#except the issue with killer's is that i made a bunch of mistakes in it

[triglycercule]

"finally, mine. heh, and it looks better than both of yours."

"uhhh, mine and dust's are both in the same style, same everything. like, there's not even that much different about yours, horror."

"yeah, but it's me."

"i hope an alternate version of you gets severely mischaracterized irreparably."

"... damn."

💜/💙/❤️

[peppermintbee]

OMORI’s poor writing (Part 2)

Once again, if you are a big fan of OMORI, this review is not for you. Treasure this game, love it, recommend it, make fan art, buy the merch, do what you will with it. I am not here to take OMORI away from anyone. Based on the overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam, I know that my opinion is in the minority.

However, just as the fans have the right to praise the game, I have the right to examine it, criticize it, and explain why it failed to provide a compelling experience. This is second part of my review where I will tackle OMORI’s problematic themes and disrespectful appropriation of mental health.

[ See Part 1: Plot Writing Lies ]

(Note: I use “OMORI” in all-caps for the game title, and “Omori” in title case for the character name.)

Spoilers and criticism below.

Part 2: OMORI’s message is mishandled and distasteful

OMORI provides a warning that it depicts scenes of depression, anxiety, and suicide. Because the game includes these scenes, I assumed these mental health issues are presented in a way that is meaningful and respectful.

However, that is not the case. 

Despite having depictions of such, this game is not really about depression, anxiety, or even suicide. It’s about committing a horrible crime, lying about it, and getting over the guilt.

1. Suicide as a game mechanic

Suicidal thoughts are intrusive, terrifying, and painful. As well as ending the victim's life, suicide wreaks havoc on the lives of those who once knew them. It is often a taboo topic, but discussing such matters is an important step to understanding and preventing it. Video games are a medium well suited to approaching such dark topics.

Unfortunately, OMORI does not handle the topic of suicide well at all.

First, suicide is written as a unavoidable game mechanic that seems to have been included for shallow reasons such as aesthetic and shock value. To leave Sunny’s headspace and wake up, you--as a player--must direct him to stab himself in the stomach. 

But why? It’s not like waking up involves some sort of major sacrifice. In fact, waking up is something that is more or less unavoidable. Reality should be something that snatches Sunny away from his headspace against his will, perhaps as an encroaching darkness that Sunny can run from, but never truly escape. But instead, facing reality is something you are forced to opt into in the most needlessly violent way possible.

Forcing you--as a player--to literally commit suicide just to wake up from a dream is a pointless, distasteful, and disrespectful action that sets a precedent for suicide not being taken seriously in this game. (And it isn’t.)

In the black space, Omori is pressured to kill a cat. In that scene, regardless of your choice, you are forced to kill yourself. However, the act of stabbing yourself has been seen so many times at that point that it has completely lost any impact. Who cares about suicide when it’s been reduced to just a means of travel?

Lastly, if you fail to defeat the final boss, Sunny commits suicide in the real world. However, this is not a cutscene, it is once again something that you--as a player--are forced to do to progress. Putting these actions in the hands of a player is not as meaningful as the writer seems to believe, because there are no other options to progress. Any weight in making that decision is lost to resignation; a frustrated sigh of “Well, okay, fine. I guess I have to click Z here.” You are then rewarded with a SLAPPING pop song and a psychedelic cutscene of Sunny falling to his death. It’s tasteless to its core and appropriates the deaths of every suicidal person as a quirky, shallow “bad end.”

(Seriously, this is how the writer decided to depict a child taking his own life.)

2. Sunny/Omori is a poor presentation of depression

Sunny/Omori does not smile. Even in past photographs before The Incident, he still is not smiling. The contrast between Sunny and his friends stands out like a sore thumb, so I assumed this was the writer’s attempt to show that Sunny is dealing with depression, where he can’t be happy even in happy situations.

Of course, if that were the case it would be inaccurate since depressed people do smile and do hide their true feelings. They are often dismissed with, “You can’t be depressed, I saw you smiling once.” However, I was willing to let Sunny’s chronic frown slide because sometimes you have to oversimplify an idea to get your point across.

Much to my surprise, there is NO evidence of Sunny having depression before The Incident and there is very little indication of him having depression throughout the game either. The evidence of this is that while looking at a family portrait, Sunny comments that he's never liked to smile. Since he's a a baby in this portrait, this goes to show that his not smiling is simply a preference -- a quirky character trait that makes him stand out so that you feel an emotion during the true ending when he finally smiles. 

Everything in the game seems to point to him being pretty happy and well adjusted up until he killed Mari. Then, even after he killed Mari, he pretty much looks and behaves the same way. Wouldn’t it be more jarring and tragic if you saw Sunny was happy in the past, but depressed now?

Which leads me to my next point...

3. Sunny and Basil are not depressed, they’re guilty (and for good reason)

In the book I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t), Brené Brown explains the difference between feeling guilt and shame.

Guilt means: “I did something bad.” Shame means: “I am something bad.”

Guilt, when attributed to bad behavior, is actually a healthy emotion. It means that you have a sense of right and wrong, that you empathize with those you’ve hurt, and it motivates you to make things right.

Shame is an unhealthy emotion. It arrests growth, destroys self-esteem, causes poor decision making, isolates you from your loved ones, and is directly correlated with anxiety and depression.

OMORI should be a game about overcoming shame. All the right set pieces are there. Sunny’s walled himself off, his sister (allegedly) committed suicide, and he seems to be struggling with lifelong depression. However, this all falls apart, when it’s revealed that he killed his sister and staged her death as a suicide to escape blame (with Basil’s help). He DID do something bad. It’s not shame, it’s literally guilt.

All at once, OMORI stops being a game about recovering from grief and depression and becomes a game that demands the player to sympathize with a killer and liar who is hiding from his crimes. Because he and Basil feel bad about what they did, Sunny and Basil are presented as greater victims than their actual victim.

4. OMORI asks you empathize with villains (with ZERO self awareness)

Games where you are playing a character with a guilty conscience has been told before, but where OMORI really fails is that Sunny is not truly held accountable for what he did to others. Instead, the game focuses on HIS pain: since killing his sister he’s been isolated, he’s having nightmares, and he’s suicidal. 

The plot of the game is focused on helping Sunny forgive himself for ruining other people’s lives. The writing barely acknowledges how his friends/family feel about what he did. When his victims’ pain IS addressed, it’s either used to further victimize Sunny (ie: isn’t it sad for him that he made his friends so sad?) or it’s used to reassure the player that Sunny’s victims have forgiven him (or will forgive him). 

In fact, the game holds Mari responsible for her own death, citing that her "perfectionism" must have been what pushed Sunny to attack her. OMORI presents Mari, through headspace, as someone who accepted death gracefully and wants Sunny to live a happy life. She is never given her own voice and nothing in the game suggests she is capable of feeling bitter over her death and postmortem desecration. She plays the role of the Madonna archetype--and the perfect victim--allowing the player to empathize entirely with Sunny while accepting that Mari brought everything on herself.

[Mari suggesting that Sunny acting out his aggression on her was her fault.]

The climax of this game is NOT Sunny telling the truth to his friends. The climax is Sunny defeating his guilt and forgiving himself. We know this because the story does not even show how his friends respond to his confession, because-- once again-- what’s most important thing is resolving Sunny’s pain, not the pain he has caused others. (Though the game does heavily imply that his friends will forgive him.)

[Pictured: the boys shedding their guilt is the true happy ending ]

Imagine, for a moment, if this game was about an abuser, who caused immense pain to someone and got away with it. Then, the whole game was about how they felt bad for the abuse they caused, and-- as a player-- you help them forgive THEMSELF for their past abuse. Then, in the last few seconds of the game, they either apologize to their victim or kill themself. The victim’s response is not shown because it is not important.

This is the plot of OMORI, except with a bunch of excuses thrown on top to make it more palatable. Sunny and Basil are just soooo cute and sad. Killing Mari was an accident. Stringing her body up like a piñata was a juvenile mistake. The boys feel SO BAD that they want to kill themselves. And because suicide is so tragic, you-- as an audience-- are manipulated into empathizing them.

5. In OMORI, suicide is used as a cheap ploy for sympathy

As I mentioned before, suicide is horrible and tragic. People struggling with suicidal ideation need help, support, and respect. That said, let’s make one thing clear: being suicidal does not automatically make someone a good person. There are plenty of examples of criminals who kill themselves to escape the penalty or guilt for something they did. It is so common in the news that I don’t think I have to list out examples.

In bad endings, Sunny and Basil’s suicides are 100% motivated by guilt for their very real crimes. Now, it should be stated, Sunny and Basil do not deserve to die. And because suicide is such an extreme, permanent end for those two boys, we-- as players-- are invested in preventing that tragic end at all costs.

However, the looming threat of suicide is used as leverage to force the audience to dismiss the severity of what Sunny and Basil did. As I’ve said before, the plot of the game is about soothing and alleviating Sunny’s guilt and stopping him from killing himself as opposed to making things right. 

The worst thing is, this tactic actually works. The threat of suicide is so strong, it has distracted many players from the truth that this story is about sympathizing with a boy who has killed his sister, with little regard for those his actions have affected (see point #4).

It’s terrible because suicide is such a serious topic worthy of discussion, but when used as little more than pity-bait, it twists your perception of what the characters did and silences those who try to criticize how this game handles such topics.

6. Mari's suicide being fake is a terrible twist

Lastly, by revealing Mari’s “suicide” as an accidental death, OMORI misses an opportunity to tell a much more powerful story. In the first half of this game, when Mari is thought to have committed suicide at the young age of 15, is a sobering moment. That tragedy is something very real.

If Mari had killed herself as opposed to being killed, Sunny isolating himself after his sister takes her own life is realistic. Mari’s death coming as a surprise is also realistic; how often have we heard people saying that they never knew someone was suffering? That they seemed like such a happy person?

Losing a loved one to suicide does not just cause horrible grief, but crippling shame as well. Those left behind will blame themselves, tormented by thoughts of how they could have saved them, how they would do anything to get them back. That shame can follow you forever, haunting you like a ghost, threatening you with the same fate. Overcoming that grief and shame is no simple task, and I truly thought OMORI was going to be about grappling with grief and letting go of survivor guilt.

Instead, Mari didn’t commit suicide, her life was cut short by her brother. Then, her body was staged as a suicide, forever changing how her family and friends perceived her. Her hanging body did not represent a devastating loss of life and horror of teen depression, but instead is a cheap twist that represents Sunny’s guilt for killing her and tampering with her corpse.

Conclusion:

As I’ve mentioned before OMORI has a lot of potential. The set pieces of a depressed kid who escapes to a dream world to cope with his unresolved trauma is one that had the makings to be very meaningful. However, it fumbles these issues, creating a sloppy plot that results in a problematic message. It’s baffling that this even happened, especially considering the length of time this was in development.

[toaarcan]

One ship exposes everything wrong with TRoS

Heaven help me, I’m back on my bullshit.

Alright, so, I enjoyed The Rise of Skywalker when I watched it. I actually watched it twice, once on my own when I rushed to see it as soon as possible in order to beat spoilers, and once with my family, in what was a semi-annual new year tradition for us during those four years that a Star Wars film released.

But that doesn’t mean it was good. I enjoyed Transformers: Dark of the Moon the first time I watched it, and that movie’s still a steaming pile of shit. I was admittedly fifteen when I saw DotM, but still. 

My point is that I’m fully capable of enjoying crappy films.

But there’s one thing, one thing about TRoS that exemplifies so many of the problems with TRoS as a whole, if not everything (And by that I mean with TRoS specifically, the woeful treatment of John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran is a Whole Trilogy Problem). And it’s a ship. Specifically this ship.

The Resistance Y-Wing. I hate this ship with the fiery passion of an exploding star, and to talk about why, we need to first go back to The Last Jedi and its conspicuous lack of Y-Wings.

One of the things that I disliked most about the Sequels before TRoS put all the other problems into stark light was the lack of new ships. Instead of new vehicles, we got shinier, sleeker versions of the ships from the original trilogy. And I disliked this because it’s the opposite of what the Prequels did.

Episodes I-III don’t feature more primitive versions of the X-Wing and TIE Fighter, but instead have similar vehicles that evoke the classics while still having an identity of their own.

The ARC-170 looks kinda like an X-Wing, but it’s bigger and has more weapons and crew, and you get why the well-funded Republic can afford things like this while the scrappy Rebels can’t.

The Eta-2 is a predecessor to the TIE Fighter, but it being employed exclusively by Jedi makes a lot of sense, of course a precognitive wizard with superhuman reflexes can do well in a light, unshielded ship, while in the hands of the Empire’s military they’re just expendable swarm fighters.

But then in the Sequels, rather than evolve the ships into new forms, they just made new incarnations of the X-Wing, TIE Fighter, A-Wing, TIE Interceptor, B-Wing, and of course the Y-Wing.

Well, except for one movie: The Last Jedi.

At the outset of the film, we’re introduced to this ship.

This is the MG-100 StarFortress, AKA “That ship all the Star Wars Youtubers hate”. It’s designed to be a much heavier and bulkier version of the B-Wing Starfighter, and is even made by the same people.

From questions about how the bombs “fall” toward the Dreadnought (The answer is magnets) to claims that they’re completely useless because most of the ones in the film died so easily, these things have been put through the wringer by the fandom, and honestly they don’t deserve it? What destroyed the StarFortresses in the film wasn’t their own weaknesses, but them being deployed in too tight a formation. It was a tactical fuckup, not a problem with the ship’s design.

And given that the whole point of the battle over D’Qar is that Poe makes a tactical fuckup to kickstart his development into the new leader of the Resistance as a whole, adding another layer makes sense to me.

But we live in a post-CinemaSins world of media consumption, where every plot-point that isn’t spelled out with a flowchart and an audio commentary by the writers is actually a plothole. 

We also live in an era where Star Wars fans pine for the days of the Legends canon where everything about new ships, species, and worlds was explained in background lore and books, and are angry that the new Canon is... doing exactly the same thing?

Seriously, how much exposition and lore dumping is actually present in any of the Star Wars films? Not a whole lot. And that applies to all three eras. 

So the StarFortress’ appearance in the film and the lack of Y-Wings led to a bevy of armchair writers demanding to know why the Resistance weren’t using Y-Wings and why they were using those “Resistance Bombers” that are just ‘terrible’.

Answer? Because the Y-Wings sucked shit.

Seriously, go back to the Original Trilogy and try to keep track of the Y-Wings, and see what they actually do, and you’ll find that what they do is “Explode, mostly.”

We’re first introduced to the Y-Wings in A New Hope, and they’re supposed to be the ones performing the Trench Run while the X-Wings cover them, and to their credit, they try.

And then they all get blown up by Vader and his wingmen before they can even take a shot at the exhaust port. Well, except that one that appears with the rebel ships flying away from the Death Star.

Where the fuck were you when the X-Wings were doing the attack run?

The Y-Wings got absolutely wrecked.

Ancillary media would go on to explain that the Y-Wings were beat-up old vehicles that were no longer fit for purpose, but the Rebels had to use them anyway because they had basically no money. They’d stripped down the ships and removed a bunch of their more costly features just to make them viable, and the results of that were pretty clear.

Of course, the Y-Wings were still present in the later films. They don’t do anything in The Empire Strikes Back, but they play a role in Return of the Jedi.

Naturally, that role is mostly “Get blown up while the other ships do the important stuff”.

Despite supposedly being a fighter-bomber that was designed to do significant damage to capital ships, does the Y-Wing play a role in the destruction of the Executor? Does it fuck. Destroying the Imperial flagship’s deflector shields and the subsequent suicidal ram attack on the bridge are tasks that are both performed by the goddamn A-Wings. Y’know, the light interceptors?

The Y-Wings get shown up at their own job by the ships that are there to protect them from TIE Fighters.

Ancillary media again explains why they’re still there. While the Rebels have a newer, better fighter-bomber in the B-Wing, the B-Wing is expensive as fuck and also really difficult to fly. 

A non-centreline cockpit that rotates will do that to a ship.

Still, the B-Wing was a better bomber than the Y-Wing ever was (And the StarFortress was better than them both at that role).

All this adds up to a simple fact: There were very good reasons why the Resistance weren’t using Y-Wings. And there were even reasonable reasons to choose the StarFortress compared to the B-Wing itself, given that the Resistance are still undermanned and under-funded, especially with the New Republic getting nuked midway through The Force Awakens. It being easier to fly and having more armaments would have made it a viable choice for the Resistance.

Buuuut oops, people didn’t like the StarFortress and we can’t make the Internet angry at us again! Better put the Y-Wings back in for Episode IX, and show them destroying a Xyston-class Destroyer, that’ll make them happy!

And sure, okay, giving the Resistance a fighter/bomber is probably a good idea. And they already have New X-Wings and New A-Wings, so where’s the harm in a New Y-Wing?

Alright, alright, sure. But why the fuck does it look like this?

If this is a new ship, why is it already stripped-down like the ones in the Original Trilogy? Why doesn’t it look like the actual brand-new Y-Wings we saw in The Clone Wars? 

Now that’s more like it. Still visibly a Y-Wing, but with more of an identity of its own. 

Seriously, “Literally the same ship but without its armour pulled off” has more of a unique identity than the crowd-pleasing New Y-Wing.

And that, in and of itself, is the essence of The Rise of Skywalker.

It’s blind, empty fanservice, rushing to include as much nostalgia-pandering as possible to try and get the fanbase back on-side after The Last Jedi didn’t do what the fanboys wanted it to do.

This is a whole near- three hour movie whose only message is “Yes, Youtubers making TFA critiques longer than an entire season of TCW, we hear you, we’ll make it for you, please love us!”

And, almost entirely predictably, it was shite.

It was riddled with plotholes and none of the scenes had any time to breathe because the movie was too desperately trying to rush itself to the next crowd-pleasing scene in a desperate attempt to wank off as many disgruntled fanboys as it possibly could.

Luke with his green saber! Jedi Leia! Chewie gets a medal! Lando! Luke raises his X-Wing out of the water! The main villain is a testicle in a bathrobe again! Snork origin! Original-flavour Star Destroyers! Rose doesn’t exist! Rey had a super-special secret magical bloodline the whole time and Luke and Leia totally knew even though Luke has literally no idea who she is in Episode VIII! Luke actually was just afraid of the bad guys in Episode VII, none of that self-imposed exile for his own mistakes nonsense! Y-Wings.

