#forgive the horrifying quality I guess

[as-rare-as-trees]

Idk maybe somebody told him it's time to trim his bangs or sth

[coffee---bean]

workn on the music and stuff

hello! been working on the score for the film. its made from feedback sounds (made by pressing electric guitar leads with my fingers) and then adding drums. the drums were recorded on my phone very loosely, just about trying to slowly increase the intensity of the score by drumming faster and faster over time. i panned one drum to one side and another to the other side, so hopefully it'll feel disorienting and immersive in something that doesn't actually exist!

then i added "jisas yu holem hand blong mi", which is probably my favourite little song. like, my automatic answer type of thing. not my favourite right now but a good answer for my favourite.

it's kind of religious, i just like chanting and clapping and i don't know what the words mean but the notes are pretty. i used a beat delay thing to distort it and make it sound like a broken brain or something. i also got a low-pitched version of it and put it underneath the entire thing, just to kind of fill the piece out and add some bassier tones to it, since the feedback sounds are higher-pitched and sporadic in the first half.

then i added a little bit of singing to give the audio a more human quality, the sense that there's a person hidden deep inside this fucked-up-ness. it's very quiet, but there is a completely unaffected voice somewhere in the right channel, singing softly.

i also added some super reverby piano organ chords. the chords are in the key of the above song, the organ was chosen cos it's sort of religion-y, and the chords were performed so that they get thicker and more dissonant and random as the score continues. it's inspired by "fittier happier" by radiohead, which is obviously 100 times better than mine, but they spent like 3 years making OK Computer so umm fuck u

i remember my friend showing me this video when i was like 13. he was like, this is so deep. and he was totally right but its funny to me cos he would totally hate radiohead now. he doesn't like rock music at all and radiohead is way too mainstream for him. just one of those weird things. why did he love THIS radiohead song out of all the radiohead songs. he's a really cool weirdo.

and then i sang a little melody over the chords, but i added a ridiculous amount of reverb and made it a little quieter and added another layer of the same performance but an octave higher, and panned them on different sides, and then made them slightly out of sync, and now the voice sounds like a weird beautiful synth. the tone of the first half is a lot more earnestly emotional. like, actually fucking me up kind of emotional. the music really does something to me now, which is great because so far this piece has felt a bit emotionally dead to me.

the tone of the music is kind of similar to this kind of thing:

david lynch often has like,, stupid and beautiful moments in his movies. there's so much unexplainable and horrifying darkness in his movies, and then sometimes there's just these equally absurd breaks in the clouds and it's really glorious and wonderful. and the music he uses is often very churchy or gospelly or very very suspended chords turning into some gigantic resolution / cadence thing. and the tone is always lifting organ energy and raw crying with happiness.

also the music from a movie like drive or really any recent nicolas winding refn thing. only god forgives also has music like this, but i guess drive has the most tender energy out of his films. this music is from a scene that goes from extremely beautiful love to extremely fucked violence almost instantly, which isn't exactly what my film is, but it's not totally off! the contrast is just a bit less exaggerated, and the transition is less sudden.

anyway the music feels mostly done. i've added it to the half-finished film and exported it, so i'll test how it sounds in the speaker-box system. i've texted someone about buying a crappy monitor, so hopefully that'll be done soon.

the last two things to do are:

figure out the monitor

animate and add in the gifs

yippee! it's gonna be tight but i think it's possible. i also think its possible it wont work. i have a kind of solution for if i cant get the monitor to work. the animation gif things are important, but i have time to do them, it'll be ok.

[this-world-of-beautiful-monsters]

this is complex for me because I do love Karen as a character and she definitely deserves more attention--I've mentioned before how interesting she is as a rebel girl who is allowed to grow up and mature, for better or worse, and I love how kind of fucking nuts she can be. I appreciate her sacrifice by going to prison, even if didn't really work (and people have noted it kind of gives her an out re motherhood), and I fucking love the church fire.

However, I don't think any of this means Sean "would" forgive her. He can, it's possible for him and it could fit an interpretation of his character, but that doesn't mean it's the only option for him or that he's obligated to do so in any way. Just because she came through for her sons, sort of (she kind of just stands there while Sean gets beaten up, which is hilarious), doesn't magically erase the years of psychological damage she inflicted on them, or her inability to show up in the first three eps. It can't, no matter how hard she tries, and she and Sean are both painfully aware of that. It's also hard for me to to tell how much Daniel forgives her and how much he just clings onto her in his nonstop search for an adult figure to look up to (Finn, Lisbeth, Joan, etc).

Personally I guess I have a few pet peeves about her--she has a habit of blaming her parents (who are admittedly fucked up in their own way) or "society" as a general concept for her decision to not contact her children for eight years, and that always felt kind of hard for me to swallow. Her description of having kids as "breeding" in her letter to Claire and Stephen is always kind of a what-the-fuck moment, even if she does scratch it out. Her line about how she came "as soon as Daniel was alone" in the church is also interesting--Daniel and Sean have been alone, on the run, for months now, and it's hard to tell if Karen has been instinctually adultifying Sean the way most adult characters in this game do, assuming her sons didn't need her help quite as much until they were separated. None of these are, like, unforgivable of course, that's just stuff that always comes to mind when I try to understand if I like her.

Re the blood brothers thing, I do personally think that's kind of a toss-up. She's (understandably) horrified when either Sean or Daniel kills Lisbeth in the church, and while she takes them in no matter what and doesn't express any fear of them, she also doesn't say she's proud of them except in routes where Lisbeth is spared, even if she does acknowledge how rough a time they've had of it. Not to mention that there's a gap between impulsively killing a personal abuser like Lisbeth and slaughtering a more impersonal threat like those border cops, and I think Karen would be keenly aware of that difference, so it feels up in the air how she would shake out in a blood brothers or lone wolf ending. honestly I feel like Chris "perfectly happy to launch a police car into a snow bank" Eriksen or drifters like Finn or Hannah would be a bigger shoo-in for side characters who support the blood brothers route.

I definitely like how the fandom overall seems more forgiving towards Karen, especially considering how lis fans as a whole seem to treat flawed female characters (*cough*Chloe*cough*). She's not really a good mom and possibly not that good a person, but she's far from a monster, and I love the inherent tragedy of how her pushing to be better can't stop her sons from being pushed into being worse. It's rare for a middle-aged female character to get so much agency in lis games and it's fascinating to see what she does with hers. I don't know if I can quality for stanhood, but I always wish there was more content about her, so I guess that counts for something.

So ive already stated that in a Karen stan. I hate that she abandoned the boys for 8 years of their lives but honestly i think sean would forgive her. And shes the only side character i can definitively say would accept every endings version of the boys. I know she only shows up in redemption and partings ways but she wanted the boys to get to mexico and find their own freedom no matter what. So even though we dont see her, i know she’s keeping in touch with them in the other endings too and you cannot and will not change my mind on that.

That being said i am curious about how other people feel about her. I just watched a play through where they tried to open up to her and did hug her in the end but then didnt actually forgive her or like her even a little bit. Which is like the first out of like the 5 that ive watched.

So im curious, do yall like karen? Did yall forgive her? Why or why not? Did you hug her? What kind of letter did you write? if you wrote one.

[ladyluscinia]

Looks like the topic of the night for the Izzy Hands tag is relitigating the Navy plot vs the toe scene, so I guess I can throw out some thoughts on that.

I think these scenes are only comparable because they are both disproportionate responses to what the other person was doing at the time. They are both part of the overarching narrative of Edward and Izzy's relationship exploding (in order to make space for them to build back up a new dynamic) which is why overall there is no "true victim" between the two of them, but Edward's actions in 1x10 are still NOT a response to Izzy's actions in 1x09.

For Edward, maiming Izzy was not a justified action. First because maiming someone is generally just a cruel and uncalled for option - if he was a threat it would have made sense to kill him or send him away, and if he wasn't then don't maim him. And mainly because Edward is pretty clearly framed as in the wrong here. It is so weird to me how many people look at the Kraken sequence and go "Oh, well, murdering Lucius at the start was bad and horrifying, and marooning the crew at the end was bad and horrifying, and the Kraken is bad and horrifying overall, but that middle bit? With Izzy? That was a reasonable and justified use of force against someone who deserved it and maybe more."

What.

Edward maimed Izzy to reassert control over Izzy when he realized he wasn't ready to give that control up. It doesn't make sense as a threat response, and it wasn't even revenge because Edward stopped caring about the Navy thing as soon as he returned without Stede. He doesn't bring it up. In fact, he banters with Izzy and treats him the same as he did in the early eps. He's not mad at him for the Navy! That punch and the exchange before signing was the end of it for both of them. It's also the end of it as far as the story is concerned, because once they arrive at the school, all focus shifts to Stede and Edward's relationship beats. Them being trapped / pressed into service is solved by mugging a guy offscreen for a dinghy. Not exactly a serious threat or struggle. The toe scene is only in response to Izzy's words in the cabin, and Izzy's words did not warrant that.

Now in another show, the maiming + context would be a moral event horizon or pretty damn close to it, and Edward would be a violent monstrous character. In this show, violence has a distinctly handwavy quality and we can definitely forgive him for being out of line without having to pretend he wasn't. Also Izzy can probably get an anachronistic and instantly effective insert for his boot and not have his fighting ability crippled until it gets him killed, which does make the situation a bit better. Handwaviness can apply to injuries too (Lucius's finger).

So that's Edward in 1x10. What about Izzy in 1x09?

For Izzy, the Navy plot is an overreaction. I don't think anyone disputes this??? Like... I think it's fun that he tries to murder the mistress in the same way I think it's fun that Edward makes his breakup everyone's problem. I think the framing is a bit more serious in order to give Edward's romantic sacrifice some oomph, but it's still ridiculous to act like trying to kill Stede is a traumatic and borderline unforgivable act when Mary will settle on the same solution to her problems next episode. But no, I don't think Izzy was warranted in trying to kill Stede because Edward was upsetting him.

In fact, I think Izzy betraying Edward - not so much the murder plot specifically as just taking initiative to force Edward to choose when he was trying very hard not to (something he thought he had sidestepped in 1x06) - is a significant part of why he goes all in on Stede in an inauthentic way in 1x09 and gets so unexpectedly hurt, and why he overcorrects in 1x10. His disproportionate response here does drive the dramatic explosion of their toxic codependency just as much as Edward's does. It just isn't a literal "I hit you and you hit me back" situation.

Izzy forces Edward to choose, Edward chooses, it goes bad but Edward tries to stick to his choice, Izzy "accepts" the choice by rejecting the person Edward chose to be and threatening to leave, and Edward overcorrects to the worst possible version of the person who gets to keep Izzy.

And since this is as good a time to nitpick 1x09 reads as any... Izzy did also try to get Edward off the boat. That was a pretty significant thing that took up most of the plot of 1x08. Like I understand where you are coming from here about it being terrible to have to nearly watch Stede die, but Izzy very much did put a lot of planning into getting Edward off the boat before any of it.

People bring that up like it was Izzy's dastardly plan or that he callously dismissed that Edward would be upset by Stede's death, but, like, he knew in 1x06 that Edward wasn't thrilled and offered to take care of it. He wasn't trying to make Edward a captive audience. He was quite literally trying for the opposite and still scrambling to keep Edward entirely unharmed when it got screwed up. You can be pissed at him for trying to off Stede, but the "in front of Edward" bit was not intentional. (And acting like he put Edward in harms way is also kind of a reach, seeing as it would have been very easy in the show to, well, show that was a risk. Instead Edward being perfectly safe makes his romantic gesture more significant.)

So yeah. No abuser / victim dynamic here, but it's not because either of them "deserves" to be mistreated by the other when they are. And maybe stop morally justifying mutilation as punitive justice, because the show doesn't frame it that way and it would be kinda fucked up if it did.

[californiannostalgia]

I cannot believe I am saying this but

Steve Harrington should've died this season

like, narratively speaking

nothing against the guy, there was just so much set-up for it and then they Game-of-Thrones-ed it (that much build-up, all for nothing? that's bad writing bruh)

and what on earth are they trying to do with the Steve and Nancy plot? do they not rewatch their own show before writing the script? where did the character coherency go? do you expect me to believe Nancy Wheeler would ever settle for a suburban mom's life? and for that matter, where's my feral, knife-sharp Mike Wheeler? where is my sarcastic little shit, where's my blorbo

also Will Byers deserved to have a horrifying clock vision actually, instead of putting Max back in the hell she magnificently climbed out of in episode 4 (and Jonathan saves him by playing their favorite song, COME ON) (my other blorbo barely got screentime, I want more Jonathan Byers in my Stranger Things aaahhhhh)

it's like because we got some quality Lucas (YES PUNCH THAT RACIST MOTHERFUCKER) and Dustin (he made me cry) content, Will and Mike got put on the backburner (I mean I guess with the track record for previous seasons, it was Lucas and Dustin's turn to carry the entire plot, but still)

Max and El had some really phenomenal scenes tho, Millie and Sadie are so freaking good (wow I can't wait for season 5 when Mad Max comes back to life and Max and El kill Vecna) (manifesting)

Brenner is a pathetic man and I want everyone like him to know that you are ordinary, you are nothing, your abuse does not deserve forgiveness and no one will mourn you

anyway I guess I'm not very satisfied with how they wrote the latter half of this season, but I did cry when Hopper and El reunited so I guess there's that (THE PARENTS ARE FINALLY KISSING)

[astermacguffin]

In line with this post by @autisticandroids I have decided that we need a fic grounded upon this post. I am specifically deciding to focus on the Dean counterpart in this paragraph (bold highlights are mine:

like i guess the equivalent is cas thinking dean doesn't care about him/want him around and will discard him if he's not useful but to be fair: i don't like it in fics when that's treated lightly either! it's usually not treated as lightly as the "cas doesn't have feelings" thing, but it's rarely given the gravitas it deserves, like, after hearing that, depending on your dean, he should either be incandescently angry that anyone could possibly think that poorly of him, or lock himself in his room for days doing some depressive soul-searching to try and figure out why cas would think that, where he's gone wrong. it might also change dean's opinion of cas, to know he'd stay with someone who only wanted him around because he's useful. like that's a seriously relationship restructuring reveal, and it wouldn't necessarily restructure things in a positive direction, at least at first.

