#for so many reasons it could've not worked because of what the show is fundamentally trying to say

[variousqueerthings]

it did strike me that out of all the guys at mash (margaret included), the person i read as the most traditional heroic romantic lead is klinger, which is fun considering he spent over half of the show in mainly dresses, skirts, or other considered-feminine wear, that he (like the others) has zero interest in war and violence and the military, and that he’s the only lead who’s not white 

and also it feels good to see that the hope exists specifically in korea and it’s not just about the idea that one can only start healing once leaving a country that’s experiencing war, as if the people who still live there aren’t important. soon-lee is such a great character, after so many single-episode characters whose fates we’ll never know, she’s carrying a lot of previous stories as well as her own, so even though i do wish she’d arrived earlier, there are reflections of her story all through the show

[burst-of-iridescent]

i've written before about how fire lady katara isn't an inherently disempowering or racist trope, as have many others, but lately i've been thinking about how arguments against fire lady katara often tend to utilise a surface-level interpretation of colonial trauma.

[edit: this post will use the term "colonial trauma" because those who argue against fire lady katara usually use the same wording or are referring to that concept. but it's important to note that according to show canon, the fire nation did not colonize the southern water tribe and zuko and katara did not have a colonizer/colonized relationship.]

antis who present this argument usually posit that marrying zuko would be a form of re-traumatization for katara, while marrying aang would "protect" her. katara is supposedly more shielded from confronting the impact of colonization in the southern water tribe or on air temple island than she would be with zuko in the fire nation, which contextualizes colonial trauma purely through the lens of physical interaction with the colonial power (ie. living in the fire nation or looking after the people of the fire nation). whether intended or not, this argument inadvertently limits colonial trauma to the geographical boundaries of the colonizing country and implies that it can be reduced or averted solely by minimizing contact with said country.

even leaving aside that we have seen katara in the fire nation (and enjoying herself there), the implication here is that active engagement with a colonial power as a member of colonized peoples is an inherent form of re-traumatization... which i take issue with for multiple reasons.

firstly, katara lives in a world that has been permanently shaped and changed by imperialism, and that's going to affect her no matter where she goes. sequestering herself in the south pole her whole life and never seeing a glimpse of fire nation red again won't allow katara to escape the legacy of colonization or the trauma it has caused her, because its influence is rooted in everything from her family to her tribe to her own bending. believe me, i understand the appeal of a world where women of colour can avoid reckoning with the impact of colonization by simply never setting foot in the colonizing country again, and why people might be uncomfortable with zutara individually as a result - but i can't accept it as a valid argument against the ship, because that's just not how colonial trauma works.

secondly, the idea that this "protects" katara reeks of paternalism because katara is not a character who chooses her path simply based on how safe or comfortable it is. if that was the case, she would never have left the southern water tribe at all! she could've remained there her whole life and likely been safe, since the fire nation had no real interest in the south pole any longer. katara is fundamentally defined by how relentlessly revolutionary she is - over and over, she chooses to do what is right, what is hard, what is unexpected, even at cost to herself. she challenges injustice and discrimination and bigotry; she fights for the downtrodden and speaks for those who can't speak for themselves; she will never ever turn her back on the people who need her. does that truly sound like someone who needs to be hid away and protected from her own supposed re-traumatization?

thirdly - and i fully accept that there are those who might disagree with this - katara actively choosing to engage with her colonial trauma can be empowering just as it can be traumatizing. don't get me wrong: as a woc and a minority in my own country, i understand how tiring it is to do this. i understand the exhaustion of confronting what was done to you and your people, of facing down bigotry over and over. i understand the desire to run away from it all, and why it can be wish fulfilment for others to let katara do so. i really, really do.

but there is also wish fulfilment in letting katara fight, as a brown girl with power and resources that few brown girls in the real world hold. there is a power fantasy in seeing katara head into the belly of the beast and emerging triumphant. there is empowerment to be found in seeing katara struggle with racism and ignorance and mindless hate to enact change - and succeed. i love reading and writing about katara unpacking her trauma regarding the fire nation, about growing to love the place she once hated, about reconciling both her homes and healing from the wounds of her childhood.

and ultimately, i think that's what katara would want for herself. after throwing herself head first into the fight against the fire nation, after facing down her greatest trauma instead of letting it consume her, after helping and protecting the people of the fire nation, after refusing to let the fire nation take anything else from her - i firmly believe that the last thing katara would do is allow herself to be ruled by the fire nation instead of being the one ruling it.

personally, i find that a more hopeful and victorious narrative than one where she remains safe and sheltered away from the fire nation, but forever haunted and dictated by her trauma. would that be realistic? perhaps. but the entire point of foiling katara with characters like jet and hama is to show that she's not doomed to be mired in the pain of her past. that where their stories could only end in tragedy, hers can - and does - end in hope for something better, as she always believed it could.

[juney-blues]

ever since i made THIS POST a lot of people have been asking for a tutorial, even though in pretty much all of the screenshots i included the specific part of inspect element showing exactly what i edited.

so buckle the fuck up I guess because the tumblr userbase want to find out how to make html pages unusable and who am I to deny you.

get ready for Baby's First HTML and CSS tutorial lmao

ok so first things first we need to go over BASIC HTML

html is made up of these things called "tags" which specify certain parts of the web page, such as

HEADERS (<h1> through <h6> in terms of importance)

PARAGRAPHS (<p>paragraph here</p>)

LINKS (<a href="linkhere"></a>)

BOLDED SECTIONS OF TEXT(<b>bold here</b>)

and a bunch of other stuff,

by default however, specifying all of this just gives us a plain white page with plain black text of varying sizes

that's of course, no fucking good, and sucks shit, so the arbiters of html decided to let us STYLE certain elements, by adding a STYLE parameter to the tag

this can change any number of elements about how things are formatted.

text colour, page colour, font, size, spacing between elements, text alignment, you name it? you can change it!

you might've noticed that, certain elements are nested in other elements

and that any changes that apply to one element, apply to everything included under that element!

how convenient!

anyway this method of styling things by adding a style=" " to their tags is called "in-line style"

i think because the "style" goes "in" the "line"

it's generally ALSO a pain in the ass to style an entire website like this and should be exclusively reserved for small changes that you only want to apply to specific parts of the page.

for any real change in style you want to create a <style> section in your page's header!

this can be used to make changes to how all elements of a type in your page are displayed

or even add new elements with whatever wacky styling you want that can be used with the <div> tag!

wow! isn't css just dandy!

and hell you can even use External CSS™ if you're making multiple pages and want them all to have a consistent theme, by pointing to a .CSS file (which is basically just a <style> header without the <style> tags lmao

ok this is all well and good and very interesting if, say, you're making your own website

*cough*neocities*cough*itsreallycoolandfree*cough*

but you came here because you want to FUCK UP A WEBSITE and make it look STUPID!!

so this is where the transform css property comes in~

you can read up on it HERE if you want the details but basically it allows you to apply mathematical transformations to any html element you want,

all of these fun bastards,

they can be really useful if you're doing some complicated stupid bullshit like me

OR for having fun >:)

if you'll remember, earlier i said that css properties apply to literally everything nested in an element,

and you MIGHT notice, that literally everything in pretty much all html files, is nested in an <html> tag

you can use style=" " or regular css on pretty much ANY html tag,

INCLUDING HTML!

ok ok that was a lot of buildup for something that i could've explained in one or two lines, but i gave you all this fundamental knowledge for a reason,

well, two reasons, go make a neocities

CHAPTER 2: THIS POST HAS CHAPTERS NOW

CSS KEY FRAMES BABYYYY

THESE FUCKERS DON'T WORK AS INLINE STYLING

I HAD TO TEACH YOU HOW CSS WORKED, TO GIVE YOU THE KNOWLEDGE YOU NEED, TO ANIMATE PAGES. TO MAKE THE FUCKERY COMPLETE!!!!