I mean fuck. Disagree with Luke’s portrayal in TLJ all you like, I certainly have my issues with it, but I lay those at the feet of JJ for making Luke’s absence into one of his fucking Mystery Boxes, and then deciding that, even though last time Luke sensed Leia and Han might be in danger, he abandoned his Jedi training, hopped in an X-Wing, and flew halfway across the galaxy to try and save them, he wouldn’t do shit when the First Order pointed a star-powered System-Killer 9000 at Leia, and Han got himself killed trying to redeem Kyle Ron. Like how in fuck was Rian supposed to explain Luke’s inaction in VII?

But regardless of the problems with that Luke portrayal, at least Mark Hamill gave it his all. Hell, it might be his best performance in the Star Wars franchise!

 In TRoS, he shows up in a bad wig, waves a middle finger at TLJ, and ascends to his final form as a Lightsaber Delivery Boy, because apparently all you need to kill a Sith who literally clawed his way back from death is two lightsabers. Haunting Kyle Ron? Nope. Providing guidance as a ghost? Not really.

And y’know what the kicker is? It didn’t fucking work. Lucasfilm and Disney fucking gutted this trilogy, sliced out the integrity, surgically removed the soul of Episode IX in a desperate effort to make the Internet’s most unpleasable fanbase happy, and it didn’t work. They still hate it! Now they just concoct hour-long videos about how much they would’ve preferred to have the Trevorrow script (Which is admittedly much better, albeit still with it’s far share of giant flaws), which was probably thrown out because it wasn’t fanservicey enough!

The Rise of Skywalker is an awful film. It’s a loose collection of nostalgia-baiting moments, roughly stapled together around the skeleton of a plot that was never properly developed. It’s a Frankenstein’s Monster of a movie, but, and I say this with full offense, the Victor Frankenstein in this tragic story isn’t Lucasfilm or Disney or Kathleen Kennedy or Rian Johnson, or even JJ Abrams. It’s you, Star Wars Fandom. It is your monster. 

[quickspinner]

Guard My Heart - Ch 1 Daylight’s Wasting

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Read on AO3 

Written for @livrever​ as part of the @lovebugs-and-snakecharmers​ Secret Admirer Lukanette Exchange!

Happy LBSC Exchaaaaaaaaange and I'm the one who gets to write for @livrever​, who's been doing so much heavy lifting making sure everything runs smoothly this year! Because I am a sucker I decided to combine her prompts (I should have known better, since the last time I combined prompts from Mal I ended up with Killer Combo) soooooo today you get a first chapter instead of a completed story. I'll reveal the second prompt when it is time, but the first one was neighboring shop owners. I opted for slightly different than the traditional take for Reasons.

I love you to pieces Mal and I really hope you enjoy the journey!

Marinette is moving out on her own and starting her own shop, where she can be the boss and responsible for no one but herself. The years have taught her that for Ladybug to do her job, Marinette has to maintain a certain amount of distance in her personal life...but how's she supposed to do that when a blast from the past is moving in next door? Especially when she's got a box full of nosy kwamis cheering her on...This was not the new beginning she had in mind!

Rating: M, Implied sexual content in later chapters

“This is the big day,” Tikki crowed from Marinette's shoulder, and Marinette tried to smile as she carefully maneuvered her rented van around all the other vehicles crowding the back alley. “Come on, Marinette,” Tikki said gently, nuzzling up against her cheek. “It’s okay to be excited.” 

“I am excited,” Marinette told her, putting the vehicle in park. “This is a big deal, Tikki. It’s just that there’s a lot of work to do and I need to be focused on that right now.” 

“I wish you didn’t have to do all of this alone,” Tikki fretted. “It’s a lot to do by yourself. Are you sure you don’t want to call anyone?” 

“I��ll manage,” Marinette smiled, flexing her arm for Tikki’s benefit. “Besides,” she sighed, opening the door as Tikki zipped into the purse at her hip. “Who would I call?” 

Tikki didn’t have a chance to answer as Marinette jumped down from the van. She glanced around the alley at her fellow business owners who were also moving in. Some of them looked almost finished; some, like her, were only just getting started.

Marinette tried not to feel a little irked at the people who were already almost done. How early had they gotten here? Maybe their renovations had been finished earlier and they’d gotten a head start. Marinette pouted for a moment, and then tried to put it out of her mind. It wasn’t a competition, after all. She just needed to focus on her own work. She had a strict schedule written out and taped to the inside of the van that would have her moved into her new shop and the apartment above it, hopefully in time to make a quick run for groceries before it got too late. 

Besides, the other shop owners probably had help or had hired people, whereas Marinette was depending on nothing but her own muscles. She couldn’t afford to hire anybody, she didn’t want to wait until her parents were free, and her friends...well. She had her life and they had their lives and other than a few friendly texts now and then, their paths didn’t really cross anymore except for major life events. Despite Tikki’s hints that opening her first boutique should have fallen into that category, it just didn’t seem worth the effort to push the issue. Marinette could do this alone. She was used to it. 

A smile grew on her face as she pulled the shiny new keys from her pocket and unlocked the back door of the shop. Marinette couldn’t help a muffled squeal and a hop of excitement as it swung open wide. She kicked down the doorstop to hold it open, and went inside. 

Marinette passed through the back room that would serve as storage and workshop, and into the small storefront. She stood there for a moment, suddenly feeling shaky and a bit short of breath. She swallowed. “This is a really big deal, Tikki,” she said, dropping unceremoniously to the floor. She ran her fingertips over the rough texture of the commercial carpeting she had picked out. “I can’t screw this up.” 

“You won’t, Marinette,” Tikki assured her, peeping out cautiously. “It’s going to be okay. One step at a time, remember?”

“Right,” Marinette agreed, still breathless, and she pushed herself back up. “Time to get to work.”

She got to her feet, and went back through the shop and then upstairs to the apartment, propping all the doors open, mentally reviewing her plan and where everything would go. Marinette felt both excitement and relief at the thought of finally living on her own, with no one else to make excuses to. Starting tonight, no one would be monitoring her coming and going, or asking where she’d been, or complaining that she’d left her share of the chores undone. No one to report to, no one to worry, no one to disappoint. As nervous as she was about the risks of this new venture, that alone would be a weight off her shoulders.

Doors open and empty rooms ready, Marinette went back outside. She threw up the gate on the back of the van, pulled out the ramp, and took a deep breath as she surveyed the contents, nervousness suddenly threatening to overshadow her earlier confidence. “Okay,” she murmured to herself. “It looks like a lot, all stuffed together like this, but I can do it. Somehow.” 

Marinette had packed the van carefully, and her boxes were meticulously labelled and color coded with stickers, so that she knew as soon as she picked a box up whether it was for the shop interior, the back room, or the apartment upstairs. Her world narrowed to the task before her, and she didn’t even notice the looks she got as she hauled box after box and pieces of disassembled furniture into her new space. Her muscles burned, but it was a familiar sensation, a normal sensation. Marinette had learned to take comfort from anything normal, especially on a day like today, when so much was changing. The burn was a reminder to pause and stretch and take a moment to breathe, and that helped keep her focused. 

When it started to verge on too much, Marinette sat down on the ledge of her propped-open shop door to rest and drink a bottle of water, mentally assessing her progress and comparing it against her schedule. She was doing pretty well, she thought, although the hard stuff was still to come. 

“Marinette?” 

She jumped, nearly spilling her water all over herself, and looked up to the man who had spoken to her. Her mouth dropped open in surprise. “L-Luka?” she gasped, scrambling to her feet. “Is that you?” 

He grinned, and there was no mistaking it. His hair was a little bit longer, still streaked with blue but tied back at the nape of his neck, and his bangs were clipped back away from his sweaty face. His dimples were more prominent in his leaner face, his jaw more defined, but his smile and his eyes were the same. “Hey,” he said, as calmly as if they’d last seen each other yesterday instead of almost ten years ago, as he adjusted the box he was holding. “Wow, what a surprise, meeting you here.” That was putting it mildly, and Marinette almost laughed at the typically Luka understatement. His eyes flicked to the propped open door and his eyebrows went a little higher. “Are you...moving in?”

“Yeah,” Marinette said, running her hand through her sweaty bangs, and trying to find the ground again. She hadn’t expected to run into anybody she knew today, let alone Luka. She hadn’t even known for sure that he was back in Paris. Marientte felt a pang looking at him, something between guilt and grief, and she suddenly didn’t know what to say.

Luka shifted his box again, drawing her eyes to both the box and the bunched muscles in the arms holding it. Her eyes snapped back to his face. “Wait,” she said incredulously, “Are you—” 

“Yep,” he grinned, and nodded at the next door down from hers. “I’m on the corner, so...looks like we’re gonna be neighbors.” He groaned and hiked the box up again. “I’m sorry, I’ve gotta put this down, but—when we’re done, maybe we could grab coffee or something, catch up? If you want to?”

“Sure!” Marinette smiled brightly. “I’d love to.”

The slow grin that spread over his face made her insides wobble a little. Wow, she thought, he really grew up. That smile had been intense enough when they were younger; with the sharper features of his more mature face it was devastating. “Okay. I’ll come over when I’m done and give you a hand if you’re still working. See you later.” 

“Bye.” Marinette waved weakly, as Luka went to his own door, propped open like hers was.  “Oh my God, Tikki,” Marinette hissed, and heard a giggle near her hip. “This isn’t funny, Tikki, what am I going to do?”

“Just go with it, Marinette,” Tikki advised cheerfully. “I know you’ve been lonely, and Luka was always a good friend to you. Maybe this is fate bringing you back together!” 

“Tikki,” Marinette sighed, and leaned back against the building behind her, tipping her head back to knock gently against it. She paused, and then opened her purse to look down at the kwami and give her a look. “Fate, or luck?”

“Does it matter?” Tikki asked, shrugging. Her big eyes softened and she reached out just enough to pat Marinette’s hand. “I know you feel bad about the way you two left things, but Luka was always good for you, and you could use a friend like him right now. It doesn’t have to be romantic, Marinette. Don’t overthink it. It’s not good for you to be so alone, so just give it a chance and see what happens!” 

Marinette rolled her eyes and sighed, and then checked the time. She needed to get moving if she wanted to stay on schedule, and people were going to think she was crazy if they saw her talking to her handbag.  

She had to wait a moment, though, when she got back to the van, for her legs to steady. Luka Couffaine...she hadn’t seen him since he left to tour with Jagged Stone when they were kids. She bit her lip hard. Ugh, how could Luka even want to be her friend now after the way things had happened back then…she’d been so confused, and trying so hard to manage her life and her feelings, and she’d been failing so miserably. Luka had been so kind to her, and tried to help, and she hadn’t even kept in touch with him when he left. If anyone had genuine reason to call her a bad friend, it would definitely be Luka. 

Marinette swallowed and took a deep breath and climbed up into the van. Focus, she told herself. Just focus on what you have to do.

She grabbed the closest box and hauled it out blindly. She risked a glance over as she walked by, and saw several young men and a woman, all with multicolored hair, carrying furniture from an even larger moving van into Luka’s place. Then she put her head down and went to her own door, determined. 

Marinette did her best not to look towards Luka’s van again, telling herself it would only distract her, and she couldn’t afford to be distracted if she wanted to get this task done. 

Everything went according to plan until she got to the wrought iron headboard of her new bed. She’d been able to lift it on her own before, but she realized now, as her arms trembled, that she should have placed this a little earlier in the unloading order. Well, she was going to have to make it work. She got it down the ramp of the van, and had to stand for a moment, bracing it as her muscles twitched and trembled, as she looked at the distance she had to cover to get to the door and thought of the stairs after that. She swore softly, and leaned her forehead against the frame as she tried to muster the strength.

A hand squeezed her shoulder. “We got it, just tell us where you want it,” Luka said, as Marinette looked up at him in surprise. 

“Oh,” she said reflexively, “I can—”

“I know you can,” Luka grunted, grabbing one end of the headboard as one of his friends got the other. “But something like this is easier with two people.” He grinned. “Upstairs, I assume?”

“Y-yeah,” Marinette stammered weakly. “The bedroom. Um—” She ran back up in the van and grabbed the first pink-stickered box she came to. “This way,” she smiled at the boys, and went ahead of them, face burning. 

“Dude, this is so much easier than all that heavy shit you brought,” Luka’s friend groaned, and Marinette giggled in spite of herself when Luka cheerfully told him to kiss his ass. The boys carried her headboard in and leaned it against the wall where Marinette directed. 

“Thank you,” she told them sincerely, and Luka winked at her as he followed his friend out. 

“Let us know if you need a hand with anything else,” he told her, and they were gone before Marinette had a chance to say anything else.

She ended up not having to ask him for help at all, because anytime she was struggling, either Luka or one or more of his friends would pop up to help her. Marinette was both touched by Luka’s concern and willingness to help, and angry at herself, for planning so poorly that she needed the help in the first place—no matter how much his friends joked that hauling her stuff was a nice break compared to hauling Luka’s.

Stupid, she scolded herself. Took on too much, as usual, and what would you have done if Luka hadn’t been around? Poor guy, he wasn’t expecting to have to haul extra stuff today, either. We’re back in touch for one day and he’s already having to bail me out. Just like old times. Nice to know I haven’t grown in the least in the last ten years. She kept working with grim determination, trying not to look like she needed more help, and getting angrier at herself every time one of them stopped to give her a hand.

Finally, she was done. She locked up the van and the apartment, and then went to stand once again in her shop front. There was still a lot to be done to it over the next two weeks before the big grand opening event, but now that the move-in was done, she could finally get started. Some of the fixtures she had negotiated with the leasing company, like the carpeted pedestal in one corner where she could do fittings and the full-length three-way mirrors. She’d created the countertop for her register herself, but the company had built the counter and installed her custom top on it for her. Marinette drifted over to it now and ran her fingertips over the resin surface with her monogram M and real pink flowers embedded in it. It turned out really well, she thought to herself, and smiled. That was one thing that went right, at least.

“Marinette?”

She jumped, but then remembered she hadn’t closed the back door yet. “I’m in here,” she called, and a moment Luka came through the door of the workroom, looking around. He grinned, seeing her stand behind the register. “Making yourself at home?” He moved around the front as if he were a customer, and Marinette giggled.

“Something like that,” she said with a shrug. “How goes the unloading?”

“I’m sweaty and filthy, but at least we’re done,” Luka grinned, leaning both elbows on Marinette’s handmade custom countertop. She resisted the urge to shove him off it. “How about you? Need anymore help with anything?”

Marinette shook her head quickly. “No, thank you. I’m done, and I feel disgusting.” She grinned weakly. “To be honest, there’s nothing I want less right now than coffee.”

“Agreed,” Luka chuckled. “I’ll buy you whatever you want, as long as it’s cold.” He winced slightly. “And cheap. This place kinda cleaned me out.” 

“I hear you,” Marinette laughed, coming out from behind the counter. It felt too weird, having it between them. “I’m in the same boat. The only reason I could afford this at all is because my grandpa passed away and left all his things to me. Turned out there were a bunch of companies waiting for the old man to die so they could make a bid on his house. They’ve been trying to get the property for years but Grandpa wouldn't sell.” She folded her arms and leaned back on the counter next to him as Luka straightened to face her. 

“I’m sorry about your Grandpa,” Luka said, putting his hand on her shoulder. The hand was bigger, but the gesture was the same, and Marinette felt a tender pang for the boy who had loved her. “I know your relationship with him was complicated.” Marinette nodded, but she didn’t really want to talk about it. Luka dropped his hand and gestured towards the door. “Listen, I still owe my friends Chinese and beer for helping me move—and before you say anything, I budgeted for that in my moving expenses.”

“You sound so responsible,” Marinette giggled, and he made a face at her before continuing.

“Why don’t you join us, if you feel up to it?” he suggested. “If not, that’s cool, I can bring you back something and we can catch up some other time when we’ve had a little more rest.”

Marinette hesitated a moment. She wasn’t sure she was up to meeting new people, and a shower would feel awfully good right now, but...they had helped her, and she felt like it would be rude to turn down their company. She bit her lip and glanced at Luka. 

He smiled. “No pressure. If you just want to relax after all this, that’s okay. I can’t believe how much crap you moved out of that van all by yourself.” His brow creased for a moment, but he seemed to change his mind about saying anything else, and just waited.

So Luka. Marinette smiled suddenly. “Papa’s going to help me with the one or two really big things this weekend, and the rest I figured I could handle myself. I guess I overestimated myself a little bit. I really appreciated your help, though. I do want to relax, but…it has been ages since we could hang out. If you don’t think your friends will mind—a cold beer sounds awfully good right now…”

Luka snorted. “Since I’m buying, they’re not allowed to mind,” he said with a grin.  

Feeling daring, Marinette linked her arm through Luka’s. “Tell you what. Since we’re both on the verge of broke right now, how about we each buy our own drinks, and I pay for my share of the food plus a little bit to cover you guys helping me out,” she suggested, “and the first one to hit the black owes the other dinner?”

“Deal,” Luka grinned, and warmth fluttered in Marinette’s stomach. 

“So, um,” she said, looking away as they walked back out of the shop. “Music shop?”

Luka chuckled as they paused by the door so Marinette could lock up. “You’d think, but, ah...actually, it’s antiques and collectibles. And uh...curiosities.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m not allowed to say junk, but you know Mom. Her taste is...weird.” 

“Really?” Marinette looked back at him, shocked. “You’re kidding.” 

“Nope. Mom’s been on her world tour, sending home crap from all over, and finally there didn’t seem anything else to do.” He gave her a sideways grin that told her there was probably more to the story than that, but he clearly didn’t want to talk about it. He offered her his arm again as she turned away from the door. “I talked to her about it and we went in on the shop together. She’s going to be my buyer and I’m going to run the business. A lot of what I’ve got is music related, though,” he admitted. “And I’ve maybe started a little collection of my own. I still love playing, but I like small audiences anyway, and well...if the shop does okay, then I’m hoping I’ll have a little more freedom to pick and choose my gigs without worrying about whether I’m going to eat that month.” He winced. “We’ll...see how that works out for me. Mom’s pretty gung ho, but...” He shrugged. “She never really was one for practicalities. I mean, I know I won’t starve if the place fails, she and...and Jagged would bail me out if I were really in trouble, but I really don’t want to have to fall back on that.” Marinette nodded sympathetically at the expression on his face. It seemed like he still had mixed feelings about Jagged, even after all this time, and Marinette could hardly blame him. “To be honest,” he went on, “this whole thing is kind of a gamble and I’m nervous about it, but it beats working for The Man, right?” 

“Tell me about it,” Marinette sighed.