In order to execute this, I propose that we give Cas a boyfriend that's a total Dean-mirror, complete with a Sam-mirror brother.

(Imagine this in a post-S11 finale world but with the eventual Mary and Jack plots on hold. As much as I love them so much, they would prevent me from inflicting as much damage to Dean and Cas because these two will be distracted.)

There are two key qualities to the Dean-mirror boyfriend: (1) he has all of Dean's bad qualities, but (2) he also has all of Dean's good qualities AND more (e.g. he's actually generous with his affection, to which Cas is very much starving from).

It would be made clear to both Dean and the readers that Cas' boyfriend is really just dragging him along because Cas is useful to him. The big reveal would be that Cas is ALSO aware of this and is totally fine with it. This, of course, would radically restructure the way Dean perceives Cas and, ideally, would force him to do some introspection.

The fact that Cas is willing to stay with someone he perceives as valuing him only for his usefulness is NOT a simple revelation about Cas that Dean can just brush off.

The second and more important revelation should be that Cas ALSO perceives Dean like this. Sure, Dean values Cas beyond his usefulness, but that doesn't matter because Cas has little evidential support for that and thus perceives Dean differently. After his initial anger, Dean should be even more horrified about this. "Cas thinks we only value him for his usefulness and YET he stays with us?" Like, that's an awfully low amount of self-worth even for Dean. That would like. Change the way Dean looks at Cas AND himself.

There is one particular event in canon that I would like to explore in detail here. Remember in S9 when Dean kicks Cas out of the bunker with little to no aid, and then Cas just easily forgives him for it? Something of that scale should happen between Cas and his boyfriend. This would force Dean to reflect on the gravity of what he did to Cas AND make him interrogate his unhealthy codependency with Sam by looking at their character mirrors.

At one point, the Dean-mirror should be mind-controlled or influenced into beating the shit out of Cas, and Cas just letting it go afterwards. (It would even be more fucked up if the Dean-mirror is blackmailed into torturing or beating the crap out of Cas in order to save the Sam-mirror brother.)

The entire goal of all of this is to break Dean's brain because that's the only way he'll ever be able to confront his own flaws: by putting him into situations that force introspection that he otherwise would never do on his own.

What's great about this is that fixing Dean pretty much also fixes Cas consequently. Like, Cas needs someone to tell him about his harmful behaviors and mental schemas. Dean is a voice that Cas would certainly listen to, so knocking some sense into Dean has the lovely consequence of making Cas realize some things as well.

By the time the Mary and Jack plots happens, we have the benefit of them having a way heathier dynamic.

[andonutty]

#like ...#also i hate people using their hunger as an excuse when. CLEARY they were coherent enough to make a ritual out of this lmfao#and what's fucked up is that i could see javi's death happening. i could see them standing by and watching him die. being complacent#but that's not the problem. the problem is before this they were willing to kill nat. like 100% willing#had the ritual ended with shauna being unable to do it then i wouldn't have complained but after nat takes off the show just ???#acts as if the girls would have ZERO problem killing nat which is insane to me lol#and not to be picky but the ritual literally fails in this episode. they think the wilderness chose javi right#which MEANS nat was wrongfully chosen. they fucked up! they didn't do what the wilderness wanted!!! yet they're gonna keep doing it#a ritual which. doesn't work. like okay i guess personally i'd be scared of pissing the wilderness off but you do you#anyway i just ... when your slow burn cannibalism cult show starts speeding down the high way all of a sudden </3#not a single thing in this ep made a lick of sense and the quality has gone down since s1 i can assure you!! it is fresh in my memory#as a pit girl enthusiast this is tragic 2 me :(

im keeping these tags because they are so meaningful to me <3 also i was going to do this commentary in the tags but i figured they’d make more sense in the body of the post itself. so if it sounds too conversational mind your business

so i totally agree that in the moment the latest episode was super fucked up and cool to watch, but then in the aftermath it’s like... what’s happening??? i feel like the showrunners are so desperate to make the last few eps of s2 really shocking that they’re not... leading up to it well. like i could identify a NUMBER of glaring pacing issues throughout all of s2. and i’m too lazy to go through the episodes of s2 and talk about all of them but... off the top of my head, we’ve got the adam plotline which is SO dragged out and frankly disgusting. like. okay. so the whole point of the adult plotline in s1 was to showcase how the girls (and travis) never moved past their trauma. like showcasing how they have this mentality that triggered them. and it also shows how even though they have this distance between them and they barely really talk anymore, they generally have each other’s backs. it’s GOOD. and while the adam plotline in s1 was a little bit horrifying, it was horrifying in a way where we all kind of suspected he was the blackmailer or at least someone malicious! and then it turns out shauna was WRONG and it was actually jeff. and that’s kind of where the writing goes wonky imo. i’m not sure why shauna, who just murdered a man in a dissociative haze for hurting her friends and leading her on, would NOT do the same to this other guy. like whatever, i’m willing to forgive it to a point, but it’s frankly disgusting that jeff faces NO consequences for literally going through shauna’s personal shit, never talking to her about it, and then BLACKMAILING her FRIENDS, one of whom relapsed on COCAINE and sold her CAR because of this shit. it is insane that jeff wouldn’t face consequences for this. i get that shauna doesn’t want to get in trouble for killing her husband or whatever, but i thought we already established that she does not love jeff in a romantic way. being with jeff was always about taking pieces of jackie and having them inside her, and then post-crash, it was about living jackie’s life because she feels it’s an apt punishment for KILLING HER. but whatever, i guess shauna x jeff is true love, etc. but not to get heated over this unrelated thing, i’m just saying that nothing about the adam plotline in s2 makes a lick of sense.

for one thing, adam seems to not really have anyone close to him at all. his mom is dead (walter confirms this), there’s no mention of any friends that are grieving him, he’s a ghost when you google him. he mentions a friend he went to college with but doesn’t really insinuate he’s still in touch. hell, even when he tells shauna he has a friend at the auto shop, HE’S the friend. and on top of ALL that, we KNOW adam isn’t a man of influence or importance. and the yellowjackets, knowing all of this, make it look like he’s just a missing person. GENERALLY, cops do not WANT to open homicide investigations when they don’t HAVE to, because murder cases are a fucking headache and it’s way easier to just deem it a missing persons case. it’s ridiculous that they even declared adam to be missing so fast, but then to put it on the NEWS?? he’s some RANDOM MAN. he’s able-bodied, in his thirties... like he’s not a poor eighty-year-old lady or a teenager or whatever. there’s no reason for it to be on the news. and they seem to treat this whole plotline like a ... some sort of gotcha moment for SHAUNA of all people? like all the yellowjackets did horrific shit. why is she the only one getting punished for -- but im getting ahead of myself. let’s talk more about this adam plotline that was given WAAAAAAAAAAAAY too much fucking screentime and didn’t give us ANY time to build up to the pit girl moment in episode 8.

so sure, the police realize adam’s missing in the span of a couple hours, which is so unrealistic. then they’re like, utterly CONVINCED it was a murder? even though no evidence in his apartment suggests this. again, they really should be LOOKING for him rather than investigating shauna, but i digress. i’m so disgusted and disappointed by this plotline that i’m spending way more time on talking about it than i want, but that beginning part was really only the beginning of the depths of fucked up and unnecessary and detrimental this plotline was. it actively drives a wedge between shauna and the other survivors for no good reason. it implies the yellowjackets are not competent enough to cover up a murder, which they LITERALLY ARE considering no one even SUSPECTED they were hunting their friends for sport. it insinuates that the yellowjackets need the help of THEIR LITERAL BLACKMAILER to cover this shit up, and keeps trying to “rekindle” the relationship between shauna and jeff as if it’s SHAUNA’S FAULT that all this was happening. like, fuck! and then do we have to TALK about the plotline with callie where that disgusting piece of shit cop is GROOMING HER for evidence that would be INADMISSIBLE IN COURT. and kevyn LETS HIM??? he couldn’t give less of a shit about where NATALIE is, instead ALL the screentime we get of him is him acting like a stereotypical cop and DEFENDING the man that he believes HAD SEX WITH A TEENAGE GIRL for information. oh my god. oh my god. this plotline did nothing except waste time and meander around things that should actually have been explored.

so that plotline was meandering and did not serve the narrative at all. again, taissa’s plot was super interesting and served to tell us more about what happened back in the wilderness. lottie’s and nat’s plots were interesting because they showed us more about lottie’s compound and revealed more about natalie and travis. misty’s plotline was ... fine? it wasn’t the best, but it served the plot in some minute ways. i found her much more incompetent this season than she usually is, but i did at least admire how singularly focused she was on saving natalie, which, again, is in character for her. but then shauna’s plotline served NO purpose. anyway. so the adam plot dominated season 2 when it really should have been dropped at the end of season 1 or even maybe one or two episodes into season 2.

and all that time could have been used to set up the wilderness AND adult plotlines so that it actually makes SENSE for both lottie to be playing russian roulette with the survivor’s lives and for the girls in the wilderness to be playing russian roulette to save lottie’s life. throughout all the decisions made in yellowjackets, there’s been dissent. because they’re teenage girls and human beings, and there’s still humanity left in them. it was such a jarring shift from episode 7, where they were still coherent and not that hungry, to episode 8, which is PROBABLY just a couple days afterward, where they’re ALL hallucinating and delirious from hunger. season one and the beginning parts of season two did a really good job at ramping up the stakes, at pacing things so that it made sense when they were so desperate that they’d eat jackie. fall happened, the animals started migrating away. nat and travis kept coming back empty-handed. the one big catch they did get was diseased. they start foraging and eating worms and grubs because that’s all they can get. then in episode ten, the wilderness gives them the bear and they’re fed for a while. jackie dies and they put her in the meat locker because shauna’s grieving. then, over a period of TWO MONTHS, they run out of the bear meat and start starving to death. there is nothing that nat and travis can catch. and then finally, when the girls are on the brink of starving to death, jackie’s body ends up getting cooked instead of cremated, and the girls, delirious with hunger and trying to rationalize it to themselves as, “jackie would have wanted us to survive”, literally gorge themselves on her and are probably full for a very, very long time. so for a long time after they eat jackie, sure, they’re still hunting, but they’re not really hungry because their focus is on shauna and her baby. shauna WENT INTO LABOUR at the end of episode 5, and gave birth in episode 6. that was TWO EPISODES AGO. and we do spend pretty much the entire episode believing that the wilderness baby made it, which leaves ONLY episode seven for that fallout. bear in mind here that episodes 5, 6, and 7 therefore occur in the span of like a day or two. that is not a long time. shauna beats the crap out of lottie because she’s convinced they all ATE HER BABY, so she’s CLEARLY not over them cannibalizing jackie. crystal is still out there, potentially still alive considering her body was moved, and yeah, some of the girls are like, if she’s dead we’ll eat her, but none of them are saying they’d KILL her if they found her alive.

the point is that throughout all of these episodes up until the last one, they weren’t really so desperate that they’d start killing people. i don’t know why we started pulling out belt soup and whatever right now. just because lottie might die? she TOLD misty that they could eat her if she didn’t make it. why are they so focused on saving lottie? all she’s been doing is mindfulness mondays every morning and blessing people before hunts. if they’re so desperate to eat, why wouldn’t they just eat lottie? and again, this cannot be very long after episode 7, so where was the starving before? it’s like the writers just went, oh right, and they’re starving, like, just like they were before they ate jackie. like there’s a starving thing happening. they didn’t even make it clear if the girls ate shauna’s placenta, which they COULD make last for a while. they definitely wouldn’t be at the point of hunting down and killing nat in cold blood. they just have so many options, and it’s clear that UNLIKE DOOMCOMING, they were all totally in their right minds. we have no idea why they decided the queen would be hunted. why they didn’t go get coach ben to make sure everyone participated. why they started making animal noises when they were chasing nat. why they wouldn’t LITERALLY ABANDON the ritual once it failed, like... oh my god. and they would just stand by and WATCH the youngest of them die when shauna’s baby JUST died.

i’m honestly just really disappointed in the latest episode and i’m not really looking forward to what they’ll do in the season finale. pit girl should not have come this early. none of them were ready for it and their first go at the ritual should not have failed. they needed faith, and that faith wasn’t earned, neither in the wilderness nor in the adult plotline. like, pit girl was always a consensual thing. i don’t know why they’re suddenly forcing it on people and having people blindly accept it. i don’t know.