OKAY SO AGAIN READ UP ON THIS IF YOU WANT THE FULLEST POSSIBLE UNDERSTANDING

BUT WHAT KEYFRAMES ALLOW YOU TO DO, IS ANIMATE CSS PROPERTIES

and then make a class, which calls that animation...

and then assign that class. to your html tag.

and then vomit forever

we can do it in 3d too,

the only limit is your imagination... (and how many parameters you want to look up on w3schools and mozilla mdn web docs)

CHAPTER 3: APPLYING IN PRACTICE

ok now the fun thing about all of this, is you can apply it to your blog theme, literally right now

like literally RIGHT now

like step one, make sure you have a custom blog theme enabled in your settings, because that's turned off by default for some reason

step 2: edit theme

step 3: edit html:

step 4: apply knowledge in practice >:)

[batsplat]

reading your fabio/casey post, im curious: how much sympathy do you give to riders who have chosen money over success? fabio could've gone elsewhere but he chose The Bag and while i feel for him given how bad the bike is (and that there's only two bikes, etc) he did tie himself to the project for years to come

(x) hm interesting one. there's a few different things here

first off, in general I have an extreme lack of sympathy for athletes who choose wealth over success. I understand it's an inescapable part of how sports works, but that doesn't mean I have to like it - these are sums of money that I just feel are fundamentally immoral. nobody should be paid as much as some of these athletes are. now, obviously not all riders in motogp are all that well paid, I get that they don't have a lot of career security and I also get that this is a reason why everyone's jumping at those factory seats. for instance, I do have some sympathy for jorge martin's choice to switch to aprilia, even though he too is of course choosing a less competitive bike. from the estimates of these guys' salaries to us available and considering expenses, that man is not being paid in a manner commensurate to his abilities or success. (though if the adage of 'ducati pays shit salaries but great bonuses' holds true, I imagine he too is very much fine.) still, by the time you get to the numbers fabio was getting chucked at him, fundamentally I... do not care anymore. like that's dumb amounts of money, I don't care how many yachts you can buy. it's disgusting

but, well. it's also what these big money offers mean, right. it's a way for manufacturers to show riders how much they're wanted - and while I also don't like... love that the way to do this involves this many millions, that's how this process works. the reason why casey ended up switching from ducati to honda wasn't a competitive calculation where he saw that ducati was trending downwards and decided to jump ship. it's because he went to ducati and told them to make him a suitable offer, and they didn't do so. from his autobiography:

After the way they'd behaved I had pretty much decided that I was through with Ducati and even though they put a new contract in front of me, for 2011 and 2012, it was going to take a much grander gesture to make me stay. I told them I wanted them to show me what I meant to them. 'What do you mean?' they said. 'That's up to you,' I told them. I gave them months to do it and nothing happened. In the end I had to spell it out. I said, 'Rip up my current contract and show me what I am worth to you.' They wouldn't do it, and that told me all I needed to know. Up until then there was a chance that I'd stay but that effectively made my decision easy.

now, listen, casey's situation was very much its own thing, his bridges with ducati were already burnt and it was always highly unlikely he'd stay. but as he puts it, he was willing to give ducati a chance - if they put enough money on the table to show him they care. this is obviously not a performance-based decision. if casey stays with ducati, he does not win a second championship - it's as simple as that. riders want to feel wanted, they want to feel valued... and the money symbolises that to them, a commitment of faith on part of the manufacturer to the rider. martin's choice wasn't primarily financially incentivised, right (and tbh, if ducati weren't willing to put a large sum of money on the table for him, factory seat or not, they're idiots) - it was that he wanted to feel wanted. it's emotional but it's also practical in that you want to know your manufacturer will rally around you and do whatever it takes to make you succeed. it helps if you know they have a big stake in your success... money plays a role in so many of these decisions - and while I really don't like it, it's also tough to penalise fabio specifically too harshly for it

all that being said, if it really were just about any of the stuff I just listed, I would have less than zero time for the choice. I'm an old fashioned kind of bloke... for me sports is about one thing, and that's winning. but the real problem fabio faced was a lack of great options that could help him achieve said winning. let's quickly run through them:

yamaha: currently laughably uncompetitive. this season has been disappointing from them, even by the standards of their modest pre-season expectations... you would have hoped they'd be a little closer by this stage in the year. but, well, by the start of the year it was clear this would be a long-term project. they have made personnel changes in line with fabio's demands, have made shown themselves willing to follow his development direction and commit fully to him on every level as their star rider. he knows the project, he knows that the money is there - and unlike the two non-ducati european manufacturers, yamaha has a proven track record of winning championships

aprilia: the second/third best manufacturer at the moment, but far off the first. sometimes have the pace to challenge for victory, frequently don't. part of that will be down to the inconsistent riders and not just the inconsistent bikes, but it also doesn't help that it's also the number one technical problem team. aprilia had some strong early season pace around the time fabio was making his choice (remember, vinales really should have been leading the championship coming out of cota - though the fact that he wasn't does of course also tell you what you need to know about aprilia)... but at this stage it seems a little unlikely they'll have a bike in championship contention next season. the manufacturer with the least spending power, still doesn't have a title sponsor

ktm: seemingly full. now, obviously, whenever ktm says they want to stick with their current riders, you can reasonably assume they will change their minds. and they did change their minds, which is how we now have a completely new tech3 line up for next season. but realistically, given pedro's golden boy status and binder's contract spanning roughly until the next ice age, that was the best fabio could have hoped for. yes, there were murmurings both jorge and marc might be an option for the factory team - but I never took those all too seriously, and both riders have a more substantial history with ktm/red bull than fabio does. in any case, ktm will be built around pedro. I suppose you can say fabio should back himself to beat pedro, but that's the kind of call you can make if you think you'll be fighting for championships the moment you join the manufacturer. if ktm isn't there yet next year (which is likely), then what fabio would have had to do is attempt to assert himself against the next great thing, already more established than him within the manufacturer, from a satellite bike, with zero guarantee that ktm will actually be in championship contention any time soon. eh

ducati: well, look, a factory seat was never on the cards for him anyway. you'd have to think he could have gotten a satellite seat of some type, if he really had been willing to take whatever was on the table. ducati has generally liked collecting all the strongest riders, and you'd hope would've been up for it... who knows what spec he would have been able to acquire. if he's on a year old bike, then winning a title would always be a tall order. even if he's on the newest spec... the template here of course is marc, but it felt from the start that this gresini gig was supposed to be a stopgap. fabio is not at the stage of his career where he should be looking for stopgaps, and he still wouldn't have an obvious place to go for 2026. whichever way ducati ended up arranging their riders, there would have been no short to medium term route into the factory team for fabio

honda: lol

at a certain point, it does make sense to go with the manufacturer that is willing to back you as its star. now, look, maybe jorge martin wins the championship next year, in which case fabio's decision will obviously have aged poorly. but you'd have to say that's unlikely... fabio's bet here basically has to be that switching to aprilia might have brought him race wins next year, but sticking with yamaha might bring him more titles eventually. at this stage, neither of his two most plausible options look like championship contenders until 2027. yamaha, however, have a lot of money at their disposal - which they proved by signing him. if he switches now and the aprilia dream doesn't come off, it leaves him in a weaker position for 2027 than the path he's currently on. none of these options are great exactly... but there is a logic to the reasoning here. if there were an equivalent to honda 2011 for fabio to jump ship to, obviously he'd be an idiot not to accept. there just isn't, though, is there? he tied himself to the project for two years, which puts him in sync with basically the entire grid. it lets everyone completely reset for 2027... until then, you'd have to say it's pretty unlikely that anyone who isn't on a ducati will be winning any titles - and if they do, my money would still be on ktm. maybe you think fabio should back himself and take the risk, which is an understandable position. but equally, I do get how sticking with the devil you know and will go to war for you might make sense in the medium to long term. if it really was just the money, I have zero respect for that. but I don't think it was, so I'll spare him a little sympathy. for his troubles

[minthe-lover]

Chapter 233 Analysis

So don't worry I'm still alive. Life decided to just kick my ass and could actually get this done but doing it now!

So just to make this clear at the start, i don't inherently dislike stories of women using their sexuality to their advantage. Ie the sexy assassin type stories, I've said it before but I was a sex worker and that very much does effect the way I look at and analysis media.

Though stories like that often run a very thin line between just sexism and sexualization. I think the main way to tell the difference is the reason why the the person is using their sexuality is such a way. In lore olympus with hera.. it's a story about women using their sexuality as a form of power.. it's women being sexually abused to hopefully save themselves from more pain.

Hera has no power in this situation, and it's not an empowering story because it's just about a women being forced to let herself be raped and lastly rs just doesn't give the time and energy to actually respect the sexual assault of hera. It shows terribly in this chapter.