Luka put his hand over hers where it rested on his arm and she looked up at him. “Hey,” he said, in the same gentle way he used to when they were kids. “We got this. We’re gonna kick ass and be living in luxury.”

Marinette laughed. “I’d settle for being able to afford pizza.”

Luka groaned. “Please don’t mention pizza, I’m still traumatized.”

Marinette laughed again, and leaned into his arm, and he leaned back, chuckling along with her, and...it was like nothing had ever changed. Marinette felt her breath catch and a sudden lump in her throat, and Luka paused. 

“Hey, you okay?” he asked softly, looking down at her.

Marinette nodded quickly, blinking back the tears that wanted to come out. “Sorry, I—I’m just glad to see you again, that’s all.” 

Luka smiled at her, and maybe it was just the heat but she thought he was blushing slightly. He took her hand off his arm and moved it down to his own hand, and threaded his fingers tightly through hers. “Likewise,” he said, squeezing, and Marinette smiled, squeezing back.  She was selfishly glad to find he hadn’t changed too much, deep down. His hand dwarfed hers the same way it always had, but it gave her an odd little flutter now to look at her fingers between his. They stood for just a moment, and then Luka started walking again, tugging her along with him. He let go of her hand just before they reached the group of his friends standing around and put his hand on her back instead. “Hey, guys, this is Marinette. We’ve been friends for a long time and I haven’t seen her for ages, so she’s coming along with us.” 

Marinette gave an awkward wave. “Thanks a bunch for the help,” she said, “I told Luka I’d help pick up the tab as thanks.“ They all grinned at her. 

“Congrats, you’ve just won their undying loyalty,” Luka commented dryly. “Bunch of mercenaries.” He put just a little pressure against her back and gestured vaguely. “There’s a place a couple blocks over, we were just going to walk if that’s okay with you.”

“Of course,” Marinette agreed, and the small group shuffled off. Luka let his hand fall once she started moving, but he stayed beside her, which she secretly appreciated, since the others were strangers. They seemed perfectly comfortable with each other, though, joking and shoving and teasing. Marinette found herself smiling as she watched them. This was what she was fighting so hard to protect, after all, even if it was something she couldn’t really have anymore. 

Luka touched her arm lightly, and when she looked up at him, he raised his eyebrows at her slightly in silent inquiry. She smiled at him to let him know she was good. He relaxed a little, and turned back to the conversation.

There was some friendly chaos as everyone ordered their food and Luka and Marinette negotiated the split, but finally they all had their dinners and enough chairs to seat everyone. Marinette hadn’t realized how hungry she was until her food was in front of her. 

“Ugh, I’m so hungry,” Luka moaned beside her, and there was a chorus of agreement that made her chuckle. The chatter didn’t exactly stop, but it slowed down considerably as they all applied themselves to their food. 

Marinette focused on her plate and just let the talk flow around her, thoughts drifting again to all of the things she needed to do between now and the grand opening. 

She only realized she had lost the thread of the conversation entirely when Evan’s words caught her attention again. 

“I dunno, man, this neighborhood’s had bad juju since Ladybug and Chat Noir took down Hawkmoth,” he was saying, shaking his head slightly. “The whole area was levelled. Even though Ladybug fixed it, people don’t seem to stay and businesses don’t stay open. My sister said that’s why they shut everything down and redid all the buildings. One last-ditch effort at trying to revive the place. Turn it into artisan shops, make it attractive to tourists and hipsters.”

Luka shrugged. “I feel a lot better about my chances now that I know Marinette’s next door,” he said, nudging her with his elbow and grinning at her when she swatted him. “She’s got a great head for business and marketing. It can’t be a lost cause if she’s here.” 

Marinette snorted. “Maybe it’s just all I could afford,” she said, making a face at him. 

“The price was right, that’s for sure,” Luka admitted. “Either way, it can only benefit me to have you attracting traffic next door. Although maybe I’m assuming too much, are you still doing fashion?” 

“Yes,” Marinette confirmed. “I graduated from ESMOD last year. I’ve...well, I decided the regular industry jobs aren’t for me, and that I’d be better off working somewhere where I could be the boss.” Also I can’t stay employed when I have to run off to akuma attacks constantly.

“I’m just surprised you picked this spot, that’s all,” Evan chuckled.  “I thought sailors were superstitious.” 

“We’re also cheap,” Luka snorted. “This was the best option I had that didn’t involve going to the old man, and—” 

“And that woulda been fireworks,” Dingo laughed. “I almost wish you’d suggested it so I could’ve watched the Captain freak out about it.”

“Yeah, I’m sure it would have been fun for you. ” Luka threw a peanut at him. “Since I’d be the one in the blast radius, I don’t think so.” 

“Well, just so you know, I’m gonna laugh my ass off if Harvester levels this neighborhood the week after your grand opening,” Evan cut back in. 

“Unlikely,” Marinette said without thinking, and everyone turned to look at her. She blinked, and then shrugged. “Hawkmoth caused damage on purpose, to lure out Ladybug and Chat Noir because he wanted their Miraculous. Harvester doesn’t seem to care about the Miraculous; she’ll take them if she can get them, but she’s just...I don’t know, greedy. She causes plenty of damage on a small scale, but she doesn’t usually destroy whole neighborhoods. There’s nothing where we are that’s worth her targeting, though. Besides, her targets tend to be in the wealthier areas of town.” She made a slightly sour face. It was bad enough that they hadn’t managed to recover the butterfly with Hawkmoth’s defeat. It was worse that it fell into the hands of someone as selfish and greedy as Harvester. She was barely more than a petty thief, and it was a burn to Ladybug’s pride that they hadn’t been able to catch her yet. 

Trouble was, because Harvester lacked the kind of focus that Hawkmoth had had, she was less predictable, and more ruthless. There had been a certain rhythm to Hawkmoth’s attacks that Ladybug and Chat Noir had learned to work with over time to minimize damage. Harvester was much more random. She didn’t care what kind of damage she caused, she didn’t care if people got hurt—she just didn’t care, period. She wanted attention, and she wanted expensive things, and she didn’t care who suffered if she didn’t get her way. 

Scratch that. She did care about one person’s suffering—Ladybug’s. She didn’t seem to care about their Miraculous, but she wanted Ladybug. Alive if possible, but she’d shown more than once that she wasn’t opposed to Ladybug very painfully dead, either. 

Marinette shuddered.

Luka’s hand fell on her shoulder and she looked up at him, startled.

“You okay?” he asked softly, leaning in a little. 

“Yeah, of course,” she lied automatically, with a bright, extremely fake smile. “Just tired.” 

She’d forgotten how good Luka was at seeing lies. She could see in his face that he didn’t believe her, but he gave her a small smile that said it’s okay, you don’t have to tell me, and turned back to the table. 

Marinette took a breath and tried to tune back into the conversation as Dingo, Evan, and Marcie continued their good-natured ribbing over Luka’s new enterprise. 

“So how do you two know each other again?” Marcie asked, and Marinette froze, her mouth full of noodles. She glanced up and saw Marcie watching her with slightly narrowed eyes. 

“Marinette went to school with Juleka,” Luka replied easily. “We got to be friends right before I left with Jagged.” His tone was pleasant, but he cut his eyes up at Marcie in a sharp look that Marinette didn’t quite understand. Marcie clearly did, though, because she said something inane and changed the subject. Dingo and Evan exchanged a look, and then Evan looked down at his plate and Dingo looked at Marinette with a thoughtful expression—or at least she thought so, but it was hard to tell because he was still wearing his sunglasses.

She was having trouble getting that mouthful of noodles down with him looking at her like that.

“Ding,” Luka said mildly, without looking away from his own food, and Dingo huffed, shook his head, and went back to eating. 

It still took effort to chew and swallow, and Marinette shifted uncomfortably in her seat, and began trying to think of a way to make her exit. Before she could, Luka put down his chopsticks and started closing the containers nearest to him. “Well,” he said, “I’m really grateful for the help today, guys. You guys can all consider one favor knocked off the big stack that every single one of you owes me.” 

There was laughter and protests, and Luka raised his voice to be heard over them. “But I’m exhausted, and I still have to shower and get at least enough of my stuff unpacked that I have somewhere to sleep tonight, so I think I’m going to head back. Are you still eating, Marinette?”

“Oh, no, I’m good,” Marinette said hastily, recognizing the out as she began packing up her own containers. “Mind if I walk back with you?”

“Sure,” Luka smiled. 

“Hey Lu,” Dingo called after them, and Luka looked back as he opened the door and held it for Marinette. “Don’t be a dumbass, man.”

Luka just flipped Dingo off with his free hand and followed Marinette out of the door. 

“They know, huh?” Marinette muttered as the door fell shut behind them, and Luka sighed. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Not the details, but...enough. I’m sorry they made you uncomfortable.” 

Marinette shrugged. “Not like I don’t deserve it.” 

Luka put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed in a light half hug, turning her in the right direction as they started walking. “I forgave you a long time ago, for what it’s worth. We were just dumb kids. Not to say the feelings weren’t real, but let’s just say we hadn’t exactly reached the age of sober judgement yet and leave it at that, okay?”

Marinette shook her head. “I still feel like I...owe you an apology for all that. I wasn’t very considerate of your feelings. If...if it hadn’t been for Adrien…” Marinette began, and trailed off as Luka’s arm tightened around her. “It’s just,” Marinette tried to control her breathing, and blinked quickly to keep the tears back. “I tried so hard to keep everything together, and it all kind of fell apart anyway, and looking back, I just...wish I’d made some different choices about my priorities. About which people I put my energy into. I’m just...I’m sorry I didn’t choose you, Luka. I’m...sorry I didn’t stay in touch after you left.” 

Luka blew out a slow breath. “It was a crazy time for both of us. That year with Jagged, it was...it was a lot. I’m honestly not sure I’d have been able to keep up my end, so. Don’t worry about it.”

“You...still don’t get along with Jagged too well?” Marinette ventured.

Luka rolled his eyes. “Having one parent constantly acting like a child was more than enough, I really didn’t need a second parent to take care of.” He winced. “Sorry, that came out a lot more bitter than I meant. It’s not like I expected him to act like a dad, but…” Luka shook his head. “Anyway, a year of that lifestyle was enough. I finally told him I was going home. I’m not interested in anything he can give me. Maybe it would have been different, if I’d done it on my own, but...there is no on my own anymore. I can’t make it in that industry without being attached to him, and I just...don’t want that.” He gave her a rueful grin. “Is that stupid?”

“No,” Marinette said, reaching up and curling her hand around his where it rested on her shoulder. “No, not all.”

He smiled at her, and she dropped her hand. They walked in silence the rest of the way. 

“Well, home sweet home,” Luka said, letting his arm fall as they walked up the steps to the balcony that ran along the back of the buildings, providing outdoor access to their apartments. “This gonna be weird,” he admitted, as they paused in front of his door. “I’ve never lived alone before.” 

“Me neither,” Marinette admitted with a nervous giggle.

Luka smiled at her. “Well, if you ever need anything, or you just want to talk or hangout or whatever.” He nodded to his door. “You know where to find me.” 

“That’s a dangerous promise,” Marinette tried to smile, but she wasn’t sure it worked. “You did so much for me before, and never got anything back for it. I feel like I took advantage of you.”

“You didn’t,” Luka replied immediately, like she should have known he would. “Marinette, even if that were true, and I really don’t think it is...I never did any of that for...payback, or something. I wasn’t expecting anything out of you. I just wanted you to be happy.”

Marinette couldn’t think of anything to say to that. It was true that everything he’d done for her, he’d done voluntarily, and that she had done some things for him, although they were more really for Kitty Section as a whole, but...it didn’t change the way she felt. She’d failed Luka, just like she failed everyone that cared about her. 

She jolted slightly when she felt his hand on her shoulder again. Luka let go quickly, his hand hovering there as he looked over her face. She started to open her mouth to apologize, but Luka let his hand drop. “I’ll see you soon, neighbor,” was all he said, and then he turned to unlock his own door. He gave her a smile over his shoulder, and though it looked different on his adult face, it was the same smile he used to give her, the one that said he had faith in her, no matter whether she had any in herself at the moment. 

Then his door closed with a quiet click, and she was standing there alone.

“Marinette,” Tikki whispered after a moment, reaching out of Marinette’s purse to touch her hand.

Marinette jumped slightly, and then turned to her own door, fumbling her keys out. She unlocked it and went inside.

“Marinette?” Tikki zipped out of her purse to float at eye level, her expression sympathetic and concerned. 

Marinette gave her a weak smile. “I can’t decide if I’m glad he’s there, or if I’m upset about it. He’s always been so observant. What if…” She trailed off, and folded her arms uncomfortably. 

Tikki tilted her head slightly. “Is that really what you’re worried about?” 

Marinette bit her lip. “Not really,” she admitted. “It’s just…” She folded her arms and chewed her lip, trying to find a way to articulate her feelings. “Luka’s easy to depend on,” she said softly. “Having him right there...I’m not sure it’s good for me. I’m afraid I’ll...I don’t know. Be tempted to lean on him more than I should, and end up hurting him all over again. Not that—not that he feels the same as he did back then, but Luka’s still Luka, he just...he’s a helper, and I’ll end up asking too much and he’ll resent me and he’ll end up selling his shop just to get away from me and—”

“Marinette!” Tikki waved her arms to catch her attention. “Okay, I get it. But Luka does live next door and there’s nothing either of you can do about that now. So what can we do?” 

Marinette sighed. “I just have to be careful,” she decided. “I have to make sure I don’t ask him for too much. For...for some things, maybe, because Luka’s discreet and he doesn’t ask questions so there might be times when I can ask him to cover for me and stuff...but not too much. Only when I really need it.”

“Okay.” Tikki flew in close and laid a paw on Marinette’s cheek. “That sounds like a good plan. We just take one day at a time, right?” 

“One day at a time,” Marinette agreed, and then smiled. “And we still have to get this apartment fit to live in, so let’s let the others out and get started making this place into home. We can do the groceries tomorrow.” Dinner with Luka had not been in her schedule, after all, but...this once, she didn’t mind.

“That’s the spirit!” Tikki cheered, and followed Marinette towards the bedroom.

It was weird, that first night, with the smell of fresh paint and cardboard, and all the noises from outside that were so different than the ones she was used to. It was hard to go to sleep, especially when there was so much to do, but the kwamis finally bullied her to bed, and their presence tucked in all around her gave her enough comfort to doze off. The same weirdness woke her early in the morning, and she wandered around her apartment like a zombie in her striped pajama pants and tank as she waited for her coffee to be ready. 

She was halfway through her second mug, still staring blankly at the pile of boxes and making absent noises of agreement now and then at the chattering kwami perched around her, when a knock on her door made her jump and sent the kwamis scattering for cover. 

Frowning, Marinette padded to the door in her bare feet, coffee cup in hand, and stood on her toes to peek out of the slightly-too-high peephole. 

“Luka?” she said in surprise, and opened the door.

“Hey,” he smiled at her. “I was going to do a grocery run, and I saw you didn’t have a car, so...I thought maybe you’d like a ride with me?” He held up a motorcycle helmet. “Not exactly the same as my old bike,” he grinned, “But if memory serves, you can handle it.” 

Marinette burst into giggles. “I can handle anything you can handle,” she said when she could control herself, folding her arms and cocking a hip. 

Luka’s smile warmed, and he winked at her. “Finish your coffee and meet me downstairs in ten.” 

It took most of that time for her to dig out her riding gear; she hadn’t expected to need it anytime soon, so it wasn’t particularly accessible, but thanks to her overly detailed box organization system, augmented by a little kwami assistance, she found the right box and got it open, pulling out her black padded jacket with pink panels on the sides, and her carefully-packed black and pink helmet with her flowers stenciled on the side. A little more digging found black motorcycle boots with pink hardware up the side to hold the lacing. She put it all on over a t-shirt and a pair of jeans, and hurried for the door.

“Wait!” Kaalki cried, bursting out of another box, towing something sparkly. “Don’t forget these! You haven’t seen him in years, so you simply must look fabulous !” 

Marinette giggled and took the glasses Kaalki held out to her. “Thanks, Kaalki.” 

“They’re not as good as mine,” Kaalki huffed, fluffing her mane. “But they’ll do.” 

Luka did a double-take when he saw her, his eyebrows practically flying off his forehead they shot up so fast. Marinette giggled at his reaction. “Grandma,” she shrugged with a grin, and slid the chrome riding glasses with pink lenses and rhinestones lining the frame. Luka burst out laughing. 

“You look amazing,” he said, trying to stifle the laugh. 

“Thank you,” Marinette sniffed. “She decked me out so she could take me on a road trip for my eighteenth birthday.” 

“Nice,” Luka grinned, zipping up his own padded jacket and swinging one leg over the bike. “I want to hear all about it later.” He jerked his head. “Come on, hop aboard. I hope your list isn’t too long, we can’t carry too much on this thing, but we should be able to get the essentials.”

Marinette didn’t bother answering, putting on her helmet instead and then climbing aboard behind Luka. Her list had been long, but she could live without most of it for a few days. This might actually work out better, giving her a chance to get the essentials so she’d have less to carry when she went back for the rest. 

Luka showed her where to put her feet, and grinned back at her before he strapped on his own helmet. “Just like old times.”

“Not quite like old times,” she giggled, putting her hands on his waist. “I’m really glad to have you back though,” she said quietly, not sure whether she wanted him to hear her or not. 

He must have heard though, because Luka put one gloved hand over hers for just a moment, and then started the bike. “Tap my shoulder twice if you need me to stop,” he called back as he backed them out of the space. He blew out a breath, and then flipped down his helmet’s visor and took off. 

It had been a while since she’d been on a motorcycle, so she tried to concentrate on moving with him as they rode. She was rewarded by a smile when they dismounted the bike and Luka pulled his helmet off. “Your grandma’s a good teacher,” he said. “You’re easy to ride with.”

“Thanks,” Marinette smiled, letting him stow her gear with his. “Don’t buy any bread,” she warned him as they walked into the store. “My parents are going to be by sometime today or tomorrow I’m sure, and as soon as they hear you’re my neighbor I know they’ll bring extra.” 

“I’m not going to say no to that,” Luka chuckled. “Anything your dad makes is going to be way better than anything they’ll have here.” They shared a smile, and a slightly awkward silence fell between them as they each picked up baskets and started walking through the store. Marinette wondered if she should go off on her own, but the store wasn’t that big and she’d probably keep bumping into him and then that would be weird and she couldn’t just ditch him— 

“How are your folks doing these days?” Luka asked, picking up a box off the shelf.