ngl as someone who's stalked yellowjackets way before i finally binged most of it this week, i gotta say i'm sooooo disappointed in the new ep. like, it's beyond sad to watch what should've been a devastating descent get rushed for the sake of ... idk, thrills? the appeal of pit girl ( to me anyway ) was the fact it was completely and utterly consensual, in a way. we know this is their second and last winter when they hunt her, and she's very deliberately dressed — there's no signs of a struggle on her outfit, so it's safe to say she willingly wore it, which all leads to this disturbing truth : the girls are completely lost in their delusion, their religion, and their love for each other at this point. they are safe and comfortable doing this ritual, choosing the girl, and submitting to the dance of slaughter and suicide. they have reached such a mental state, where they've come to terms with being willing to feed the girls with their body and feasting on their friends if they get picked instead. and their actions are brutal and relentless because that's a human being that they're treating like an animal, but it's also natural, it's their way of life, and this doesn't mean they don't love their pit girls. they do! these are people they've relied on for months, a year and more, this is their family! but they're a hive mind now, they love each other so much they're willing to die so others may live, they're willing to lose loved ones to save more loved ones. jackie's necklace is a sign of respect, of blessing ... pit girl is a wonderful thing to be! and that's such a gruesome, fucked up thing to grasp as a viewer. that they could treat people they love like mere meat, like any other animal. it's the descent i've been dying to see! yet they completely rushed it for ?? no reason ?? almost none of these girls are at this state yet ; we've spent the last couple of episodes watching people's faith in lottie waver ( van was having a whole crisis about this !! ) and them mourning the baby, so this sudden feral state is such a tonal shift, a jarring not-good one.

shauna was having nightmares about cannibalism and genuinely believed the girls ate her baby and now she's just a-okay with eating javi or nat?? tai couldn't even be conscious when they ate jackie! and when they did eat her, she'd already been cooked and dead for two months, she had been their captain, and her best friend was telling them that jackie would want them to ; they're still excusing it, not really addressing it, and so ?? them just jumping straight to pit girl is fucking weird to put it mildly. hungry or not they had other options! the placenta, the rest of jackie, finding crystal to eat, also what about coach ben?? you know, the useless grown adult man that none of them are really close to and could feed them way longer than some teenage girl or kid could? we know the girls can be ruthless, but the fact they were so ready to turn that ruthlessness onto each other ( despite CLEARLY not wanting to ) is stupid when they had other options. i agree they should've killed someone, as it's the natural progress to get to pit girl eventually, but that person should've been injured, or completely and utterly willing ... none of them are at the point where they can just kill their friends, and if they really are, then that hasn't been shown enough.

also, not gonna lie, them all just deciding that they couldn't possibly eat lottie is weird too. i'm not saying any of them would kill her, but once she told misty not to waste her body if she dies, we should've seen some inner conflict. because it'd be so easy to eat lottie, it'd be simple, she's their leader and she's giving them permission and they wouldn't even have to kill her for this. but she's also their friend! they don't want to eat lottie, but if that's what happened then ... like idk them acting like this was a bizarre notion when they literally listened to lottie last episode and let shauna beat her practically to death is strange. why does her word suddenly not matter now? again i get the conflict, but they all just unanimously agreed they couldn't ever eat lottie which is. whatever. they could've waited around for her to maybe die to eat, saw this wouldn't happen and be a mix of relieved & disappointed, and figure something else out.

anyway i just have some gripes with this episode and season overall. i still loved watching it in the moment, since the actors are so damn good, although the aftermath was not pleasant considering i was just. hit with bad writing decisions and weird pacing lol

[sillyguyhotline]

17. “How is any of this ok?” with Joe and Sara maybe?

dude im gonna be completely honest i havent written anything in like a month so i think the quality isnt gonna be great but here goes nothing

God, Sara missed the feeling of home.

Every semblance of familiarity and comfort she’d once found in the town she’d grown up in, the house she’d spent her childhood running through, now felt chillingly foreign.

Perhaps it was the heavy burden of knowledge weighing fresh upon her shoulders: ASUNARO’s corruption seemed now to peer slyly around every corner, no matter where she went. She still didn’t know how much of the town had rotted away under its grasp, how much of the town its poison had pervaded… but she was probably better off not knowing.

Whatever was left of Midori, that miserable mix of pulsing blood and electronic emotion, had been ground to bits inside that coffin… but Sara couldn’t ignore the creeping fear that his burning, ever-present gaze would appear out of nowhere and terrorize her again.

But he wouldn’t. The death game was over, and they’d promised they would never hurt her or any of her loved ones again.

Most of the loved ones she still encountered day-to-day, gruesomely blood splattered and sitting like corpses propped up hastily in a corner, would be safe no matter if ASUNARO was fresh on her tail or a thousand miles away. What a cruel price to pay for safety, to never be hurt again.

They still lived on if Sara closed her eyes tight enough, if she listened to the twisting words of the hallucinations and let them convince her she was monstrous. But the second she dared to open her eyes, she knew they’d be dead again. Life worked in terrible ways, and that was all there was to it.

Joe’s house had always been a second home to her, ever since the two of them became friends. Joe was the farthest cry from Sara in terms of social interactions- it had taken at least 3 months for Sara to trust Joe enough to invite him over, but Joe had insisted she hang out at his house the very same day they became friendly enough to exchange more than a sentence with each other.

There was a certain sort of comfort to the warmth of his house, the constant scent of cooking food pervading the air and the little trinkets scattered in every corner. No surface of his house went without decoration, in its silly little way. It was full of pictures, too, some carefully framed and some dangling from the wall by pushpins, but Sara got the sense that none of the photos went unloved. Most of them were occupied by an orange-haired man, often carrying a younger Joe (back when he was still sporting that atrocious crew cut). Sara always assumed it was his dad, but thought it would be impolite to ask… particularly when the weeks stretched on and Sara had yet to meet that mysterious orange-haired man.

Eventually, pictures of Sara began to join the collage on the wall- pictures taken as she butchered yet another pop song during karaoke, or when they went out to get food, or when she mistakenly sat down on a traffic cone during gym (after many protests from Sara, he took that one down). As silly as the pictures were, and as obvious as it was that Joe had waited for the most embarrassing moments to take them, it was sort of sweet in a way.

Joe’s mother was always kind to her, though there was a constant weariness in her eyes that Sara always felt a bit uneasy about questioning. Sometimes she’d let the two of them cook things in the kitchen, but more often than not they’d go up to Joe’s room and screw around in there, with video games or music or the 50 times Joe tried to persuade Sara to climb out the window and sit on the roof with him before she finally agreed.

As rare as it was for Sara to agree to sit on the roof, it was even rarer for Joe to agree to study with her, much to Sara’s chagrin. Joe had always walked a fine line between passing and failing, but Sara had to admit he walked it well. When she did manage to convince him to study, though (usually the day before final exams), they’d sit on the cushy couch in his living room and somehow manage to bother each other as much as possible while feigning concentration.

The couch hadn’t changed after several years- Sara could tell that much the minute she sat down on it and avoided the urge to break eye contact with Joe’s mother. It was still well-worn, a couch that likely should have been replaced at least a decade ago but had never really been disposed of. Loose threads were protruding from the cover, drawn out from years of visitors fidgeting with them.

Sara shifted uncomfortably in her seat, the slight motion making her sink deeper into the couch’s soft cushioning. She’d only spent one minute in the house and was already sweating, whether from the heat of the home or the thousand-yard stare of the woman sitting across from her.

Ryoko was there, too, sitting to Sara’s left and gazing listlessly at the well-trodden carpet beneath her feet. …Ryoko.

Sara cast a hesitant glance around the room, duly noting the photos covering the walls. Not a single one of hers had been taken down, but several more photos had appeared with Joe’s beaming face featuring prominently in them. Joe’s presence was always enough to fill a room even when he wasn’t speaking; it took a lot to fill in the gaps left by his absence.

God, she missed him.

The wind whistled against the window-screen; Sara had memorized the familiar creak of the wooden window frame being lifted up to welcome in the mild autumn air. Sara had always thought of autumn as a beginning- she loved summer as much as any other kid, but as the haze of the weather began to wind down she was quick to grow impatient and look forward to the school year, to being productive again. Joe had always disagreed with her.

“Fall is the literal death of fun,” he’d complained once, walking home with Sara after finishing the first week of school. “Couldn’t they have pushed back the first day of school by, like, another week? You think if we got enough people to sign a petition, they’d give us an extra week of summer?”

“Oh, come on, we both know even if you had an extra week of summer you’d just be complaining a week later,” Sara had teased back.

The death of fun. It certainly felt like that, Sara decided. She’d never feared the looming darkness of fall and winter quite so much before. But now, she supposed, there was no sunshine who’d weather it with her.

“Well… Sara?” Joe’s mother spoke up, voice hoarse with the sound of repressed tears in her throat. Sara recognized the sound all too well.

There was no resentment in the woman’s eyes when Sara made eye contact with her. No anger, no frustration, nor had there been any in her measured motions when she welcomed Sara into the home. It didn’t take any words for Sara to tell that there was no blame to be foisted upon her.

She was still Joe’s best friend.

“I’m sorry to have dragged you out here on such short notice.” The woman’s voice was weak. “I don’t know all the details of what happened, of course. Haven’t heard anything, aside from the little tidbits the police told me when I dropped by the station.”

Sara’s shoulders stiffened at the mention of the police, at the idea of them pleasantly answering her questions as though they weren’t just as complicit in that tragedy as ASUNARO had been.

“And…” the woman glanced down at her hands, toughened from a lifetime of working. “I know something terrible happened to you. The circles under your eyes are darker than midnight, I know it’s so selfish of me to be dragging you out here, but… I haven’t slept a wink for weeks. Been so worried about Joe, and about you too.”

She nodded in the direction of the black-haired girl who hadn’t spoken a word the entire time. “Ryoko’s been worried about the both of you, too. Your parents weren’t answering the door, so she went to me. I hope you’ll forgive the two of us for disturbing you, Sara, but… you have the answers the police won’t give us, don’t you?”

God, her gaze was piercing.

“...Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

It was taking everything in Sara’s power not to look at the vacant seat to her right. If Joe was there, he would have been laughing and lightening the mood, completing the circle that had been left so jarringly empty.

But they wouldn’t have been having this conversation if Joe was there.

Ms. Tazuna nodded slowly. “This means the world to me, Sara. Don’t forget that.”

Sara did her best to muster a smile. “Don’t worry. I won’t.”

The woman gave another nod, eyes defocusing as though even now, she wasn’t quite sure why she was there. “Alright. Alright. Well, then…” She cleared her throat uncomfortably. “Guess I should get right to the point, yeah? Is he… is… how is he…?”

So she still hadn’t quite let go of that little thread of hope, even after seeing Sara return home safe and alive with no best friend in tow. Who was Sara to judge? When hope was the only thing to cling to, it only made sense to cling to it like a lifeline.

Sara twisted her hands, the same old nervous habit she’d had for years, and wondered briefly if she’d picked it up from Ms. Tazuna. How terrible it was, to carry the news that nobody, much less any mother, ever wanted to hear.

“I… I’m sorry, Ms. Tazuna. He didn’t make it out alive.”

Sara hadn’t expected the hush that immediately fell over the room. She’d expected immediate tears, the grieving cry of a mother in pain. Instead, the room became muffled, still as a painting captured in time.

Slowly, Ryoko looked up from her bitten-down fingers, eyes rimmed red already. Ryoko had always been an emotional person, the only person Sara knew who could fluctuate from full-on sobs to cheerful giggles in less than a minute. Sara was so unused to the look that was now filling her eyes- cold, solid misery. As though there were no tears in her eyes left to cry, no more tragedies to bemoan. Just a deep and horrified comprehension of just how many things in her life had gone wrong.

And, slowly, Ms. Tazuna began to cry.

Tears had become so uncomfortable for Sara to bear witness to. Was it selfish of her to look away? It couldn’t be, not when every raw sob reminded her of the art student seeing her first (and certainly not last) death, of the broken sibling openly weeping over apologies gone unspoken, of the unknowing siblings screaming their throats out with pleas for death so the other could survive.

Especially not now. Not when every tear rang in her mind as a reminder of cold tubes piercing her best friend’s chest, of his corpse slumping and falling in a pool of blood, because oh god he wasn’t supposed to have lost so much blood, how was he supposed to live without it, of the clickclickclickclickclicking rising in volume while her attempts to save him grew feebler and feebler.

Her hands were bloodstained, no matter how many times she tried to scrub them clean. Those dreadful hands of hers had failed her, failed Joe, failed the women sobbing openly in front of her.

She swallowed back the apologies that always rose in her throat as Ms. Tazuna rushed to sniffle back her tears.

“I… god, I… he’s really gone?”

Sara couldn’t bear to look her in the eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

“Please… please tell me it was a peaceful death. He didn’t… suffer too much, did he?”

The resounding wave of clicks flooded her mind. “It was as peaceful as I could make it. I… he smiled at me, right before he died. I’d… very much like to think that means he was happy when he died.”

“What happened?” Ryoko’s voice came out rough, the first of it Sara had heard in weeks. “Joe told me, after our date, that he was going to walk you home, and then neither of you showed up at school the next day. And now… it’s been three weeks? And Joe… Joe’s dead? What the hell happened, Sara?”