This episode starts.. alright. I don't fully mind hera being haunted by kronos, it's honestly sort of terrifying. The problem is that we aren't given enough time to actually sit and grow with this, Rs just can't spend the time she's given well enough to put it towards this event.

One of the first things we learn after the kronos fight is that he wants hera... it takes us another like 17 or so episodes to learn that kronos the main villain is fucking hunting hera. This is such a big and important event that just gets ignore and rushed in one chapter. We see her struggling with this, we even in like one panel how it is actively effecting her others relationships.. but we only get one panel. Like you can imagine a scene where hera gets uncharacteristically angry at echo and we aren't even a reason why till we get like a shot with kronos in a reflection with hera. There are ways this could've been set up and made it so much more impactful but then it's just ignored till it's needed.

Also again rs just has so many great points to make interesting drama that she just ignores... like the whole missing ten years thing is barely brought up. Most people just continue as normal. This line is a fucking insult cause like.. besides one panel of them hugging WE HAVEN'T SEEN HERA WITH HER DAUGHTER. like holy shit all this time could have been spent so much better.

Now I honestly don't think the child has been even mentioned since it was told to hera.. also having hera being the only one mentioning the child.. and when she is she's being literally raped... really makes persephone and hades look even worse. Also again.. this chapter didn't have a trigger warning.. and it really fucking should.

now I don't fully dislike this plot point... like the idea of it.. same way I don't dislike the idea of persephone sexual assault. My problem with it isn't the fact that sexual assault happened.. it's how it's dealt with. We have this dramatic build up and while it's not explicitly stated it's pretty clear that hera was just fucking raped.

now instead of giving this really upsetting and serious plot point time to breath.. rs decides to immediately go to a cut away joke? about how haha persephone and hades are engaged and dumb drama with that. It's just such a tonal shock that just fundamentally doesn't work. Rs you literally couldn't done the exact same thing you did with persephone rape. Give a few quite panels of reflection and just... let a chapter go by without Perspehone and Hades.

We barely even see heras own reaction to what happened to her.. the literal rape that just fucking happened is basically completely ignored for the rest of the chapter. We don't have a few panel of someone asking hera why she wasn't answering the phone. No one acknowledges what happened and instead it's time for dumb Hades and Persephone.

This chapter, which is mainly about hera being sexually and emotionally abused... ends on the happy note where the main characters are going to get married. It's just... feels so disrespectful. Rs you could make this chapter like 80% better by just removing all the stuff with the marriage and instead just having a few panels of hera actually being effected by her rape.

Now I've taked about how the whole rushing into marriage with Hades and Persephone is bad.. but it really shows the most in this chapter. A chapter that regardless if you are a fan or critic should objectively be focused solely on the rape of hera... instead is just made so much worse by adding this... It's been what.. an hour maybe two at most since hera was literally sexually assaulted and she's just completely fine and shows no effects of it.

Like it's so clear the bias towards hades and persephone that rs has.. literally every single story outside of theirs suffers because of them. Why are you making stories that and obviously more important then them getting married if you want the focus on them being married. Kronos should have just been fully defeated.. adding all this other shit just makes them look like terrible people and makes it clear that they don't actual care.

Despite season 3 not being finished yet... I'm pretty sure this is going to be by far the worse chapter.. just because rs decided that a rape should happen right before the main characters getting married.

[which-hospital]

Take the Strain (03/02/24)

Melty brain week. Staying on top of my reading but at what cost?

This episode review ended up incredibly unbalanced with three paragraphs about the same topic and then I ran out of energy by the time I got to the rest of it. Normally, I'd try and give myself some time to try to balance it out but I really don't feel like for this episode.

I’m just going to unpack all of my Teddy Thoughts at the start.

An even more frustrating episode than I bargained for because there were actually some things I liked. Just, separated entirely from their context. Things I liked: Jan. Jan's so underrated. I am so desperate for them to actually continue from Switzerland that I will take anything at this point and I did really like that it felt like Teddy still wants/appreciates Jan’s approval, even now. Very Character of him. Extremely Character. In my head, Teddy has never and will never get over needing Jan’s approval and that’s just emblematic of the deeper issues going on with him. Those moments were good. I just don’t think Jan being upset at Teddy had to come from her noticing the Jodie stuff, he was already up to objectionable stuff without that. 

Similarly, I thought Teddy and Paige’s conversation in the lift had potential. The big problem I have with how this relationship has ended is that it feels like the writers are somehow convinced that they're breaking up because Teddy and Jodie happened, when Teddy and Paige would absolutely have broken up even if that didn't happen. They've been headed this way since Dog Days, at least. I just think the whole thing would've been better if they'd have leant into the fundamental issues the relationship has, instead of putting all the focus on this stuff with Jodie which is not the most interesting or even biggest problem they have. The Sah/Paige kiss created so many interesting routes they could've taken but they lost track of what they were doing with it very quickly and then kept losing track of every new opportunity they created. In my heart, they are to Casualty what tomshiv is to Succession. In reality, they're a mess.

I wish I could give a real, proper reason why I don’t like Teddy and Jodie together but I just don’t. It’s so bad that I can barely their scenes together. I guess we’re heading towards more of them, potentially even a proper romance plot? Ughhhhhhhhhhhhh. As I type, I am grimacing at the thought. Whenever I get a romance plot and I don’t like any of the potential outcomes I just start thinking of more unlikely outcomes. Anyway, Paige/Jodie when? When Jodie also figures out that Teddy is probably best left single right now, she and Paige can commiserate together and then get together. It wouldn't make sense but has any of this made sense?

Otherwise, it was a heavy one. Are they just making the most of always being on after the watershed or something?

My incredibly unpopular (at least, unpopular in other areas of the CAS fandom) opinion is that Iain is my least favourite paramedic. Don't dislike him at all, I like him but I just don't understand why the show chooses to only remember plot that has happened to him and often chooses to pretend things that happened to the other paramedics never happened. Maybe I associate him with Faith a bit right now, too.

The music sequence or whatever was so out of nowhere that it was more amusing than dramatic.

I’m glad Rash and Rida have worked it out for now.

The way Casualty has been dealing with disabilities lately has been uncharacteristically uncomfortable. I don’t really have the brain space to expand on that right now but certain choices sure have been made.

Nothing in next week’s spoilers that I feel like I need to comment on, except for Max finally agreeing to take Jodie’s kidney. I would really, really hope it’s mainly an episode of Jodie and Max stuff.

[chaoxfix]

i don't remember enough about cars to ask a specific question sorry but im dying to know your takes/questions on the cars lore

okay so i actually do have a weird amount of questions and theories about cars lore

was there an apocalypse that transferred human sentience into the cars they were driving somehow

why do they have door handles if sentient beings DIDNT used to live in this world

cars seem to have organs. why. how. where are they. is this picture canon. should it be?

why does lightning mcqueen have a tongue if the cars DONT have organs

the cars movies explore resource scarcity and career pathways that imply it's a larger capitalistic society. what does capitalism mean when individuals are technically commodities themselves, with supposedly organic parts and features that can be modified and replaced? how would they seize the means of production when fundamental parts of their bodies (tires, parts for tune-ups, equivalent to limbs and essential organs) are part of the production? if they were humans, this would be a cyberpunk disability capitalist hellscape. why is the worldbuilding the way that it is.

their minds seem to be largely human -- not just sentient, human. human references, human phrases, human range of emotions.

but despite the above point, their lives have such limited ranges of motion and freedom of movement beyond just - driving. psychologically, what would that do to otherwise largely human minds? imprisoned in car bodies -- the entire world would be locked into metal boxes that can only move forward, backwards, and make a few expressions with their faces. i am left remembering black mirror episodes with similar premises.

on the other hand, the entire world has to be automated, voice-activated, or based on scrolling selections in what must be infuriatingly precise tire-movements. because they simply do not possess the fine motor control of hands, or indeed limbs, to gesture, create, or carry out tasks. the worldbuilding shows that they've at least adapted to make the world functional, so. accommodation win?

what does it mean for earth's dominant species to be made solely of technology? do they care about earth's natural resources? if they aren't organic at all, do they have any love for organic creatures -- and if not, is that the reason there aren't even insects in this world? how do plants grow without pollenators like bugs and birds which possess important and irreplaceable fine motor control and skill sets to carry pollen from one plant species to another?

are there any environmentalist movements in the cars universe when they have no organic tie to the world around them?

anyways.

pixar didn't have to make them cars btw. the plot would've worked fine with literally anything. could've just been humans driving cars. i dont know why they decided to make them sentient cars. too many questions.

