#his height is a little inconsistent but he is consistently Big | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

asaka-lucy-dr-rc · 7 months ago

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First of all, thanks so much for your detailed answers! I'm glad you took the time out of your busy schedule to respond.

As for his eye color, I mentioned in my ask that his eyes are clearly blue at times, but yes, they are also greenish. In fact, I think there are times when they are clearly greenish, even if you just look at Rui Komatsuzaki's art, for example, below is one of the official art on the cover of the official art book:

So often, on merchandise and such, this eye color is the standard. Like this and this.

I agree with you that gray is really the right color. This is just my guess, but Komatsuzaki tends to paint with low saturation, so he increases the saturation as a final touch, and I think Nagito's eyes would be too distinctly blue or green. But just as a matter of taste, I was a little curious what color you prefer for Nagito's eyes.

Incidentally, what I think is the right color for Nagito is something like this:

(This is part of a drawing I did for Hajime's birthday that I posted earlier. I was wondering if there were others that would be better, but not as many as I thought because I have a tendency to draw him with a closed eye expression...)

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Also, thanks for mentioning his hair color! That's right. Sometimes it's clearly red and sometimes it's not. It is interesting to point out that it is even purple! XD (Come to think of it, the hair color of the Nagito figure designed by Kei Mochizuki was also purple.)

I also feel that it varies from art to art whether his bangs are also red or just the back of his hair is red. The reference sheet says that his hair gets whiter as it goes to the top of his head, so the hair on the top of his head is definitely white, but I think the color of the tips of the bangs is inconsistent. Personally, I interpret his bangs as white and only the back of his hair as red, as shown in this image:

I know a lot of people think Nagito's showing Junko's arm art looks bad but I honestly like it.

Huh? Do many people not like it? If so, it's very surprising. I like it a lot, just like you! While he is acting out of the ordinary by transplanting Junko's arm, I like the fact that his facial expression is like that of a child who is excited about something.

I also like the art of Nagito standing in front of the flame because it uses the design of his hair. Because in the reference sheet, his hair is described as unstable, like a flickering flame.

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By the way, I've seen you mention the Danganronpa 2 spin off mangas many times, but this post made me decide to buy them! The Nagito in this manga has the physique of a "180cm" tall man. (This is a side note, but I just learned that his height setting is lowered in the English version! XD) I will read this manga and use it as a reference because I always have the problem that I tend to draw Nagito too young (almost like a ten year old kid).

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While I'm at it I also want to highlight his reference sheet, it's clearly consistent because that's the job of a reference and I think his expression is pretty cute here.

THIS!!!! is how I always feel too! Nagito's face on the reference sheet is so cute. I've seen it so many times to reference it, but no matter how many times I see it, I can't help but be surprised at how cute he is.

In fact, Komatsuzaki's drawing style has changed a lot since his early days, and perhaps the most recent drawing of Nagito he did was the bonus art for the collector's edition of Danganronpa Decadence, in which he looks much more mature.

(I actually didn't know about this art until recently. When I first saw it, I was confused by how insanely cool he was and how short his hair was. lol)

Speaking of reference sheets, I like how thin Nagito's thighs look compared to Hajime's ones. There is no big difference in the silhouette, but Hajime's pants have more horizontal lines where the fat seems to be pushing out the cloth, while Nagito's have fewer horizontal lines, so I think his legs are thinner. I know a lot has been said about the thickness of the chest, but I thought few people mentioned the thinness of the thighs, so I wrote about it. (Sorry for my crazy point of view...)

I was just rambling on about what I remembered from your response rather than replying to you, I hope you can tell that I found your answer very interesting.

To conclude, I would like to talk about my favorite art of Nagito. If I were asked the question, this would be the first thing I would mention:

(This is a screenshot taken from the Ultimate Gallery of the Switch version of SDR2.)

I really think this art is a good and pretty representation of his face. I like that this art clearly shows how he looks with his coat off and how thin his body is. (This does not mean that I like thin-bodied characters. I just think that it is part of the design of the character of Nagito Komaeda.) I also like the chain on his pants, so I like that it's drawn as well.

Sorry to write at almost as long as or longer than you. Thanks so much for your answer!

Hi Zen! This might be another difficult question for you to answer, but I'd like to ask: Which official artwork of Nagito do you like the most?

Even in the official art, he looks different sometimes, doesn't he? I am still confused as to what color his eyes are. (In a lot of fanfic they are described as gray, but in some art they are clearly blue).

I would like to know which of the official artwork, whether in games, anime or manga, is your favorite.

Whoa!! that Is a difficult question! I'll try to answer it though haha!

I have a lot of them I like but choosing one is pretty difficult... so I'll just start this answer off with a discussion on the inconsistencies statement! I believe Nagito's eyes are definitely gray, at some points it maybe hard to tell but they're definitely gray! There are a few anime moments where his eyes feel green, some promotional material straight up changes it to green, and a small amount spin off art may change it to something that can be interpreted as blue, but for the most part they are absolutely gray.

I think the only actual very small change he undergoes is his color tips? His hair always has a gradient but the colors used for it are a little inconsistent sometimes. In Danganronpa 3 they're red and occasionally purple so it's a little weird haha! Sometimes he's not drawn with his gradient at all, a slight gradient with the same color, a red gradient, or a purple gradient so it's pretty confusing. His gradient also changes with how prominent it is depending on the art if there even is one. He's drawn most often with red subtle tips though so I think that was the intention. You could probably chalk it up to lighting if you wanted Lol.

While I do love a lot of his sprites I think some of them are pretty restrictive and lack all of the emotions we know he's able to show because he does in other appearances. This is why I really like when the Mangas allow him to be very expressive beyond what his sprites can convey! I think his sprites can really excel with some expressions but falls flat with others.

Rambles about his sprites in Dr2 and his slight inconsistencies aside, a lot of his art is great! (I'm very biased) but I do have some strong opinions, positively and negatively, on quite a few of them. The main thing is that I don't know if I actually have a favorite??? It's a really difficult question.

But I do want to highlight these three dr2 cgs I really like! He isn't fully 100% consistent here but I really like them. I know a lot of people think Nagito's showing Junko's arm art looks bad but I honestly like it. Nagito about to play Russian Roulette is such an awesome moment too! The one where he has the fire behind him is not only really cool, but also a really good in game shot of most of his body from a different angle!

I truly, again, love his manga art! His specific spin off's manga has a lot of really amazing, interesting, and fun visuals! Even if I'm not really fond of the anatomy the artist uses it's still really good stuff. The Danganronpa 2 spin off mangas have really good anatomy and expressions he looks sooo good there I'm in love with it.

While I'm at it I also want to highlight his reference sheet, it's clearly consistent because that's the job of a reference and I think his expression is pretty cute here. I don't really see people talk about it so I just wanted to also bring it up Lol.

For the most part I've really struggled to directly answer your question because he has a lot of different interpretations, art, and appearances that all mix together into one mental image or understanding of what he looks like for me. I really love most all of his art so it's hard to say. Nagito has a lot of different tones in his art as well, from his crazed ramblings to happy expressions, he has so many tonally different art pieces because he excels at being sweet and intimidating. This makes it even more difficult!

In conclusion, I don't believe I can come up with an absolute answer for you unfortunately. Regardless though, I definitely learned from this that I have strong opinions on all of his art. I hope you enjoyed my appreciation for some of his art and small talk about mild inconsistencies of his haha!!

Apologies this took so long and Thank you for your ask <3

#my ask sent from my main blog

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galactic-glamour-girl-posts · 3 years ago

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In celebration of the Animaniacs reboot's second season coming out soon...

I'm going to list a few things I think the reboot does better than the original show so far (not including technical things like animation quality or sound quality, that's not a fair comparison). Here we go:

1. There's a "Here's the show's namey" variant every episode now rather than re-used lines (like "Pinky and the Brain-y"). I totally get why the original show re-used lines (although by season 3 they do so way less), but it's just really cool the a new and unique one every episode now.

2. Yakko's role as big brother seems more apparent now. He was always the leader in the original show sure, and he clearly did care for his siblings, but there wasn't really a sense of authority there. The Warners, either alone or together, always did their own thing. The fact that they weren't all (physically) the same age didn't really matter in most episodes, and often only apparent due to their (kind of inconsistent in the original-I SAID I WOULDN'T TALK ABOUT THE ANIMATION) height differences. Now, in addition to him being the leader, there's multiple episodes where Dot/Wakko will ask Yakko for permission to do stuff, like keeping the bunnies as pets or to watch TV.

It's a cute touch, a nice little reminder that "Oh yeah they're not triplets".

3. The PG rating has allowed for edgier jokes/language. Characters can say "Hell" now, Pinky almost said "bull-(you know what)" and Wakko almost said "motherf-(you know what)", then there's these:

It's dark but I think it's funny darn it 🤣.

4. Less mediocre segments. I've said it before, I'll say it again, the Warners, Pinky and the Brain and Slappy carried the original show. I also enjoyed Rita and Runt and Minerva Mink segments, but they were cut from the show after season 1, so that sucks. Every other segment on the show I consider kinda okay/mediocre/bad 🤷‍♀️. A lot of characters would've worked better as recurring characters within segments where they're not the stars. Honestly their absence is a positive in my book, while watching the original show I often found myself thinking "Man I wish this show only had the Warners, Pinky and the Brain and Slappy segments in it". I know Slappy isn't in the reboot but that's not a deal breaker for me (the other two segments are a lot more popular so I understand prioritising them). If no Slappy also means no Katie Kaboom, I'm good.

5. More heartfelt moments - outside of the Rita and Runt segments (as in there's a higher ratio of them, not trying to compare how heartfelt they are). In the original, pretty much the only segments that had heartfelt moments consistently was Rita and Runt (Rita's song about humans, "Smitten with Kitttens", "Puttin' on the Blitz", etc). This is fine, it's a comedy show; but it would have been nice if some of the characters that got a lot more screen time than those two (the Warners, Pinky and the Brain, etc) had some too, especially since there are no Rita and Runt segments past season 1 anyway.

I know before the reboot there were quite a quite few heartfelt moments related to Animaniacs-the climax of the Pinky and the Brain Christmas special, Dot's fake out death (spoilers for a movie from over two decades ago-yes it's that old get over it) in Wakko's Wish...basically all of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo Clock". But most of those aren't actually in the original show, only one of them is. Wakko's Wish is a non-canon (I swear "Animaniacs" and "canon" are two words that don't mix but you get my point) movie and Pinky and the Brain series is a spin-off. If we're talking exclusively about the original series that ran from 1993 to 1998, then only "One Flew Over the Cuckoo Clock" counts really.

Maaaaaybe that one moment in Taming of the Screwy when Scratchy tells the Warners to leave...but it was really quick and not taken that seriously (it kinda just felt like build up for a punchline) so I think that one's a stretch (although it was a little sad).

Meanwhile the reboot already has caught up to it (in only 13 episodes as well) with two moments; Brain's backstory in "Roadent Trip" and Yakko's panic attack in "Fear and Laughter in Burbank". They're both taken seriously, last over a minute and say something pretty interesting about the characters involved. It's just nice to see characters other than Rita and Runt be allowed to have emotional moments (again, within the actual show). It's on-par with the original in this regard despite having 86 less episodes. And there's probably more heartfelt moments to come!

6. The Warner's fangs:

They make them look a little more feral! 😁 Very fitting, I wish they had them originally now. I also appreciate that they (usually) don't have gaps in their teeth anymore. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE their TMS designs, but I honestly prefer the Warners with no gaps in their teeth.

7. The PatB segments. Just in general, overall I like them more than in the original show (I'm comparing them to the ones in the original Animaniacs, I'm not talking about the PatB segments in the spin off series, Pinky an the Brain). Not only are they more creative, with ideas like Future Brain and Julia, they also do the running gag thing less. What I mean is, in the original show their segments sometimes would have a running gag they do over and over within a segment, to the point where it becomes obvious that gag is how/related to how the plan is gonna fail. Some examples of segments that do this are "Bubba Bo Bob Brain", "Spellbound" and "Brain Meets Brawn". Now of course we know they're gonna fail, but trying to guess how they fail or the surprise how how they fail is one of the fun parts of their segments. Their segments are already quite formulaic, so why add to that? The reboot so far pretty much only did this once in "Close Encounters of the Worst Kind", so that's good.

8. More variety in terms of musical genres. Most of the songs in the old show are of the old-school Broadway type of music. There's a lot of orchestral music, a bit of jazz. Many songs just add lyrics to pre-existing music. Which is good, 'cause those songs are good. But I appreciate the reboot adding some other genres in there, like pop and hip hop. They're NOT what you'd expect an Animaniacs song to sound like, but they're still amazing! (like The Cutening song or Yakko's rap).

9. The Warners' morality. This one's really important. Ideally, the Warners should act like karmic tricksters. Yeah they can be annoying to anybody, but are generally harmless and actually pretty friendly if left alone/aren't being mistreated. Once someone actually provokes them though, they won't hesitate to humiliate, harm and drive insane their "special friend". This is explained well in "The Sound of Warners" (credit goes to clownmoontoon for the video):

https://va.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_qnxp2bDmlE1r1jfup.mp4

Sometimes the Warners don't even need to be the ones being provoked for them to go after someone for being a jerk, like in "Morning Malaise", where they call out a radio show host for being rude to their guests, or in "Dot's Entertainment", where they call out a parody of Andrew Lloyd Webber for placing blame onto his actors.

But then in seasons 4 and 5 of the original show they start bothering people and legitimately harming people who literally weren't being rude to them at all. Some examples of this are "Anchors Awarners", "Acquaintances", and "Back in Style":

I guess I can understand in "Back in Style", they were mad about being sold off to other studios against their will, but they took it out on actors who probably had no say in the matter.

Thankfully, in the reboot they seem back to normal, once again only intentionally humiliating and/or harming people who actually provoked them, be it hunters ("Good Warner Hunting",) cocky athletes, ("Gold Meddlers"), rude conductors ("Here Comes Treble"), etc.

...and I think that's all I got. There are other things too but they're smaller points not really worth mentioning. I do like both series the same but wanted to praise the reboot specifically given that I have done multiple posts analysing the original show.

Season 2, here we come!

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ghosthan · 4 years ago

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what would you say are the differences between 616 Tony and MCU Tony? 🤔

Hi anon! Many people have talked about this and I'm certainly not the authority on the topic, but I’ll try my best to explain some of the major differences that I have noticed! Thank you for asking and I’m sorry it took me so long to answer you.

Important to note: neither version of Tony has had a totally consistent characterization. Depending on who you ask and which comics/movies they've consumed, they might give you a different answer here and not be wrong.

616 Tony is even harder to put into one box because his character has been around since Tales of Suspense in the 1950s. That’s a long time. Things have changed over time, under different writers, changing political atmospheres, and outside pop culture influence (including influence from the MCU, unfortunately, in recent years.) You get the picture. So I’ll be making some generalizations and try to be clear about which eras I’m speaking when I make these comparisons, but ultimately, if someone wanted to be contrarian, you could probably refute a lot of what I say here if you cherry pick canon. Which is fair enough! That’s sort of the fun of comics, there’s so much to choose from and something for everyone.

So here are some observations from me, under the ‘read more’.

1. Physical Appearance

This is sort of an easy one, but worth mentioning!

