#fandompost

[symphony-calamity]

The Murderbot Diaries are so good because they ask big questions like "what if a machine wanted autonomy but didn't want to be treated like a human" and "what if your co-workers kept trying to talk to you about your feelings".

[chann3l-chas3r]

Shrimpo has exactly one brain cell and it is constantly slamming against the inside of his skull like a fly at a window.

[teaboot]

Yeah Doctor Harleen Quinzel *has* commited a number of federal crimes, but so have a lot of successful academics. What I think we need to discuss is that she dated a patient, which is like. A different kind of icky

[automatisma]

It's so interesting to me that Slay the Princess is the kind of art that leaves little room for structured interpretation of the text because it's so good at exploring what is it about (almost everything you want to say about it is already in the text! just go play it again), while easily supporting a lot of derivative reimaginings, remixes and fanworks.

[specterris]

he looks bad yes but i cant draw any of these characters so its ok

[jerksbitch]

me? normal…? why, yes!

i’m so horny for dean winchester i’m about to start gnawing on steel rebar & concrete

[rogdona]

[revacholian-girl-utena]

I guess you could say we believe it *because it’s impossible*.

Alt text: Frames from the finale of Revolutionary Girl Utena with overlaid text.

1: Prince Dios lounges on the ground, looking disinterested. Text reads: YOU — "They think their success is a given."

2: The same shot from another angle, showing Akio mirroring Dios as he looks on with a fruity drink nearby. Text reads: "Yes."

3: Anthy bites her knuckle, tears in her closed eyes, looking torn. Text reads: "Whereas we understand"

4: Utena lying crumpled on the ground as the million swords bear down on her. Text reads: "that we'll almost certainly fail,"

5: Utena and Anthy's outstretched hands touching. Utena's hand is visibly bloody. Text reads: "which is what allows us the chance to succeed." End alt text.

[cat-hesarose]

Izzy Hands and broken promises

Now that I've had a day to digest the ending, I'm still in the "Izzy should have lived" camp but can better understand why it soured an otherwise great season finale for me.

Keep reading if you like rants about storytelling and queer catharsis from people with a Bachelor degree's worth of overconfidence and strong opinions.

Bar a handful of icks (Zheng Yi Sao getting outsmarted by Ricky, etc), I loved this season and don't see a wealth of problems that would not have been solved by two additional episodes. That said, Izzy's death is one of the things I can't see making any more sense if they had more time to explore his journey because his journey is what problematizes djenk's stated reasoning for his death.

In that one interview (and to be fair, we only have a brief window into his intentions as of right now), djenks positions Izzy as two things, specifically to Ed: a mentor and a father figure. And yeah, mentor figures often die. Their student surpasses them, or acquires a new narrative drive from their mentor's death to continue a quest.

Neither of these things feel like a fit for Izzy and Ed's dynamic nor their respective arcs. Neither does "father figure". Izzy was a love interest. He was described as a love interest. He confessed love to Edward. His mentor relationship was more established with Stede, if anything, who is an unreliable narrator and may well have been lying about Edward claiming that Izzy taught him everything he knows.

The journey that Izzy went on this season was parallel to Ed and Stede but it was with the crew. It's one big queerplatonic love story essentially, of him finding himself as an individual through the support they give and the space they hold for him. Season 2 Izzy Hands is, among other things, a love letter and showcase of the queer community's power to revive hope and purpose.

Izzy has the world's messiest breakup with Ed when they're both at their worst, and his healing begins with the crew of the Revenge. He only interacts with Ed again after bonding with, and growing through, the crew. So yes, it absolutely makes sense that his journey would proceed towards making peace with/saying goodbye to "Blackbeard". But it does not make sense that it would end there, with his death.

Djenks says that they're pirates, and people die. And yeah they do. But in the hand-wavy logic universe of OFMD it feels dismissive to say that about the death of a major character. And odds are, David "Izzy is my favourite character" Jenkins is not dismissive of Izzy, so that leaves tragedy.

My issue with that is, season 2 Izzy is no longer an innately tragic character. If you told me at the end of season 1 that season 2 would end with Izzy dying in Edward's arms telling him to go forth and change and accept love, I would've gone "that's sad but it makes sense." Because it would have, at the time. Season 2 Izzy departed from the trappings (so I thought) of the doomed fate of the bitter old repressed grimdark pirate when he put on the gold-painted wooden hoof and embraced his new role as First Mate of Stede Bonnet's gay floating kindergarten.

His death feels like a betrayal because, in a show that does queer characters Really Well, Izzy's arc feels like a broken promise. To say nothing of the politics of having a character attempt suicide, begin to heal, then say "I want to go" before dying, I wanted Izzy to want to live. It really felt like that was where his character was going, where his character was supposed to go.

Death for a character who is showing all this potential is only a natural ending in a tragedy. It isn't presented as peaceful or to punctuate another character's growth. Season 2 Izzy Hands had ceased to be reliant on and subject to Blackbeard. If anything, he was tied to the crew, who all stood back and felt much more removed from his death than they probably would have been if the show had more time to show their emotional responses. Having him die in Ed's arms, apologising for fueling Ed's destructive tendencies and encouraging him to be himself and accept love, feels like he got shunted off his new arc and back onto the old one. It feels like he went through all of that just to take a last-minute huge step back and re-subjugate himself to this character who does not reciprocate his devotion.

It makes me wonder if his death scene was one of the first ones written, before all that energy was spent giving him a new life and new connections and new, you know, new reason to live.

Anyway, that's how I feel about it. TL;DR Izzy's growth should have included LIVING HIS HARD-WON NEW LIFE and if I ever see djenks i'm going to cross the road and avoid eye contact.

[tokyosmega]

dadtober day 23: gothcleats

royalty au gothcleats !! i have a whole sad storyline in my head but i decided to make them happy

[it-foll0ws-me]

I know this joke has been made 10000 times in the Zanvis fandom but I needed to actually make it, it was keeping me up at night

[symphony-calamity]

"Average Tumblr user has fucked a train" factoid is actually just a statistical error. The Mechanisms fandom, who fuck 10,000 trains every Friday, are outliers and should not have been counted.

[chann3l-chas3r]

For today's hour of pencil practice I gave myself 15 minutes each to draw four doodles!

It's all Horrible Shrimp Man <3

[teaboot]

I can't remember if I told yall about this already but I told my brother that my favourite Robin is Jason Todd and he just groaned and went "so you're one of those ones"

[automatisma]

I am actually not done thinking about Disco Elysium's parallels. The whole cryptozoological research shown as a futile endeavor that's kept alive exclusively by Lena's guilt and Morell's mad obsession while actually showing the Phasmid talking directly to Harry in the end being a direct parallel with Revachol's revolution and the prophesised Return! Harry's aching for Dora (who is repeately assimilated to Dolores Dei) as an impossible and self-destructive pursuit of static perfection just as what Dolores Dei was and will be for Insulinde and humanity as a whole!