[lobautumny]

Reviving this intermittently-active blog yet again to make another post chronicling this toy's thoughts on Hot, Relevant Discourse:tm:, this time about Rivals 2.

For those not in the loop, we'll start with background info. Rivals of Aether is an indie platform fighter with very unique recovery mechanics, no shield or grab (instead having a parry mechanic), and a generally very fast pace. However, interestingly, they made the decision to give nearly every character some kind of persistent area control gimmick that's central to their gameplay. While this toy never really clicked too hard with Rivals, it appreciates how unique the game is.

A few years back, the dev team for the game stopped adding new content and announced a sequel, Rivals 2. Eventually, a Kickstarter was made to fund this sequel, and 16,408 backers would raise $1,076,198.

So why is everyone angry and yelling at each other? Well, basically, Rivals 2 is not going to be remotely similar to Rivals 1, outside of the general concept of being a platform fighter and having similar movesets. The entire mechanical landscape of the game is different. There's ledge grabs, there's shielding and grabs and no parry, there's a getup state... Even the DI works completely differently for seemingly-arbitrary reasons.

Now, this wouldn't necessarily be a problem, but it's left a very bad taste in a lot of people's mouths in the community because for many, many people, the game simply is not what they thought they were putting money into. And it's not like it was a matter of people just putting in money without reading anything. There simply wasn't that much information about just how different the game was going to be on a fundamental level at that point. Keep in mind, through all this, that the average backer spent ~$65.60 on the Kickstarter campaign.

In addition to feeling like they spent substantial amounts of money under false (or unclear) pretenses, many people in the community also feel burned by the fact that this game appears to be aiming to completely replace Rivals 1 while not being remotely similar to Rivals 1, meaning that if any given member of the Rivals community doesn't like the sequel (which many of them won't), then they simply won't have a game to play at all anymore unless they keep hosting official Rivals 1 tournaments, which seems very unlikely.

So, a lot of the core community for Rivals of Aether feels burned and lied to and disrespected, and this toy feels like most of this discourse could've been avoided if Aether Studios had simply been more up-front from the beginning that they had no intention of making a game remotely similar to Rivals 1, and that Rivals 2 is meant to be its own thing and not an outright replacement for its predecessor.

It's also not helping anything that Dan Fornace (the games' lead developer) has been spending a lot of time getting into Twitter arguments about the game and showing that he either genuinely has no clue why people are upset or understands and simply thinks that their reasons for being upset are stupid.

It's a really dumb, shitty situation and Dan's been handling it with all the grace of a crane fly that got stuck in someone's living room. And like, it sucks, because Rivals 2 looks like a perfectly fine game, and there's no reason they couldn't have just brought a team on to keep content updates and tournaments going for Rivals 1 indefinitely to keep the game alive so that both it and its sequel could co-exist. And if they did that alongside being more up-front about how different the sequel was going to be, this toy thinks nearly everyone would've been happy in the end.

[numericalbridge]

"#(most likely imo him stopping being friends with odalia over whatever happened during the rats play)"

I'm sorry this may come out of nowhere but I just can't get over this tag because it makes it sound like the Darius & Alador/Odalia rift was over Raine of all people and is just sounds so fucking funny to me like holy shit.

Raine: I just ended a 5 year relationship.

Lilith: OMT are you ok?

Raine: I'm fine, it wasn't my relationship.

Absolutely not canon but funny as hell that image may forever live on my head now, you placed a curse upon me and I wanted you to know.

Haha, 😆

To be fair - since this is my theory only for the case where the old hexsquad was not one single friend group and instead people Eda had particular memories about - it would be not because of Raine specifically, but more like Darius standing up for what is right/realizing Odalia had crossed the line.

Longer explanation if you are curious:

Obviously this is based mostly on the vibes and there are way too many variables and i feel like even things that were initially planned since s1 can be changed/retconned, so, as i've said, i find it hard to speculate, but when i tried picturing what a raeda-focused old hexside spin off would've looked like as a mini-series or comic - and i don't think it would work as anything longer - it seemed like the Rats play was meant to be an important event, and, lets be honest, i don't think it would be very likely for Darius to get a lot of screentime judging by the way the main show handles its characters, so tying up development of several supporting characters to the Rats play could be a possibility, even if that wasn't the initial pre-shortening plan for the Darius, Odalia and Alador friendship break up. And in Eda's memory in Kings Tide: compared to Odalia, Darius seemed to be placed closer to Raine and Lilith and his expression seemed more open to me (although everyone was off-model in that image, lol), so i assume Eda had some positive memories of him.

So my speculation is that Odalia could've done something that crossed the line, Darius, who previously might have been somewhat 'antagonistic' towards Raine (like pestering them about their acting abilities etc), wouldn't support it and eventually stoped being friends with Odalia, while Alador for one reason or another wouldn't and that caused the rift that just continued to grow. Darius standing up for what is right/for other kids would also tie with ASIAS.

But the thing is, i don't actually want this speculation to be true, lol, because i would much prefer 1. Darius and Raine being some kind of actual friends in school and then drifting apart, even if doesn't fit Eda's Requiem and 2. i love the headcanon that Darius used to be much more open in his school years and more like s2 Willow - though still petty and somewhat bitchy - and became more closed off and cold with years, and that's something that he has to work on, post-canon. And the above scenario might not fit with this headcanon.

And my personal favourite headcanon for Darius and Alador friendship break up is either disagreement over some fundamentals of abomination magic and/or just petty teenaged drama that spiralled out of control (though i dread to imagine what fandom's reaction would've been).

[bellshazes]

do it again directors commentary part 2

He and Etho had shown up at her favorite diner for takeout midnight breakfast while she had been hanging out at the bar, chatting with Scott, and without even thinking about it she’d joined their argument, switching sides periodically to keep it going. Years enough have passed that she can’t remember now what it had even been about, but she remembers Bdubs’ instant adoption of her as an ally and the wounded look he gave her when she conceded Etho had some good points, too. Etho had smiled brightly with his eyes and given her the faintest nod of approval, opening up the takeout boxes and settling down on the seat next to her.

this is very explicitly inspired by all the times i've gone to waffle house and the encounters i've had meeting old friends there who i never expected to see again. it's about the familiarity but also the capacity to shift and surprise and change the dynamic if it's funny. so it goes

Bdubs smiles knowingly at her. He heard all the goings-on of her tabletop campaigns and knows exactly what happened to her old D&D group. He’d been an exceptionally good sport about it, showing up for many late-night dinners to let her vent, as if it were a recap of his favorite TV show.

this and other things allude to the cleo-big b breakup that i never found a good place to make more explicit. i like the idea of it being some nebulous D&D situation partially because i despise D&D and because i think it's fun that since cleo continues to care that big b betrayed them, it should show up in silly ways, because it's fundamentally a betrayal in the specific context of a game. but it matters, what we did or didn't do, etc.

Cleo pauses and holds eye contact. For half a second she imagines a red bandana around Bdubs’ head, but it’s only the force of Bdubs’ belief that snares her.

another thing i never quite made explicit but is true: cleo received an unusually high number of lives, as did bdubs, and it's that fact that makes her more susceptible to remembering. if i had got to make it more explicit, i could've got into the exchange of lives as memory and as permanency, as debts and owing and relationships built across lifetimes... but I didn't. so this is what you get.

“That is a lot to ask of a guy, Cleo,” he says, but he stands up when she does. “If I for some reason am prevented from talking to Etho by such things as him being asleep all day, or un-overcomeable anxiety -”

i hate this line? i think i nailed bdubs' voice in the first half but i've spent so long trying to come up with something better than "un-overcomeable anxiety" and never did. i think he says things in super fucking weird ways but that's not right. it was worth leaving because i do believe in the dynamic of cleo playing mediator insofar as it's funny to them, and in cleo chastising bdubs, and their back and forth.