MCU Tony does not look like 616 Tony. RDJ is great, but he would not be most 616 fans’ casting choice on looks alone. MCU Tony is tan, a Malibu man, with brown hair and brown eyes, and RDJ has sort of round facial features (a funny sloped nose, big, round eyes, round forehead, not a particularly sharp or classically ��superhero masculine” face.) As you may know, this lends well to certain fanworks and tropes, such as Tony having Bambi eyes.

Or Tiny Tony. He is not actually canonically small, but he's smaller in the MCU than in 616 and from what I can tell, a portion of fandom has latched onto that. He’s a grown man, but RDJ is pretty short, and of slighter build than 616 Tony. RDJ is 5′9, but they make him act in heels, and I believe his canon MCU height is 5′11. Another popular trope I’ve seen is shrinking Tony in fanfic/fanart for a dramatized height difference with Steve, making him weak or fragile; this is fine because everyone has their own taste, but for the official record, he’s a capable, strong guy! Especially in earlier stages of the MCU, in which he’s a bit younger. Tony isn’t just a brain; he carries out his plans with his own two hands! He builds his armor, he remodels his lab, he survives hand to hand combat when he doesn’t have the armor. Muscles!

616 Tony is 6′1 without armor and 6′6 in armor (making him taller than his 616 Steve counterpart in armor and very close to the same height out of armor!) 616 Tony is generally paler with black hair (sometimes the classic blue-black I love so much) and blue eyes, and it obviously depends on the artist, but he has a pretty typically ‘masculine’ face and build. Generally he is drawn with a squared jaw and a high bridged nose (such as in the Extremis storyline, or drawn by Marquez), but again, this varies from artist to artist! Here's some examples of 616 Tonys.

Wait, you might be saying, but I have seen comic panels where Tony has brown hair/brown eyes!

Yep. Due to a combination of forgetfulness, inconsistency, and the MCU bleeding into the general consciousness of the comics, sometimes Tony is randomly depicted in the image of RDJ, or if not in his image, at least visually inspired by the MCU-- hair color and style, eye color, dialogue, etc.

616 fans don’t typically love this; he’s very handsome when drawn this way, of course, (look at him!) But it isn’t really the same character.

Also, MCU Tony has (at least for some of his movies) a reactor built into his chest. While 616 Tony has, at times, been more or less physically connected/dependent to his tech, he doesn’t have the built in reactor (most generally speaking, there are times in comics when he temporarily has the tech built in, but this isn’t really the status quo.)

2. Relationship with parents/ family history

While it is definitely implied in the MCU that Howard was not a good father to Tony, (such as in Iron Man 2 when Tony says “You're talking about a man whose happiest day of his life was shipping me off to boarding school” and “He was cold, calculating, never told me he loved me, never even told me he liked me”), Tony has a different sort of attitude toward Howard in MCU than in 616. It’s kind of weird, and hard to discuss. To me, it seems implied that MCU Howard was emotionally abusive to Tony based on what Tony does say about his childhood, and yet, the films kind of randomly give Howard weird moments of “Well, he tried his best and deep down he loved me the whole time!” forgiveness. MCU has a Howard kink and I'm very cringe-face emoji about it.

For example, Iron Man 2 shows that old film reel of Howard talking about how Tony is the greatest thing he ever created, and in Endgame, when Tony goes back in time, he meets Howard and has a very weird interaction with him in which Howard declares he would do anything for his son, (to his deeply damaged son who is a new father himself.) Yet, for all his talk, it's his actions that speak, and his actions left Tony damaged, traumatized, and emotionally inept at forming healthy relationships. So.

Sorry. I’m a little bitter. I'm just uncomfortable with how they sort of set up an abuse history but then treated it kind of lightly and Howard gets off the hook as "well, he tried his best" without really acknowledging the hurt he caused.

Avengers: Endgame 2019

I won't go super in depth into the abuse stuff because it's a little touchy and could take up a lot of this post. But.

I’m not against any reconciliation and I do appreciate the fact that a lot of times, victims of abuse feel a desire to forgive and reconnect with their abuser-- my issue with the MCU depiction of Tony and Howard is that Tony never really gets the vindication of his abuse being recognized for what it was before he forgives Howard. To me, that’s not forgiveness as kind of... gaslighting himself that it wasn't as bad as he remembered his own experience being, because of a sense of nostalgia and grief. It’s not the same, and I have issues with it.

However, a lot of my opinion is based on subtext and it is just my opinion; with depictions of abuse, different people are going to react differently, and other people may have found these scenes touching and gotten something positive out of them, and that's totally fine too!

It’s also a bit difficult to talk about Tony’s relationship with Howard in 616, for a few reasons: shifting timelines, lots of canon that I have not read all of, and the fact that it really is difficult to sum up such a complicated relationship.

Right off the bat, I’ll address the basics. I used the same scene in another ask, and I think it's frequently cited in any meta regarding Howard, but in Iron Man Vol. 1, we see more into Tony’s childhood and see Howard verbally abusing his family, drunk, at the dinner table.

Iron Man Vol. 1 #285

We get this scene with adult Tony’s retrospective commentary on how his own issues that he blamed himself for were actually a cycle starting with his father, the insecurity and abuse and alcohol, and that he realizes how much this has influenced him. Both MCU Tony and 616 Tony have some form of “stop the cycle of shame” arcs, but I don’t really see how this works narratively in the MCU because Tony makes excuses for Howard and continues to blame himself for a lot of his own personal struggles, whereas I think there’s just a bit more nuance in 616.

But uh. This isn’t totally true, and in recent years, things got real weird. I choose to ignore this chapter of canon, but in the Dan Slott run, Tony Stark: Iron Man, Tony’s whole backstory gets imploded. For one thing, the little of Tony’s childhood it shows in a flashback is uh. Uh. Well, it’s certainly out of character compared with previous 616 material, depicting Tony as an overly confident poor sport.

Basically, Tony is adopted. Tony has an evil brother. Tony’s biological parents make an appearance, as do his ‘classic’ parents, Howard and Maria. It’s just weird. It’s kind of out there. I’m honestly not a huge fan of this and ignore a lot of it, but it is certainly a difference between MCU and 616.

3. Personality

I’m going to be very general. Both Tony’s have an outer self which they present to the public and an inner self, but they’re a bit different. Both Tony’s have struggled with self loathing, but I think MCU Tony’s actual self worth is a bit higher, even just at some points in time. Even if his ego is part of his facade, I think he does believe some amount of the “I’m awesome��, even if just when it applies to his own work/inventions/saving people. Not to say that these moments of fluctuating self esteem make him egotistical, but this combined with his egotistical act and snarky, non-stop sassy dialogue, he’s quite different in general personality from 616 Tony, who is much more reserved.

Some more recent iterations of 616 Tony have been adapted to reflect the snark of the MCU, but he’s not so snarky and he tends to approach things more seriously. This is not a dis on MCU Tony; I think MCU Tony uses false ego and excessive sassy jokes as a means to deflect and control, which I think is very interesting and it’s nice to see this explored more in depth in fic where you get to see the thought process behind the bravado. MCU Tony is a partier, a good times guy, especially during Iron Man 2, in which he really does disregard consequences to have fun (driving his race car, partying drunk in his suit, letting pretty girls play with the armor, shooting off repulsor blasts for fun in a crowded room); I’m not bashing MCU Tony-- I think he had psychologically understandable reasons for behaving this way, the man was dying-- but 616 Tony really doesn’t act this way generally, and I think it’s a personality difference more than a difference of one being “better.”

616 Tony handles his stress differently, and they just have different psychological patterns, I think. I’m coming up kind of blank trying to think of a good comparable 616 arc, (sorry, I’m brain dead) but a less-than-perfect example might be Tony’s brain delete arc; he’s “dying”, like in Iron Man 2 he knows his expiration date, (circumstances are quite a bit different), but he throws himself more into work, into a cause, and as he really fall apart, we see him spiral into self doubt, remorse, fear, and insecurity, sort of falling into himself with lots of manly tears and calling himself pathetic.

(Some things happen in this arc that a lot of people find Gross. I also find these events gross. But. I don’t count the sex in “World’s Most Wanted” as partying to cope with personal mortality, because I think both character involved are in “end of the world” mode, and it’s more seeking intimacy for comfort than partying to numb the hurt. Does this distinction make sense? No? Perfect, moving on.) 616 Tony is generally much more humble.

Whereas MCU Tony, I think, tries to outrun those feelings via parties or making dozens of new suits, or seeking comfort by comforting others! Gifting things to people, building things for people, highly personalized individual living quarters, teaching Nebula games and trying to show her a fun time when they were in peril together.

They have some traits in common, for sure! But canon being inconsistent both in the MCU and in 616, my observations aren’t the rule, because I’m kind of cherry picking and going based on limited memory. But off the top of my head, they’re both extravagant gift givers! Recall Tony gifting Pepper the giant bunny in Iron Man 3, and compare this with Tony carrying a mile high pile of Christmas gifts after shopping with Rumiko in Iron Man Vol. #3.

I would say that while both Tony Starks are considered humanitarians, this is much more fleshed out and supported by canon in 616. Some examples of his philanthropy in the MCU: Tony makes charitable donations of art and money, Tony has an organization which provides disaster relief/cleanup which is referenced in Spider-Man Homecoming, Tony has an MIT grant for students and staff members. But to be honest, a lot of his MCU philanthropy is only mentioned in passing, or is largely handled by other people on his behalf and on his dollar.

In 616, we see Tony using charity almost as a means of therapy: it’s something he does very privately, not in the public eye (at least, not always), and it’s something deeply personal to him. One example that immediately comes to mind is Tony’s home for disadvantaged girls in Iron Man Vol. 3, and we see scenes of Tony basically driving the streets at night, picking up underage prostitutes, feeding them and listening to their stories before bringing them to a home he’s established where he knows all the residents, and provides educational opportunities and protection.

Another more recent example in canon that the Tony fandom loves is that Tony canonically holds babies at an orphanage. Sorry I don’t have panels for all of this, this section got long and I have been working on answering this ask in a very scattered way for a very long time.

Both Tony’s are romantics, I literally could write a whole other post about their canon love life similarities and differences, but I will briefly say that while MCU Tony does the long on and off, and eventual ultimate commitment, to Pepper Potts, 616 Tony is a serial monogamist; he is always falling in love, and he’s definitely not a playboy, but the hero-ing, self loathing, and lifestyle make it very hard for him to keep anyone in his life, and most of his partners fuck his life up and betray him. Needless to say, 616 Tony is not married, and certainly not to Pepper Potts.

Oh, and I guess this is so obvious I almost forgot to include it, but a huge similarity between both iterations of Tony is that they both constantly use their own life as a bargaining chip, and will pretty much die for anything. Or be the bad guy for a good reason (at least, in his own mind... see Civil War, or Hickmanvengers; 616 Tony, especially, does not shy away from making the hard decisions, and this leads to a lot of guilt and tension in his relationships-- often with Steve because 616 Steve/Tony angst fans are well fed, I guess)

Remember that time Tony had Steve’s mind wiped because Tony felt that Steve’s inflexible morality might hinder the Illuminati’s ability to save the world? And it eats Tony up inside and erupts into a homicidal fight when Steve finally gets his memory back? Me too.

Tony Stark as a character is defined by sacrifice, both of his own life but also of his own happiness and reputation and conscience, I think, in a lot of ways, and we see this in many universes. I could go on about Tony’s propensity for sacrifice in the less obvious ways, because I think in terms of heroic sacrifice, Tony has done a lot that other heroes wouldn’t be able to do because of moral inflexibility and conflicting philosophical schools of thought; Tony really is the “whatever it takes” type, and often believes the ends justify the means if he deems a threat worse than the potential wrong that could be done in preventing the threat. We see this a little bit in the MCU in the creation of Ultron, and in Civil War with the Accords. But there’s a whole lot more going on there I don’t want to get into.

4. Alcohol

MCU Tony’s alcoholism is never really explicitly explored. He is shown drinking in Iron Man 1, and in Iron Man 2 he drinks a lot and makes a fool of himself publicly, but MCU Tony doesn’t get any specific narrative arc focused on his drinking, and if I recall correctly, I don’t think he ever refers to his drinking as alcoholism in the movies? Also, while his binge drinking and embarrassing behaviors ostensibly stop after the events of Iron Man 2, he is shown drinking on screen at least one other time after that which I can remember, and it wasn’t a “falling off the wagon” moment, and an alcoholic in recovery such as 616 Tony would not take a drink casually. This article sheds a little light on some decisions made about Tony and alcohol in the MCU.

Alcoholism is a huge part of 616 Tony’s personality, which I went a bit more into depth about in this post, so I won’t repeat myself too much.

5. Their relationships with the Iron Man armor

A few points here: MCU Tony is famous for the “I am Iron Man” line being repeated throughout the franchise after he blows his own secret in the end of the first movie. MCU Tony sees himself as one with Iron Man, and the suit is the tech that enables him to be this version of himself. He sees Tony Stark and Iron Man as inextricable: you cannot separate them, and his identity is public. He, as Tony Stark, is an Avenger.

You may remember MCU Tony’s induction into the Avengers; in Iron Man 2, Nick Fury is forming the Avengers and tasks the Black Widow with going undercover to assess Tony to be a part of a hypothetical initiative. “Iron Man yes, Tony Stark no” and the comments about Tony as a narcissist may be funny, but the fact is, the snark and erratic personality of MCU Tony at the time of the formation of the Avengers in the movies is not at all like the Tony of the comics, at the time of the Avengers being formed.

In 616, things are quite a bit different! Tony invents the Iron man armor to save himself (like in the MCU) and uses it for hero-ing, but in secret. He works very hard to protect his identity as Iron Man, and for a long time, as far as the world is concerned, Iron man is a mystery man piloting armor built by Tony, hired as Tony’s personal body guard, (hence the 616 Steve/Tony fandom’s proclivity for identity porn as a trope!) When the Avengers form, Iron Man is the Avenger, close friends with the Avengers, (particularly Steve!) and Tony Stark is just the benefactor of the Avengers, providing them with a place to live and finances with which to operate.

In the very early days, Tony did not have the “reactor” like in the MCU, but his chest plate did keep him alive, leading to some very dramatic shots of Tony charging up using a wall socket, lamenting the plight of a secret hero.

616 Tony, generally, and especially in some of these earlier comics, was quite reserved, rather serious, and very angsty, (in private of course.) He may be wealthy, but speaking generally, he’s much less ostentatious than MCU Tony, less of a show off, less into flashy things and grand gestures. Of course, this isn’t always true in the comics, and some iterations of Tony are more like this than others, but MCU Tony is showier, sillier, and more of a fun-times guy. Any MCU fan would find those panels quite contrary to the Tony Stark you know:

Iron Man 1

Iron Man 2

I think I would say that while MCU Tony sees himself and the Iron Man identity and the armor as all being inextricably connected, we see a bit more compartmentalization with 616 Tony, who pretends that the armor is a whole separate person for years when his identity was private, and we see instances in older and newer comics, in which Tony is uncomfortable with some aspect of himself as Iron Man (for instance, during the second drinking arc, Tony temporarily swears off being Iron Man entirely, or for another example, when Tony is in a comma and Tony AI exists during Secret Empire, Tony “lives” in the Iron Man suit, and I think this could be interpreted as a meta parallel to Steve during this arc; Steve has had some core aspect of his character inverted, Captain America becoming Captain Hydra, so Tony experiences a similar inversion-- Tony Stark and Iron Man are forcibly merged, in a way that Tony seems deeply uncomfortable with, if his digital drinking relapse is any indication. But I digress; sorry for the tangent.)