“God,” Sara mumbled, mesmerizing herself with the twisting motions of her own hands. “I’m not sure if you’d even believe me if I told you. I don’t even know if I believe what happened myself.”

“I’d believe anything.” The sentence was firm. “I just want to know what happened.”

Sara nodded wearily. The familiar weight of her bright orange ponytail was notably missing- the day after she’d escaped, she’d demanded the hairdresser cut her hair short and crisp. She shuddered every time she thought about the ponytail brushing against her neck as she spent each argument screaming and protesting for her life. Even worse was the memory of how carefully Joe had styled her hair, forsaking his usual clumsiness to braid every strand with a remarkable tenderness. She didn’t want to remember any of it- even though, as the locks went cascading to the floor, she was reminded starkly of Keiji’s bleach-stained trauma response.

“For some reason, something to do with the mafia, we were kidnapped. And pulled into a death game. There were twenty of us, including me and Joe. I- I’m not going to get into all the specifics. It’s going to make me sick to my stomach if I do. But… they made us play this sadistic fucking game to narrow down the competition. Based on cards. Joe drew a bad card, and… they executed him.” Something in Sara’s throat tightened as she finished speaking, and she fell silent.

“Just like that?” His mother’s voice came out as a hoarse whisper. “How… how’d they kill him?”

“I’d rather not say.” There came the gushing sound of blood pulsing through the tubes. “He didn’t suffer too long” - she hoped - “but it was a gruesome way to die. I don’t want to think about it, please understand.”

It took a moment for his mother to register the words and nod, face still painted with horror.

“Why… how did the two of you even end up there in the first place?” Ryoko spoke up again. “You said something about the mafia? How the hell are you two connected with the mafia?”

“I don’t know how I am,” Sara responded immediately. “It must be something with my family. I couldn’t control any of this, I swear, but… Joe wasn’t meant to end up there at all.”

Ryoko paused. “He… he wasn’t meant to end up there?”

Sara swallowed back the lump in her throat. “The game… it was something that was being prepared for ages. There weren’t just a few ragtag kidnappers behind it, there was an entire organization. Even the police were involved. They ran AI tests, hundreds if not thousands of them, trying to calculate who’d be the most likely to win. And… when all the numbers came back, the person most likely to win… was me.”

She spread her arms wide, baring her sins and her cruelties to the world, and in that moment felt distinctly like the angel of death Keiji had branded her to be.

“They needed something to drag me down, I guess. Make the odds more balanced. So they dragged Joe into this fucking mess. I guess they thought that him being there would keep me steady enough to make everything fair.” A cold hand, dripping with tendrils of phantom blood, caressed her chin with a lethal grip. “...They were right.”

Ryoko’s gaze had gone cold again. “So Joe died just because you cared about him? What the fuck kind of death sentence is that?”

Sara shook her head numbly.

“Why did it have to be him?” The heartbreak in Ryoko’s voice was clearer than day. “So many people love you, Sara, why did it have to be him? Hell, I’m your best friend too, aren’t I? Why couldn’t it have been me? I’m a much worse person than Joe ever was, I deserved to be in his place way more. Couldn’t they have killed me instead?”

Sara winced at the growing desperation in her best friend’s voice, the raw crack she knew all too well. It should have been me, it should have been me, it should have been me. Sara could have almost fooled herself into seeing a crisp aquamarine when Ryoko’s hair flashed into the light.

“Ryoko… it could have been.”

The girl fell silent.

“They had files on you too. They knew how close we were, they knew how much you meant to me… but Joe was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And they fucking killed him for it.”

Oh, how she wished she could go back to that balmy early-autumn night, see the smile on Joe’s face and listen to his lighthearted laughter again. The desire to keep one’s friend safe had become a crime deserving of a death sentence.

Ryoko’s eyes remained locked to Sara’s, devoid of any dullness. In the look they exchanged was a deep, sinking understanding, one that had nauseated Sara to the core the first time the realization struck her.

It was by no crafty strategy that Joe had died instead of Ryoko, no favoritism biased against the kindest person either of them would ever know. It was a simple, terrible twist of fate. Ryoko could have taken his place had she done something as inconsequential as offering to walk Sara home instead.

But she hadn’t.

It took everything in Sara’s power to avoid wondering what would’ve changed if she had.

“How is any of this okay?” Ryoko broke the silence weakly. “They killed him- they could have killed me, too. He was seventeen. Seventeen. How did anybody let this happen? How did this happen, Sara?”

“I- I don’t know.” Ryoko’s wrath was simmering; even though Sara knew truly that she wasn’t the subject of the anger, she still felt scalded. “I miss him so much, Ryoko. I watched him die, and nothing in my power let me save him. I miss him, Ryoko, I miss him every waking minute of every day. We were supposed to escape together and get out safe and pretend this never happened, but…” the tears were beginning to well up again. She couldn’t bear the thought of breaking down in front of anyone, especially not over him.

“I’m going to go make some coffee,” his mother interrupted suddenly. She’d been noticeably quiet, but the still-fresh streaks of tears painted down her cheeks told the story she didn’t need to vocalize. “Some coffee, and some snacks. And we’ll keep talking from there, alright? Do you guys have your phones?”

The two girls nodded uneasily.

“Please… find any pictures you have of him. I want to make this wall as bright as possible.”

Without any other words, she hurried out of the room, and it fell to silence once more. Outside the window, the cool autumn breeze began to stir the leaves in the air, gusting forward to brush against Sara’s cheek just as the hallucination had done mere minutes ago.

And the Tazuna household began to feel more like home again.

[the-awful-falafel]

Oh gosh yeah, there was a really unpleasant vile reset of Morty’s character which felt slimy to see because of how much Morty was developing as his own person and how it was setting up for a split from Rick but then they had to make it rick and morty 100 years I guess. It felt extremely uncomfortable for Morty to feel so dependent and that he needed rick to survive despite how much he had clearly grown. It makes all character development null which I feel is weak writing

"Slimy" is a good way of putting it. Like, we spent literally the whole series up to this point showing how Morty's growing a spine, no longer putting up with Rick's abuse, and trying to be his own person in a way Rick actively punished him for, and this was their best idea of resolving a series-long conflict?

The moment Rick leaves with the two crows along with a vague "what we had was toxic and unhealthy" (which is such an understatement and shouldn't even have been Rick's line to deliver), not only does Rick completely dodge any consequences for his treatment of Morty, Morty has a complete codependency-fueled breakdown and practically crawls after Rick in a way that allows Rick to put in zero work to earn his grandson's forgiveness once he returns, in a way that was so utterly, painfully regressive and clearly the writers just backpedaling the entire conflict to keep to the status quo. (And with the revelation/handwavey justification that Mortys are engineered to be like this, the fact the show still tries to frame this as heartwarming and a fresh start between the two of them becomes utterly horrifying.)

Yeah, sure, I can buy that Morty is a forgiving kid by nature. I can even buy that Ricks (not our Rick, but most Ricks) specifically clone/engineer Mortys to be like that, because it's an easier personality type for them to exploit and makes a horrific amount of sense considering what we've seen of the Citadel so far. But the existence of Mortys like Evil Morty shows that that trait is not some unshakeable instinct that they're doomed to regress to, nor an easy reset button that can be hit at any time-- it's a personality trait that can be worn down over time through character growth and sheer jadedness, which is what seemed to be happening to our Morty during the past several seasons. He was becoming confident, more distant from Rick, more resentful of the shit he puts up with from everyone around him, even as he was still trapped within the cycle of abuse and still acquiescent enough to enjoy Rick's company. Most of the time he came off as bottling up his trauma rather than being forgiving, to be honest. He's definitely tried being forgiving and empathetic towards Rick before, and Rick, rather than be redeemed through it, nearly always manipulated and took advantage that quality to punish Morty or get a free pass for his shitty behavior.

So while I could buy our Morty being saddened by Rick leaving, even missing him to some degree because of how abuse can leave you with complex feelings, especially if you had many "good times" with your abuser... the fact he completely fell apart and started chasing after Rick, as well as immediately forgiving him for everything once he saw his tragic backstory, felt so disturbing and inconsistent based on what we've seen of Morty so far. It basically made their entire fallout with each other, as well as Morty's development throughout the series (to not see Rick as a hero, to see past Rick's excuses for his behavior, to prioritize his family's well-being over Rick's, to resist Rick's controlling clingy bullshit, to not need Rick to find happiness and to in fact find relief in his absence) completely and utterly pointless. Like, what's even the message here? What was the purpose of any of it?

It's very weak and shitty writing to render such a large chunk of a protagonist's characterization null and void, and just feels like they didn't want to confront the sheer extent of what Rick has done to Morty in favor of making ~trust~ and ~forgiveness~ the answer, even though that was barely the tip of the iceberg as to what was wrong with their relationship. Our Rick being slightly nicer to Morty is him passing a very low bar and getting praised for it as far as I'm concerned, since it really seems like they slipped straight back into their old dynamic otherwise, just in a "honeymoon phase" for lack of a better word. Like, it's not like Rick caring about Morty has stopped him from abusing him before. Morty was so happy that Rick was back that he couldn't even get himself to set proper boundaries like Beth tried to get him to do, for fuck's sake (and yes, I know the joke is that it was a side effect of the aging serum, but it was treated way too casually for comfort). This romanticized and exaggerated codependence, the character regression of Morty to avoid addressing what Rick has actually done to him, and the harmful "abused child fixing/healing their abuser through selfless love/forgiveness" narrative, even after they established that Morty forgiving Rick can't even be trusted to be of his own free will and is exactly what Ricks want, is just... really, really disgusting to me.

[samwontshare]

Black Widow Review I guess

Was Black Widow the send off movie for Nat that I wanted to see after Avengers 1 first dropped? No.

Did I really enjoy it anyway (with some criticisms)? Yes.

Here’s what worked and what didn’t work for me.

What worked for me:

-Yelena and Nat’s relationship carried this entire movie. It was start to finish a truly beautiful sister movie. Their relationship is so genuine and they have such a great connection on screen. The bickering! The older/little sibling dynamic is so powerful in this movie. Yelena’s need for Nat in her life, and Nat who suffered so much trying to just escape but her younger sibling was left behind. This was so painful and real for me as a survivor of childhood domestic violence - where my older sibling would often leave to protect himself, but then I was left behind to survive. It took me a long time to have empathy for him and his very real need to protect himself. Because we both were just trying to survive and it wasn’t our fault. I saw myself in Yelena and my brother in Nat’s decision to leave the Red Room. For them to come together to take down the Red Room together is just some beautiful, cathartic shit.

-Yelena. Every. Single. Thing. About. Yelena. The acting was just stunning - that Yelena has this childlike quality to her because for the first time, she can be a human being. She has beautiful character moments: fogging the glass, playing with her beer bottle, her enthusiasm for the vest with pockets she purchased AND modified thank you very much. Do I feel they dulled her trauma to keep the levity? Yes, but she still has some stunning moments of vulnerability - especially when she took her fake family to task and called out Nat for saying it wasn’t real. This was just *chef kiss* THE HEAD TOUCHES OMG.

-The found family dynamic. I think some folks might baulk at the forgiveness shown to the parental figures, but for me this rings true as someone again who experienced childhood violence. What’s often hard is that you feel such justified anger toward those who hurt you and didn’t protect you, but for many people (though not all) there is still a need to be loved by those people and you might still love them despite everything because there were good moments in all the horror. What I think actually made this work is that Melina and Alexei both took steps to correct their ways - they immediately helped the sisters. It spoke a bit on generational trauma - particularly re: Melina. Was it perfect? No. Do I think it will work for everyone? No. But I didn’t mind it. Damaged people trying to do better is my jam. And I was just happy Melina lived.

-The opening credits is one of the best things Marvel has ever done. Chilling.

-The humor. This shit was funny.

-The way it centered Yelena and Nat, women supporting women, and said fuck off to the male Avengers.

-This is unpopular but I was fine with Taskmaster. I remember Taskmaster from the Deadpool comics so I get why people are mad, but to me it threaded a nice loop in Nat’s story. Nat’s desperation to leave the Red Room and end her violence meant killing an innocent child - was it heroic? No. Was it human? Yes. Taking the time to make some amends there felt like nice closure, even if Antonia falls into one of my biggest issues with the film (see below).

-I’m glad Dreykov was an unexplained Bond villain with his ridiculous sky lair that everyone should have known about after NYC. Dreykov was symbolic for every shitty male abuser that’s plagued women. It ain’t about him. It’s about what he represented.

What didn’t work for me:

-How WOC showed up in the movie felt super uncomfortable. We see a Widow of color starting the movement to free the others, but she’s quickly dispatched and the job is taken over by two white women. There is a really horrifying scene where another WOC is forced by a white man to kill herself to further Nat’s horror about the situation. The only time in this movie WOC are on screen it’s to 1) die and 2) literally be brainwashed into servitude. There’s no agency for WOC in this movie and it sucks A LOT.

-That sort of plays into my other big problem with the plot and that was the whole brainwashing storyline. It fell really flat for me and I’ve been trying to figure out why. The movie started out really strong with the absolutely horrifying story of Nat and Yelena’s childhood and the opening credits that pull no punches about human trafficking and the literal child torture that takes place in the Red Room.

