a large portion of them, including this author in particular, that community still has a reputation for being hateful, toxic, and full of mean-spirited harassers who will never look critically about their own behavior but only ever point fingers at others. The ones who are so very determined to cause misery wherever they go that as soon as their usual victims are no longer immediately available, they will turn on each other at the slightest hint of weakness.

This entire piece of (fan)work is misinformed at the most generous, disingenuous at the most objective, and downright spiteful when we get right into it. The creators of Dai Bendu, along with various other works, series, and fan events that these people personally dislike, have been targeted because it is so much easier to harass, bully, and use progressive language as a weapon against them, than it is to put any effort into making fandom spaces more informed, more positive, more respectful.

As someone rather eloquently put it, community is not a fucking spectator sport. You want a better community, you gotta work at it. And conversely, what you put into your community is what you'll get out of it. This author and their friends have put a lot of hate into their communities, and now they're toxic cesspools that people stay well away from, for fear of contracting some terrible form of harassment poisoning.

Congrats, Ri, you've gotten just what you wanted: adoring crowds listening to you spout your absolutely heinous personal views purely to live out some kind of power fantasy, and the rest of us staying well away, because fuck knows nothing kind, helpful, or in good faith has ever come from Virdant or her echo-chamber of petty, spiteful assholes.

No love, bad night.

P.S. Everyone actually in the Dai Bendu server knows your ass got kicked because you didn’t say shit for a full thirty days and ignored the announcement that inactive members would be culled. You ain’t cute pretending like it’s because you were ~*~Silenced~*~ after ~*~Valiantly~*~ attempting to call out racism. We see you.

[burnedbyshoto]

One last unpopular opinion cause I need to get it out. tell me if I’m wrong pls. Whitewashing POC characters is 100% wrong. Why is it okay to change the race or ethnicity of a POC character? I’m talking about stuff where one of the characters isn’t Japanese anymore and they’re mostly black or occasionally some other race. If they’re making a dark skinned Japanese version I get that. But why change race/ethnicity. Isn’t that wrong too? What’s your opinion on this? Not trying to start shit I swear

I guess... hm, I will try to break down my thoughts and opinions on this. i’m not claiming i’m right, i’m merely stating this as someone who literally over thinks literally everything and anything I can. please let me know if i’ve said anything wrong or offensive as i’d like to correct it because i’m not trying to offend anyone here.

when it comes to anime specifically, westerners have this very quick ability to start saying that these characters are white. as we are all damn well aware, anime is created mostly by asian creators (japanese creators to be exact) and are often depicted to be happening in japan or in some fantasy land where terms like white, black, asian reallt don’t apply. there are some anime that take place in america, & we have anime like yuuri on ice that has multiple different countries represented, but i’d say for the most part all characters are japanese.

issues come into play when, typically seen as white people on twitter who are able to pass easily as anime characters appearance simply due to skin tone color and hair color. personally, I think anime tends to throw in funky hairstyles and hair colors and eye colors not because they’re trying to claim characters as white but because japan is a largely homogeneous country and with that they tend to have similar attributes (in which I mean hair type, eye color, and hair color). the lack of color diversity can lead media to look especially dull, for lack of better words, so mangaka & anime creators make these characters have every colored hair, eyes, and sometimes make them bipoc in the world and hair type to create visual contrast, engagement, and highlight important characters.

however, we westerners are quite self centered & think if a japanese character has blonde hair and blue eyes it makes them white! meaning that should white people cosplay this blonde hair and blue eyes character it’s okay! and due to racism, whenever poc individuals — especially black cosplayers — attempt their own version, they’re attacked with how the character isn’t whatever race the cosplayer is and are overall scum bags. the character isn’t even white the mass majority of the time either so I don’t understand the anger they have over that detail except they’re racist pigs.

now, about the race bending, I think it’s because we westerners want to see ourselves within these characters. they’re like headcanons, if you will. just like you might headcanon bakugou to eventually become hard of hearing or deaf, or how you headcanon that midoriya izuku will lose all his limbs and need a robot arm and legs, these are just personal headcanons that make the character more tuned to how everyone wishes them to be.

now this is a western issue so i speak largely for america.

the underlying issue, I think, is racism. white people, whether they like it or not, have a social advantage over everyone. things will always sort of be for them, look like them, accept them. white people will never have to wonder if the newest movie coming out will have a poc lead because they tend to have it be white people. white people never have to worry about if their foundation color is in stock or even exists in the first place because the system makes it so that it’s there for them, or if not, it’s just two blocks away. white people don’t have to worry about if they will see a face that looks like them on all forms of media because european standards are whats it. we are curated in a society where we should want the lighter hair, the lighter skin, the lighter eyes, the button nose, and thin figure. & I understand that beauty standards and ideas are shifting, but if you’re unable to see that people used to shame, put down, and harass other people for having such traits before (and even still right now harass people for having the features they want as well), I guess you’re one of the naive few.

now, because in western countries, not being able to see yourself in any characters on the tv shows (with real people or animated), some people choose to simply take it into their own hands. so they take their favorite characters and decide that they’ll give it a spin to make it look like them. I don’t think anyone really bends the race and goes “damn they should really be fucking latino, what a waste they’re not!” because I really don’t think anyone’s that...intense???? that’s not the right word, but I can’t seem to find it rn. it’s simply for fun and to show other people who also don’t see themselves in these forms of media a way in!

most importantly, I think, is that when characters are turned into different ethnicities it’s other people who come out and say they’re doing it wrong & taunt them with how they would feel if they turned someone white. if i’m being especially honest, most anime characters could definitely be white in my eyes had I never known it originates from japan simply because of the way they’re drawn. they’re putting down people who are simply expanding their creativity and wanting to see a familiar face because western media continues to fail in serving its largely ethnic population.

personally, I don’t think we westerners have the right to demand more black, latino, arabic, whatever characters in anime because the fact is japan owes us nothing. we should be demanding and continuing to harass america to include poc characters because we aren’t involved in japan. (& i’m not saying that japan should just continue to serve only pure japanese characters because they do have their own intermixed population that isn’t just of japanese decent, but I think if they want us to aid their voices i’m here for it, but I won’t be the one demanding anything from a country that isn’t mine when it comes to this form of media. )

so, to me, the reason why it’s okay for poc to change the race but not white people is because racism in america lol. white people got it good on screen & the fact that it really really bothers some people is a bit scary considering the stats on how many movies and tv shows involve main white casts.

my unpopular opinion to all this, however, is I really dislike latino!sero because the spanglish people use for him makes me think that no one writing him is actually any type of latino & i’m sorta tired and a bit offended by the sexy latin lover thing. plus it sorta seems to me that my fellow latinos only use that trope because white people think it’s hot & since they carry more weight then they think; creators keep it up to seem cool or whatever idk. so it’s not my cup of tea as a mexicana 😗✌🏽

edit:

I also think when people race bend characters to other forms of poc it’s a positive expression and something done to make people happy! but typically when the characters are bent to be “white” it’s done as an attack in a way towards poc people & not done because they want to be included in a world, ya know?