Okay this post is inexcusable long, and very, very tangential, and I don’t feel like I’ve really covered everything I wanted to. But it has been sitting in my inbox for too long and if I don’t post it now I never will, so I hope this long, rambling thing has been a little bit helpful to you! Thank you so much for asking, I had a lot of fun rambling about this.

If you want to read a similar post, but well written and organized, with other insights, this post by Sineala answers a similar question!

#Anonymous #han reads comics #han meta #meta #iron man #tony stark #616 tony stark #616 #mcu #long post #han speaks #ask #sorry this definitely gets more incomprehensible as it goes on but i have been writing and rewriting and editing and fretting about this #for so long that if i dont just post it i probably never will and i sunk too many hours into it #to throw it away now 😅#abuse tw #abuse #alcoholism tw #alcoholism

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an-apocalypse-of-magpies · 4 years ago

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On the world of Mortal Engines, class, and the metaphors of consumption

This is less an essay and more a collection of thoughts. Basically I just saw a video on the Mortal Engines film and its being a civilisation too stupid to exist. I got fed up, mainly because so many of the criticisms amounted to ‘the book did it better’ with little elaboration but also the arrogantly grating voice of the presenter got on my nerves, but I cannot deny the points made and in fact wanted to elaborate further on the worldbuilding of this series and, while unrealistic, look at why the books were so engaging.

Some background to start off - Mortal Engines is a four-book series (and three-book prequel sub-series) written by English author Phillip Reeve, and depicts a bleak post-apocalyptic world. North America is uninhabitable and lost to the sands of time, irradiated, poisoned, and flattened by war. Eurasia is mostly barren plains. And, of course, the central premise - towns and cities have raised themselves onto mobile platforms and trundle about. Well, mostly. A major antagonist to this system is the Anti-Traction League, a collective of nations hiding out in old east China, the Indian subcontinent, southeast Asia and some of Africa. They are seen as barbarians and heathens by much of the world for refusing to mobilise, instead hiding in stationary citadels behind their mountains. The Traction Cities near-universally engage in a philosophy of Municipal Darwinism, a savage system of bastardised pseudo-biology where cities literally predate each other and ‘consume’ each other for resources. Cities eat towns, towns eat smaller towns. Some towns and cities deliberately adapt to cheat the system and make themselves a less appetising target, or for that matter a more aggressive and efficient hunter.

THE TRACTION CITIES

The first three books tend to focus their action on one or two cities, whereas the last is a bit more of a road trip. The other consistent thread is multiple characters’ stories running concurrently, usually reconnecting near the end. This allows the books maintain an open, almost global scale - you’ll nearly never not��be moving, even sitting still on a city, which reinforces the theme of unnatural life. The first book focuses on London, which has been sulking in what was once Britain (by sheer happenstance on their part and pure irony on ours), and is suddenly running at full pelt back into Europe and eastward as fast as her engines can carry her. Why? London’s not the biggest city around, and the vast expanse of Eurasia is now the Great Hunting Ground - it’s where the big boys play, and by play I mean ‘savagely predate each other’. It’s dangerous territory for a little city. But over the first book, it becomes increasingly apparent that Traction Cities are increasingly non-viable option for existence. Fuel is scarce, prey moreso, and what morsels London can confidently snap up will not sustain it for long. There is an ecosystem at play here - static settlements can farm resources, but are universally seen as food, either by small bandit settlements to raid for supplies or for larger towns to just straight-up eat. Small towns too small to hunt tend to be miners or gatherers, either mining minerals to use or trade, or gathering resources like wood from natural deposits or sifting through the waste heaps left by bigger cities. Most cities bigger than that are ‘urbivores’, or hunter towns, that hunt and eat smaller prey or opportunistically scavenge the ‘carcasses’ of dead cities. I mentioned specialisation earlier, and like in nature, species and cities can occupy a niche that gives them an advantage and thus increased chance at survival. Airhaven, for example, is a politically-neutral city in the air that floats around Eurasia seasonally and serves as a rest stop, fuelling station and trading exchange for airship pilots the world over, Tractionist or no. Tunbridge Wheels is a pirate-run town that has a lightweight wooden chassis and flotation devices to hunt amphibiously in a world where many small towns escape threat by setting up on islands. Panzerstadt-Bayreuth is a conurbation of four massive cities, too big to survive long without prey, they banded together to take down the biggest of prey (it’s unclear whether they achieve this through sheer size or whether they decouple and become a pack hunter). Anchorage, the last American city, neutered its own jaws to increase mobility, skating around the frozen north too fast for threats to catch up with, and survives on trade. Brighton is a pleasure city that paddles around the warm Mediterranean, technically still a predator but with no real agenda and about the only city left that can be called a tourist city (it’s run on the back of brutal slave labour). And these are just the major ones. Throughout the books, cities are treated like living things ... like mortal engines.

And like living things, they need resources to survive.

A DYING WAY OF LIFE

The books are inconsistent on the origins of Traction Cities, as it turns out deliberately - history is written by the winners, after all. But it’s all closely tied to the ‘apocalypse’ part of the post-apocalytic I mentioned earlier. Long ago in-universe, long into our future, was a terrible event known as the Sixty Minute War. This war tore the world asunder with nuclear and quantum energy weaponry. America, the epicentre, is simply no more (it turns out there are some fertile areas in Nova Scotia, but for the most part America is dead). Entire new mountain ranges were born, notably the Tannhäusers in East Asia that shield the heartland of the Anti-Traction League. There was a long period of geological and tectonic instability. According to legend, Traction Cities arose to escape these instabilities. In other words, like animals will flee a volcanic eruption, cities first became mobile to escape and survive. Trade was likely facilitated by towns literally being able to park next to each other. Ironically, London was also where everything changed. After Nikola Quercus conquered (static) London with his mobile fortresses, he decided to upgrade and raise London onto wheels to become the first fully-mobile city. And he did it for war. After all, there’s no better comeback to ‘you and what army’ then literally rolling up with your entire city. By the series present, the idea had caught on and grown into the ideology described above. But herein lies the problem. Early Traction London was a tiny little thing. Now it’s not even the biggest fish in the pond, but it’s still HUGE. And, as we all know, big things need lots of energy to go. London is described as having a top speed of about sixty miles per hour at the height of a hunt. So, you need fuel. There is still oil in this world, mainly because they now have no qualms about mining Antarctica, but if you think there’s nearly enough crude oil to run a world full of cities like London you are sorely mistaken. Wood’s not much better off. And, of course, Traction Cities tend to run on some form of internal combustion engine - it’s only at the very end of the traction era that science has advanced enough for a town to experiment with magnetic levitation. So what do they burn? Well, bits of other prey towns. Do you see the problem? Use fuel to hunt towns, burn those towns for fuel. What next? And it’s not just fuel. London captures a little salt-mining town called Salthook at the beginning of the first book to introduce us to the concepts at play, and we see what goes on in the Dismantling Yards - part of a system literally called the Gut, in case the metaphor wasn’t clear yet. Everything is recycled. Bricks, mortar, steel, wood, everything. Because the state of technology is so weird in this world, Old-Tech (technology from before the SMW) can be incredibly valuable to history and/or science, and London is keen to snaffle that up too. The people are interred into refugee camps, though if you know anything about how real-life Britain treats refugees you can probably see where that is going. And it’s not enough. It’s never enough. Food is an even more pressing concern. Unless you’re very rich (more on that in a mo), food is mostly algae-based, then hardy vegetables that grow quickly like cabbage. And it’s running out fast. And London’s a big city with a lot of resources at its disposal. Most cities don’t even have that. A lot of cities are starving on the wheels, city and populace alike. A lot of cities run on slave labour, and feed those slaves as little as they can get away with. Shan Guo, home of the Anti-Traction League, is a green and vibrant land only because it doesn’t have cities running over or eating its farmlands every other day (and, again, city folk generally don’t know this - they’re given endless propaganda that Anti-Tractionists are barbarian warbands a la Mad Max). A lot of the A story is told from the point of view of Tom Natsworthy, who until the events of the book had never left London. He’s never seen bare earth or walked on mud before. He’s never seen a horse. The idea that you can survive, much less thrive, outside of a Traction City is alien to him. But on the city he came from, everything is rapidly running out, and some cities are turning to desperate measures to survive, including Arkangel openly bribing pilots to sell out the locations and courses of nearby cities. A chilling scene in the first book even has Tom see, from the safety of the air, the corpse of Motoropolis, a city not unlike London that literally just starved to death, running out of fuel and helpless as the scavengers closed in. It’s been weeks since the city stopped, and the narrative description evokes the grotesqueness and sadness of a whale carcass. Sheer Jingoism is about the only thing keeping Municipal Darwinism alive - Traction good, stationary bad.

CLASS, CLASSISM, AND OTHER SOCIAL OPPRESSIONS

In a world so starved as this, compassion is hard to come by. Cities still exist mainly by virtue of rigid social stratification, and often that stratification is literal - most medium-to-large cities have tiers, and will generally arrange those tiers based on social class. London, for example, has seven tiers. The bottom two tiers are dominated by the Gut, the engines, and homes and communities of the workers who keep them running. Tiers 4 and 3 are miscellaneous proles of increasing social standing. Tier 2 is mostly what I’d call ‘tourist London’ - lots of the nice bits and the establishments that London likes to be proud of. Because of his work at the London Museum, this is the quality of life Tom Natsworthy was most used to. Tier 1 is High London, where all the rich live and have their amenities and nice parks (and even that doesn’t last - London’s food shortage means even the High London parks are eventually, begrudgingly, turned over for food production). Katherine Valentine, the hero of the first book’s B plot, lives here. Finally there’s Top Tier, which is purely administrative. The only buildings are the Guildhall (the seat of government), St Paul’s Cathedral (which the Engineers’ Guild have secretly been installing a deadly superweapon in under the guise of ‘restoration’ work) and the headquarters of the Guild of Engineers, the most powerful of London’s Guilds. Social stratification is nearly non-existant, and people are shown to get very uncomfortable when out of ‘their space’. Tom is sent to work in the Gut during the capture of Salthook as a punishment before the plot ejects him from London, and he notes being actively intimidated by the claustrophobia, the dirt, the rough and burly labourers, and the noise. But despite Tom’s relatively privileged life - he lives near High London, above the heat and noise and smoke of the engines, in the care of one of the top four Guilds of London - he is of very low social status. Tom Natsworthy is an orphan; his parents were Historians, but were killed when an accident occurred and part of Tier 3 collapsed, crushing anything on Tier 4 beneath. Even before that, the Natsworthys were middle class at best, but being orphaned meant being left to the care of an orphanage run by the Guild of his parents, the Historians. The Historians were Tom’s only source of education, and eventually they would employ him, but with no parents or money, Tom can only afford a Third-Class apprenticeship. He has no upwards mobility within the Guild, and with no money he can’t leave and train with another. His dream of being a pilot trader, or better yet adventurer, will never come true under normal circumstances. The rich live in a completely different world yet. Katherine Valentine, daughter of the Head Historian and the Lord Mayor’s ‘right-hand man’ Thaddeus Valentine, has a positively bougie lifestyle with not a care in the world. Ironically, though, it is through Katherine’s eyes that the horrors of London’s class system are revealed. Trying to find information about her father’s would-be killer, Katherine finds herself regularly travelling to the Gut, eventually befriending an apprentice Engineer who witnessed the attack. But in the Gut, life is very different. It’s not just a life of hard labour and smoke - petty criminals and the aforementioned ‘refugees’ are tasked with working dangerous and sickening jobs like managing the city’s sewage. And by that, I mean ‘harvesting literal faeces to be converted into food and fuel’. The foreman overseeing their work admits they feed such criminals nothing else. And he has the gall to be annoyed that they keep dying of diseases like cholera and typhoid! These people are denied medical care, denied treatment, denied even basic food other than being told to literally eat sh*t. And when they inevitably die? They get sent to the Engineerium to be turned into robotic zombies that can never get sick, tired or unhappy. And, eventually, they’ll be put right back to work. The crimes these criminals did to deserve this, remember, include petty theft, criticising the Lord Mayor, and living aboard a town that got eaten. The foreman literally cannot fathom why Katherine would care about these people’s wellbeing - after all, they’re just criminals. The Engineerium’s end goal in all this is, again, to staff the entire lower tiers with robot zombie workers who will never grow tired, get sick, complain or protest their lot in life, and will never disobey orders, and just enough human overseers to keep things running smoothly ... because that’s what these people are worth to London, cheap, unending labour. Katherine can’t even bring herself to tell her high-class peers about what she learned down there, because it’s such a different world that they would never empathise, much less care. Again, slave labour is common in this world, especially child slavery - Brighton runs on it to maintain its image as a floating Caligula’s Palace, and in Arkangel slavery is so normal that we watch a rich man beat a slave nearly to death for the crime of bumping into him. In the second book, we see the logical end-point of this. Anchorage’s social structure has completely fallen apart due to a plague in recent years that turned to once-proud ice city into a ghost town manned only by a skeleton crew. The margravine, Freya, is only 14, but with her parents dead, she finds herself in charge of the whole city. She has no household staff, apart from Smew, who finds himself constantly juggling outfits to adopts the roles of steward, chamberlain and so on. His official role before the plague was ... erm ... the Dwarf. He was there in a manner similar to a court jester, for the amusement of the margrave due to being a little person. But the head navigator is just ... the woman who kept the maps. The head engineer is going half-mad, seeing his dead son staring at him from the shadows, and the only reason the town’s still going is because his systems are the best on the ice and can mostly run on automatic. They have no doctor. The only other people of consequence in Anchorage are the Aakiuqs, the Inuit couple who run the air-harbour. The common workers of Anchorage number in the mere dozens. And yet, because they’re so fixated on their traditions, nobody will drop the formalities and just admits that they’re trying to uphold a class system that doesn’t work anymore. No, that’s not quite right - everybody realises it’s pointless to maintain the artifice of Anchorage’s social heirarchy, but nobody wants to be the first one to say it out loud. Much like Municipal Darwinism, nobody want to address the elephant in the room, that the system is broken and that people hold onto it because it’s comfortable in the face of uncertainty. Only in Anchorage’s darkest hour, when everything has been turned upside down and the conquerors are on their doorsteps, do the agree to drop the formalities, drop the artifice of class, and address each other as people, say what they think, and work to save what they have left. And of course, there’s the racism in the world. Life on mobile cities has made cultures smaller and more insular, considering we mainly see this series from the point of view of culturally-English towns. Throughout the first book there is a clear west vs east divide - the Traction Cities are generally English-speaking or multicultural enough that English will get you by. The Anti-Tractionist League, meanwhile, are south or east Asian, or else African, and are commonly understood to be ‘those brown people’. The only ethnically white Anti-Tractionists are from ‘Spitzbergen’ (likely Scandinavia/Finland and northwest Russia) and Hester Shaw’s family, and the latter lived on a town that floated out to an island and gave up running from predators forever. The way Tom reacts to this attitude calls to mind the way racists might refer to ‘race traitors’. There’s even an in-universe slur for people who live in static settlements; ‘Mossies’, because ‘a rolling town gathers no moss’. However, when Tom is taken to Shan Guo itself, he realises that all the propaganda he’d been fed his whole like is exactly that - propaganda. Shan Guo is described as beautiful - an endless patchwork of rolling fields and farms, colourful, bright, vibrant, heaving with life and energy. The Anti-Tractionists aren’t vicious savages, they’re just ... people. Tom can’t understand it at first. He wonders how people can live without the hum of engines or the vibrations of deckplates - he subconsciously equates city life with, well, life, and the absence of that makes him uneasy. But he can also see this culture before him, thousands of years old, outlasting even the end of the world, and he realises there is another way. The next time he sees London, he sees it from outside, from the side of the hunted, and he realises it’s not beautiful or efficient, just dirty, and huge, wrapped in its own waste smoke and driven only by destruction. For the rest of the series, even with the rise of the radicalised Green Storm (Anti-Tractionists Lv2), large Traction Cities are consistently the enemy. Tractionism as a culture is understood to only represent imperialism, destruction, and consumption, literally and figuratively.

