#i assume that my interpretation of her backstory situation is the popular one but i really have no idea

[doodlebeeberry]

what implications do u think the amelia investigations episode (possibly) being last has......

thinking about it im not sure implications is the word i was really looking for, rather i think theres like. a particular weight, to me, in placing her episode as the last one (presuming, of course, that there are only 5 episodes in investigations like is generally whats being assumed. for all we know though there could be more than that but thats the assumption im working off of)

ive always read the lack of any particularly tangible details about her pre-plane life, let alone the lake of an actual disappearance scene for her, as a means of further alienating her from her previous life. It drives in this wedge between Amelia and Scenty, such that even though shes probably the most vocal (at least throughout s1) about wanting to go home, her desire is countered by the fact that pretty much her entire existence in the show is defined by exclusively her time on the plane. The lack of a background for her (as absolutely crazy as it drives me) does play a pretty notable role in how her relationship to earth and the plane and herself are laid out.

This, in my mind, creates a bit of an interesting situation for investigations to play with. seemingly, investigations kinda requires an exploration into everyone's pre-plane lives, a certain insight into their lives that amelia just doesnt have. so, unless they do something a bit radical in the presentation of that episode in particular, youd have to explore her old life on some level without undermining the dynamic with it that we already have. I guess the most obvious answer is that it wont be amelia telling her own story to the audience. We wont be hearing her explain or be in her perspective, we'll be hearing from (presumably) garret. Its a story about her that isnt her story to tell. even when we do finally get to see it, her life, her disappearance isnt hers. not really. and i think placing it last in the sequence, the final mystery to unravel, the hardest answer to get, implies at the very least an acknowledgement of that.

but i do have a degree in Reading Into Things so like. who knows. maybe thats just what i want

[wordsnstuff]

Guide To Writing Found Family

This is also available on wordsnstuffblog.com!

– Found family is a very popular trope that I don’t often see explored in technical writing resources, and as a person who is currently in the middle of developing one for my own series, I decided to make a resource for those who were also confused when approaching this character dynamic. If you have anything to add to the topic, feel free to comment down below for the other writers out there. Hopefully this is helpful to those who need a place to start. Happy writing!

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Avoiding Romantic Subtext

This is one of the hardest obstacles to sidestep when writing an unusual dynamic, and for certain genres it can be ten times worse. For example, in fiction written specifically for young adults, there’s a baseline expectation for a hefty amount of romantic tension, and readers will often insert it no matter what the text and subtext suggests. In order to prevent this automatic insertion of romance in the reader’s interpretation, it’s wise to establish a clear and reasonable explanation for why the relationships are platonic and will never develop into something more. 

It’s not a good idea to go for the “person a nor person b has ever considered this relationship blossoming romantically” because that’s often the basis for romantic stories, and will leave that wiggle room for the reader to run with. Show in the way they interact and perhaps in the narration/first person that each party has thought of that scenario and ultimately come to the conclusion that there’s just no romantic potential.

Showing Familial Relationships

Families rely on each other and in diverse ways. The way these individuals interact and build a familial bond is determined (often) by the way in which they form a dependence on the other, and this is more often than not in found family stories, a healthy dependence. It shows the other person’s reliability, care, and compassion, and the way this develops is different for family than it is for friends. 

Certain family members also have specific types of humor when it comes to each other. A father and a daughter will have a different sense of humor or understanding with each other than maybe the daughter and her brother do, and this all adds to form a vivid dynamic in your reader’s head that will alter the way they perceive relationships. Found family will be exactly the same, but they’ll have different backstories and different reasons why that sense of humor or understanding has developed that way.

Friendship vs. Family

Found family is unique in the way that readers can very easily perceive a relationship as close friendship rather than a familial one. However, friendship lacks a certain vulnerability and dependence that found family can use to its advantage, because family sees each other at their highs and lows and conflict usually carries different implications. 

Family also implies a different attitude and motivation behind the relationship. Conflicts between family members are less severe in the long-run because there’s a ground-level understanding that no matter what happens, arguments will end in forgiveness and closure, whereas that is not necessarily guaranteed with friendships or romances. The motivation, also, is different in the sense that found family is more often meant to last a lifetime, and therefore is less fragile and opens the door for more open communication and vulnerability.

Converting Tension to Intimacy

When you’re tasked with turning a tense, unfriendly relationship into a close and familial one, it’s daunting to even begin thinking about how to go about it.  First, it’s important to understand the function of this stage of their relationship as a starting point for growth in both of the characters rather than merely a device to create drama for the reader to munch on. Intimacy of any kind develops out of mutual growth, vulnerability, and understanding, and in order to convey these things to the reader, you need to take your time letting this stage simmer. If you extinguish the tension too fast, it will read as shallow and futile, and it will throw a wrench in the natural pacing.

Now, the transition from tension to intimacy is a several step process and does not happen in one chapter. Mindsets, perceptions, and attitudes change over time as both the reader and the characters learn more information and experience more genuine interaction. The relationship, as I mentioned earlier, will change as the characters see each other in increasingly vulnerable situations and in periods of growth, and as they witness this their understanding of the other and ultimate acceptance will change the way they treat each other and their mutual perceptions of one another’s place in their lives. This usually happens in the subtextual area of the story, excluding events that are formulated specifically to depict this evolution.

Different Sizes of Families

The size of the invented family very much impacts the way that the group relationship develops. For example, two or three people who develop a family-like connection will be much more intimate and dependent than a created family that includes ten. Larger groups imply more diverse, but also more shallow representations of what relationships between family members can be, but they often leave more room for relatability and comedy. Smaller families work well for more serious struggles, and make more sense with characters that deal with serious issues that a real person wouldn’t be comfortable giving all the details about to ten other people. 

There’s definitely a spectrum and it fluctuates wildly for different types of stories, genres, character archetypes, and themes. Deciding how large to make this found family really depends on the fine details and requires some time and thought.