[dawnsrose]

BASIC QUESTIONS

first name?  aurora

surname?  capulet

middle names?  josephine antoinette

nicknames?  briar rose / rose ... i guess heh

date of birth?  february 26th

age?  twenty - five

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

height?  5′6ft / 1.70m

weight?  121lbs / 55kg

build?  slim

hair colour?  very light blonde, golden - like

hair style?  straight and lightly curled at the end, with bangs

eye colour?  violet, kind of a purple-ish blue

eye shape?  almond

glasses or contact lenses?  neither

distinguishing facial features?  the color of her eyes, but also her lips are naturally a really pretty pinkish color

which facial feature is most prominent? i don’t think there is one ?  her face is very well balanced, although i guess her eyes are the most attention - catching part

which bodily feature is most prominent?  her waist, it is quite small!

other distinguishing features?  nope

skin?  fair ,  and her skin do be clear af we love to see it

hands?  small and dainty

make up?  she doesn’t really wear makeup, but she thinks its fascinating! her favorite items are mascara and lipstick

scars?  none

birthmarks?  none

tattoos?  none

physical handicaps?  none

type of clothes?  dresses ,  though she would love to incorporate some pants into her wardrobe .  usually wears neutral / earthy tones ,  unless it’s a special occasion ,  in which she’ll wear either pink or blue .  loves a nice skirt .  think cottagecore outfits !

how do they wear their clothes?  again ,  light and cottagecore outfits .  think of outfits like these: 1 2 3 4 5

what are their feet like? (type of shoes, state of shoes, socks, feet, pristine, dirty, worn, etc)  aurora takes really good care of her feet ,  so they’re pristine !  she really hates wearing shoes ,  but wears them when she’s in public so as not to seem weird .  she really enjoys the feeling of her feet touching the grass though ,  as it reminds her of home

race / ethnicity?  caucasian

mannerisms?  classy ,  delicate and polite .  very ballerina like ,  except her gestures aren’t as grandiose .  i would say a good example of her demeanor is audrey hepburn ,  or the movements in old / classic barbie movies like nutcracker or swan lake .

are they in good health?  for the most part !  she has a bit of anxiety when surrounded by many people ,  but it’s getting better .

do they have any disabilities?  none

PERSONALITY

what words or phrases do they overuse?  little expressions of surprise like “ goodness! ”  or  “oh!”

do they have a catchphrase? none

are they more optimistic or pessimistic?  optimistic for sure

are they introverted or extroverted?  ambiverted leaning towards introverted 

do they ever put on airs?  not at all !

what bad habits do they have?  sleeping in heheh she may be an early bird ,  but aurora really enjoys sleeping in and napping

what makes them laugh out loud?  philip being a clown. honestly it’s not hard to make aurora laugh, especially over silly things

how do they display affection?  gentle touches, words of affirmation, poetry, tender gazes

mental handicaps?  none

how do they want to be seen by others?  as someone who cares about them and that can be trusted

how do they see themselves?  as someone who still has a lot to live and learn and give, but who appreciates every little thing around her. she sees herself as a good person who is just trying her best

how are they seen by others?  i think people see her as someone kind and full of life. something like the embodiment of hope. maleficent probably sees her as a nuisance though

strongest character trait?  i’d say it’s a tie between how much she believes in goodness and kindness, and how perserverant she is 

weakest character trait?  she dispairs quite easily, but always ends up collecting herself

how competitive are they?  not very !  it’s about the experience ,  not the result 

do they make snap judgements or take time to consider?  it depends on the situation, i think. but more often than not, aurora is capable of thinking things through before reacting --- except for when it comes to her feelings.

how do they react to praise?  lots of blushing and dismissal ,  though she appreciates it always

how do they react to criticism?  lots of self doubting and crying at first, but she’s thankful and appreciative of it all, because she assumes it means the other cares about her improvement and well being 

what is their greatest fear?  being alone

what are their biggest secrets?  that she doesn’t hate maleficent , and wants to meet and talk to her

what is their philosophy of life?  treat others as you wish to be treated and have faith in love

when was the last time they cried?  when she first saw philip in elias

what haunts them?  fear of never meeting her parents

what are their political views?  she knows nothing about politcs, just wants everyone to be treated with respect and equally

what will they stand up for?  prejudice ,  unnecessary rudeness ,  racism ,  homophobia ,  mysogyny ,  literally anything that puts someone in an uncomfortable spot .

who do they quote?  probably her aunts heh

are they indoorsy or outdoorsy?  outdoorsy !

what is their sinful little habit?  she’s very secretive and sneaky about her thoughts ,  and likes finding little loopholes in things

what sense do they most rely on?  touch and hearing

how do they treat people better than them?  with respect ,  would like to learn from them as well

how do they treat people worse than them?  also with respect , tries to find common ground and understand why they are that way 

what quality do they most value in a friend?  kindness and support

what do they consider an overrated virtue?  detachment 

if they could change one thing about themselves, what would it be?  how dependent of others she feels .  it’s not her fault of course, but she wishes she had more control of her life .

what is their obsession?  the feeling of being loved 

what are their pet peeves?  loud sounds / people arguing over silly things

what are their idiosyncrasies?  she tends to panic and overthink things at times, which can be bad

FRIENDS & FAMILY

is their family big or small? who does it consist of?  i’d say it’s decent sized / kind of big ,  considering she still considers the good fairies family .  plus ,  philip’s also become part of her family ,  and his family is huge .

what is their perception of family?  any and everyone who is there for you when you need them most and cares for you as you care about them

do they have siblings? older or younger?  none .

describe their best friend.  i don’t think she has one ?  give her a best friend :(  philip can’t be both okay that’s too much.

ideal best friend?  just someone she can be a silly romantic with, who’ll watch movies and read books and sing or dance with her, maybe go on walks / play with animals too ! 

describe their other friends.  most of aurora’s friends are really sweet ,  nice people .  she’s also protective of many of them ,  like dani for example .  there’s others she actually looks up to ,  like penelope for example or emily .  she thinks they’re both absurdly glamorous and beautiful .

describe their acquaintances.

do they have any pets?  not really, but aurora loves animals and gets along with them so well so ...  who knows heheh she had lots of animal companions back home though

who are their natural allies?  the charmont family

who are their surprising allies?  not too sure but thackery binx and i think hercules zevrous would be an ally to her as well!

PAST & FUTURE

what was your character like as a baby? as a child?  not too different from how they are now. aurora was a very lively, happy child! she was also absurdly kind and was full of life, while being naturally graceful and poised. i don’t think she was one to cry a lot either, and was most grateful for everything the good fairies did for her.

did they grow up rich or poor?  while she wasn’t poor, aurora had a fairly modest upbringing, since she did live in a cottage in the glen back home, but nothing lacked for her in terms of essentials and etc.

did they grow up nurtured or neglected?  nurtured by the good fairies! aurora grew up knowing nothing but love.

what is the most offensive thing they ever said?  i legit don’t think aurora has ever offended anyone like that? if she doesn’t have anything good to say she’d rather not say anything at all, and nothing has annoyed to the point of doing so. at least not thus far.

what is their greatest achievement?  i think still being alive lmao

what was their first kiss like?  oh i don’t know yet 👀

what is the worst thing they did to someone they loved?  i legit can’t think of anything other than her argument with the fairies about philip, but she came around soon enough.

what are their ambitions?  to be reunited with her family, to have a big wedding with philip, to understand maleficent’s ideals, to become more independent.

what advice would they give their younger self?  to just believe in herself, and that everything will fall into place. 

what smells remind them of their childhood?  fresh flowers and grass.

what was their childhood ambition?  to find love.

what is their best childhood memory?

what is their worst childhood memory?

did they have an imaginary childhood friend?  nope!  she had a fair amount of animal companions, so there was never any need for imaginary ones. 

when was the last time they were crushed with disappointment?  that brief moment when meeting philip in elias where she thought she would have to ignore him for the rest of her life due to being engaged to someone.

what past act are they most ashamed of?  arguing with her aunts over love and being so sad/crying so much about it.  still, she doesn’t think she could have behaved any other way.

what past act are they most proud of?  i think she’s extremely proud of how she’s been living in elias so far,  not relying on others for help and taking good care of herself.

has anyone ever saved their life?  i think in a way, everyone who’s been involved in keeping her away from maleficent has saved her life.

strongest childhood memory?

