#i always think about the tragedy that these writers didn’t get to experience the freedom to explore and express themselves that i am offered

[booksandothersecrets]

Dedication of Maurice by E.M. Forster // Sappho // The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall

[fahrni]

Saturday Morning Coffee

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

We’re expecting a snow and sleet event this morning. As I was composing this post it started raining around 6:30AM and it’s below freezing. Here’s hoping we don’t lose power and have frozen roads later. 🥶

I hope you enjoy the links.

Colleen Long • The Associated Press

President Joe Biden will stress democracy is still a ‘sacred cause’ in a speech near Valley Forge

If TFG wins we may become an authoritarian nation. Kiss freedoms we’ve come to expect — like the horrible reversal of Roe v. Wade — to become the norm. I’d expect to see jailed political rivals and journalists. The Justice Department and Military will become law enforcement. With the law being his Orangeness.

No thank you.

Brynn Tannehill • The New Republic

The Polls Prove It: Many Republicans Love Fascism

So, yeah, fascism is the new GOP policy and Republicans across the nation love it.

That’s sickening.

Slashdot

Niklaus Wirth, Inventor of Pascal, Dies At 89

I never learned Pascal but know plenty of developers who made their career using it. 🪦

Casey Newton • Platformer

On Tuesday, I told subscribers that we are considering leaving the platform based on the company’s recent statement that it would not demonetize or remove openly Nazi accounts.

Bravo Casey! I wasn’t planning on linking to any Substack content but I had to break that rule for this piece. Casey is planning on doing something about Substack’s horrible position by, potentially, taking his publication and subscribers elsewhere. That’s very brave given it’s how he makes his living! ❤️

Now, if we can get other writers to follow that would be amazing.

BBC

Japan earthquake: Nearly 250 missing as hope for survivors fades

Our world has become such a mess the tragedy unfolding in Japan doesn’t even register as big news, at least that’s how it feels to me.

Kyle Orland • Ars Technica

34 years later, a 13-year-old hits the NES Tetris “kill screen”

Great explainer video of how the true Tetris Kill Screen was finally reached.

Also, I had no idea Tetris was still such a big deal. Silly me, of course it is! 🧱

Ashur Cabrera

I thought I’d be sharing photos of pintxos and more Basque lettering from Donostia-San Sebastián, and diving into our early experiences of living abroad.

My friend Ashur had planned a big adventure that didn’t quite work out as planned. It’s a worthwhile read and proves things don’t always go as planned.

David McCabe and Tripp Mickle • The New York Times

The Justice Department is in the late stages of an investigation into Apple and could file a sweeping antitrust case taking aim at the company’s strategies to protect the dominance of the iPhone as soon as the first half of this year, said three people with knowledge of the matter.

Some of the things the Justice Department are interested in seen really strange to me. Like allowing access to the Messages Service. Why should Google, or whoever else, be given the keys to access Messages backend services? Apple created and runs that service. It’s not built on a free to use, government backed, open-to-the-public utility. It’s paid for and maintained by Apple.

Now, if by access the government means Apple has to open it up as a paid service, I could see that. Perhaps Google agrees to take on some of the cost burden, based on usage, or pay Apple some huge fee so Android users have full access to Messages with a native messaging app built by Google. That wouldn’t be so bad. Another alternative is for Apple to build a Messages app for Android and sell access to the service as a monthly subscription. Hey, Apple, that means more service revenue! 😁

The whole App Store payment kerfuffle is something a lot of developers would like to see changed. I think most developers don’t want to pay Apple 15-30% of their potential revenue. That can be a lot of cheese for many Indie developers. There are some things Apple could change to help the situation, like allowing developers to actually tell users to visit their website to sign up or subscribe to their service. E.G. Amazon and Netflix cannot tell new users, through their app UI, to visit their website to get started. For a company who prides themselves on simplicity and great user experience sure do make it difficult for third-party apps to be easy to use.

Anywho, I’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for the Justice Department taking action against Apple and fallout from it.

Dave Winer • Scripting News

So at the beginning of a new year, I’m going to remind myself that I’m too old and not paid well enough (I’m not paid at all, heh) to do another year of this kind of work. I should be making writing and reading tools work better on the web. That’s my mission.

Dave has been an innovator all his adult life. Whether it was scripting on the Mac and Windows or creating widely used technology like RSS and podcasting. Since he sold weblogs.com and left UserLand he’s continued to build writing tools of various kinds. His latest venture is FeedLand. It’s a feed reader and more. I can personally see it as a mechanism to follow and find excellent podcasts for a podcast player. Yes, it has an API that could be used for such things and it has full search capability. Bet you didn’t see that use case coming!

Anywho, I hope you get some rest, Dave, and have a wonderful 2024 making the web a better place for writers.

Keep digging!

Tim Kellogg

Back in the ’00s you would download a feed reader and subscribe to feeds. This felt a lot like an early version of social media. Google Reader was killed in 2013, which was largely seen as the death of RSS. I think social media generally replaced RSS because it took far fewer technical skills to setup a Facebook account versus an RSS-enabled blog.

This is interesting because it uses Mastodon as a feed reader. That’s not a bad idea, really. It’s such a good idea to have a timeline based reader I made one! 😁

All the stuff Tim says about Facebook and other social media platforms is 100% accurate. Those platforms stood in for blogs because of their low barrier to entry. Quite honestly I’m surprised Facebook never embraced blogging as a true feature of its platform, complete with all the expected bells and whistles, and that includes RSS and posts that don’t require a Facebook login to read them.

Anil Dash

Well, things changed a little bit in tech of late. Often, the power shifts in the tech world because of a dramatic new invention that solves an old problem a whole lot better. But in the current era, when most of what’s getting funded and hyped up are just various attempts to undermine workers and control consumers, we’re instead seeing lots of major players lose power because their signature offerings have gotten so much worse.

There was a time, not that long ago, folks said things like “RSS is dead” or asked “Is RSS dead?” First off, it’s just a technology, so it can’t actually die. Second, its web fabric and has been since its inception. It’s boring stuff — this is not a dig or insult, it’s a compliment. It’s as boring as HTML or CSS. I’d imagine it’s been used for all sorts of stuff beyond blogs over its history and it’ll probably be around for as long as we have a web to browse.

Sure social media, or microblogging, took center stage for a while. My own blogging slowed for a long period of time because I started posting little blurbs of text to Twitter instead of my blog.

Now I do that with a combination of Mastodon and Micro.blog. Short posts go to Mastodon and Micro.blog and long posts, like this one, go to my blog with a link on many services including Mastodon, Micro.blog, Blue Sky, and Tumblr.

My blog is at the center. It’s my content, I own it.

Matt Birchler

Here’s an uncomfortable question: when do I stop blogging?

I always find this question odd. I figure I’ll stop when, or if, I just stop one day. I suppose folks who do it professionally have to think about stuff like this, especially if they have subscribers and/or advertisers.

Maybe when the day comes that you’d like to stop doing it for a living you just let folks know you’re going to blog about whatever you’d like and do it for fun?

I’ve been blogging since February 2001 and still love it.

Rain Noe • Core77

A Handsome Aluminum and Ultem Smartphone Case

I want one of these. Guess I need to buy an iPhone 14 or 15 Pro? Having an updated iPhone would also open the door to a whole lot of cases I love at Cotton Bureau. 😃

Chance Miller, Benjamin Mayo, Ben Lovejoy, and Ben Schoon • 9to5Mac

The iPhone is the device that pushed the mobile industry away from physical keyboards, but nothing can truly replace that tactile experience. Launching next month, “Clicks” aims to add a physical keyboard to your iPhone with support for keyboard shortcuts and backlighting too.

In 2013 Ryan Seacrest was part of an effort to bring a physical keyboard to the iPhone. It was called Typo and I never heard much about it beyond the initial announcement. I could’ve sworn it was earlier than 2013, but my memory sometimes fails me.

Anyway, I hope these folks are wildly successful. Good luck y’all!

Richard Devine • Windows Central

The best holiday gift was Mac losing out to Windows, at least according to these stats

It’s obvious some Windows users and pundits still have an inferiority complex when it comes to the Mac. It’s surprising.

I’m an old, long time, Windows developer and I owe a lot to the platform. I spent around 20 years writing code for Windows and I still believe it to be an amazing platform for users and developers. But I switched to the Mac full time in 2006 and have grown to enjoy it every bit as much as Windows.

It’s perfectly fine to love using a different operating system or prefer coding for one over the other. Let people have fun and enjoy what they love doing. ❤️

Here’s hoping 2024 isn’t a complete shit show. 🤣

[myhumanweakness]

I don’t want to be a huge asshole, but...

There are a lot of people trying to find a modicum of positivity in the finale. It’s not about this Destiel-Bibro war that’s happened over the years, it’s not about Cas, it’s not about any of the superficial drama. This finale was the weirdest mixture of OOC and in character writing I have ever seen. 

Things that are in character: 

The brothers put each other first. They are each other’s safe place and stability. Up until the very end. Sam respected Dean’s wishes, stayed with him in his last moments, and let him go gracefully. Sam even went on and had a full life so Dean’s sacrifices weren’t in vain. 

For Dean, Heaven wasn’t perfect without Sam there. And he had this huge sense of relief and happiness when Sam arrived. 

Jack deconstructed the walls of Heaven so that it was a vast place where everyone could be together. They weren’t living out their “best memories” anymore. They were creating new memories eternally with each other. And Bobby recognizing that Jack is like Dean’s son by saying, “That boy of yours...” 

Cas helped build the Heaven that he always dreamed of. Cas always had such a high standard for Heaven, and it always fell short. He helped Jack build a home that was warm and comforting and beautiful and open and loving and true. Everything Cas stood for. 

Bobby, the man Dean adopted as his father, was there to share a beer with him (just like Dean shared with his dad in his childhood). And Bobby was happy and confirmed that Dean is in a Heaven he deserves. 

Sam mourning Dean’s death for the rest of his life, but also living his life to honor Dean. Classic Sam. 

Dean using his last moments to tell Sam how much he loves him and how proud he is. Sam deserved to hear that because we all know Sam looked at Dean as a parental figure. 

Things that are OOC:

Sam not marrying Eileen. The show created this HUGE story arc around Sam and Eileen and their real love and connection. And then they shoot this finale and couldn’t even get an actress that looked like Eileen to stand it the blurry background. Like, I don’t care what you say, it’s NOT open to interpretation. Sam did not end up with Eileen. All of you people who are Sam stans, who say you want your character to be happy and live a full life should be livid. Sam ending up with Eileen wouldn’t have canceled out the fact that Dean was/is his number one person. Dean gave his blessing for Eileen, and he loved her and welcomed her into their lives because he knew Sam loved her and had a genuine connection with her. Having them together would not have ruined the ending in any way. Sam still could have ended up with Dean on that bridge. 

That woman with the blonde/light brown hair is NOT Eileen. They couldn’t even get an actress with dark brown hair to keep hope alive that they ended up together. Absolutely awful. 

Dean just accepting Cas’ death and not even talking about it, other than to say, “Yeah I think about em’ too.” I don’t care if you don’t believe in Destiel or that the love was reciprocated. Dean EXCLUSIVELY said multiple times that Cas is a member of their family and a brother to the boys. He said the words, “YOU”RE MY BEST FRIEND.” I’m not saying Dean should have scarified himself to go pull Cas out of the Empty (because we had 40 minutes to wrap up 15 years). But the fact that Dean was like: I’m gonna eat some pie and just not acknowledge any feelings or thoughts and act like nothing ever happened is SO OOC. If your best friend died tragically, you’d have something to say about it or act like you had something to say about it. And that’s not to say I wanted Dean to be miserable and hurting. I’m happy he got a dog and found some normalcy. But they lost SO many people, and he’s just walking around cool as a cucumber? When every other season/episode where they lost someone important to Dean he was a mess. And I’m not just talking about Cas- we all obviously know how Dean behaved when Cas died/was missing/Lucifer was controlling him. But even when Jo and Ellen died. Even when Mary died. Even when Bobby died. Even when John died. Even when Crowley died. Even when Jack died, Dean was shown hurting. Suddenly everything is cool and normal there’s no pain or anything? The fuck? A brief moment of acknowledgement. That’s all it needed.

I will never forgive the writers for ending Dean’s story that way. A rusty nail impaling him (probably in his pulmonary arteries/aorta based on the angle) on some random hunt after he finally exhaled the episode before and said, “We’re finally free.” He sacrificed his ENTIRE childhood and life for his brother and the world and so many other people, and he didn't even get to enjoy being a human on the Earth and living a life for more than a week. What! Dean was always a character filled with tragedy, and yeah, maybe he did have to die. You can make that argument. But like that?! AND. AND! Sam held a funeral for Dean and DIDN’T INVITE ANYONE! What!!! No one was there to toast to Dean and share their memories and give him the send-off he deserved. Sam just burned his body alone. Never. That would have NEVER happened. Sam loved Dean SO much and looked up to him and thought the world of him. Dean was his big brother who was fearless and strong and the best hunter on this Earth (and probably every other planet), and he didn’t celebrate his life in the end? 

Cas not showing up in Heaven is absolutely insane. INSANE. It doesn’t matter what you think of their relationship, the show has proven that Cas is important to Dean (even if you think Cas is way at the bottom of the list, he’s on it!). Dean’s ideal retirement/endgame was him, Sam, and Cas on a beach, drinking cocktails, with hula girls. That was the future Dean wanted for him and his family. And you’re telling me that Cas helped Jack build the best version of Heaven possible, and the minute Dean Winchester arrived Cas wasn’t there to greet him. Even just to say “Hello, Dean.” Even call Dean’s phone and say, “Welcome home.” Cas would have been the one greeting Dean in Heaven, with Bobby. Requited or not, it’s canon that Cas is in love with Dean. You don’t just ignore the opportunity to see the person you’re in love with. And... and! Even if Cas didn’t greet Dean in Heaven immediately, he would have appeared in the Impala during the drive. He would have met the brothers on the bridge to welcome them both home. Cas loved Sam too. He would have been there. The three boys together again. Team Free Will!  

I love Cas, and I know a lot of Cas stans feel buried and betrayed and hurt over the show doing a “is he there or isn’t he?” thing. And that is completely valid. I can’t even express to you how sorry I am that so many of us in the fandom are hurting. But I know this show. And this show has always made it clear that it was/is always about two brothers. Fine. But Dean Winchester, the most caring and loving human in the entire universe, deserved better. I am so sick to my stomach that Dean’s whole life was him convinced that there was only one way for his story to end and it was him dying tragically. For years he never let himself even entertain the thought of living a life because he 1) didn’t think he deserved that or was worth it 2) it just wasn’t in the cards. We watched Dean grow so much, SO MUCH, that we finally saw him talking about the future and having hope for the future. And yeah, maybe he wouldn’t get the future he talked about with the retirement on the beach, but he would have lived long enough to experience life outside of just “playing whack-a-mole” and being God’s favorite story and puppet. Dean didn’t even get to enjoy his freedom and humanity. They took a character that they purposefully pushed through so many stages of character development to attain hope and faith and self-worth and promise, and killed him. 

What the fuck!

[planesofduality]

Full Transcript edition:

“The Story Behind Solas with Dragon Age Lead Writer Patrick Weekes” by Dialogue Wheel/Video Game Sophistry

Reblog of one of my first posts ever. I didn’t understand how tumblr worked back then really, and long story short, I split the transcript of this interview  into 3 parts :) I’d probably do things differently now. Reblogging it as a single transcript for my own convenience, as I still refer to some of the things Weekes said here from time to time!

Interview is from before Trespasser DLC; posted to YouTube 12/20/2019 

Note: pseudo-reblog

“Interview with lead writer for Dragon Age Patrick Weekes years ago about how the enigmatic character Solas was created, here is what that magic elf could have up his sleeve for us in Dragon Age 4.” Not my interview, just wrote transcript of questions and answers for reference. 

Full video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFx1nCdZFjw&t=1s

Time: 2:54

Solas, tell us about little old Solas. Talking about your other characters you created we always start at the beginning. Pen to paper - How did the idea of Solas first start? What was that first iteration?

So actually Dave and Mike both, you know, we - everyone knew who Solas was - everyone knew what the ending was going to be with him. And, you know, Dave and Mike said, “Well Dave is writing a ton of the crit path, the main part of the game. Dave really wants to do Dorian, that’s very important to him, and are you comfortable writing this guy? Are you comfortable writing someone who is going to be, in some respects, deceiving the Inquisitor for the entirety of the game?” And, honestly, how do you turn that down?

Time: 4:02

So really it was that simple then - from there, in the way you described it, they already had some ideas and some concepts about what Solas needed to bring?

Oh, yeah. Originally, one of the most difficult parts of writing him - and, you know, I said Iron Bull was the one closest to how I originally planned him - Solas and Cole are probably tied for least like how I originally wrote them. And, really, it was getting past the secret. It was getting past Fen’Harel.

Iron Bull: badass former spy, the opposite of Sten.

Blackwall: awesome Grey Warden who is not actually a Grey Warden.

Solas: He’s Fen’Harel…

Okay, can he tell you he’s Fen’Harel? No.

Okay, well what are we going to talk about?

[Pretending to be Solas:] “Hey Inquisitor, I’m still not Fen’Harel, do you have any questions?”,  “I will not take any questions about whether I am Fen’Harel.” That was the big stumbling block of writing him.