Common Struggles

~ Bringing people together when there’s an age gap… Age gaps can serve really well in the area of establishing a familial relationship without suggesting romance because most readers will assume that a close relationship between a younger woman and an older (say, 65 year old) man is more of a father-daughter relationship than a romantic one. The way you an bring together two people with an age gap and establishing a familial relationship is by playing on the aspect of guidance and support that a parent or typically older figure would provide to a younger, more naive person. This can come off trope-y but, like any other aspect of a story, putting an original twist on it can make it more original and interesting to the reader. 

~ Starting with tension… This is very common in the case of a sibling-type relationship or a guardianship situation. Usually, there’s some resistance from the party that does not hold the upper hand, and this can create tension in both of them. I suggest that if you’re going to develop a tense relationship into a close one that resembles family, then avoid tropes. There are so many ways that you can twist these ideas and situations based on your world and characters’ traits, so don’t go straight for the “I hate you because you’re trying to control me even though you’re not my real dad” thing.

Other Resources

Useful Writing Resources

Useful Writing Resources II

Resources For Describing Characters

Resources For Describing Emotions

Resources For Creating Characters

Resources For World Building

Resources For Plot Development

Resources For Writing Science Fiction

Resources For Writing Dystopian/Apocalypse

Resources For Fantasy & Mythology Writers

Giving Characters Bad Traits

Writing Children

Having Trouble Connecting To Your Characters?

On Making Scenes/Characters Unpredictable

Keeping Characters From Sounding Identical

Writing About Uncomfortable Topics

How To Foreshadow

Commentary On Social Issues In Writing

Tackling Subplots

How To Make A Scene More Heartfelt

How To Develop A Distinct Voice In Your Writing

How To Perfect The Tone In A Piece Of Writing

A Guide To Tension & Suspense In Your Writing

Writing Arguments Between Characters

Ways To Fit Character Development Into your Story

Tips On Writing Intense Scenes

Showing vs. Telling

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[praisetheaxolotl]

I’d like to get your thoughts on this, hope this is okay!

Look at this quote from this article:

“It’s easy to pick on the “this wouldn’t be happening if these characters were coded as male,” but it’s nonetheless true—as a fan of the unrepentantly (gloriously) awful Bill Cipher, among others, I can promise you I see it regularly.”

I immediately thought of this blog when I read this. 

Not saying you’re misogynist, of course. This blog is just so fascinating, and for someone to dismiss it all like that is frustrating. 

I mean, of course they weren’t referring to you directly, but still. 

For someone to brush off people’s interesting, thought-provoking theories as nothing but misogyny is kind of close-minded, in my opinion. 

But this makes me curious. Do you think you’d still feel the same way about Bill if he was more feminine-coded? Would it matter?

And what do you think about that statement? Are you as annoyed by it as I am?

It’s always alright to get my thoughts on certain subjects, Anon! And lucky for you, I have lots of thoughts on this.

First of all, thank you for liking my blog! I put a lot of work into it, and I still look back on everything I’ve done here fondly. This blog is my only fandom-specific blog that’s still semi-active even after I’ve left the fandom. 

And, about what you said about misogyny... I don’t actually think that’s what the article is talking about. It’s not misogyny for someone to pick apart Bill Cipher, but it’s misogyny if someone offers that level of potential depth to a male character while instantly condemning a female character. 

But... honestly, from my experience? These two groups of people are different groups. 

I used to run in those “anti” circles, back in 2015? 2016? Before the whole “SU criti/cal” thing started to become popular. But I could still kinda see hints of it? It was back when SU was hailed as THE perfect show, before people knocked it off the pedestal they put it on. 

Anyway. These people hated redemption arcs. They saw Bill as this irredeemable monolith of a character, and any alternate interpretations were met with outright malice. I got called out once for, and I am not joking, headcanoning Bill as an abuse victim. They claimed I was “excusing his actions,” but when I asked to please show a screenshot of where I said that this excused him, they couldn’t. Because I never said that. 

(I ended up publishing the whole headcanon on my main blog, and people loved it. That reception is what pushed me to create this blog.)

I don’t doubt at least some of those people became the type to nitpick SU. So I feel that the same people that nitpick male characters are also the type to nitpick female ones. They’re just nitpickers with a black-and-white sense of morality.

But there are always exceptions to the rule- people who love morally gray male characters but hate morally grey female characters. Yes, some of these motivations may be spurred on by misogyny. But what frustrates me is the initial assumption of malice. I’m not saying the article itself is guilty of this, as it seems to be speaking to a general problem, but more those tumblr posts or tweets trying to “call people out” if they gravitate towards more morally gray male characters than female ones.

Which brings me to my answer to your question: No, I don’t think I would like Bill as much, had he been a woman.

But please let me explain first. 

First, you need to know some facts about me:

I am transmasculine. (Not a trans man- I’m nonbinary.)

I have a personality disorder. I’m not comfortable disclosing which one, but it’s one of the cluster B ones.

I was abused, and my reaction to the abuse was extreme anger and irritability. (Hence the PD.)

Another important fact is that my abuser was a woman. She’s my mother. I had to live with constant emotional abuse, gaslighting, neglect and other forms of malice for my whole life. I’m still not free yet, and I’m turning 20 in a month. (No, literally, exactly one month to the day.)

I was abused my whole life by a vindictive, manipulative shit of a woman, and it made me into a vindictive, manipulative shit of a person. The key difference is that I am actively trying not to be a vindictive, manipulative shit.

When I pick apart asshole male characters, I see myself in them. I do a deep dive into the whys, the hows the whos of why they ended up the way that they did, because it makes me feel liberated. It’s personally liberating to see someone like me, whom everyone sees as a monster, have a backstory that shows that monsters aren’t born, they’re made. It’s liberating to see them try and change, it’s liberating to give them someone to help them change no matter what, it’s liberating to look harder. Because that’s what I wanted. I wanted someone to look at me and see past the violent, angry 15 year old that I was, and actually help me. I wanted someone to see I was a victim, that I didn’t like being the way that I was. I wanted someone to help me and be there for me, even though I was messed up and awful.

(But don’t feel too bad for me- A few years ago I met someone wonderful through this very fandom who was exactly the kind of person I needed. And last November I proposed to him and he said yes!)