LOVE

do they believe in love at first sight?  OH HELL YEAH

are they in a relationship?  yes !  happily married :`)

how do they behave in a relationship?  not much different from how she normally does, but she definitely blushes and sighs a lot more every time she thinks of philip.  also loves to talk about him, please ask her about her man.

when did you character last have sex?  ... never 👀

what sort of sex do they have?  none lmao

has your character ever been in love?  OH YEAH

have they ever had their heart broken?  yes, but it wasn’t his fault.

CONFLICT

how do they respond to a threat?  by keeping composure and trying to reason with the person.

are they most likely to fight with their fists or their tongue?  tongue !

what is your character’s kryptonite?  her loved ones, children and animals.

if your character could only save one thing from their burning house, what would it be?  a letter from her aunts, which they gave her before she came to elias.

how do they perceive strangers?  as something she has to be on the lookout for despite nothing they’re not always dangerous.

what do they love to hate?  cold weather. 

what are their phobias?  being alone in a large crowd/surrounded by unfamiliar people, losing her loved ones, being in a completely unfamiliar situation. 

what is their choice of weapon?  words, but i think aurora would secretly love to learn how to use a sword. Let Her Fight.

what living person do they most despise?  i guess the easy answer would be maleficent, but aurora really holds no hatred towards her. if anything, she sympathizes.

have they ever been bullied or teased? no.

where do they go when they’re angry?  wherever there’s lots of flowers and warmth.  or to philip.

who are their enemies and why?  maleficent, and that’s because of her father’s clownery !

WORK, EDUCATION & HOBBIES

what is their current job? n/a.

what do they think about their current job? n/a.

what are some of their past jobs? n/a.

what are their hobbies?  dancing (she’s been learning ballet in elias! ), singing, gardening / caring for her flowers, reading.

educational background?  homeschooled by the good fairies, i’d say she has a good grasp on history, mathematics and a few languages, plus other things she’s learned on her own.

intelligence level? slightly above average.

do they have any specialist training? no.

do they have a natural talent for something?  singing !  she’s very gifted when it comes to music and dancing, but singing is definitely where her talent lies.

do they play a sport? are they any good? nope, and no, but she could be !

what is their socioeconomic status?  despite still leaving a fairly common life in elias, aurora is a princess, so she is extremely wealthy. her family is in charge of her expenses in elias, yet she doesn’t spend a lot.

FAVORITES

what is their favorite animal?  she loves all fauna, but bunnies and birds hold a special place in her arms.

which animal do they dislike the most?  crows. for some reason they give her a bad vibe, though she likes birds.  snakes and dragons also make her shiver.

what place would they most like to visit?  honesty ... her home lmao.

what is the most beautiful thing they’ve ever seen?  sunrise !  aurora loves waking up in the morning and watching the sky’s pretty colors.  she also adores sunset.

what is their favorite song?  love dance by sergei perkofiev,  fee des lilas by tchaikovsky, quelqu'un m'a dit by carla bruni, moon river by audrey hepburn.

music, art, reading preferred?  all sorts of music but espeically clasical and old love songs. she loves classic literature, but also mystery and romance novels, and her favorite art movements would be romanticism and renaissance.

what is their favorite color? pink ,  but don’t tell merryweather !

what is their password?  briarrose59

favorite food:  i feel like aurora would absolutely love pasta if she tried it.

what is their favorite work of art?  springtime by pierre-auguste cot

who is their favorite artist? jean-honoré fragonard

what is their favorite day of the week?  wednesday 

POSSESSIONS 

what is in their fridge?  a number of juices, some fruits like watermelon and strawberries, milk, ice cream.

what is on their bedside table?  a lamp,  lavander oil, a difuser , perfume bottle and a novel

what is in their car?  doesn’t have one !

what is in their bin? paper bags, crumbled up paper balls, a couple of candy wrappers 

what is in their purse or wallet?  a credit card, some dollar bills and she always has a coinpurse around, just in case.

what is in their pockets? i think some seeds for birds to eat.

what is their most treasured possession?  a gold necklace with a heart pendant, the letter the good fairies gave her.

SPIRITUALITY

who or what is your character’s guardian angel?  OK LETS GO. i would say the good fairies or thackery are her guardian angels, but if i had to name an actual angel, i think it would be chamuel.

do they believe in the afterlife?  yes, she believes everyone that leaves is going somewhere else.

what are their religious views?  she doesn’t really follow any religion in particular, but believes a lot in karma and in the whole “do no harm but take no s***”, “treat others as you want to be treated” way of life.  she does, however, believe in a higher power.

what do they think heaven is?  a place where there’s no sadness, no pain, no evil. somewhere where there’s nothing but love and joy and people are able to live in eternal bliss.

what do they think hell is?  a place where people who hurt others and lived a selfish life learn from / are punished for their mistakes and hopefully become better. maybe one day they’ll reach heaven.

are they superstitious?  a little ,  but not to the point where it clouds her judgement .

what would they like to be reincarnated as?  a bird or a beautiful flower .

how would they like to die?  peacefully ,  before philip ,  hopefully in her sleep and surrounded by her loved ones 

what is your character’s spirit animal? a swan or dove

what is their zodiac sign?  pisces 

VALUES

what do they think is the worst thing that can be done to a person?  i think lying/keeping someone in the dark all their life as was done to aurora is something she would never want anyone to go through. that and betrayal. 

what is their view of ‘freedom’?  to be able to follow your dreams without fear or worries, to live the life you want.

when did they last lie?  she doesn’t lie !

what’s their view of lying?  incredibly wrong and hurtful. please don’t lie to her.

when did they last make a promise?  not sure.

did they keep or break their last promise?  she always keeps her promises.

DAILY LIFE

what are their eating habits?  she’s very healthy, eats all her greens and fruits and veggies, but will allow herself to indulge in sweets every other week. aurora grew up healthy, but there’s a lot of delicious food in elias and out in the world, and she would like to try it all !

do they have any allergies?  she’s allergic to a few metals, which results in all of her jewelry being real gold. 

describe their home.  i suck at words so here’s a few pictures that i think fit the vibe of her home !  bedroom / bathroom / random wall / kitchen / corner of living room  

are they minimalist or a clutter hoarder?  minimalist !

what do they do first thing on a weekday morning?  shower !

what do they do on a Sunday afternoon?  she usually goes for strolls around town, the library or mama odie’s for a nice snack !

what do they do on a Friday night?  relaxing bubble bath and netflix, no joke

what is the soft drink of choice?  none

what is their alcoholic drink of choice?  she doesn’t usually drink alcohol, but isn’t opposed to a bit of wine

MISCELLANEOUS

what or who would your character dress up as for halloween?  i can definitely see aurora dressing up as titania or a fairy of sorts.

are they comfortable with technology?  it was a bit difficult at first, but now she’s much better at it !  still messes up quite a bit though.

if they could save one person, who would it be?  i think philip, since the fairies probably wouldn’t need her help.

if they could call one person for help, who would it be?  in elias, probably thackery and if not him, philip. however, if she’s panicking, philip will probably come first. 

what is their greatest extravagance?  she has a

what is their greatest regret?  doubting her family’s concern for her even if for just a split second, as well as arguing with the fairies.

what is their perception of redemption?  she thinks everyone deserves a chance at it.

what would they do if they won the lottery?  charity.  everything goes to charity.

what is their favourite fairytale?  steadfast tin soldier.

what fairytale do they hate?  the little match girl, for it just makes her cry a lot.

do they believe in happy endings?  absolutely !

what is their idea of perfect happiness?  to be surrounded by people who love you just as much as you love them.

what would they ask a fortune teller?  if her family and kingdom will be alright , and if maleficent will change for the better.

if your character could travel through time, where would they go?  i think the day of her baptism, just to see what really transpired.

what sport do they excel at?  i feel like she could be very good at tennis, equestrianism and fencing !

what sport do they suck at?  i can’t see her being good at anything that overly relies on strength, as aurora is too graceful and delicate. she legit doesn’t wanna do anything that’s too brutal or something.

if they could have a superpower, what would they choose?  to fly or to properly speak to animals.  maybe shapeshifting / changing her appearance so as to hide with easy could be helpful.