I remember the first draft… the first draft all we talked about was elves. It was elves all the time. Every conversation went “Elves, elves… Elves were awesome back in the old days.. Everything was great with the elves.” And then you’d go, “You really like elves huh?” “No, shut up - I’m not Fen’Harel.” And we all kind of looked at that and went, that’s not really much of a character hook. You cannot have a character hook built on something that you only reveal after the play has watched the credits. That is how we got to Fade expert. That is something where, if something had gone terribly wrong, if we were six months from shipped and we decided not to do anything with elves in the future, we could have taken the Dread Wolf out of the equation entirely and a mage named Solas who loves the Fade, is an apostate but without all of the fear and anger that you think of when you think of an apostate, but is just this guy who wants to travel through dreams and find mysteries and explore… that was a good enough character to stand by itself. That is what it took us a couple of drafts to get to.

Time: 7:04

You mentioned the first two phases of Solas - share with us a little more of that journey, when you finally go to this character that could stand on its own. If you don’t mind, a little more of that journey- was it just those first two and now everything’s cool?

First draft was “ ‘Elves, elves’ but ‘I don’t like elves’”. Second draft was about how much to tell. I think in the next draft it was significantly closer. Anyone who looked at that draft - and, you know, I apologize to anyone who looked at that draft - but, anyone who looked at that draft you would find places where “Oh okay that’s the Solas I know and love. There he is. He likes the Fade.” That’s something that’s actually interesting. But, he lied a lot more. And it actually really weakened his character. We played it so close with both Blackwall and Solas - both characters are the liars who don’t actually lie. They will tell you almost truths. With Blackwall - he never actually flat-out says “I am a Grey Warden.” If you ask him what it’s like being a Grey Warden he will say "Well  a warden embodies this and a warden embodies that… I’ve been blessed in my travels.” You know, he never actually quite says “I’m a Warden.” With Solas it’s the same way with the hand wave of ‘in the Fade’. I would start putting ‘in the Fade’ at the end of a lot of sentences.  “Yeah turns out that all of the stuff you thought was true in history was wrong… because I saw it…. in the Fade.”

In revision 2, he lied a lot more. On the one hand it worked, on the other hand it made him less tragic, more of jerk when we got to the reveal. So that is how we got to what we made him into: this character who is intelligent, wise… Solas will think very carefully before he tells you anything and anything he tells you is exactly as much as he wants you to know. That actually led to one of the funny little game moments - one of the last things we do is add the places where characters will approve or disapprove. I think what I want Solas to approve us is you actually asking questions . He’s kind of unique in that regard -  What Solas approves us is people who are interested in finding out knowledge. Whether they are finding it out from him or they’re talking with other people, Solas wants people to explore, he wants people to find information, he wants people to learn. What he disapproves of, honestly, more than what you do, is in many ways how you do it. You can do the thing that he wants you to do, but if you do it in a knee-jerk way, Solas hates that. He wants to know that you are carefully considering your options and taking a measured approach.

Time: 12:16

When it comes the characterization of a character that you’ve already been give at least some sort of name to. We know that this character is some sort of trickster god - when you were trying to develop and make him some a stand-alone character, did you ever have to rely on what the mythos already established of this particular kind of eighth-seat god that maybe a lot people hadn’t heard a lot about?

Well, I think, like we talked about before, one of the great things about the Dragon Age universe is everything that you learn in a codex entry is something that someone else heard in a story and wrote it down somewhere and you’re reading half of the book. So the good news on that is anything we wanted to do with Fen’Harel, there was so little and what was in there was already so sketchy that we had all the freedom we needed to play with him.

That turned out to be a nice thing because I think if we had someone that was completely by-the-books, already established, their character already given, it would feel like more of a letdown to write that as a character or you would have to play against type, you’d have to do something completely different to show he wasn’t just what the stories wrote about him. And, you know, in some ways that is both liberating but also disappointing to people who might have liked  the original stories. This was a fun experience of getting to fill in some of the gaps.

The only thing I think we had to struggle against is that anyone who hears “trickster” or anyone who hears “oh, he’s chaotic and unpredictable” it feels like there is a natural urge to go to “He’s Loki in the Avengers. He’s the guy who’s gonna make large grand-standing plans.” Or, you know, “He’s the Riddler, who’s gonna leave clues to test you.” We had to get away from that: “Let’s tone that back a little bit, let’s not have him be the Jack Nicholson Joker version of the Dread Wolf.”

That’s quite a quote.

You got Dorian as a large, grandiose , extravagant figure and it would have been easy to have him go that way. It was fortunate that we had Dorian as the mage who had the larger-than-life persona already to make Solas be the quiet one.

Time: 15:21

Was there ever an instance where you were really pushed with giving some indicators to the player that Solas may have some connection to this going through the gameplay? Because you do see a lot statues of Fen’Harel. There’s many instances of where you’re discussing it, you’re traveling through those lands. Where do you walk that line, how do you walk that line, or do you just completely disregard it whatsoever?

The goal we had is we wanted the very careful players, the very sensitive players, who were playing attention and watching every scene with Solas to know that something was up and to want more answers and then go to “OH MAN” as soon as the stinger after the credits rolled. But we wanted most players to just go “Oh, okay, he’s like ‘Fade nerd.’ He’s like ‘hippie guy.’”

The other thing we wanted was everyone on their second playthrough, as soon as they talked to Solas to be like “Oh, man, he’s just saying it. He just flat-out said it right there and I missed it completely the first time!” I think we called it the “inevitable in retrospect”- or the “slap the forehead on the second playthrough” style of writing, where we wanted people to see that the most interesting thing about the trickster god is he’s not actually that great of a liar - He is almost telling you a lot of the time. And, you know, some of the tragedy is it that you never had the chance to actually ask, “Wait -are you Fen’harel?”

Time: 17:13

We talked about leaving breadcrumbs, what that meant. Now the big turn, the big scene at the ending:  How did this come about, were you really involved in that sort of process and are you happy with it?

Oh, I’m absolutely happy with it. It went through several iterations,. Mike was hugely involved. The writing was definitely done by Dave; it was a huge crit path moment. He had me give a look at the Solas voice, I think I looked at it, I don’t think I actually changed a single word in the final one.

We had versions where after the main plot it was actually going to be a full plot where you the player went and were actually present when Solas confronts Mythal. We had a part where we said, “Wow that’s too big, a lot of players are gonna miss that, we’ll make it a DLC.” So it was gonna be a separate DLC where that happened. At one point we said “No, this is too big, we actually - let’s cut it and address it next game.” So it was going to be this thing that we pushed off into some future content.

I am really happy with what we went with, because, I think, you know, for my money, that short, little Marvel-style, after-the-credits stinger is what we needed. We needed something so that everyone who was paying attention and everyone who was really invested could go “oh my god!” And go, “Okay, so, just in case you were wondering, we’re not done, we have more stories to tell, and we are confident enough in what we are doing that we are willing to throw that ball.” That stinger is essentially us throwing a football to future us, trusting that we are going to catch it. Because, you know, at the end, we had that level of confidence. We felt that we had that level of confidence, we felt we made a really good game. Dave led an amazing team of writers, and I’m really touched that he has the confidence to believe that I’ll be able to carry that on for him.

Time: 19:49

When we spoke to Dave, one of the big moments that he mentioned, was when he created kind of a long-term idea for what’s going to happen in the Dragon Age universe. And to hear him say it, he mentioned that what he originally wanted for Dragon Age: Inquisition couldn’t happen - it was far too big - it wouldn’t work. And you guys had talked about  taking that concept, finishing Inquisition somewhere in the middle of that concept arc, and then using at least an influence or something like that to affect the franchise going forward.  Speaking with you now, as someone who has taken up the reins, do you know what I’m talking about? Am I talking crazy? Where do you see it going?

Um…

Reasonably - of what you can say on this.

So here’s the last scene of the next game… (laughs). I think there’s an extent to which no plan really survives contact with the audience when it comes to video games. We look at how fans react, we look at what hit, what rang true with everyone. You know, it’s funny, having people react angrily actually isn’t as bad as having people ignore things sometimes. Having people react angrily  means they were definitely emotionally engaged, so you know you hit something there. Whereas having fans go, “I don’t know, fine, I guess, whatever” and move on means, “Okay, I don’t know if that’s what we want to go back to. We didn’t actually get anything from them there, they didn’t actually remember that later.” So that’s a phase that comes after every game we ship. We look at what hit, what missed, and where we want to go from there.

Now that said, Dave’s future plan is, I think, fantastic, epic, and heartbreaking. Our plan is to use that as our starting point. To look at where we want to go, what we want to do, and it will not be - and I, you know, Dave and I have talked about this - it will not be the story that Dave would tell if he were still here as lead writer. Because it could never be that. We can get into that when we talk about Cole a little bit, but if I tried to do that I would just be doing a bad impersonation of Dave Gaider and no one is ever going to be as good at that as Dave is. My goal going forward is to, as lead, put my own spin on that process, put my own spin on the plots going forward, on the thematic elements, while keeping those same thematic elements that we had. Because, I think, what Dave has set in motion in three games, countless DLCs and expansions, is something that can endure: The idea that no choice is ever really that easy and that the great events always stem from human-understandable motivations.

So, that is where I think where we are going to go, as vaguely as I can say.

Time: 23:30

Speaking of specifically to Solas: His continuation of the story. Adding that little “Marvel moment” at the end - what do you think that did for the crit path and the overall arc of the story that players experienced in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Do you think they would have been more satisfied if there was  a DLC or is that just us gamers complaining because we can’t get everything we want right away?

Well, I think you want to leave people wanting more. “Man I wish you guys had done more” is a better problem to have than “Man I wish you guys had done less.” So, I think, looking at it from inside the studio, we didn’t have the resources to do much more than we did. So it was never going to be the big moment right then anyway. From my perspective, the reason I’m really happy we have it is, like I said, I thought it was a vote of confidence. The team is still the Dragon Age team and it is still the writers and designers who did everything else, who made such wonderful characters and were responsible for such fantastic plots.

Time 25:10

Well, again, looking at that in its completion, it’s good to see that even a character that needed to give you a stinger in your estimation didn’t take away, I guess, from the overall story you were trying to tell.

Well, thank you. Yeah it was obviously the moment we were building toward, but again, the goal was even if we didn’t have that stringer, he was still an interesting enough character that people would have not felt cheated that he was in the party.

Time: 25:35

One of the most beautiful scenes I think in Dragon Age Inquisition is the scene that you get with Solas if you play as a female elf Inquisitor. Talk a little bit about that choice to have this romance option very, very specific. It’s race- and gender- specific. Why that scene - what that scene meant and a lot of the subtext, because it is a very rich sequence of scenes, not just one. And, I think it’s really one of the most interesting romances in the game.

I love that scene because that scene for me shows how far we’ve gone past - not the make myself irrelevant anymore - but how far we’ve gone with the digital acting. Jonathan Epp the cine-designer for that scene put it together and when you take everything that Gareth David Lloyd - the voice actor - everything he did on his lines. And just putting so much tragedy, and making it clear in every line that he wants to say more than he can. And with Jon Epp the cine-designer, just in the wordless scenes: showing the tragedy, showing the heartbreak, showing how much he does genuinely care against his better judgement, and how he finally forces himself to step away.,

You know how I said when we were talking about the Iron Bull - everything, every major moment we do, is there for a specific type of player fantasy fulfillment. And you know, not all types of fantasies are the happy ones. There’s a reason why The Phantom of the Opera was on Broadway for so many years and it’s not because it has a happy ending.

The Phantom of the Opera isn’t exactly the theme for the romance -  the razor was something closer to almost professor and student in some ways. He definitely comes across as a mentor in some ways. When he finally steps back it is him beating himself up, not you, saying “Wow what I have done here is actually really unfair to you, and you, player, at the time don’t know that I’m beating myself up because I’m actually  1000s of years old and not the person you think I am and it’s disrespectful to you for me to continue this relationship.” So it’s a very moral perspective for our ancient, quasi-evil, trickster god to come with.

Time: 28:41

And it’s amazing because it’s another instance of content that so few players would actually get an opportunity to see. When it comes to making it that specific, I guess, why was that choice made? Because usually a lot of your content - most of the Dragon Age content - it’s very easy to get really rich, wonderful characters right in your face and have those wonderful “eat-em-up” experiences, why for this one was it such a steep price to get in?

You know, I won’t lie, a lot of it came from some of our designers. Some of the women in the design department really, really loving his voice and saying, “You are absolutely fools if you do not make him romance-able in some capacity.” And, really, his story overall is - and, you know, I think we’ve only hinted at that but I think we have hinted at it enough that I can at least say this part of it - his story isn’t a happy one. His story is one, where, if you look at him and Mythal, there is clearly some grief, there is clearly some tragedy. And, adding in the option - even for players who don’t take it - on my end as a writer,  knowing that some players will have this as a star-crossed, forbidden romance, you know, it makes him more sympathetic. It’s important to me as a writer because when you’re writing about someone who, according to Flemeth, is at least somewhat responsible for the bad guy getting the magical item that he used to blow up half a mountain in the prologue, it’s important to have something in there that you can always have, as a writer, look at as your touchstone and go “This is a real person. This is someone who experiences sadness. This is someone who falls in love.” Even if he doesn’t do it with that Inquisitor on that playthrough, this is always someone who can be like that.

Time: 30:58

Where do you see a character like Solas ending up?

(Big sigh) Musical theater.

(laughs) Right when we reach those beautiful moments, Patrick!

I think that it is fantastic that people have emotionally engaged with Solas and I hope we get a chance to explore that in some future content.

Alright and that’s the most that we’re getting right now.

Time: 31:37

Oh, and here’s a little tie in: Here Lies the Abyss, the demon that spoke to Solas - what was all that about, what was that going on?

Oh yes - the demon who speaks perfect Elven!

Yes perfectly to him, and if you remember any of that - did you have anything to do with that?

Yes, Here Lies the Abyss was mine. It was a fun plot. It was a terrifyingly difficult plot, because - I’m not sure how clear this is to players that have one done one playthrough or with one import state - but your key characters throughout the events at Adamant Fortress and then the events of the Fade, it’s a customizable Hawke. Which means it could be a male Hawke or a female Hawke and within that, Hawke from Dragon Age 2 is characterized by one of three different attitudes: friendly, grim, or sarcastic. So, that’s three attitudes times two genders, that’s six different Hawkes and three different possible Grey Wardens: Alistair, Loghain, or Stroud.  So, the process of going through Adamant Fortress and then going through the Fade was a crazy juggling act of trying to keep track of “Okay, now one of these five people, these five Schrodinger’s cat quantum people, will say this line, and then another of these five Schrodinger’s cat quantum people will respond with this line.”

It’s important to remember that as we went through everything in Adamant Fortress and the Fade was taking place in that contest. There was a long period time when we were looking at that really going, “Okay, I just have to hope this actually makes sense when it’s nothing but Alistair and my sarcastic female Hawke.”

But, to actually answer your question. As I recall, the Nightmare, who as a friendly, chipper guy was basically - I do basically two types of villains: I do the villain who thinks he or she is the hero, and is misguided and has opposed goals, and is kind of tragic and tortured in that way. And then I do the mean-girl villain who says snotty high school insults.

That’s it - that’s the gambit.

Well, just about, yes. I’m looking forward to see who writes the villain in the future Dragon Age games - so get ready for either tragic pathos or really, really good high school mean-girl zingers.

As I recall, he was speaking Elven to Solas and if I remember right, he said, “Your pride is responsible for everything that has gone wrong” and I think he said “You will die alone.” And then Solas said something that translates to either “Nothing is known for certain” or “Not necessarily.”

And what does all that mean?

Well I think it’s fascinating that people are emotionally engaged, and I hope we have the chance -

It was a very asked question - it was a question that was asked a lot. Specific to that.

Oh, I’m not surprised, and I hope one day that we can tell you. But, obviously, that demon knows that Solas is hurting and Solas feels guilty about some stuff and really wanted to dig in there, and Solas was shouting back.

Literally just describing what happened (laughs). All right, so something that will clearly be talked about in other games.

TIme: 36:22

Dealing with this particular quest I really think that this was one opportunity to involve the Grey Wardens in a story, and a world, that kind of progressingly, after the first game had less and less of a need to exist - let alone in the world - but in the main characters arc. Talking to David I remember initially there was some idea for this particular mission they would just fall into the hole and be hanging out in the Deep Roads, and having out with the dwarves, so tell us a little bit about this creation.

A lot of the process of writing these large plots, like I talked about the razor, you figure out what the core concept is, you always start with a lot of things, and in most cases what you then end up having to do is cut. And if you’re not someone in the studio, talking about having to cut things sounds like you’re losing awesome content, you’re ruining what would have been clearly the best part of the plot. Inside the studio though, most cases what you’re cutting is the stuff that didn’t actually help tell the story you wanted to tell.

So yes in the original version, in a very early draft, actually this was before I was actually on the plot - this predates me - there was, yes, going into the Deep Roads, and when you fell in instead of ending up in the Fade you ended up down in the dark. And finding out what the Grey Wardens in this version of the story had been involved with the Architect from Dragon Age: Awakening. It was an interesting direction, and it was, I think, a very cool direction, but it did not help tell the story of the Inquisition. It was more a story of “Hey, if we wanted to do more with the Hero of Fereldan, here is an interesting place we could go” and it did not help tell the story of “What is the Inquisition doing?” “What is Corypheus doing?”, “How do these two organizations bounce off each other and who’s caught in the middle?” So trying to come to terms with the Grey Wardens in this game not being the protagonists, not being the group that is in the center of the action but being the group that is caught in the middle of this power struggle was something that led to us having to eventually do the re-jiggering that got us to the plot you saw.