When I see a morally grey female character... all I can see is my abuser. I see in them the person that hurt me. I don’t want to look deeper, just as I don’t care about my mother’s long rambles about how shitty her childhood was. Was she also abused? Yes. Do I care? Nope! I don’t feel that same drive to pick apart female characters that act like the male ones I like, because of my trauma.

 And honestly? Just because I gravitate towards male characters more doesn’t make me a misogynist. How I treat actual real life women does. I do examine my behavior to make sure I’m not being misogynistic- in fact, it was worry that I was being misogynistic in my dislike of these characters that made me think hard enough to have such a long answer to your question. 

Maybe someone liking only male characters is an indicator of misogyny. Maybe it isn’t. I’m not shy about talking about what happened to me but people should not have to disclose their traumas in order to be “allowed” to consume fiction in a way some stranger doesn’t like. 

And there actually is a specific subset of morally grey female characters I like: my own OCs. 

I guess it’s the fact that I created them and thus can control how they act? They’re all assholes and I love them so much, but I don’t feel that same aversion as I do with characters that aren’t mine. Because the lack of control I had over my own abusive situation is what fucked me up so hard, but now I do have the control. If I watch a TV show, I don’t have any control over what the characters do, they’re not mine. But I do have control over my OCs.

(Psst- if you wanna see those OCs, I’ve since moved to the Invader Zim fandom, and am working on a HUGE fic series for it. (It’s not published yet- I’m working on it behind the scenes.) Those OCs I’m talking about star heavily. Here’s my blog, if you’re interested. I kinda wanna do some metaposting for that fandom, too, but I’ve no idea where to start. I love the Irkens, though, haha. Anyway if any of you happen to like IZ and have a meta-question for me... the askbox IS open!)

Anyway. This got really long. But misogyny in fandom is a thing, and the article does call it out well. I just get frustrated that people immediately assume malice. The statement does annoy me, but because it does happen if the characters are coded as male, too. I see it all the time. People just tend to either be fans of the morally grey, or... not.

[freshlybakedspiderbread]

I need to hear about Iku and Medicine and Shizuha

breaking them down... (x)

Iku

How I feel about this character 

I think she’s pretty neat! One of the coolest-looking  both in design and the way she moves. I used to not think much of her beyond what was already there in swr, but a certain mimic’s stories made me appreciate all sorts of ideas with her.

All the people I ship romantically with this character 

I don’t have any serious ones, or even jokey ones I think about often... I’ll make up for it by going extra in the next section though.

My non-romantic OTP for this character 

Most obvious one is Tenshi. I like that initial development from them barely considering each other past the most basic formalities, to them getting to know each other a little better for the first time after Tenshi’s self-caused incident. They’re not exactly buddy-buddy, but Iku comes to admire certain traits of Tenshi and maybe feeling proud of how she changes thanks to her time on Earth, and Tenshi comes to consider Iku to be maybe the one and only thing from Heaven that is worthwhile, and the only person from heaven who cares about her as a person rather than what she’s supposed to do as a celestial.

Next obvious one, there’s no way she and Tenshi didn’t both begrudgingly became friends with Suika whom I like to think spent a year-long vacation in heaven. Iku may not have ever had any problems or animosity towards her daily lifestyle as a messenger, but Suika just throwing it into disarray every now and then was appreciable in it’s own right. I like the thought of them sharing a drink on evenings, Iku talking about her work or the people she knows, Suika laughing at her face, and somehow it’s always a nice time. Also Iku secretly thinks it’s extremely entertaining every time someone is tasked to drive Suika out of heaven and Suika effortlessly beats them up.

My unpopular opinion about this character 

I think literally everything I just wrote above about her dynamic with Tenshi counts as an unpopular opinion? Usually it’s either she’s entirely subservient, or she just 100% doesn’t care for her, neither of which are that interesting to me.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon. 

I just need her smugly telling people about the weather, and then taunting them about how disasters might befall them just to freak them out.

Medicine

How I feel about this character

I surprise myself with how much I like her. Maybe nostalgia is a part of it because pofv was my first touhou game, and when she first shows up in that stage of purple flowers and her theme song kicks... it leaves an appropriately ominous impression! I like her a lot for real though. Her backstory kinda sets up her as a dark figure, and she certainly can be what with backstory and passion for poison, but she’s just as capable of being goofy with her dreams of doll liberation.

My non-romantic OTP for this character

Skipping romances. Though honestly, I think she would probably have roughly the same kind of relationship with just most other character, since her narrow-mindedness groups anyone and everyone as “my fellow dolls” and “not a doll”. One fun exception would be her looking at Alice’s dolls, and assigning herself as the one to check whether or not Alice is treating them properly. (Alice puts up with it because she likes the chance to examine a living doll like Medicine).

Another would be her being friends with Yuuka. This is somewhat popular in fanworks and with me even though I never came up with the ‘why’. I just like the thought of Medicine respecting the way Yuuka cares for flowers and in turn finds her pleasant company. Yuuka likewise respects Medicine and humours (maybe even believes in!?) her goals of doll emancipation.

My unpopular opinion about this character 

I think she can actually pretty cool, and even other youkai are scared to go near her (mostly after they meet her once, tick her off, and get hit with all the diseases)!

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon. 

I think she should come to Miyoi’s bar and demand dolls allowed to be served drinks. Miyoi agrees only because she’s afraid Medicine will infect everything with poison, but Medicine’s actually too civil to even think of doing that.

The older 🍁 sister...

How I feel about this character

Is it weird to say I feel a sense of melancholy every time I see a picture of her? It must be because all those moody scenery fanarts of her surrounding by leaves has left a strong impression on me... Anyway, I like her and Minoriko a bunch! I’m sure like most people, I consider her the more introspective and spiritual (funny thing to say about a god, I realise) of the two.

All the people I ship romantically with this character 

Okay while I was coming up with ships like on the spot here, and I realise I’d rather just cover any relationshps in general of hers I might like in the next section. Some of them can be constituted as romantic if I ever just wanted to tick the ‘is this a romance’ checkbox on a whim.