“O-oh, they’re...they’re good. Well. I mean, pretty much the same as always, you know?” she said, flustered. 

“How are they handling you moving out?” he asked, smiling as he put the box in his basket and then stuck his hand in his pocket as they strolled forward. 

Marinette let her head drop back and gave a sigh of longsuffering. “They’re...doing their best,” she giggled. “They’re very enthusiastic, but…”

“Holding a lot back?” Luka smiled. 

“Not very successfully,” Marinette giggled. “What about you, how’s your family doing? How’s J-Juleka?” she asked, and tensed when Luka gave her a sideways glance.

“Pretty good,” he said, selecting a box from the shelf to put in his basket. “I haven’t told her yet that I ran into you.” He glanced at her again. “You want me to, or should I not? I know you girls lost touch a while ago.”

Marinette shrugged without looking at him, blushing faintly. “I don’t mind. We didn’t have a falling out or anything, just you know...time, and stuff. She probably doesn’t want to hear from me, maybe you should just not mention it.”

Luka smiled, eyes on the shelf as they strolled. “I don’t know. Juleka and me, we were always taught that people have to live their lives, you know? You appreciate them while you have them, and you let them go when your paths drift apart. You were always going places, Marinette, everybody knew that. I don’t think Juleka will hold it against you.” His smile broadened, and he pulled his phone out of his pocket. “She’s been doing some dream chasing of her own, after all.” 

“Really?” Marinette said, taking the phone when he handed it to her. She looked at the image and her mouth dropped open. “Oh my gosh, she really did it? She’s a model?”

“Cosmetics mostly so far,” Luka told her with a smile. “She’s trying to get into clothing and runway but she’s done really well with the cosmetics companies. Her eyes are so amazing and her skin’s always been flawless.”

“She looks beautiful,” Marinette sighed, handing the phone back. “Is she happy?”

“She seems to be.” Luka pocketed the phone, and went back to shopping, giving a pointed look at Marinette’s empty basket. She hurriedly turned to the shelves too, trying to make herself focus on her list. “Anyway, she’s had to let a few things go in the process, so I think she’d understand. She did have to get a new number a while back, but I can give her yours if you want me to.” 

“Well…” Marinette still felt a flutter of nerves, but she pushed it down. “Sure.” She smiled weakly. “You always make everything so easy.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Luka chuckled. 

“It is,” Marinette smiled. 

“It’s the same for me, you know,” Luka said, and Marinette blinked at him in confusion. “About the friends coming and going, I mean. It’s just a part of life, Marinette. It’s not something you should be embarrassed or ashamed about. It’s just the way things are.” He gave her a kind smile. “There were a lot of friends I left behind that year with Jagged. I wasn’t kidding about how busy I was.”

Marinette smiled, though she kept her focus on the shelves. “You’re still friends with Dingo.”

“Don’t remind me,” Luka chuckled. “I can’t get rid of him. There’s some people, you know, where no matter how long you go without talking. With Dingo, no matter how much time passes, it’s like we last talked yesterday. Besides, he knows all my secrets. I can’t afford to cut him loose.” 

Marinette sighed. “That must be nice though. Having someone who knows you that well.”

“Sometimes,” Luka agreed. “Though mostly he just uses it to make my life hell. Thank God he’s still chasing Brielle or I’d never get rid of him. He has to pretend to be an adult at least half the time to convince her he’s still worth wasting her time on.” 

“Wow, they’re still together?” Marinette giggled. “That’s impressive.” 

“They are, they aren’t, they are again. It’s…” Luka shook his head. “Not my idea of the ideal relationship, but it works for them—well, most of the time—so…” he shrugged. “I’m chronically single, though, so who am I to judge.”

“Really?” Marinette finally looked up at him. “Why? I mean—” she turned red and spluttered, and Luka had to dodge her flying grocery basket as she tried to frantically erase the question with her flailing hands. “Ooooh, I’m sorry, that was so nosy.” 

“It’s okay,” Luka laughed. “Relax, Marinette. What about you? Anyone special in your life?” 

Marinette’s face heated, but she figured Luka was the last person on earth likely to judge her relationship history. “Me? Oh, no. I had a few flings in high school and uni, but…” she shrugged. “They never lasted long. I’m...not very good at casual, but I don’t have a lot of time to give a relationship. It seemed like no matter how hard I tried it all tended to fall apart sooner rather than later. Eventually, I just stopped trying.”

“Timing,” Luka sighed sympathetically, shaking his head, “Timing is a bitch, no doubt.” 

Marinette hunched her shoulders a little. “You can say that again.” 

Luka touched her arm gently, and they finished the rest of their shopping with lighter small talk, mostly about all the crazy shenanigans Anarka was up to now that she was free and unfettered with both of her children out of the house. 

It took some ingenuity to get their purchases loaded on the bike, and Marinette had a few things precariously wedged between herself and Luka, but they made it home without losing anything, and that was what mattered. 

Luka stopped at his door, while Marinette kept walking to hers. She was still trying to get her keys out of her pocket when Luka got his door open. 

“Marinette,” he said, and she looked at him in surprise. “If you need anything, let me know, okay?” 

“Oh...um, sure,” Marinette said as brightly as she could, remembering her vow the night before not to ask him for anything more than necessary.

“I mean it.” Luka held her gaze for a moment and grinned. “Because I have like a million favors I’d like to ask, and I need to start stockpiling on my end. I could use some help with branding and advertising, for starters.” 

Marinette blinked, and then laughed, and she saw his shoulders relax a bit. 

“You can just ask, you know,” she told him, and Luka shook his head. 

“Nope. Fair’s fair. Every artist deserves payment for their work, I just don’t have the cash handy for it. So if you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask. It’ll be a down payment on designing my new signage.” He grinned at her one more time, and then opened his door and was gone. 

That was...so Luka, she thought affectionately, coming up with a way to put the offer of his help out there in a way she couldn’t refuse. She wasn’t sure whether to laugh or be mad at him for daring to see through her so easily.

Well. She definitely didn’t want a repeat of last time, where she was constantly taking from him and giving nothing in return. But surely, an equal trade would be okay? She could do that without making it weird. 

She opened her door and stepped inside, and was immediately swarmed by kwami hoping for a snack. “Only one each!” she scolded them all, making her way to the kitchen. “We’re never going to make this work if you’re constantly eating me out of house and home.”

“Did you enjoy your trip?” Sass asked her, and she met his knowing smile. 

“Yes, I did,” she said, lifting a finger to poke him in the belly. “It’s good to see him again.” She smiled. “He’s doing well, Sass.” 

Sass chuckled, still giving her that same look. “That isss good to hear.” Marinette narrowed her eyes at him. 

“Are we ssstill painting the shop tomorrow?” Sass asked innocently. 

“Yes,” Marinette said firmly. “We have a lot of work to do before the grand opening.”

Fiction Master Post | LBSC 2021 Exchange Collection

[a-duck-with-a-book]

REVIEW // Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicle, #1) by Jay Kristoff

★☆☆☆☆

So I’m very late to the party, but I just finished reading Nevernight by Jay Kristoff I had such high hopes for this series based off of what people recommending it had told me and what I read about it before picking up. Dark fantasy? Check. Strong leading lady? I’m here for it. Gays? It’s literally my only personality trait. Sign me up. Unfortunately, this book fell flat in all those categories. It reminded me a lot of Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass, which made me take one point off of to begin with simply for making me think of Maas’s writing. Overall, I just found the book to be too predictable, with bad writing, exposition, and pacing, and too many parts that just made me ~uncomfortable~.

In case you are not familiar with this novel, Nevernight tells the story of Mia Corvere, a girl who lost her family when she was a child after her father was convicted of treason. When the book begins, she is 16 years old and embarking on a journey to join the Red Church, a school for assassins, so that she may one day be able to avenge her father’s death. Along the way she meets a bunch of forgettable characters whose names I can’t be bothered to remember and is taught by the most fearsome killers in the Republic. Here she gains many valuable skills, like how to survive being poisoned, how to fight, and how to get big boobs.

+ Side note: by chapter 3 three I started picturing Mia as the crow guy from RWBY and I could not shake that for the rest of the book

I had many issues with this novel that I will try to summarize in some sort of coherent fashion, but to be honest this book sucked the will to live out of me so I don’t know how much energy I can put into this review.

// image: official cover art by Jason Chan //

FOOTNOTES

The footnotes were probably the most jarring element of the book for me, and, unfortunately, there’s a lot of them. Their function seems to be twofold:

they are the form of most of the world-building, explaining several customs, the history of the institutions and peoples Mia meets, and the mythology followed by the people of the Republic.

they allow for the narrator of our story to interrupt with comical one-liners or cryptic foreshadowing

In my humble opinion, both of these are unnecessary and stupid. The interruptions come off as crass and immature and make the other more textbook, boring exposition come off as a joke, especially when it is dealing with sensitive or serious topics. There is one that explains this brothel called the Seven Flavors, which the footnote explains refer to “Boy, Girl, Man, Woman, Pig, Horse, and, if sufficient notice and coin was given, Corpse.” Now, on its own, this passing mention of pedophilia, bestiality, and necrophilia could very well contribute to the world building and tone of the novel, but when placed side by side with the childish, joking tone of the “cue the violiiiiiiiins” or, regarding the acoustics of a room, “…they were, as it happens, exceptional. Falalalalalalaaaaaaaa”, come off as way too light-hearted for the topic at hand. Maybe I’m being way too sensitive, but I’m pretty tired of authors using serious topics as off-hand remarks as a lazy way to make their world daker and grittier. Plus, these footnotes were just so incredibly cringy that I would recoil from second-hand embarrassment every time. They resemble the things I wrote when I was 14 and trying (and miserably failing) to be funny. Also… there are way too many of them. While at first I appreciated the attempt to deepen the lore of the story (I’m a sucker for world-building), after a while it became evident that the author was just forcing information down our throats without taking the time to actually weave the lore and background into the story itself. It came off as a very lazy way to force exposition.

OVERLY FLOWERY LANGUAGE

This story is BRIMMING with similes and metaphors, like every other sentence is some overly complicated way to describe something that could have been presented in three words. When you include so many metaphors/similes/etc., they begin to lose power. They should allow the reader to extrapolate more meaning and emotion from a sentence, but if the book is bursting at the seams with them, they become increasingly ordinary, to the point of losing all of their luster. One prime example appears on page 30:

“It was a bucktoothed little shithole, and no mistake. Not the most miserable building in all creation. [here there is a footnote about some other inn/brothel] But if the inn were a man and you stumbled into him in a bar, you’d be forgiven for assuming he had—after agreeing enthusiastically to his wife’s request to bring another woman into their marriage bed—discovered his bride making up a pallet for him in the guest room.”

So first of all what the fuck is that supposed to mean? That whole paragraph is a fever dream. Let’s begin with “bucktoothed little shithole”. Bucktoothed? Really? What does that mean. Please, someone explain to be right now what a bucktoothed building is. Is it uneven? Is it awkward? Is it half-finished? Is one side longer than the other? Did they do a bad paint job that only covers on side? Are the windows askew? Is the door too big for its frame? We already know from the paragraph above that it is “disheveled” as well, so why the need for another weird phrasing of its appearance? We then move on to that whole JOURNEY of a sentence, where the inn is compared to a man being cuckolded. That is the most insane tale-can you imagine running into someone in a bar and that story being the VERY FIRST thing that runs through your mind??? I know I’m focusing way too much on this stupid paragraph, but basically what I am trying to get at is that even though we spend half a page talking about how bucktoothed and disheveled and cuckolded this building is, we get no actual physical description of it. Imagine if Kristoff had just written that it was a run-down, ill-kept building that looked as worse for wear as its owner did. Done, one sentence. Great. Let’s move on. Instead, we spend so long reading these absolutely batshit descriptions that ultimately tell us next to nothing. Flowery language is placed over actual context. You may think that a description this long and complex means that this inn is a significant or recurring setting in the novel. Nope. It’s not. Mia leaves and that’s that. The reason that I’m focusing so much on this objectively irrelevant paragraph is because it is so representative of the biggest issue I have with the writing in this book. There are so many unnecessary comparisons that function only to make the author feel clever rather than add anything to the story at all. It’s very à la 2010s Tumblr.

THE (IN MY OPINION, BAD) WRITING

For the first half of the book, we are constantly being TOLD things rather than being SHOWN things. With the exception of one of the teachers cutting off Mia’s arm, we rarely see the ruthlessness that the assassins are so feared for, but we hear about it in nearly every other sentence Where are the consequences? I think this book would have been way more enjoyable if there were actually consequences to the characters’ actions. The inclusion of the weaver and the weird vampire guy completely remove any tension regarding the fate of the central cast. When Mia had her arm chopped off, I was shocked, and pleasantly surprised. How was she going to overcome this unexpected obstacle in her training? Then a couple pages later, its reattached with absolutely no lasting consequences. All of the initial tension and shock value of the loss of Mia’s arm is entirely removed because of the two incest-y siblings. Their entire purpose for existing is just to undo all damage to the main characters. Then suddenly, out of the blue, Mia is willing to take on a ton of consequences and completely throw away her chance at becoming initiated in order to avenge her family just to save Tric from receiving like one punishment??? Like why?? As an aside, the only moment I truly enjoyed was when Ash fucking stabbed Tric to death. I assume that when the reader’s favorite moment is one of the central characters’ death, it does not bode well for their reception of the book.

THE THEMES

TW: rape-y subjects

The author seemed a little too keen to include rape and sexual assault in his story. Mia withdrew her consent in the sex scene in the very first chapter, and even if you read it as consensual (which I do not), it is described as incredibly unpleasant on her end. Tric is the result of a rape, which is brought up several times throughout the story. Further, Mia is constantly facing harassment from men. I understand that this is frames the idea that the world she lives in is misogynistic and ruthless, but there are other ways to push that idea through other than constantly putting in her in those situations. As in, this didn’t need to be the ONLY way we explored this subject. Beyond the uncomfortable propensity for sexual assault, I also very much disliked the sexualization of the 16-year-old main character. Oh. My. Gosh. Mia is CONSTANTLY sexualized. Every single damn character makes comments about her body, how hot she is, how much sex she potentially has. It is so weird and uncomfortable. I feel the need to reiterate that she is SIXTEEN. There is, however, a focus placed on the power Mia can gain from seducing her targets. Girl power? Not to me, really. The issue I have with this is the idea that a woman has to be overtly sexual in order to be considered powerful. This is something that we can see in many female assassins and supposedly powerful female characters in fiction (like Black Widow) especially those written by men. Now, there is nothing wrong with using one’s sexuality as a weapon, and I’m certainly not saying that a strong female character cannot be sexual, but the idea that a sixteen-year-old girl is shown having her body painfully modified tp be more desirable, and in a graphic sex scene with another character, in order to for the reader to read her as liberated and powerful does not sit well with me. I don’t really feel like this aspect of her training should be relevant to the overall story. I wish the time that Kristoff had dedicated to hammering into our heads that Mia is a femme fatale to developing her Darkin powers instead. The way she is written now feels more like she is a faux strong female character written for a male audience.

Secondly, Mia is fully written as “the plain-girl-who-is-actually-pretty”. This whole trope bothers me IMMENSELY. YA is full of girls who are described as plain, forgettable, or ugly while their physical descriptions are just the dictionary definition of conventionally attractive. It seems like a way to market off of girls’ self-consciousness while still being able to market the main character as a hot heroine in official art. And there is, of course, the issue of Mia’s boob job Readwithcindy (just “withcindy” now!) did a whole video about this so I won’t get into it much just to repeat what she already said, but I agree that the idea of a 30-something year old man including this completely unnecessary detail regarding the sexualization of teenage girl, who we have ALREADY seen in a rape and being sexualized by other men in the story, made me really, really, uncomfortable. I highly recommend you go watch her video, as she touches on this in way more detail. [Cindy's video

RATINGS

Worldbuilding: ★★☆☆☆

A lot of thought obviously went into the world-the mythology, society, and politics are well-thought out. But the way they are introduced is annoying and bland. It seems like the author put a lot of effort into constructing this world but realized a lot of it would be left out of the book, so he crammed it into footnotes instead.

Tone and writing style: ★☆☆☆☆ for first half, ★★★☆☆ for second half

The tone of the first half is all over the place, like it doesn’t know if it should be dark and gritty or comical and immature. Footnotes and character dialogue ranges from lighthearted and crass to seeped with themes of torture and sexual assault. It is jarring, to say the least, and often feels like the author doesn’t take these ideas of rape or violence seriously. There are so many instances where the scene is tense or gritty, and Kristoff is actually writing it pretty well, I’m enthralled and on the edge of my seat, and then Mia or some other character (or the footnotes) throw in some stupid comment or make the same “Mia is such an asshole lol” joke for the billionth time and completely ruin the mood of that scene. The second half of the book moved much faster and was helped with way better writing, but it really did not do enough to make up for the horrendous structure of the first half of the book.

Pacing and structure: ★☆☆☆☆

The first half of the book really drags on. Once we arrive at the school, there are constant jumps in timeline, marked with periods when a thousand things happen all at once and the plot moves forward at a dizzying rate, and others when the characters just seem to be going about their daily lessons.

Concept: ★★★☆☆

I found the overall idea of the books to be very interesting, even though it is certainly not the most original or unique concept for a YA fantasy book. The issue is that the potential is squandered with a poor execution.

Characters: ★☆☆☆☆

I truly did not care about any of the characters. The token mean girl, the bumbling nice-guy-who-is-definitely-the-love-interest. too many of the characters just sat nicely within their tropes, doing nothing much to pique my interests. I think my favorite overall was Mister Kindly.

[xehathotbetterxehanot]

Crack AU: Tik Tok Twilight

My brother and I came up with something hilarious a few nights ago - both of us had been talking over political issues and problems in our own lives - when we somehow got on the subject of Tik Tok and then Twilight. This is what happened from it:

* Edward Cullen is not the same stalker from the series but actually the same ‘Edward’ but his real name is Robert Patterson, he’s a completely out-of-touch Boomer with phones, he’s adorably socially awkward and genuinely friendly, but he’s still able to snark and more willing to kick your ass if you piss him off. He unintentionally is forced into the spotlight when a strange girl tracks him down and introduces him to a ‘social trend’ called ‘Tik Tok’ and intends to make him a sensational star after ‘recognizing his perfect aesthetic’. He and Bella become vitrolic friends from then on. 