But the MCU once again proves it’s not ready to tackle deeper issues in their totality - they have to walk it back so it’s still the quippy, action oriented formula that makes every one a blockbuster. So instead of a story about the horrors of the Red Room and psychological conditioning of young trafficked girls into trained killers - and more importantly how those women still maintain their agency despite this, how they are survivors and how they break the chains of the Red Room to take their power back (a story much more grounded in real abuses), they put a sci-fi veneer over it.

Suddenly they’re trained assassins who are brainwashed into being trained assassins…? As if the horrors of the Red Room aren’t enough without the total removal of agency (and it’s handled with so much less grace than say Bucky Barnes’ experience, who breaks his own conditioning). The Widows spend the entire movie as nameless victims waiting for rescue and get absolutely no scenes of agency even when they’re freed.

To me, it undermined the whole trafficking commentary. They remained nameless. They remained victims. They remained waiting for rescue. But at least they’re not forgotten? Yeesh. It flattens the experience of real trafficked people and their resiliency. I think there was a way to both honor survivors and honor those who didn't survive and the movie didn't get that balance.

-I think a lot of other people have already pointed out that this movie feels like Black Widow 2 and we’re missing parts 1 and 3. Telling this story now is a let down. That Black Widow’s only movie is about passing the torch after she’s already dead is a disappointment (and that’s not a criticism of Yelena - who is pure gold in this movie). I left the movie still feeling like Nat herself was hollow, that she didn’t get the earnestness of Yelena’s character. She had an endearing moment of watching spy movies and a beautiful childhood opening and then she gets lost in her own movie bouncing from one fight to another. It was sad as hell. I wanted this to be about her time in the Red Room, her escape from the Red Room, her experiencing what it means to have freedom to decide.

-They really ruined that beautiful moment of Yelena mourning Nat with Val showing up. Look I don’t care if it would’ve been predictable, that movie would have hit harder if Nat whistled back. They didn’t even have to show her. It could have just ended that way.

Overall, I enjoyed it as a movie. I don’t know that I enjoyed it as Black Widow’s ONLY movie.

[tlbodine]

The Great Content Warning Debate

Horror Twitter has been aflame for a few days now with heated discourse about trigger/content warnings, and I keep seeing the same arguments and questions and points come up repeatedly so I wanted to collect all of it into one place because I feel like discourse can only get so far if people keep reinventing the wheel -- so perhaps having the full discussion laid out in one place could be helpful.

Of course, the folks arguing probably won’t see this post, but perhaps there can be some benefit from talking about it anyway. This is intended to be more of an overview of arguments and counter-arguments, collected and displayed as impartially as possible, but of course my own opinions are going to leak in and color some of this. 

NOTE: This is written specifically from the perspective of the horror book community, a genre that traditionally is associated with troubling, transgressive, risk-taking and shocking works. There are discussions to be had for content labels on other types of fiction, but as I’m unfamiliar with the norms and expectations of, say, romance, I’m not going to wade too deeply into that here. 

So without further ado, the arguments and counter-arguments and discussion points that I keep seeing hashed and rehashed and circled around when the issue of trigger warnings comes up! 

If you’re sensitive, you shouldn’t be reading horror 

“Horror is supposed to be horrifying! It’s not fluffy bunnies and kittens! You’re supposed to be made uncomfortable!” 

There are a few problems with this: 

“Uncomfortable” is not the same as “Sent into a panic attack/flashback/relapse” (ie, triggered) 

People with PTSD and other issues can and do engage with horror all the time and often love the genre for entertainment or therapeutic purposes

Many people are fine with some types of content but not others; blood and guts won’t affect them the same as rape, or they’re fine with adults dying but can’t handle child death, and so on and so forth 

Knowing what you’re getting into can help you prepare/brace yourself so you’re not taken unaware; people with the right warnings can mentally prepare themselves and enjoy a book that they would not have been able to read if they were confronted with it unexpectedly

Trigger warnings are censorship 

Some folks have an implicit/kneejerk reaction that “trigger = bad thing” and respond to the request to put warnings on a book as a moral value judgment on the book’s contents. I can see why they might fear that, especially because at a glance it’s easy to conflate the groups asking for warnings with the groups who say things like “if your characters have underage sex then you the writer are literally a pedophile.” But by and large the folks asking for warnings do not seem to be asking for folks to stop writing certain difficult themes, only to provide a heads up for readers about the type of experience those readers can expect from the book. 

There is an argument to be made that warnings could affect the sales of a book, in much the same way that an NC-17 film doesn’t get the same distribution opportunities as an R-rated or PG-13 film, and that authors/publishers will make marketing decisions to include or exclude certain types of content in order to avoid this. 

Trigger warnings will spoil the book 

While some readers will benefit from content warnings, others might have their reading experience ruined by knowing about major twists. This seems especially relevant with a warning like “child death.” It’s very important that people who have, for example, recently lost a child not be unexpectedly re-traumatized by reading about a child dying without warning. But it’s also important that people who want to enjoy the full, shocking impact of such a scene have the opportunity to do so without having it dulled by forewarning. 

Any kind of warning system needs to be opt-in for a reader. Some suggestions include: 

Placing warnings at the end of a book, where readers can flip to that page to look (not helpful if you’re ordering online) 

Placing warnings on the author’s website, where readers can search (not helpful if you’re buying in person)

Given the limitations, a combination of those strategies seems to make sense. It may also be unfortunately true that someone looking for one type of warning (ie, rape) will have their experience ruined if they spoiler themselves for another warning (child death). This may be unavoidable collateral damage. 

Authors/Publishers should be responsible for putting warnings in their books

There seems to be some debate over whether the onus of responsibility for providing warnings rests on the author or the publisher. It should be acknowledged that authors may not always have the power to make this choice -- and if the presence or absence of warnings becomes a factor for judging the quality/moral fiber of authors, those authors could be punished by the reader community for a choice that was largely out of their hands (although, there’s still nothing keeping the author from hosting those warnings externally - how successfully that is implemented is another matter). 

Additionally, the demand for warnings will be placed more consistently on small presses simply because those presses are more likely to heed the request. This could create a double standard where readers might be more forgiving of large pub works that forego warnings because there’s no expectation that they would have implemented them anyway. On the other hand, this could be a way for indie publishers to differentiate themselves on the market and appeal more to certain subsets of readers. 

External groups or communities should be responsible for warnings

There’s a line of reasoning that an author or publisher may not be sensitive to the potentially triggering/damaging things in their work, and some kind of external governing body should manage this work instead. This does sound a lot more like the censorship argument that people are worried about. 

Wiki-style sites and places where people can freely tag books (such as Storygraph) also fit this bill to an extent. They would presumably have less power over the market than a ratings board like the MPAA, but could still exert influence over how a book is received. 

Demanding warnings will negatively impact marginalized authors 

We’re already seeing some evidence that BIPOC and LGBTQ authors are affected more by user-generated trigger warnings on sites like Storygraph, and that these warnings can be weaponized against marginalized authors. Much like review-bombing a book before it comes out can affect its launch, labeling a book with inaccurate trigger warnings could damage its sales. 

Similarly, lists of “safe” and “unsafe” authors have already begun to circulate among some groups, and there seems to be a disproportionate number of marginalized creators on that “unsafe” list -- at least according to the anecdotal reports I’ve seen. 

Historically, it is true that any attempts at censorship or content moderation will be more harshly applied to marginalized groups (see: film ratings for gay sex vs straight sex). 

It’s impossible to warn for everything

One hesitancy that some authors have with tagging their work is they’re not sure what to tag for. Triggers are highly personal, and there’s no way you can possibly guess what might upset a reader. 

Here’s a list of commonly agreed-upon things that might make sense to tag for in a given work: 

Violence/gore 

Suicide/self-harm

Rape/sexual assault

Domestic violence

Child death/endangerment

Animal death/abuse

Drug use/substance abuse 

Racism/slurs 

That said, it’s still difficult to account for context. At what stage do you warn for something? If a character is drinking a beer, do you need to tag for that? Do you distinguish between the tone things are written in, such as being played for laughs vs seriously? If the rape scene is written artistically/metaphorically, does the same warning apply as if it were described act-by-act in a clinical sense? What if your blanket list of warnings gives readers a false sense of what the book will be like -- is it actually helpful at all, or is it just posturing/virtue signaling to include warnings that won’t actually be effective?  

Some would argue that this is dramatically overthinking it, but this does seem to cause a great deal of distress to authors who want to do the right thing but worry about getting it wrong. An argument could be made that trying and failing might be worse than doing nothing, especially if your attempts get you labeled as a “trustworthy” or “safe” author only for that trust to be “betrayed” by a warning you used incorrectly. 

On the other hand, many would argue that we all “pretty much know” what needs to be warned for, and that warnings are intuitive. These granular questions could be viewed as a distraction from more common sense issues. 

Readers are responsible for managing their own safety

Ultimately, because it’s impossible for every potential trigger to be identified and warned for, readers will need to remain vigilant. Of course, there are already ways to identify the content of a book without any kind of established warning system -- such as, for example, reading posted book reviews, asking a question on a book’s Goodreads page, reaching out to the author directly, asking about the book in a reading group online or having a friend/parent/spouse/trusted person read the book first and report back with their findings. 

This is the system we’ve pretty much used as readers for years, before “trigger warning” became part of the common vernacular, and it does have some distinct advantages just because you can get a lot more specific information this way. 

It is possible that if warnings become more commonplace for books that readers may become less vigilant about their own safety, which could paradoxically put them at greater risk of finding troubling content unexpectedly. 

There’s also the issue of “safe” and “unsafe” author lists. At the moment, while the discourse is hot, it’s perhaps more natural to pick sides and disregard some authors for reasons that may be unfair -- for example, marking an author as unsafe or boycotting her work because she doesn’t want to include warnings, but she wants to avoid warnings because she strongly believes they will be detrimental to a reader’s safety. A reader may or may not agree with that perspective, but it’s certainly not the same motive as an author who would do something actively malicious to a reader (like, idk, emailing a screamer to a reviewer or something. that’s a made up example.) 

In the end, trigger warnings are a good idea, but the issue is complex to implement and some people do still have reservations about their overall efficacy. 

We simply won’t know one way or another until we try to implement it. But in the meantime, I do think it’s valuable to continue talking about this, as long as everyone involved remains civil and engages in good faith. Once people’s perspectives start getting thrown out the window in the heat of the moment, or strawmen arguments are erected that don’t reflect what anyone involved actually believes, the discussion ceases to be helpful. 

[tobiasdrake]

Dragon Ball E024 - Krillin's Desperate Defensive and Offensive Battle / Krillin's Frantic Attack!

Funimation's Krillin is apparently less concerned with defense than Toei's. To be fair, every battle is "Offensive and Defensive" so that title is kinda redundant.

According to Funimation's announcer, nobody has ever surrendered during the quarterfinals before Giran.

Funimation's announcer also asks Krillin if he thinks, being a student of Master Roshi, that his upcoming fight with Jackie Chun will be an easy match. Krillin reponds that he hasn't had an easy match yet, which is a bald-faced lie; he zipped through the qualifiers like it was no big deal.

During Yamcha's attempt at confronting Jackie Chun about his identity, Toei added Yamcha attempting to grab Chun's wig and yank it off his head. Jackie uses a Zanzoken/Afterimage to vanish from Yamcha's grasp. This is the first time we ever see the technique in the anime.

After he grabs the mic, Funimation changed Master Roshi's song to be a celebration of martial arts. In the original, it's a pick-up song.

The fight between Krillin and Jackie Chun is manga-accurate. Yes, that includes the elaborate explanation of a complex sequence of fighting that occurred in the span of a second. That is not filler. That is from the manga.

When Jackie Chun uses a Kamehameha to return to the ring, Krillin is confused and horrified. Funimation's Krillin explains that, to his knowledge, only Master Roshi and Goku were capable of that technique. This is an error; even if Krillin does know that the Kamehameha exists, he wasn't around when Goku performed the technique and thus shouldn't be aware it happened. I guess maybe Goku could have mentioned it in passing while they were training?

...

Y'know, it just occurred to me. The Muten-Roshi taught Goku and Krillin that technique doesn't matter because fighting just comes naturally. His philosophy of martial arts is that physical stats are the most important qualities in fighting, and that if they want to be great martial artists, they need to train their bodies to break human limits.

He used a giant rock he could push as a yardstick for them, but when Goku was already able to push it, he picked a bigger rock. It's implied that he couldn't push the bigger rock, as he evades demonstration. But near the end of their training, both Goku and Krillin were strong enough to push it. Thus implying that Goku and Krillin, as of the 21st Tenkaichi Budokai, are physically stronger than the Muten-Roshi.

So how does he even the playing field and best them in the tournament? Through cleverness and technique. The things he refused to teach them because strength is the only important thing.

"You must forgive Wimp Lo. He is an idiot. We have purposely trained him wrong as a joke."

Jackie Chun spends the tournament breaking out Zanzokens, Kamehamehas, drunken boxing, all kinds of shit that Goku and Krillin would have liked to formally learn. And Goku still manages to push him to his limits due to his shonen hero fight prodigy qualities Saiyan heritage, I guess, letting him swiftly learn the techniques as soon as Jackie breaks them out.