“Bdubs,” he says. “Hey, Bdubs.” He squeezes his hand again. “I wanted you to know. I’m so glad you were my partner.”

this whole Death Coffee Incident is borrowed wholesale from opera25's mll au, but it was fun making something kind of fantastical work. etho never was given any lives, and only gave one up to tango for the you bet your life game; he remembers here solely due to the life-threatening duress of consuming wayyyyyy too much caffeine. it was fun to write but also the pivotal moment in bdubs becoming convinced etho always had remembered and thinking then that the only reason he'd behave the way he did if he remembered was out of bloodlust... not that bdubs had yet unlocked memories of enjoying that murderousness and play back and forth.

there's a level to which this misunderstanding is a satirization/playing with fandom conceptions of if you view LL in a vacuum you get some crazy interpretations. but as they both learn, the threats were fun BECAUSE they had history and both enjoyed it. four more chapters for that to sink in though.

The process of checking into the ER is as onerous as he expected – trying to fill out the paperwork for Etho, who is still more out of it than Bdubs was when he had a head injury, having to put his foot down that he’d like to stay with his partner as much as possible and yes he had the paperwork to back him up, because Etho had made him keep a copy of important things in his wallet after he fell of the roof in case of something like this.

this part is in spite of my severe medical phobia, but also because of me working in insurance-related fields for the last 4 years. this document is called an advance directive or living will and if you live in the USA you should complete one by searching "advance directive [your state]" and filling it out and filing it according to the directions on your attorney general's website or whatever. it's genuinely imporant esp if you're not married and queer in any way. this is my one genuine PSA of the fic. but also they would. etho requesting to dot Is and cross Ts bc he thinks bdubs will be the one who needs and and then needing it himself... well. anyway.

He remembers fragments from his last death: that he had made some promise that didn’t save him, that cost him his last life. That he died calling Etho’s name, calling out to an Etho who took great joy in menacing him and making him paranoid, who had attacked him in that long dark stairway. It does not comfort him to know Etho thinks he’s responsible for whatever happened.

this chapter ends with bdubs trying and sort of succeeeding in believing in etho, but that last sentence is the lynchpin of what comes after: etho feeling even a little responsible for bdubs permadying - esp when bdubs remembers being a ghost for session 7 but was not present for etho's permadeath in session 8 - makes him think etho knows more than he does, and holds him accordingly responsible. the metacommentary is there but it wasn't the point; it's true, but incidental. the reveal eventually is that the trust was there, and that bdubs' permadeath was stupid and willing because it's about the novelty and the endless beginnings. spoilers but whatever if you're reading this you must not care by now.

chapter 4

He can feel his heart beating in his chest, and he has a sense-memory of falling down with all the vivid, terrifying sensation of jumping from the height of a swing in the park as a child, down to the faint awareness that the intervening years meant it was no longer quite the same body, that something had been knocked out of alignment by time.

it's a little tonally dissonant, but i'm still proud of this. you can tell later on i floundered for plot in this chapter, but the image of being both in the past and in the present and the overlay is important to me. it's very poetic.

Etho snagged a nametag off the apron that had been draped over the drinks counter, presumably in a now-ruined hope of ending the shift quickly, and slipped it into his pocket before turning back to smile placidly over Bdubs’ shoulder.

etho stealing the nametags is another MLL AU concept i stole and can't take credit for, but again trying to find a plausible concrete explanation for it was really fun and was the impetus for this whole chapter. grateful for it, and he's an ass and also nosy like that. he would.

Etho punched the crosswalk button and tried to remember that conversation but couldn’t. He remembered getting coffee, and that he’d almost finished it off by the time he’d gotten home. [...] “No,” he said, sounding strangled. “That hadn’t come up, actually.”

the limited alternating third person POV is restricting at times, but i really enjoy the contrast between what we already know of bdubs' perception of the Death Coffee Incident re: etho's knowledge and etho's POV making clear he doesn't know jack shit, but he cares. bdubs is reacting this way because etho saying he took the crazy coffee to stay up to see bdubs sounds like a threat, but it's also an expression of caring and not knowing how to bridge a distance.

if theres anything i believe it's that these two motherfuckers don't capital-T talk. they exclusively communicate through threats and shenanigans and team-ups and every time they mention talking outside of Events it shocks me. and yet their friendship persists over more than a decade! what miracles.

“You can’t take dreams too seriously,” Etho said, cat purring loudly under his hands, a soothing anchor. “It’s just your brain picking up on whatever’s going in your life and making up stories about it. No good worrying too much about them.”

this is mine own opinion on dreams, despite my sincere involuntary belief in signs and omens, but more importantly it is another point at which bdubs is implicitly in his own POV goign oh my god this son of a bitch is manipulating me. miscommunication for ages.

 He spends a few nights on the couch, methodically trying to rule the variables out: the quality of moonlight through his bedroom window, some oppressive sense of confinement, embracing the possibility his roommate is testing him and trying to prove to his subconscious that fishing rods are nothing to be worried about.

etho being experimental and scientific about this all is important to me. almost as much as half-remembering bdubs misinterprets this exacting need to know as being meaningful and knowing when it's not, especially when he was trying to elicit some response. guy gets a response and thinks the worst even though he's causing his own problems? there's a thesis in that

Etho bites back a comment about Bdubs’ dedication to sleep schedules and waves the criticism off instead. “I’m trying to sleep right now,” he lies. “Not my problem if you want to haunt me.”

if i ever let myself revise this chapter (and this chapter is the one i want to revise most) i want to include the detail from beau's comic of this passage of etho having his glasses on when he says this. my dude was definitely not tryign to sleep AT ALL and i forever wish i'd thought of that indicator myself.

When he sits down to start his own work for the day, he thinks about the drawing and decides then and there what his plan is to fix all this.

i wrote this line bc i have such a sense that chapter endings, like the endings of short stories, should have a paritcular cadence and effect - but neither etho nor i knew how "to fix all this" and in fact the subsequent chapters indicate he definitely was not laying his final plans yet. i've let it stay because putting this line in let me move on to write the rest of the fic... but it's untrue and a red herring and i hate it. i will fix you eventually. but not yet because i still dont' know how to satisfyingly transition.

etho doesn't get his next POV chapter until the second half of chapter 6 at the diner with cleo, where he finally confronts that his dreams might be real enough to have to deal with, and even then he goes through great lengths to validate cleo's theories by messing with tango... so who knows. but it's fine. it's fine. i hate it. it's fine

[azeriairis]

I'm going to rant a bit about Trinity

Okay so Trinity is one of my favorite Stargate Atlantis Episodes, but I dislike the ending, specifically the apology McKay gives to Sheppard. Sheppard's reaction is fine, though I'm a little annoyed that it didn't carry on to later episodes, so it rings a little hollow. McKay's apology itself is more annoying because it fundamentally feels like he learned the wrong lesson for the mess.

There's a lot below the cut because I essentially just wrote a miniessay on the potential Trinity had for developing Rodney McKay's character that was completely wasted.

"I'm sorry for messing up and I promise to go back to getting everything right again" is a bad apology because him making a mistake was not the problem. The problem demonstrated in Trinity is that McKay, by refusing to consider the concerns of other Scientists and the possibility that he may be wrong effectively opted out of any system that may have prevented his mistakes from spiraling out of control, and this is not a problem McKay is ever shown to acknowledge nor solve. Mistakes aren't really a problem, so long as you learn from them, allowing your ego to get out of hand to the point where you neuter any system that could've helped prevent your mistakes from causing harm because you think that you are so much smarter than everyone else is one.

Doranda was the perfect example of what the consequences of McKay's opting out can be, McKay fucked up, yes, but his mistake would've been caught and prevented beforehand if he was literally anyone else, but because of his position as Head of the Science Department nobody can force him to actually consider the objections and concerns of other scientists*, so even though it was caught by Zelenka, McKay had free reign to completely ignore his advice, resulting in disaster.

Honestly a reasonable consequence to his actions would be McKay getting completely removed from his position. In Trinity he showed that he was completely willing to abuse his position as head of the science department to get out of what is essentially the peer review process by refusing to consider any objections others may have. And someone who will do that, isn't someone who you want in that position. Instead McKay essentially just got a stern talking to, and by the next episode pretty much everything is resolved and back to normal. He never really learned nor grew from this incident, and it didn't really impact his relationships with other characters.