[ashintheairlikesnow]

hi ash! i know you said before that you're not autistic you just did a lot of research to depict chris realistically- do you have any advice for finding resources on writing disabled characters that isn't like... horribly abelist? im writing someone with an intellectual disability from head trauma and who is nonverbal, and i want to get it right but everything online seems very autism-speaks-y. im autistic and semiverbal but i dont have an id and i want to be realistic and respectful.

I cannot speak with any expertise or sense of speaking from enough experience to be taken as an expert here, and defer as always to those with lived experience with intellectual disability!

But I will give a few more general tips for what to do when looking to write a character with a neurological makeup that doesn’t match your own, as far as what has worked for me with Chris:

1. The story should never be ABOUT their lived experience if you do not also have it. Chris’s story is not about autism, or being autistic. I would never presume to try and write a story like that because, whatever my intentions, I don’t have that knowledge that comes from living it. I would at BEST be taking the experiences of others, their voices. At worst, I would be someone standing with a megaphone shouting over those who deserve to be heard.

Making the disability what the plot revolves around is... generally just not going to be a good idea, in any sense. It’s moments like this where I feel like it’s best to defer to the writers who have lived it, instead. 

This is not to say “never write someone different than yourself”, because... I don’t think that’s at all good advice. I think that way lies stunted writers who never push themselves. But it does mean “do not center the story on this thing if you have not experienced it and don’t have that knowledge and understanding”.

2. At the same time, don’t try to be coy or dance around or hide the disability behind purple prose or refuse to acknowledge its reality. Trying to make a disability sound cute, or talk around it instead of speaking it out loud, can be minimizing or shaming in ways that I think it’s easy to miss, if you don’t live with that disability yourself! To me, this touches on one of my hugest pet peeves - characters who are written as having a particular neurodivergence in media, or shown on tv, but they never expressly admit to it or name it. 

I know I hesitated with Chris, more because I didn’t feel comfortable giving him a diagnosis until I understood autism better myself, and I do regret how long it took me to embrace that reality about him. I just thought it better to err on the side of researching before I embraced. But I do feel some guilt about waiting so long when I had readers who were identifying so heavily with him, and I kind of knew, but just didn’t feel comfortable owning it yet.

3. On a related note - disabilities in a story that become melodramatic tragedy or turn the disabled character into a ‘redemption story’ for an abled character. This is so, so prevalent in common media and pop culture and once you recognize it for what it is, it’s so hard to not see it in so many places. Think of how many movies, novels, etc contain a disabled character who exists to teach abled people some virtuous lesson about living life to the fullest or ‘what it really means to be human’ blah blah blah blah blah. Don’t do that. Please. (I mean, I kind of feel like you definitely won’t, but I’m just speaking very generally here). If you find the story going in a direction in which abled people learn something from the disabled person, please think very carefully and critically as to why the story is heading in that direction.

Language alone can also be a problem here - think about the difference between openly describing a character moving around their life with a wheelchair vs. calling them “wheelchair-bound” or “reliant on a cane”, when the cane or wheelchair may actually represent freedom to that person - an aid they need, yes, but one that allows them to live with far more agency than they might have had otherwise. 

To describe them, especially from their own POV, as “wheelchair-bound”, may ring false to disabled people who understand that the wheelchair isn’t a cage, but a tool that allows that individual person to feel less caged by being able to more freely leave home.  

(This varies person to person, just providing an example)

4. Educate. Research. And don’t just do so by asking people with disabilities to tell you their stories. I often express gratitude to the autistic readers, those with ADHD, etc who spoke up about Chris, talked about their own experiences, identified with him, found him very resonating for aspects of their own lives. 

These stories, this information, this sharing of their lives was given freely to me, and I’m fucking amazed and grateful for how welcomed Chris was, and how willing readers were to share about themselves when talking about him.

Their willingness to speak about these things is something I treasure. But I absolutely would never believe that a single person owed me the story of their life to make sure I got Chris right. That was my responsibility, you know? I try to keep in mind the concept of ‘emotional labor’. Asking a disabled person to be your resource is asking them to give, and give, and give of themself. They may want to give you that kind of labor, they may not. But I definitely wouldn’t ask it of anyone without understanding it was something they were happy or felt comfortable giving.

Research, on the other hand, is essential. You mentioned things being “autism speaks-y” when trying to research on your own, and oh god, do I feel you. It sucks that autism speaks is the first thing to pop up when trying to research the lives of autistic people - and in my research, I was lucky to already know AS sucks and write them off and anyone who heavily referenced them as not helpful. I can see how someone might not know that, though, and stumble on them and believe they were a helpful resource for writing autism when they... well. Nope. 

Try to think about the express disability you are writing for this person, and why, and then go research! I looked up “books on autism recommended by autistic people”, and found some invaluable books, yes, but also papers published online, websites, etc! Each of them vetted and looked over and recommended by autistic people, so I knew I was getting information that came from people with those experiences and that understanding. A good example - I picked up a book on the history of diagnosis and treatment of autism in the United States, mentioned it here, and @redwingedwhump recommended a book called Neurotribes... which turned out to be immensely more helpful, spot-on, and provided some really excellent foundational information I wouldn’t have found in the first book at all.

There’s a lot of information out there on Traumatic Brain Injuries and their lasting effects on individuals who receive them, so I would start there. What you’re describing sounds like a TBI with lasting effects! So I would start your research there, and also look up being nonverbal separately, as well as combining the two. Make sure you’re not just looking at the top links - often paid ads or problematic organizations that are able to pay more for better exposure - but also scanning for blogs, nonprofits, lived-experiences stories, too.

I found a lot of information on the second or even third page of results i would never have seen if I only stuck to the first. Remember the algorithm on search engines is usually showing you what other people are clicking on, not necessarily the best source.

5. This is one you the asker already know, but I want to include it for general reasons: do not ‘dumb down’ the thought processes of a nonverbal or semi-verbal person. I see this in fiction surprisingly often, and I think it’s this sense we have as abled people (’we’ just meaning I’m including myself) that being verbal is required to have a highly complex thought process, and it’s... it’s just fucking not. Speech and though are related but not completely wound around each other, and the ability to verbalize is not the same as the ability to think. 

Like I said, I know you know this, asker, but it’s something I see in fiction/media and it drives me up the wall. So I wanted to include it.

6. For the love of God, do not use medical terminology unless you actually know what you’re doing/talking about. Many disabled people or those with serious medical conditions become what amounts to experts on their own diagnoses, because they have to. They have to be experts to receive the care they should be able to rely on. If you constantly fuck up terminology - trust me - it will be noticed, and it will take people out of the story or hurt their ability to suspend disbelief while reading.

There are ways to do medical scenes/conversations with doctors that avoid falling into this problem! I would just be very very careful to heavily research before using any complex terminology.

7. This disabled person does not exist to evoke pity. They are a human - nuanced and multi-layered - living their life, and their story should always, always reflect that. I don’t really have anything else to add to that.

I would love to hear further advice from anyone with anything else to add.

[bidean-byedean]

freedom is a length of rope and God wants you to hang yourself with it

you know what, I almost see it

the ouroboros 

it didn’t matter that they stopped Chuck, they could never get off script, it doesn’t work like that. Chuck is a lesser deity of creation, the real cosmic force behind it all is far too powerful to show its hand, to be caught out by the book it wrote. 

So, let’s set the scene:

Dean Winchester a traumatised kid blindly serving as a weapon in his Dad’s crusade at the expense of his own health and happiness and trying to be at peace with that. 

Sam Winchester the main character - so desperately wanting more but haunted by the things he cannot unknow, by the fact he can only have freedom by isolating himself from his family and his past. 

Castiel a piece on the celestial chessboard, created solely as a tactician in a meaningless, never-ending war, devoted to the cause no matter the cost.

For over a decade we watched them grapple with these identities, watched them suffer tragedy after tragedy as they tried to fit themselves into the bigger story. We watched them grow and learn and spill off the pages. It was fascinating and hopeful and heartbreaking.

It was ultimately pointless.

Castiel was the first to go: his sacrifice was calculated, it was a suicide bomb tucked up his sleeve for the crucial moment. Always happy to bleed for the Winchesters. He got to experience love, but it was never reciprocated (out loud) - because no matter what he does, God will not reciprocate. That’s how faith works. He had to be happy knowing that he felt love (for God, humanity, Dean), but it will not validate him back. It’s not in the having, it’s in the saying. He dies for the cause one last time. 

Dean is next. He knows his death to the letter: that he’ll die during a hunt, gun in hand, there’s nothing more for him, nothing better expected of him.  Dean’s arc is epic. He is a torturer in Hell, marked by Cain, a knight of Hell, Michael’s vessel... a weapon in every. single. instance. Giving himself up (literally) in every. single. instance. for the mission. But Dean is loving, he does all of it for love. Then Cas confesses. He uses his words to mobilise Dean one last time, a Captain until the end, to give Dean a reason to stay strong after Cas is gone because Cas knows it destroys Dean to lose him over and over. And it works! Dean Winchester is saved! He is not a killer. Until he is again. Dean dies trying to finish John’s unsolved case. Dean dies a quiet, meaningless death - scared and in pain - in the arms of his only remaining family: his baby brother. The traumatised child resurfaces in his final moments. Dean found love, he found purpose, he found value in his individual life, but it didn’t matter. He was written to be a weapon. Eventually he would blunt, as even the best knives do, and be no longer fit for purpose. He accepts his death. He accepts his empty Heaven. He accepts that he will never get to love the person he wants to. Because there was never anything more for him. 

Sam is last. The black sheep. The optimist. The cerebral one. He tried so many times to have more than the lonely hunter life, trapped in tragedy and self-destruction, but he was always doomed. Always doomed to be alone if he wanted peace. He knew too much. He’d seen too much. His entire found family had to die before he could escape the hunter’s life, and the grief marked every single second of his life. His sacrifice is the story (Swan Song anyone?) and he can never be separate from it; he is haunted until his dying breath. 

The Winchesters reunite in Heaven to complete the circle. They are the same people were saw in the pilot. After everything, we are presented with Sam and Dean reuniting after a separation that was necessary to establish their roles, and resume their storyline of not finding themselves together.

If you read the show as a soul-wrenching tragedy then 15x20 is the perfect ending. If you come to terms with the ouroboros finally catching it’s own tail and trapping Team Free Will in their pre-destined fates, doomed to desperately try to find the weak link and break free. But they don’t. They can't. 

I saw a post saying that you could just watch S1E1 and S15E20 and that would be the whole story. Nothing that  happened in-between made the damnest bit of difference. And if you think about the whole Chuck/Meta arc and S15 in particular, it’s almost genius. The writers came so close to Unfortunate Events-ing us. 

It could've been the greatest tragedy ever framed like this. 

It was the greatest tragedy ever told because it wasn't framed like this. 

[thebibliomancer]

Essential Avengers: King-Size Annual Avengers #11: In Honor’s Name!

August, 1982

“Why do the AVENGERS battle the Defenders?”

I dunno, man. Is it Tuesday again?

“And who is the mystery woman Nebulon has fallen for?”

Nebulona? She’s clearly just him but a woman.

Oh, hey Beast. So this is where you got to after quitting the Avengers.

Soooo.... Annuals, amirite? Pain in my butt. I actually forgot to cover this one and #12 is going to be somewhat plot relevant soon so I’ll shove this in wherever.

Its a blast from the past of the previous year.  Back when the Avengers were fantastic but only numbered four: Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and Wasp.

And the Defenders seem to number many so this isn’t a very fair fight at all.

This issue starts with a PRELUDE

(J. M. DeMatteis again? Is this going to be weird?)

Nebulon the Celestial Man and damn fine dresser fades onto a hilltop shaking his fist and yelling that someone can’t do something to him.

Nebulon is mostly a Defenders villain and the major thing I know about him is that he’s supposedly exceptionally handsome but the handsomeness is a ruse and that the Squadron Sinister stopped helping him destroy the world once because they discovered he wasn’t as handsome as he was letting on.

Goes to show where their priorities lie. Also, the experience was so jarring that the evil Nighthawk decided to join the Defenders much to their chagrin.

So basically I know nothing about Nebulon. Hi, Nebulon.

An angry yelly fish head with the Rocky Horror Picture Show lips inside its fish lips shows up (I think this is what Nebulon realy looks like) and tells Nebulon that his punishment for constantly dicking with Earth is to be stranded on Earth with his powers reduced to half and stuck in his handsome-to-some-but-grotesque-to-fish body.

Okay. That clears things up.

Although I wish all of space would stop using Earth as their place to dump stuff or exile people. Its bad enough when Asgard does it. Its worse enough when there’s a whole crossover about all of space deciding to make Earth its supermax jail. And its a medium amount enough here.

But apparently the shouty fish people have a Prime Directive and Nebulon keeps breaking it, specifically on Earth. But a Prime Directive that also lets them dump troublemakers on planets where they’ve been troublemaking.

Nebulon tries to defend himself that, hey, Earth makes you do crazy stuff. But the yell fish is hearing nothing of it and just tells Nebulon to kill himself if he doesn’t want to be on Earth so bad.

... Eesh.

In his rage at being stranded on Earth, Nebulon teleports inside the Sanctum Sanctorum and starts yelling at Wong.

Wong tells him, dude, Dr Strange isn’t even here. So Nebulon starts beating up Wong.

How dare you, sir. Wong is a great guy!

Nebulon: “Then Wong shall die -- just as your master shall soon die -- and his accursed Defenders with him! They shall all pay for bringing this tragedy down on my head! For, if they had not risen up to thwart me. If they -- if they... Listen to me. Listen to the words of -- a fool! Forgive me, Wong! Neither you, Strange, nor the Defenders are responsible! The blame belongs solely to -- NEBULON!”

And then he teleports away, no doubt leaving Wong very confused.

CHAPTER 1: IN HONOR’S NAME!

Later, Thor flies over the Himalaya mountains and over the chapter title.

He has come for some peace and quiet sitting on a mountain away from the bustle of mortals but what does he find but someone already in his thinking spot!

Thor lands to see who would be sitting on a mountain with no pants on and its Nebulon, of course.

But I have to say. He’s sitting and hugging his knees. That’s advanced brood. That’s, in fact, verging on pout.

Although lets not let the fact that Thor flies out to the Himalayas to be alone sometimes slip on by uncommented.

Thor asks what brings the guy out here and Nebulon has a dramatic exile speech ready to go.

Nebulon: “For hours now I have sat, lost in thought, pondering that very question! What is it that brings any creature to the depths of despair, the edge of doom, but... himself?”

And since he senses a kindred spirit in Thor, one who is as different from the Earthly masses as Nebulon is, he unloads his full story onto Thor’s ears.

Upon hearing all about this dude who tried to take over or sell the world multiple times, Thor is like ‘this guy has got to meet the Avengers!’

Nebulon thinks Avengers sounds like Defenders and he’s not into that but Thor says that the Avengers are way cooler than the Defenders.

(Ooooh, shots fired, Thor)

Thor: “No, my friend -- there are none in all creation to compare with the Avengers! A hardier band of warriors hath ne’er been assembled! Where else could a god walk among mortals and find -- his equals?”

If Nebulon has truly repented of his past deeds, the Avengers will help him make a home on Earth.

And with a manly armclasp, like the one from Predator, Nebulon accepts and Thor takes him AWAY!

While the person who looks like Nebulon but a woman and with better boots watches them go and disappears in a bright flash of light.

CHAPTER 2

Yes, already.

“Avengers Mansion... Over the years, many fantastic beings have walked through the doors of this august Manhattan townhouse: Gods, mutants, androids... even a were-woman. But, of all these unique individuals, few -- if any -- have been more honored, more respected... More willing to serve the cause of freedom, wherever the place, whenever the time.. than the living legend whose only powers are his wits, his daring, and his years of hard-won skill... Captain America!”

And we see Cap leaping and gamboling about the exercise room, exercising.

Cap: “Ah -- there’s nothing like a good workout to make a man feel truly alive! It might pay to run through it once more, though --- my timing was a hair off on the parallel bars!”

Wasp comes in to... well, its Wasp. She comes to eye the eye candy and flirt a little, in a friendly fashion.

Wasp: “I see you’re here early for our meeting -- as usual! Don’t you ever slow down?”

Cap: “I seem to remember catching a few winks back in 1942 or so!”

Wasp: “Why, Cap -- that was two jokes in a row! I didn’t think you had it in you!”

Cap: “Oh, come on, Jan -- I’m not really that serious a guy, am I?”

Wasp: “I was just kidding, handsome.”

Cap: “Oh.”

Heh.

So, Thor called a super special emergency meeting of the Avengers to introduce his cool new friend.

Iron Man (secretly Tony Stark, true believers) is a little tense about the meeting because he had to cancel three business conferences, an address to foreign stockholders, and two dates.

Geez, for one meeting? You ever consider your calendar is way too packed, Tony?

Thor arrives with his cool, new pal and introduces the Avengers to NEBULON -- THE CELESTIAL MAN!

And Iron Man lunges out of his chair to get into better pointing distance.

Thor: “What irks thee, comrade? Why art thou so angered?”

Iron Man: “What irks me, Thor? He does! Haven’t you ever bothered to study our computer-file on alien threats? Your ‘newfound ally’ almost totalled the Earth -- several times!”

Nebulon: “Don’t you see, Thor? They react as I predicted they would!”

Also, geez. I know Tony is frustrated about all the schedule juggling he’s had to do but in this and the Black Knight two-parter he’s a lot ruder to Thor than you’d expect considering how close they are.

Some writers just don’t get the Avengers, I guess.

Cap and Wasp try to get Iron Man to calm down.

Wasp: “I’m sure there’s a darn good reason why Thor brought Nebulon here -- isn’t there?”

She’s downright staring daggers at him when she asks that.