[ordinaryschmuck]

Why I (Want To) Love Amphibia

Salutations random people on the internet who probably won't read this. I am an Ordinary Schmuck. I write stories and reviews and draw comics and cartoons. If you've been paying attention to my posts, you would have known that I made a top twenty list of the best-animated series of the 2010s. And if you read my Honorable Mentions list, you would have known that I consider Amphibia one of those shows that, while I like it, I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's one of the best. Don't get me wrong. It's good. But there are issues that I have with Amphibia, and I can't recommend it without being hesitant. I still like it fine, but I doubt some people will be as forgiving as me. So I'm going to explain the quality and faults that the show has, while still being considerate to those who do love it. Because unlike some people who would make a two-hour-long video essay about how much they hate something, I can at least acknowledge that while something doesn't entirely work for me, that doesn't mean it won't work for everyone else. Because there is a reason why this show has such a following...I don't think it's earned, but I won't knock people down when they love something I find passable. And I hope that respect goes both ways as I explain why I (want to) love Amphibia.

Also, this review is going to contain spoilers for the entire series. So if you haven't checked it out yet, I recommend you do it to form your own opinion. Season one is on Disney+, and you're on your own for season two. And I suggest you find a legal way to watch it if you can, because I'm not going to leave a link to a pirating website filled with every animated series and movie you can find. And I'm definitely not going to insert that link into a random letter in this review with the thought that if you have to pirate something, then you might as well work for it. Because that would be crazy.

...

Stop being crazy.

....

Anywho, let's start with:

WHAT I LIKE

The Comedy: Let it be known that this show is funny. Like, really funny. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's funnier than Gravity Falls, which got me chuckling with every episode, but Amphibia definitely hits more than it misses. There are occasions when the jokes aren't really character-oriented and could be said by anybody in the Plantar Family, but if they're still funny, then who am I to complain. Although there is one issue that I have with the comedy. But I'll save that for when I talk about what I don't like. For now, I can assure you that if you're hoping for some laughs, Amphibia has plenty to offer.

Warnings Against Toxic Relationships: But even the best comedies know when to offer some substance. Because I won't lie, when Anne described what is clearly a toxic friendship in the second episode, I was hooked. I love it when kids shows breach topics that can be important for children down the line. And for the most part, I think Amphibia does it well. There are so many instances that the writers' point out the several red flags that a person should avoid when it comes to a friendship and when it's time to either cut that person from your life and stand up for yourself. One of my favorite episodes is "Prison Break," where Sasha explains how she manipulates people and shows zero remorse for it. Then there's the episode "The Sleepover to End All Sleepovers" that shows how a person's influence can affect others and how much it changes perception as Anne and Marcy still believe they need someone like Sasha in their lives...At least I hope that's what the intention is. Because if the writers are trying to say that Anne and Marcy really need someone like Sasha...Well, I'll save that for my dislikes. Because even though it could use a little polishing, warning kids about toxic relationships is what keeps me hooked into seeing what happens next in this series.

It’s Not Afraid to go Dark: On top of breaking borders with morals intended for kids, I just gotta respect a show for playing around with what's considered "too dark." Especially if that show is on the Disney Channel!

The writers are not afraid to imply that death happens in the world of Amphibia, primarily because it is like a swamp ecosystem filled with predators and food chains. And I feel like because the characters are mostly amphibians, the writers can get away with an entire cave filled with the bones of victims as long as they're not humans. But frogs? No one gives a crap about them. There's a reason they're the ones who get dissected in schools.

Plus, a good majority of the monsters that Anne and the Plantars face are pretty horrifying at times. The crew who work on the show do a great job balancing the line of making these creatures look scary, but never go too far that they'll scar kids for life. Except in the Halloween special...How the f**k did they get away with the monsters in the Halloween special? And while they don't ever show what these monsters do, the implications honestly make things much worse, which again, I kind of respect. It's good to have shows like Amphibia that can scare kids a little bit. Getting through something fictitiously dark helps make kids feel braver and prepare them for the real horrors in the world. Especially since most of these creatures are just exaggerated versions of real-life predators...google them.

The Season One Finale: It was "Reunion" that made me realize that Amphibia has the potential to be amazing...it's also the last episode of season one, so let that sink in.

Joking aside, I honestly do love this episode. It's funny, it brings in elements from other episodes, nearly everybody does something useful, and it all ends with a satisfying and equally gut-wrenching climax. A climax, by the way, that is so perfect that I'm going to do a scene breakdown for why it's so good...so, you know, add that to the to-do list (I have so much s**t to make -_-). "Reunion" has so many elements about what makes a season finale so good that I feel like future writers should take notes for their own series that they plan to make. While I wish every episode of Amphibia had this level of quality, the writers know that the last impression is one of the most important. Because I will defend this show if this is the episode people use to trash it.

Marcy: I will also defend this show if someone trashes Marcy. Trust me, the best way to tell that someone is just hating on Amphibia for little to no reason is if they utter the word, "Marcy is a bad character." That is not true. Marcy is a great character, and I'd go so far as to say she's the best character in the series. She's sweet, adorable, and has a story ten times more interesting than Anne's. Anne learns what a sincere relationship is like through the Plantars, where Marcy falls victim to another manipulative relationship through King Andreas. It's her co-dependency that has the chance to get fleshed out more, and I can't wait to see if she has a moment to break out and form her own path.

Also, in the mass expanse of the multiverse, there exists a world where Amphibia is about the adventures that Marcy had in Newtopia as she uses Dungeons and Dragons logic to get by. And I want to see that universe! Because this clumsy nerd is already a blast to watch with the briefest of cameos. Imagine how much fun she would be if she had her own series!

Sprig: I don't know how much love Sprig gets within the fandom, but I got a feeling that it's not enough. He's funny without being annoying (most of the time), there's a whole lot of heart and sincerity to his actions, and above all else, he's the best friend that Anne needed. When Anne explained her very flawed views about friendship in "Best Fronds," it is clear how essential someone like Sprig is as he teaches Anne what friendship really means. It means caring for each other, supporting each other, making equal sacrifices for one another, and just being on the same page as each other. It is genuinely sweet seeing their friendship bloom, and I honestly hope the Amphibia fandom gives Sprig the amount of appreciation he deserves. Sure, he can be annoying sometimes, but for the most part, he's easily up there as one of my favorite characters.

Wally: Same with Wally! Who would have guessed that a character who appears as an dumb source of comic relief has a level of depth and lovability to him? "Wally and Anne" shows that while he is a nonsensical goofball, he doesn't really care what the frogs of Wartwood think of him. What matters is what he thinks of him. And that is just an incredible lesson to teach kids that just makes me love Wally more. 

(It also helps that he's probably the funniest character in the show. I know I said that he's dumb, but when he works, he works.)

Kermit the Frog Cameo: ...It's Kermit the Frog, y'all. I physically can't hate him. Especially since this is the perfect show for him to make a cameo in!

WHAT I DON’T LIKE

Anne’s Character: I don't have a problem with Anne. I think she's a serviceable protagonist, and I love the fact that she's Thai, offering a form of Asian representation other than Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. But here's the problem with Anne: After a season and a half, I still don't know what her character is. If you were to ask me to describe a Disney show protagonist within one sentence, I could do it effortlessly. Watch:

Star Butterfly: An adrenaline junky of a warrior princess who slowly learns to be responsible with each passing season.

Luz Noceda: A generous nerd that obsesses about fantasy and fiction, who still understands when to take a step in reality when the moment calls for it.

Scrooge McDuck: An old Scottish miser who has the heart of adventure and is a duck that almost loves his family as he loves his money.

For Anne, I don't know where to start because her personality is so inconsistent. Sometimes she makes friends with others without even trying, and other times, she gets on others' nerves easily. Sometimes she's a thrillseeker with the heart of adventure, and other times, she's a person who prefers to hang back and avoid doing work. And sometimes she's the only sane character with logical advice, and other times she's the most insane character who needs advice. Now, you could argue that these are all character traits that make Anne multidimensional. But if you ask me, it seems like her personality is dependent on what the writers want her to be for the episode. Someone like Luz going back and forth between two traits only works if there is a dominant personality trait that takes over the other. If Luz spends an entire episode being angry and serious, it proves that there's more to her than just a character that's nerdy and optimistic. But it's clear she is still that lovable nerd by having her say a corny line like, "Talk to the glyphs, Witch!" But because Anne has so many personality traits, it's hard to tell which is the norm and what is out of character. Case in point: Having Anne obsess over hang-gliding in one episode and doing a puzzle in the next is off as neither correlates with each other. Nor do they tell me who Anne is, other than the fact that she's clearly a character lacking a singular identity. And seeing how she's the main character, the one audiences are supposed to root for and identify with, it's probably not a good thing.

The Story: For the record, I have no problems with the story itself...the way it's written, however...

First off, there's too much filler. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as filler episodes have the potential to be fun when written well. The problem is that relying on filler instead of telling your story can leave some people (me) uninterested and angry. And the thing is, there is a perfect way to avoid filler that doesn't involve telling the overarching narrative: Introduce personal plotlines. Look at The Owl House, for example. There are several character-oriented narrative threads that get introduced within the first few episodes. Such as Luz learning magic, Eda's curse, her relationship with Lilith, and Amity's redemption. Therefore, The Owl House avoids any filler episodes just as long as it focuses on any of these plotlines and even introduces new ones. Amphibia has the plotlines, but it rarely focuses on them. Especially since the story takes way too long to develop. 

Every time I think the show is finally going to start moving forward and we can continue the story, there are like ten more filler episodes where everything comes to a screeching halt. Now, to be fair, there is an explanation why we're forced to wait for the story to move forward, and it's because the characters are forced to wait as well. But, even then, there could have been better ways to pad out that waiting than just adding filler. For example, I may not have been forced into an alternate universe where nearly everything wants to kill me, but if I was, I WOULD SPEND EVERY WAKING MINUTE I HAVE TRYING TO FIGURE OUT A WAY BACK! In the first season, how many episodes does Anne spend trying to figure out the mystery of how she got there and how to go home? Two. There are two whole episodes, out of thirty-nine, where Anne tries to figure things out...That is insane to me. But to be fair, season two is doing a much better job at moving things along...but it doesn't change the fact that the writers are kind of bad at telling their own story.

There are two episodes, "Anne Vs. Wild" and "Lost in Newtopia," where the story continues, but it's only in the last few minutes. The problem is that if you take those endings out, the episodes themselves do not change a bit. BUT because those are significant and essential moments for the plot, you can't take them out. Resulting in scenes that, while intriguing, come across as awkward in the long run. So now, my question is why. Why is the story handled so poorly? And I have one theory.

It Feels Like the Writers Can’t Decide What they Want the Show to be: Sometimes it seems like Amphibia is written as a pure slice of life series like Big City Greens. However, there are times when the show seems like it's intended to mix slice of life with fantasy like Gravity Falls. Now here's the problem: Big City Greens and Gravity Falls are two very different shows in terms of storytelling, tone, and character work. Big City Greens is an episodic comedy series where character development is unimportant, and the adventures rarely go beyond just being wacky. As for Gravity Falls, it is a show that is semi-serialized where the character development is constant, and the fantasy-adventures are always prevalent in every episode. And there are several episodes of Amphibia that could be a part of either show. Episodes like "Stakeout," "Lily Pad Thai," and "Little Frog Town" have plots that I can see being in Big City Greens. Then there are episodes like "The Domino Effect," "Toad Tax," and "Marcy at the Gates" that I could see being in Gravity Falls. These two groups of episodes are vastly different from one another that it causes Amphibia to feel disjointed in the process. Usually, I'm a fan when a series mixes different genres together, but do you want to know why something like Gravity Falls does such a great job at mixing slice of life with fantasy-adventure? Because, as I said, fantasy-adventures are always present in every episode. "Dipper vs. Manliness," "Boss Mabel," and "Roadside Attraction" each have the most basic slice of life plots of the show, but there is always a fantasy element or a monster to fight. There are entire episodes of Amphibia where there is no monster, and even when there is, it doesn't have the same amount of tension and weight that the creatures in Gravity Falls have weekly. A show like Big City Greens doesn't have to worry about monsters or evil villains every week because it doesn't need to. It's a show about the wacky adventures of a family of farmers adjusting to city life. Why would they have to worry about a monster every week when they just have to worry about each other. If Amphibia was the same way then there would be no issue. But because if it wants to be a mix of slice of life with fantasy, then it does need to worry about a monster every week. I usually try to defend shows that try to play both sides, but this show has to be the one occasion where I have to say pick one or the other. Because the writers tried hard to be both, and personally, I don't think they did a good job.

Characters Don’t. Stop. SCREAMING!: It's here we move on from what's objectively wrong with Amphibia to the things that just bother me personally...and this is one of those things. I get it. An over-the-top reaction to something minimal can be funny on occasion...but it's never "on occasion" with this show. Nearly every episode has characters screaming to get a laugh, and most of the time, it's more annoying than it is funny. It's Hop Pop who does this the most, and I just feel so bad for Bill Farmer. That voice already seems like it's hard to do, so being forced to scream and yell with it for the sake of comedy can't do him any favors. Other shows, especially ones on the Disney Channel, have characters overreact for the sake of humor, but it's Amphibia that I feel like it relies on this the most. I'm sure some people aren't bothered by this, but I am, and this is my review, so I'm mentioning it.