It just feels like such a waste, this could've been used to develop Rodney's character in so many ways, but it just wasn't. He continues to shame and ridicule others for making mistakes, when this could've been used to get him to realize that everyone makes mistakes at some point, so it's more important to have systems in place to mitigate the harm of mistakes when they inevitably do show up. And He continues to discount and ignore other people's concerns even though taking the time to do so would've prevented the Doranda incident from happening altogether.

And even if he doesn't learn anything from this incident it still should've impacted his relationship with others. I mean for one there's Radek who he disrespected pretty openly while he was present, but he's not the only one. John nearly died because Rodney decided to be reckless and ignore the advice of someone he apparently trusts. Or what about the entire rest of the science department? Their boss essentially just made it known that he doesn't give a crap about their opinions when deciding which route to go down, once he's made a decision he's going to do it even if you confront him directly about the potential dangers he'll just lambast you, ignore your input and keep going anyways. That will most definitely impact how someone approaches their work and their interactions with said boss. Elizabeth just saw her Head Scientist completely opt-out of any critique of his idea, something he could only get away with because of his position, that should have an impact. But does any of these relationships change at all? No.

I could go on but I'll just stop here. Maybe I'll do a rewrite at some point, but not right now.

*technically John and Elizabeth could but as neither of them are scientists they lack the scientific knowledge to evaluate this stuff and make an educated decision, leading them to generally just trust Rodney implicitly, which isn't a very solid check.

[onewomancitadel]

Why is Jaune older now: a case for Jaune/Cinder

Anyway okay back to Knightfall, I just want to say that if I were writing Jaune/Weiss, I would've expected equal development between that ship, Ruby/Oscar (similarly and potentially a slow-burn), Ren/Nora and Blake/Yang. I mean anything from interrelated and mirrored ideological conflicts (I don't want to go into this too much, but again: BB: Adam; RN: backstories and Atlas/Mantle; RG: Ozma curse/Ironwood) to basic focus on couple reunions (you can see this in V5 and V8 in particular) to like literally anything else sorry.

Of course you might say that an about-turn can always be expected, but I want to qualify that you only can reason an about-turn based on what I'm once again laying out here. So I think it's worth thinking about anyway; it's not purposeless.

So then the question is that if the scene with Jaune's Semblance in V5 is sufficient enough reason for the ship, why no development until only now? More importantly, what I want to know is why they had to age Jaune up to make the Jaune/Weiss ship possible. It doesn't make sense. The character development from the Fall of Beacon put him into a reasonable enough position where their characters could've worked, even if you only wanted to start slowly stoking it in the background much alike to Ruby/Oscar. Then further to that, why is Penny not an actual stickling point for the pairing? It obviously is for him with Ruby, and it's something that will (and has) put some tension into the Ruby-Weiss relationship, but it absolutely should have given some ideological tension and weight to the Jaune/Weiss relationship like every other likely canon endgame romance. So then on this point, as Tower Anon pointed out, it's strangely mirroring Blake/Sun.

I'm not finished. Why would you need to age up Jaune to make the Weiss pairing work? Whether that eventuates as him actually staying this physically old or being transformed, it doesn't matter; he is fundamentally changed. There's no going back. But it's not something on paper that doesn't square out to me because realistically Jaune becoming hot and confident (in Weiss' eyes) and competent is not something which actually addresses the wound of his character; it's not actually a positive set-up for a romance (that isn't to say they're not dumb. I just don't think this tracks). The much more interesting point to develop the relationship from would have been the unconditional compassion and regard which Jaune showed with his Semblance which was not contingent upon his personal feelings for her, but his actual desire to save as many people as possible, which would then open up the door to her noticing him as being selfless, not selfish for the way he projected his own idea of her, onto her, tied up in who he thought he should've been.

So then what gives? Is it lazy storytelling? I don't know, it could be. Is it mirroring Blake/Sun?

I want to know why Jaune's been put in this position. Sure, fissure in his identity. Sure, mirroring Ozma in the Four Maidens fairytale. Sure, literal actual fairytale hero who is imperfect (rusted) but has the potential to be redemptive. Yes. That's all great. I don't know how that links to Weiss in any way (other than her being the Winter Maiden in this scenario. Otherwise I can kind of reason Weiss' role in the story right now in respect to Ruby based on Qrow's relationship to Summer). I don't know why you'd need to age him in order to make the romance work, when it conceivably should have been developed alongside the others for four volumes, even with some of the barest foreshadowing (I'm talking even like, scene transitions - which Blake/Yang does use).

I'm not trying to cope because it's obvious I'm a Jaune/Cinder shipper, but I can only make the case for Jaune/Cinder on the basis of the other canon romances. If I'm searching for Jaune/Weiss parallels to the other canon romances, I want to know why it is or isn't developing differently, and more importantly I want to specifically know why because yes, Jaune's my favourite and I'm invested in his character development, and what I want to know is if this development this volume is literally just accessory to make Weiss notice him being hot (which is superficial and gross, to me) or if it does actually have greater narrative consequences - which to me, from an economic perspective, I'd like it to, and because it's actually potentially interesting development. I know that Jaune is set-up right now to go save Ruby, and their character struggles/leadership struggles are being mirrored, so there is that at least.

The point I'm working toward is that I don't think that this ageing was necessary for the Jaune/Weiss romance and that the development crossvolumes has been insufficient.

I can't help but wonder that the experience of V9 for Jaune's character actually puts him in a much better position for a romance with Cinder. Sorry. It does. Being more psychologically mature and slightly divorced from his peers does alienate him and make him potentially relate more to Cinder, who other than her subordinates (whom she's also cut off from in some way, who are also evil!Renora) herself otherwise is and was psychologically divorced from her peers (who were all older men, other than her master). Like, she's young enough to enter Beacon and pose as a student, and she's definitely a character who tries to act older than she is (like Salem and Madame) and she's disguising who she really is. I do think there's a relationship here between Ruby, Oscar, Jaune, and Cinder and experience/age.

Even further to that is that putting him in a deeper position with Ozma in the exact way Cinder is with Salem just intensifies the reverse Ozlem element of the relationship (which is alike to all the other canon romances, but she has the actual Grimm curse, now he's actually lived the fairytale) and then you've got the element where redeeming Cinder's wounded idealism could perfectly involve what is effectively a rusted (imperfect) knight, and then you've got the fact she's responsible for the situation with Penny in the first place, and that's their shared wound.

But the point I'd been wondering is how you get (what is to my eyes) the only character who can function as the chainlink between Ruby (silver eyes, scary but necessary) and Cinder to actually notice Cinder in a deeper way, beyond the way he challenged her at Haven, and I feel like an option I had never considered has been put in front of me and I can't help but notice it. If you're going to write Jaune/Cinder, doing this to Jaune's character is actually kind of clever and it does signal that you're willing to push Jaune's character in particular in a direction that people aren't necessarily expecting (especially when it refutes a lot of the fandom's fantasies about him). If you want to make Cinder's redemption arc special (because it is), making the person involved in it go through special development makes sense.

It does feel like purposeful development then. It does feel like you'd push him in a particular way for this very reason. It does feel like something that has consequences beyond this volume, and it does explain why Jaune/Weiss feels like Blake/Sun, because Jaune/Cinder is like Blake/Yang in this set-up, and you know how Blake/Yang has gone.

So it's that or it's meaningless. But the question is why you'd bother, with what space you're given in respect to his character.

[azeriairis]

This is one of the reasons I think they should've continued Atlantis and premiered the first seasons of Universe alongside more Atlantis. Universe was an experimental work, it tried to take the franchise in places it hadn't gone before, which is a good thing, stagnation can also be a franchise killer, but because Universe premiered alone the entire Stargate brand was resting on the performance of an experimental show that hadn't had time to figure itself out yet and that the existing stargate fanbase wasn't prepared for. (more below the cut including personal opinions on how to fix the transition between SGA & SGU)

In order to sell someone on a TV Show you need to sell them on both the premise and the characters. As it is, the premise felt like it came out of left field and was just something the producers pulled out of their ass, and nobody knew who any of the characters were, so the selling on both fronts was rather bad. And even if they decided to watch anyways it was so different from SGA and SG-1 and didn't even seem to know what it was going for, so many who tried it out ended up dropping it. Add to that the unsatisfying end of SGA, and the fact that SGU came out shortly after (therefore giving the impression that SGU was meant to replace SGA); and there wasn't much goodwill for SGU in the fanbase remaining; so only a small amount of people were willing to stick around. The amount of viewers dropped, as did the profits, so MGM wrote it off as a loss and cancelled SGU before it was able to come into it's own, and because SGU was at this point the sole thing holding up the franchise, Stargate (as a Franchise) mostly died with it.

