#for the saltiness coming back

[sallysellsseashellssundays]

The post about GitF has briefly revived my Moffat saltiness lol

Every single contribution he made during RTD’s era (aside from Blink) involved introducing a love interest for the Doctor or Rose, I mean come on!

I’m actually surprised he didn’t have Sally reveal she fell in love with the Doctor, but...GitF and the Library episodes are just so out of place 😭right smack in the middle of their respective seasons’ arcs suddenly here’s someone Ten is now apparently in love with and someone he’s going to marry sometime in the future😭 they really do feel more like Eleven episodes

and in s1 with Rose being so...idk how to word it maybe “ditzy” around Jack- like the lines about fainting or getting swept off her feet or how he’s talking to her about a bomb and she’s going “promises promises” 

it always rubbed me the wrong way, she didn’t act that way around Adam (if anything he’s the one that fainted lol), Mickey or the Doctor

there was something just so passive about how she was behaving there compared to how fierce she was in ‘The Unquiet Dead’ or “Rose” or “The Long Game”

ok if I don’t stop rambling now I’m going to write an essay haha

[royaltea000]

Fourth of July is so funny cuz it’s the one time every year that people decades past their hetalia phase will wake up in a cold sweat and go “there’s only one character I can draw for this day… 👁️👁️💦”

[here-comes-the-moose]

Crosshair: What’s it like having a big forehead?

Tech: What’s it like not being able to consume dairy products?

[ghost-bxrd]

Prompt:

Calvin Rose finds a catatonic teenager roaming the streets and… well, the poor kid looks dead on his feet, and it’s raining cats and dogs, he can’t just leave him there.

And, it’s fine. He’s just passing through (can’t risk more with the Court still at large) and will be back on the road come morning. And he’ll sleep easier knowing he kept the kid from certain death.

So, really, how the hell did he end up with the very same kid riding shotgun and nagging him to turn up the radio to Phoebe Bridgers?

[petrichormore]

rewatching a Tina qsmp stream and I want you all to know that when q!Bagi reveals that she and q!BBH are best friends to q!Tina and q!Foolish, q!Foolish actually gets fucking jealous but in the weirdest way possible.

He’s like “oh he’s your best friend? has he ever pranked you??? I bet he hasn’t pranked you like he’s pranked me!”

and then when Bagi’s like “yeah he has” Foolish is like “oh. well. whatever. it’s good that he’s giving you all his attention actually. i don’t even care really.”

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

The fandom can't make up its mind on what's supposed to be a joke and what's supposed to be serious because the show can't either half the time. It's a tonally disjointed mess that wants to have absurd over-the-top humor as well as a plot and moments of drama, romance, and angst that demand you see the characters as people and feel for what they're going through. Except you can't do that without also treating the dumb bullshit in a somewhat grounded way. Like, you're still dealing with the same characters. You can't just go "Oh, that? Let's ignore that!" the moment it's no longer convenient to you. You've opened this can of worms and now you have to sleep in it. So, every character flip-flops between two different versions of themselves depending on what the writers need in any particular scene.

This is not to say surreal humor can't be used right alongside characters you're supposed to empathize with, Teen Titans (not Go) did that and it worked. It's just that the absurdity can only come from the setting (Mad Mod, Mother Mae-Eye, pretty much anything Control Freak is in) or from designated joke characters (Date With Destiny). Teen Titans never had the main characters acting in clearly absurd ways as the butt of a joke unless those characters were brainwashed somehow, because the writers knew that would ruin any of the more grounded moments they wanted to write. The writers of Miraculous missed the memo on that one.

I don't disagree. A perfect example is Derision where the show takes all of the bad jokes about Marinette's crush and decides to take them seriously as if you can possible take them seriously without making Marinette come across as unhinged and dangerous. You can't, which brings us to the topic at hand: how do you even begin to understand these characters when the show is constantly making character-breaking choices?

My approach - and the approach I recommend others take if they're going to keep watching the show - is to focus on the characters' cores and reject anything canon does to violate those cores. I don't argue for this stance because I love the characters so much that I only want the good things to count. I take this stance because, if you don't, then the characters fall apart. There is no way to make them work as fully realized characters while embracing every choice canon has made. Miraculous has massive characterization issues that go well beyond the humor.

For example, Adrien has multiple moments of terrible behavior that are played in a serious manner such as the moment in the episode Frozer where he tries to start a fight with Ladybug in the middle of an akuma attack because she wouldn't accept a rose from him earlier:

Setup

Ladybug: I can't accept this rose from you. I told you already. I'm in love with someone else. Cat Noir: I know, M'lady. But if he weren't here, would things be different between us? Ladybug: Well, you know, I can't even begin to imagine him not being here. I'm sorry, Cat Noir. I really gotta get going, and you better do the same. (Swings her yo-yo to head back home; Cat Noir is sad, looking downwards, with one petal of the rose falling.)