Poly: Speaking of things that probably don't bother other people...I feel like I'm making some enemies with this one. Because, boy, do I not like Polly. Her voice is annoying, she mostly causes problems for the family, and to me, her entire character seems pointless. No, really. Think about it. Anne is the main character, Sprigs acts as her emotional support, and Hop Pop acts as the voice of reason. What's Polly's purpose? Because all she adds are unnecessary jokes, character traits that could have gone to anybody, and acting more as a plot device than an actual character. The only justification for her that I can think of is that she adds gender balance to the main cast. Which would be more than acceptable if there was a point to her existence. But I think it's pretty evident with her exclusion from the original pilot pitch for the program that Polly's personality is practically pointless...that is most likely the only alliteration I'll ever do for a review, so you have better appreciated it.

If you like Polly, then more power to you. For me, I just don't enjoy her.

Sasha: Oh, nelly. I can already see the hateful messages I'm gonna get from this.

Now, as a character, I actually do like Sasha. I think her personality is interesting enough to dissect, and I think she acts as a perfect antagonist to Anne, the Plantars, and even Marcy if you want to get into it. My problem relies on how much the fanbase is already jumping on the "Forgive Sasha" train. Because, "Aw, she's just like Catra and Amity! So sweet, tortured, shippable with the main character, and--" STOP IT! Stop it right now...and think. With Catra and Amity, you see the environment they grew up in, you feel the abuse they deal with, you understand the reasoning of their actions, and you come to forgive them for who they are...At least for Amity, you can. For Catra, it requires more of an argument. But Sasha? Did we see the same cruel mistreatment to her friends? Did we hear the same coldness in her voice as she describes how to manipulate people? Did we witness the same damage she's done to Anne and Marcy in how they perceive healthy relationships? Apparently not! Because while everyone else is already on the same page that Sasha deserves redemption, I'm sitting here thinking that maybe it's for the best to be a little more hesitant. So far, we have yet to see any way to understand her reasoning and have yet to see how she deserves forgiveness. Sure, Sasha was willing to sacrifice herself for Anne, but did Sasha really earn that? It works as a sudden realization that Anne deserves better, but Sasha has yet to do anything that proves she can be better. Especially since the next time we see her, she's trying to help a fascist ruler get back up on his feet...THINK ABOUT THAT!

But, sure, she's meant to be forgiven. That can work. Because while Sasha shows kids the type of people they should avoid, she can also work as a warning for what kids should avoid becoming. That is a great thing to teach...but it can also be potentially dangerous. Because if incorrectly interpreted, Sasha can show kids that every person who seems toxic just needs a chance to change. And that is the last thing you want to teach, given how very few toxic people actually change. You want to know why The Owl House gets away with an equally dangerous lesson about how not every bully is awful? It's because it shows two sides of the spectrum by proving why someone like Amity did the things she's done while also saying that characters like Boscha and Mattholomule are just a-holes for the sake of being a-holes. Sasha has no one to compare to. Sure, there's King Andreas, but he's a government figure. They're built to be manipulative. Sasha needs someone that's on her level of cruelty to prove that while some people can change and have reason to do so, others don't. And seeing how I don't think she deserves to change, at least not yet, that is an issue. It's the biggest issue out of all the issues I have with this show.

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So, yeah, I think it's pretty evident how I feel about Amphibia when I can write paragraphs about the stuff I don't like while barely being able to talk about the things I do like. Because I do enjoy this show. It's funny, most of the characters are enjoyable, and its discussion on toxic relationships still has me hooked to see what happens next. My issue lies with inconsistency. The main protagonist, storytelling, genre, and thematic purposes are all inconsistent. I'm interested enough to watch more, and who knows, maybe I'll make a final verdict review once the series comes to an end. For now, if you had to ask me what I’m excited to make a return, I don't know if I'll be willing to hop to it by saying Amphibia.

(Also, if you're still looking for that link for that pirating website I mentioned, now would probably be a good time to tell you that I really never did put one in. I told you, that would be crazy...That should teach you to try to break the law.)

[tatyana-dreaming]

Onegin Baden-Baden ‘98 Act 3

okay this type of lighting is acceptable because it gives off an ‘iconic’ look (I lack a richer vocabulary for describing such things, forgive me)

--quick aside for the classic zoom-in on the guy who is dead inside among all the lonely people:

great filmography!!

back to my regularly scheduled critique of the lighting -- honestly. You can only see about half of the people who are truly onstage because they are completely in shadow and their costumes are also black! (Which is a shame because their costumes are quite worthy of attention when you can catch a fleeting glance, and there is some interesting choreography going on that is trying to say something important....)

Okay, I know I said I am going to love this production unconditionally now and defend it, but honestly, the lack of lighting really cheapens what could otherwise have been a pretty luscious production, minimalistic or not... though now I’m wondering what’s hiding in all those shadows...hmmm....

a rare sighting of well-lit faces! (well... somewhat). By the way, Gremin’s aria was gorgeous, again, such a shame most of it was done in the dark!

Welcome to Act 3, otherwise known as the pit of darkness.....

...where we just stand like this for a little bit while the Ecossaise reprise plays (I absolutely love it, because guess what... there WAS no Ecossaise in this version!)

Did I mention there was indeed an actual pit? (of books, again, of course) (ohhhhh we love parallels from Act 1)

AREA DANDY ONCE AGAIN FINDS HIMSELF KNEELING AND INDEED HAVING FEELINGS

The level of coolness and collectedness this Tatyana has reminds me of the version where Tatyana is sitting at the table and sipping at her drink in a very blasé way, mockingly saying “ya plachu” (yeah yeah Yevgeny, what a sob story, crying my eyes out over here). She actually parallels Onegin’s brusqueness from when he rejected her by more of less saying with her motions “take a seat, kiddo, time for me to tell you how embarrassing this is for you”.... I really appreciate this, because Tatyana is all the more realistic the more disillusionment, wariness, and rightful bitterness in response to his actions that she is able to express (rather than premature hesitation and “I still love you” in body language/too quickly forgetting all the pain he caused)

Not a fun time in Yevgeny’s Corner of Shame

Honestly, I love the staging here, it says so much! Just wish they were more visible....

Catch the other parallel from Act 1? Instead of dropping Tatyana’s scarf back on her shoulders like a piece of garbage, Onegin is wrapping her in his coat like an absolute creepo :)

Is it really a quality production of Onegin if they don’t end up on the ground by the end?

Also, will one or both be flung into the book abyss that threatens below??? You’ll just have to watch for yourself to find out!!

But, oh goodness. This ending. THIS ENDING.

I was not expecting this at all. I’m still recovering.

It’s so perfect - it says so much, and it’s so satisfying (as it is terrifying, claustrophobic, and simply, honest. Onegin finally must face.... himself)

Watch it yourself if you dare and especially if you enjoy watching productions of EO - I hope you enjoy it as well!

One last warning (besides Triquet, honestly, those curls are horrifying :D) - the sound, alongside the lighting, is quite a bit subpar, but honestly, who am I to complain about a full length, lovely production of EO on Youtube?

[theangrycomet]

Comparing KO’s (OK KO) Character Arc to Cassandra’s (TTS)

Ok THIS^ actually bothers me and I really hope it’s a shit-post. Sorry, @astratic, but you have inadvertently signed up for some Character Analysis.

Let’s establish one critical difference between Cassandra and KO before we really dig into this shall we?

Cassandra is a fully developed, fully functional adult roughly in her early to mid twenties.

KO is a CHILD, who’s age is literally 6-11, though fans typically agree that he acts in the 8-9 range. Additionally, he is commonly head cannoned to be on the Autistic Scale and/or ADHD.

Because of this, their decisions and actions need to be seen through different lenses.

Point 1: work tirelessly to become a hero like [parent] who you idolize

KO:

This statement perfectly depicts KO’s goals. KO strives to be a hero in order to help people to the best of his abilities. He hates being useless and powerless to help his friends, so he trains to be a better hero and works through his struggles with their help. He lives to be like his mommy and his father-figure. I mean, look at him when Gar praises KO and tells him how proud he is of him.

Cassandra:

Cassandra’s goals are different. She wants to be a guard at the end of the day for glory. She wants people to see and acknowledge her abilities and strength and admire her for it.

Yes, making her dad proud is a benefit of that, but that is NOT her driving motivation.

Point 2: Become discourage by lack of progress and hindrance by social status

KO:

Social status was NEVER KO’s problem. His stalling in progress, as I mentioned in another post, was a mental block. He couldn’t tap into his power He came from lower middle, working class family with a single mom.

Cassandra:

Social Status was her problem, but only up until the 1st season finale where she was placed as Captain of the Guard.

She had regular progress in getting more time and respect as a royal guard. The fact that She CHOSE to leave that behind in order to follow her crush on some half-baked, unplanned road trip is only the fault of her own. She threw out the chance she had been waiting for for her entire life to follow Rapunzel.

And than was given numerous opportunities through out the trip to leave and pursue other goals. 

Point 3. Be Mentally Ill

Okay, first OP, you could phrased that WAY better. 

Secondly, the mental struggles our characters face are completely different and largely incomparable so to group the two is insulting to both characters.

KO: 

Disassociative Identity Disorder (or multiple personality disorder) 

Possible Undiagnosed Autism and or ADHD

KO develops Disassociative Identity Disorder, due to his frustration at lack of progress, the manipulation of Shadowy figure, and his bottling up of negative emotions. KO is mostly unaware of what happens when TKO is in charge and vice-versa. It took the two a long time to figure out how to work together and eventually merge back into one personality. 

He also demonstrates some traits typically associated with Autism and ADHD, though some of those could be on account of his age. It is a common head cannon amongst fans that his either and sometimes both. 

Cassandra:

Cassandra doesn’t have to deal with any mental illness until the season 3 finale where it can be gleamed that she’s working through depression if you squint at it. 

Yes, there is the Blueberry Ghost, but she was never a result of Cass’ mental state so much as her being host to the Moon Stone. 

Her struggles lie in reigning in her anger and her pride so that she can see problems from unbiased perspectives and apologize for her actions. And that is left still unresolved by the time the finale comes around. 

Point 4. find out long lost parent is actually horrifically villainous and have a whole crisis about it.

Perhaps, we need a little reminder here before I dig into this one:

KO is a child figuring himself out and Cassandra is an adult figuring out what she wants in life.

KO:

KO had been struggling with his darker side for quite some time before he asked his Mom about who exactly his dad was. 

This was something the show had demonstrated time after time that bothered KO, not knowing who his dad was.

So he finds out his dad was this big time hero, and gets reassurance from that fact that he comes from great heroes, so he too can be a hero. Only for that to be immediately tossed out the window when it’s revealed that the only person he hates in the entire world, the person he dubs as the truly evil villain, is actually his father. 

His whole world is not only shook to its core, but his self-confidence as well. Laserblast was a great hero who turned villain; what does that mean for a hero-in-training whose already struggling with that darker side. 

Praise Carol for not killing PV on the spot. 

Additionally, PV didn’t actually know KO even existed until a few months before this incident, and wasn’t even sure if KO was his kid (KO does coincidentally share a lot of Physical attributes to Gar) until KO came busting in, wearing Laserblast’s helmet and bragging about how his dad was a great hero.

So when they attempted to have that father-son relationship, it was as awkward and strained as it should have been. (I’ll get to the OK KO Finale in just a minute)

Cassandra:

Cass could have cared less as to whom her real parents were. She had her dad. She had her goals. She had her job. Who her parents were and why they dumped her on the Captain was irrelevant to her life. 

She didn’t care until Season 3, and that whole season was OOC for everybody, 

Even then, it wasn’t so much as a crisis so much as an excuse to use to fight Rapunzel. It didn’t matter that Gothel was her mother, it mattered that Gothel picked the Sundrop over her. Which in all honesty was the best thing that could have happened to Cass.

Her “crisis” revolved around a dead woman’s shattered legacy more than her mother. 

Point 5: Fall under the influence of said Villainous parental figure

KO TKO: (again, a CHILD)

TKO was used and manipulated into letting his darker side show by Professor Venomous/ Shadowy Figure, (this is my opinion), in order to actually have something they could relate to eachother on. 

Yes, Shadowy Venomous saw TKO as more of his tool for power, but you can’t deny that he wasn’t motivated to have his son by his side. 

Additionally, KO had at this point literally locked away a part of himself because he didn’t have the tools to deal TKO with this mentally or emotionally. So he responded the best way he could and pushed the problem down so he and others wouldn’t have to keep cleaning up TKO’s messes.  

KO was in desperate need for someone to understand how he was and how to help him.

And guess who was there.

Cassandra: (again, an ADULT)

Cass was never led on by Gothel, she was led on by Zhan Tiri.

Cass was delusioned that the moonstone was hers by Zhan Tiri just as much as Rapunzel was delusioned into thinking stopping the moonstone was her destiny by Demanitus. 

However, Zhan Tiri really didn’t make Cass do anything, she never pushed her past the breaking point, she never forced her to do anything. 

Baked Ziti only prompted Cass, reminding her what she was angry at. 

Cass was perfectly capable of ignoring her and doing her own thing. 

Point 6: suddenly and dramatically betray everyone you love even as they plead with you to stop. Become convinced they all hate you except for [villainous parental figure] who is actually just manipulating you to gain power.

This point is actually a very good description of what happened to both, given different contexts. Again, remember that KO is a child who is significantly more easily influenced than Cass should have been.

(Note: again, Zhan Tiri’s not her Parental figure and neither was Gothel)

Point 7: ruin everything and destroy your home

KO TKO:

His destructive rampage was motivated by the betrayal of the one person he believed to understand and support him entirely. He was literally grabbed by the shirt, lifted in the air, told he was nothing more than a tool at best, and that the plan to conquest together had been a lie. 