Here's a list of tweaks I would make to SGU and SGA to ease the transition between the two:

Discuss the 9th chevron in Season 5 of SGA more. The one scene that brought it up was deleted, however it should've been kept and additional scenes mentioning the possibility should've also been added. This would familiarize the existing fanbase to the concept, and when SGU comes along and succeeds at dialing the 9th chevron it would be a lot easier of a sell, as the possibility of that working would already be established.

Introduce characters from SGU in S5 of Atlantis, and/or take an existing SGA/SG-1 character and place them in a major role of SGU. This is for a similar reason as the above, it would mean that the existing fanbase would already know and somewhat care about at least some of SGU's main cast before watching, making it easier to convince fans to stick around to find out what happens to the character(s) they already know (and in the process hopefully convince them to care about the other major characters).

Add additional seasons to Atlantis and premier them alongside the early seasons of SGU. This gives SGU time to breathe and familiarize itself with the fanbase as it's figuring out it's format, then when it's grounded itself and has a stable following SGA can come to a proper end. And if SGU flops, SGA is still around to carry on the franchise until a new show concept is able to catch on.

SGU could've also been a little less experimental in some regards. The idea of a Stargate Show that focuses more on interpersonal conflict and runs up against some more mature themes is fundamentally a good one. But some parts of it could probably have lightened up (such as the sex/nudity) at least in the early stages.

I recently realized that Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis had very little nudity - mostly just occasional episodes like with Hathor or some shirtlessness in the infirmary. And Universe practically opens with a sex scene and then continues to give us sex and nudity from there.

[bellamyblake]

I love your blog title, it's what bellamy wanted to negotiate from Octavia in s5 right? The 80 acres?

that's it, yes! i love it because i think it also tells a lot about what bellamy really wanted, which was that he like the rest of the 100, even though he wasn't sent down there on pupose, only wanted the same thing they did-to have a home.

thinking about it, he never had one, not since O was born, things started taking a turn for the worse and his and his mom's once peaceful existance, turned their little place into hell instead of an actual place to live. they filled it with fear, he was bound by fear from the moment Aurora placed that little baby in his arms, so all the negative emotions were connected to this one place of sadness and the fear of being discovered.

their home wasn't really one, it was a hiding hole with a glimpse of hope that they wouldn't get caught and with a literal hole in the ground, something fundamental for every home if you think about it, the grounds of it, they were shaken and fileld with a hole where a kid hid hoping to get out and not be found out, so their foundations, of their family, their home were based on fear.

they lived above hell and in this hell they had a little girl, hiding away from the world, never truly living it. and he was the protector of that little girl and her small hole of hell.

and he failed.

so of course he always looked for a home and i believe that is one of the reasons why he gave his big motivational speech in season 1 episode 13 when he tried to convince the 100 not to leave camp. they had built it with their bare hands, they protected it, it was and had turned into their home.

he just didn't want to abandon it again.

but he lost that home again-i think arkadia never really was that, it reminded him of the ark and everything wrong with it and overtime his home became a person in the face of clarke, rather than a place.

then he lost it again with mount weather and he lost himself with failing gina who was the same glimpse of hope in the hell that was Arkadia after the mountain and after everything that happened with pike, i am not sure he was even looking for a place to call "home" anymore.

after leaving clarke behind and coming back on the ring well...i dont think that he considered the space station a real home. i think he always liked it better on the ground despite everything. he just had too many bad memories up there and never a happy existance, unlike monty or harper or even clarke for that matter who had whole lives up there and they were relatively happy ones. bellamy's also not one to be contained in one place for too long, i think that's partly his anxiety from the life he had as a child and on the other that he likes action and building and working with his hands more than living in a tin can and doing nothing.

that is why i think he was so eager to have those 80 acres and why he wanted to negotiate them from octavia. he could see them finally building that place, a small camp, a settlement just for him and his friends and actually living good lives there.

i think he could see himself building cabins step by step for them all, a wall to surround it, help monty with the crops, be close to the river so he could go fishing, have clarke and madi show him this new world and then inviting him into those 80 acres which he'd fill with live and love and hope.

i think that's what bellamy always wanted. i think that's what he was looking for at by the end too, despite the bad storyline. a home. with peace. nothing else. while others strived for power or wanted to fit in or were desperate to prove themselves, he just wanted a home. yes, he was a great soldier, he was also a good leader and he cared deeply but i think he could've let those things aside, like he did on the ring, and live a good and happy life like he should have.

and hopefully he'd have also been able to forgive himself for everything and turn on a new leaf. this doesn't necesarrily mean being with clarke which yes i would've love to, but it means just to live good and quiet life. in fact i think that it'd have taken him years to actually get together with clarke and once they did it'd have been fine because they'd both be where they needed to be and where they weren't at in those other points.

[number5theboy]

Please elaborate on how Five could've turned into the most insufferable character to watch

Thanks for asking me to elaborate on this text post:

@tessapercygranger​, @waywardd1​ and @margarita-umbrella​ also wanted to see a more detailed version of it, and I ended up writing an essay that’s longer than some of my actual academic essays. So buckle up.

WHY NUMBER FIVE SHOULD BE THE MOST OBNOXIOUS CHARACTER IN TV HISTORY, AND HOW HE MANAGES NOT TO BE

Number Five: The Concept That Could Go Horribly Wrong

Alright, let’s first look at Five in theory in an overarching way, without taking into account the execution of the show. The basic set-up of the character, of course, is being a 58-year-old consciousness in a teenager’s body, due to a miscalculation in time travel. Right off the bat, Five is bar none the most overpowered of the siblings; by the end of Season 2, no one has yet been able to defeat him in a fight. He is a master assassin – and not just any master assassin, but the best one there is – and a survival expert, able to do complex maths and physics without the aid of a calculator, shown to have knowledge of half a dozen languages, has very developed observational skills and, to top that all off, he can manipulate time and space to the point where he can literally erase events that happened and change the course of history. And Five knows how skilled he is; he is arrogant, self-assured and sarcastic, and his streak of goodness is buried deep inside. David Castañeda once described Five in an interview as 90% chocolate with a cherry in the middle, meaning that you have to get through a lot of darkness and bitterness before knowing there is a good core, and I think it’s an excellent metaphor. However, Five is also incredibly, fundamentally terrible at communicating with anyone, and, because he is the only one with time travel abilities, the character a lot of the actual plot - and the moving forward of it - centres around. Also he’s earnestly in love with a mannequin, who is pretty much a projection of his own consciousness that functions as a coping mechanism for all the trauma he has endured. All in all, this gives you a character who looks like a teenager, but with the smug superiority of a fifty-something, who a) is extremely skilled in many different things, b) has a superiority complex, is arrogant and vocal about it, and most of the superiority is expressed through cutting sarcasm, c) has one very hidden ounce of goodness that he is literally the worst at communicating to other human beings, d) is what moves the plot along but is also bad at talking to anyone else, meaning that the plot largely remains with him, and e) his love interest is essentially a projection of himself. Tell me that’s not a character who is destined to be just…obnoxious, annoying, egocentric, a necessary evil that one has to put up with to get through this show. There are so many elements of this characterisation that can and should easily make Five beyond insufferable, but the show manages to avoid it, and I’m putting this down to three aspects.