* Bella Swan is an ordinary teen girl...except for the fact that she’s her schools’ biggest and most popular Tik Tok user. Having an OG of Vine, and Musically, she has all the social skills and an actual good singing voice to be the Queen of Tik Toks in her region. Her reason to move to Forks is a combination of her mother being genuinely overworked to give her living space as well as thinly veiled harassment from ‘Mean Girls’ at her original school. Upon moving to Forks she realises that the setting is perfect for more low-key Tik Toks and to take a break from all the sensation of Arizona...at least until she meets a young man named ‘Edward Cullen’ whose aesthetic is too good to not be cultivated into a popular Tik-Toker, with her as his managing assistant and new Best Friend.

* Bella and ‘Edward’ are not romantically interested in each other. This is a shit and giggles Tik Tok journey adventure thingy ma jig. Most of the conflict comes from the fact that Robert keeps self-defeating his own Tik Toks, Bella is always - comically - on her phone, and eventually the trio of Vamps who didn’t seem to get the memo that the Cullens aren’t that interested in sharing space with some wannabee dracula-kin. 

* The Cullens have more personality to them.

* Alice is two-faced being along the lines of both your best friend and Affably Evil to literally everyone else, willing to sacrifice anyone in the name of achieving her goals...which mostly involve sinking local businesses to create her own localized brands, teaching impressionable teenagers how to create a killer trend - based on events she’s of course foreseen -, and being an internet Troll to popular acceptable internet targets; such as anonymously cyber-bullying Anti-Vaxxers, Racists, and people who still use musicly. She and Jasper have a Gaming Twitch Channel. She’s a Tik Toker with remarkable prowess and following under the handle name of ‘DemonPixie’ idk haven’t finished this bit yet.... 

* Jasper is a Big Game Hunter, that game mostly being other Supernatural Creatures such as the infamous BigFoot and even the occasional Wendigo that unfortunately mistakes him for a human. He’s not a full on bogan though and would honestly not give a shit if Firearms were made illegal as he prefers using improvised weapons such as large rocks or tree branches to kill his prey. He’s still got his polite guy personality from canon with a better grip when it comes to blood, and throws a cold one with his wife, Emmett, and Rosalie whenever they stream new Tik Tok set-ups or family/party games, such as Minecraft, Call of Duty, and - Alice’s favorite game - Ultimate Chickenhorse. 

This is all I have so far. Well except for Jacob, but that’s another funny thing. So is the Volturi - they’re not rulers (everyone just thinks they are), they’re just extremely old vampires who have kept up on the trends and arts and their ‘coven’ is just a bunch of well-known tik tokers who wanted to live forever. Their palace is less a living space and more an ‘gold mine of tik tok opportunities’.  

[electronicdelusionstarlight]

Deadpool is not a nice person.

Like, I still remember that one time Deadpool kidnapped a blind old lady before emotionally abusing her and physically torturing her for years, one time even locking her up inside a cramped SENSORY DEPRIVATION room filled with sharp edges just because she invited one of his friends over and they were having dinner together, just because he was feeling lonely.

Like... Yeah, he’s a sexual abuse survivor and he’s funny and he takes jobs for free when children and teens are involved and most often then not he tries, yet I feel like we must remember that... Deadpool... Isn’t exactly a good person.

He doesn’t start as a good person, of course, but he isn’t a good person by modern standard either.

Mostly due to the unwarranted 16 year old dipshit levels of sexual harassment he partakes in, of course, but I feel like killing people it’s also a huge bad thing?

I’m not talking about bad guys, I’m talking about collateral damage.

I’m talking about Deadpool being tasked by a mob boss to kill another mob boss, so instead of just go there and kill him he actually explodes a warehouse he was visiting with his goons and a bunch of prostitutes, except the warehouse was actually filled with people who were working for him, who all died in the blast, the innocent sex workers among them, AND at least 1 of 2 undercover cops infiltrating the mobster’s organization so they could take him down, the other one, who was disguised as one of the sex workers, ending up crippled for life, because Deadpool had to show off and ended up exploding a building filled with people for money.

Like, that’s a big thing? For his character? One time a evil psychiatrist who had a crush on him made him do jigsaw puzzles about the aftermath of his rampages, and he notices how that leaves all the fun in training monkeys to shoot with a gun while riding a small mono-cycle to kill the target, since that’s just showing the corpses of all the people caught in his madness, not the “cool” madness thing. Which is important to keep in mind.

What he does is horrible. He once faked Spider-Man Death (After, again, so much fucking sexual harassment, it’s incredible really), just so he could make a sentient monkey serial killer think he actually killed spider-man instead of deadpool, so he could go to the funeral (AGAIN, he stages a funeral for spider-man, the public figure, knowing full well people who might know about his secret identity might freak out over their friend/son/boyfriend being DEAD, which Spider-Man points out with much vitriol by the end of the story), so Deadpool could kill the monkey AT THE FAKE FUNERAL.

Which, you know, when you remove the “fun” part, which is the serial killer monkey that mills mercenaries and serial killers and apparently likes to go to nightclubs to find some chicks to seduce with some monkey animal magnetism and later fuck, it’s still something really bad.

The firs time he meets back one of his old friends? Who has become a private superhero for a las vegas Casino thanks to a power armor he created? Deadpool demands a power armor too, becomes his “sidekick”, and later just... fucks things up so much with a scheme involving the grizzly and him impersonating his old friend, that his old friend loses his job, is considered a bank robber despite not being one, and is forced to go into hiding, culminating with Deadpool locking him in THE SAME FUCKING SENSORY DEPRIVATION ROOM FILLED WITH SHARP EDGES, without food or water, for MONTHS, with Deadpool forgetting about him as he goes into space to fuck a female alien hippo, and only ending up being saved by a second, mexican alien by mistake, with Deadpool taking his place as Las egas superhero... Just to abandon the job 1 issue later because he really doesn’t want to work stable hours, just because Deadpool didn’t like him having a cool job with power armors.

Deadpool is not a nice person. He is a fun character, and he’s trying his best, and he once kicked the head of zombie George Washington into the Lincoln Statue crotch, yes.

But he is not a nice person. He is a killer, and a scoundrel, and a sexual harasser, no mater under what light you see him, with a history of violence and nihilism and bullshit longer than most other characters.

And I feel like people should really be aware of this fact by this point.

[tranxendance]

Westworld Spoilercast Rebuttal

So I made the thing because I feel like Woolie on the super best friendcast dismissed a lot of things that were good, and latched on to a few things that were bad and that seems to have ruined his experience. Readmore because I wrote a lot. Singlequotes are Woolie’s paraphrased remarks from the spoilercast video.

'Maeve has to take human hostages to get done what she wants done'

Sylvester was sympathetic and went along with it willingly. The other tech guy whose name I forget didn't believe Maeve was awoken UNTIL she started issuing threats.

'Fear for their lives, then punch off the clock, go home...and come back into being a hostage'

There's no going home from westworld island, everyone lives on-site. Again, they weren't really hostages despite being threatened by Maeve at times.

'So then you have to account for human incompetence'

Yes, Woolie, a main part of why the hosts managed to become awoken in the first place is that all these people want to keep their lucrative jobs and put up the big numbers and at every level we're shown people that want to keep their status by sweeping actual problems under the rug.

'The dumbest part is soldiers with guns coming in and seeing robots shooting people and yelling PUT IT DOWN'

Maybe. When hosts started acting up before, they always would just shout “freeze all motor functions” and it worked.

'These future soldiers with body armor and machineguns and ATVs are getting killed by dudes on horses with revolvers' 'You can say they've been modified, but we don't see that at all'

There's arguments on both sides here, I think removing the limiters to not kill, and not stop functioning when you take a human-like level of damage did this, but we aren't explicitly shown it, so maybe. Also, for the time being there's a lot LESS of the human mercenaries than there are hosts in these battles, and even then the hosts take big losses.

'They have the humans with machineguns walking into range of the people with the shit guns and dropping dead' (at the fort battle)

But the humans won that battle...like, they clearly trounced the Hosts, and this was by design so that they'd get in range of the Nitro trap. Them walking forward slowly and shooting is a little odd maybe instead of taking coolguy tactical covering positions but the end result would've been the same of them winning and then getting blown the fuck up as they're finishing off the confederados outside the walls. This is probably like a fight choreography fail because HBO likes to skimp on this sort of thing for some reason.

'Maeve going through her problems, she can literally wave her hands and make the problems go away'

Except Maeve wakes hosts only willingly. She does this for Akane who rejects her offer. She says later that she uses her powers to make hostile hosts kill each other because by attacking her 'they made their choice'. A bit weak of a justification? Maybe, but if she didn't and just forced everyone to obey her she'd be the same character as Dolores

'They take a completely useless detour to samurai world'

This whole thing was intended to show another, mostly still functioning park running with the same rules as westworld was. There are zero humans left in shogun world, and it's pretty much been left to its own devices and hosts are living their own lives and making their own stories even without human intervention. We needed to see Shogun World not just because it's cool, but to demonstrate that the hosts absolutely don't need humans in order to affirm their humanity.

'Ha ha, i've cut off my men's ears so they can't hear your commands'

Well yeah, but the actor also gestures to give his men orders, so the verbal part of his orders are probably just for the audience. If I was him I definitely would've agreed on a couple of gestures that mean certain things, and they definitely were planning on taking Maeve captive before this, so it seems obvious to me they woud've agreed that 'a sweeping arm gesture' means to take them away. Not really a plothole, just a tv-thing that Woolie is reading too much into.

'There's never really a concrete reasoning why (Delores says) some hosts can be free or not'

He's right, there isn't. Delores is kind of a psychopath and is promising these hosts freedom knowing that she's going to be sacrificing all but 5 of them. It's classic cult leader shit. If you work real hard and kill lots of humans for me you too can be saved. it's a lie she feeds them to justify to them why she kills some and uses others for her own ends and so on.

'Seeing the symbol (awakes hosts) but there's also this ear worm of 'violent delights bring violent ends''

The Maze is a host-created symbol that helps other hosts awaken. The spoken command was created by Bernard to unlock hosts' ability to kill humans. While it's not clear if the maze-awakening also gives you the ability to kill humans and those awakened hosts simply did not do so, or if they needed the secondary command before they could. Non-awoken hosts that get the verbal command usually just become tools of Delores.

'There's a whole thing of hearing the inner voice and realizing 'this is me' but the guy that did that to Delores just walks up and sees the wood carving and goes 'I hear the voice' skipping all that'

Bernard spends two seasons getting pushed around to develop his struggle, and mistakes the Ford-voice for not being himself for awhile.

'Delores has the godlike ability to modify people with an Ipad' 'She reprograms Teddy to be a super accurate killer assassin dude' 'And basically has the ability to nullify all of her problems by keeping this ipad around'

Can't reprogram humans. Teddy rejected his changes and was driven to suicide. I'd say human soldiers are Delores' biggest problem, not other hosts, and that it's not the magic bullet she thought it was since Teddy ended up killing himself because of it. Also they go over the point over and over again that having backups or any ability to come back from death or be modified makes you not human in her eyes. Like, this was a major plot point and reasoning for why Delores does most of the things she does, you can't have missed this. She realizes around this time that open conflict is not going to win her freedom, and that having respawning, perfectly accurate shooting host army will eventually get overrun by a larger military force when it comes to the island so she swaps over to commando raids and ultimately wins by stealth.

'Mwaha, can't wait to kill you, ms. main character' and it cuts back to her on the gurney 'ooh you're gonna get it someday' 'Four or five episodes go by of just her lying on a table' 'Then she just decides i'm gonna take control of these dead bodies that are in here and free myself' 'She could've done it at any time and had to do it at this moment because the plot required it'

Maeve is extending her consciousness to other bodies this whole time and even listens to Akecheta's story through her daughter. After she's gathered all the information she can and knows there's somewhere she can escape to, and the six or so hosts in her control range can fight off the small amount of humans between her and freedom, only then does she enact her escape plan. 'Then they're in the cradle and a human soldier comes in to stop the hosts from destroying it but ther'es like a sexy host in there' 'Why do they care about the host-backups?'

They care about protecting the host backups because Ford is in there, and I think it's a big investment of dollars for Delos. The leader of the merc guys getting a boner and losing is pretty weird though, I don't know how to defend this one. Guess it was the moment of the villain gloating because he thinks he won? This moment is in fact kind of goofy.

'Why are we keeping a bunch of guest data? They never really explain why they're keeping all this stuff'

Because having multiple personalities 'vet' an incoming copy for fidelity and having real people's personalities to test with is valuable to creating more copies. Bernard was created by other people’s recollections of how Arnold was, after all. It's also not said but in the original westworld movie, they made robot copies of politicians and powerful people and replaced them. So this is a tie-in to the old movie or novel as well.

'Bernard has zero agency as a character'

But this whole thing of people pushing him around, using him for their ends, hurting him emotionally was the suffering he needed to awaken. You questioned this yourself earlier. Bernard is the most important character because the whole thing of him starting to make decisions on his own is what starts all of this stuff off. He decides to scramble himself so he'll be unhelpful to the humans when they force him to cooperate with them. He decides to do all these things and justify it to himself as it being Ford's programming, but that was his internal voice of him awakening.

'They are building up some secret about the man in black, there's something about him they're holding back' 'The story's not telling us what it is'

Sure it does. You got tricked. You thought that the secret was just what we the audience already knew, that TMIB is a bad person that pretends to be a good guy and that ruined his family life. But it's actually that TMIB was a host for most of season 2, and a lot of the violence and awfulness was him on his loop.

'And then there's this moment of sacrifice where this guy decides to sacrifice himself in this big blaze of glory'

Yeah, Lee had a redemption arc, to prove that some humans can change, even if the majority of us will remain violent selfish assholes as a matter of human nature. His actual sacrifice while shouting the lines he wrote is a little odd, but I got it that he was just trying to buy as much time as possible, deliberately shooting to miss to keep the Delos mercs' heads down and listening to him, and that they keep trying to talk him down because he's clearly not even killing any of them. Unspoken, but that's what I thought during this.

'They've taken the one that they put the power (To make all the other hosts kill each other) and put her on a horse, thus locking her to a slow horse speed'

Except everyone else in universe thinks that too, and they kill her, only for the rate of infection to keep going, and maybe even faster since now it's being passed up the line from host to host as well and her individual proximity doesn't matter after she infected one of them.

'There's all these things in the opening (...) But robirth never happens'

What about the ending when Delores in Tessa Thompson's body remakes people's bodies on the outside of the park?

'This dude, William, takes six shots to the body and manages to not only be fine but shoot armed soldiers'

He takes six shots and dies, and is made into a host-human hybrid. Future space medicine couldn't save him at that point.

'And the torture of being that paranoid apparently wasn't bad enough?'

No, clearly not, because William is a sociopath. He begins to believe that people shouldn't come back from the dead, and sort of stops trying to make the James Delos hybrid. The thing he would hate the most would be to be brought back to life, over and over, just like is father-in-law that he's had to watch breakdown and go insane over and over again, and there he is, now a hybrid himself.

I feel like Woolie missed a lot of things, or had a hate boner for it and dismissed things when he shouldn't. Such as the really (to my mind) obvious and strong differentiation between Maeve and Delores, where Delores takes, but Maeve asks. And she says things like 'I'm doing what I have to do to make it out' and in the end she's the only one that makes it out. Or downplaying Lee's redemption arc, or saying Bernard has no agency when he's the one that causes most of these things to happen, and the voice of Ford is actually his own thoughts. Him calling Shogunworld 'fanservice' hurts me the most because seeing a mostly functioning park post-disaster and having these hosts living their lives and making their own stories without any human interference was one of the most interesting things for me.

[rubyvroom]

with his hindsight of having brought someone as consumed by evil deeds like Darth Vader back to the light. Does it really make sense that he would not think he could do the same for his nephew? This is the issue most people have. Its not that people can't change but given Luke's experiences, that scene makes no sense except that Rian couldn't think of any other reason to try and shift blame away from Kylo.

I think it makes sense, actually. Forget Rian Johnson for a minute and think about the time that has elapsed since the original trilogy. Bear in mind that I’m not in the fandom and have no desire to be, this is just my uninfluenced read. 

Anyway, take it back to just after ROTJ. Luke watched the Empire slaughter literally millions of people. He watched the Galaxy rebuild from this for decades. His sister’s home planet was destroyed and he probably dealt with her grief over that. His father’s shadow has lingered over the entire galaxy for years and years. A certain subset of people are lionizing his evil deeds and talking about bringing back the empire. They want to literally undo everything Luke and the Rebels originally did and make all of those deaths meaningless. 

When you get older, here’s a couple things that happen. You start thinking about the choices you made when you were young. You start really feeling the losses you have witnessed in your life and wondering if they could have been prevented. You think a lot less about individual heroics and more about how to plan for the future and protect as many people as possible (a big theme of TLJ overall). The purpose of the original rebellion was not to save Darth Vader, it was to overthrow the evil Empire. Yes, Luke made it a personal mission to save his father. He did save him, in the end. But what did that do for all the dead people? What did that do to prevent the empire from coming back? Apparently nothing, because it’s all happening again. Was one soul really worth the death of millions? Even your father’s? Even your own?

Now Luke’s been tasked as the sole custodian of the entire Jedi legacy and surely one of his main goals is to keep these young students from turning to the dark side of the force. And here’s his nephew worshipping Darth Vader. Asking all these questions about him and the empire and was-it-really-so-bad and yada yada. All the while growing immensely powerful and showing every evidence of actually wanting to bring back Vader’s genociding ways. He’s not just an average kid who reads about serial killers or whatever. He’s Darth Vader’s grandson with means, motive, and opportunity. 

We don’t get a lot of specific details about what Ben was doing that alarmed Luke so much, or how long Luke tried to work with him before things came to this point (it could have been years for all we know) but my read is that this is basically a Hitler As A Baby premise. Luke has the opportunity to potentially prevent many, many deaths by stopping an extremely powerful Sith from joining a bunch of Empire wanna-bes. If someone had killed Anakin before he became Darth Vader, how many lives might have been saved? And if Ben Solo went on to kill even one person, isn’t that a death Luke might have prevented, that he would blame himself for if he sat back and did nothing? Now think of the number of people we watched Kylo Ren kill in the movies alone, including his own father. Just hold that in your mind while you think this out.