Wonder where I’ve seen THAT BEFORE?

(Sorry about the low photo Quality, I quickly search and screen shotted so)

(yes it’s this scene that made me think Mad Ben and TKO would get along)

Cassandra:

Which betrayal are we talking about? Because both involve trained guards rightfully attacking Cass for injuring the crown royalty and wrecking the castle.

Point 8/9: snap out of it at the last second and be horrified at what you've wrought/ the world is fixed by an incredible magic. Reconcile with your loved ones. Flourish

KO: 

This is accurate. 

But KO didn’t have to lose his power to see how bad he messed up. He was actually at the top of his game. He probably could have taken out the President of the Universe if he really wanted to. Instead he begged for everything to get fixed, and wished that EVERYONE (even Professor Venomous) could live their best lives. 

Cassandra:

She was only repentent AFTER she lost her power. Even then, she does not apologize for her actions but rather the circumstances and ONLY to Rapunzel herself. She does not care that she caused a world catastrophe, and still wouldn’t have had she won. 

With how it was executed, Cass did NOT deserve such an easy redemption. She should have had to work at it. She should have at least attempted to apologize to the people whose lives she ruined. To the people she’s hurt. Not just Rapunzel. Rapunzel has no right to forgive her in place of everyone else. 

Eugene should not have to forgive her.

Varian should not have to forgive her.

The Brotherhood honestly deserves to fight her in combat. 

She should not have been able to ride off into the sunset and avoid the consequences of her actions. 

BUT I digress. 

IN SUMMARY:

KO and Cass, while they share some similarities, do NOT have the same Character Arc. At all.

Sincerely, 

TheAngryComet

[calypsoff]

Fifty Nine. Part 2

Clinton honestly plays at my heartstrings with Chris, just to see a good father. He is ever so attentive towards Chris and I love to see it, he just comes out with the most random things too which makes me laugh but to see a father, it’s nice to see. I don’t know what one is, it’s been tainted for me because of my own and I don’t think I know what a real father should be doing “you good now yeah? No more tears” Clinton placed his arm around Chris and patted his shoulder “no more, I’m good now. I ain’t seen y’all in a while, I missed it. You know how much I missed you when I was locked up but yeah, I’m good” Chris makes me so proud, he really does. He just so open with his emotions with his family, even with me but I love that “so what is happening in the family, how is the baby? Tell me” Clinton asked Chris, he probably wants to hear what he has to say which I don’t mind “good, erm me and Barry aren’t friends anymore. I’m not sure what he is on at all, we just not speaking anymore. He was saying things that angered me that I ended up beating him, in the middle of iHop and I got arrested and now I got a court case. So that happened” Clinton looks horrified “again!? What did I say to you about letting anyone get to you! Seriously, you have so much going for you. I said it to you when you were first time arrested, I said to you that you are not like those boys out there that need to do these types of things. Barry isn’t proceeding the way you are Chris; you need to make new friends in that field. The people of VA you leave behind, nobody is happy for you” Clinton was harsh there “we understand why you both didn’t come to the home and we appreciate that you even came to VA, I’m very happy to see you both even came but we will come to you both” Joyce added “I’m not hiding though, fuck them” Chris said “you’re not hiding son, you’re fully there and we see it” Clinton is right “move to Cali, then I can see you when I want and then when Robyn isn’t speaking to me I can see you all” Chris would mention that “no baby, your sister is here” Chris pulled a face “but I would like you to be safe, you know Robb is throwing threats” Clinton looked at Joyce “I think your mother wants to stay in VA; our family is here. Only you are in Cali” Chris shrugged his dad’ arm off “yeah the family that don’t fuck with your son, ok. It’s just me” Chris is offended by what was said, I don’t blame him.

Chris as he does he’s walked off because he’s not happy, I’m not going to get myself involved because it’s his family “Clinton leave him, he needs space and we give him that” Joyce said as Clinton was going to get up and follow him “I just don’t want him to be sad, it’s a lovely day. Seeing each other” taking in a deep breath “do you all still speak to the family still? It’s just Chris?” I questioned, I want to know more actually “they speak to us yes, but when it comes to Chris he is a bit of a taboo, Robb is the first born grandchild. Spoilt, so when that all happened they took sides and it hurts me so much because he’s my only son, but I also want my family, We decided to just keep both sides happy and not speak on either, I know my son feels I am betraying him. I don’t know what else I can do without losing the family I got and have nothing” pressing my lips into a hard thin line “but then Chris had nothing besides you three? How was that fair on him. In that situation, coming out of jail and he came back to nasty behaviour. I just feel it’s hard for him, he did what he needed to do to be out, I won’t ever say he did wrong. You both got your boy back and that alone should be praised but how you think he feels when now he’s between you and that family you want” I shouldn’t be involved in this because it’s not my issue at all “it’s ok because I will have my own family” oh Chris heard then “son, you’re taking it the wrong way. You knew this, you knew the family didn’t forgive. We would always choose you over them, it is never like that but we are ok in VA, we really are so please let’s not argue, can we not” Chris made his way over to me and sat next to me “I have no family” looking over at Chris “stop” I don’t want this to be an argument, we didn’t come here for that.

Both Clinton and Chris went out to get some groceries, they took Frank with them. I wasn’t letting them go alone, I’m not risking it at all “Joyce, it’s playing on my mind and you can tell me to mind my business but. They want to kill your son, does that not hurt you and want you to not deal with them anymore?” I’m still on it “kills me deep inside. My sister came and she said my son is suffering, I said to her so is my son as you all wish nothing but bad on him so all he keeps getting is bad, I told Chris to go to church more, he needs the blessing because there is nasty people out there that are wishing it, those people is my family. I do want a change but all I know is VA, I am comfortable here” as a mother I can imagine how hurt she is about it all “all I knew is Barbados Joyce, but I did it and I was happier, hand on my heart a change could be best for you all because he wants to protect you all too, but that’s something you all want. Chris is a hurt man and I see it sometimes, he loves Barbados, he loves my family and minus my dad but how close we are. I see his smile and then he comes here, and he has no family around, it’s a shame. All they are doing now is selling stories about him, my publicist told me, and I said deny it all, he doesn’t know that, but I do. It’s just a nasty situation where now his cousin is threatening him, I feel like someone has put some witchcraft on him, you’re right. All those bad wishes add up and maybe we need to go church, but I think if you really want a change, make it” they are thinking on moving then they need to do that now before Chris gets the house for them.

Joyce touched my bump and it made me giggle “my mother would be jealous right now, she just calls me on FaceTime to stare at my bump. She’s so excited about this, she’s telling me she will move in for me and she will do this and that and I’m like hold on mommy, I am ok. Chris and I are ok, I just know Chris is going to be so supportive. But I think I will let her stay for a few days and then she needs to go home, she will take over. The baby is going to be so loved, I can’t wait” she cooed out “what you guessing? My mother said boy weird enough, she said the way I am carrying so I am so unsure, also Chris and I met this guy in Jamaica called captain and he knew so much, he turned around to me and said girl, I was so freaked out” Joyce gasped “wow, well I think girl. Oh baby I hope it is a girl, daughters are a pleasure. Such beautiful, spirited kids, boys are a pain. I enjoyed my daughter then I did my son but Chris himself, he was clingy to me, forever wanting me to pick him up but I feel like when boys grow up, they grow up to not be yours” Joyce has got a point “he also said we have four kids but one is vague and I questioned and said was one a miscarriage and he said no so that scared me, I don’t know. I hope it’s not anything awful” I sighed out “impressive” Joyce said and I laughed “well” I dragged out, her son has super sperm so it could be a thing actually “would you want that many? You’re a very busy woman” I chuckled “with the help and support from the love of my life yes it can happen, even if god blessed me once I am happy” Joyce cooed out “I am so excited for you both” this baby is going to be so loved and I can’t wait.

Sweet of Joyce, she cooked for us and I wasn’t expecting that at all. She made me sit down and not do anything at all, it’s nice “you know what, this was so nice. Thank you, but leave the dishes, Chris will clean up” I grinned at Chris “what?” He said confused “you heard me but it’s getting late, I don’t want you driving home and it’s too dark for you” Chris chuckled “she is trying to make you both leave, she is bored of you” Chris is such a liar “don’t listen to him please, he is a liar. But anyways, can we take a picture together, just before you depart. I want a in-law’s picture, I’ll get Rich to come and take it” getting up from the seat “oh god my hair is not done?” Waving Joyce off “stop it” making my way to the living room to get Rich so he can take this picture of us “Rich, can you take a picture” walking back on myself “what’s bout your bump?” Chris asked “your jacket” taking his jacket from the back of his chair, I just really don’t care about hiding about the fact I’m with my in-law. Putting Chris’ jacket on and zipping it up “don’t you think it looks better on me?” I smiled at Chris “mhmmm nah, better on me” Chris wrapped his arms around my shoulders “Rich can you notice my bump? Anything at all?” I asked as he aimed the camera up “erm no, the counter covers it” shuffling to Joyce and placing my around her “ok smile” I grinned wide, I probably look a mess but who cares “done” Rich made his way over to us, taking my phone from him “awwww thank you, I love this picture. I don’t look pregnant here at all, ok family” pressing next and adding a caption ‘I have the cutest in-laws’ pressing send on the picture “it’s been honestly so nice to see you both, but honestly. Chris will clean” I am being deadass, he thinks I am joking “awww, how long you both staying for?” Joyce asked “erm, I would say a few days. Spending some quality time together” I laughed to myself because that sounds stupid, we see each other anyways.

Chris is downstairs trying to figure which home he wants to get for his parents, I spoke to Chris last night about them remaining here, they are happy to be here so why change that for them. Even though for Chris I would have liked them to come to Cali but it’s fine, just because they are happy here so he is downstairs looking at different homes, he changed his mind on what he wants to get and I don’t mind because I need sort out his birthday gift or gifts anyways, but I don’t know what I am doing with this shit so I am getting my brother to help me, I have not a clue about this shit so while he is down there I am calling him “nigga, why you take so long to pick up” I scolded him “sorry, man I was just going to have a nap under the sun” he knows damn well I miss Barbados “asshole, so anyways. Have you done your investigation for me? I told you, if I say it to him he will clock on so I don’t want to ask” he better have spoken to him “yeah, I text him and said well lied to him. I said I am moving to Cali to be closer, and I am looking to get a car, well at first we spoke about sports and then I turned it into about cars, then he said oh my car is just an Uber which made me laugh but he spoke on Lamborghini, he said once he makes his money up he will get that for himself, so there. I did it” I have no idea about cars, they cute whatever but I don’t. I have that Porsche that is in a garage that I don’t even use “right so now what? Rorrey please, you got to do this for me” he has no choice he has too “right there is a few models but I am flying over sis so we can both go and look, don’t worry about it I got you” thank god he is coming.

As I come down the door knocked at the same time “I will get it” Rich said as he got up, I need to make some lunch actually, I am hungry. Slowly walking down the last step as Rich walked by me “you don’t look happy” I said, “I was having a nap” I gasped “so in that nap you were saving me from what?” Rich chuckled as he opened the door “oh wow, hi” letting out an oh, it’s TJ “I come in peace, honestly big man” Chris jogged by me “is that you TJ?” Rich moved to the side, TJ stood awkwardly with a car seat in hand but then he placed it on the floor as Chris jumped on him, giving him the biggest hug “oh man, it’s the married man” I smiled seeing them both hugging, seeing Chris happy with his friend “oh shit, oh my god. Is this Camron? Holy shit, who this white boy” Chris crouched down to the car seat “hi Rihanna” TJ waved at me “hey, come in. Chris bring the baby, come in. I am going to make lunch, you want some?” I asked “no thank you, I just ate. I really wanted Chris to meet my son, like I am so excited about this” watching Chris as he bought the car seat over to me “look at him, he fat and white” I cooed out looking into the car seat seeing this chubby little thing with the lightest hair “wow TJ, he is you!” I spat “he is so cute” now I am jealous, I Want my bbay with me now, Camron is so cute.

Walking into the living room and sitting next to Chris “ugh, I cannot wait for our baby to be here. Look at you being all daddy, TJ your son is beautiful. He is really you’re twin, god bless him” TJ laughed “thank you, I just wanted Chris to meet him, and it happened. I just wanted this moment, when he’s older I can start taking him to Cali, he will have someone to play with when little Breezy comes along but thank you” poking my lips out “come here, you are so precious” picking Camron off of Chris, slowly placing him in my arms “you really are a charmer staring at me with those big brown eyes” I should have known, like he’s a baby and they can sniff milk “aye, wait. No, those nipples are mine” I snorted laughing moving him away from my breast, this baby is ready for milk “oh shit, I just fed him, he probably senses it” lifting him up and sat him up on my lap with my hand behind his head “take a picture for me, do you mind?” I asked TJ “I don’t, I mean after the breast thing. You can” Chris aimed the camera, placing my hand just under his chin “mind the stomach” I added “Camron, hey nephew! Yeah, you going to smile at me, awww look at that” Chris turned my phone to me “cute, post it please and put. Just had a baby the world thinks I am pregnant with, I want to annoy the rumours floating around. This will throw them off” also just that alone will upset Seiko, she will be so angry about me posting her son.