My non-romantic OTP for this character

Shizuha doesn’t strike me as someone who goes out of her way to interact with people, instead being content with whoever comes to her. One of those I think would be HIna, whose aura of misfortune is something Shizuha is totally indifferent to, and so they hang out without a care.

I bought Ushahori’s video about the Aki sisters chatting it up with the Watatsuki sisters, and thanks to that I’m pretty fond of the latter stopping by to visit whenever they drop by Gensokyo.

My unpopular opinion about this character 

I have no idea if this is unpopular, but I just assume that it’s a very common story beat to have Shizuha’s angst over the inevitable passing of autumn and her jealously towards Minoriko’s popularity with humans into both outright despair over her being and resentment towards her sister respectively. I don’t have anything against either those takes, but my default interpretation of Shizuha has her mostly melancholic yet peacefully content and even happy about the passing of autumn. I also think she and Minoriko are basically two peas in a pod and never have any serious disagreements, always having each other’s back no matter the situation.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon. 

In the canon that is real life, I want to eat a sweet potato from her sister’s stand.

[gumceline]

another massive bubbline shipper here too say i got mad respect for this blog. as much as i stand by my ship 1000%, i also stand by the fact its totally okay too ship them with other people. i admit the bubbline fandom can be pretty toxic, but alot of us will stand by you. not only are you being super respectful even when you get hate, but you arent straight washing. also the way you looked at the negative parts of our community with understanding in last post, that was real great

oh i appreciate it! I prefer never to judge an entire fanbase by one dude because EVERY fanbase has THOSE people, no fanbase is ever perfect.

I really wished my experience with bubbline shippers had been better, it really was unfortunate to have countless hate, to have people make posts mocking me, to be put on “Lists to block”, not to mention that i legit had supportive friends who were bubbline shippers, but they pretty much turned their back on me, abandoned me, and called me a “Homophobic uncaring asshole”.

It really broke my heart dealing with the stuff i did, and i wasn’t perfect either, but i still don’t think i deserved what that was. I was a kid at the time, and was still having fun and i REALLY wanted to be a part of the fanbase because i love the series and loved the characters, but the fandom just....hated me.

Because i was a multishipper and had different opinions on the characters.

It really didn’t matter to them that i also shipped the characters with other female characters, or i said myself i don’t consider them straight. Because the fandom didn’t really care, they took one look and decided nothing i said mattered.

Being in the star fandom is widely different because the biggest ship there is Starco, a MXF (Which i personally don’t really like but that’s just me), and my favorite ship was...and still is Tom and Marco, because i love their chemistry so much and i genuinely consider them to be a much more believable relationship then the romance they wrote for star and marco.

And trust me, it’s always annoying if you don’t ship the most popular ship and like another pairing more but are succumbed to it everywhere regardless of the characters themselves.

But me not shipping star and marco didn’t make me someone who hated straight people, so i don’t think it’s collectively fair to tell anyone who may of liked marcy or bonnie with finn or maybe they ship them with a male oc of theirs....hate lesbians or were just homophobic.

it’s Like if i took finn out of his (Maybe) relationship with huntress and shipped him with....Tiffany (Who is a male character)...that wouldn’t mean i suddenly hated all straight couples and think finntress should burn.

That’s still a huge leap to jump to and extremely dangerous because you’re collectively accusing someone of something serious without really knowing much more about them then “They like this ship”.

Without any knowledge of them outside of that.

You could effectively damage their rep and make their time in the fandom a living hell out of something minor or something you just assumed, i would know.

I welcome progress, i am quite happy for the bubbline shippers who got their ship, heck...i’m STILL mad that we didn’t get poly tom x marco x star on star vs and felt VERY baited by the crew on that.

but even though i am happy for those people, i don’t think it’s validation to beat up on other shippers either, it does nothing for anyone’s case to do that. If the people are actual bigots who are actively acting terrible and throwing around nasty words and doing terrible stuff, then by all means, call them out.

But people who are just causally shipping stuff for fun? In a way it just feels like using them being a gay ship as a weapon against everyone else, because if they disagree with you and have a different opinion you can effectively boil them down to a bigot and no one might question it...especially when it’s the vast majority.

And that should not be acceptable to do, i ended up hearing from a friend of mine that this fandom actively started purging out other creators for having opinions people didn’t like, and now people are starting to regret that they shunned out so many members of the fandom based on things that were probably incredibly trivial in the long run.

And i get it, it’s an important ship, but it’s important as a rep of that ship to be respectful to others, because if not what you’ll end up doing is turn people away. I would like to be more celebratory of your success in getting the ship canon, but it makes it harder if i’m getting several messages asking when i’m deleting my “Hateful” blog because bubbline was now canon.

I’d like to get along with and support these people, but they don’t want to try and support me and have almost just decided to hate me and it sucks, and there’s not much i can do. That’s why i am thankful for those who don’t just immediately decided to judge me and want to know more about my views on the characters. 

This of course does not apply to the community as a whole, not everyone is acting like this, but it is a problem and it has consequences and i hope the fandom does work on it in the future. Please do better in the future.

Now when it comes to shipping, I have my limits personally, like if the characters have canon sexualities i tend to stick to those sexualities, i for one, have a oc that’s gay. I effectively tell others if they make fanart with him for fun that’s great and i love it, but i want his sexuality respected if ships are involved.

Since the AT ones are left in the air, it means i am left to come up with my own ideas, so that’s what i do. I think everyone should be allowed in that regard to have their own interpretations, marcy could be bi, lesbian, ace,pan, ect and all of those are perfectly acceptable headcanons.

i don’t think one should be held superior over another.

I’ve never looked at Marcy or PG and said “Oh yeah, these two are so obviously straight”, they’re about as straight as a bent nail. XD The people who say this stuff clearly don’t follow me to know that they’re not treated as straight here and i think that’s just frustrating because it’s attacking for completely incorrect information.

And the main problem i think i have, like the biggest issue, is i see the F&C characters differently.

Because i know where the fandom is getting this impression people who these other pairings are homophobic is coming from, it’s because most of the fandom doesn’t really see those characters as much more then well...GB characters.