We’ve jumped back in time a little from where I was covering but Jan is still the chairperson of the Avengers. It happened right when she returned from her divorce related hiatus and this four person group has to take place post-Tigra leaving and pre-membership drive.

So, she’s the boss and she just gave angry boss eyes at Thor. And Thor did his default squinting always-looks-pissed look back at her.

Thor tells Nebulon’s whole sad story off-panel.

And damn if it doesn’t hit the Avengers right where they live.

Wasp tells him that they all know what it means to lose something precious “whether it’s an entire world... or the love of one person -- it makes no difference! It hurts to suddenly find yourself -- alone!”

And Captain America sympathizes because when he was defrosted after twenty years, it was like a strange new world!

They’re both on team ‘give Nebulon a chance!’

Iron Man is more reluctant but decides to give Nebulon one chance.

Then the Defenders bust in.

Beast, Valkyrie, Silver Surfer, and Gargoyle who is not Etrigan at all.

And they’re here to kick Nebulon’s ass. Which is entirely fair considering that they’ve been the ones who keep having to stop Nebulon’s planschemes.

Since the Avengers seem to not be beating up Nebulon, obviously they’ve all been mind controlled. Nebulon is clearly planning to blow up half the Earth and use the Avengers to control the rest.

Cap: ‘what’

Silver Surfer: ‘HE’S MAKING A HOSTILE MOVE!’

And then Silver Surfer blasts the floor, sending all of the Avengers sprawling every which way.

MEANWHILE, IN SPACE

There’s a huge spaceship, in space. And within the huge spaceship in space, the lady who looks like a lady Nebulon watches the fight on a screen and cries.

Hey, I get it. Doing the Avengers vs Defenders Again But Worse makes me sad too.

CHAPTER 3

See, that’s more of the length for a chapter. You could learn something from chapter 2, chapter 1.

Anyway, the clock winds back a little for the Defender’s side of the story.

Valkyrie returns to the Sanctum Sanctorum in a good mood and also on a flying horse.

For a long while, Valkyrie’s status quo is that she was inhabiting the body of Barbara Norris, a woman that Dr Strange accidentally drove insane. But she’s gotten her original Asgardian body back so she’s stronger than ever and also not bodyjacking someone else.

She flies into the window, alarming Gargoyle, Beast, and Wong.

Gargoyle tearfully flies up and hugs Valkyrie saying that he thought she was leaving for Asgard forever.

Hey, um, who dis?

-wiki- Ok so he’s an elderly man who was trapped in a gargoyle body by some demons who he broke an agreement with. Cool, cool, cool. I would have guessed much younger based on how he acts here.

Valkyrie also smooshes Beast’s hand when he gives her a handshake hello, because she’s much buffer than she was when she left. Also, she talks more like Thor.

Valkyrie: “I am, at long last, the true Valkyrie! What more need be said?”

Then the Lady Nebulon teleports in and introduces herself as Supernalia. She tells the Defenders that she’s here to save the world from the evil of NEBULON!

Beast doesn’t recognize the name but Valkyrie definitely does. What with all the existing history that I keep alluding to.

Supernalia: “Indeed! I am a bounty hunter from Nebulon’s homeworld come to bring him to justice! He has fled to your Earth, taking sanctuary among the so-called Avengers! Using celestial mind control, he has usurped their will, and -- after decimating part of your world with four pre-set anti-matter bombs -- he plans to use the Avengers to take control of the surviving population!”

Beast goes ‘uh cool story but i’mma verify this real quick by ringing them up’

But then he remembers he already did do that and they were very rude to him!

He remembers this interaction very clearly even though it didn’t happen at all.

Ironically, the Defenders are the ones who are being mind-controlled into accusing other people of being mind-controlled. Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s irony.

Wong suddenly remembers that Nebulon rushed in the previous night but he can’t remember how that interaction actually went.

AH HAH, decides Beast. Clearly proof that Nebulon mind-controlled Wong. Lets go half-cocked everyone.

No, no. Beast decides they’ll need more than just the three of them and wonders who they should call to bolster their numbers to a whole four Defenders. Dr Strange is busy chasing Daimon Hellstrom and Namor soooo...

Valkyrie suggests Silver Surfer because he kicks ass but they have no way to get in contact with him.

Supernalia goes hey allow me.

Supernalia: “Although my planet’s laws forbid direct involvement with alien cultures -- and thus my need of you Defenders -- I can help!”

And she baps Valkyrie in the forehead and instantly transmissions Silver Surfer right to the Sanctum to his existential annoyance.

Silver Surfer: What force has swept me halfway ‘round the world? Who toys with -- the Silver Surfer?”

Valkyrie explains off-panel because this is very much “let me explain! No, there is too much. Let me sum up” kind of day.

CHAPTER 4

We cut back to right after the Silver Surfer knocked everyone on their ass with a warning shot.

Thor: “Surfer -- art thou mad?! Thy ‘warning’ came close to slaying us all!”

Thor gets up to kick Norrin’s rad ass but Valkyrie grabs his arm. She tries to convince him to trust her that Nebulon is controlling the Avengers. She appeals to their shared history, their shared love.

Thor: “Brunnhilde -- thou art truly the one blinded... by thine own prejudice! Because, once, Nebulon stood as thine enemy -- thou takest him for that again!”

Valkyrie: “Thunderer -- once I loved thee -- but now I see -- that thou art -- A FOOL!”

Then she just up and tosses him.

It’s pretty great.

Thor just rights himself midtoss by helicoptering his hammer and tells Valkyrie that she’s the fool. And also that because she fucking threw him, now he knows that its her group that are under some kind of control.

Nebulon starts yelling too because he’s not going to sit by while other people fight his battle so he’s like ‘come on if you’re hard enough, dickfenders’ and Beast is like ‘ok.’

Wasp, team leader, thinks Thor is onto something re: the Defenders being against some kind of influence and asks Iron Man to create a distraction so the Avengers can skedaddle.

Iron Man has the perfect distraction and fires the UNIBEEEEAM. At his own roof, collapsing it on the Defenders.

Iron Man: “Wait till Tony gets the bill for this!”

... so depending on the time frame, either only Nebulon or both him and Wasp are the only ones who don’t know Iron Man is Tony so who are you putting on a show for, Tony?

Or maybe you’re just so used to grousing about the Avengers breaking your shit that you do it even when you do it.

Anyway, since Thor has a hunch that the Defenders are being controlled, he decides that the best thing is to teleport somewhere safe and make a plan.

So Nebulon teleports himself and the Avengers to the Himalayas where he and Thor first met.

The effort nearly kills Nebulon, since his powers have been curtailed by the yell fish. But now they have some space.

Wasp: “And don’t think we don’t appreciate it, Nebulon! But couldn’t you have zapped us to a more temperate climate -- like the Bahamas... or the French Riviera? It mean, it’s COLD here!”

Cap hopes that the Defenders won’t find them somewhere so remote and isolated but Thor, whose idea this was by the by, isn’t so sure because they don’t know who is pulling the strings.

Iron Man: “Good point! Are we dealing with one of our old foes -- one of the Defenders’ -- or perhaps someone out for Nebulon’s head! Let’s face it: we’ve got a wide field to choose from!”

Annnnnnd thennnnn, the Defenders just show up anyway so trying to get some breathing room was a waste of Nebulon’s efforts.

Beast: “Cap, Thor, Iron Man, Jan! You’re all my friends... more than that -- you’re family! So why won’t you believe me when I tell you that this nut’s gonna wipe the whole planet out in a matter of hours! Please -- hand him over or --.”

Nebulon: “Or... NOTHING!”

Then he shoots an energy blast at the Defenders.

Which sadly arcs to the ground with a SHOOOM! and does little more than splash some snow on the Defenders.

But awwww, Beast considers the Avengers family! Shame that once the X-Men pull him back into their orbit, he only hangs out with them and decides never to ask the Avengers for help, either when Professor X gets shot by Stryfe or when trying to solve the Legacy Virus.

I think that social group is a bad influence on Beast. He never broke time or pretended to be gay to dunk on his ex when he was an Avenger. He just got high, practiced polyamory, and yukked it up with his bffsie Wonder Man.

Anyway, Silver Surfer gets up and disses Nebulon for his sad laser blast.

Silver Surfer: “Like all who seek conquest, Nebulon -- you refuse to recognize truth! You alter reality to serve your own malefic ends! But the power you no wield, tyrant, is as nothing compared to that which you once had! You are weak -- as Supernalia said you would be!”

Nebulon is aghast to hear that Supernalia is the one behind all of this. And also aghast when Gargoyle shoots a bio-mystic bolt at him.

Apparently, Gargoyle can shoot bio-mystic bolts. Are there mystic bolts that are not bio? Shrug.

CHAPTER 5

Hey, some of these chapter divisions feel arbitrary. We go from the fight to the fight. At least some other chapter divisions had scene or temporal shifts.

Cap begs the Defenders to fight off Supernalia’s influence. Or the Avengers will fight off Supernalia’s influence for them. Probably via punches.

For whatever reason, this makes Valkyrie go stickycaps.

Valkyrie: “The hour of Earth’s doom draws ever closer -- and, to prevent that doom, we will do whate’er we must! wHaTeVeR wE mUsT!”

Mystifying.

Anyway, with both sides thinking the other side are dumb easily mind-controlled doodoo heads, they both get to the slugfest that neither side wants but thinks there’s no other way to reach the other side but by punching some sense into them.

This panel feels like a microcosm of a lot of Marvel events.

And as this goes on Nebulon just watches the fight with calculating eyes.

I’m sure that’s fine.

Thor and Valkyrie continue sparring verbally, as well as with punches. Valkyrie asks how Thor can let Midgard be destroyed when they both love it so much. And Thor is like ‘for the last time, there’s no danger except from your mysterious new golden pal’

Meanwhile, the Defender’s mysterious new golden pal Supernalia is monitoring the fight from her spaceship. And monitoring the Defenders’ brainwaves.

Thor is actually making Valkyrie doubt. And Supernalia can’t have that.

Supernalia: “I cannot afford to lose control of the Defenders now! For honor’s sake, their rage must grow! And more -- they must retain a psychological surety that cannot be breached! In Valkyrie’s case, the introduction of something... familiar -- something to increase her confidence -- would seem appropriate!”

So Supernalia teleports Valkyrie’s sweet flying horse Aragorn to just. Appear on the Himalayas. Between Valkyrie and Thor.

Valkyrie doesn’t know how her horse suddenly appeared but she’s not going to look a gift teleporting winged horse in the mouth. She jumps on his back and takes to the air.

Thor gets pissed and hammerflings himself after her.

While Thor is chasing Valkyrie around the sky, Iron Man squares up with Silver Surfer.

Silver Surfer tells Iron Man that “you see to halt one who has outraced comets! Soared faster than light itself!” and basically that he rules, Iron Man sucks. And then to prove it, he blasts Iron Man with the power cosmic.

Just that one attack nearly tore Iron Man apart and he’s pretty sure that Silver Surfer was holding back. Oof, that’s some power gap.

BUT MAYBE just maybe if Iron Man puts all of his might into one staggering punch...

It’ll do jack shit to the Surfer.

Well, damn.

Gargoyle fights Wasp but says its not proper for a man to fight a lady. Wasp points out ‘hey you’re fighting me anyway so maybe someone is making you do it.’

Gargoyle: ‘.... NUH UH’

Cool. Good talk.

Supernalia: “This Gargoyle is too... soft! His mind accepts -- but his heart rebels! These beings are not like us! Their minds are filled with too many questions! Their souls overflow with conflicting emotions!”

I can’t believe humans (and Asgardians) have too many feelings and emotions to be easily controlled.

Well, I can believe. It really checks out.

So Supernalia increases the celestial mindwaves to shore up her control, even if it means burning out the Defenders.

Rude.

Thor blasts Valkyrie off of Aragorn with lightning and then catches her, saying he won’t let her fall. So, reasonably enough, Valkyrie elbows him in the face for treating her like a damsel.

They both fall toward the ground. Aragorn catches Valkyrie and Thor catches... a cosmic bolt from Silver Surfer.

You had one job, Iron Man.

And that job was to sneak up on Silver Surfer while he’s self-flagellating for doing a shameful opportunistic attack on Thor.

Iron Man uses those... hip... power pod... things. To zap Silver Surfer’s temples and siphon off some of his power.

And with that power, Iron Man tips a chunk of the mountain on top of Silver Surfer.

This doesn’t keep the Surfer down for long. Despite the fact that trying to contain the incredible surfing energies he absorbed threatens to damage his armor, Iron Man absorbs more when Silver Surfer blasts him, to try to turn the energy back at the Surfer.

Instead, they both explode.

Double KO.

Elsewhere in the fight, Gargoyle blasts Wasp with his bio-mystic bolts, knocking her into the snow.

Gargoyle panics because his bio-mystic bolts are supposed to drain off a fraction of a person’s life-force, not up and kill them.

So Gargoyle shouldn’t have been surprised when Wasp pops back up and zaps him in the chin. And Wasp shouldn’t have been surprised when Gargoyle zaps her back.

She passes out. But so does Gargoyle, to his confusion. His hide should be tough enough to take a truckload of punishment, yet he suddenly feels so weak.

I mean. Wasp is strong enough to blow up a house with her own zaps. But this is probably intended to be Supernalia’s mind control burning him out.

I choose to believe that its Wasp’s cool house-blowing-up might. She’s kicked bigger ass than Gargoyle.

Wasp’s defeat scream momentarily distracts Cap from where he’s fisticuffsing with Beast.

Beast: “Holy cow! I hope she’s not badly hurt!”

Cap: “You hope she’s not -- ?! You can still say that after all you’ve done today? After all the pain this Supernalia has driven the Defenders to cause?”

Beast: “We’ve caused? You’re the ones harboring the lunatic with the anti-matter bombs --.”

There’s no guilt-tripping some people.

Cap throws his mighty shield but Beast must not have heard the song because he not only doesn’t yield, he also catches the shield with his feets.

Then he sleds on it down a snowy incline and tackles Cap.

Beast: “It’s time we quit all this clowning around!”

Cap: “That’s right, Hank! This is serious business -- so hit me! Hit me, blast you! HIT ME!”

Beast: “Hey! wHaT tHe HeCk Am I dOiNg?”

Cap: “Coming to your senses, I hope!”

Beast realizes that Cap dropped his guard and let Beast beat the shit out of him on purpose, let Beast almost kill him.

Cap: “You’re no killer, Hank! And no force, however great, could make you kill! I counted on that fact to snap you out of it!”

Wow, good going, Cap!

Out of everyone here, you’re the only one who successfully snapped anyone out of anything. Although I think Wasp coulda if she had played possum and let Gargoyle think he killed her instead of popping up to zap him.

But Cap has insight into Hank. That probably helped.

Me and Jan know jack about Gargolye.

CHAPTER 6

With exactly two people conscious but not fighting anymore, Nebulon is like ‘hah eat shit Supernalia’

So Supernalia appears.

Beast feels like he’s about to keel over even though he beat the shit out of Cap and Cap feels weaker too. They blame Supernalia because its very easy to blame someone whose fault everything is.

But Supernalia blames Nebulon.

Nebulon slams a drama bomb in response.

Nebulon: “Do not seek to reclaim the upper hand with more lies, Supernalia! Such sophistry is unbecoming in... my wife!”

I heard that in Borat voice and I hate myself a little.

But now that Supernalia’s relation to Nebulon has been established, Nebulon is like ‘but why are you trying to ruin my exile?’

Supernalia: “You were convicted of high crimes, my husband -- and the sentence was a choice of honorable death by your own hand... or ignominious exile! In 500 generations, none of our people have ever chosen exile! All have proudly faced extinction! But you, lacking courage, brought shame upon your wife and children!”

HE HAS KIDS??

Anyway, she came to Earth to just. Kinda. Kill him. To restore honor to their family.

But when she got there, she found that he had already made friends and decided well I need some pawns of my own. So I can kill him.

Nebulon isn’t really impressed because in his one day as an exile, he’s had some epiphanies.

Nebulon: “Unlike you, I have traveled far across this universe! I have learned to see in new ways! Our concepts of honor are archaic! Our laws are cruel! I now dare to dream higher dreams, for I have learned what it means to have -- friends!”

Supernalia: “I have been your friend... and much more! Since our childhood betrothal have I stood by you -- despite your constant avoidance of responsibilities! Despite your failure to achieve glory or rank!”

Oof, imagine if your childhood friend and spouse told you that being exiled on Earth taught him what friendship really means.

I have to imagine that Cap and Beast are just listening to this like ‘god why do cosmic people always have to dump their relationship baggage on Earth?’

Supernalia then tries to tell Beast and Cap that Actually Nebulon is up to no good.

Beast is like yeah nice try.

But this time Supernalia has actual proof evidence.

She dispels the invisibility cloak hiding the Ennui Device that Nebulon left on a prior trip to Earth and is now using to drain energy from the Avengers and Defenders to beef himself up.

Now, Cap and Beast turn to Nebulon like ‘but buddy, why?’ and also to punch him a little bit, in a friendly manner.

Nebulon: “I did what I had to -- to survive! Believe me -- I truly wanted the friendship you offered -- but observing the unfolding battle, I realized I could never find peace on this or any world -- without the POWER!”

And this rude boy who doesn’t understand what friendship means punches both Cap and Beast.

Beast sprawls right at Supernalia’s feet completely burned out and goes hey feel like stepping in??

Supernalia: “I can do nothing directly, Beast. I am not permitted to interfere!”

Beast: “You... stupid... self-deluding... idiots! Don’t you understand that all this has happened... because you already have... interfered?!?!”

Supernalia: “So           I              have!”