Payoff

Ladyice: Cat Noir. We need to set up a trap for whoever turned the city into a giant ice rink. (throws yo-yo) Icecat: (bitterly) My feline instincts prefer to track and observe before I attack. You go your way, I'll go mine. Ladyice: Please don't tell me you're mad at me about the rose. Icecat: There may be a certain chill now between us. Ladyice: I get it, but we should really focus on saving Paris right now. Icecat: We don't always have to do everything together, after all. It's not like we're a couple. (skates away)

There's no way to argue this off as a bad joke. While Adrien has every right to feel hurt, those feelings don't excuse him acting like a pouting child in the middle of an akuma fight. It doesn't excuse him acting like this at any point! Ladybug is not a villain for telling him no. She wasn't even mean about it!

I clearly fully agree that Adrien looks awful and selfish here, but I'd still argue that it's not something that should be used to define Adrien's character if your goal is to tell the "ideal" version of Miraculous. "Ideal" being the version that canon seems to be going for based on the overall picture we can sort of make out if we back way, way, way up and look at the extremely abstract picture canon is clumsily painting.

Unless canon is going to do something monumentally stupid, Adrien is Marinette's endgame romantic interest. It's also clear that there is no plan to cut him from the team. He's going to be Chat Noir for the rest of his life or at least well into his adulthood. This means that he is supposed to be a good hero who deserves his miraculous just like he's supposed to be a charming and cute romantic lead. These are the two things I keep in mind when trying to shift through canon to figure out what writing choices I should fully embrace and what writing choices I have to either ignore or treat as true flaws that get an actual character arc. In my book, either approach is fine because most of the characters are deeply flawed at this point and you can't give them all arcs without bloating the story to nonsense levels.

My goal with this approach is never to say, "oh, that moment shouldn't count in terms of how people feel about the character." It's more, "that moment goes so hard against who this character is very clearly supposed to be that I can't take it into account if I want to tell the kind of story that Miraculous is trying (and clearly failing) to tell."

As an example, let's list off Adrien's worst behaviors. The things that make him look terrible:

He sucks at communicating his needs and feelings, leading to multiple moments where he gets mad at Ladybug for things she's totally unaware of

He has quit or considered quitting without warning multiple times and only one of those was because of something he did "wrong" (NYC Special)

He puts his feelings before the safety of Paris on multiple occasions, even going so far to purposely miss akuma fights to see what happens

He is incredibly pushy about his crush, often ignoring Ladybug's feelings on the topic by continuing to bring it up even after she asked him to stop

There have been multiple instances where he almost cataclysmed multiple people in a fit of anger

His love for Ladynette isn't strong enough to let him break free of things like akumas and nightmare dust even when he's looking her in the eyes making him a pretty crappy romantic lead

People will argue that some of this behavior makes sense for his character because of the abuse that canon has technically introduced, but that the writers seem blissfully unaware of. I don't disagree with that argument, but that doesn't change the fact that none of this is acceptable behavior for a hero and Adrien is a hero who keeps doing these things. A sad backstory doesn't give you the right to behave poorly without consequences.

At the same time, if I fully embrace these elements of canon, what I get is an Adrien salt fic where he loses his miraculous for good while Marinette finds her real true love or even just a non-salty fic where Adrien leaves for his own meatal health and gets replaced by someone who can handle being a hero right now. Canon's not writing either of those, so the only way to engage with these flaws while enjoying canon or aiming for the same end goals as canon is to say, "I guess this doesn't count" or "I guess I need to tone this way down and work through it via a character arc" or even "I guess that was just a bad joke maybe?"

That is the essence of what I mean when I call myself a writing salt, character sugar blog. It comes from looking at canon and seeing that there's simply no way to embrace the worst moments and the best at the same time. We're not dealing with a coherent plot and/or complex characters. We're dealing with a nonsense plot that will warp the characters to bizarre shapes to make random ideas work even if those idea go wildly against canon's end goals.

As an example, Glaciator and Frozer should not exist in the same universe or, at the very least, something should explain why Chat Noir randomly changed his stance on Ladybug's crush from acceptance to pushiness. As is, the pieces don't fit together. The behavior is too contradictory. Remember, this is how Glaciator ends:

Perhaps Ladybug will love me someday. I mean, like, I love her. I have to believe. In the meantime, her friendship is the best gift of all.