If i saw tomco, and one was turned to a girl to avoid them both being boys, i would be annoyed, i would, i wouldn’t assume the person was homophobic without other evidence but i’d be annoyed. (I mean for all i know it could be an au and i could be mistaking the situation entirely)

What makes this different for me, is because for one, these aren’t fan-characters, the fans didn’t make a genderbent world and design these characters for fun or anything. These were show characters, that were in episodes and have their own comics and all that.

The way the show approached them for me, makes me feel like they’re kinda misjudged, and people don’t have to agree with me on that fact. But i just feel like between them being fanfiction characters ice king made up, the fact their canon is different, the fact the characters do things the F&J characters don’t do, i just can’t help but feel like treating them as if they were something fans did for fun and have no difference outside of their gender is not the right approach for them.

(I mean ice queen died in one comic and has her own unique origin story which is apparently tied to cake’s, flame prince apparently speaks cat and is the most nervous and awkward cutie I've ever seen, gumball is apparently a card wars superfan and legit takes it WAY too seriously, i just can’t really look at these characters and say “Oh, these are all just Ice King, Flame Princess, and Princess Bubblegum but the opposite gender”).

I feel like the show does enough with them,and had a unique enough approach, that i feel like they should be judged as different characters. Like the redraws of regular episodes with the F&C characters are cute but they’re for fun and probably not what ice king wrote for them in his weird stories.

Like i can’t imagine ice king knew PB so well he made sure gumball had her entire backstory and motivations.

And i feel like the people who do enjoy these ships, heck, ALL FOUR of these ships, feel the same way i do. I’m sure some could def be shipping them for the wrong reasons, but i can’t help but think it’s less about their gender and more that other people recognize they’re different and have considered the different dynamics...like they would if they were shipping any other pairing.

And people don’t have to agree with any of us on that, but i don’t think the alternative should be to accuse us of something so heavily either.

These days i have newer friends who like bubbline who are chill with me, and yeah that’s cool, and i personally don’t really draw the ship myself because i’m still not too comfortable in the AT fandom or with the community right now....the situation with it never leaves me feeling safe frankly.

But we get along, they’re lovely, and the shippers who like bubbline but support the blog are also lovely people and i adore them.

At the end of the day i just want to have fun, i’m fine being in a small subsection of the fanbase and who knows, maybe i have gotten people to think about the F&C characters in a new light, i’m not sure.

But i hope maybe at some point the fandom can chill down and we can support each other without turning it into...whatever that entire situation is. Because i don’t want to be fighting with that community and would prefer to get along with them, but only time will tell.

But thanks for the support! I wish you the best ! I sometimes still have a lot to learn but i hope throughout this whole thing I've gone about it as respectful as possible.

I love the show and all the characters and the fun ships and relationships, i hope someday in the future i can be comfortable enough to get back into the fandom as much as i used to be! ^-^

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Fruits Basket 2019 Episode 10: “It’s Valentine’s, After All”

And with this episode, we’re officially starting to cover material that the 2001 anime completely cut out, just to make it even more clear that this is going to be a complete and faithful adaptation of the manga.

I can’t wait to see new viewers react to Shigure’s true nature as this goes on, lol.

Thoughts under the cut [plus some big spoilers for the entire manga]

Even though this episode was a pretty 1:1 adaptation of stuff from the manga, there’s a lot to say about how it compares to the 2001 anime’s take on the same part of the story, since they’re surprisingly different, and really highlight how much the 2001 anime cut out from the manga.

To put it simply, this episode adapted chapters 15 and 16 of the manga, whereas episode 11 of the 2001 anime [kind of sort of] adapted chapters 15, 16, and 17 of the manga. It’s been a while since I watched it, but I think they did it by removing everything from chapters 15 and 16 that wasn’t specifically about valentine’s day. Which meant that they cut out all the set up for Kyo’s character development and Shigure’s darker side. It’s understandable that the 2001 anime would have cut that stuff out since it’s some very long-term set-up that only pays off in parts of the story that hadn’t even been written by that point, but it’s a very good example of how the 2001 anime cut out a lot of the darkness and depth of the series and focused way more on the comedy.

I have a feeling some people might be a bit confused about why Momiji and his story about the foolish traveler weren’t in this episode, but that’s just because that part’s from chapter 17, so it should just be in the next episode.

The next episode should cover up to the same point as the equivalent episode from the 2001 anime, but the hot springs part itself should probably feel a bit less slow and drawn out than it was there.

Anyway, even though this episode is mostly just a straight adaptation of the manga, the fact that so much of it wasn’t adapted in the 2001 anime makes it feel really fresh and new. It’s a really effective set-up episode for a whole bunch of future plot points and character development.

The stuff with Kyo’s traumatic flashback to Kyoko’s death is one of the things I’ve been most excited to see in the reboot, and I think they handled it really well. They even added a short original scene at the start of the episode with Kyo waking up from what was probably a nightmare about Kyoko’s death, which he then flashes back to again when Shigure points out how irrational his hatred of Yuki is. The panel where he has that flashback is probably one of my favourite individual panels of the manga, since it’s so sudden and visceral and different from the style of anything else in the story, and comes way before the story really digs into it’s darker elements. I knew that they wouldn’t handle it in the exact same way, artistically, so I was a bit worried it might be a bit of a let down, but I think they handled it nicely. Having it be a very sudden, choppy black and white flashback to some scattered visuals of Kyo watching Kyoko die was really effective. And at least going by what I’ve seen anime-only people say, it was ambiguous enough that people who don’t know the truth of it seem to be assuming that it’s just something to do with Kagura, or his true form. So hopefully the eventual full reveal of his backstory with Kyoko will still be shocking to them when it happens.

But on the other hand, the real MVP of this episode was Shigure, which a lot of people who just watched the 2001 anime might be surprised by, since I don’t think he really played a big part in the original Valentine’s episode, and in general the 2001 anime didn’t get into his actual backstory and character development at all. But a fair bit of this episode was devoted to teasing at the darkness going on in his past, and his selfish schemes and motives, with the whole Valentine’s double date with the main trio and Kagura quickly becoming more of a background detail than the main focus of the episode. I’ve seen a lot of anime-only people who’ve been really wanting the show to focus more on Shigure, so I hope they’re pleased with this episode one way or another, lol.