And since now she’s done the big bad transgress of the Prime Directive, she decides that unlike her shitbird husband, she’s going to do the honorable thing and kill herself.

I. Have no words. At this entire exchange.

Its too much.

Nebulon is distraught so slaps the gun out of her hand and begs her to instead of killing herself, not do that. She could stay on Earth and rule at his side!

This latest bout of cosmic interpersonal drama gives Cap the opportunity to muster his strength and throw his mighty shield.

It deflects the ray emitter of the Ennui Device so it hits Nebulon instead of the Avengerdefenders.

Except, oops, the Ennui Beam was calibrated for “humanoid physio-psycho energies” so instead of draining his energy, the Ennui Beam just straight up starts killing Nebulon.

Amazing how you can stretch vocabulary to encompass humans, Asgardians, mutants, power cosmic imbued Zenn-Lavians, and whatever demonic biz is going on with the Gargoyle.

It sure is amazing how it affects all these different things as intended but its accidentally fatal in a way that will help wrap up the story.

Beast wet noodle jumps to try to redirect the beam and save Nebulon but Supernalia shoves him out of the way and then jumps into the beam herself.

Supernalia: “Thus, I join my husband -- in oblivion!”

Geez, when she sets her mind to killing herself, she sticks with it

.__.

Nebulon agrees that Actually This is the Right and Correct Course for them, I guess because couple counseling is a hassle.

Then the Ennui Device overloads and explodes and Nebulon and Supernalia turn to their true forms of giant weird fish people with Rocky Horror Picture Show lips inside fish lips.

Beast laments that Supernalia didn’t just let him save both of them but she’s like ‘HONORRR’ and then dies.

Thor: “I called Nebulon friend and he decieved me! Yet now -- Thor mourns his passing!”

Silver Surfer: “What manner of beings were they, to cherish honor so much... and value life so little?”

Cap: “Perhaps, Surfer -- not so different from us. Not so different -- at all!”

Okay, shut up your face, Cap.

First off, I don’t think much of an honor code that says its okay to mind control and lie to people and use them as pawns in a way that could kill them but then also goes ‘this is an honorable death’ when you stupid yourself to death.

And neither should you! Don’t put a poetic, poignant spin on things! This whole affair was a weird couples spat that two space weirdos forced you to participate in!

Follow @essential-avengers​ because I went back and covered an inconsequential annual and now I can’t go back and not do that. I wasted my time for you. Also, like and reblog. I need positive reinforcement. It makes me happy.

[cacophony-of-notions]

Really appreciate you saying that disliking the finale isn't just about ships. I just think it was a disservice to Dean.

People making everything about shipping is getting to me... closely followed in order of frustration by people telling me that I just “don’t understand tragedy” and that's why I can’t appreciate the ending. 

The way Dean was killed was a disservice to him in so many ways that I still can’t untangle it all. It becomes worse the more I think about it instead of better. All of the possible implications behind killing Dean this specific way—seeing it as important that he die this way—are very unsettling to me and I can’t even wrap my head around all of them. This post starts a series of taglines to a number of posts that could be written on the subject of possible disturbing reasons for Dean’s young death.  The fact that it’s so tangled up like this is also why it’s so impossible for me to put the finale behind me, because in the back of my mind, I am always thinking, “What did it mean? What did it mean to kill Dean that young, in that manner? Why that way? Why was this how they wanted him to go?” (and don’t get me started on “Atomic Monsters” and Becky and how it just makes your head want to explode). It seems so pointless at best to kill Dean that way, and then you consider the potential meanings and fall into some truly disturbing waters you can never climb out of. It’s “choose your narrative” among a sea of horrifying possible narratives.

I really felt that Dabb wrote primarily about Dean’s boundaries being violated during his run. This was in theme for Dean before, but Dabb took it to the extreme, I felt. 

Dean had to take on a parental role with his own mother to some extent

Dean had to take on a parental role with Jack that I felt paralleled how John placed responsibility for Sam on Dean’s shoulders. (I really believe Dean never wanted Jack as his child... he cared about him, but their relationship was strained by Jack’s powers and the circumstances of his birth/involvement in Mary and Cas being hurt. Father was a role that others tried to force Dean into, when I really think Dean didn’t want to parent another child, or at least not Jack. He would have been happier with Jack as a brother, absent the responsibilities of being a father to him. This is, imo, why we see Dean treat Jack as much more of an adult even when they are getting along, handling the adult conversations Sam and Cas won’t like sex, and driving lessons. It feels more like the work of an older brother. It’s sensing what Sam and Cas want Dean to be to Jack + what Jack himself longs for, that has Dean occasionally trying to force himself into a fatherly role, but he doesn’t really want that role—he wants boundaries and he wants less responsibility, and there never should have been anything considered wrong with that)

Michael’s possession

The alternate universe hunters (strangers) moving into the bunker, one of the only places in the world where Dean feels safe 

Michael possessing him again

Sam and Cas entering Dean’s mind (a necessary but nonetheless violating prospect)

Castiel’s perpetual secrets

Soulless Jack trying to ingratiate himself back with the Winchesters and continue to be a part of the family (Dean is the found family) while, in his state, being incapable of understanding the real weight of his actions (I reblogged an absolutely wonderful bit of writing on this by mittensmorgul at one point)

Chuck revealed as the ultimate villain, Dean feeling he never had free will at all, the way this took every trauma of his life—every lifelong violation—and made it traumatic in new and horrific ways (the deaths of his parents, him having to raise Sam, going to hell, the deaths of the found family he surrounded himself with). Dean says he doesn’t feel real, that he doesn’t really have choices, that he’s just a puppet, which makes your heart break all over again as you think about this also coming from the man who depended on free will in a world where he felt deeply objectified—”Daddy’s blunt little instrument”, “The Michael Sword”—once again an instrument with no will of its own, no power, simply helpless. 

To take that character, who was shown to experience such sheer terror over the prospect of being controlled by an all powerful cosmic force... having his free will perpetually ripped to shreds, to the extent that when presented with the opportunity to make this horrific lifelong violation finally stop, he turned a gun on the person he loves most in the world (and that person begging him to continue enduring his violation, with no alternative plan, and no idea when he will be able to make the violation stop)... it’s all.. a lot. And they take that person, who was so profoundly terrorized by his lack of agency within the narrative of his life, especially in the last two seasons... who was absolutely torn apart by how he had been controlled and used and objectified, and after he gains freedom from the writer of his story once and for all, and the weight is lifted off his shoulders, and he has the chance to make his own choices and stand out on the road and say, “look now at all the possibilities” they kill him. He is stabbed in the back, he is made helpless against creatures who (as Jensen has noted more than once) Dean considers it a cake walk to defeat. It continues the narrative of his helplessness to stop his own violation (he is stabbed. Stabbed).

And that’s only one unpleasant theme mingling with Dean’s death... there are far more than that.

Then there's what it means for Sam, how it forces him into a life he insisted he had grown out of in season 10—how Sam said what he wanted, once and for all, was to hunt with Dean, but if he couldn’t have that... (and he cut himself off, because he couldn’t even consider the prospect) and they take Sam and force him back into that normal life he didn’t want anymore. This time, it feels like it’s in honor of Dean that Sam lives this normal life (exactly like Jared said in his Variety interview). Years later, he still gets in the car and the pain on his face makes Dean’s absence seem like a raw and gaping wound—like he gave up the hunt not because he actually wanted the normal life, but because Dean would want him to live a normal life and die old, and he couldn’t bear the painful memories that would come from continuing the hunt without Dean or even driving the car. 

There’s the way the finale clashes so painfully with Dean’s speech to Sam and Sam’s returning, insistent speech to him in 8.14—how it gives Dean the ending he expected when he was traumatized and suicidal, and calls us back to that forever unfulfilled promise of Sam’s to take Dean to the light at the end of the tunnel. That light at the end of the tunnel materializes as nothing more than the death Sam was trying so desperately on so many occasions to prevent, no matter what the cost (season 3, season 5, 8.14, season 10, 14.12). Don’t think about how Dean was actually the first to use the phrase “The light at the end of the tunnel” in season 3, talking about his impending death, and Sam insisted, “That’s hellfire, Dean.” 

Don’t think about how there are no pictures of the found family in Sam’s home, only dead blood family and his son. Don’t think about how no one attended Dean’s funeral except Sam and Miracle after Dean said he wanted a big funeral. Don’t think about the disturbing prospect of Sam’s son as Dean’s proxy being the one to “finally” give Sam permission to move on and be back with his brother again. 

Don’t think about Dean saying in the finale that if they don’t keep living, Cas’ sacrifice will be for nothing, only for Dean to die a few scenes later. Don’t think about how Cas’ sacrifice perpetuates Dean’s long held fear that loving him is poison. 

Don’t think about the possibility of Dean’s childhood unfairly burdened with adult responsibilities repeated through Jack when he, as a three year old, becomes the new god. 

Don’t think about Amara, who was caged for millions of years, having her agency ripped from the narrative completely nonsensically, absorbed by her brother, absorbed by her grand nephew, and once more stripped of her free will in the process and caged with only a throw away, nonsensical line that she’s at peace simply floating in existence inside Jack, which makes no sense given her history and seems deeply cruel and thoughtless. Don't think about how she was paralleled with Dean in season 11.

Don’t think about what happened to Adam or Kevin, the former unfridged conceivably to deliver to him a more satisfying conclusion, only for him to be forgotten again.

Don’t think about found family and free will and always keep fighting being torn to shreds along the way. 

[dailymilesmorales]

Thor and Hulk are at it again. The Avengers' helicarrier is under attack by a swarm of robot minions under the command of MODOK, the head of a tech company who became a super-powered Inhuman villain after a catastrophe known as A Day — and still the raging green muscle finds time to hurl a projectile at Thor’s head. “Just like old times,” says the Asgardian, referencing a bit from 2012’s Avengers movie. Only this isn’t their next blockbuster sequel. It’s their first blockbuster video game.

Since the MCU has been put on indefinite hold in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic (see: Black Widow’s release date, production on the next Spider-Man movie), games — and, specifically, Marvel Games — are rising to meet the need for fresh stories. This year alone will see the debut of Marvel’s Avengers (Sept. 4) from the Tomb Raider team at Crystal Dynamics, plus Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales (holiday 2020), a separate spin-off of Insomniac Games’ 2018 Spidey adventure that revives the breakout Spider-Verse star.

“We always believed in the power of video games,” says Bill Rosemann, who’s like the Kevin Feige of Marvel’s gaming division. “We’re happy that more people than ever are discovering — even though you may be physically in different areas — [that] games can bring you together and create connections."

This next phase (to use an MCU term), which finally gives fans playable Marvel adventures on large console platforms, began with Spider-Man. Earlier attempts to make games of this scale, like an Avengers project planned to coincide with the original movie, fell apart. Leaked footage of this first-person effort, as well as a canceled Daredevil game, exist on YouTube as a glimpse of what could've been. The 2018 release, Marvel’s Spider-Man, finally webbed a green light because it was “all about timing,” says Rosemann. “It's all about what talent is available? Do they want to work with Marvel? If so, what's their passion? When you have all those things align, that’s when you can create something great.”

Jon Paquette, the lead writer of Marvel's Spider-Man, noted how one of their mantras "was to design an experience that felt like you were playing a Marvel movie." Out of that mission came a story about Peter Parker, a little more experienced in his years as New York's friendly neighborhood... you know, interwoven with a battle against a sinister rogues' gallery. It became the best-selling superhero game of all time, at over 13 million units. “We had a feeling it was gonna do that,” says Bryan Intihar, Insomniac’s creative director. "I mean, you don't [really] know. There’s this ultimate fear of screwing up one of the most popular characters.” When celebrities like Lin-Manuel Miranda and LeBron James began sharing images from the game on social media, they knew it had “reached another level."

They still didn’t know if they could make a sequel. There were two post-credits scenes that teased big things to come — another element borrowed from the movies — but that was them "stacking the deck," as Intihar put it. One stinger revealed that Miles Morales, an Afro-Latino teen from Harlem and a playable side character, also developed powers after a bite from a radioactive spider once held in Norman Osborn's secret lab.

“We knew really early that [Spider-Man] was going to end with him getting the spider bite," Intihar says. “We would tease it during development. I think everybody was focused on, 'Can you make the first one really good and we'll worry about the other stuff later?' But we wanted to have that set up so if it became a reality [to do another game] we could pull it off." At one point during an early workshop session, Miles was going to be a post-credits scene reveal and nothing more, but Intihar says the team determined it was important to "see the roots of him being a hero before he even had spider powers." Intihar adds of the final end-credits tag, "One of the reasons we put that out was to hopefully convince people that ‘He’s a Spider-Man now. Can we have a game with him?‘”

It paid off, partly because Insomniac went from being a partner with game publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment to being an official member of the Sony family once the company acquired Insomniac in fall 2019 for $229 million, per the company's financial statements. After that, "they were fully on board with the idea" for a sequel, Intihar says. Rosemann thinks of that first Spider-Man as "proof of concept." Now, for the holiday 2020 season (COVID-19 willing) Miles’ own game will further expand this virtual world.

In Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, set in winter one year after the events of the previous game, Miles' Harlem home is on the verge of being torn apart by a war between an energy corporation and a criminal organization armed to the teeth with advanced tech. It's not a formal sequel to Spider-Man. That, if the coy responses from the creatives are any sign, may or may not be coming later. It's a shorter spin-off, likened in scope to the Lost Legacy game in the Uncharted series. Nevertheless, Intihar promises "it has a lot of heart."

"This is a full arc for Miles Morales that started in Spider-Man," Brian Horton, the game's creative director, says. "We really are completing this hero's coming of age in our game. It is a complete story."

The choice of a smaller narrative came amid discussions of what that hero's journey looked like for Miles in the context of Insomniac's games. After all, Miles, according to Marvel Comics canon, doesn't typically exist in the same reality as Mr. Parker. "When we started crafting it," Horton recalls, "we realized that, with a little bit more of a compact storytelling style, we could tell a very emotionally impactful story that would fit really well as an experience that would take Spider-Man 1 and [Miles Morales] and do justice to this character."

Miles may be training with Peter to hone his Spidey skills, but Horton and Intihar see him as "his own Spider-Man." The animation, the movements, the mechanics, even his powers (including bioshock and invisibility) aren't just unique tricks for this character, they are metaphors for that hero's journey the pair keep mentioning. Peter's origin "was born out of tragedy" — i.e. the death of his Uncle Ben — but Horton mentions Miles "is more so born out of family. What I think is really compelling about Miles as a character is he has friends that he could actually let into his world — his human world and his Spider world. He's a little different in the way he approaches it."

Despite all this spin-off talk, Rosemann isn’t actively overlapping his universe of interconnected games — at least not yet. It's more like a Spider-Verse. "Each game is in the Marvel universe, but they're in their own reality, if you will," he says. "Currently, our plan is to keep each game set in its own Marvel universe." It's part of his goal to give game-makers as much freedom as possible to craft the stories they want to tell. So, while this year’s Avengers won’t be linked to Spider-Man, it has its own web-slinger. Spider-Man has been confirmed to arrive in Marvel's Avengers as a DLC story sometime after launch. But when the game drops, it will also come with a lead character who maintains certain parallels to Miles.

[..]

[george67611-blog]

Heroes of the Enlightenment – Time Journal

Introduction

What is stuff we value a lot about in the modern world? freedom, to enjoy ourselves, to argue and discuss, to express our view, to find things out, to read and write, and the science and technology that made these possible. I’d like to share the amazing trips I took to visit some of the heroes of the enlightenment who changed how we live life now. None of this happened by accident these freedoms were one from courage and vision, in an extraordinary period of human history. It began in 17th century Europe which was called the Age of Enlightenment. A little more than a century, religious faith yielded to reasoned argument and the power of aristocracy gave way to the power of knowledge. In this journal, we will talk about the trips I took to the 3 great enlightenment innovators. Isaac Newton, who opened up the knowledge to everybody by inventing modern science. Voltaire who had been known for his writings that completely inspired literacy and the different forms of historical writings. And Erasmus Darwin whose discoveries deep underground mantid a direct challenge to the church's claim to truth.

 Isaac Newton (December 25, 1642 – March 31, 1727)

In 1661, I visited a very good friend of mine in England, Isaac Newton. The founder of modern science which was to become the greatest challenge to the power of the church. When I met him at his Woolsthorpe Manor, he was very mad and furious. I didn’t understand why. He later told me that most of the people’s lives were based on obedience and belief. He never agreed on that, he felt that the information was procured not by daze confidence however by perception. He set down widespread principles for what we currently call science and one of those guidelines was that it was available to everyone. I was amazed to see how knowledgeable he was, I picked up a few concepts while at it. He later told me about the many theories he has including lights and color. “In the letter, it contained theories that light consists of deform rays, some of which are more than others: And Colors are affirmed to be not qualifications of light, derived from refractions of natural bodies” (A Letter of Mr. Isaac Newton, 2003). Newton’s method was to see things most people wouldn’t be able to see. One day we were sitting beneath this apple tree and a sudden thought was triggered. He watched an apple fall off the tree to the ground something he’s seen hundreds of times before, but this time was different. He questioned himself and was furious about why the apple always falls. I didn’t know how to help him since I was only majoring in cybersecurity. He was seeing things most people wouldn’t be able to see even if they tried. His brain was like no one else’s, quick at discovering things. He told me that instead of an empty space between the apple and the ground; he saw an active force pulling things towards the earth, the force of gravity. At the time, I didn’t understand any scientific thing he said, but once I left and visited my good friend Voltaire he had come up with the law of universal gravitation.