Where did this version of Adrien go? Why did he regress in Frozer? There's no in-universe reason. It happened because the writers weren't ready to let the love square date or grow close, but they also wanted the love square to cause drama, so Adrien ends up looking terrible just like Marinette ends up looking terrible when it's her turn to cause love square drama. Her terribleness takes a different flavor so it can be hard to realize that this is a systemic issue, but that's what it is. It's deeply frustrating, but it also clearly stems from cheap writing and not quality characterization.

This is also why my stance is that canon as a whole only supports my Doyalistic core-character analysis style of approach. The writing is too poor quality to do Watsonian analysis where you embrace the full picture and try to put it all together. The closest I'll get to Watsonian analysis is pointing out how much the writing botches a Watsonian take by showing you all the way the writing contradicts itself, twisting into a nonsense pretzel of frustration where the payoffs never satisfy! (See the season four rant for an example or anything where I talked about Chloe's supposed damnation arc.)

There are even characters where canon is such a total mess that you can Doyalistically argue for two separate takes! Gabriel is a perfect example. He is all over the place and his ending was so poorly handled that you can make strong arguments for writing him as a cold-hearted villain or a sympathetic villain without the end result feeling like it spits in the face of canon because both takes maintain his one core element: villain.

That's the big thing I keep in mind when I look at the characters and the lore and the plots and try to come up with versions that the average fan would like. I don't think that there's one true version of any of these things, but I do feel comfortable saying that there are versions that will very clearly only appeal to people who are salty about a specific thing that canon did poorly. That's not who I want to appeal to in my adaptions, so while I'm not going to argue that those takes have no backing in canon, I will argue that those takes are not supported by canon as a whole. Embracing them requires you to take the worst parts of canon at face value while ignoring what canon is clearly trying to do with the overall story.

I get the appeal of that, but it's not fun for me because that approach feels like rolling around in the mud with the pigs. I don't want to sink to canon's level! I want to have fun! That's why I talk about how to make canon into its best self, not its worst self. If you want its worst self, just go watch the actual show. I will be shocked it if disappoints you.

[airenyah]

@secriden you don't know the feeling of getting these tags into my notifs after feeling like i've been the sole public defender of dunk's acting for the past year and a half (and that's only counting the time i started being more vocal about it online, i've been defending him in my mind since 2022 actually)

truly TRULY love the energy you bring!!!!! join me!!!!!

DUNK IS A GOOD FUCKING ACTOR AND HAS BEEN FROM THE START. EVERYONE WAS JUST UNNECESSARILY MEAN

[slackershipper]

still thinking about choicale from time to time... the au that sometimes grabs hold of my head is one where cale dies while fighting the hunters and, instead of actually being dead, he regresses all the way to the first day he woke up as cale henituse. turns out the god of death has put this condition on him when he switched the souls, because he didn't expected krs!cale to be this... effective. he knew the guy could do this, but to not die at least once...? it made he even forget about it.

then, since he died, the others... don't react all that well. berserk mode on. choi han decides to make a deal with the god of death again, since he can use all his life span, which in turn would make the other dragons (still not so sure with it will be only raon and eruhaben or if mila, dodori and rasheel will do it too) make a deal with the god too. then everyone would go back to the past while offering the rest of their life span, probably tying it with cale's life span or something.

cale would be unaware of all of this until he meets choi han and is greeted with a hug instead of a suspicious stare. and if raon gets to them earlier than he should and with company, who is cale to complain?

[u-n-k-n-o-w-n-n]

I know this is probably been said before but I feel it doesn't get said enough. Dick should be allowed to be kinda salty with Bruce when Damian gets a managire of animals but when he was adopted Zitka had to go to the gothem zoo or something. Like I don't think would take it out on Damian if anything he would start ploting with Damian to get Zitka back for the zoo or something. But he can be salty at bruce.

[rubberduckyrye]

Okay so like. I found this and.

This really annoys me. And this is a perfect example of the narrative being biased against Kokichi and it's not necessarily the class who have a biased against him.

So it reads:

The night before, Shuichi and some of the others were forced to stay in the Ultimate Entomologist's lab by Gonta, who was tricked by Kokichi.

This is blatantly untrue, as proven by this post here. This piece of evidence is also not being written by Shuichi, as it refers to him in the third person, so this isn't Shuichi being biased.

This is the narrative just. Blatantly lying to the reader. This is the Narrative showing one thing (Gonta in full agreement to get everyone to watch their motives and Kokichi being 100% honest with him about the motive screening party) and just flat out lying in the next breath (Kokichi tricked Gonta)

Now. You could say that Kokichi "tricked" Gonta in saying that Kokichi lied to him about liking bugs, but. Everyone lied to Gonta about that.