SCIENCES SANS FRONTIERES

It should be noted that science and technology are not universally reviled by the series. As a dieselpunk series, a certain degree of technology is fundamental to the series existence. But this is a very different world than the one we know. On the one hand, engines exist that can drive entire cities. On the other, computers basically do not exist. The rare few that still exist are not in working condition, and nobody knows how to restore them. Heavier-than-aircraft don’t really exist - the third book introduces some, but they’re small, experimental ... barely more than short-range toys designed for flashy air shows but not real travel. The main form of personal locomotion in this world is by airship, and this world’s airships are far beyond anything we’ve made in our time. But lost technologies are heavily associated with the hubris and destructiveness of the Ancients. Until now. Like I said, the most powerful Guild in London is the Engineers’ Guild. And they got that way under the leadership of now-Lord Mayor Magnus Crome. It should be noted that Crome genuinely loves his city and wants it to survive no matter the cost. But under Crome, the Engineers began to dabble in sciences considered unethical to downright taboo. Most notable is the MEDUSA Project. Through Thaddeus Valentine, London came into possession of an energy weapon from the SMW ... and, more importantly, the working computer that runs the thing. In terms of Darwinist Evolution, this is like giving a monkey a gun and teaching it how to use it. MEDUSA exhibits a level of power no other force on Earth can match, and London is forced to deploy it early in a crisis. Originally, the plan was to march up to Batmunkh Gompa, the Shield-Wall that represents the only break in the mountains around Shan Guo big enough to permit a city, and blast it to cinders. Unfortunately, London attracts the attention of a bigger, hungrier city about halfway there, and is forced to fire MEDUSA at it to save its own skin. The sheer terror of what that weapon represents is revealed then. Panzerstadt-Bayreuth was the fusion of four massive cities, each one bigger and more powerful than London. MEDUSA killed it dead in one stroke - the energy beam set the entire city ablaze and ignited its fuel stores. Her engines nearly immediately exploded. When the fires go down enough for an Engineer scout ship to investigate, the people had been almost flashed into glass. The flash of light from the attack is so bright that, hundreds of miles to the south, Tom and Hester see the sky light up like a new dawn. The people of London are relieved, of course, that they didn’t all die that night, but more than that the entire city become suffused with the excitement of just how easy it would be to kill ... well, anyone they like, really. London doesn’t even stop to devour Panzerstadt-Bayreuth, as the Engineers can’t afford for the Shield-Wall to prepare for their arrival. Appropriately, and karmically, the finale has an accident lock down the computer lock down, with MEDUSA unable to fire but unable to stop gathering energy, and London melts under the heat of MEDUSA’s glare. But that wasn’t the only scientific sin committed by London’s engineers. I’ve already mentioned London trying to repurpose faeces as food, but we need to talk more about the Stalkers. Stalkers are kinda like discount Cybermen from Doctor Who - dead bodies, threaded with weird old machines and coated in armour, their brains hooked up to simple computers. Originally conceived as soldiers, they were believed long dead. However, one survived to the modern by sheer survivor instinct - Shrike. Through negotiations that are not the purview of this essay, he allowed the Engineers of London to take him apart and figure out how he worked, and hoo boy they did. The Engineers figured out how to manufacture their own Stalkers. The first batch are used as law enforcement like the Worst Robocops, but, again, the plan was to have Stalker workers all over Low London. Katherine, learning this, likens it to London ‘being a city of the dead’ (Apprentice Engineer Pod, to whom she is talking, grimly notes that the Deep Gut Prison is so awful, so callous with human life, that it already feels like that). Logically, the end-point of this idea is to have all workers in London be the resurrected dead, with just enough living to keep things in order ... oh, and they’d all be loyal to the Engineers, because remember, no Freedom of Speech here, and you can be sent to do the worst form of prison labour for dissenting against the Lord Mayor. With Crome being both Lord Mayor and Head Engineer at once, the Engineers’ creed is as good as law - traditionally, London Lord Mayors forsook their former Guild allegiances to show their representation of all of London, and Crome’s refusal to do that caused a bit of a stir. The Engineers are also keen to arm their security teams with some form of energy pistols, despite guns being outlawed in London and the police are only allowed crossbows. Crome’s rationale is the same as every two-bit mad scientist villain, of course - that science should not be held back by moral restrictions, and that progress for progress’ sake is essential for London’s survival. Really, it’s the Engineer’s survival, as they’re rather loathe to share these advancements except to exert power on those around. London isn’t the only example of technology being used to leverage control and benefit the ruling classes. Grimsby is a sunken wreck of a city somewhere in the north Atlantic, yet due to a complex series of airlocks the interior of the city is a secret hideaway of the Lost Boys, a society of children stolen from aquatic towns and trained to be thieves under the watchful eye of the mysterious Uncle. They will then take submarine walkers, attach to passing towns, steal whatever tools, fuel, food and riches they can carry, and vanish back into the depths. Uncle, naturally, takes the lion’s share of the haul. But Uncle maintains his power by careful access to technology, only letting the Boys have what they need and juggling the power structure by choosing team leaders, and punishing insubordination harshly and publicly. Uncle sees and hears everything in Grimsby with his surveillance network, and can address any give Boy in a heartbeat, training the Boys to never expect privacy from him, so that when he demands a progress update from a mission, they never question him. He rewards Boys who do well on burglaries, but more importantly than that, he chooses team leaders according to apparently inscrutable whims. The Boys believe it’s a mark of favour from Uncle, and thus social status, to be trusted with the limpet command and all the tech that comes with. Really, Uncle carefully give command to people he can trust to remain loyal to him, even if that means passing over a more talented Boy who might get a bit uppity. Even in a more mundane way, higher status in the Lost Boys means you can move closer to the heart of Grimsby, where you’re less likely to wake up and find your bedroom wasn’t as watertight as you thought and flooded in the night. Uncle, naturally, doesn’t care if a few Boys drown, so long as he doesn’t lose anything useful. Technology, and in particular access to unusual technology, is the dimension on which power is really decided.

THE END OF AN ERA

We’ve already established that this world is not a sustainable one. There are only so many cities. The inherent entropy of Municipal Darwinism is really showing. Once upon a time, big cities could ‘reproduce’, creating little satellite towns that could grow and become independent - even London had some - but those are no more. In a greedy desperation to keep moving, the predators are not reproducing, and static settlements can’t spread and grow fast enough to count there. The attack of London, and MEDUSA, turned staunch opposition into outright war, with the Green Storm being willing to doublethink their way into using the weapons of the Traction Cities in their fight to stop the Traction Cities, even recruiting ex-London Engineers to make weapons and stalkers for them, and eventually even seeking out another ancient superweapon - an orbital laser called ODIN - without a hint of irony. The Green Storm eventually face internal resistance, from Anti-Tractionists who disagree with the outright terrorism angle, and eventually crumbles. The last great Traction Cities stop. The last mobile city is New London, no longer a hunter but a trade platform, and even that probably stopped hovering about at some point. The ending is told by the great survivor, Shrike, who has cheated Death again and again, who outlived Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw, Valentine, Magnus Crome, and a thousand other heroes and villains. When he awakes, long in the future, Traction Cities are not even ancient history. They’re a dream, a fantasy, too incredible to be true. But Shrike remembers, and he teaches people the story of London and Anchorage, Arkangel and Airhaven, Brighton and Harrowbarrow. Did they learn the right message from Shrike’s story? Did they learn that ruthless imperialism is like hunting faster than the food can come back, and that you will starve before you have everything you ever wanted? Did they learn that hoarding resources, gatekeeping knowledge, will lead to ruin? Did they learn, or will the repeat the same mistakes of the greed and gluttony of the Traction Era? Well, who knows.

#mortal engines #wow that was a ramble and a half

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kichimiangra · 10 months ago

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The End of an Era:

Faeries Bible shares the same opening as several of the previous stories above in that it's a little hard to describe, though not because I lack the memory to remember the events of the story or my intent. Oh no. Simply because Faeries Bible was intended to be a BIG story and I actually buckled down and WORKED on it! For SEVEN YEARS! And to this day am still proud of young!Me for committing for that long. I desperately knew what I wanted Faeries Bible to be. God I wanted it to have the same vibe as The Slayers anime series. I just didn't know how to do it. As far as my brain could tell the Slayers was just random shit happening to a group of silly fantasy genre characters with a bit of plot to move them in a direction... and I'm not 100% but I failed to see how amazing that series (My fav anime) was set up especially compared to Faeries Bible that sorely missed the mark from a structural standpoint but had huge amounts of world building that I very sadly never actually made it to. There's also more available art for this one...

Faeries Bible see's the return of Lily from LMW and SQ, evolving from the "maternal team mom and her adoptive sweet pea of a son" to Lily the unfortunate babysitter of this group of idiot teens. Lily is an Elven Sorceress here with an affinity for fire magic, and is also revealed in the third(?) chapter to technically be the second in line to the Elven throne should the elder King Federick not sire an heir before he dies. Unfortunately she has wanderlust and to be tied down is the last thing she wants, only babysitting her party members because Frederick personally told her to due to some sort of premonition.

Kichi was also a side character from Chibi House and Shadow's Quest, appearing here as a 15 year old Imp who was raised by the Orc king Karnak's wife. While Kichi is not particularly tall by human standards, imps are usually a small goblin-like race and Kichi's height remains a mystery to those around him. Kichi only stays with the party because his "Right to Manhood" trial was interrupted and Karnak, being told of the same premonition, changed Kichi's trial into joining the party less he be stripped of his right as a man. He was just chaos in a blue tank top which was why I drew him for this tribute.

Hiku marked the return of Sumiko from Chibi House but under a new name and a slight passive aggressive twist to her personality. Hiku is a member of the Beast Tribe lead by lord Withold with cat features and the ability to expend her mana in order to change her form age-wise and was drawn the most inconsistently. Her forms consisted of "House Cat", "Doll Size", Child and Adult as well as an unstable Large Feral Beast form. She was bossy and often butted heads with Lily and siding with Kichi because she had a crush on him.

Hoshi, like the rest of the cast, was reused from something else I made, but that idea "Stardust Alice" was shortly scrapped in the idea phase because, and I kid you not, it was LITERALLY the anime Alice Academy. Like I was so amazed I based Stardust Alice off of a dream, and I had never seen or heard of Alice Academy but they were the same fricking story down to their powers being called "Alice"! Crazy shit. In FB Hoshi is a Satyr, technically of the same race as Hiku, the beasts but from a very small sub population called the "Myths". He was the youngest of the group at around 10 years old but was a virtuous and highly trained swordsman non the less and probably the most combat trained and disciplined of the four man party. He was also a well meaning but flighty dumb blonde prone to crying. He was kind of the moral heart of the group and fought with a rapier, his speed alone making the blade deadly.

The only thing the characters had in common really was the triangles on their cheeks that they were not born with, but just appeared one day along with the premonitions from their respectful kings tying them all together.

The first four chapters were just random bullshit for the sake of random bullshit. I was initially writing as I drew and the story was going to be about a pilgrimage of summoners like in Final Fantasy X but I dropped that almost as soon as I implemented it. The real 'Narrative' started at the end of chapter four when Lord Frederick tells them to go look for someone named Jaques in the town of M'ramba, as he would have the next key to the premonition, and would pick up in chapter 5 for a multi-chapter storyline that was supposed to span chapters 5-10 and run for about 100 pages. Unfortunately by this point I was no longer a 14 year old junior high student, I was in college and I couldn't handle the workload, my comic, and world of warcraft. Warcraft was the first to go but in the end so did Faeries Bible in the middle of chapter 8 as even before college I had been improving but was STRUGGLING to keep the comic somewhat stylistically consistent.

(Same character only a few pages apart)

As silly as it is my main hobby in college was consuming fanfiction because it was free and could be done anywhere-ish if you had a laptop or a smart phone (I had a flip phone), but reading a crap ton of fanfiction sort of improved my story telling/structuring skill while college improved my art skill and by the time freetime returned to me I had felt like... I had wasted seven years of my life devoting it to Faeries Bible and the story's beginning just felt so sloppy (because it was) that I felt like I couldn't continue it unless I remade.... the WHOLE story. I considered it too. I had put so much into this world, lore on all the races, maps, different kingdoms relations etc. and so many storylines for the characters like learning of Lily's Fiance, the heir to the dark elf clan, Learning the protagonists haunting backstories and traumas, who they grow to fall in love with, the chapters where the gang is separated and each get their own little short 3 act adventure before reuniting, hell it doesn't happen in the story but I had even planned their deaths.

It always feels sad to say goodbye to Faeries Bible, I hadn't even gotten to the part where they acquire the first page of the titular tome in chapter 10! But I still revisit the world frequently, whether from scrapping plot points for newer stories, or reusing the world like in a later Idea: "Mipuig: Fodder for Hire"

((Lily, Rhil, Piper, and Piper's dad in the test page for Fodder for Hire)) Faeries Bible had also had a small spinoff in the summer of 2006 where each character was going to retell a fairytale in a way you would expect them to tell. Kichi started first and began telling a silly version of the little mermaid where the mermaid is out to kill the prince for shits and giggles, which the concept went on to be reused as the second story for my big grand return to Long form comics (Not counting my BowserxPeach comic): Faeredoux... but I only got one chapter into the first story done before my family moved and my life fell apart again.

My heart still loves and returns to Faeries Bible from time to time. My sister frequently suggests that I remake Faeries Bible and redo the story from scratch, but I always tell her "no, I gave Faeries Bible seven years of me, and the scope would just be bigger than the kinds of stories I want to tell these days." The characters truly feel like long time friends to me that I haven't seen in a long time, but still secretly celebrate it's birthday every January 23. It was nice this year to also celebrate all of the stories that came before it that were also friends and meaningful to me, some characters even being why my account names have been KichiMiangra since 2005. It feels like after FB it was really hard to commit to doing another long form comic again, out of feel that I would be wasting my time. But I'm still glad it exists. I still had that stack of 150 pages on 8x11 computer paper from back when I had drew everything and inked with Micron pens.

Today is January 23rd, 2024 and the anniversary of my first long term attempt at webcomic that I started when I was fourteen. Despite having shelved it long ago back in college, I still privately celebrate it every year in my heart as a personal milestone, as the comic in question; "Faeries Bible" was the first time I committed to a single project for any long period of time, running for 7 years with 150 pages plus 2 short 10-12 page spinoffs.

I don't do something every year but decided to indulge myself by drawing a tribute, not of Faeries Bible characters specifically, but a tribute to all the stories and OCs that came before it from the time I was 11 to the time I was 14, at the point I stopped calling each story my first, my second, my third, etc. story. There were many ideas that never left the concept phase, but these were the ones I stuck with long enough to be considered stories.