[katierosefun]

ahhh love your points about poc being seen as interchangeable!! might be shouting into the void w this one but my lil indian self has gotta talk about ahsoka real quick- growing up and having next to zero representation in the media i was consuming was so hard for me for ages. and i always thought of ahsoka as indian - besides her name literally being inspired by indian mythology, her skin tone and features were just SO south asian to me and i always thought of her that way. (1/2)

I was so happy to see her in live action played by a poc but a huge part of me was sad that that idea in my head was in a way decanonised and i was back to having not a single south asian piece of star wars representation (except like depa billaba who has 0 lines). idk but just her animation as a kid and adult were both SO south asian looking to me and i love rosario but its never not going to sting just a little bit that i cant see myself in ahsoka so much anymore :(( (2/2)

your feelings are 10000/10 valid! i totally relate to that feeling of disappointment when a character that you thought was someone who shared your identity is suddenly casted as someone who...is not. 

i guess with ahsoka there was some leeway in choosing who got to represent ahsoka because i think ashley eckstein was the one who was like “the beauty of ahsoka is that she is literally identifiable to anyone”, and i think that’s because in clone wars, where like,,,there wasn’t that same wall marking ahsoka as a certain race, it! was! really cool for lots of young girls--and young girls of color especially--to maybe see themselves in a character who they might headcanon as someone sharing their own ethnicity. 

that said, i also agree that i kinda thought? ahsoka was more south asian in my head too because of her name. (and oh boy, the topic of names and star wars is something that actually gets my blood boiling too, because some of the names that george lucas gives the characters/cities are literal places from south/east asian culture...the jedi outfits are heavily influenced by south/east asian culture...and like, yeah, the fact that we rarely see any south asian characters be an actual speaking character is kind of sad?) 

so  basically--your feelings are absolutely valid about the situation, and yeah, i agree that it sucks that you might not be able to see yourself the same way in ahsoka as you used to. (if it helps any, i feel like there’s a lot of people in fandom who are of the similar sentiment in rosario being the one to play ahsoka.) 

and, just in general, you’re right: there needs to be more south asian representation in star wars. i think it’s incredibly ridiculous that a lot of star wars depends so much or drew so much from south or east asian culture, and the fact that we don’t have any characters at all represent those cultures is a whole other level of cultural appropriation. (like, dude. if you’re gonna use different cultures to “world build”, then you might as well make them the main characters/significantly important secondary characters in your universe, you know?)

[wearevillaneve]

Some people think s4 will be the last season of KE and I don’t think so. The creator of my other favorite show, when his show was renewed for a sixth season, he decided to end the show & sent an announcement via social media saying that the show was renewed for a sixth & final season. KE would have already announced s4 being the last season when they announced its renewal. I think s5 will be the last season. I want sandra to work on a project where her character is respected & properly developed

There’s two points here and I’ll get to your first one first.  Nothing has been publicly stated by the stars or producers whether or not the next season of Killing Eve will be the last one.  There are and were reasons to think it might. In the U.S. the third season debuted to solid, if not spectacular ratings.   There’s no danger to the show being canceled by BBC America and AMC as it is both a critical darling (though not so much in S3), and has taken up residence as an award magnet for the BAFTA’s, Emmys, Golden Globes among others.   Don’t believe for a minute that these networks don’t enjoy showing off trophies in their offices.  What hasn’t received much attention from the KE fandom is the departure of Sarah Barnett as president of the AMC Networks.  Barnett, a British expatriate, has been with AMC since 2008 and was a champion of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s gender bending subversive little take on the tired spy vs. assassin trope.   With filming for Season 4 indefinitely delayed due to the global pandemic and Barnett gone, will the new president of AMC be the same champion for Killing Eve that Barnett was?   We don’t know what goes on behind the curtain at AMC, but the longer the shooting schedule is up in the air, the greater the pressure is going to be to fill that 9:00 pm time slot with something.  Killing Eve’s European locations makes it more authentic, but also more expensive than Unnamed Show X that shoots in the U.S. or Canada and all the talent in front and behind the camera is homegrown.  

(Sarah Barnett and Sandra Oh in 2018/ photo credit:  Getty Images for BAFTA LA )

Do not think for one second there are not other producers of other shows waiting for Killing Eve to delay its 2021 return  so they can grab that sweet prime time spot.  Should Unnamed Show X be a ratings and critical juggernaut KE was in 2018, do not be shocked if when Season 4 does finally drop, it ends up in a different time slot, or worse, an entirely different day than it’s previously occupied.   Most KE fans wouldn’t know Barnett if they bumped into her on the street, but being where she was and doing the job she did meant a lot when it came to getting behind a TV show shot in Europe produced by a showrunner who never had done the job before and starring an Asian lead who had never held that spot previously and and a talented young Scouser who had established herself in England, but was a total unknown in Hollywood.

Barnett might never have been the most powerful television executive in Hollywood, but that was never her game. Her programming philosophy was always about risk, discovery, and resisting the obvious. It’s the kind of philosophy that flourished during the Golden Age of TV, and it’s now out of fashion. Scale is everything, data is king, and the streaming wars must be fought at all costs. Where Barnett goes next is a mystery, but her tenure at AMC will fondly be remembered as we reminisce a now bygone era of television.

There’s always competition for a prime-time slot, so you might have to ask yourself it you would be in your feelings should  Killing Eve 2021 aired at 9:00 pm on Wednesday and not Sunday?    It never hurts to have a powerful ally in the suites, and KE has lost one.   I tend to agree with you that it will get a fifth (and hopefully final) season.   To repeat myself, I hold firm to my belief  most TV shows hit their peak at five seasons.   After that, contracts expire, actors move on, and the churn of talent exiting behind the scenes begins to show up on-screen. 

Let’s look at this way:  do you really want to watch Killing Eve when it reaches’ 22nd seasons like Law and Order: SUV?

To your second point, I too want to see Sandra Oh move on to other projects beyond playing a bisexual mouse chasing a bisexual cat.  Not that she’s bad at it, but Oh’s talents were squandered in S3.   Killing Eve would be better cutting the cord than seeing its lead actress treated as an accessory to the co-lead a second time. 

The pandemic has reset the clock for nearly every form of entertainment and with it the best laid plans of Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh’s agents.  Clearly, Comer is aching to respond to Hollywood’s calls.   She won’t continue to blow off opportunities like Death On the Nile and a chance to raise her profile to an international audience for eight episodes of a TV show that eats up months of her time.    She’s going to have to eventually choose her exit strategy should KE go beyond a fourth season.

She hasn’t asked for my advice and she’s got well-compensated pros she can do it far better, but should J.C. drop me an anonymous question, my answer would hinge upon when her KE contract expires.  If it ends after Season 4, then demand a hefty pay raise (especially should she score a second Emmy) and then head for the exit  as soon as Season 5 wraps.  

This is business. Not personal, and there’s zero chance Comer is at all interested in playing Villanelle for a decade.   Her future is too bright to be limited to simply playing a fashionable assassin for too long. 