 Voltaire (November 21, 1694 – May 30, 1778)

I started traveling again in the 1700s. I had visited Paris, France in 1718 to see the best-known play, the Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus. That’s where I first met Voltaire. I was amazed by his approach to tracing the movement of world human advancement by concentrating on social history and expressions of the human experience. Voltaire was a critic about the Bible and establish religions believing them to be the source of animosity between people. He had a lifetime passion for religious liberty and strongly believed that no one should be penalized by the government for their disposition. There was a multitude of economic and civic barriers against non-Catholics who also faced religious persecution and injustice. Voltaire had always come to me for advice since he hated fighting vigorously with society because they never listened to him. On a bright sunny day, we went for a walk in Toulouse. On the way we found a guy named Jean Calas getting tortured. This brought interest to Voltaire since he was all about criminal law reforms. “The panel reversed Calas’s conviction on March 9, 1765, and the government paid the family an indemnity” (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica). Voltaire valued the free flow of ideas and especially the ability to dissent. His published works often put them in the crosshairs of government sensors, and he risked his life on several occasions to disseminate his controversial works. “Voltaire was a prolific writer, producing more than 20,000 letters and over 2,000 books and pamphlets. Despite strict censorship laws, he frequently risked large penalties by breaking them and questioning the establishment” (Pettinger). I decided to stay with him until a major problem came his way. He was banished to England after being associated with a fight with a French aristocrat. The man utilized his riches to have him captured, and this would make Voltaire attempt and change the judicial system.

 Erasmus Darwin (December 12, 1731 – April 18, 1802)

To finish up my trip I visited my dad’s friend, Darwin. He was one of the few people who were determined to do about anything. He was a doctor, poet, philosopher, and inventor. Darwin’s wide-raging interests would inspire him to mount the enlightenment ‘s ultimate challenge to the authority of the church. When I went over to Lichfield, England in 1778, he was trying to create a machine that can possibly copy from paper to paper. It didn’t take him long because he had other inventions in mind. I had lived with him for couple years because I was amazed to see the inventions that came to his mind! He was intrigued by enlightenment thinking and its application to reality. For Darwin, the key was to comprehend, oversee, and direct the quickly changing world. Inspired by his friends he recorded his ideas and inventions in a book called Common Place Book. A couple of ideas he drew out were new weaving machines which completely transformed the English textile industry. A new kind of toilet, one which Darwin notes won’t be annoying because it won’t smell. He was the first Briton to explicitly write about evolution. “His main prose on the topic appears in the first volume of Zoonomia in 1794” (Plant Morphology). In the book, he intended to characterize realities about creatures, to set out laws depicting natural life, and to catalog diseases with their medicines. In contrast to some contemporary doctors, Darwin supported dynamic mediation with drugs and mechanical devices. However, he later passed away due to Dysentery a serious illness. I couldn’t stand enduring all this pain, so I headed home to Gainesville, Virginia. I had an amazing trip and plan to go on another soon. Everyone should be able to learn more about these important people who has impacted our life completely.

WORK CITED

“A Letter of Mr. Isaac Newton ... Containing His New Theory about Light and Colors.” A Letter of Mr. Isaac Newton ... Containing His New Theory about Light and Colors (Diplomatic), Jan. 2003, www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/diplomatic/NATP00006.

“Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802).” Plant Morphology, plantmorphology.org/portfolio-item/erasmus-darwin/.

Pettinger, Tejvan. “Voltaire Autobiography:  .” Biography Online, 7 Feb. 2018, www.biographyonline.net/writers/voltaire.html.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Jean Calas.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 15 Mar. 2020, www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Calas.

[esonetwork]

Tiger Kings, Snyder Cuts, and direct-to-streaming blockbusters: Entertainment in the time of COVID-19

New Post has been published on https://esonetwork.com/tiger-kings-snyder-cuts-and-direct-to-streaming-blockbusters-entertainment-in-the-time-of-covid-19/

Tiger Kings, Snyder Cuts, and direct-to-streaming blockbusters: Entertainment in the time of COVID-19

As an entertainment blogger, finding topics to write about this year has been somewhat of a challenge. Normally I have my blog schedule all neatly planned out, based on what movies are coming to the theater.

Of course, pretty much all the big spring and summer blockbusters have been moved to a later time, although of course due to the uncertainty surrounding COVID-19, those release dates may have to be moved again if quarantine procedures must be reinstated.

I’d initially thought this time might be a great opportunity to do a blog series project similar to my Western blog-a-thon earlier this year, but pandemic anxiety and the loneliness of the quarantine have made staying motivated challenging. I find myself turning to entertainment comfort food (a.k.a. watching Star Wars again for the billionth time and then staring longingly out the window and remembering what it was like to go to a movie theater).

Return of the (Tiger) King

Anyway, I finally got around to watching one of the more unusual hits during this pandemic: Netflix’s “Tiger King,” a documentary about private zoo owner Joe Exotic. The show is billed as a tale of “murder, mayhem, and madness” and honestly that doesn’t even begin to capture just how wild this show is. At numerous points, I found myself staring at the screen and thinking, “There is NO WAY this can be real.”

Even if you gather all the world’s best creative writers and told them to come up with the most outlandish story possible, I don’t think they could top the true story of “Tiger King.” If this show had come out before 2020, I don’t think I would have made it past the first episode. But 2020 has been so crazy that somehow it fits right in. The fact we’re all stuck in our homes and the world is awful right now provided the perfect environment for this show to become a viral hit.

I don’t even really know how to describe this show, other than that it must be seen to be believed. It features a feud (which you’ve probably heard about, thanks to Internet memes) that takes place between Joe Exotic and tiger sanctuary owner Carole Baskin (who may or may not have murdered her husband). The disappearance of Baskin’s husband is just one of the many over-the-top subplots this show has. In fact, it’s not even necessarily the craziest.

Ultimately, I wasn’t sure how to feel about the show after I finished watching it. I wanted to see it because it was a viral hit and everyone was talking about it, but in the end it actually made me feel a little sad. Because once you look past the eyebrow-raising drama, the real victims are the tigers who are bred solely for the purpose of entertaining people and who are not always treated with proper care and respect.

While Joe Exotic is getting a lot of attention right now, I hope that everyone who watched this show came away with an increased awareness of why people shouldn’t be keeping exotic animals like tigers as pets and why the breeding of these animals should be left to licensed, accredited zoos that can take care of these animals and that have their interests at heart.

To cut or not to cut

Though this entertainment news was not a surreal as “Tiger King,” I was still more than a little shocked by the announcement that the mythical “Snyder cut” of the Justice League movie did, in fact, exist, and it will be coming to HBO Max in 2021.

If you’re a geek, you’ve probably heard about all the drama surrounding the so-called Snyder cut of “Justice League,” but just in case, here’s a quick recap.

“Justice League” was released in 2017 to disappointing critical reviews and box office returns. Joss Whedon finished up the project after Zack Snyder had to depart the production due to a personal tragedy. The final film felt like a mishmash of Snyder and Whedon’s very different personal styles, and for a while now, certain fans have been quite vocal about wanting to see a specific Zack Snyder cut of the movie.

I always saw #ReleasetheSnyderCut as a quirky social media trend that would eventually fade away, but apparently Hollywood was actually listening and now the Snyder cut is a real thing. They’re even devoting a reported $30 million+ to the project.

Is this new cut a cash grab that won’t be that different from the version we saw in theaters? Maybe. But I have to confess that I’m already hooked; I will pay my hard-earned money to watch this alternate version, simply because I’m dying of curiosity. I did not really enjoy “Justice League,” but I’m actually a “Batman v. Superman” apologist, so I’m interested in seeing what Snyder comes up with here.

“Batman v. Superman” is a deeply flawed movie, but there are moments of greatness that it doesn’t receive enough credit for. Maybe “Justice League: The Snyder Cut” will still be a raging dumpster fire, but I’m intrigued enough to check it out.

As a side note, I am a little troubled by the concept of fans demanding a redo of a movie they didn’t like. Blockbusters, by their very nature, aim to be crowd-pleasers, but there’s also a danger of film makers being so concerned by audience reception that they’re afraid to try anything bold or ground-breaking. I don’t believe that “fans making demands of creators” is a very healthy process for creating art.

On the other hand, one could argue that “Justice League” suffered due to studio interference, and if the Snyder cut is a success, maybe Warner Bros. will give more directors freedom to follow their own vision for a project.

Skipping the theater?

Finally, an interesting trend we’re seeing in terms of entertainment in our new COVID world is that more films are bypassing a traditional theatrical release and going straight to streaming.

In some cases, it may be a good thing, such as Disney’s poorly reviewed “Artemis Fowl” that probably would have flopped at the box office.

Even as someone who deeply loves the movie theater experience, I’m okay with having a mix of films, with some going straight to streaming and others that start in the theater. I still think a movie theater is the best place to see a movie, but not every film necessarily needs to be seen on a giant screen.

I hope that as theaters are able to safely reopen, the industry will find a balance between in-person and on-demand.

[miazeklos]

I can’t believe I’m actually going to talk about Cersei Lannister’s character arc on tumblr dot com of all places given all the incredible (and insultingly shallow) takes I’ve had to read over the past couple of months, but here we are. Warning: this is long and discusses topics such as miscarriage and suicide and Cersei’s general cheerful state of mind, but I couldn’t resist.

It's just... honestly funny to me how so many people seem to have learnt that they scrapped Cersei's miscarriage plot and have taken in extremely personally, as if D&D decided to, I don't know, take away (yet another) instance of profound misery from this character just so that people who hate her won't have the pleasure of watching her suffer when, IMO, it's painfully obvious that what they actually wanted to give her was a tragic ending.

I mean, I already have an inkling what kind of doubtlessly nightmarish fate GRRM has got for her, but it's clear that the writers never had the same attitude towards Cersei, given the fact that they've entirely changed the character and only kept the bare, extremely necessary bones of her book plot (she’s so whitewashed at places that the High Sparrow plotline's credibility is hanging on a thread), so it makes sense that her death would be somewhat different as well. And sure, her losing the baby and then Jaime and being left with nothing but power would mean that she could go out guns blazing, face Drogon and walk backwards into Hell, but for anyone remotely invested in the character, it would feel incredibly hollow, because without the aforementioned things, Cersei has literally nothing to live for anyway. Therefore, the whole miscarriage subplot had to go.

Her attachment to her family has always been a central topic for show!Cersei, both when it comes to the children - being a mother and a queen are pretty much the only two things she readily identifies with - and to Jaime (”Without you, this is all for nothing”) and even to Tyrion, although I get that that’s not a meta the world is ready for yet. The first divergence that the show actually takes with her is giving her a backstory with child loss and adding the scene with Catelyn back at the very start, which is already a pretty major shift from book!Cersei, and it only goes further from there. Family is everything she truly cherishes. She’s suicidal and literally hates herself and the only thing that made her push forward after Tommen’s death was absolute power (a.k.a. something she’s wanted for herself all her life) and Jaime’s presence. Looking at the show from afar, she was left childless for four (4) episodes out of 73 before they gave her a new baby to look forward to.

The pregnancy was constantly mentioned. It was the reason behind Tyrion’s unwavering faith that she’d see the light because ‘she has something to live for now’ (repeated constantly in case the viewers missed it the first eighteen times), mainly because he was the only audience to windows into Cersei’s soul such as  “If it weren't for my children, I would have thrown myself from the highest window of the Red Keep” and “All I could think about was keeping those gnashing teeth away from the ones that matter most, away from my family.” 

(Jaime knew this too, even if he also knew that for her, power=safety and that her child’s safety was the exact reason why she wouldn’t budge. It’s followed by a very on the nose, “the worst things she’s done, she’s done for her children” as yet another reminder of the biggest running theme for her character - motherhood - right before the end.)

This is why that plotline matters. Even if the ‘WhAt WaS tHe PoInT aFtEr AlL’ complaints are not taken into account (of course Cersei was occupied with finding ways to explain her pregnancy because she’s a character in a story and is not an independent entity; unless you expect her to operate on ‘well, everyone involved in this situation will be dead by next episode so I shouldn’t bother’ basis, her actions make perfect sense), while it might not be important to the plotlines of other characters, it’s incredibly important for Cersei’s arc because it leads to where she was always going - the realisation that choosing life and freedom over the supposed safety that power gives her was always the best choice she could make for herself; that she’d always had that choice and that finally, finally she chose to run (even if she didn’t have a clear idea where she was going) and leave everything behind for the sake of what could come next. Death is so final. Life is full of possibilities.

Somewhere around here is where the tragedy comes in. She knows what matters to her the most (Jaime, their baby, her own life - yes, explicitly in that order) now, and it’s too late for her to do anything about it. This is Cersei stripped to her core. After everything else is gone, this is who she is - she’s scared for Jaime, scared for their child and, in the end, she’s scared for herself because they were so close. That’s why, before it finally sinks in that this is it and nothing else matters and at least they’re together, it’s a constant litany of ‘not like this’ - Cersei knows what she wants now, what she’s always wanted, and it’s right there in her arms, seconds before she loses it all and her final comfort is, as Lena said, that at long last, she can know peace.

There were plenty of other ways for the actual, physical death to happen, of course, but it honestly feels to me that regardless of the circumstances, her dying in this precise company - essentially with her family - was always going to be her endgame in the show and a much more satisfying conclusion to her arc than her dying with absolutely nothing left. A miscarriage would have added nothing to her character and I don’t trust anyone claiming otherwise because, again, she’s already had a similar experience before. The only thing gained would be more pointless suffering, hence all the people complaining about not getting to see it. The concept of her future child was an enormous part of the catalyst that drove her to where she was mentally by the end of 8x05 and where she was mentally by the end of 8x05 was an ever-present part of Cersei’s characterisation brought to its natural (when combined with everything else about her) conclusion.

Of course, this only makes sense if you consider her an actual character with an actual arc instead of a plot device to inconvenience your faves, and I’ve seen maybe three people actually see her in that light, so I’m not entirely sure who the target audience for this post is, but it sure has been needing an outlet for a while.

TL;DR: Thank you, D&D, for suppressing the need for angst роrn for five seconds to give your best character a slightly better storyline and for actually taking the time to develop her as a person enough for it all to make sense in the end. I shall never forget it.

P.S.: This could not more obviously be an analysis on the show version of the character, so any potential arguments that include the phrase ‘but in the books...’ will be pursued with legal action on sight.

[deadlysequence]

Sequence 8 - Stand Alone

This is going to be a very long post about my impressions and thoughts about this certain sequence of AC Syndicate and why is in a some way special in comparison to the other sequences of the whole game.

First of all, we know this sequence, "The Joys of Freedom", only last 4 missions and is the last one before the final sequence where the Frye twins must take down Starrick. But as I looked around internet, many people consider this sequence a "stand-alone", which is very interesting point considering the fact is part of the main storyline. Or is it?

Stand-alone means not necessarily part of the main storyline even if the sequence is in sequencing order (eighth one) along the others, but a kind of separate storyline. In fact, this part of the game could easily be a secondary event or even a separated DLC which can't affect the main storyline. Why? While the rest of sequences and missions are mostly  about "Assassins vs Templars", this sequence is all about "Rooks and Blighters' alliance", considering Jacob Frye and Maxwell Roth as the leaders of the Rooks and Blighters respectively, joining together.

First of all is very interesting about how to start this sequence: ended sequence 7 as part of the storyline shouldn't be necessary to access because the stand-alone aspect of the sequence 8. But focusing, in my opinion, the only needed requirement to unlock the sequence:

Conquering Boroughs.

In order to make Jacob to get a letter, is really necessary to conquer three boroughs around London. This secondary mission is especially difficult in the sense of how long one person could take to conquer. Each borough is big territorial speaking with plenty of missions to achieve: capturing Templars, liberating children from the factories, gang wars, capturing strongholds, and more. This mission could take hours to finish and could be comphensive to only require three boroughs to unlock S8.

But in my personal opinion, why only three when you can free all London?

Sure, it will take much longer to free all the city and not all gamers have the patience to explore, unlock all secrets, got money and material. Even considering the difficulty level of each one with Whitechapel as the easiest and Westminster the hardest. And for what? Freeing all London won't influence in the final mission of assassinating Starrick. And conquering all boroughs will only reward you with improving your skills and something else. So... What to make this bother more satisfying with unlocking S8 at conquering all London instead of only three boroughs?

The whole deal of doing this is to make Jacob's reputation to be high enough to capture Roth's interest. After all, the Blighters are been the only all powerful gang of the city for years. The whole deal of a brand new gang challenging them couldn't be go unnoticed by the Blighter leader, no? And of course he has going to take time to study this new threat and by extension, who the Rook leader was.

So in my opinion, instead of three, conquering all the boroughs should be the requirement to unlock S8. And trust me, the sequence only is worth it all the time exploring London.

Now let's talk about the sequence itself.

Is divided in four missions: "Strange Bedfellows", "Triple Theft", "Fun and Games" and "Final Act".

For a standard sequence, this is a very short one (except sequence 1, 2 and 9 for obvious reasons). For a stand-alone sequence this could make sense because is Jacob-only and there's no other characters to be involved. But I agreed with people saying that the whole Jacob/Roth thing should last longer. Only four missions for a very complex and interesting relationship doesn't make sense.

Now when I said about been a Jacob-only, it really means that in every sense: Evie isn't part of the sequence (unless you get into secondary missions in between but she's never really involved), no sign of Henry Green and the other characters, even the historical ones are abstent. Starrick is a constant but he's also an absent character even if his downfall are Jacob and Roth's goal.

So, in short, this is Jacob/Roth-only sequence. Is the sequence about them.