I’m not sure how much I should say about Shigure and his relationship with Akito now, and how much I should just save until later so I don’t end up repeating myself, but to put it simply, I actually really like their relationship, and both of them as characters, so this episode was really exciting for me. I think they’re doing a great job of setting up Shigure’s motives and plans while still leaving a lot to be explored and revealed later.

I feel like I need to attach a whole list of disclaimers to me saying that I like their relationship, though, since I don’t like it in the same way that, for example, I like Kyo and Tohru’s relationship. It’s hard to say that I ‘ship it’, because I don’t think their relationship is healthy at all and I don’t even really think they should have ended up together in the long run. I just think that their relationship is really interesting as a plot point that acts as the crux of basically the entire story. I like it because it’s dark and unhealthy and a lot more ‘adult’ than basically all of the other major relationships in the series.

Since this episode at least introduces the idea of Shigure’s dream from when he was a child, I may as well make it clear that that’s basically the core aspect of their relationship which set the whole thing in motion, and it defines what it’s all about. It’s up for interpretation, to some degree, but I view it as a sort of dark, realistic take on the romanticized notion of ‘soulmates’. You know how soulmate AU fan-fics which premises like ‘your soulmate’s name appears as a tattoo on your body when they’re born’ or whatever are really popular? I view Shigure’s dream as exactly the same sort of thing. Broadly speaking, the dream is a reflection of the supernatural bond between the god and the zodiac members, and most of them don’t like it at all, but for Shigure specifically, the dream effectively forced him from that day onward to view Akito as his soulmate. Those feelings came to him in a dream, and as he himself put it in this episode, it was over for him from that point onward. He had no choice but to devote himself to claiming and preserving that feeling.

A big part of why I like their relationship so much is because it goes so far to expose how incredibly messed up the entire concept of having a supernaturally designated soulmate from birth would actually be for someone. If you knew that you had to do everything you could to be with one specific person, or else you’d live your life with a feeling of hollowness, because you’ve already had a glimpse of that intense emotion, which no other person can give you. Just like Shigure says, it probably makes him the most cursed of all the zodiac. When the curse eventually gets broken, most of the zodiac are able to just move on with their lives and slowly separate themselves from Akito, and they wonder why they ever cared so much about her in the first place, but even after all of that, I think Shigure still had no choice but to be bound by his feelings for her.

The whole underlying thread of how Shigure seems both genuinely in love with Akito, and aware enough of his situation to be bitter and resentful about how his feelings for her are basically an inescapable curse placed upon him from childhood, is one of the most fascinating parts of the story to me, even if it only rarely gets touched upon.

I just have a lot to say about these two, lol. They’re definitely two of the most polarizing and controversial characters in the story, but for better or worse, the entire story wouldn’t exist without them.

On a more random note, we finally get to see Shigure’s editor in person in this episode for the first time, and let’s just say I wasn’t expecting her to have silver hair. Come to think of it, I don’t think she ever appeared in any colour pages in the manga, so I don’t think we’ve ever seen her canon hair colour before this. It’s kinda funny that it’s basically the reverse of what’s probably gonna happen with Kazuma later in this season, since he had silver hair in the 2001 anime, but he has brown hair in the manga.

She also sounds a lot more young than I imagined, but I never really put much thought into who would voice her in the anime.

Anyway, this was a really great episode in a whole lot of ways. It makes me really happy that these elements of the story are finally being adapted, especially with so much care and attention to detail. I’m glad that both manga readers and anime-only people seem to be really enjoying where it’s going.

And since it seems like the reboot is gonna be 63 episodes long in total, there’s a whoooole lot more left to come, so we’ll at least actually get the full pay-off to all of these things being set up.

[cdyssey]

Once Rewatch: Snow Falls, 1x03

“You’re a... girl?!”

“Woman.”

And then she clocks David upside the face with a big rock.

Now this is start of a beautiful pair. :’)

Omg, I’d forgotten that MM had gone on a date with Whale.

Talk about awkward.

Hm, I also think I’ll do some Whale analysis here as well. He’s arrogant, misogynistic, and kind of spineless when it comes to dealing with forces more powerful than himself. I think this is a great interpretation of source material, lol.

Bc if we’re being honest here, Victor Frankenstein is a whiny college dropout, a prototypical incel who probably passed biology but severely failed ethics.

I’m not crying—there’s just some Snowing in my eye.

On a related note, Isham’s swelling score is particularly powerful here; he amps up the suspense perfectly.

I love Once’s retcon of the name Prince Charming; it works so much better as an ironic moniker.

Snow: “True love? It doesn’t exist. It’s all arranged marriages and business transactions.” (1) So in my writeup on the pilot, I wrote something to the effect that Snow is less vulnerable to optimism than David is, that she’s long been disillusioned about the possibility for happy endings. I think this quote backs that sentiment up quite nicely. (2) I know A&E probably haven’t figured out the logistics of Regina and Leopold by this point, but even still, this quote very well applies to their farce of a marriage. (Snow’s cognition and/or ignorance of this is such a rich place to explore in fic.)

Emma (talking about Regina): Where does she think you are anyway?

Henry: Playing Whack-a-Mole.

Emma: And she bought that?

Henry: She wants to believe it, so she does.

This exchange is funny but also purty revealing, even if Henry doesn’t quite know it. Regina desperately wants things between them to return back to normal, so when Henry tells her that he’s off doing something normal, that he’s returning to his old habits of playing games and having fun and not becoming Storybooke’s new junior sleuth, she’s more than ready to take his word at face value.

Side-by-side, Ginny and Jared look so much alike, and I love that. <3 They also share a buoyant, youthful kind of energy when they play off each other. So I hereby headcanon that Snow and Henry, post-uh-everything, are always going out on mini-adventures together. With their combined imaginations and mutual penchants for curiosity, this grandmother-grandson can make even the most mundane of grocery runs into something like a hunt for buried treasure.