Whether it’s the right or wrong decision to kill Ben Solo at that point, do I believe that Luke Skywalker would be tempted? Absolutely. To prevent more deaths, to prevent Ben going the way that Anakin did, to stop the Jedi ways from being used as a force for evil in the universe again, he was tempted. It makes sense to me that he would be tempted to do it after what he saw became of his father. You can even think of it as his own Dark Side temptation moment, depending on how you think of the Force and the whole Light/Dark thing.

But Luke passed the temptation. He didn’t do it. He was ashamed of the impulse and if Ben hadn’t woken up and seen him he would have gone on trying to teach the kid and turn him to the light.

(This is why Luke later wants to end the Jedi altogether - because people with access to that kind of power will be tempted to misuse it, the Jedi training doesn’t effectively train people not to misuse that power and if preventative murder is not an option (and it really shouldn’t be) then maybe the Jedi way is not the best way to use the Force.) ****

Now, did Ben Solo pass that same temptation moment? At the same turning point? Because he is totally justified in feeling betrayed there, and would even have been justified in killing Luke in self-defense. But he did a lot more than that. He slaughtered all the other innocent students, burned down the temple, and went on to join the Space Nazis. So fuck him. Luke didn’t force Ben Solo to become Kylo Ren. “Fuck it, I’m gonna be evil” is not not something he can blame on Luke. Every single thing he did from there on out is on him, and he proved to be an evil little shit.

This gets reinforced when we get another turning point for Kylo Ren in the throne room. He could have done a Vader there. The movie fakes us out that this is what he’s doing. He kills the emperor/Snoke and it looks like he’s doing it to save Luke/Rey. This is where the movie could have gone, oh, he just needed somebody to BELIEVE in him because he’s just MISUNDERSTOOD and that will turn him good! But the movie doesn’t do that. He doesn’t then embrace the light. He does the opposite. Vader didn’t try to convince Luke to turn Dark Side and take up the Emperor’s throne and keep going. And Kylo didn’t kill Snoke to save Rey. He wants the throne himself, and he can use Rey’s power to keep it. He tells Rey to rule the galaxy with him as fascist overlords and goes about trying to murder absolutely everyone, including Rey, for the rest of the movie. And Rey thoroughly rejects him, turns her back on him, and shuts the door on him. It’s done. He’s not redeemable, he doesn’t want to be redeemed, he blames his mistakes on everyone else and wants to go on endlessly revenging himself on innocent people because he’s sad or something. He’s a monster. A pathetic monster. He doesn’t get any more heroic shots or moments after that because it’s been proved he doesn’t deserve them. 

I guess where I part ways with your interpretation the most is that I don’t think this movie favors Kylo Ren at all. Rey in the Throne Room scene is doing exactly what Luke originally did - but this time it doesn’t work. And Old!Luke knew that would happen because of the hindsight of his years and because he saw Kylo fail at the Jedi temple. All of the lives and bloodshed he has caused are his own doing, and he needs to be stopped, not saved. If anything, the movie repudiates what Luke originally did, which is what people are *really* mad about, I think, even if they don’t exactly know it. The actual question that nobody’s asking yet is whether Darth Vader was worth saving in the original trilogy if it endangered the rebellion to do it. Much more interesting question imo.

But anyway - to your last point about shifting blame, Luke also gets the last word on this in the movie. Face to face with Kylo Ren, Luke explicitly apologizes for the mistake he made - the moment he was tempted to kill Ben Solo before he had actually done anything evil. That is always treated as a tragic mistake. But he also says, explicitly, that he is not trying to save Kylo Ren, and he rightly does not blame himself for the evil things Kylo has done. The movie ends on this beat, that every single evil choice Kylo made was his own doing, and he needs to be stopped, not saved. Then he doesn’t physically beat Kylo Ren in a lightsaber battle, he uses his Force powers in a way Kylo never imagined doing and could not detect to distract him long enough for the rebels to get away, and also, to humiliate Kylo Ren in front of the entire First Order. He proved he was an immensely more powerful Jedi with greater control over his emotions who doesn’t even have to kill or even physically face his enemy to defeat him. He says he knows Rey will carry on the Jedi legacy and she is stronger than Kylo Ren. The next generation of heroes – Finn, Poe, Rose, and Rey – will use the lessons of the previous generation to defeat the first Order. 

The next movie’s almost pointless after this except we get the pleasure of watching that play out. 

… I did not intend to write so much about The Last Jedi and I think I’ll stop there. I hope that at least explains how someone could plausibly read the opposite intentions out of that scene, when taking the movie as a whole. As an aside, I was also upset when that plot point was raised until I saw how it played out later in the movie, which made me feel differently. The movie doesn’t excuse Kylo or have Rey redeem him with her goodness or whatever like I was afraid it would, it does the opposite. And in the end I thought it humanized Luke a lot for me, although I certainly understand how making him more flawed would upset some fans of the character. But I don’t think it’s an impossible character progression at all.  

**** this little bit is another thing they did in the movie that I loved - Luke’s explanation of the Force implies that maybe it could be open for anyone to use, and the Jedi way of limiting its use to select special people is wrong. This interpretation is supported by the revelation that Rey isn’t descended from Jedis, as well as the little boy at the end of the movie. There isn’t a secret special bloodline that makes the superest force users, maybe this was all a Jedi construct to keep a monopoly on use of the Force as a Jedi thing. Maybe they’re the DeBeers cartel of this universe. This interpretation probably violates fandom lore of some kind and let me reemphasize that I do not care about that at all. 

[smokeybrand]

This is Snyder

I don’t care for Zack Snyder. I don’t hate his craft as much as i hate Michael Bay, Snyder actually tries to make good movies, but i don’t find his schlock entertaining. He’s not a bad director, i guess, but his movies are always scatter-brained messes. I think Snyder is more a creative than a crafter. He’s the guy you want in your development stages, throwing out ideas and boarding those massive action scenes. If i were to equate him to a sports analogy, Snyder is the Offensive Coordinator on an American Football team. He’s the guy that builds the visual aspects of your scenes, the car who sets up the set pieces. He’s Mr. Battlemaster, the Attack Master, the guy you call in to adds little spice to your drama and conflict laden plot, not the guy you give the keys to an entire cinematic universe where you have to humanize godlike heroes. Emotional subtlety has never been Snyder’s strong point. Since the only DCEU film that was passable was Wonder Woman, the one flick that Snyder didn’t really have his hands on too much, i wanted to take some time and kind of dissect why i hate almost everything Snyder has ever made.

Dawn of the Dead

It’s been years since i’ve seen this movie but i recall enjoying it considerably. But it’s a zombie movie. And it wasn’t written by Snyder. That’s going to be a running theme in this; Other people’s stuff, Snyder is okay. His own stuff, not so much... Zack was only a Director on this flick which meas he just got to bring a script to life. He just got to pick the best scenes and build a cool looking movie. That’s Snyder at his best and it shows. For my money, DoD is his best film.

300

This was his breakthrough. 300 lends itself to Snyder’s style even more than DoD. The comic it’s based on is literally revisionist history written by 80s comic madman, Frank Miller. It is literally a series of splash pages with cool sh*t on them. In comic book speak, it’s literally a series of action set pieces. Splash pages are used to fill every inch of paper with dynamic, poignant, information. When every page of your book is a splash page, it conveys a sense of aggressive action. That is right up Snyder’s alley. There’s no room for plot or character development but that slow-mo buster kick to that persion dude was crazy dope, son! “THIS! IS! SPARTA!” It’s also a superficial, special FX laden, popcorn movie that is borderline sexist with all of the half naked dudes about but still, i had a good time.

Watchmen

Watchmen was the first Snyder movie i saw where i realized he was kind of out of his depth. Dude did his best to bring this unfimable story to the screen, and in some spots i think he did a really good job (Comedian’s arc was okay and that change toward the end made all of the sense to me) but overall, it lacked the emotional, philosophical, and political depth from the source material, you know, literally the reason why Watchmen is so goddamn brilliant. Snyder shot this movie like a mid 2000s cape flick. Think Raimi’s Spider-Man or X2 but infinitely more superficially, which is ridiculous because the Watchmen novel is infinitely more rich. WB kind of let up on Snyder’s leash a bit and he focused way too much on the sh*t that shouldn’t have been focused on. At it’s core, Watchmen is a character study of those old timey 80s archetypes and an indictment of the destructive materialism infecting society at that time. There’s a visceral moral question that my brother and i argue about all of the time and i believe Snyder stuck the landing, but he kept falling off the bar to get there.

Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch is one of the worst movies i have ever seen. The mechanics, the technical aspects of this movie, are just the worst. I can go into how this is basically a shittier version of Inception with the dream in a dram aspects or how that sh*t doesn’t make any sense in the movies established lore or timeline. I can go into how this thing technically takes place in between the five minutes that Babydoll is being moved from her cell to the lobotomy chair so none of it matter or how f*cking ridiculous it is that this woman’s name is f*cking “Babydoll”. Sucker Punch is wildly problematic and i’ve written at length about how i feel about it before, i think, but my point with this entry is to high light how messy this movie feels. This is Snyder wit h no brakes. This is Snyder unleashed, When left to his own design. THIS, Sucker Punch, is the type of movie Zack Syder wants to make. He wanted to explore the psychology behind being in such dire straights, the emotional and psychological rationale of those terrible circumstances but he also wanted naked chick, a dragon, and giant robot samurai in it. How does that work? You can’t put Nazi Zombies in Girl, Interrupted, man. that dog don’t hunt. i know because Sucker Punch tried it and IT was AWFUL!

The DCEU

I thought about doing these thing individually but considering he basically directed all of these f*cking movies (except Wondy) i can lump them all into one entry. WB mistook the success of the Grimdark Nolan Batman Trilogy as audiences wanted a bunch of edgelord superheroes. So they gave the Batman Begins treatment to f*cking Superman. And, to bring this car crash of an idea to the big screen, they give the reigns to Snyder. I don’t like Superman. I think he’s a terrible hero. How do you right him? What aspects do you focus on when the guy and turn back time by flying real fast? How do you make that asshole compelling? Snyder’s solution? Uncle Ben his ass! Guilt trip him into becoming the world’s savior! sh*t’s lazy son! Man of Steel was adequate though. it was good enough for the WB suits to hand the entire reigns of the DCEU over to this asshat and, oh boy, was that dumb! My chick is the biggest Superman fan and she hated this movie. For her, someone versed in the Kal-El mythos, this was an affront. From what little i know about Supes, i’d agree.

SO Snyder double-downs on his Batmanfication of Superman by literally introducing Batman into a Superman story. BvS is an abortion of a film. It destroys the archetype of what all of these heroes represent. Batman is a psychopath killer. Superman is a morose pussy. Lex Luthor is the goddamn Riddler from Batman Forever. It’s a goddamn mess. Which sucks because, at it’s core, there are a lot of good ideas here. I liked how Luthor was more Zuckerburg than Rockefeller. I liked the introduction of Wonder Woman, even if it felt a little forces at times. I liked at the whole “Punished Messiah” story line for Supes, even if it never got deeper than a puddle. I hated everything else. Everything was just too Snyder-y. Cool sh*t to look at as opposed to deep sh*t to identify with. But that’s what happens when you forgone character development for mech fights and a Doomsday story line that should have bookend a phase one of pictures. Seriously, Doomsday in the second goddamn movie of your fledgling franchise? No! no, im not going to get into that. We’ll address that later.

Suicide Squad was a goddamn mess. I know David Ayer directed that, and one day i hope we get to see that sh*t, but the studio brought Snyder in to fix what they felt was an unwatchable film. Seriously, Snyder is considered a “guest Director” on that film and it shows. Justice League is the same way but Joss Whedon kind of added a bunch of levity to this ridiculous film. While i think Justice League is trash, i also believe it’s the second best that the DCEU has produced, mostly because there was reprieve to ll of Snyder’s grimdark bullsh*t. Whedon was able to bring out the best of these characters. I eve liked Superman in this and i f*cking hate Superman. But that’s kind of my point. If you remove Snyder from the equation, you get solid sh*t! like Wonder Woman!

Everything about Wonder Woman screams dope. It reminds me of a Phase one MCU outing, which is a fitting tone for Diana’s adventures. It’s not a perfect movie, there area ton of issues with it, but overall, it is a delight. I think Gal Gadot gave her best performance and someone finally used Chris Pine in an advantageous manner. I think going full on Ares was a mistake but, in the context of the world, i get it. I thought this was a decent ride until the end. The climax was whack. Seeing as how Snyder is credited as a writer, i assume he wrote this part because it feels wildly Snyderish. Literally the worst pat of this film is the ending. Tonally, it’s ridiculous. It doesn’t fit. It’s poorly executed. But it’s fun to watch, i guess. That’s Snyder in a nutshell.

Ultimately, putting this guy in charge of the entire DCEU, which wanted to be a direct competitor to the MCU, was a mistake. His vision is ridiculous. He has too many ideas for any one film and with no one to reel that in, you get the mess that we have now. There are certain things that needed to happen in order for the DCEU to be relevant, to be good. Snyder doesn’t have the patience to execute like this though. He doesn’t want to put in the time to world build. He just wants to throw awesome looking sh*t on screen and move on. That, a good movie, does not make. If i had a say, i’d probably loosely follow the MCU Phases. That sh*t worked and gave ample time to develop a proper story. As an example, i’d have done something like this:

Phase One - Trinity

Movie 0: House of El. Prequel to the entire DCEU set in the final days of Krypton. You could establish all of the requisite Supermann necessities while also planting seeds for Brainiac, Doomsday, Apokolips, and Darkseid. This would be the backbone for the first three phases of your DCEU. Think Star Wars but with Krpytonians instead of Jedi.

Movie 1: The Batman or Gotham, dunno about that title yet, Definitely a Year one or Year Two Bat-story. I’d want to introduce The Long Halloween arc. Make it a noir, focus on the assumed Batman doing his detective thing, until the climax which would be an amalgamation of No Man’s Land and The Man Who Laughs. Like, Joker is holding the city hostage and all of the holiday murders were a distraction while he planted his trap. Batman would have to choose between his morals or vengeance in the end.

Movie 2: Superman Sequel. Calling this one Man of Steel as it would have both Superman and Metallo as the primary antagonist. I figure having Clark and Corbin duke it out makes for a clever title, you know? You can introduce Luthor as the mastermind, secretly collaborating with his miraculous AI that turns out to be Brainiac. Deathstroke could be hired muscle. Cadmus can be introduced. You get to see the introduction of Superman on a world wide scale as he and Metallo duke it out in the open. This would feel like that old Superman cartoon on the WB way back when. Light-hearted yet serious tone. Actual stakes. Sub plot of Lois figuring out Luthor is the reason all of the trauma occurs.

Movie 3: Wonder Woman. It will probably be a period peace set against WW1. It would pit her against Aries and the preconceptions of women during those bleaker times. The battle would be against disillusionment; trying to find a reason why Man should be defended or something of that nature. Wonder Woman would be more or less what we already got from Patty Jenkins, with a much better ending. Like, an actual pgysical fight with Aries seems dumb. If we have to go that course because of executive meddling, at least cast a better Ares. Make him more menacing and less inept. Motherboxes and a bit more of Apokolips will be introduced in this movie.

Movie 4: World’s Finest. Basically Batman against Superman while WW actually solves the real issues behind the scene. Like, she uncovers the underlying plot of the Motherboxes and actually tries to prepare for the coming of Steppenwolf. I really like the idea of Wonder Woman adapting her skill set to covert ops kind of like Motoko Kusanagi does. Also, you know, dudes is dumb and punchy. While Supes and Bats are having their tiff, Steppenwolf actually appears and engages the two of them. Ultimately, Wonder Woman arrives and the three of them, the Trinity, send ol boy packing back to Apokolips and the Motherboxes go dead. The Trinity is established, the seeds of Apokolips have been sown, and we can move into Phase Two - Justice League with the first movie of the lot; Death of Superman. Opening with the sidelining of the most powerful hero opens up a reason for Batman, having an established relationship with Winder Woman and Superman, realizing there are bigger things out there and a team might be necessary to combat them.

See, four movies, five if you count the Krypton prequel, and you’ve established the world, the main characters, the underlying conflict, and you have room to grow. You’ve developed characters, established the backbone to your entire universe, and given each of your principal heroes, Batman, Superman, ad Wonder Woman, their own outing, in the vein of their own themes. Grimdark works for Batman because he IS grimdark. Sh*t doesn’t fly with Superman or Wonder Woman. Diana is a warrior, set her story to the backdrop of a conflict to showcase her strengths. Superman wold spend his time trying to save Metallo, not murder him at the end of the goddamn movie because Supes is about believing in the good, not killing troubled assholes. Snyder didn’t have the patience to do this. He wasn’t building anything. He just wanted to put cool sh*t on the screen while trying to make everything dark and deep. He failed at both.

In closing, i don’t think Zack Snyder is a terrible director. I don’t. I think he has too may ideas and no one to reel him in when left to his own devices. When he is making someone else’s material, when he has a guidelines to follow and people keeping his rampant creative energy in check, he can be pretty good at his job, a la DOD or 300. Hell, i’d even give him Watchmen. But, left to his own devices, we get nonsense like Sucker Punch and BvS. Zack Snyder is everything that’s wrong with modern American cinema and it galls me to the core.

[adavendescendants]

Congrats on getting 100 followers! Idk if you've already done this but do you have any headcanons for how Mal, Evie, Jay, and Carlos (and maybe even Jane, Lonnie, and Ben too) would interact with Uma, Harry, and Gil if they ever attended Auradon Prep? Congrats again!

Thank you! I really liked writing this and I got a bit carried away which is why its under a read more. Hope you enjoy!

Ben

Ben is honestly so excited

He had been really worried the three of them would never accept his offers but after extending the invite to their entire crew, ship, and actually making some improvements to the Isle, they finally did.

Ben is the most excited for Uma to come to Auradon. He won’t admit that he is slightly scared of Harry and he really doesn’t know Gil outside of who his father is. With Uma though he feels like they can work well together and he can use her advice to help fix the issues within the kingdoms.

Uma is reluctant to help him at first but it’s not in her nature to just sit idly by when she can say or do something, so she eventually gets pulled in.

Surprising Ben (but not any of us) he and Gil hit it off really well. He was hesitant around Gil mostly because he respects the fact that the people on Uma’s crew are there for a reason, and you don’t just become the strongest and second mate for nothing. Not to mention he is Gaston’s son. However, the first day they are there he realizes Gil is an absolute sweetheart as long as your not messing with the crew. Ben and Gil end up hanging out a decent amount. Gil doesn’t care about the fact that Ben is King so it is a good way to just relax for Ben, and Ben also loves showing Gil all the different foods of Auradon.