Considering about how Jacob and Maxwell interacted could have the potential of a longer story: If they did something else in between each mission. How they trust one and other despite the facts that they were gang rivals. If Roth's affection towards Jacob could be more noticeable and the Rook be aware of that, feeling similar affections in return.

Let's remember that S8 is Jacob's love interest sequence, which it is a very huge step for the franchise to make the very first LGBT main character in a AAA game. The interview of lead-writer Jeffery Yohalem and Loomer is a very indication of that idea and not only it was the writer's idea but a whole group of writers and makers agreed with the it. Jacob/Roth love story was formed by the group who helped to create the game.

Is very fascinating to see how they interacted around each other. About how Maxwell's constant use of endearments ("Dear", "Darling") to Jacob, how Jacob seems to enjoy this attention he's receiving, staring at Roth in an affective way at the end of a mission, the scene of Roth staring at the crow and asking if he's beautiful when in a very clever subtext he was actually thinking about the assassin, how Jacob flirts back at the start of "Triple Theft" (true, he flirted before but those are more teasing and manipulation than a serious flirt) and how he looked like enamoured of Maxwell in general.

That until the factory incident where Jacob couldn't accept the idea of killing children in order to harm Starrick. But at first he tried to change Roth's mind because this bond is too special for Jacob, and only when he realizes he'll not listen to him, is when the assassin stand against him. He didn't even kill him in the moment, realizing that at the end Roth is very special for Jacob. We know how badly Maxwell reacted to this betrayal, mostly because of a broken heart and we should understand how he was as a person, what kind of experience he dealt in his life to that very moment. Why freedom is so important for him no matter the consequences? Why he's sort of extremist in his ideals? Why he never was a Templar per se despite working for them but at the end wanting to cut it down? Why Jacob is so special for him to the point of falling in love for?

"Everything is permitted" taken to the extreme in Roth's actions.

Many people discussed this and even today there's discourses about why Roth reacted like this and if his feelings are truly honest. But even the most crazy and insane people are capable to love someone, they can't be emotionless for the sake of been the villains. Maxwell is very capable to love, just that he surely aren't used to love instead of lusting for someone (is possible that he had plenty of lovers but Lewis, his assistant, is the only one alive. Surely the others killed because Roth can't risk his criminal reputation with the rumors of sodomy spreading around. Is the Victorian London after all, very conservative and repressive), and at the moment he fell in love for Jacob Frye, for him there's two options: or having a life with him as his lover or been killed by his hands if things went wrong.

And obviously the latter happen.

"Final Act" is very special on its own as mission. There's no more the goal to take down Starrick, no more about destroying Templar influence in London. Is basically a mission so apart of the main storyline.

This is only about Maxwell and Jacob.

When he send Jacob the letter along with the dead crow, it was clear his intentions: giving him reasons to go to the Alhambra by free will and do what the assassin need to do. It is an invitation to the final performance and Roth even wishes the best of luck for him. Who else do that in this way? Roth was angry at Jacob but keep loving him to even saying that.

Of course he couldn't take the thing gladly...

That's why the dead crow in the box. Little Rook meant to be loved by Roth but send it with the neck snapped mean that at the end, is a loss. He just lost Jacob and Roth killed the crow in response, not only as a warning of how dangerous he could be and how many other people are going to suffer his wrath and pain (remember Lewis' warning), but also the end of a relationship, how Roth seen pointless in keeping the bird alive when at his eyes Jacob is far more important than a baby crow. There's also a symbolism here... He snap the crow in the neck, foreshadowing his own death by Jacob's blade in his throat.

I always like to see a connection between crows and Roth. Not only the fact that Maxwell's appearance (he have a raven hair) shows a bit along with his personality, and how this birds are highly used in theatrics, in Shakespeare's plays, mostly the tragic ones. And Roth is about to start a whole play with a tragedy as the ending.

Corvus the Trickster isn't only dedicated to Jacob. Is for them both.

Rooks and crows are part of the same family of birds. Jacob and Roth are also the same in a sense.

Also is important to point out that Jacob went to the Alhambra by free will. He have no reasons to go, it was clear that Roth isn't like the other targets he killed, he have no connections to Starrick, he isn't a Templar and he don't even care the Blighters are almost eliminated. No direct hit to the Grand Master.

Just nothing.

Jacob went there because even if he feel like he need to kill him, also needed and even wanted to be there. Is personal and deep. And is an assassination he don't even want to do and still he had to. And Roth knew Jacob will come back to him. Like magnetism, a chaotic and intense attraction.

That night many rules as changed.

His dedications to the assassin as soon the performance started. How he openly said "And is for the benefit of a young fellow very dear and near to my heart!", after surely years hiding his prefences. Is going to be his last night alive and now Roth is fully embracing publicly his deep infatuation, obsession and love for Jacob with his words. How he constantly invites Jacob to join him in the stage for the finale.

The decoys he placed in the theatre are for saving time, enough to say openly all his quotes to Jacob. To let him know how much he needed him, how much the betrayal hurted him, how much he cared.

How much he loved him.

And yet ready to die at Jacob's hand once all decoys are killed and heard him shouting "Roth! Show yourself!", and ready to set the place on fire with him allowing a murder-suicide.

We know how this ended. How Jacob manage to get him, how much he was in pain when Maxwell was dying. This reaction is very unlike the usual reaction Jacob shown at the other assassinations (except with James Brudenell, Lord Cardigan, but only annoyed with his constant chatting), proving that he grew feelings for the Blighter leader and how his actions hurted the Rook's heart. And Maxwell, unlike all the other people killed who lamented or get furious that the assassin murder them and by default, stopping their plans and projects, he was like glad and victorious. He knew Jacob would came and he does. Just as he wanted, to see Jacob one last time and killed by his blade. And when he answered the assassin's pained questions, he spoke with his experience. He did everything he wanted because the world was too harsh on him that finally he decided to live with his own freedom, knowing that not all people are good and they could betray you according to the circumstances and how rules the society teach or impose, could limited any potential. Roth lived enough to see that is not worth it if that makes him live miserable. Is in the danger and the lack of rules where he could find what he looked for. The freedom to do anything he want, the freedom to make his own choices, the freedom to lead his gang before the Templars came and changed the game, the freedom to enjoy the theatre lifestyle away of Starrick's orders. And when he said "For the same reason I do anything", kiss Jacob and finally add "Why not", is also the freedom to love whoever he wanted.

And he wanted Jacob. At his side and if not, been killed by him.

Because at the very moment the Rook leader turn his back, Roth see his life and freedom pointless and even lifeless without Jacob. As I said, surely Roth had plenty of lovers before but Jacob is the only one who give Roth's life a new sense. He longed for his affection, to be loved in return and working together even after Starrick is gone. For the first time in his life, love was way more important than freedom to Maxwell Roth. He could easily get over it if he was cold enough and go back to normal. But wasn't the case.

It said love can bring the best of people. But also the bad of them. Love is also poison and it was for both Roth and Jacob at the end.

And of course there's Jacob's reaction to the kiss. People said he was disgusted but this not shown in his expression. If he was indeed disgusted, he could yell at Roth or stabbing him again.

But he looked hurt, shocked and confused. And suddenly that become in an upset expression as he stand up, realizing what happened to finally just emptiness in his eyes when he collected the blood with the handkerchief, accepting the kiss.

And when he tries to escape the burning theatre. The broken voice each time he talk, showing the magnitude of what he just experimented. His assassin reflects push him looking for the exit, but his voice and surely his mind all in a chaotic storm, haunting and hurting him like a dagger in the heart. Even after he escaped.

Then we can hear a crow in the background outside as Jacob was coughing because of the smoke inhalation. Remember what I said about Roth and crows? I don't know but this could be inspired in "The Raven" story when the man tries to move on from the tragedy of losing his love one and yet the crow spoke "Nevermore". The crow in the background as Jacob coughs and stare at the burning theatre could be a signal of the horror of what he just did and which will never recover.

Now... We all know that people debated if the kiss was the culmination about the Rothfrye relationship, and even if I agreed that it settled many things and how much both were attracted to each other, the indication of Jacob's affection, pain and love is shown during the train scene.

In this scene, Jacob wasn't his normal self, don't even started a joke or something when Evie told about Starrick's plans. He just looked down, depressed, looked at the edge. "Let him have it", as he said with glowed eyes like about to cry, a fake and cracked smile. The very image of a defeated and heartbroken man. He saw that a freedom without limits have terrible consequences. He saw how many people had died in the fire. How he went there despite having no reason to go but needing to be there. How he feel forced to kill the only person who accepted him as a whole, without forcing him to change. Roth never tried to force him into anything, the whole deal was mutual until the factory incident.

How he realized too late that he feel love for him. To have that kiss he never thought he wanted until he had it. And how his words pierced his mind because Roth was telling the truth. Jacob wanted him but at the end, Maxwell Roth is dead by his blade.

That nearly caused Jacob to just give up until Evie mentioned their father and make Jacob to react. At the end there's no time to grieve and lamenting what he did... They need to stop Starrick and the next will come eventually. And surely after finally the Templars are defeated, Jacob will spend a lot of time to properly grieve Roth and having clear his thoughts and feelings about him, to have the courage of moving on, still haunted by the pain of losing a love one but bearable and be able to marry and start a family.

In the context of storyline, psychology and emotional aspects, S8 is the love interest of AC Syndicate where Ubisoft take such step of creating the first male/male canon relationship with a main character back in 2015. Let's give them credit for such brave action despite the controversy this caused just after the official release and seems that is not totally settled down. But it depends on the fans and how they this event.

Now, let's discuss about what kind of changes this sequence could get. After all, in my opinion, this story deserved to last longer, with more cutscenes, more missions, surely interesting rewards and clear indication about their mutual attraction and surely lead to something more (trust me, if they could do that, killing Roth could be even more hurtful for the player).

First of all, if we could add missions (to make S8 to last like 6 to 8 missions or more) and cutscenes:

1) Jacob and Roth, lead their Rooks and Blighters to fight against Templars in the street in a very intense War Gang to keep the Strand liberated (Rooks skills to the maximum).

2) Roth vs Jacob in a brawl fight inside the Alhambra (with Jacob's fighting skills to the maximum and already fought in all Toppings fight clubs to unlock this), in a sort of friendly yet very difficult brawl.

3) Both of them dancing in the stage with the player controling Jacob's steps, with a cutscene of both almost kissing.

4) Parkour race inside the Alhambra.

5) Jacob looking for any important object with Lewis helping him.

6) Cutscenes of Maxwell clearly showing his affections and seducing Jacob in a more evident way.

And well, you can add your ideas about what other missions and cutscenes S8 could had.

So, in conclusion, Sequence 8 truly is a stand-alone and Jacob-only mission which could had potential to be more impactful if the writers and producers didn't decided that the final fight with Crawford Starrick is more important than Jacob and Roth's relationship, developing their personalities and how the player could see that interaction. Subtext is important in this sequence which only a very attentive eye and mind could realize but many people didn't see it in the moment and had their own interpretation about what they just saw. That's why a explicit text could had solved the issue since the beginning.

Sometimes I even dare to imagine this could had been an amazing DLC like the Jack the Ripper DLC. Longer and with a story on its own. No?

But despite that, S8 as a whole become a very important highlight moment for AC Syndicate not only for fans but also for the whole franchise. As for me, as a Rothfrye fan and also a history teacher with a special likeness for the contemporary European history which started with the Industrial Revolution (along with my two trips to Europe, having fondness of London) , this game and especially this sequence, hold a very special place.

Be free to like, reblog and comment your impressions.

[xanderuwu]

for whom it may concern; here’s a letter

i wrote this long fucking rant about voltron, enjoy (click here to view on google docs)

My name is Alexander, I’m 23, and here is my sob story. I’m a bisexual trans man who grew up in a tiny village where people believed that being LGBT+ was just as bad as being a child molester. I spent the first 20 years of my life hiding my truth because of the fear & shame that was ingrained in me as a child; I was disgusted by myself. I have never gone a week in my‬ ‪life without contemplating suicide - I’ve tried to kill myself 9 times, the first time was when I was 8.‬

‪One of the main things that kept me afloat during my childhood & teen years were stories in any medium; film, TV, books, I swallowed them whole & they kept me sane. But they never made me feel goof about myself or my life. I didn’t experience the impact of good representation until I saw the first season of Glee in 2009 when I was 14 (that show went downhill as it went on too, wow). One of the main characters on Glee was gay & had an arc in the first season where he came out to his father, & his father … embraced him.‬

‪… I remember crying in bed, watching the coming out scene over & over in shitty quality on the Youtube app on my old iPod. I had never seen anything like it. Sure, I’d seen LGBT+ people in media before, but they were always either stereotype-ridden jokes, or they led miserable lives & never got a happy ending. & in so so so many cases … they died. Or their partner died. Or they got AIDS. Or they were framed as disgusting degenerates.‬

‪I’d never seen a parent accept & embrace their gay child. I had never seen a gay character who “made it” with loving friends & family. It gave me courage, it made me hopeful.‬

‪Hope is the most powerful powerful tool we have when it comes to suicide prevention within the LGBT+ community. Every day, thousands of people toe the line between life & death, & THAT is why our representation is so important. Yes, it helps normalize LGBT+ people to the cisgender & heterosexual audiences, but you have no idea how much hope & joy can blossom in the hearts of vulnerable LGBT+ people from good representation that shows LGBT+ characters being embraced & loved, finding partners, falling in love, getting that happy gay ending we so rarely get to see in media. I’m certain that that gay kid from fucking Glee of all things, saved me from the brink a few times.‬

‪In December of 2014, when The Legend of Korra made Korra & Asami the romantic endgame, I cried. Cried for all the LGBT+ kids who would, perhaps for the first time, feel good about themselves. I also cried for the child in myself who still struggles with the shackles secured around his feet from a childhood of isolation & self-hatred, because he needed it too. & then we got record-breaking amounts of well-rounded LGBT+ representation on Steven Universe, a show that not only features same-gender romances, but also explores gender & challenges toxic masculinity. & last year, Disney Channel, the fucking DISNEY CHANNEL, had a character on Andi Mack come out as gay! Freakin’ DISNEY, man! & Korra was on Nickelodeon, Steven Universe is on Cartoon Network - those are all huge traditional television broadcasters where shows have to be assessed by a whole lot of boards in order to make sure they’re suitable to broadcast.‬

‪Netflix, on the other hand, has more freedom. Many of their live-action shows have had explicit LGBT+ representation. Watching as more & more mainstream TV shows & films with prominent LGBT+ characters get released makes me believe in the change, from when i was a kid in the early 00’s to now.‬

‪I first encountered Voltron: Legendary Defender in the form of gifs, fanart, & screencaps on Tumblr. The first thing that caught my attention was Allura’s design; she’s gorgeous & I’m weak. I found out that she was from the Voltron reboot which, not gonna lie, sounded kinda dumb to me at first. I watched Voltron: Defender of the Universe as a kid, not because i’m old enough to have been a child in the 80s, but because we were a family with six mouths to feed & no disposable income that could be spent on cable TV. So we got public service television, & they ran a lot of cartoons from the 80s because they were cheap to license I guess.

Anyways, I was obsessed with VDOTU (we’re using abbreviations now because this is getting stupidly long & typing is hard) as a wee lad, Allura was my favourite character because she had long hair & a pink uniform - as I said, I’m weak for pretty people. So in late June of 2016 I watched the first season of VLD & I was so pleasantly surprised. VLD is animated by Studio Mir; one of my favourite animation studios, & the show has writers & producers who have also worked on Korra, so that, in addition to the show being distributed by Netflix, made the possibility of clear-cut LGBT+ characters & storylines seem more plausible. ‬

‪I loved the first season of VLD. I very quickly latched onto Keith & Allura, but as I kept watching I found myself adoring the whole team. Having Pidge be a girl was cool, & I was so excited when I found out that she was voiced by a gay actress! & whoever came up with the idea of making Allura, Hunk, & Lance brown deserves a high-five. ‬

‪(We’re getting to the real meaty LGBT+ rep rant soon, just stick with me here because I wanna talk about some other gripes I have with this show first).‬

‪So, we had a show with a diverse main cast of characters, good writing & pacing, a good balance between character & plot, & gorgeous animation. I was excited to see the second season.‬

‪However, the second season was when some of the show’s main flaws popped up for the first time. That nice balance between character & plot from the first season seemed to have driven right off its tracks and straight into a bio-hazardous lake. In the first season, each character got a fair amount of attention, but in season two Hunk & Lance were just … barely there? Keith is my favourite character & I liked the Blade of Marmora stuff, but Keith’s amount of screentime came at the expense of other characters, especially Hunk & Lance. Having Keith’s entire arc in season two pretty much only involve himself & Shiro did every character a disservice. & the reveal that Keith was Galra was so underwhelming. We only saw two characters react to Keith’s alien heritage. The episode with Keith & Hunk in the Weblum was lovely, but we haven’t really gotten team bonding episodes like that since season three so :/ And oh God, the whole subplot of Allura, a black-coded character, being “racist” against the Galra is a WHOLE other mess that I don’t think I can adequately explain. Just, why. ‬

‪Season three was good, the balance between character & plot seemed to be getting back on track & the lion switch-up made for some good character development, especially for Lance & Allura. Episode four was a mess though like y'all could’ve been just a liiittle more sensitive with that kind of stuff. Also it is embarrassingly obvious that in the first two seasons, Allura was portrayed as being around Shiro’s age & the two of them shared moments that seemed to be hinting at a future romance - until, suddenly in season three Allura is at the same maturity level as the other paladins? What, is it because that was when you decided to have Shiro be gay because you weren’t allowed to kill him after season two, & so instead of doing Shiro/Allura you started pairing Allura with Lance? That’s just absolutely stellar mate.‬

‪Season four - character/plot balance swings off the rails once more & to this day it hasn’t been recovered. This was the season where y'all’s plot became way too fucking convoluted & too damn big! The plot takes so much room, OF COURSE character development suffers! Season five had the same problem, & whoops Allura has a new love interest! It’s Lotor, a grown-ass man! Great! Totes loved it!‬

‪Season six had some good moments but again, y'all’s plot left no fucking breathing room for the characters! Also, Lance’s crush on Allura is suddenly True Love now? At this point you need a fucking Excel sheet to keep track of the plot & subplots. Lotor was an asshole all along & betrayed Allura? BITCH WE BEEN KNEW! Lotor’s betrayal could be seen from miles away. Bad.‬

‪SEASON FUCKING SEVEN HERE WE GO.‬

‪You ruined Keith’s entire character. Plain and simple. Keith & Shiro’s backstory was the highlight of the entire season. And in those flashbacks we see Shiro’s BOYFRIEND! Shiro is GAY! Shiro being gay & having a partner was revealed at San Diego Comic Con in July, & fans were so fucking happy. Remember at the start of this monstrosity of a letter where I talked about LGBT+ representation in media igniting hope? That was what you saw from fans after SDCC; pure joy & hope. It was amazing, people cried because they were so happy! & the showrunners said we’d learn more about Adam & get to meet him, shit I was so hyped!