So this year I decided to indulge some old (fictional) friends.

#art #Jan 23rd #kc rambles #Faeries Bible

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theapathetickat · 5 years ago

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long post ahead. way longer than i thought it was gonna be.

So I found a bunch of official character design scans from the Soul Eater anime, and included were some height charts!

So I chose one of the height charts to calculate with, adjusted a few characters' standing places (Crona, Soul, Maka, the Thompson sisters) to make them more even with the others, and since there was a 150 cm mark, I knew what I had to do and got to work.

After adjusting the aforementioned characters, I first made some marks for 1 meter and 50 centimeters by measuring the pixels between designated points on the 150cm/0cm lines and labeled these points. Then I determined the approximate height of a centimeter in pixels and rounded that to both the nearest whole pixel and the nearest tenth. (I used the nearest tenth to calculate with) Then I approximated tops of characters' heads, accounting for typical anime hair volume, and made multiple points for characters with super spiky hair (to see how much the spikes add) and Lord Death (because I wasn't sure which point I should use).

Finally I took the difference between the head lines and what pixel of the image was my designated zero, and divided that by the number I calculated to be a centimeter's height in pixels to generate approximate heights. These heights were then rounded to the nearest whole centimeter. However, they seemed off.

Approximate heights ordered left to right, using 150cm mark as reference:

Black☆Star: 150cm/4'11" (169cm/5'6" including hair spike)

Lord Death: 203cm/6'7" at Point 1, 218cm/7'1" at Point 2, 256cm/8'5" at Point 3

Tsubaki: 166cm/5'5"

Stein: Ok according to this chart he's 194 cm/6'4", but in the NOT! production note he was 210 cm (6'10"). I'm gonna chalk this inconsistency up to differing character designers for the anime adaptations (Yoshiyuki Itou for the original and Satoshi Koike for NOT!) and no known release of character heights from Ohkubo. And I'll still be going with the 210 cm number for Stein's height as it's the only one that's known to have been stated by any staff member. (I double-checked my math and it still checked out within an acceptable margin of error, but there is still the possibility that I was off somewhere in rounding)

Medusa: 172cm/5'8"

Crona: 161cm/5'3"

Soul: 142cm/4'7" (15ocm/4'11" including hair spike)

Maka: 145cm/4'9"

Spirit: 194 cm/6'4"

Death the Kid: 150cm/4'11" (note: his shoes have a slight heel to them so I feel it's reasonable to estimate this despite him being slightly above the 150cm line) (In the NOT! production note he is listed as 158cm/5'2". This can be attributed to the same reasons as the inconsistency with Stein's height)

Patty: 145cm/4'9" with heels, 139cm, 4'7" without. (The NOT! production note lists her as 160cm/5'3")

Liz: 161cm/5'3" with heels, 155cm/5'1" without. (This is also inconsistent with the NOT! production note which lists her as 170cm/5'7". This inconsistency I'll chalk up to the same reasons as Kid, Patty, and Stein)

Sid: 196 cm/6'5"

So all the kids are just absolutely TINY in the anime universe if we go by the mark on this production image.

Here are set 2's numbers, which ignores that 150cm mark and bases the heights off what's in Stein's NOT! production note files, because I was curious as to what numbers that would show: (Note: Kid, Liz, and Patty's numbers may not match that production note because this is enough of a different point in the story that they may have grown) (all heights rounded to nearest whole inch/centimeter)

Black☆Star: 161cm/5'3" (182cm/5'11" including hair spike)

Lord Death: 219cm/7'2" at Point 1, 237cm/7'8" at Point 2, 276cm/9'1" at Point 3

Tsubaki: 180cm/5'11"

Stein: 210 cm/ 6'10"

Medusa: 186cm/6'1"

Crona: 174cm/5'9"

Soul: 153cm/5'0" (161cm/5'3" including hair spike)

Maka: 157cm/5'2" in combat boots (because let's be real those are definitely adding an extra inch or two)

Spirit: 210 cm/ 6'10"

Death the Kid: 162cm/5'4" (the 4 centimeter difference from the NOT! info can be attributed to NOT! being a prequel and Kid having grown since then, or a really big margin of error in my calculations)

Patty: 160cm/5'3" with heels, 154cm/5'1" without heels

Liz: 174cm/5'9" with heels, 168cm/5'6" without heels (see Kid's footnote)

Sid: 212cm/6'11"

These heights feel a little more statistically accurate to (mostly) American teenagers, (some were born outside the US but a majority of the kids were), though ranging on the tall side for a few.

However, one time a while ago my brother and I tried to calculate character heights based on the manga post-timeskip using that same Stein height from NOT! as a reference. I redid the calculations using the metric system (because I used the US Imperial system before and that one has way more opportunities for conversion errors) and got this: (it only contains a few characters because Ohkubo's paneling clearly never had full height comparisons in mind)

Transcription of heights incase my handwriting is unreadable for the characters in this image:

Stein and Spirit: 210cm/ 6'10"

Maka and Kim: 170cm/5'7" (Kim was stated to be 154 cm in NOT!, but considering the timespan and her age, it's perfectly feasible for her to have grown)

Black Star: 170cm/5'7" (177cm/5'10" with hair spike)

Kid and Azusa: 175cm/5'9"

Soul: 181 cm/5'11" (186cm/6'1" with hair spike)

Crona: 176 cm/ 5'9" (also because their neck is so long-looking, I measured that. It is roughly 13cm/5.12")

Jackie: roughly the same height as Crona, give or take a centimeter or two.

I was originally going to calculate Marie, but the proportion of characters shown wasn't enough in that panel to calculate. (with no designated zero, it's tough)

Even though the anime adapts pre-timeskip events, I was a bit suspicious of the height differences. Because there is absolutely no way Crona only grew 2 centimeters from pre-to-post-timeskip, especially if Maka grew 13cm. Look at their relative heights on both sides of the timeskip:

So I did a quick Google search on growth rates and compared what a few different websites say, which was that on average (in America, judging by the websites' lack of metric system usage), AFAB people grow around 2.5-4.5 inches per year during puberty (often being closest to 3 inches a year), while AMAB people grow 3-5 inches per year during puberty (often being closest to 4 inches a year). The timing of when these growth spurts occur varies by individual, but considering the canon age ranges of the Soul Eater kids it's safe so say most of them are in the peak growth spurt area.

Comparing these averages to the different sets of data I calculated, and considering inconsistencies such as Stein's height when going off the 150cm mark in that height chart, Crona's relative height to Maka across continuities, and Soul potentially having a growth spurt well over twice the average, I think it's safe to say that as long as the heights relative to other characters are consistent, go nuts.

In conclusion, it's likely that Ohkubo and the anime's character designers, or for that matter, the character designers between the original and spinoff's adaptations, may not have been in close communications when it came to consistency in character heights, even factoring for time differences.

if only Ohkubo or Studio Bones had completely released official character heights then I wouldn’t have calculated this mess

#soul eater #maka albarn #crona #crona gorgon #soul evans #soul eater evans #franken stein #black star soul eater #death the kid #tsubaki nakatsukasa #liz thompson #patty thompson #medusa gorgon #sid barrett #if my math is wrong please let me know

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gascon-en-exil · 4 years ago

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A Game of Thrones 10th Anniversary Season Ranking: Part 2

Link to Part 1

Time for the bottom half of the list. The four seasons here will surprise no one, but the order might.

#5 Season 6

You can tell what I most what to talk about here...but there's an order to these things.

S6 actually has a bunch of great ideas, but they drown beneath the most slapdash plotting and character work the show has seen yet in order to set the stage for the narrower conflicts of the last two seasons. It's notorious for bringing back characters who haven't been seen in a season or longer only to kill them off (Balon Greyjoy, Osha, Hodor, the Blackfish, Rickon, Walder Frey) or awkwardly graft them back into the main plot (Sandor Clegane, Bran). There are plot threads that ought to be compelling but are too rushed in execution, like the siege of Riverrun, Littlefinger's hand in the Battle of the Bastards, or Daenerys's time back among the Dothraki and then finally getting the hell out of Meereen. Arya hits on the only interesting part of her two-season sojourn in Braavos - a stage play, of all things - only for it to stumble at the end with a disappointing offscreen death and some incomprehensible philosophy ahead of the start of her murder tour of Westeros. There's also so much cutting off the branches, enough to be conspicuous; the final shot of Daenerys leading an armada of about half the remaining cast she assembled partially offscreen says that better than anything else. Well, not anything....

Highlight: Without exaggeration, the opening of S6E10 is easily my favorite sequence in all of GoT. The staging, the music, the mounting suspense even as it becomes increasingly obvious what's about to happen, the twisted religious references particularly in Cersei's mock confession to Unella, Tommen throwing himself out a window because he can't deal with the reality of how terrible his mother is, how Cersei gives absolutely no fucks whatsoever about murdering hundreds of people at once in a calculated act of vengeance largely prompted by her own poorly thought out actions - I love it all. It's the single most masterfully-executed act of villainy in the whole show - Daenerys torching King's Landing probably has a higher body count, but the presentation there is all muddled - and if I had any doubts about Cersei being my favorite multi-season major character they were silenced in this moment. The explosion of the Sept doesn't sit perfectly with me, because I liked the Tyrells and because of what I said about deaths like theirs and Renly's in the previous post under S2, but I think that unease only cements the strength of this sequence. It's an overused phrase in fandom these days, but GoT at its best is all about moral greyness that gives its audience room for multilayered reactions. Cersei nuking the Sept and making herself the sole power in King's Landing, which in a sense is just a more overt example of the kind of character/plot consolidation elsewhere represented by Daenerys's armada, is one of those events that's impossible to approach from a single angle if you care about any of the characters involved. And hey, it's not in the books (yet, presumably), so unlike Ned's death or the Red Wedding the GoT showrunners can take the credit for realizing this one.

Favorite death: Even leaving aside the Sept and related deaths there's a lot of good ones to choose from in S6. Ramsey is cathartic but too gory for me, Osha's was a clever callback but a little delayed, it's hard to pin down specific deaths when Daenerys incinerates the khals, and Arya only gets half credit for Walder Frey and his sons when she saves the rest of the house for the opening of S7. I'm thinking Hodor, not so much because I enjoy his character or the manner of his death but because it's a clever bit of playing with language (that must have been hell to render in other languages for dubbing) wrapped up in some entertainingly murky consent issues and some closed time loop weirdness. It's all very...extra? Is that the word for it?

Least favorite death: Offscreen deaths continue to be mostly letdowns, in this case Blackfish and the Waif. Way to botch the ending of Arya's already near-pointless Braavos arc, guys. Speaking of Arya, this spot goes to Lady Crane, whom the Waif somehow kills with a stool or something. It's a dumb way to send off an entertaining minor character.

#6 Season 8

I swear that I'm not putting S8 this high solely because of Jonmund kind of sort of happening. I've never been very interested in either of them and the sex would be far too bear-on-otter to suit my pornographic preferences, but even so the choice to close out the series with them is hilarious.

I really don't need to elaborate on why S8 is down here; everyone who's ever watched the show has done as much in the nearly two years since it wrapped up. I do however need to explain why I've ranked not one but two seasons below it. My biggest argument here is that I don't believe it's fair to critique S8 for problems it inherited from earlier seasons. A non-comprehensive list:

Mad Queen Daenerys: unevenly built up beginning from S1 and continuing in some form through every following season

The questionable racial optics of Dany's army: also seeded as early as S1 and solidified by S3 with the Slaver's Bay arc

Cersei only succeeding because she makes stupid decisions and then lucks out until she doesn't: apparent from S1, directly lampshaded by Tywin in S3, fully on display with the Faith Militant arc of S5-6

Jaime not getting a redemption arc or falling in love with Brienne: evident with his repeated returns to Cersei throughout the show as one of the most consistent elements of his character, particularly in S4 and during the siege of Riverrun in S6

Tyrion grabbing the idiot ball/becoming a flat audience surrogate mouthpiece: started in S5 around the time the showrunners ran out of book material for him and wanted to make him more of a PoV character and his arc less of a downward spiral, although I've seen arguments that changes from the books involving his Tysha story and Shae set him on this trajectory even earlier

The hardening of Sansa's character: began in earnest in S4 and never let up from there

The strange ordering of antagonists: set down by S7's equally strange plot structure - the Night King had to come first with that setup

CleganeBowl and the dumber twists: from what I've heard the whole thing of writing around fans on the internet guessing plot twists started pretty much when the book content ended, so S5-6 maybe?

Yes, there's plenty to criticize about S8 on its own merits...but just as much that was merely the writers doing what they could at that point with deeply flawed material.

Highlight: This may sound cheesy, but the better parts of S8 are almost all the cinematic ones, whether that's E2 being a bottle episode with tons of poignant character send-offs before the big battle, a handful of deaths with actual satisfying weight like Jorah's and Theon's, and an epilogue that incorporates both closure for individuals and the broader uncertainty of messy socio-political systems that GoT has always been known for before working its way back to the Starks at the very end for some tidy bookending. Even imperfect moments like the Lannister twins' death and the resolution of Sansa's character felt weighty and appropriate based on what had come before.

Favorite death: Forget about the audio commentary attempting to flatten Cersei's character; Cersei and Jaime Lannister have an excellent end. Cersei especially, as the scenes of her stumbling her way down into the catacombs as the Red Keep crashes down around her really show off how her world is abruptly falling apart and how she retreats into her own self-interest at the end in spite of her demise being at least partially of her own doing. There's some stupid moments associated with these scenes, like Jaime dueling Euron to the death and CleganeBowl, but I can excuse those when the twins end up dying exactly where you'd expect them to: in each other's arms, in a ruined monument to their family's grand ambitions that, like Casterly Rock itself, was taken from another family.

Least favorite death: Quite a few dumb ones in S8 have become forever infamous. Missandei sticks out, and for me Varys too just as much because of how the writing pushes him to do the dumbest thing he could possibly do purely for the sake of killing him off ten minutes into the penultimate episode. But no one belongs here more than Daenerys Targaryen, killed at the height of a rushed and uncertain villain reveal by a man who takes advantage of their romantic history (who is also her family, because Targaryens) to stab her in a moment of vulnerability - pretty much only because another man tells him that Daenerys is the final boss. Narratively speaking that might be the case, but even so this is the end result of multiple seasons of middling-to-bad buildup. Not even Drogon burning the symbolism can salvage that. Also Fire Emblem: Three Houses did this scene and did it better.

#7 Season 5

...Yeah, we're going to have to go there.

Sansa's rape is not a plot point that personally touches me much. It's terribly framed in the moment and the followup in later seasons is inconsistent at best, but it's not a kind of trauma I can relate to. On the other hand, in the very same episode Loras is tried and imprisoned for homosexuality, and Margery faces the same punishment for lying for her brother. That hits much closer to home, not just for the homophobia but also for the culture war undertones of the not!French Tyrells persecuted by a not!Anglo fanatic who later reveals himself to be the in-universe equivalent of a Protestant. The trial is just one part of Cersei's shortsighted scheming, just as Sansa being married off to Ramsey is part of Littlefinger's, and both of them get their comeuppance in the end...but it's unsettling all the same. I especially hate what the Faith Militant arc does to King's Landing in S5, swiftly converting it from my favorite setting in GoT to a tense theocratic nightmare that only remains interesting to me because Cersei is consistently awesome. What's more, pretty much everything about S5 that isn't viscerally uncomfortable is dragged out and dull instead: the Dorne arc, Daenerys's second season in Meereen, Arya in Braavos, Stannis and co. at Castle Black. The most any of these storylines can hope for is some kind of bombastic finale, and while several of them deliver it's not enough to make up for what comes before, or how disappointing everything here builds from S4. S4 has Oberyn, S5 has the Sand Snakes - I think that sums up the contrast well.