Oh’s career opportunities diverge from Comer’s and there aren’t a lot of feature films in the future for a 49-year-old Korean Canadian actress.   I know it, you know it and you best believe she knows it better than we do.

Beyond The Chair, her Netflix comedy produced by Amanda Peet, there’s nothing else upcoming on her schedule besides voice overs in two animated projects.   Despite her equivalent skills, due to her ethnicity and age, Oh will never receive the same opportunities as Comer.   That’s not a complaint.  This is an indisputable truth.  

Oh will never stop working in TV and films as long as she is willing to take parts as the best buddy to the White lead, as Season 3 of KE reduced her to, but she isn’t going to pivot toward directing or writing.   Sandra Oh is an actress.   It’s really that simple and she is respected as a damn good one as her 12th Emmy award nomination and third consecutive for perfectly playing the hot-ass mess than is Eve Polastri.

I share with you the hope that Oh will find roles in a post-Killing Eve world that honors and validates her incredible acting chops.    “Hope” is a vague word and more than likely Oh will find her career arc is similar to than of one of her contemporaries and one of my queens, Viola Davis when she said, “The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is an opportunity.”

Oh and Comer have vastly different opportunities.  

The post-Killing Eve path for Comer is far clearly defined and brightly lit because the world reacts in radically different ways to a 27-year-old White woman than a 49-year-old Asian woman, and anyone who wants to claim otherwise can kindly fuck all the way off because you don’t know what you’re talking about and I got nothing for you but scorn and contempt. 

The pie is not cut in equal slices for Actresses of Color.  Never has been, and there’s little reason to believe that will change in any of ours lifetime. Women of Color in the entertainment industry are still fighting battles thought long won decades ago.  

Yet here we are.  Knowing the playing field ain’t close to being level and not particularly giving a shit as long as our needs are being met. 

Sorry for going so long, Anonymous.   You caught me stuck in a moment I wasn’t quite ready to get out of.   U2 fans will get the reference and everybody else will have to use their Google-Fu.     

[writingwithcolor]

Human culture mixed w/ Animals , Tapetum Lucidum

@pineapplemountain:

Hi! I have a story based around an altered evolutionary history (briefly: same earth, but humans evolved alongside four other major animal species, eventually mixing cultures and languages--so most countries are not the same as irl in name or borders). Humans also evolved as primarily nocturnal mammals. One of my MCs is Vietnamese and another is North Indian. My first question pertains to a planned nocturnal trait: tapetum lucidum (reflective eyeshine at night, not supernatural). I can't find anything on whether or not reflective eyes would be a disrespectful or offensive trait, especially if all humans had it. My second question has to do with the North Indian character: her parents are financially successful and she is their youngest child and a bit of a brat, but good at heart (and she grows thru the story). She has several siblings who don't have the same personality. Am I crossing any lines with a wealthy North Indian family / spoiled child dynamic?

Whenever working with Black and brown characters, I believe the SOP is to avoid animal traits for such characters unless these traits are applied to all humans. There’s a difference between Animorphs, where all featured characters, regardless of race/ ethnicity, can transform into animals, and, say, a story where within a group of supernatural characters, the werewolf is coded as Black/ brown. As you say, all of your characters have tapetum lucidum, but you mention that humans have mixed with other animal species (and presumably acquired other traits). Thus, I advise you to trace your logic when assigning other animal traits to different characters and ensure that your North Indian character is not more feral than your other characters simply because of traits you associate with them being South Asian.  

To say you have a wealthy North Indian character is extremely vague. There’s not enough religious/ ethnic/ regional information for me to work with here. Please see the naming guide for information as to how to flesh out their cultural background further. There are certain ethnic/ religious groups that are regularly associated with stereotypes pertaining to wealth, exploitative business practices, miserly behavior, ostentation and so on, particularly in parts of the North where economic disparity and poverty are more pronounced. For such groups, these tropes are best avoided, but without further information, I wouldn’t know which direction to point you. With the information provided, I sense that you need to do a lot more research. How to avoid stereotyping can become an easy issue to overthink if you aren’t familiar with Indian domestic politics and caste issues, so take care when selecting your research sources. Look for sources not from India, but also not from a country (E.g the USA or the UK) that tends to provide sensationalized perspectives on India as a whole.

- Marika.

[diamcndgirl]

under the ‘read more’ you will find a full interview about the one and only penelope hainline.

BASIC QUESTIONS

first name? penelope.

surname? hainline.

middle names? bernadette (after the broadway legend bernadette peters).

nicknames? penny (most common) and miss piggy.

date of birth? may twenty-eight, 1998.

age? twenty-three.

PHYSICAL / APPEARANCE

height? 5′2.

weight? 120lbs.

build? athletic/small.

hair colour? blonde, but known to wear different wigs.

eye colour? bright blue.

glasses or contact lenses? glasses for fashion and fashion only.

distinguishing facial features? her big eyes and tooted up nose.

which bodily feature is most prominent? chest. while she lost most of her weight her chest is still relatively large for her size.

make up? penny loves make up, spends almost as much time doing her make up as she does picking out her outfit.

type of clothes? all types of clothes! she loves clothes but is known mostly for her high fashion looks. she creates her own outfits from time to time. but she loves high fashion and designer clothes.

how do they wear their clothes? penelope has an outfit for literally every occasion. basketball game? she’s got a jersey with her name bedazzled across the back in pink. painting? she’s got a total get up and special painting beret. her clothes are an extension of herself. she loves having fun with her clothes.

race / ethnicity? white.

are they in good health? over all, yes. she’s slimmed down and is in a lot better shape. she does karate/kick boxing to keep in shape but honestly she still eats like a pig.

PERSONALITY

what words or phrases do they overuse? “excusze moi”, “moi”, “thank yoooou.”, “oh dear..”, “totally”, “shut up!!”.

are they more optimistic or pessimistic? hmm, is there a middle ground? honestly, overly optimistic about her own talents and overly pessimistic of other’s. she is absolutely positive she’s perfect at everything she does.. but as for other people? it’s all their fault anything goes wrong.

are they introverted or extroverted? extroverted, extroverted, extroverted!

do they ever put on airs? literally all the time. like i said penelope thinks she’s perfect at everything straight out the gate... doesn’t matter if she’s done it before or not. which means she always puts on a front like she is great at everything.

what bad habits do they have? not many, her mother was good for breaking bad habits young. but, the ones that stuck are: emotional shopping, emotional eatting, sleeping in, and interrupting people.

what makes them laugh out loud? a lot. penny laughs at everything and anything.

how do they display affection? physical touch and gift giving... she’s always been one for big displays of affection. so she’s one for holding hands, kissing in public, and showing out with big gifts.

how do they want to be seen by others? perfect. she wants to be seen as perfect. anything less is just a no.

how do they see themselves? not so perfect. while she acts like it on the inside she is constantly nit picking herself, the way she dresses, and every little thing about herself.

strongest character trait? tenacious. she’s got a strong grip on herself and her life.

weakest character trait? overly confident. while she’s got a go and get it personality she also has a tendency to over over board and think bigger than her ability.

how competitive are they? extremely.

do they make snap judgments or take time to consider? snap judgments all the time with everything. then it takes a good while to convince her she’s not correct about it.

how do they react to praise? highly. she loves praise. anything to hear that she’s as wonderful as she thinks. “oh please. you’re so silly.. tell me more.”

how do they react to criticism? not good.. she hates being told she could be better at something.

what is their greatest fear? failing. be it in her career choice or relationships. to fail means her mother was right and so were all the kids when she was younger.

what is their philosophy of life? go big or go home.

what will they stand up for? their friends. what they believe in. people with smaller voices than her own.

are they indoorsy or outdoorsy? indoors.

what is their sinful little habit? kissing strangers when she’s tipsy.

what sense do they most rely on? her sixth sense-- or at least that’s what she says. penelope picks up ‘vibes’.

what quality do they most value in a friend? loyalty.. and a good fashion sense.

what do they consider an overrated virtue? forgiveness. you don’t always have to forgive someone.

if they could change one thing about themselves, what would it be?

what is their obsession? fashion, rupaul’s drag race, kylie minogue, and fancy chocolate.