Was Shiro, the character who has struggled the most in the show, going to get a … happy ending? As a gay character? With his partner of the same gender?‬

‪…‬

‪Y'know,‬

‪There’s still probably hundreds of thousands of LGBT+ kids who are growing up in a similar environment to where I grew up. They feel the same way I felt. That … indescribable loneliness that pierces through your bones, the self-hatred & hopelessness that weighs too much, you are the deer and the headlights is every person whose approval & love you need most. ‬

‪& then you see someone like you in a story, & they are happy, they aren’t alone, because people like us aren’t destined to be tragedies.‬

‪It gives you hope.

‪VLD could’ve given that to people y'know? And maybe that’s the saddest part, that instead they chose to kill the man Shiro loved, & thus put their only remaining confirmed LGBT+ character through even more suffering. ‬

VLD killed 50% of their confirmed LGBT+ characters. ‬

‪Imagine if they’d killed 50% of their female characters.‬

They killed Adam to show the gravity of the situation, to show that with war comes death. But LGBT+ viewers don’t need that reminder. We die every day. We know war, we know that war walks hand in hand with death.‬

‪And we didn’t even really have any feelings about Adam aside from “Shiro’s boyfriend!!!” We only got a tiny snippet of his & Shiro’s relationship. From a basic storytelling standpoint, killing someone like Colleen or Sam Holt would have been so much more effective because we know a lot more about Pidge’s relationship with her parents than we know about Adam & Shiro.‬ Adam’s death fell flat because we never knew him or his & Shiro’s relationship.

‪So why did they decide that the gay characters had to lose? VLD could have made something beautiful, something that would help people. But you didn’t.‬

‪Why didn’t they?‬

‪And why, in the same season, did they suddenly make Allura show signs of returning Lance’s feelings, despite her having shown zero romantic interest in him for over a third of the series? Why did they push Keith & Acxa together, two characters who had never spoken before this season? ‬

‪They take away the prospect of a same-gender romance, & then shove some half-assed straight relationships in our faces? It’s as if they’re doing this to be intentionally cruel.

‪Even if Adam somehow returns, that doesn’t repair the anxiety & hurt they caused their LGBT+ fans. With this season, VLD gave us the same age-old tale we’ve been told since we could understand words.‬

‪Happy endings belong to straight people. Gay people are doomed to live through tragedy after tragedy until we die young.‬

‪I believed in this show. I honestly thought the slow-burn romance would be Keith & Lance. Already in season one they had the “bonding moment” that was a textbook example of how to convey romance through visual storytelling. In that scene, Lance said “We are a good team” to Keith, & that was supposedly just bros being bros? But in season six, Lance says the exact same phrase to Allura as a flirty line, so what’s the deal here?

Are Allura and Lance the slow burn? Allura had never shown interest in Lance before now, when she suddenly noticed that Lance is … nice? What … is this? Honest to God, what is happening? VLD really decided to do the guy-likes-girl-girl-doesn’t-reciprocate-but-if-guy-keeps-trying-she’ll-like-him-back-eventually thing? Ah yes, If you flirt with a girl & she ignores your advances, you shouldn’t stop & move on, you should keep pushing, that’s how VLD staff want people to treat women I guess.‬

‪Keith & Axca … looked at each other three times & now they’re in love. Very good slow burn, I cried, 11/10.‬

‪Had the straight romances at least been well-developed I might’ve been slightly less angry. But no, you killed the man Shiro loved & then presented us with some gourmet heterosexual nonsense - no really, where are your Michelin stars because this hetero bullshit is top notch, truly.‬

‪I’m not saying this as a bitter shipper. I’m saying this as someone who invested so much time into your show, only to be severely let down. VLD has had some incredible episodes, but season four & onward was a massive display of incompetent storytelling. It’s as if seasons one through three were created by a different team!

Not to mention the showrunners themselves, who have consistently been dismissive of valid concerns from fans, & when given chances to confirm that Keith & Lance’s relationship was strictly platonic, they instead remained vague, instilling hope in fans - giving people false hope to string them along so they’ll keep watching your show is cruel.‬

‪There are so many other things I could say here, but I’m running out of time.‬

‪Y'all could’ve done extraordinary things with this show & these characters. You could have made something amazing, your show could have been remembered as a trailblazer. But instead, it’ll only be remembered as a clusterfuck & as an example of what not to do, for future creators to learn from.‬

‪I don’t know how or why y'all ended up turning your show into a damn mess. I don’t really care. I just wish you hadn’t exploited the fragile hopes of LGBT+ people.‬

The only thing that can save y’all now is if season eight makes me physically shit hundred dollar bills so I can buy a fucking boat, sail to the middle of the ocean, and just scream for a good six years or so.

Thanks.‬

[planesofduality]

The Story Behind Solas with Dragon Age Lead Writer Patrick Weekes - Dialogue Wheel (Part 2 of 3)

Full video: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFx1nCdZFjw&t=1s

Part one here

Time: 12:16

When it comes the characterization of a character that you’ve already been give at least some sort of name to. We know that this character is some sort of trickster god - when you were trying to develop and make him some a stand-alone character, did you ever have to rely on what the mythos already established of this particular kind of eighth-seat god that maybe a lot people hadn’t heard a lot about?

Well, I think, like we talked about before, one of the great things about the Dragon Age universe is everything that you learn in a codex entry is something that someone else heard in a story and wrote it down somewhere and you’re reading half of the book. So the good news on that is anything we wanted to do with Fen’Harel, there was so little and what was in there was already so sketchy that we had all the freedom we needed to play with him.

That turned out to be a nice thing because I think if we had someone that was completely by-the-books, already established, their character already given, it would feel like more of a letdown to write that as a character or you would have to play against type, you’d have to do something completely different to show he wasn’t just what the stories wrote about him. And, you know, in some ways that is both liberating but also disappointing to people who might have liked  the original stories. This was a fun experience of getting to fill in some of the gaps.

The only thing I think we had to struggle against is that anyone who hears “trickster” or anyone who hears “oh, he’s chaotic and unpredictable” it feels like there is a natural urge to go to “He’s Loki in the Avengers. He’s the guy who’s gonna make large grand-standing plans.” Or, you know, “He’s the Riddler, who’s gonna leave clues to test you.” We had to get away from that: “Let’s tone that back a little bit, let’s not have him be the Jack Nicholson Joker version of the Dread Wolf.”

That’s quite a quote.

You got Dorian as a large, grandiose , extravagant figure and it would have been easy to have him go that way. It was fortunate that we had Dorian as the mage who had the larger-than-life persona already to make Solas be the quiet one.

Time: 15:21

Was there ever an instance where you were really pushed with giving some indicators to the player that Solas may have some connection to this going through the gameplay? Because you do see a lot statues of Fen’Harel. There’s many instances of where you’re discussing it, you’re traveling through those lands. Where do you walk that line, how do you walk that line, or do you just completely disregard it whatsoever?

The goal we had is we wanted the very careful players, the very sensitive players, who were playing attention and watching every scene with Solas to know that something was up and to want more answers and then go to “OH MAN” as soon as the stinger after the credits rolled. But we wanted most players to just go “Oh, okay, he’s like ‘Fade nerd.’ He’s like ‘hippie guy.’”

The other thing we wanted was everyone on their second playthrough, as soon as they talked to Solas to be like “Oh, man, he’s just saying it. He just flat-out said it right there and I missed it completely the first time!” I think we called it the “inevitable in retrospect”- or the “slap the forehead on the second playthrough” style of writing, where we wanted people to see that the most interesting thing about the trickster god is he’s not actually that great of a liar - He is almost telling you a lot of the time. And, you know, some of the tragedy is it that you never had the chance to actually ask, “Wait -are you Fen’harel?”

Time: 17:13

We talked about leaving breadcrumbs, what that meant. Now the big turn, the big scene at the ending:  How did this come about, were you really involved in that sort of process and are you happy with it?

Oh, I’m absolutely happy with it. It went through several iterations,. Mike was hugely involved. The writing was definitely done by Dave; it was a huge crit path moment. He had me give a look at the Solas voice, I think I looked at it, I don’t think I actually changed a single word in the final one.

We had versions where after the main plot it was actually going to be a full plot where you the player went and were actually present when Solas confronts Mythal. We had a part where we said, “Wow that’s too big, a lot of players are gonna miss that, we’ll make it a DLC.” So it was gonna be a separate DLC where that happened. At one point we said “No, this is too big, we actually - let’s cut it and address it next game.” So it was going to be this thing that we pushed off into some future content.

I am really happy with what we went with, because, I think, you know, for my money, that short, little Marvel-style, after-the-credits stinger is what we needed. We needed something so that everyone who was paying attention and everyone who was really invested could go “oh my god!” And go, “Okay, so, just in case you were wondering, we’re not done, we have more stories to tell, and we are confident enough in what we are doing that we are willing to throw that ball.” That stinger is essentially us throwing a football to future us, trusting that we are going to catch it. Because, you know, at the end, we had that level of confidence. We felt that we had that level of confidence, we felt we made a really good game. Dave led an amazing team of writers, and I’m really touched that he has the confidence to believe that I’ll be able to carry that on for him.

Time: 19:49

When we spoke to Dave, one of the big moments that he mentioned, was when he created kind of a long-term idea for what’s going to happen in the Dragon Age universe. And to hear him say it, he mentioned that what he originally wanted for Dragon Age: Inquisition couldn’t happen - it was far too big - it wouldn’t work. And you guys had talked about  taking that concept, finishing Inquisition somewhere in the middle of that concept arc, and then using at least an influence or something like that to affect the franchise going forward.  Speaking with you now, as someone who has taken up the reins, do you know what I’m talking about? Am I talking crazy? Where do you see it going?

Um…

Reasonably - of what you can say on this.

So here’s the last scene of the next game… (laughs). I think there’s an extent to which no plan really survives contact with the audience when it comes to video games. We look at how fans react, we look at what hit, what rang true with everyone. You know, it’s funny, having people react angrily actually isn’t as bad as having people ignore things sometimes. Having people react angrily  means they were definitely emotionally engaged, so you know you hit something there. Whereas having fans go, “I don’t know, fine, I guess, whatever” and move on means, “Okay, I don’t know if that’s what we want to go back to. We didn’t actually get anything from them there, they didn’t actually remember that later.” So that’s a phase that comes after every game we ship. We look at what hit, what missed, and where we want to go from there.

Now that said, Dave’s future plan is, I think, fantastic, epic, and heartbreaking. Our plan is to use that as our starting point. To look at where we want to go, what we want to do, and it will not be - and I, you know, Dave and I have talked about this - it will not be the story that Dave would tell if he were still here as lead writer. Because it could never be that. We can get into that when we talk about Cole a little bit, but if I tried to do that I would just be doing a bad impersonation of Dave Gaider and no one is ever going to be as good at that as Dave is. My goal going forward is to, as lead, put my own spin on that process, put my own spin on the plots going forward, on the thematic elements, while keeping those same thematic elements that we had. Because, I think, what Dave has set in motion in three games, countless DLCs and expansions, is something that can endure: The idea that no choice is ever really that easy and that the great events always stem from human-understandable motivations.

So, that is where I think where we are going to go, as vaguely as I can say.

Time: 23:30

Speaking of specifically to Solas: His continuation of the story. Adding that little “Marvel moment” at the end - what do you think that did for the crit path and the overall arc of the story that players experienced in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Do you think they would have been more satisfied if there was  a DLC or is that just us gamers complaining because we can’t get everything we want right away?

Well, I think you want to leave people wanting more. “Man I wish you guys had done more” is a better problem to have than “Man I wish you guys had done less.” So, I think, looking at it from inside the studio, we didn’t have the resources to do much more than we did. So it was never going to be the big moment right then anyway. From my perspective, the reason I’m really happy we have it is, like I said, I thought it was a vote of confidence. The team is still the Dragon Age team and it is still the writers and designers who did everything else, who made such wonderful characters and were responsible for such fantastic plots.

Time 25:10

Well, again, looking at that in its completion, it’s good to see that even a character that needed to give you a stinger in your estimation didn’t take away, I guess, from the overall story you were trying to tell.

Well, thank you. Yeah it was obviously the moment we were building toward, but again, the goal was even if we didn’t have that stringer, he was still an interesting enough character that people would have not felt cheated that he was in the party.

Part 3

[motherlcss-a]

let’s root for each other and watch each other grow ( favorite portrayal of a character in your fandom ) 

let’s hear it for the boys and girls !!

- lethalintelligence / torie : honestly torie is such a wonderful gem that i’m so lucky to have on my dash , that we’re all lucky to have on our dash . she’s such a truly gifted writer that explores raven’s depths and all the facets of her personality in a way that is nothing short of inspirational . just reading torie’s writing always pushes me to be better and i’m so thankful for her existence . 

- rainkilled / rachel : wow peter colton is just a freaking delight . i might be hella biased but i have such a soft spot for the soft hearts ( elena gilbert , scott mccall , clary fray , caroline forbes , angus macgyver , barry allen  ) but i think what makes soft characters all the more interesting is that they aren’t blind to the darkness of the world or their own tragedies but they’ve faced them , they’ve turned them into strengths and refused to let them dim their lights and peter is a shining example of this because peter as gentle and full of light as he is has been through a time i mean honestly this poor bean like i wish i was as strong as peter colton because peter still manages to retain this light about yes he’s a little bit wiser , a little more weathered but , he’s not beaten and this all comes from the extremely layered way rachel has written him , the care she has put into his character . peter is honestly someone we should all strive to be more like , rachel is someone we should all strive to be more like and i love them both dearly so much . 

- holiistichcro : okay but people who play bellamy blake always have a special place in my heart because people who love bellamy blake automatically have a special place in my heart . since the pilot bellamy has been changing and growing , since before he’s been changing and growing into this strong and kind and protective and smart and thoughtful and sometimes very tragic hero and people who can not only appreciate and respect but capture in a way that leaves me freaking breathless will forever go down on my list of people that deserve the roleplay equivalent of an oscar or emmy or kids choice award and this babe right here deserves all of them . nina already is proudly a founding member of the bellamy blake fanclub and so am i and we will forever be and will forever be loving and promoting the hell out of this cute little red velvet cupcake . 

- jobikilled : okay let’s see how far i can get through this before i start crying about jasper jordan and about his sweet brown eyes and his excited smile and his googles and his young little face and how he deserved so much better , deserved and to be happy and to live a life that wasn’t shattered by war and grief and anger . wow didn’t even last thirty seconds and i usually don’t when it comes to spencer’s writing . spencer has a way of writing things that make me so happy and smile-y and then simaltaneously breaking me by talking about things like clarke finding jasper’s goggles and i never fully recover . i’ve said it before and i’ll say it spencer is the jasper that jasper deserves always . 

- mcntyre : MY NEW BEST FRIEND LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY BEST FRIEND CAUSE THEY FLIPPING KICK ASS . harper is one of those characters that is both underappreciated and easily misunderstood . harper is not just your sweet little flower girl and she is not just your tough as nails gunner she is both , she is this deep combination of softness and edge and that is something few people who actually take the time to get to know harper seem to understand but , my babe gets it and as i’ve told them before finding someone who appreciates harper and takes the time to flesh her out so much and put explanation and thought behind her thoughts and actions behind what she’s actually feeling and who she wants to be in light of everything they’ve been through is a blessing and i will never be able to find the words to express how grateful i truly am . 

- gonatombom : man i have such a complicated love / hate relationship with octavia blake but i think that’s because i’ve never truly been able to connect with her character since season one but , when talented as feathers writers come onto the scene i can feel that connection between the young girl in season one who just wanted to experience life and freedom that had been stripped away from her and the angry and hurting and strong warrior that she is now and that’s something that i am so lucky to be able to witness and someone both me and my muse are so grateful to interact with . 

- foxofthe100 : this sweet little gumdrop here is someone special because she’s taken a character we unfortunately never really got a chance to learn much about and that is a tragedy in my opinion because the world needs more characters like fox . characters whose loyalty are their defining traits , characters who are fragile and not afraid to admit it , characters who strive to be strong especially to protect others , the world has always needed more fox and honestly so do both me and my muse . we’re co - founders of the bellamy blake fanclub with our weekly meetings and matching shirts and honeslly it’s one of the best things ever and so are they .