Highlight: S5 does get stronger near the end. As much as his character annoys me I did like the High Sparrow revealing his pseudo-Protestant bent to Cersei just before he imprisons her, and there's a cathartic rawness to Cersei's walk of atonement where you can both feel her pain and humiliation and understand that she's getting exactly what she deserves (and this is what leads into the climax of S6, so it deserves points just for that). The swiftness of Stannis's fall renders his death and that of his family a bit hollow, but it's brutal and final and fittingly ignominious for a character with such grand ambitions but so little relevance to the larger story. The fighting pits of Meereen sequence is cinematic if nothing else, and even the resolution to the Dorne arc salvages the whole thing a tiny bit by playing into the retributive cycles of vengeance idea (and Myrcella knows about the twincest and doesn't care, aww - no idea why that stuck with me, but it's cute all the same). Oh, and Hardhome...it's alright. Not great, not crap, but alright.

Favorite death: I don't know why, but Theon tossing Myranda to her death is always funny to me. Maybe because it's so unexpected?

Least favorite death: Arya's execution of Meryn Trant is meant to be another one of the season's big finale moments, but the scene is graphic and goes on forever and I can't help but be grossed out. This is different from, say, Shireen's death, which is supposed to be painful to witness.

#8 Season 7

I can't tell if S7's low ranking is as self-explanatory as S8's or not. At least one recent retrospective on GoT's ruined legacy I've come across outright asserts that S7 is judged less harshly in light of how bad S8 was. If it were not immediately obvious by where I've placed each of them, I don't share that opinion.

Because S7 is just a mess, and the drop-off in quality is so much more painful here than it is anywhere else in the series except maybe from S4 to S5 (and that's more about S4 being as good as it is). The pacing ramps up to uncomfortable levels to match the shortened seasons, the structure pivots awkwardly halfway through from Daenerys vs. Cersei to Jon/Dany caring about ice zombies, said pivot relies largely on characters (mostly Tyrion) making a series of catastrophically stupid tactical decisions, and very few of the smaller set pieces land with any real impact as the show's focus narrows to its endgame conflict. As with S6 there are still some good ideas, but they're botched in execution. The conflict between Sansa and Arya matches their characters, but the leadup to that conflict ending with Littlefinger's execution is missing some key steps. Daenerys's diverse armada pitted against Cersei weaponizing the xenophobia of the people of King's Landing could have been interesting, but there's little room to explore that when Cersei keeps winning only because Tyrion has such a firm grip on the idiot ball and when Euron gets so much screentime he barely warrants. Speaking of Tyrion's idiot ball, does anyone like the heist film-esque ice zombie retrieval plotline? Its stupidity is matched only by its utter futility, because Cersei isn't trustworthy and nobody seems to ever get that.

And how could I forget Sam's shit montage? Sums up S7 perfectly, really. To think that that is part of the only extended length of time the show ever spends in the Reach....

Highlight: A handful of character moments save this season from being irredeemable garbage. As you can guess from my screencap choice, Olenna's final scene is one of them, even if Highgarden itself is given insultingly short shrift. S7 also manages what I thought was previously impossible in that it makes me care somewhat about Ellaria Sand, courtesy of the awful death Cersei plans for her and her remaining daughter. The other Sand Snakes are killed with their own weapons, which shows off Euron's demented creativity if nothing else. I like the entertainingly twisted choice to cut the Jon/Dany sex scene with the reveal that they're related. And, uh...the Jonmund ship tease kind of makes the zombie retrieval team bearable? I'm really grasping at straws here.

Favorite death: It's more about her final dialogue with Jaime than her actual death, but again I'm going to have to highlight Olenna Tyrell here for lack of better options. She drops the bombshell about Joffrey that the audience figured out almost as soon as it happened but still, makes it plain what I've been saying about how Jaime's arc has never really been about redemption, and is just about the only person to ever call Cersei out for that whole mass murder thing. There's a reason "I want her to know it was me" became a meme format.

Least favorite death: There aren't any glaringly bad deaths in S7, just mediocre or unremarkable ones. I still think the decision to have Arya finish off House Frey in the season's opening rather than along with their father at the end of S6 was a strange one that doesn't add much of dramatic value.

#Game of Thrones #GoT

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mwolf0epsilon · 4 years ago

Note

Headcanon heights for the Joey Drew Studios employees pre and post ink?

To answer this question I needed to find a consistent way to measure the ink creatures which luckily was actually not too hard:

Using FC Makes's 2nd Viewer Suggestion video where they spawn several ink creatures into Joey's apartment, I could compare them to the average American household doorframe's height and try to make visual assumptions of just how tall they are.

I also looked around for any confirmed heights I could, but otherwise these are just personal thoughts:

--Joey Drew Studios--

Joey Drew - 5'11" (Hard to tell since he's leaning heavily on the counter but I always felt like he was taller than Henry)

Henry Stein - 5'6" (There's still a good foot over Henry when he passes the doorway and I like the thought of average height grandpa!)

Sammy Lawrence/Searcher Sammy - 6'0" / 3'5" (His size only changes after he becomes a Searcher, and even then he's technically crawling)

Jack Fain/Swollen Jack - 5'4" / 3'5" (Was already on the short side before becoming a Searcher, not that he ever minded much. His size as a Swollen Searcher also varies depending on how much Ink he's collected!)

Susie Campbell/Twisted Alice - 5'2" / 6'2" (As a human she was decidedly a petite little lady. She's much taller as an angel!)

Norman Polk/The Projectionist- 6'11" / 7'2" (As the Projectionist he bumps his head on the doorframe while slouching, so I'm guessing he's on the 7 foot mark. What a beast!)

Allison Pendle - 5'9" / 6'2" (Just a little bit taller as an angel, otherwise it's not too big a change. Not that she recalls.)

Thomas Connors/Tom Boris - 6'2" / 6'0" (Becoming a Boris knocked 2 inches off his height! He's mildly annoyed by this...)

Wally Franks - 5'3" (He may be short but he can still kick your ass.)

Shawn Flynn/Boss Searcher - 5'7" / 6'8" (The luck of the Irish has bestowed upon him the height of a giant as the Searcher Boss! This is crawling height mind you, so imagine what his actual full scale might be...)

Grant Cohen - 5'11" (He's a tall glass of anxiety)

Buddy Lewek/Buddy Boris - 5'5" / 6'0" (Before Boris took over completely, the added height put him off quite a bit)

Dot - 5'6" (Pretty average which seems fitting!)

Abby Lambert - 5'9" (Miss Lambert is just tall enough to grab everyone by the ear. Grandma vibes.)

Bertrum Piedmont - 6'2" / ??? (I'm honestly at a loss for measuring Bertrum's Octopus Ride form. The man was already a unit, then he became bigger)

Lacie Benton/Bendy Animatronic - 6'3" / 6'0" (She's tall but often hunched over working so you'd never tell. As the animatronic she should still be tall but sadly her state of disrepair makes it hard to notice...)

Emma LaMonte - 5'11" (It's not her height you should be intimidated by, it's the ballerina legs. Kicks harder than a goat on crack.)

--Ink Creatures--

The Ink Demon/Beast Bendy - 6'11" / 7'5" (That's pretty intimidating considering he's a slouching and limping terror. Becomes an absolute unit!)

Searchers - 3'5" (A little inconsistent since they're technically crawling)

Lost Ones - 6'7" (They walk with a bit of a limp but they're almost bumping their heads on the doorframe)

Piper - 5'6" (Tallest member of the Butcher Gang and appears to be at eye level with Henry)

Fisher - 5'2" (That neck was hell to visually measure but I figured its a bit shorter than the Piper)

Striker - 5'0" (Group babby)

#Bendy and the Ink Machine #BATIM #Headcanons #Heights

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zixzs-ajk · 5 years ago

Photo

It just didn't make sense to him. Sure, he knew about the supposed "science" of water evaporating, collecting high in the sky, then falling back down, but it was so... inconsistent. The first day, he spent nearly an hour staring at the incredible grandeur of a single cloud resting solemnly in a sea of blue. It was so calm. The day after, a monstrous storm of black and blue swarmed the sky, throwing water down to Earth like a spiteful teenager. Speaking of spiteful teenagers, Ralsei looked ahead of him and saw Susie standing under the rain, still as a statue. He couldn't make out her features from behind her, but Ralsei hadn't seen her so seemingly calm. The sight almost worried him. "Susie?" he ventured. Barely, her head moved an inch upwards, and she parted some of the hair from her face. They'd only been walking for maybe a dozen minutes, but apparently that's all it took for Mother Nature to completely drench them both. In that time, Susie hadn't seemed the slightest bit discontent. Not that she'd been explicitly jumping for joy, either, but something about enjoying the day outside placated her well enough to reach a rare level of indifference. Calmness, even. "Man, I missed this," Susie muttered. Her voice, too, sounded atypically relieved. Ralsei took it as a good thing. Honestly, he enjoyed when his usually violent companion found some semblance of respite. These moments tended to be few and far between. He stepped forwards a little, reaching Susie's side to see her looking up into the clouds above, hands at her side like she was trying to soak up the rain. Ralsei felt himself grin a little. Just as he opened his mouth to speak, his nose briefly twitched, tickled by the droplets falling down. Then, he sneezed. Rather loudly. The noise threw Susie from whatever form of meditation she'd been so encapsulated in. Both of the former adventurers recoiled, and Ralsei lifted a wet paw to his nose, doing his best to rub the awkwardness out of his face. "Uh," he started sheepishly, now shying away from Susie's frown. So much for respite. "Sorry." "Mh," Susie grunted. The bangs of her hair prevented him from seeing any sort of frown, but it wasn't the most unrealistic notion. Suddenly, the water soaking into his robe felt much colder and uncomfortable. And to think, he had enjoyed the rain so much a few moments ago. Ralsei brought his arms to his chest, doing his best to preserve what warmth he could. He ended up just making himself colder. Next to him, Susie observed motionlessly, still refusing to move much. The rain didn't seem to bother her regardless of the calm (or lack thereof). Ralsei, getting the idea he was being watched, shifted on his feet, listening to the steady hiss of rain hitting the grass underfoot. Then he drew back his head and sneezed again. "Sorry," he apologized once more. He shook his head, flinging specks of water from his fur. One of his paws moved to the back of his neck, the prince embarrassed. "I-I'll just-- leave you to--" "Here," Susie interrupted in her usually gruff voice. For some reason, she spoke so quietly Ralsei had difficulty hearing her above the white-noise of the rain. He leaned in closer to his friend, curious. She hesitated for a second, moving one of her scaled hands to the opposing sleeve of her jacket. In that brief second, she glanced at Ralsei, sizing him up for... something. The girl shook her head, visibly giving Ralsei a full-body eye-roll. Then she pulled her arm up out of the coat's sleeve. The other arm soon followed. Confused, Ralsei rose an eyebrow, tilting his head a little. Some more water spilled from his fur as an effect. "Susie? What--" "Just... take it," Susie grumbled, as if she was upset. She now held the coat out in front of her, nearly smothering Ralsei's face with the covering. Not much else was said. The coat itself was more than a little wet, though it did seem less absorbent than the soft cloth of Ralsei's robe. Unable to see much else, Ralsei looked over the clothing, still processing Susie's offer. "Well?" she said much more aggressively. Just like that, the offer turned into a command. Ralsei reached his paws outwards, lightly grasping the collar of the garment. It was much heavier than he anticipated. He took it regardless, feeling himself smile again as he threw the coat around him. It was certainly warmer than his soaked robe. Curious, Ralsei pushed his arms through the coat's sleeves. Susie let out a cynical snort. "That's a good look for you," she teased, crossing her arms. Ralsei stretched his arms apart as far as he could. Not even the tips of his claws could reach the coat's cuffs; Susie's more imposing stature meant that her coat nearly reached Ralsei's knees. Suffice to say, it was a little big on him. That did little to suppress his grin. Susie, seeing his smile, visibly eye-rolled again. Then Ralsei noticed her bare arms, and promptly frowned out of concern. "Thank you for the coat, Susie," he granted, adjusting it to rest more comfortably over him. It was surprisingly comfortable in the first place. Ralsei continued with a hum, absentmindedly reaching a covered paw upwards to feel the rain. "But... are you sure you don't need it?" Despite probably being the most consistent thing she could experience, Susie seemed surprised by Ralsei's empathy. She shook her head with a shrug, arms still crossed. After a lengthy hum, she glanced back upwards into the downpour. Some of the weather's intensity had let up. "Eh," she told him. The girl casually took a few steps past him, moving to step up on one of the few rocks adorning the hill. Ralsei watched curiously as she uncrossed her arms to stretch upwards, like she was about to exercise. "Don't mention it. Just wanted to feel the rain, anyways." She definitely had an affinity for the shower, that much was obvious. Ralsei felt there was more to her reasoning, but didn't move to question it. He hugged the coat closer to his body, simply watching Susie enjoy the weather. That was when he saw it. Now, Ralsei tended to be what most would call "naive." He liked to think of himself as more innocent or optimistic, but even he had to admit that few others could match his capacity for niceness. And being so nice, Ralsei harbored a lot of respect for people, especially their privacy. Certain things were just meant to be private; he understood that much. Which is why, when he witnessed the translucent effect the rain had given Susie's shirt, he only stared out of shock and nothing else. Too many details filled his head in the span of seconds. Susie turned to him, feeling his stare, and rose a suspicious eyebrow. "What?" she questioned. Apparently she wasn't too aware of how thin her clothing could be when it was soaked in rainfall. "Something on my face?" Immediately, Ralsei whipped himself out of Susie's coat, nearly tearing into the cloth with how strong he grasped it. Not one second later, he sprinted forwards and slammed the coat into Susie's shoulders, not even checking to see exactly how covered she was. His face was too weighted to the ground by the blood in his cheeks anyways. Silent, Ralsei breathed heavily, still pressing his hands into Susie's shoulders. He had to stretch a little to reach her height. Susie herself stood still, both surprised and a little confused. She glanced to the side for a moment, then back at Ralsei, who seemed especially fixated on her boots. "Uhhh..." she slowly drew out, unsure. Ralsei took a deep breath, shaking his head. "Just--" he squeaked out. His voice had a subtle shake to it. "Just keep it. Please." At this, Susie frowned. A few moments passed. Then Susie let out a grunt, grabbing her coat back and about tearing it from Ralsei's grasp. "Fine," she grumbled, shoving her arms back into her coat with a certain vitriol. The girl shook her head, her cheeks a deeper violet than usual. "Try to do one nice thing..." "N-no!" Ralsei instantly responded. He rose his paws defensively, shaking them with a violent fervor. His face was so red, rain seemed to steam off the heat of his cheeks. "Really, thank you, Susie. I mean that-- but--" Again, Ralsei froze, leaving the sound of rainfall to fill in his quiet. His eyes broadened considerably. Somehow, his face managed to get even redder. Then he recoiled with as much severity as before, snapping his head to the side. Before Susie could question what kind of brain disease he'd caught, the prince rose a single hand forwards, pointing directly at Susie. It didn't clear much of her confusion. She looked over herself with an annoyed grimace, still grumbling. The moment her eyes found what her coat left exposed, her grimace melted away. Susie blinked, staring at herself. "O-oh," was all she could mutter. Flushed, Susie shifted her coat, wrapping it over itself like she was trying to fuse the ends together. She hunched over a little, crossing her arms too self-consciously to be deemed normal. Ralsei had shifted to move his hands behind him, his head tilted downwards to face the grass of the hill. Rain continued to fall. Both monsters stood still, neither one of them daring to move an inch. After a considerable length of time, Susie spoke again, her voice nearly a whisper under the hiss of water. "Let's get outta the rain," she told Ralsei, like she was imitating him in one of his meeker moments. Ralsei nodded silently.