FRIENDS AND FAMILY

is their family big or small? who does it consist of? small. there are only three members: her mother bonnie a retired model, her father jim a business lawyer, and herself.

what is their perception of family? she loves her parents. they gave her everything she could ever want.. but they did let her down in a lot of ways. so it’s a tad screwed.

do they have siblings? none that she knows of. her father wasn’t a very faithful man and neither was her mother.

describe their best friend. penelope had a best friend growing up. kaiden russel. sadly, after going into high school the pair didn’t stay connected and she moved onto a more popular crowd and hasn’t truly had a ‘best friend’ since then.

ideal best friend? hm, someone who can keep up with her all the while keeping her in line. someone who listens and doesn’t mind her rambling. also they’ve got to have a great fashion sense and killer personality.

describe their other friends. penelope has loads of friends. while she may be a bit of a mean girl she doesn’t have trouble making friends. especially since moving to elias. she’s been able to calm down on the venom and let friendships grow.. she still worries about people not

do they have any pets? back home she has a biscon friese named pinky. she’s trying to convince her land lord to allow the dog to stay.

who are their natural allies? wally, georgette, daphne, and buzz.

who are their surprising allies? rita. they’re very much opposites attract and have a surprisingly great friendship. while they’re an odd pair penny has her back just like rita has pen’s.

PAST AND FUTURE

what was your character like as a baby? as a child? loud, chubby, and a little too in your face.

did they grow up rich or poor? rich. her parents wouldn’t have it any other way.

did they grow up nurtured or neglected? right in the middle. one parent nurtured with gifts and the other neglected with words.

what is their greatest achievement? prom queen, except it was a fluke. next would be getting into walt academy.

what was their first kiss like? hm, not great. it was with the smelly boy on the back of the bus because the cool kids dared her.. she was promised to sit at their lunch table then got tricked.

what is the worst thing they did to someone they loved? she told her mom she hated her.. like multiple times.

what are their ambitions? become a fashion mogul and build a huge empire.

what advice would they give their younger self? don’t listen to axel.. ever.

what smells remind them of their childhood? chocolate and tears.

what was their childhood ambition? be the next britney spears.

did they have an imaginary childhood friend? she didn’t have many friends besides kaidan. so she created friends from her stuffed animals.

when was the last time they were crushed with disappointment? besides being stood up.. probably being told her latest design wasn’t good by her teacher.

LOVE

do they believe in love at first sight? yes, she’s a hopeless romantic.

are they in a relationship? clearly not.

how do they behave in a relationship? she’s a fun partner. but she’s very about herself. while she’ll cover them with attention and love.. she’ll always be her first priority.

when did you character last have sex? it’s been a hot minute. penny isn’t big on hook ups. she wants to be in love.. or in ‘really like’ before she puts that out there.

what sort of sex do they have? again she wants to make love not have sex. she’s more about pleasing and being pleased. and she just really loves kissing and cuddling.

has your character ever been in love? nope, she doesn’t even know what it feels like.

have they ever had their heart broken? her feelings hurt but her heart wasn’t broken by axel. just hurt really bad.

CONFLICT

how do they respond to a threat? with a bigger threat back. penelope is very confrontational.

are they most likely to fight with their fists or their tongue? tongue, girl has a mouth and can say very hateful and mean things.

if your character could only save one thing from their burning house, what would it be? her diary. she’s kept one since she was a child. it’s important to her.

what are their phobias? spiders and bugs in general.

what is their choice of weapon? her purse and the taser she keeps in it.

what living person do they most despise? axel and his band.

have they ever been bullied or teased? yeah, her whole childhood.

where do they go when they’re angry? to cry in a pillow then to the gym to punch away her aggression.

WORK, EDUCATION AND HOBBIES

what is their current job? jobless socialite student.

what are their hobbies? fashion design/sewing, karaoke, and karate.

educational background? she’s currently in college for fashion design.

intelligence level? she’s about a 8/10 on the intelligence scale. she has always done well in school but def isn’t a valedictorian.

do they have a natural talent for something? sewing. she can make an outfit in under an outfit and it will be perfect.

do they play a sport? are they any good? kick boxing, doll. she’s great. and karate. she’s a black belt you know!

FAVORITES

what is their favorite animal? her pup. but she likes flamingos strangely enough.

which animal do they dislike the most? spiders.. and bats.

what place would they most like to visit? paris. again and again and again. she hopes to live their one day. but as far as new place to visit would be london.

what is the most beautiful thing they’ve ever seen? can she say her own reflection?

what is their favorite song? love at first sight by kylie minogue or the call by the backstreet boys.

music, art, reading preferred? ooo, this is hard for her because fashion is art to her but she loves singing. we’ll say art to be safe.

what is their favorite color? pink, all day everyday.

POSSESSIONS

what is in their fridge? lots of leftovers and food prep. penny doesn’t cook very well.

what is on their bedside table? a picture of her puppy, her phone, a ring dish with her everyday jewelry, and a cute lamp.

what is in their purse or wallet? junk on top of junk and things she needs to clean out.

what is their most treasured possession? her diary and her grandmother wedding band.

SPIRITUALITY

who or what is your character’s guardian angel? she’d believe it’s her father’s mother but then again with her fate she doesn’t think she has one.

do they believe in the afterlife? yes. but she’s not sure it’s like the ‘good book’ says.

what are their religious views? believes in a god but is not practicing any strict religion.

what do they think heaven is? heaven would be a happy life where she’s treated like a princess on a throne.

what do they think hell is? reliving prom night over and over again.

are they superstitious? a bit. she wont place her purse on the ground, doesn’t step on cracks, and little things like that.

what would they like to be reincarnated as? hm, a butterfly.

how would they like to die? in their sleep.

what is your character’s spirit animal? a peacock.

what is their zodiac sign? gemini sun, gemini moon, cancer ascending.

VALUES

what do they think is the worst thing that can be done to a person? murder.. or having their heart broken.

what is their view of ‘freedom’? she’s not sure... it seems like there isn’t such a thing these days.

when did they last lie? she told her teacher her outfit was cute.. it wasn’t. it was tacky and she hated it.

what’s their view of lying? penny doesn’t lie often.. maybe fib and tell little white lies.. but never about anything major.

when did they last make a promise? hm, she doesn’t really make promises because it’s hard for her to keep them.

did they keep or break their last promise? again.. she probably broke it.

DAILY LIFE

what are their eating habits? awful. she works out to keep off the pounds.. but penny has never ate healthy and probably never will.

describe their home. chic chaos? clothes and accessories everywhere, pictures of herself and pup everywhere, her sewing station a hot mess.. lots of color and fun.

are they minimalist or a clutter hoarder? clutter hoarder.

what do they do first thing on a weekday morning? drink water and write in her dream journal.

what do they do on a sunday afternoon? her weekly skin care routine.

what do they do on a friday night? a night on the town. she’s probably dragging a friend to karaoke or on a ‘friend date’.

what is the soft drink of choice? she’s a mountain dew girl.

what is their alcoholic drink of choice? sangria or margaritas. she’s simple.