Regina: “Now you’re lying to me?” A simple question which cues us in on lying being a v. new trait that has surfaced in Henry. The psychology of it is pretty logical. She lied to him, and now he’s reciprocating the favor, both of them unable to trust each other at this point.

So Regina says that she found David lying on the side of the road somewhere and that she brought him to the hospital. Whale supports this statement and claims that she saved his life by this act. Assuming that this is true, then I’m reminded of that popular meta which essentially proposed that the Evil Queen rarely, if ever, made a move that would deeply or permanently harm Snow. Theoretically, Regina could have left him on the side of the road to die, could have dealt Snow an irreparable amount of damage without so much as lifting a finger... but she didn’t. #SnowQueen

“Enjoy my shirt... because that’s all you’re getting.” SJKhdsha. 

I like to think that Emma kept the shirt, and every once and while, she pulls it on just so she can mock a v. embarrassed Regina. “Hey, Regina, what was it you said to me again? You know, back when you wore a lot of dark eyeliner and had a giant stick up your—” “Oh, shut up, Miss Swan.”

Lolol, I love how Storybrooke’s hospital is apparently bordered by the woods. That’s some reaaaaally safe architectural planning there.

Snow wants to go somewhere “isolated, where she can never get hurt,” and in the context of the entire show, I hurt to fully comprehend that Snow’s young life was a hellhole. Her parents were killed, she’s forced out of her kingdom and into exile by a vengeful witch, and now, as a bandit, her existence, for all its flux, is constantly defined by paranoia and fear and cynicism and... well... guilt.

In the grand scheme of things, I think we sometimes forget about Snow.

How much she’s endured.

How much she’s suffered.

Snow: She blames me for ruining her life.

David: Did you?

Snow: [Pausing, thinking, her voice hard and wistful.] Yes.

This is a great beat because it further emphasizes that this isn’t your Disneyfied version of Snow White and the Evil Queen.

There’s no such thing as black and white morality in the world of Once Upon A Time.

The Evil Queen wasn’t always evil.

Snow White was not always as pure as the color of her name.

It’s complicated.

They both are.

MM: “Henry told me that you were from a similar situation to his own?” Honestly, beyond the fact that they were both adopted, I don’t think comparing Henry and Emma’s situations is exactly... apt. Emma bounced around from foster home to foster home and had to deal with the fact that she was ‘abandoned’ by her parents. Henry was given up by Emma to receive his best possible chance at life, and accordingly, he grew up in a mansion with a—as we’ll come to find out—loving mother. 

But, lol, that’s not the point the show’s trying to make here. Point is, Emma is a lost kid, and she’s trying so hard to make sure that Henry doesn’t end up being one as well. Plus, it’s heartbreakingly ironic that the very person she’s been trying to find is standing right next to her.

Oh, Kathryn, you have a v. painful arc coming up.

You know, had I been in the OUAT fandom when Ginny and Josh announced that they were together, that would have been the end of me.

The chemistry between these two is incomparable.

Like, I know it’s for the aesthetic™, but this bag is so impractical for the life Snow lives, lololol. 

Had to include these iconic lines.

Regina: We’ll talk about your insubordination later. Do you know what insubordination means?

Henry: [Shakes his head.]

Regina: It means you’re grounded.

Good God—Kathryn’s fake backstory is so intricate and moving. (Also, I love Anastasia Griffith. She really portrays the duality of Abigail/Kathryn well.)

“Because all of this has reminded me of something, oh, so very important... how grateful I am to have Henry.”

“Because not having somebody... well, that’s the worst curse imaginable.”

Lana Parrilla has no right giving such a nuanced performance of what should have been a one-dimension villain.

But that’s why we love her.

Over the course of the seasons, we learned that the curse backfired on Regina. Sure, everyone was miserable, but so was she... and at least her victims weren’t even cognizant of the fact that they were cursed. Heck, in that sense, they had it better than she did.

So in exacting her perfect revenge, Regina only deepened the void inside of her, drove herself to an emptiness like no other she has felt before.

By the time Greg and Owen showed up, it was nearly unbearable.

And then... she adopted Henry.

And suddenly, she wasn’t alone anymore.

Without Henry, her life is but a void, an emptiness, a nothingness of her own design, and right now, Emma Swan is a perceived threat to the tenuous solace she has carved out for herself these past ten years.

What Regina doesn’t understand is that she’s the real threat.

She’s the one who is ultimately pushing Henry away.

Okay, y’all aren’t allowed to make eye-contact anymore. 😭

:’)

I think I can safely say that “Snow Falls” is one of the most tightly written and acted episodes in the series. On an architectural level, the dialogue parallels were especially poignant, and the sentimental moments were well chosen. For instance, concluding the episode on this sweet, tender moment between Emma and Mary Margaret is an expert choice that ameliorates the Snowing pathos we’re currently feeling. Theatrically, it’s the little nuances that make “Snow Falls” so great: JMO’s uncomfortable vulnerability as Emma talks about her history with MM, the mutual attractions of Snow and David that surface in meaningful glances expertly affected by Ginny and Josh, the softnesses Lana and Anastasia imbue their hardened characters with.

Just really wonderful stuff all around.

[nightmareonfilmstreet]

Murder, Mystery, and Macguffins: The 13 Best Films of Alfred Hitchcock

August 13th is the birthday of one of the most gifted filmmakers the world has ever seen: Alfred Hitchcock!  From his humble beginnings as a title card designer in the silent films of the early 1900’s, Hitchcock went on to direct over 50 of Hollywood’s most celebrated films. Always up for a macabre tale of murder or mystery, Hitchcock’s films traveled through a world of the seedy underbelly in our own backyards. Known for surprising twists and turns, Hitchcock also popularized the use of the term ‘Macguffin’; a plot device central to some of his most iconic films. Hitchcock explained the term “MacGuffin” in a 1939 lecture at Columbia University:

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the other answers, ‘Oh, that’s a MacGuffin’. The first one asks, ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’ ‘Well,’ the other man says, ‘it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ and the other one answers, ‘Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!’ So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.