So you either have the narrative just contradicting itself because it can't stand the idea of Kokichi being likable in any way (as that ruins the plot you see!) or just singling out Kokichi specifically for something that everyone does and only punishing him for it. Either way? It ain't a good fucking look.

The bias this narrative has towards Kokichi and how much it wants the reader to believe he's a horrible villain is so fucking jarring when they have proof that he isn't.

I do not like how V3 handled it's writing at all.

[transingthoseformers]

Thinking about Ultra Magnus running one of those "[thing] explained" YouTube channels because not only would it be funny to think about, but because I can totally see him recording long explanations of various documents & laws and them being VERY in depth

[redpenship]

why is everyone advocating for wade to die in the knuckles show? who else is going to convince shadow that humanity is worth saving so he helps sonic stop the ark

[imintobones]

I might get crucified by the fandom for saying this, but as much as I think the theory that Undertaker will bring back Madame Red would be an insanely cool plot twist, and it'd allow us to finally get a bit more development on Ciel's connection to his family, as well as Grell's place in the story, I'm kind of hoping it doesn't happen... This might sound stupid, but Grell fans (including myself, to a certain extent) are kinda known for blowing her appearances in the story out of proportion, and I fear that her presence during such an important development would overshadow a lot of discussions about the Phantomhives

[ghost-bxrd]

Back again with another Calvin in Owl Song thought 🦉🦉🦉:

So Calvin is working for the Court still, and somehow they end up assigning him to work for the Joker for a night. All hes doing is being extra security, and making sure the Bat doesn't find the Clown too soon, easy enough.

Until Sheila sells Robin out. Until the Clown starts beating him.

Until Robin starts calling out for his dad, asking his mom why she would do that. And Robin is a kid, he's a scrawny little kid, scared and confused and wanting his parent's protection, and Calvin can't do this.

He kills everyone in that warehouse, he can't leave any witnesses, then he grabs Robin and flees; he can't return to the Court after this, nor will Robin return to the Bat, who didnt save him.

Bruce still gets to the warehouse, but just as he gets there, it goes up in flames. When he frantically searches the rubble, there's blood and gore but burned beyond recognition; he has no way of identifying if it's Jason's or not. He has no way of knowing his son wasn't in that warehouse, no way of knowing Jason's still alive.

He plans a funeral and buries an empty casket. Dick loses his mind at the loss of his beloved owlet.

Meanwhile Jason is on the run with Calvin, who refuses to let the little bird out of his sight. The kid clearly doesn't have good parents, so it's up to Calvin to protect him.

And Jason already knows how to deal with Talons, how to communicate with owl noises and body language. He also knows that this Talon cares for him, feels protective of him, but won't let him leave, and he knows he can't run from a Talon; Dick would always find him whenever he tried to hide, for whatever reason. So all Jason could do was try and convince Calvin to take him back to Gotham.

Except as soon as he manages that, assuming Nightwing is patrolling, Dick notices a Talon's presence in the city. Of course he does.

He thinks nothing of it when he catches glimpses of Jason; hallucinations are becoming increasingly normal for him. But what chills him to the bone is that whenever he sees his owlet, the Talon he's noticed is never far behind; always watching, always there.

Calvin means it as protection, Dick sees it as a threat.

Eventually everything comes to a head after tension builds; maybe Dick somehow realized Jason was alive and thinks he's being stalked by the Court as a prospective Talon, so he lashes out at Calvin who fights back and eventually Jason has to get between them and explain everything.

Except Calvin has gotten attached at this point so he ends up getting dragged to Wayne Manor where he's accepted with open arms; Dick likes that he protected Jason and killed both Joker and Sheila, and everyone already knows how to deal with Talons so he's in good hands.

(wow this came out longer than I expected lmao)

Omg poor Dick would feel like he’s perpetually haunted by glimpses of the past because— that Talon could very well be himself. Or he’s reminded of alternate universes and is heartbreakingly relieved that at least one version of him didn’t let his precious owlet die….

Meanwhile Calvin has hardcore imprinted on Jason, and Jason… well, he’s got experience wrangling Talons. This one obviously needs his help. Also, he may be a teeny-tiny bit pissed at Dick and Bruce. So, no going back home until he’s blown off some steam. Socialized Calvin. All that.

And with Jason and Calvin both busy navigating life (and some awful injuries), they both miss the nuclear fallout of Robin’s death….

[thenegoteator]

👀 Happy New Year!

happy new year!!!

this was while the Ahsoka show was airing and I was feeling salty about how little Kanan came up initially. it's the "my death is unreasonably downplayed/ignored in recent star wars media" support group. but then we did get the barest of crumbs eventually so I didn't feel it was worth following through

[send me a 👀 in exchange for unposted art from 2023]