MISCELLANEOUS

what or who would your character dress up as for halloween? probably wanda from wanda vision.. she has no idea. or she’ll try to get a date and force them to be her vision. or maybe princess peach.

are they comfortable with technology? very much so. social media queen.

if they could call one person for help, who would it be? probably howl.. she just learned about magic.. that has to fix everything.

what is their greatest extravagance? her princess tiara, her father bought when she turned sixteen. it’s diamond encrusted and also has pink diamonds.

what is their perception of redemption? obviously she think shes got the greatest redemption story of all time.

what would they do if they won the lottery? give it to charity for publicity... whoops.

what is their favourite fairytale? the twelve dancing princesses.

what fairytale do they hate? princess and the pea.

do they believe in happy endings? yes, and she hopes she gets one.

what is their idea of perfect happiness? honestly, a good marriage and sucessful career.

what would they ask a fortune teller? who she’s going to marry and if he’s loaded.

if your character could travel through time, where would they go? to meet anne boleyn and tell her what’s going to happen.

what sport do they excel at? karate.

what sport do they suck at? anything with a ball.

if they could have a superpower, what would they choose? super strength or flying.

[storytelling-101]

Character Development — Part D

So, following the General Information is the Physical Information about your character. As mentioned before, this category is pretty much the most important one to be fleshed out properly, because your character will very likely be introduced by their appearance the very first time they appear.

Physical Information

Height Rather self-explanatory. The height can be noted down in your preferred measurement unit like meters/centimeters/foot/inch/ ... or a fictional unit. You can put a conversion into a common measurement unit i.e. in brackets for comparison purpose.

Weight This is the same as with height. You can either choose a universal unit or use a made-up one.

Body Type/Shape Body type, in this case, refers to type such as the common female types apple/pear/hourglass figure. The shape depicts the level of fitness of the character. This can reach from lean/skinny over muscular to curvy/fat. If you want, you can also add if your character is ectomorph, mesomorph or endomorph.

Species This comes in most useful if you write a fantasy story. The species would illustrate if someone is human/beast/demon/dark elf/ ... or anything you can think of.

Ethnicity Ethinicty is one of the most sensitive points in the character sheet, especially because it covers such a wide range of information. Determining someone as i.e. Banjarese/Hani/Komi/ ... gives a lot of information about a person’s ancestry, history, homeland, language and cultural heritage. However, be very careful when filling out this point, because it can happen very quickly that the character becomes an annoying avatar of a stereotypical representative of your chosen ethnicity.

Current Health A rather important but often overlooked point, I think. It gives you a lot of information to work with. Is your character currently ill? Where did they contract their illness? Is it likely to become an epidemic or pandemic? Or has your character a chronic illness? Is it lethal or just interfering with their life? You can also add the other extreme. Has your character outstanding health? Do they ever get sick? Do they have an unusual regenerative ability?

Hair Color Of course, here goes the color of your character’s hair. This can be a natural color like black/brown/blond if you aim for a more natural feel. But it can also be an unusual color like blue/pink/green/ ... if you want your story to feel a bit more like a fantasy story. Naturally, those can also be colors acquired through hair dyeing. You can simply put the original hair color i.e. in brackets.

Eye Color Like with the hair color, this can be common ones like brown/blue/green or exceptional colors like pink/red/yellow/ ... if you like. As with hair dyeing, unusual colors can also be acquired through colored contact lenses. Try not to give too many characters outstanding eye or hair colors because they will become the norm if used too much.

Skin Tone If you write an ordinary story, I would recommend to stick to skin tones that are present in our world. Strange and uncommon skin tones like blue/green/red/ ... won’t go too well with humanoid characters, so those colors should only be used for non-human characters.

Face Shape This is also a point that will look very random to most people. However, the face shape often tells a lot about a character. Those with round faces i.e. are often softer in personality and usually also have rounder body shapes. Moreover, for every face shape there are a variety of stereotypical traits that people think of immediately. So if you want your character to have some kind of specific impression on others, you can also utilize the face shape on top of body type. Of course, there can be exceptions to this rule.

Distinguishing Features Do they have any special birthmarks or tattoos that makes them easily recognizable in a group? Did they sustain any visible scars or some other kind of disfigurement? All this info goes here!

Facial Expressions Do they show their emotions on their face? If so, do they show everything or are there emotions the character hides no matter what?

Resting Face This could, of course, also fit into the facial expressions, but I think it is very meaningful to know if someone is constantly smiling/frowning/scared/angry/ ... even if they don’t feel the emotion at that specific moment. Because they could be easily misunderstood that way.

Smile Another point that would also fit into one of the two points above. However, like with the resting face, the type of smile says a lot about a person’s real thoughts or intentions. Do they smile often? And what type of smile do they show (gentle smile/smirk/sneer/...)?

Eye Contact Do they usually keep eye contact? If yes, does the character constantly keep eye contact? Or do their eyes shift/break from time to time?

Posture The posture can also tell a lot about a character’s background. Is it stiff or relaxed? Do they stand upright or slouched? An upright and slightly stiff posture could i.e. indicate that a person is from a noble family since they are often urged to keep such a posture all the time.

Gait Not many people know that, just like a fingerprint, the stride is unique for every person. So knowing if a character’s gait is confident/lazy/slow/fast/ ... can come in handy, especially for mystery stories.

Gestures Do they often use gestures? Are they using them compulsively? Or maybe they only use them when they are excited or agitated?

Distinguishing Tics and Mannerisms Like already mentioned before, this is another part of tics and mannerisms and a bit different from the one in the general information. While the ones in the general information cover more or less the mannerisms that hail from the mind, these are the ones that have a definite physical component. It includes habits like biting their lip during certain situations, rubbing their arm when they are nervous and anything along that line.

Accent The accent describes almost everything regarding the voice. What falls under this point is i.e. dialect, intonation and pronunciation.

Pitch Another component of the voice, but slightly different from the accent, is the pitch. This can also be a stand-alone identifier. The pitch can be described as i.e. melodious/gravelly/deep/smooth/...

Speech Impediments Although this could also be considered part of the accent, like the pitch it is something that can easily identify a character. This point could contain things like apraxia of speech, stuttering or dysarthria.

Preferred Curse Word This is just what it is. In my opinion, a curse word here and there livens up almost every story. It also tells a bit about a character’s upbringing. Tame and harmless curse words usually indicate a different upbringing than crude or vulgar curse words.

Style of Speech Rather self-explanatory. How does the character talk? Do they sound formal and stiff with complex grammatical structure and heavy use of subject-specific vocabulary? Do they use formal speech that would rather be used in written texts with a lot of figures of speech? Or does the character speak casually to others, regardless of who it is with easy sentences and commonly used words? Maybe they talk intimately with everyone, almost like a child, with very easy to follow sentences and slang words or abbreviations?

Tempo of Speech This too is quite self-explanatory. Does the character talk rapidly without pausing? Are they talking at a measured tempo? Or do they talk very slow as if choosing every word very carefully?

Distinguishing Speech Tics This point shares some similarities with speech impediments, but speech tics aren’t necessarily a speech disorder. What could also be included in this point are repetitive speech patterns that i.e. appear at the beginning or the end of almost every sentence. Like the catchphrase in the general information, Japanese media is a very good example. If watched/played in their original language, anime and games do often have characters that have a recurring pattern at the end of sentences. One good example comes from the game Final Fantasy IX, where the villainous characters Zorn and Thorn use the words ojaru and gojaru to finish their sentences in the Japanese version. The German version has a similar pattern with ..., sag ich and ..., zag ich.

Accessories Accessories cover anything that is carried around on a regular basis. This can be jewelry, hats, a cane or a pipe or anything else. Those things might also be important keepsakes from people the character cherishes.