#ralsei #susie #ralsusie #deltarune #comic #rain #ralsei x susie #fanfiction

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marvelmando · 5 years ago

Text

tempest [p.parker x o.c.] - before

notes: hi. so, I’ve already uploaded this before, but I don’t think enough people saw it, or maybe it was just bad in general. I’m not sure. please let me know what you guys think, I need the validation :)

contains: swearing, canon-typical violence, hostages

pairing: peter parker + fem!o.c.

word count: 4.4k

next chapter tempest masterlist

MARIN WASN'T SURE WHAT BUGGED HER MORE—the annoyingly steady thumping of Oliver Hall's foot, or the weight of the side-eyed glares Lucy Webb kept aiming her way.

Decidedly, Marin met Lucy's gaze with equal intensity. "What?" She clipped, not meaning to sound so sharp, but heights tended to do funny things to Marin's stomach, and unless she wanted a second look at her lunch, she kept talking to a minimum.

Lucy pressed her full lips into a flat line, looking at Marin out of the corner of her eye until she slid her gaze forward. She adjusted her grip on her seat's straps. "Nothing."

Sensing the fire burning behind Lucy's eyes (a good, ironic pun, she commended herself silently), Marin waited patiently in her own seat to Lucy's right, watching as Lucy strung together words in her head. Unlike Marin, Lucy, admirably, was careful in what she said and how she said it—a great characteristic; exemplary of her leadership abilities, but completely inconsistent with the expected temperament that was typically associated with her mutant abilities. One would assume, with Lucy's ability to control fire, her personality would be complementary, but she was rather the exact opposite—mostly level-headed and calm. Marin could count on one hand the number of times she'd seen the older mutant lose her cool (another pun, she thought, I'm on fire! Whoops, did it again).

"Do you think you're... prepared... for the mission?" Lucy finally asked after a while. She was being careful again, Marin could tell. Her eyes said it all—the blatant fear, the hesitation, the caution; it was a look Marin had seen in all the eyes of those who knew her—knew her story, at least—since she'd come to live at the Institute nearly nine years ago.

"I'm going to behave," she responded, narrowing her eyes. "Since I know that's what you're really wondering."

Despite her occasional censure of Marin's behaviors, Lucy was one of only a few other mutants whoever looked at her with anything other than suspicion. She supposed that meant Lucy was her friend—her only friend, really—and Marin was glad enough for it.

Lucy gave her a disbelieving look. "That's what you said last time, Marin. And your heroism nearly cost us Sanchez's life, and all the information he had on the Crimson Circle."

"I'm well aware." Marin huffed, jostling in her seat as the jet jerked through a pocket of turbulence. She flicked away a section of her bangs that had fallen into her eyes. "Besides, I think the three weeks of probation was more than enough punishment for me to learn my lesson on how not to treat criminals like people."

Lucy rolled her eyes at the sarcasm. No matter how many times Marin got in trouble, no matter how many punishments the doled out to her, Marin would never lose the stubborn streak she'd had since she came to the Institute. For reasons Marin couldn't understand, Professor Charles Xavier had yet to kick her off of the X-Men team, and she wondered just how far she could go before he lost his patience entirely.

Marin was ambiguous about her role as an X-Man. On the one hand, it gave her an opportunity to help people in ways she wouldn't be able to if she was stuck back at the Institute every day. It often felt that this was the only reason why she hadn't just quit the team herself. The X-Men were an elite team at the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning, and her position as one of ten total members put her in an uncomfortable sort of spotlight—one even more unnerving than being the center of gossip on what happened the night her powers were revealed.

(Which confused her, since most mutants tended to have gnarly origin stories, and Marin felt like she was no exception. But she knew what they said about her—what they say she did. None of it was true, and the Professor never addressed the gossip, so she never brought it up. She'd just figured he had no idea of what they said about her. Besides, tattling would do nothing but fuel the flames further. And anyway, it didn't bother her; she was a loner either way.)

Whatever today's mission was, it apparently required five members of the team, accompanied by two of the older mutants. Hank McCoy sat at the cockpit, showing Avery Cho sequences of button-pressing and flip-switching. The girl looked bored, popping her gum against her teeth as she copied Hank's movements by flipping and pushing with a nudge of her mind. Logan (she wasn't really sure if he actually had a last name) was standing at the back of the jet, leaned against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest and sharp eyes observing his wards. Marin suspected he was only there to make sure she stayed in check, and the way his gaze seemed to train on her periodically confirmed her suspicions.

With nothing left to say, Lucy fell silent. The consistent drone of the jet speeding through the air was only disrupted by Oliver's tapping foot. Marin knew he couldn't help it; his super-speed made him constantly hyperactive, and she didn't think she had ever actually seen him stay still for more than a second at a time.

As she observed her surroundings, she noticed for the first time that Lucy sat unaccompanied, surprised to find James' usual seat (always right next to his girlfriend) empty. The couple was practically inseparable, joint at the hips in a perpetual honeymoon phase—even if they'd been together for three years now.

James was also telepathic, and Marin figured that if there was one person who should go on all missions, no matter how inconsequential, it should be the guy that could read and control minds. Not for the first time that day, Marin wondered what the mission was that they need to travel all the way to Queens for, and with half of the team, no less.

The last person Marin observed was Juniper Pierre, and as far as Marin knew, she'd only been at the Institute for little over a year, and that she could control plants or something. She was nice enough, though, from the few interactions Marin had had with her.

Feeling the lurching impact of the jet setting on the solid ground had a similar effect on jerking her out of her thoughts. She clicked her straps loose, standing with a stretch to regain feeling in her numb behind.

Everyone gathered around Lucy, who had taken head on the center of the now-lowered gangway ramp. She cleared her throat and began reading her exposition off of a small packet of folded papers she pulled from the inside of her X-Men jacket. "Witnesses reported seeing a flash of green light before calls were made into local responders after a neighbor noticed smoke coming from within the house. The sheriff department's lieutenant then contacted the Institute when he found our subject, Mary Tellers, aged seven, inside the home and abandoned by her parents— crying, but otherwise untouched by the fire. Lieutenant Collins informed us that when he tried to drag the subject out of the house, she emanated the same green light witnesses noted seeing earlier. Our best guess is energy manipulation, and we should tread with caution."

A weirdly heavy feeling settled in Marin's stomach, but the group was moving before she had a chance to contemplate as to why. She was still unsure why this recruitment mission needed so many people, but followed anyway.

Logan and Hank stayed behind as usual. Marin realized they'd landed the jet in a secluded plot of flat land that was surrounded by a thick layer of trees. According to her own smaller packet of information, which she referenced with a passing glance, they were heading to the police department located in Richmond Hill.

She wasn't sure exactly how far away they landed, but it took a solid twenty-five minutes for the group to reach the precinct. It must've looked strange, even for New York, to see a gaggle of teenagers dressed in matching blue and yellow leather jackets, approach the doors of the police department with varying levels of determination and severity. Marin was the last to enter the building, only pausing with her hand still holding the door open to let an officer pass through before she hurried along after the group.

They huddled into a small waiting room, where a little girl still covered in soot sat in a padded chair with her knees tucked up to her chest, wrapped in a light blue blanket. Next to her was whom Marin assumed to be the lieutenant. Lucy exchanged a few indeterminable words with him before turning to the girl.

"Hello," Lucy smiled kindly down at her, gently taking an empty seat beside her. "What's your name, sweetheart?"

"Mary Tellers," the little girl whispered, the missing front tooth giving her a slight lisp.

"That's a very pretty name." Lucy cooed. "My name is Lucy, and these are my friends: that's Oliver, and Juniper, and Avery, and Marin." She said, pointing to each in turn. "Can you tell us what happened this morning, Mary?"

Mary flicked her eyes hesitantly between each of them. "It's alright," Juniper spoke, her honey-smooth voice warm and gentle. "We're here to help you."

Mary nodded slowly, taking them in. "I don't kn-know, I came home from-from school and Mommy was putting clothes in a big suitcase, and Daddy said I had to go live with Na-Nana because they couldn't take care of me anymore, and I just—I just—" tears overcame her, and the little girl hugged her knees tighter as she buried her face into them.

"It's okay," Lucy shushed the girl—comforting her, but not touching her. If there was one thing all mutants collectively excelled at, it was dealing with people who had experienced trauma. "It's okay, Mary. You're not alone."

Mary eventually calmed down enough to pick her head up from between her knees, watching as Juniper approached her slowly, holding out a flattened hand so she could see a small daisy bloom in her palm.

"You're not a monster, Mary. You're a mutant." Lucy explained, the girl's eyes going wide. "So is Juniper, that's why she could grow that flower. We all are."

"Really?" She asked, and when everyone nodded in response, she seemed to calm down.

"There's a place where you can go and be safe to use your powers. That's where we all came from, and we would all love it if you came and joined us there. Would you like that?"

Mary nodded slowly, unfurling herself and standing on wobbly legs. Taking Lucy's hand, Mary was led out of the station with the rest of the group. By that time, the sun had begun to set, and the streets were surprisingly empty for a brisk April evening.

Barely five minutes had passed, and Mary was already starting to cheer up as Juniper popped out flowers one-by-one, so the two could fashion them into a braided crown.

Marin, once again, lingered behind, too caught up in her passing thoughts. The team had come to a relatively quiet intersection, only the occasional car passing them by.

The air was still and calm, but the tranquility shattered as a shrill scream rang out through the street, coming from behind them. Marin bristled, immediately alert and aware of her surroundings. Surprisingly, no one else seemed affected, as if they hadn't even heard the scream at all. No one else except Mary, who tugged on Lucy's hand.

"What was that?" Her lip quivered, the half-made flower crown shaking in her tiny hands.

"Oh, I'm sure that was nothing, sweetheart." Lucy responded with a saccharine smile, before giving the rest of the team a discreet jerk of her head that said 'we've got to go'.

Marin was shocked but not entirely surprised to see the rest of the group follow Lucy without hesitation. Marin watched their retreating backs frantically as the headed in the opposite direction of where the scream came from.

"So—we're just going pretend like we didn't just hear a woman screaming?" Marin blurted, causing everyone to turn and look at her. She noticed the glares they gave her, but she decided that she didn't particularly care; instead, she felt stunned that she was the only person concerned. "We're just going to ignore them, even if they probably need help?!"

"We can't do this now, Marin." Lucy clipped, making to grab Marin's wrist. But Marin twisted away, taking a couple steps back.

"No," she shook her head incredulously, gesturing around with her arms. "We—we've got to do something! We can't just abandon them!"

Lucy made up the difference in the distance Marin had put between them in a fraction of a second. The sudden close proximity to the heat radiating off of Lucy was stifling and caused Marin to drawback. "And why exactly do we have to do anything, Rain?" Lucy sneered Marin's horrendous code-name like it was a searing fire poker, branding painfully on Marin's flesh. She had made it obvious of her disdain for the name in the past—it had become a permanent reminder that she was stuck at the Institute, that she'd forever be an X-Man. (That, and it was kind of a hideous superhero name.)

"Don't call me that." Marin snarled back, clenching her fists. Her voice was sharp but pained, displaying obvious weakness to a trained ear. Lucy noticed, of course, because she quirked an eyebrow like Marin was challenging her (and failing, too, judging by the haughty weight in her eyes). Marin inhaled shakily. "We—we're heroes, aren't we? I mean—isn't that what we should do? Go out and save—"

"No." Lucy snapped, her eyes glowing a vibrant orange with barely-controlled rage. Stunned by her sudden hostility, Marin cowered. It was there, in her eyes—a resentment too familiar to Marin. Lucy was supposed to be different, she thought pathetically. "We are not heroes, Marin Frost. We are mutants. And we are certainly not those irresponsible, arrogant fools playing dress-up and dropping cities out of the sky. We are not the Avengers—you are not an Avenger. Your stupid delusions that you are one, need to end now because you never will be."

Marin's breath seized in her chest, she felt like she was boiling from the inside out. As she glanced around at the others, Marin noticed that no one was coming to her defense. No one even looked sorry—just annoyed and impatient. They didn't care about her—it was a realization that, while not entirely surprising, still slammed into her like a fist to the solar plexus. Marin fought through the large hole of abandonment burning through her heart.

(She could still hear the distant cries for help.)

"Fine." She conceded with a choking sound, appearing defeated. As Lucy nodded and led the group away, no one bothered to see Marin's eyes scorch with bright defiance.

No one even noticed she was gone until they had climbed into the belly of the jet, and no one was there to trail in behind them.

+++

This was a bad idea. The worst she'd ever had, if Marin would admit it to herself (which, of course, she wouldn't).

She was already on thin ice with Charles after her last act of defiance, and she was positive that this was the last stunt she would pull as an X-Man. But she couldn't find it in herself to regret her actions, not when she could still hear those women screaming for help. She relished in the rush of adrenaline sweeping through her body as she followed the commotion to a bank down the street. She took only a few precious moments to catch her breath, yanking off her X-Men jacket and exposing her bare arms to the cool air. Digging through her jacket, she pulled out her reusable water bottle and unscrewed the lid for easy access. Despite the chill in the evening air, Marin flushed with slight perspiration.

Peeking around the corner from where she hid next to the building, Marin looked in the window, taking inventory of the people inside. Four men in ski masks, all carrying handguns; two women huddled in the furthest corner of the bank with one criminal keeping his gun trained on them, and one woman being held in the clutches of the center-most robber, his gun digging into her temple. The other two men had their guns aimed at... a boy, Marin assumed, wearing blue sweatpants (were those red knee-socks they were tucked into?) and a red hoodie, his arms waving minimally in the air. Was he... wearing a mask? And what were those chunky black things wrapped around his wrists?

Marin didn't know what this kid was doing walking around dressed like that in public, but she supposed that she was still technically in the city, and she knew the truths behind stereotypical city-dwelling crazies. Still, the masked weirdo was a hostage just as much as those women were, and with how his hand gestures kept getting increasingly more erratic, Marin didn't want to waste another second.

"Well, I must say that I'm disappointed I wasn't invited to the slumber party," She waltzed through the door, adopting a casual tone as to not startle the criminals and jeopardize the hostages' safety.

"Who the fuck are you?" The man holding the female hostage by the neck demanded, aiming his weapon at the boy, while the other two whipped theirs on Marin.

"That is... incredibly rude, sir." Marin tutted, taking small, careful steps toward the scene. The fabric of the ski mask shifted like he was scrunching up his face, most likely in confusion. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you and your buddies to leave this fine establishment."

The man scoffed, adjusting his grip on the gun. "You've gotta be kiddin' me."

"Afraid not, Mr. Criminal. I only kid on Tuesdays and Fridays exclusively, and today just so happens to be a Thursday." Marin sighed, continuing to inch towards them. "Now, why don't we let these nice women and... boy... go? Surely you'd rather things stay nice and clean so your face doesn't get any uglier than I'm sure it already is."