That Trick of Age and Appearance

Bluntly put, Five as a character would not work if he was anything else than an old man in a 13-year-old body. Imagine this character and all his skills and knowledge, but actually just…a teenager. Immediately insufferable. Same goes for him being around 30, like his siblings, all of which are stunted and traumatised by their father’s abuse. If Five, being comparatively unscathed by Reginald to the point where he explicitly does not want to be defined by his association with his father, were 30 like his siblings, it would just take the bite out of that plot point and also give him a lot less time in the apocalypse, reducing the impact it had on him as a person. And making Five his actual 58-year-old self would make him very similar to Reginald, at least on surface level, with the appearance and attitude. Five and Reginald are two fundamentally different people, but having one of the siblings being a senior citizen that’s dressed to the nines and bosses his siblings around in a relatively self-centred way does open up that parallel, and would take away from Five’s charm as a character. Because pairing the life experience of a 58-year-old with the appearance of a teenager gives you the best of both worlds. You get the other siblings (and a lot of the audience, from a glance in the tags of my gifsets) feeling protective and paternal about Five, but his age and experience also give the justifications for his many skills, his arrogance, in a way, and his ability to decimate a room full of people. It’s the very interesting and not new concept of someone dangerous with the appearance of something harmless, a child. This is also where Five’s singular outfit comes in. I know we like to clown on Five to get a new outfit, but I think what gets forgotten often is how effective this outfit is at making the viewer take him seriously. The preppy school uniform is the perfect encapsulation of the tension between old man in spirit and young teenager in appearance. The blazer, vest and especially the shirt and tie are quite formal, relatively grown up. They’re not something we, the audience, usually associate with a teenage boy wearing; it makes Five just a little bit more grown up. But there is also a reason characters in this show keep bringing up Five’s shorts and his socks, because those are not things that we associate with grown men wearing; they’re the unmistakably childish part of his school uniform. Take a moment and imagine Five wearing a hoodie or a t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers; would that outfit work for him as well as the uniform does? Would he be able to command the same kind of respect or seriousness as a character? I don’t think so; the outfit is a lot more pivotal in making Five believable than a lot of people give it credit for.

Writing Nuance

The other big building block in not making Five incredibly insufferable is the writing. Objectively speaking, I think Five is the most well-written, and, more importantly, most coherently written character on the show (which does have to do with the fact that the show’s events are all sequential for him), and his arc and personality remain relatively intact over the course of the two seasons. More to the point, a giant part of what makes Five bearable as a character is that he is allowed to fail. He is written to have high highs and low lows, big victories through his skills and his intelligence, but also catastrophic failures and the freedom to be wrong. His superior intellect and skillset are not the be-all end-all of the plot or his character, just something that influences both. His inability for communication has not (yet) been used to fabricate a contrived misunderstanding that derails the plot and left all of us seething; instead, it’s a characteristic that makes him fail to reconnect with the people he loves. This is a bit simplified, as he does find common ground with Luther, for example, but in general, a lot of the rift between Five and his siblings is that they can’t relate to his traumas and he does not understand the depth of Reginald’s abuse, which is an interesting conflict worth exploring. Another thing that really works in Five’s favour is that he is definitely written to be mean and sarcastic, but it is never driven to the point of complete unlikability, and a lot of the time, the context makes it understandable why he reacts the way he does. Most of the sarcastic lines he gets are actually funny, that certainly helps, but in general, Five is a good example of a bearable character whose default personality is sharp and relatively cold, because it is balanced out with many moments of vulnerability. Delores is incredibly important for this in the first season, she is the main focus of Five’s humanising moments, and well-written as she totes the line between clearly being a coping mechanism for an extremely traumatised man and still coming across to the viewer as the human contact Five needs her to be. In the second season, the vulnerability is about his guilt for his siblings, it’s about Five connecting a little bit better to them. There’s also his relationship with the Commission and the Handler specifically – which honestly could be an essay on its own – that deserves a mention, because the Handler is why Five became the man he is, and this dynamic between creator and creation is explored in a very interesting way – their scenes are some of the most well-written in the entire show. And TUA never falls into the trap of making Five a hero, he is always morally ambiguous at best, and it just makes for an interesting, multi-faceted character, well-written character, and none of the characteristics that should make him unlikeable are allowed to take centre-stage for long enough to be defining on their own. I know a lot of people especially champion the scenes where Five goes apeshit, but without his more nuanced characterisation, if he was like that all the time, those scenes would not hit as hard.

Aidan Gallagher’s Performance is Underrated

But honestly, none of the above would matter that much if the Umbrella Academy didn’t luck out hard with the casting of Aidan Gallagher. I think what he achieves as an actor in this show is genuinely underappreciated. Like, the first season set out to cast six adults having to deal with various ramifications of childhood trauma, and a literal child that had to be able to act smart and wise beyond his years, seamlessly integrate into a family of adults while seeming like an adult, traumatised by the literal end of the world, AND had to be able to create the romantic chemistry of a thirty-year-long marriage with a lifeless department store doll. The only role I could think of to compare is Kirsten Dunst in Interview with a Vampire, where she plays a vampire child who, because she is undead, doesn’t age physically, but does mentally, so she’s 400 in a child’s body. And Kirsten Dunst had to do that for a two-hour movie. Five is a main character in a show that spans 20 episodes now. That’s insane, and it’s a risk. Five is a character that can’t be allowed to go wrong; if you don’t buy Five as a character, the entire first season loses believability. And they found someone who could do that not only convincingly, but also likeably. As I said, he is incredibly helped by the costuming department and the script, but Aidan Gallager’s Five has so much personality, he’s threatening and funny and charming and arrogant and heartbreaking. He has the range to be convincing in the quiet moments where Five’s humanity comes to show and in the moments where Five goes completely off the rails. Most child actors act with other children, but he is the only child in the main cast, and holds his own in scenes with adults not as a child, but as an adult on equal footing with the other adult characters. That’s not something to be taken for granted. But even apart from the fact that it’s a child actor who carries a lot of the plot and the drama of a series for adults, Aidan Gallagher’s portrayal of Five is also just so much fun. The comedic timing is on point, he has the dramatic chops for the serious scenes, the mannerisms and visual ticks add to the character rather than distract from him, and his line deliveries, paired with his physical acting, make Five arrogant and smug but never outright malicious and unlikeable. It’s just some terrific acting that really does justice to the character as he is written, but the writing would not be as strong if it wasn’t delivered and acted out the way Aidan Gallagher does. He is an incredible asset for this show.

Alright, onto concluding this rambling. If you made it this far, I commend you, and thank you for it. The point of all of this is that Five, as a character, could have been an unmitigated disaster of a TV character. He is overpowered, arrogant, uncommunicative and could so easily have been either unconvincing or completely unlikeable, but he turned out to be neither. It’s a combination of choices in the costume department, decisions in the writing room, and Aidan Gallagher’s acting skills that make the things that should make him obnoxious and annoying incredibly entertaining, and I hope you liked my long-winded exploration of these. Some nuance was lost along the way, but if I had not stopped myself, this would’ve become a full-blown thesis.

[the-badger-mole]

It's kind of sad (and wholesome too) how Zutarians nowadays are like...- fine, Kataang. But let Katara be happy. Write their relationship decently. Make Aang support Katara, her family and her culture, make him respect her, make their feelings mutual. Make her not a damn prize and a constant caretaker. Show, not tell.

I think there isn't many Zutarians left who simply dislike Kataang because Aang is a bald young boy and hardly a shipping material. No, we just want a happy ending for Katara.

To see her truly happy and not worried where did her boyfriend run away to again. To see her laugh and smile and have her own interests. To see her gaining her own students or even a fan-club. To see her being attractive and young and maybe having boys (and girls) swooning over her while she already has a date with her SO and her SO totally doesn't just throw hissy fits at her but goes - "well, I'm not surprised you're poular because you're so amazing" and she just playfully kisses them.

That could've been Kataang, and I would've been okay with it. But it is totally not it and never will be.

The funny thing to me is that in order to make Kataang work, you'd have to fundamentally change who Aang is as a character. It could work if within the show, Aang had to actually face his problems and maybe even fail a few times to build some character; if he learned how to empathize with people and see from their perspective and appreciate opinions that differ from his own; if Aang had put in work to develop his understanding of his culture beyond what little he would have been taught or absorbed by the age of 12, I could maybe see that version of him ending up with Katara. I still wouldn't ship it, but it wouldn't fill me with visceral disdain. As it stands, I ship Zutara, but I'd rather see her end up with just about anyone else than with Aang.

Basically, the version of Aang that would work with Katara isn't a character that actually exists, so shipping Katara with that version of him may as well be a Katara/OC ship.

I don't care what people ship. As long as you're not a jerk about it, I hope you enjoy it in good health. But I hate Aang as a character for a lot of reasons, and a lot of it (but not all of it) does center on his treatment of Katara. I will never, ever, ever be positive about Kataang. If you see me post something supporting Kataang, call the cops because I'm being held hostage somewhere. The absolute best you will get out of me is support of shippers. I think everyone has the right to enjoy their ships, even the ones that piss me off to even think about.