Glasses Even though glasses could be counted as accessories as well, I listed them separately because aside from being a fashion item, glasses can also be a measure against a physical disability. Does the character wear glasses? Do they even need to wear them? And if they do, when do they have to wear them? Are they able to see without them?

Body Care This point tells a lot about a person’s upbringing, living environment and habits. It illustrates if a character cleans up regularly, washes their clothes and takes care of their body in general. I.e. a person who is on the run will very likely look disheveled, untidy, dirty and famished.

Preferred Outfit/Preferred Style The clothes a character likes to wear the most might also tell you a lot about the character’s personality. Though it will not always represent the exact same type as the personality, you can often estimate someone personality based on their clothing style. It can be a certain outfit they like to wear all the time or a specific style like grunge/casual/goth/sportswear/business casual/hip hop/streetwear/etc. which acts as a visible representation of the character’s personality.

As you can see, there is much more to comment on than with the general information points, so it might be obvious how important the physical information is. Next time we are going to cover the Mental Information.

[gascon-en-exil]

This past weekend I picked up another Steam dating sim, Full Service. I don’t think I could do a complete write-up like I’ve done for some others, but it’s worth mentioning some highlights and lowlights.

The Good

A lot of content for an indie erotica game, with seven primary love interests, over 200 CGs, and over twenty endings running the gamut from tenderly romantic to wildly kinky to dubcon/noncon scenarios. There’s more actual gameplay here than any of the dating sims I’ve previously talked about, with some light scheduling and resource management and a gifting/heart level system comparable to Fire Emblem support ranks or even more so heart levels in those old Harvest Moon games (are those still a thing?). The second playthrough adds more story content to better explore certain character motivations, and there are even after stories - epilogues, essentially - unlocked after perfect endings that catch up with the characters some time later and feature brief animated sex scenes. In the tradition of most gay dating sim protagonists that I’ve come across, Tomoki is fully vers, and his love interests are evenly divided by favored position: three tops, three bottoms, and one fellow vers with a little additional flexibility for certain scenes/combinations. Speaking from extensive personal experience I consider this much more reflective of how the gay/bi male population as a whole approaches anal than something like To Trust an Incubus contorting itself to ensure that every single guy is vers.

The premise is that all the love interests work at a spa/massage parlor that specializes in happy endings. All of them could be considered sex workers, and some of them have alternative sources of income in a similar vein, ex. modeling. This is not the easiest subject matter to write well without being either overly glorifying or overly preachy, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that for the most part Full Service walks the fine line between the two. It doesn’t shy away from the potential dangers and hardships of sex work (especially in some of the bad endings) or from the issues it can create with forming romantic connections, but it also remains generally sex positive and never condemns its characters for what they choose to do with their lives or suggest that they’d all be happier doing something else. The most judgmental the game ever gets seems to be a projection of Tomoki’s own prudishness...which comes off as deliberately hypocritical considering all the raunchy things he can get up to over the course of the game.

Speaking of sex positivity, it’s actually impossible to go through a full playthrough and only have sex with one person, and the fact that around half of the love interests’ development occurs outside plot events means that it’s quite likely that Tomoki will sleep his way through half or more of the spa’s masseurs before all is said and done. Furthermore, despite what I said in my Chess of Blades review about a poly relationship being beyond the scope of a typical dating sim this one pulls it off with one pair of love interests that Tomoki can potentially end up with at the same time.

While she’s not a love interest, there’s a trans woman in the supporting cast. Her full story isn’t revealed until your second playthrough owing to her major role in the plot, but I appreciated the depiction of someone who discovered her gender identity/presentation through her sexual relationships with men. Thara may not be the sort of trans character who would appeal to typical fans of either yaoi or bara, but having explored feminization kink in the context of sex work myself I thought she was a nice addition.

The Bad

So...voice acting. Most of the game goes for vocal work in the style of Fire Emblem Awakening and Fates, short clips that only somewhat match up with the text on screen and are meant to be more suggestive of what the character is saying. Those are fine enough if not always exactly on point, but then there are the perfect endings which are fully voiced. There’s a fair bit of variance in this game’s vocal talent and even audio recording equipment in one or two cases - sadly one of my favorite love interests has a noticeably lower recording quality to his audio, and it’s no more evident than in his perfect ending where suddenly he’s voicing full lines of dialogue - and then there’s the recurring problem these games have with fully voiced sex scenes and how generally silly those come off. I really have to ask: does anyone genuinely feel that full or even partial voice acting adds anything to the eroticism of such scenes? Props to the voice actors for doing their best with the material, but the sounds of sex are just not easy to vocalize unless you’re actually doing it - at least not without sounding ridiculous.

Harping on lack of realism in gay sex scenes has become rather passé, and I can overlook things like everyone being muscled and well-endowed, no one wearing a condom, or there rarely being any mention of artificial lube. However, there is one glaring issue that over and over shattered my suspension of disbelief, because it comes up in like 80% of the game’s sex scenes: these men have no refractory periods, at all. Almost every scene has all characters involved cumming twice, with only one or two lines of text between CGs as a break. Even worse than the inherent absurdity of a man cumming and then being hard again five seconds later is that it leads to the scenes coming off as quite predictable. With only a handful of exceptions sex scenes in Full Service consist of two NSFW CGs: a foreplay CG - oral, rimming, or some light kink like bondage or nipple or armpit play - and then an anal CG. There’s a lot of variety in positions and (tame) kink elements on display, but it’s undercut when almost every encounter follows this exact script.

On some subjects Full Service flirts with a particular kind of kink but can’t find it in itself to commit. Tomoki’s romance with his boss Rald is almost an instance of this, although they do end up having one of those (allegedly) scandalous workplace romances with its kink potential left intact. Less fortunate however are the twins Oki and Okan, who Tomoki can romance either individually or together in the aforementioned poly ending. The twincest is indeed hot, but it’s explained in supplementary material (if not necessarily the game itself) that two really aren’t twins or even related which annoys me as the same sort of cop-out as Coming Out on Top’s teacher/student romance. Here it’s a bit more forgivable as the reason Oki and Okan are more or less RPing as twins is tied into the plot.

The...Eh

Full Service’s setting is difficult to pin down. It’s clearly somewhat inspired by Japan and takes place somewhere in the real world as various other ethnicities get referenced throughout, but it’s all rather vague. I honestly can’t even tell if the developer is Japanese or Western, as there’s signs pointing to either.

There’s an annoying mascot character who runs a gacha for gift items - in-game currency only, thankfully - but the script knows how silly he and uses him sparingly in the plot and heart events.

One of the love interests is (so I’ve read) the protagonist of a completely different indie game, recognizable because he looks like a JRPG protagonist and has plot-convenient amnesia. He’s not a bad character by any means, just a big bundle of genre clichés.

With both Chess of Blades and Coming Out on Top I pointed out that best friend romances were a tricky business and tend to end up lighter on conflict. Full Service really yanks the rug out on that one, but it’s impossible to say any more without heavy spoilers. Suffice it to say Tomoki does have a best friend romance, but it’s hidden and hard to obtain and figures into the main plot in a thoroughly unexpected way.

What I said pertaining to second playthrough reveals also brings up another serious issue the game attempts to tackle, this one with more mixed results. It’s sex trafficking, which indeed ties into the larger sex work premise but in my opinion doesn’t land nearly as well as the rest in large part due to it being treated as a mystery and the centerpiece of many a lategame reveal. There are worse ideas for a source of conflict independent of who Tomoki ends up dating, but I’m still not sure about the overall execution.

So in summary? It’s not entirely my genre and there’s a lack of polish in parts, but a lot of gameplay for a dating sim and so, so much porn. Kind of middle of the pack for me.