Harry and Ben learn to respect each other. With Uma working with Ben and Gil hanging out with him, Harry and Ben end up spending a decent amount of time together. Harry enjoys mocking Ben and trying to scare him. At first he really was trying to subtly threaten Ben, but as time went on and Harry realized Ben wasn’t going to hurt either Uma or Gil, it became more for the fun of it. Ben knows that if he gives Harry the impression that he will hurt either Uma or Gil, Harry will have no problem going back to the Isle. They don’t ever become good friends, but they are certainly able to spend an extended amount of time together fairly comfortably.

Ben definitely invites them all over to meet Belle and Adam and that was simultaneously a fantastic dinner for Gil and a right hot mess for Uma and Harry. 

Evie

Evie doesn’t have as much of a history with the Sea Three as the rest of the Core Four does. Paired with her being one of the head people in charge of helping Isle kids adjust to Auradon life, she is the first to spend extended time with them.

Out of the three she hits it off the best with Harry. At first he doesn’t like her because of her close relationship with Mal and because he thinks she is just another annoying prissy princesses. Evie quickly puts him in his place, showing him just how fierce a princess can be and gaining some respect from him in return. Their friendship starts out kinda rocky, with Harry telling her an outfit she designed look awful. Evie got mad and asked him what he would do, and Harry told her how he would change the color pattern. This led to the two of them beginning to work together on making clothes and the reveal that among all his other talents Harry actually has a knack for sewing and design. None of the crew is surprised, Harry was always on them about making sure they not only acted the part, but also looked the part of a scary pirate.

Evie and Gil get along really well, honestly who doesn’t get along with Gil. While Gil doesn’t have the fashion sense that Harry has, he does have a killer body and adorable face, something Evie takes full advantage of by using him to model many of her clothes. Gil is perfectly fine with it, Harry is usually around as well either as a designer or model, and once Evie found out how much he likes hats she made a bunch for him.

It took Uma a little longer to warm up to Evie, but they were thrown together so much they inevitably bonded. Said bonding was mostly over Harry and Gil and their struggles with school work. Uma tries to help her boys with all their schoolwork but it is a struggle, especially with Harry in math. Evie and Uma are in many of the same classes, Uma being a very fast learner. This led to Evie finding out about Harry’s and Gil’s struggles and teaming up with Uma as their personal tutors. They did have to go to Fairy Godmother for help with Harry’s dyscalculia, but all other subjects they managed between them. They are both advisors for Ben and they realize that they have many of the same concerns, just different ways of approaching them. They come up with many amazing policies to help the non-Auradon royalty of the world.

Jay

Jay and Harry bond over their competitive nature. Harry is heavily encouraged to join the ROAR team and he eventually does. He and Jay are constantly trying to one up each other during practices and matches. Their competitiveness goes beyond just the ROAR arena. They are constantly trying to out do the other in literally every facet of life, except school work. Jay made the mistake of mocking Harry’s inability to do math, and that was the beginning of a long stay in detention for both of them and the end of any academic competition. Between the two of them they have most of the Auradon girls, and many of the Auradon boys, as their adoring fans. They are the two bad boys of the school, and they use that to their full advantage.

Jay appreciates Gil. He finds his easy going nature relaxing. Jay likes hanging out with Gil because he finds him funny (not in a malicious way, Harry and Uma would kill him if it was ever malicious) and since Gil is on the Tourney team they spend a lot of time together during practices. Jay takes back what he said about Gil being of a bad sort. Jay is determined to one day beat Gil at arm wrestling.

Jay and Uma really don’t spend a lot of time together. After he patches things up with Harry and Gil they don’t hold any animosity towards each other, they just have very little in common. Jay respects her skill with a sword and her ability to keep Harry and Gil in check.

Carlos

Carlos and Gil bonded over Dude. Gil loves animals and animals tend to love him. Carlos was intimidated by Gil but it didn’t take long for him to realize Gil wasn’t all that scary. If together they can often be found walking Dude and looking at all the wildlife, or  in a room working on some type of new invention. Gil isn’t very good at actually coming up with the design but he can come up with lots of ideas and is amazing at putting pieces together, even small ones which require a lot of precision and delicacy.

Unfortunately, his friendship with Gil does not equate to seeing either Harry or Uma as any less scary. He knows it’s irrational and as time goes on it lessens somewhat, but never enough for him to really feel comfortable with getting to know either of them. He is fine if there are multiple people around, mainly Jay or Gil, but one on one is mostly a no go.

Mal

Ah Mal, to put it simply none of the Sea Three become friends with Mal. If they can avoid it, they try not to spend time around her at all, which is sometimes tricky due to their relationships with the rest of her gang. In the beginning they are still downright hostile towards her, but as time goes on they get to a point where they can be around her and not have someone ending up in detention. Even so, Uma never forgives Mal and neither do Harry or Gil.

Lonnie

Once Lonnie becomes adjusted to Harry’s sense of humor they hit it off really well. Harry respects her ability with a sword and takes particular delight in destroying Chad every chance he has, especially after he found out what Chad said about having girls on the team. They like practicing with each other and when their circles cross they have no problem talking, mostly about different fighting techniques.

Gil and Lonnie are perfectly amicable with each other they just don’t have as much in common. Lonnie has found Gil trying to make something in the kitchen on a few occasions and whenever she does she helps him out.

Uma and Lonnie get along really well but they don’t spend much time together. Sometimes they will spar when Uma wants someone other than her crew to practice with, and they both respect each other once Uma realized Lonnie isn’t a frilly princess. They like each other’s drive and willingness to go for what they want even when people say they can’t because they are girls.

Jane

No one can really explain Jane’s relationship with the Sea Three. It started off really similar to Carlos’s. She was scared of all three but then she got to know Gil and they became friends. Except unlike Carlos, she ended up also befriending Harry and Uma. No one knows how just that one day she was highly nervous whenever Harry or Uma so much as passed her, and the next the four of them were talking and laughing together. It’s a true mystery. They may not hang out all the time but they are all perfectly comfortable and happy when they do.

[michin--yeoja]

So, I held off on doing a critique on Criminal Minds until I finished episode 2... And all I can say is that it’s again very underwhelming. I was not invested at all in the case and what was occurring throughout the investigation. Most of my attention was focused on the awkward acting, poor chemistry and illogical flow of the plot.

First of all, I want to clarify that I do not expect the Korean version to be anything at all similar to the American version. I knew there would have to be major differences just due to the structure of Korean dramas. This is 20 episode drama that will have a conclusion, whereas the American one is 12 seasons and counting (although, maybe the writers were thinking it could have multiple seasons if the drama is popular? The format would call for this possibility). 

However, comparisons are almost impossible to ignore just because of how similar the writers are trying to make this to the American version. They have copied many of the same characters, apparently they’re copying the cases (as this is the same case as the pilot of the original), as well as copying lines word for word. If the writers wanted to do this, than I don’t think it’s too much to expect the quality of the drama to match that of the American version. Furthermore, the writers have 12 seasons of source material from the American Criminal Minds, of which they could watch to do their research and ensure their profiles are logical and make sense throughout the progression of the case. 

Maybe one of my biggest flaws is that I nitpick at plots because I want everything to make sense, to understand why something is happening and how conclusions are reached. This is even more so in suspense/police procedurals because I want to be able to follow the case. I saw a comment where someone said the Korean version is focusing more on showing what’s happening, instead of telling it; however, I don’t see this. In the American version, the profiles are created on evidence that viewers see, the deductions are made in a manner where the viewers can follow the logic and I think it “shows” more than it “tells”. In comparison, the Korean version comes to these conclusions and profiles in a very random manner with no evidence to back up the claims, so it seems like these conclusions have been reached out of thin air. All of a sudden the suspect has OCD, but what indicated this? Kang Ki Hyung randomly knows to look for a missing victim, but what lead him to do this? There was no victim profile, no explanation given to why his hunting grounds are second hand sale websites, and overall no concrete profile of the suspect. If you ask me, I could not tell you comprehensively the profile of this suspect, whereas in the American version I could. 

There were two really ridiculous conclusions that were drawn that are so unbelievably illogical. First was when Kang Ki Hyung miraculously gave an approximate height and weight of the suspect. How in the world did he deduce that? They had no images of the suspect from which to extrapolate this data, nor was there any evidence such as footprints to help form this opinion. What is he, psychic that he knows this? The second conclusion was when Ha Seon Woo told Kim Hyun Joon the name of the suspect. How did the team manage to narrow it down to just one person? What criteria did they use? How were there no other possible matches? In the American version, they generally have at least a handful of possible suspects and then they narrow it down from there with other factors, if possible. However, here we just see the final result. They spread this case over two hours, whereas the American version only has about 45 minutes to do all this, and they couldn’t spare the max 5 minutes it would have taken them to show this process of elimination?

The biggest issue in these two episodes is that they skipped essential scenes that would help formulate the background of the suspect/case and thus provide a better flow in their investigation. Instead we have a bunch of disjointed scenes, with random conclusions made with no evidence shown for them or which are only revealed later on.

Another issue was I felt that the writers just threw in as many psychological jargon they could fit into these episodes. There was no rhyme or reason to half of what was said regarding the psychology of the suspect. Lee Han mentioning Dissociative Identity Disorder when the fifth (or fourth?) victim was discovered when they found hesitation marks was random and honestly, very pointless. (Which also brings up the question of where were the autopsies on the bodies? Valuable information tends to be discovered there as well.). What made you think of DID? And if the suspect had DID, why would a different identity emerge during the process of killing the victim? I could understand if it emerges after the fact because different emotions and thought process could trigger that. Also, why only now did this other identity emerge when it didn’t during the previous four cases? Then, when Kang Ki Hyung said it’s due to there being two suspects... Again, why did the alpha randomly allow the beta to participate in the murder? There needs to be explanations given for these conclusions! The whole point of the show is behavioural analysis, and yet that was the most absent aspect of the investigation!

All this makes me think the writers were lazy and sloppy in their research; that they assumed they didn’t have to put as much thought and detail in their scripts because they’re essentially copying the American episodes. If anyone watched OCN’s Tunnel, then you would see what good profiling looks like and how it’s achieved.

Another glaring flaw in the drama is the awkwardness of the actors. Excepting Kang Ki Hyung, Ha Seon Woo and Kim Hyun Joon, the rest of the actors do not seem comfortable in their roles and are beyond awkward (although these three are awkward at times as well). Seriously, don’t get me started on Lee Han because he’s just ridiculous. Another thing missing is the chemistry between the team. They do not seem like a team that has worked together for a long time, rather they act like this is their first case together. There is some chemistry between Ha Seon Woo and Kim Hyun Joon, but it’s sporadic. All in all, the acting falls flat and leaves something to be desired. 

And now, on to my biggest personal problem with the drama... The characters themselves. Honestly, I like Ha Seon Woo and Kim Hyun Joon the best because they are the only original characters in the drama as neither one of them has overt similarities to any of their American counterparts. 

My question to the writers is, why did you have to copy the same characters? Why couldn’t you create original characters who would fill the same roles as the American characters? You can still have a hacker without trying to copy Garcia, a team leader without imitating Hotch, but you didn’t and you compounded that mistake by getting actors who cannot do these characters justice. My common complaint with the portrayal of these characters is that it looks unnatural and forced for them all.  Kang Ki Hyung/Hotch is semi-decent, but he’s an awkward family man (at least in the few minutes he’s in that role) and he lacks the charisma of the original Hotch. When Kang Ki Hyung tries to be as intense as Hotch, he ends up looking stiff. Na Na Hwang/Garcia, of what little we have seen of her, does not have Garia’s seemingly effortless talent, verve and uniqueness. Yoo Min Young/JJ is really actually not even like JJ. She’s supposed to have a really close relationship with Lee Han/Reid, sort of like an older sister, and a very maternal personality, but this was not what they achieved with Yoo Min Young. This makes me wonder if this was an attempt at creating an original character, but they tied in enough parts of JJ to confuse this. Last of all, the biggest disappointment, Lee Han/Reid. Oh the mess this character is... He is just plain awful. Yes, Reid is a genius, but he’s not the kind of snobbish intelligent that Lee Han is, nor is he quite as idiotic. In my opinion, everything about Lee Han is wrong and a poor imitation of Reid... But I admit, I may be incredibly biased as Reid is my baby and he is one of a kind. 

In conclusion, I think viewers who have not seen the American Criminal Minds would be the ones to enjoy this version the most because they won’t be subconsciously making comparisons between the two. For those of us who have watched the American version, it is impossible to not make these comparisons and find the Korean version lacking because of the glaring similarities. I think if the show was unique enough, but maintaining that similar premise, it would have been better received.

I am extremely tempted to drop the drama, but I’m really intrigued with the Killer Reaper case, and the Nadeul River Murder which hints at a connection between Ha Seon Woo and Kim Hyun Joon. Also, I really like Lee Joon Gi and seeing him in modern clothes and hearing his voice just tempts me to give it one more chance. Also... I really want to see him in those glasses.

[darisu-chan]

Darisu-chan Liveblogs the Death Note Netflix Movie

Warning: spoilers ahead

Less than one minute in, and I saw something I didn’t like. Why is super genius Light (I guess Turner here) having a sketchy business of doing other people’s homework. I feel that canon Light wouldn’t have done that even for money. He’d just let the peasants suffer.

Who’s that cheerleader and why does she seem so done with life? Is she a representation of all of us watching this movie?... Wait.. is she supposed to be Misa? That’s so OOC.... Wait... She has the hots for Light. Nevermind. Typical Misa.

Light seems confused about a girl smiling at him... Where did self-centered Light go? 

Everyone took wait to long to cover themselves from the rain.

Wow. This Misa is more badass and interesting than anime Misa. I like this.

Light’s gonna get the asswhooping of his life.

How lame can Light get?

I regret asking that question.

So you gave Light a sad backstory probably to make the viewers sympathize with the questionable decisions he will take next. That’s bullshit. 

Also, the principal’s a douchebag.

In this universe, Light has a crush on Mia/Misa.

What’s with American movies and detention?

Yikes. Light could’ve just put the books on another desk or something, no need to throw them.

Don’t try to make Light the underdog.

Light’s lack of reaction to the first rule is kinda weird with his background.

Light skips all the rules. Bad idea.

I’m upset the notebook looks less than a death note and more like Tom Riddle’s diary.

What’s the purpose of the marbles? Is it a metaphor to Light slowing losing his marbles?

Light continues being a loser by screaming like a girl and then crashing into a rack and breaking everything.

I get that Ryuk is a Shinigami, but why does he have all these powers?

That’s Ryuk’s voice? Oh, hell no! (though nice nod at Ryuk liking apples, but you could’ve made that less obvious)

“I don’t have a pen.” Seriously, Light?

Is Light’s first victim going to be a bully? Like, really?

That was such a stupid death. *dumb ways to die sounds in the background*

I’m not loving Ryuk’s design.

As if Light’s life couldn’t be shitty enough, sure, let’s make him live right where trains pass in what seems to be more of a hut rather than a house.

Light has daddy issues and he doesn’t respect his dad, nor his dad seems to like him very much. So, that dynamic won’t favor them when the plot moves on.

Also, of course Light’s mom was ran over.

Why is Light skimming through the pages if he’s so smart?

Why are they mispronouncing Ryuk’s name? How difficult is it to pronounce it?

“Don’t trust Ryuk.” So I’m led to believe this wasn’t the first time Ryuk gave the note as in the anime/manga?

Ryuk’s being extra af hiding from Light instead of following him everywhere.

Thank you, Ryuk, but you still pronounced your own name wrong.

*takes out Death Note to check if the rules are right*

Why didn’t Ryuk mention Light needs a name and face to kill at the beginning? That’s the most important rule.

I just feel that his mom’s killer should’ve been the first person to die.

Okay. This movie is relying on being gorey instead of actual plot.

Mia’s a creep.

Argh. No, Light, just no.

Wait... no, that’s not the rule. Anyone who touches the notebook can see the Shinigami.

Why is life making so many mistakes?

Misa’s character is doomed to be a psycopath in all universes. But does this mean Mia won’t get a DN now that Light told her everything? So no Rem? I’m disappointed.

Sure, nothing gets me in the mood than killing a bunch of people.

... Is that for real? Does Kira actually mean light in Russian and Celtic? I’m calling bullshit.

Well, I’m glad at least they kept Kira’s original meaning, it just doesn’t make sense Light would give himself that name in this context. Besides, the public game him that name.

Why does L look like a mugger? At least he’s still a badass and can speak many languages.

Out of all characters, I never expected for Watari to remain Japanese in this adaptation, specially when Watari wasn’t even Japanese to begin with.

Mr. Turner has more common sense than Mr. Yagami ever did. I respect that, but I don’t respect his very old cellphone.

I get that they need to talk, but why are they doing it in public?

Well, L will be L no matter what, and I’m happy about it.

What?! No Lind L. Taylor ploy?!

Also, L is scared to show his face but willingly shows himself in public? Even with the mask, that’s risky. That’s why they shold’ve just gone with the Lind L. Taylor plot.

Light, honestly, what did you expect? Did you thing you’d just get a life-time sentence in freaking America?

Of course, Mia, like Misa, fucks up Light’s plans.

Why do the agents look like zombies?

Well, that song was anti-climatic.

No L joining Light’s school? No tennis match? No iconic reveal scene? I feel robbed.

If Light and L are so smart, then why are they making such a scene in a coffee shop?

Also,they  should’ve just kept their cool like in the anime. 

Step back, Joker and Harley, we have a new psychopathic couple kids will try to emulate from now on: Light and Mia.

Did they really make Watari, Watari’s real name? Also, without any last name? Fuck this movie.

Flip phones? Wait, what year is this movie set in? 

I’m just so mad right now. What the fuck?

Of course no one would believe this weak ass Light would be Kira.

The vault looks like it belongs to the Illuminati.

How come it took L so long to figure out Light wanted his name?

Light’s homecoming pictures are embarrassing af. What kind of god are you?

Okay, as expected, it was Mia who handled everything. But yeah, real L would’ve been onto her too. I’m expecting this L to figure out Light’s a pansy and Mia is the real mastermind in here.

I just don’t get what Mia sees in Light, but okay.

FUCKING PLOT TWIST! I ain’t even mad. Yeah, kill that useless fucker.

Aawww Killing Light would’ve been so much better than burning the page to save him. Bummer.

Although revenge isn’t something far from L’s character, it still felt weird.

Talk about a literal cat and mouse chase.

Wow. L’s such a lousy driver.