Curse her improvising ass. She always ended up insulting someone when she was on a roll, and to do it now was asking for trouble. She had a split second to realize that he turned his gun on her, but she was prepared enough to react. She flicked her hand up, summoning the water from inside her bottle and surrounding the bullet with it. Instantaneously, she turned the water to ice, trapping the bullet in midair and swatting it to the floor beside her, barely missing her head.

Silence fell over the room as everyone watched in astonishment.

"What the hell?!" Marin heard a voice cry out. Shifting her head to spare him a glance, the boy had his hands clutched to his head in shock. Were those goggles?!

In her moment of distraction, one of the extra thugs took the opportunity to strike, lashing out at Marin's forehead with the butt of their gun. She yelped in surprise but didn't have enough time to recover before the other man stepped forward and kicked her hard in the stomach.

Her breath flew out of her with a grunt, the force of the kick sending her sprawling back into a couple of chairs lined against the front wall. Just before she moved to right herself, red and blue flashed in the peripherals of her vision. She straightened as best as she could, clutching her stomach and determinedly ignoring the throb of pain radiating in her forehead.

To her complete and utter surprise, Marin found the boy in red and blue pajamas on the ceiling. What... the hell?

As he hung upside-down, somehow keeping himself attached to the stucco ceiling of the bank, he took turns fighting the three criminals that had gone to attack him. He lashed out only occasionally, letting the criminals to most of the work for him; ducking and dodging swings he couldn't have possibly seen, even out of the corner of his eye. Then, almost strangest of all, he shot out his hand and released a white fluid from the black thing on his wrist, attaching itself to one assailant's face.

What. The. Hell?!

Marin flipped her gaze over to the women, who were being corralled to the opposite side of the bank, away from the action, by the fourth criminal. As he shoved one of the women, Marin retrieved the shattered ice laying on the floor, turning it back into a liquid and gathering it in her hand. The man shoved the barrel of his gun into one of the women's face, so Marin thrust out her hand, using the water to snatch the weapon away. With expert precision from years of training, Marin released the magazine from the gun with one hand, and turned the water back to ice with the other. She chucked the sphere of ice at the man's head before he could react, knocking him out instantly.

A pained gasp yanked at Marin's attention. She pivoted to find the boy on the ground, curled into himself for protection as the three thugs took turns beating into him with whatever means they could use. They weren't using their guns on him—an observation that told Marin that they would rather drag out his pain and suffering than stop him from retaliating.

Marin felt her anger surge as she watched the boy take the beating. Images flashed against her vision: Lucy digging into her soul, ripping her psyche to shreds and reveling in it—watching as no one came to defend her—enduring the years of isolation and animosity—remembering the night her powers surfaced, seeing the look in her father's eyes as he—

The first thing she noticed as her vision began to return, and her mind began to clear, was the ringing in her ears.

"What the hell are you?!" A feminine voice exclaimed in terror. Marin blinked away the dark spots clouding her vision. What... what happened? Marin wondered, taking in the scene before her. The lights overhead were blown out, bathing the bank in darkness. The criminals were tied up, trapped to the floor under a blanket of whatever came from the boy's weird wrist gadgets, unconscious but alive. Marin glanced around, only to find the boy gone. Where was he?

Remembering who had spoken, she snapped her gaze to the women still cowering in the corner of the room. Her heart dropped when she saw the fear in their eyes. The adrenaline rushed out of her and she was left with nothing but exhaustion and the feeling that she was about to shatter into a million tiny pieces.

"I-I don't—I'm sorry, I—" Marin stuttered, and realizing she was still gripping the unloaded handgun, she dropped it like it had stung her. She stumbled, tripping over her feet as she crashed through the doors. She gulped down a shaky breath, the crisp air burning a path down her trachea. Her throat ached with the desire to cry as she reached to pick up her jacket where she'd left it lying in the alley next to the bank, and collapsed against the wall, taking heaving breaths to keep herself from crying.

Suddenly, just as she'd managed to settle her breathing, a figure jumped down in front of her.

"Holy shit, dude!" She yelped and would've lashed out instinctively if she'd had enough energy to even get up off of the ground. Instead, she only clutched at her chest and didn't get up from her spot in the dirt. "Give a girl some warning next time you leap from outta nowhere!"

It was the boy, hovering over her hunched figure like a cross parent lecturing their child. "What the hell is your deal, lady?!" He shouted, pointing vigorously down at her. Marin immediately went on the defensive.

She screwed up her face. "What the hell is my—you should be thanking me right now! I just helped you—"

"I had it under control!" He growled forcefully. "I didn't need your help!"

Marin scrambled to her feet, enraged. "Are you fucking kidding, dude?! Waving your arms around like that? You were basically a human neon sign, screaming 'hey, come and shoot me'! I saved your ass, and if I didn't intervene when I did, you probably would have been shot—or killed!"

"Well, your little light show almost did kill those criminals in there! Not to mention that those women could've been killed, too!" He fired back. Marin's expression closed up as she glanced away. She had no idea what he was talking about, and her head was throbbing too much for her to come up with a response.

As the two regarded each other in silence, Marin realized something. This wasn't just a weird dude dressed like he was going to Comic-Con—he had powers. She didn't know what the whole deal was with his wrist devices, but she recognized his enhanced sensory abilities—the way he could detect movement even out of his line of sight. Then there was the matter of him being able to stick to the ceiling. As she looked down at his chest, she noticed a design drawn onto the fabric with a black marker.

"Is that a spider?" Marin pointed to his chest.

Startled by the sudden change in tone, he glanced down at his chest. "Ye—yes, it's a spider!" He screeched. Clearing his throat, he said, "I'm—I'm Spider-Man!"

That explained the white fluid—they must have been his version of spider webs. Marin cocked her head, thinking. "Hmm."

"What?!"

"I'm Marin."

"'Marin'? That's a weird superhero name."

"That's because it's my name, dingus."

Before he could respond, a throat was cleared. In front of them stood Logan, looking angry as hell with his claws out and on full display. Marin only gulped, but Spider-Man took a few frantic steps back.

"Shit," Marin's face twisted. "I'm screwed now, aren't I?"

"You're in real deep shit this time, kid," Logan grunted, obviously holding back his rage for the sake of the boy standing—well, behind her, now. "Say goodbye to your boyfriend, and get going."

"It was nice meeting you, Spider-Boy," Marin lamented, dropping to grab her jacket and water bottle. She muttered as she passed Logan, "And he's not my goddamn boyfriend, claws."

Logan grumbled a half-amused sound as he dragged her away, leaving a very disturbed young superhero in the darkness of the alley. Spider-Man grimaced to himself in disbelief.

"Spider-Boy?!"

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this-is-a-podcast-fanblog · 5 years ago

Text

ok here’s my really long night vale meta

(I want to just start by saying that I love Welcome to Night Vale more than any other show that I’ve ever listened to or watched. I’m not sure if I would even still be here without the positive change it brought to my life and the art form it introduced me to. So although this post is critical of recent story develops, please understand that I critique with love, and that I have nothing but the highest respect for the writers and cast.)

So let’s get into it.

This turned out way longer than I meant for it to be.

Since the beginning, each season of Welcome to Night Vale is basically self-contained. The things brought up in them can stretch across seasons, but for the most part any conflict or Big Bad brought up will be resolved when that season ends, which typically is on June 15th.

Let’s look at the first five seasons and their overarching in-season arcs.

Season One: The introduction season. This season laid the groundwork for all the seasons to come and established Cecilos. The arc of the Apache Tracker was resolved within this season.

Season Two: The Strexcorp season. This season taught us a lot about the characters, and about Desert Bluffs.

Season Three: The auction season. This is also the long-distance relationship season for Cecil and Carlos. Both plotlines are resolved beautifully by the end and relate well to each other.

Season Four: The beagle season. Also known as “Who’s a good boy?”. The evil beagle puppy was defeated by the end of the season. I felt like this season’s arc felt very natural and was enjoyable to listen to.

Season Five: The Huntokar season. A lot of things that have been building slowly come together. We finally meet Huntokar after hearing a lot about her throughout the show. The small arc of converging timelines is resolved, but as we will see, it later comes back.

So that’s the first five seasons.

Now, as far as writing styles go, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor are pretty formulaic. (This is also evident in their other shows, Alice Isn’t Dead and Within the Wires). I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. Quite the opposite - I think one of the reasons why Night Vale is so endearing to so many people is because you always know what to expect: the complete unexpected. The world is weird and it doesn’t make sense, but it’s consistent in its inconsistency. You’ll get a community calendar or sponsor, you’ll get deep thoughts about life, and you’ll get a weather. Similarly, with the seasons, you’ll get a problem introduced over the course of the season, and then it will be resolved.

But as you can probably see from the list I’ve written out, the seasons don’t exist in a bubble from each other. The things that happen affect each other. The arrival of Strexcorp in town was what eventually drove Carlos through into the desert otherworld, which set up the conflict for season 3. The tiny city under the bowling alley in season 1 was revisited to teach us more about Huntokar in season 5. Each season has a different flavor, but they’re all ultimately the same dish, if that metaphor makes any sense.

And this is where we get into the issues I’ve been having with the most recent three seasons. My biggest problem is simple. They just don’t have a distinct flavor like the other seasons do. They don’t have anything that stands out to me.

Let’s take a look at seasons six and seven, and then the first episode that dropped today of season eight.

Season Six: The guest writer season. This season was mostly written with guest writers that would do a mini-arc of two to three episodes.

Season Seven: The Carlos’s Double/Blood Space/Lee Marvin/Thanos-Snap season. Not sure what else to call it.

The basic premise of season six was that it would be a bunch of character-driven stories set in the world of Night Vale, most of which were written by guest writers. To me, worldbuilding and characters are more important than plot every time, so I didn’t hate this as a concept. It was just... the execution honestly wasn’t all that interesting to me. I feel like the way the characters were discussed moved their placement within the world, but it didn’t actually change anything we knew about them. Tamika’s episodes, for example, didn’t really show us anything new about her, they just showed us how she acted as a city council leader instead of a militia leader (spoiler alert: pretty much exactly the same).

My biggest problem with season six is that it set up a lot without actually doing anything. All of the best moments from season six were things I thought we would revisit later: who will be the mayor now that Dana stepped down? What is it Carlos is still keeping from Cecil? What’s up with the shipwreck? But then all of these things were totally forgotten in season seven. It was like the writers didn’t care. That may be because they were established by different writers, but it still feels... I don’t know, *Cecil voice* Incomplete?

Now let’s talk season seven. I think season six was definitely the weakest of all Night Vale seasons, but this was a close second (and that shows you how much I love this show, because even the weakest seasons had moments that blew me away, and I’ve relistened to most of the episodes at least once, if not more.) Season seven, like season six, just had way too much going on. For the first few months there was no plot whatsoever, just a bunch of disjointed episodes with seemingly no relation to each other.

And don’t get me wrong - I think a lot of these episodes were amazing. Are You Sure? was thrilling, totally game-changing for podcasts. Save Dark Owl Records was a really great look at Maureen and Michelle. I’ve relistened to UFO Sightings a bunch. But there’s a difference between enjoying episodes alone and thinking they fit in a larger story. And so while I really like a lot of the episodes of season seven... they’re kind of pointless story-wise. What disappointed me the most was the Kevin mini-series near the start of the season - Kevin is one of my favorite characters, and so while I liked to see him happy, I was annoyed that they forgot about him again after the arc ended and they moved on.

That’s because season seven didn’t really have a story - it had a bunch of stories. The problem is that they weren’t introduced until near the very end. We had the Lee Marvin arc that started somewhere in the middle, and I did like that. I thought it was cool to take what seemed like a throwaway gag and turn it into a story, especially one that seemed relatable. But running this arc concurrently with the Blood Space War arc didn’t make any sense to me. There were a bunch of times that I thought the two could relate - linking time travel to being trapped in time would be pretty easy, I thought. But that never happened.

Then the Blood Space War arc nosedived into a pit of emotion after both Cecil and Carlos were erased from history, and I was ecstatic. Not that Cecil and Carlos had been erased - but that the show was taking such a drastic emotional change. It felt like a shift in tone, but also consistent to the show’s format, hitting that perfect sweet spot. I was even more excited when I found out that the resolution to this was that Leonard Burton would have to die again. That seemed like the perfect end to his (albeit brief) character arc, and a great emotional high for the season.

And then the next episode was just... Cecil saying everything had been fixed.

That really disappointed me. It felt so anticlimactic, especially considering the heights some of the other season finales had reached (I’m especially thinking of the dog’s ominous barking right before the finale of Who’s A Good Boy, and the town almost being destroyed). The ending to the Blood Space War arc felt rushed to me. I liked the close of the Lee Marvin arc, but everything else seemed a little off-beat.

I think a big problem with season six and seven is they try to take us to new things within the world of Night Vale, but they do that in a way that doesn’t actually show us anything we need to learn. Eunomia hadn’t been in any other seasons and her backstory was minimal, so her death in season seven had no real impact on me.

So why are they doing that? I don’t know. But it seems like the writing team has made the decision to utilize Cecil more as a voice for the town than an independent character, and are trying to let other people take the spotlight. However, because Cecil is by far one of the strongest and most beloved character, and because he drove most of the story for the first few seasons, this doesn’t work as well as you might hope.

I hoped that season eight might go back to the old format. However, the first episode was another self-contained episode (although I do love Josh Crayton), so that has me worried.

I guess I can say, there’s a difference between a story podcast and a storytelling podcast, does that make sense? Those might overlap, but they aren’t really the same thing. While a story podcast exists to have an overarching plot, a storytelling podcast just wants to put you in a world and let you look around. What I love so much about Night Vale is that it has always been able to be both. It has a plot, but it isn’t just a plot like many other shows are - it can let you walk around, run from government satellites, and NOT enter the dog park.

However, it seems to me that Night Vale is forgetting it does have a story, too. There are still SO many things from past arcs that haven’t been resolved yet. What’s more, the show doesn’t seem all that interested in resolving them. You can have floating cats and five-headed dragons, but you can’t give up an essential part of your show. That doesn’t mean the show can’t still be fun to listen to, if they decide the plot no longer matters. But I think it will be a little less rewarding.

And to finish I’ll just share my biggest fear: I really really really hope Night Vale isn’t going to become normal. At the end of season seven, time started working again. I’m so scared that they’re going to slowly convert the whole town to being normal before the show ends. And I think that would really suck, because it would change what Night Vale means to a lot of people, and what the town really is.

TL;DR: although it is one of the greatest shows ever, Welcome to Night Vale has recently started to stray from its established formulas, tropes and characters, especially in seasons six and seven. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, I feel like the way it’s been executed has weakened the recent episodes. Seasons six and seven also tried to fit too much in without actually doing anything to advance certain arcs or plot points. Nonetheless, it is a great show, and I’m optimistic about the future.

I’d love to have a dialogue about this so if you are the one person alive who’s going to read this, please don’t hesitate to comment or send an ask! Again, I absolutely love this show, these are all just my opinions, and my ability to critique the show exists outside of my adoration for it.

Now I should sleep.

#It's one am #this is not beta'd #and my formatting is all over the place #but here you go #please someone read this #welcome to night vale #night vale presents #podcasts #meta #my meta #cecil palmer #carlos the scientist #cecilos #all hail the glow cloud

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