I feel bad for all the people that got hit by these two losers.

Welp. L lost because of a motherfucking Kira supporter.

These two assholes are gonna die for being assholes. Serves them right.

Their deaths were super disappointing and L didn’t even win. I’m mad.

Light didn’t die? Fuck this.

Again, I’m glad Mr. Turner is smarter than Mr. Yagami.

Brilliant plot, except it doesn’t make sense given what we’ve seen Light do. Also, killing Mia is something OG Light would’ve done, but again, it doesn’t make that much sense that this Light would do it.

...You’re telling me L stooped that low? Becoming his enemy? Oh fuck no! That’s it! That was the last straw!

Fuck this movie and all that it represents.

[its-just-like-the-movies]

Arsenic and Old Lace (44, C+/B-)

How does one react to a project that is so determined to be strange, and hilarious, and morbid, all at the same time, and yet winds up being none of those things through the sheer effort of trying to accomplish it? That was the thought running through my head for a good portion of Arsenic and Old Lace, which features a pretty game cast burdened by a director who doesn’t seem to be in sync with his own material. There’s a surprisingly hefty amount of plot and characters running around, filling in its two hour run time absolutely fine, but almost none of it feels like it’s in the right key. In fact, the film is given a pretty straightforward, straight-faced treatment by director Frank Capra as he asks Cary Grant to contort his face, voice, and body into so many odd and strange positions and registers. The sheer range of sounds and movements, anxious tics and nervous screams Grant is asked to perform is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in film, fascinating to witness but also excruciating to watch, and who knows how laborious it was for him. His central performance is symptomatic of the film’s worst problems, stretching for effect when the material is potent enough to work with a little less obvious effort. And yet, it’s also a sign of the film’s most compelling efforts, the sheer spectacle of itself and willingness to go that far into comedic overplaying. It’s an interesting lark, constantly threading the needle between an inspired concept and a palpably miserved execution.

So what is this mad plot, you may be asking. Well, the sell line that got me to look into the film is that a man learns that his aunts have been serially slaughtering random, lonely old men as a giddy hobby to save each man’s poor, unfortunate souls. What we also have to contend with is the newly-married wife of that man, shoved out of his life as soon as he learns what his aunts have been doing. This man also has one brother who believes he’s Teddy Roosevelt, and another who’s a career criminal partnered with a plastic surgeon, both on the lamb with a bunch of body parts. There’s also two bumbling cops running around the neighborhood, though they aren’t smart enough to pick up on much. Cary Grant’s character is also named Mortimer Brewster, in case you wanted to know for a fact that this was written in the 1940’s, and his marriage is ever-so-slightly controversial because he’s written multiple books on the bounteous beauty of bachelorhood and the mundane monstrosity of marriage.

But, like his wife, this basically becomes an unnecessary add-on to an already busy film. Second-billed Priscilla Lane’s entire part is seemingly built of the character demanding attention not just from new hubby Mortimer but from Arsenic and Old Lace itself, popping in at random and trying to get her new hubby to remember she exists. This gag reaches its nadir after Lane is nearly killed by the criminal brother, who mistakes her for a burglar, and we are forced to watch her scream about her near-fatal encounter to Grant as he ignores her completely during a phone call he started just after she began her speech. She storms out in fury, and he looks up to wonder what’s got her in a fuss.

Then again, a lot of the film’s scenes feel as though they’re in poor taste, if not just poorly staged. Scenes like Mortimer’s discussion with a sanitarium director who requests if his brother could think he’s Napoleon instead of Teddy Roosevelt given the surplus of Roosevelts they already have, two separate metafilmic instances of characters describing plays that act as narrations of someone trying to kill them, every aforementioned moment with Lane, and a running joke about the second brother’s new face greatly resembling Boris Karloff, all feel like they’ve missed the landing by a good few feet, though some more than others. In fairness, the Karloff joke comes from the original Broadway run starring Karloff in the role as an in-joke, but that doesn’t mean it works quite as well here. Hell, what made it work then? Director Frank Capra’s biggest issue frankly seems to be a lack of shaping of the film’s morbid humor, even as the actors have all been encouraged to do the absolute most they possibly can. Grant’s mugging should work better than it does, but his triumphant, anxious giggle and jump after realizing brother Boris knows about a new body where an old one had been is also the only moment this film ever made me laugh out loud. Josephine Hull, as one of the murderous aunts, is a visible exception to this demand with her casual tendencies, body moments, and line readings, a contrast made even stronger by the permanent grin and upper-register voice work of Jean Adair as the other Brewster sister. Everyone else in the cast falls under the umbrella that Capra’s direction has egged them into, doing fine work in limited parts without challenging or doing much with them.

And yet, for all my palpable misgivings about the film, I wouldn’t call it a bad one at all. The missed opportunities can’t impede that, at its base, this is a strange and fleetly edited object. If I’m not that excited about it, I can’t say that I feel any strong hatred for it, or regret my time with it, even if I don’t plan on watching it again. You could do a lot better when it comes to finding weird, morbid shit from the 40’s, but as far as a selling hook you really can’t beat Arsenic and Old Lace’s “Cary Grant finds out his aunts are serial killers” line, and that arc is certainly the film’s most interesting. In fact, even if some overall narratives were easy to predict, one a scene-by-scene basis the film felt pretty unpredictable, doing its own weird thing whether you liked it or not. The Boris Karloff brother doesn’t even make his introduction until an hour into the film, and does so with absolutely no warning that he’ll be showing up. It’s moving at its own pace, and whatever that pace may be, it’s certainly commendable for doing so.

[theonyxpath]

The astute among you may have noticed that the Trinity Continuum rulebook has (finally) moved up the production list. The bottleneck I’ve previously mentioned has been cleared thanks to the tireless efforts of Danielle Harper, who is now acting as our Storypath developer after the departure of Neall. Neall kept saying he had his own game line to develop, but he kept talking about “psions,” and I’m pretty sure we only have one psion game in development. Weird.

Please give a warm welcome to Danielle!

In celebration, I figured it was time to drop another Allegiance teaser. Archangel comes to us from Jack Norris. As usual, bear in mind that this particular section is draft material and not yet fully developed.

Archangel

Archangel is an organization started by Count Raphael Orzaiz, sometimes known as Orzaiz the Elder, to aid those without the power and influence that too often leads to exceptional action and attention for their troubles. The group focuses on locating and assisting those who find themselves in dire situations where conventional authorities are unable to assist. “Helping the helpless” is both the organization’s mandate and defines how they approach situations. While financial or legal assistance is sometimes the solution, often Archangel operatives find themselves in situations requiring personal intervention. This is often done at great risk to members, so skilled and adaptable personnel are recruited.

History

In  2008, the eight year old heir to the Orzaiz family was kidnapped along with the nine year old son of the family driver, a young boy named Bakar. The Orzaiz were old school Basque aristocrats who traced their origins in pre-unified Spain in the 11th Century and possessed considerable financial resources and social connections. When the kidnappers realized they had not only grabbed the family’s heir but the “worthless” son of a servant, they sent Bakar back in pieces to prove their resolve. The result was not what they hoped.

Angered by the pointless torture and slaughter of a young boy whose family had served his for generations, and fearing his son would suffer a similar fate, Count Orzaiz used his connections to fund and assemble a team of experts to retrieve his boy. Led by ex-special forces and counterterrorism expert Jonas Luther, the team located the kidnappers. In a daring pre-dawn raid they retrieved the boy, killed the kidnappers, and exposed the mastermind behind the plot as a business rival of Orzaiz attempting to distract him from a particularly competitive business deal. As he hugged his son and praised his rescuers, he caught the sad and broken sight of his driver, whose son would never again return home. It was at that point Raphael made decision that has since saved countless lives.

Hiring Jonas Luther full-time, he tasked the man with creating an organization that would lend assistance to those without the good fortune to be born wealthy and privileged. Luther, himself a poor boy from one the worst neighborhoods in Chicago, threw himself into this task with enthusiasm and passion which surprised even his employer. With the Orzaiz fortunes backing him, he created a database of skilled freelancers, military personnel, various professionals, and even some criminals. Each candidate was selected for their professional and personal record of aiding others regardless of social or economic standing. Thus in 2009, Archangel was born.

Since then the group has worked to rescue kidnapped children, shut down human trafficking rings, protect small business owners from organized crime or corporate bullying, and numerous other activities. Archangel’s private status and the considerable influence their patron affords them allows the organization to work globally and often without regard for treaties and agreements that might block official intervention.

Recruitment

Archangel operatives are selected for their skill and drive to help others. The skills are anything that will assist in the various missions the organization undertakes. Combat skills are a common trait among many members, but expertise in computer hacking, field medicine, legal expertise, surveillance, and intelligence gathering are also highly prized. The organization doesn’t focus much on training; recruits are selected for their own skills far more often than they are taught essential ones. Many recruits are polymaths, able to score a headshot on the run, navigate a thorny issue of legal jurisdiction, hack a security system, or some other combination of useful skills. This focus on a handful of potent and hypercompetent operatives means that many who join Archangel are Talents, but this isn’t a requirement of membership. In truth, few within Archangel even understand much less make the distinction between a highly skilled “normal” operative and a Talent. For them, it’s all about results.

In addition to their skills, recruits must impress on Archangel a desire to aid others, especially the less fortunate. The group is more likely to recruit an ex-gang member who works with community outreach and neighborhood watch efforts than a veteran special forces operative who only works for the highest bidder. This moral component won’t substitute for the skills necessary to join, but those who don’t fit the profile won’t be sought out.

Many Archangel recruits have something in their past they are seeking to redeem or balance out. Some are former criminals seeking to protect those they once victimized, others are ex-military or intelligence who grew tired of serving the interests of nations while many normal citizens suffered. Others are fueled by personal tragedy that caused a change in perspective. A few are even victims helped by the organization in the past whose skills make them an asset. In any case, it’s a rare member who joins simply to risk their lives constantly to help the underprivileged and

Organization and Structure

Archangel is organized into cells which generally handle operations in a given area. Cells can be small, in some cases a single operative might be tasked with handling cases in an area. However, large cells of a dozen or more members are found in large population centers like Mexico City or Los Angeles. Most cells post advertisements in newspapers, social media sites, and other places that give contact information and offers to help in situations where no one else can or will. These efforts generate a lot of crackpots and scam artists, but a tested filtering process usually means that a handful of genuine clients are located on a regular basis. In truth, most cells are overrun with legitimate requests far more often than they’re sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.

Whenever an operation is called for in places where a Archangel cell doesn’t exist, the home office will select a cell whose skills and experience best suits the task at hand. Thus, they won’t send a bunch of ex-cops and a former coroner to rescue tourists from Somali pirates any more than they’d send a team of commandos to track a serial killer preying on the homeless. Any cell requiring outside assistance can usually receive it, though it might take some time as there’s rarely an idle operative in the group.

Archangel is headquartered in Barcelona, and the home office is run by Jonas Luther and various members of the original team that saved young Raoul years back. Luther and his crew don’t handle as many field operations as they once did, finding that recruitment, coordinating cells and locating clients takes up the bulk of their time. Count Raphael Orzaiz doesn’t involve himself with the organizations operations at all, save to write checks and occasionally point other interested philanthropists at the group. These donations along with the Count’s fortune give the group ample funding.

Goals and Methods

The goal of Archangel is simple: use their skills and resources to help those in need, particularly those who cannot secure aid elsewhere. Very few of its clients are wealthy or well-connected unless they find themselves the victim of forces with overwhelming power and influence. How an individual cell goes about helping someone is largely up to them; though the focus is always on assistance and not retribution. Thus a crime syndicate smuggling people to serve as slave labor might end up ruthlessly eliminated by a cell, but that’s an afterthought. The focus of such an operation would be to liberate captives and shut down the operation. Due to his past experiences, Count Orzaiz is ironclad on this goal; returning a kidnapped child or saving someone’s livelihood is always a priority. Justice or revenge is a luxury, though ones the group often manages to afford.

Methodology varies wildly with different cells and the whole organization has a “whatever works” attitude as long as overall goals are met. Operatives are encouraged to work with local authorities whenever possible because it makes missions go easier, but it’s not a requirement. In some locations with rampant corruption, such cooperation is even functionally impossible. A team of legal experts and some sympathetic politicians help keep members out of trouble in most cases, though if an operation goes horribly wrong the blowback could be severe. Given the stakes involved in many situations when Archangel is called, mistakes are something other people get to make.

Archangel treats those it helps as paying clients whose needs are the utmost priority, but they never accept payment. In rare occasions where an individual has the resources or willfulness to insist on paying, the funds are donated to a charity that helps those in a similar situation to the client. Thus, if Archangel liberates an unjustly accused activist languishing in a corrupt hellhole somewhere, any payments would go to organizations such as Amnesty International or the appropriate branch of the Æon Society. In fact, the Triton Foundation receives a noticeable influx of donations from Archangels efforts, a reality not lost on Æon and relations between the two organizations is generally favorable.

Advantages

Archangel’s greatest assets are its patron’s fortunes and its own people. Everything necessary for a mission can be purchased as needed, and many cells maintain a small armory, crime lab, and whatever else operatives might need to accomplish their goals. These resources are often cutting edge, though they rarely branch into the realm of “weird science” unless a cell member designs something using their own skills.

Operatives are extremely well-paid to avoid any temptation of bribery or corruption, but in truth this is usually unnecessary. Most Archangel members are devoted to the group’s mission and would likely do the job for nothing and a significant portion of member salaries go to supporting various charities. Many who work for the group find their bank account and assets growing as they jump frantically from one crisis to the next, and despite the group only being active for five years many of the senior members already have enough to retire comfortably. Despite this, the retirement and turnover rate for Archangel is quite low; these people are in it for the cause, not money.

Since three operatives were abducted and killed in 2010 during a disastrous mission that also cost the life of their client, all members have taken to wearing identification markers implanted with a tracking device. Typically the device is in the form of a medallion, charm, piece of jewelry, ring, or mundane item bearing the image of St. Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint of the hopeless and helpless. Some have chips implanted surgically and  conceal any scar with a tattoo instead. This marking also help operatives from different cells identify each other in the field. Despite the typical religious iconography, most members view these as symbols of their allegiance and practical safety precautions; in fact the whole idea was dreamed up by Jonas Luther’s agnostic assistant after she saw the movie The Untouchables. Some cells even use churches and shrines devoted the saint for meeting places and information drops, but this is a matter of style and not policy.

[tessatechaitea]

Justice League vs. Suicide Squad #4

This isn't even a challenge! How did these two become nemeses?! Comic books are stupid.

I would have begun by mentioning the Lobo/Bueno Excellente sex tape.

The next move is Max Lord's. I guess they're taking turns instead of creating a chaotic brawl because while Max Lord uses his mind-control powers on Enchantress, everybody just stands around and watches to see what happens. Maybe they just rolled too low on their initiative checks. Next, Johnny Truant opens up his face and spills minotaurs all over the floor. I guess that's the sign to turn this into a chaotic brawl. According to the initial brawl splash pages, Aquaman is matched up with Rustam. According to the next bunch of panels under the splash, Rustam simply walks away to kill a bunch of guards and enter the control room where he plans to release all of the prisoners by smashing the computers. I really think these high-tech prisons need to rethink these electronic locks and just go back to using individual keys for every cell. Any time any electrical interference hits the prison, they have a riot on their hands. The only way that would happen with manual locks is if a speedster broke in and stole the keys. Luckily Katana saw Aquaman completely fuck up and arrives in time to stop Rustam. That seems like an obvious match-up, right? They each have a sword! Too bad Deadshot didn't match up with Rustam. He could have killed Rustam in one panel.

I guess nobody has to worry about Max Lord since he apparently broke his back on the way to the vault.

Killer Frost goes after Max but since Amanda Waller didn't brief everybody on the mission, she's mind-controlled by Max Lord. All Amanda (or Superman!) had to tell everybody was that if they see Max's nose begin to bleed, knock him the fuck out instantly. I should be running the fucking Suicide Squad! And the Justice League! Lobo chases down Waller, Deadshot, and Batman. That means Lobo has the toughest fight of all the Super Duper Scary Suicide Squad members. Emerald Empress is battling Superman and Jessica Cruz.

At least I thought it was Jessica Cruz. It looks like her. But she made that light construct too easily. So it must be somebody else.

I admit, it still could be Jess since I've stopped reading Green Lanterns. Maybe there was an issue where she learned how to make constructs without spending four pages wrestling with her anxiety. Simon Baz returns to crack the shit out of the Emerald Eye. This causes the Emerald Empress to panic and mention how she needs to find Saturn Girl. Saturn Girl is in Arkham! Everybody knows that! Anyway, Emerald Empress disappears. Katana defeats Rustam and Wonder Woman defeats Johnny Truant (with a little help from Harley Quinn). Doctor Polaris defeats lots and lots of heroes at once by manipulating the iron in their blood. Remember when Magneto first did that back in like the seventies or eighties and everybody was all, "WHOOOOOOOOOA! COOOOOOOOOL! HE'S SO POWERFUL!"? Well, that's why Doctor Polaris is on the Super Duper Scary Suicide Squad. Because he's just being written as DC's Magneto. Cyborg defeats Doctor Polaris with like his White Noise Cannon except he pretends it does some magnetic thing this time. He's not fooling anybody! He only has the one attachment!

By "everything," Deadshot, of course, means "bullets. Lots and lots of bullets." Now if he'd throw a few bucks at him and purchase his talents, Deadshot might actually stop him!

Apparently the best way to defeat Lobo is to run away from him. He's fucking slow! Batman rushes off to find one of Waller's injectable brain bombs that her team just leave lying around the complex, along with the remote to blow the bomb. He comes back, injects Lobo, and blows Lobo's head off. It's okay though because Batman doesn't kill. That means Lobo will be fine. Pissed off but fine. Waller reveals that Max is after the Eclipso Diamond so they all rush off just in time to be Eclipso'd by Max. Well, the Justice League is, at least. Max decides not to control the Suicide Squad because he has to make some kind of mistake or else he'll rule the entire world! I mean, if his plan is to control the world using the Eclipso Diamond, why not just control everybody he comes into contact with? I guess next issue can once again be called Justice League vs. Suicide Squad since the Justice League are currently evil. One more example of why Superman should go live on Mars and stop allowing villains to use his power to threaten the world. What Did We Learn? It's a toss up between power corrupts and power doesn't always corrupt but the incorruptible people with power usually wind up being used by corrupted people so it doesn't really matter anyway. The Ranking! No change!