  To celebrate the master of suspense, we are presenting you with our list of the Thirteen best Hitchcock films. Feel free to kindly disagree with me in the comments if I left your favorite off – let’s dive in!

13. The 39 Steps (1935)

Many of Alfred Hitchcock’s early films are overlooked – he didn’t join the Hollywood club until the 1940s with Rebecca. Don’t sleep on films like The 39 Steps, though; Hitchcock weaves an intense and dramatic mystery throughout its runtime. The story focuses on an ordinary man named Richard Hannay (Academy Award winner Robert Donet) who gets caught up in an international spy ring. Soon, the police are after him for a murder he didn’t commit, and the race to clear his name and stay one step ahead are tense. Hitchcock often doesn’t get enough credit for his humor, and The 39 Steps also contains some genuinely funny moments.

  12. Dial M for Murder (1954)

This suspenseful thriller has all the hidden, salacious details you come to expect from Hitchcock, all wrapped in a tight thriller about adultery, murder, and betrayal. Grace Kelly is in top form here, but one of the most fascinating aspects of the film is that it was filmed in 3D and is widely considered one of the best examples of the medium from its era. Alfred Hitchcock worked some technical wonders in his day, and Dial M for Murder may be one of his most impressive.

11. Rope (1948)

Another of Alfred Hitchcock’s experimental films, Rope is notable for not only being one of his “single setting” films (it is based on a play that takes place, essentially, in a single room), but also for attempting to be filmed in real-time. It is shot to look like the entire movie is one long, continuous take, and its slow burn plot about two people attempting to commit the “perfect murder” will keep you on the edge of your seat from beginning to end.

10. North by Northwest (1959)

One of Hitchcock’s most iconic films, this mistaken identity thriller starring Cary Grant has a few of the most recognizable scenes in all of film. You can clearly see that Alfred Hitchcock wielded some serious influence in this film – the casting, set design, and sheer size of the film are some of the biggest he ever put out there. It’s telling that a film this well made and culturally significant is only “one of his best.”

9. Spellbound (1945)

Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman? Yes, please. An insanely fun mystery about guilt, mistaken identity, and amnesia, Peck’s character in Spellbound is a perfect way to examine how people deal with trauma. This one has twists and turns throughout, and a few of the swerves will surprise even the most jaded moviegoer. Hitchcock also got to experiment with surrealism in Spellbound – watch for the trippy dream sequence created by Salvador Dali.

8. Strangers on a Train (1951)

The premise for this one is just so darn creepy. Two men meet by chance on a train, and one of them proposes his idea of “the perfect murder” (Hitchcock sure seemed fascinated by this idea, huh? ); they will exchange murders, both killing someone the other wants dead. That way, they are both killing a total stranger with no motive, and thus cannot be caught. The other man humors him, laughing it off – which causes problems when the first assumes this means they have agreed to execute the plan. Strangers on a Train is crazy tense throughout, building towards an adrenaline-fueled finale.

7. Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

The reason this one strikes such a chord is because of how relatable it is (not the exact circumstance, mind you, but the idea). How often have you known something is off, someone is lying, a situation is dangerous, etc., but couldn’t figure out what to do with it? That’s exactly where Charlie (Teresa Wright) finds herself in Shadow of a Doubt. Her uncle, who is also named Charlie (played with perfect sleaze by Joseph Cotten), comes to stay with her family, and she very quickly starts to figure out that he may not be who he says he is. Shadow of a Doubt is an extremely unsettling film, and Wright is phenomenal as the suspicious main character.

6. Rebecca (1940)

I may be a bit biased with this one, as the Daphne du Maurier novel the film is based on is just so darn good. Hitchcock’s first Hollywood film is a strong interpretation, however, utilizing some excellent casting like Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, and Judith Anderson as the super-creepy Mrs. Danvers. Rebecca is also another film where Hitchcock takes a relatable situation to very uncomfortable levels – in this case, a new wife who cannot seem to escape the shadow of the first.

5. The Birds (1963)

This was the first Hitchcock film I ever saw, and it holds a place near and dear to my heart. Even watching it as a kid, I remember being as fascinated by how Hitchcock was able to accomplish the cinematic feats on-screen as how he was able to tell his story. The Birds has been marred a bit by recent revelations of Hitchcock’s onset behavior, but it is a visceral and terrifying experience if you can set that knowledge aside. Jessica Tandy is s-o g-o-o-d in her supporting role here, and the final scene is one of Hitchcock’s most haunting images.

4. Vertigo (1958)

It’s tough to talk about Hitchcock and not mention Vertigo, one of his most technically impressive masterpieces. His ability to successfully juggle multiple characters and storylines, all while maintaining the narrative sleight-of-hand necessary to keep you guessing, is some of his best work as a filmmaker. Hitchcock’s technical wizardry is unmatched; he pioneered the “dolly zoom” technique for Vertigo to help audiences visualize the main character’s fear of heights. It’s a technique that you may have seen in, essentially, every major film since. And you can’t mention Vertigo without highlighting Kim Novak’s brilliant performance.

3. Psycho (1960)

We’ve talked a lot about performances in Hitchcock films, and the casting in Psycho is top-notch. We’ve talked about Hitchcock’s innovative techniques and ability to impart information with the camera, and few of his films do it as well and with such voyeuristic, perverse joy as Psycho. What about the music? It would be tough to point out a movie soundtrack more instantly recognizable than the screeching strings that play as the film’s infamous shower scene play out. There aren’t a lot of films out there that get a shot-for-shot remake, as this one did (to limited success) in 1998. It just shows you how well made and influential Hitchcock’s horror masterpiece is.

2. Notorious (1946)

Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, and Claude Rains, all at their best in Hitchcock’s most romantic film. Notorious is also a tight spy thriller, using all of Hitchcock’s cinematic techniques to tell a tense mystery full of breathtaking scenes. Notorious also features Hitchcock’s most well-known moment of skirting the uptight movie rules of the time: on-screen kisses could not last longer than three seconds, but Grant and Bergman kiss for almost three minutes. He accomplished this by having them kiss for three seconds, stopping and whispering to one another, then starting again. On top of ticking all the Hitchcock boxes, it’s one of his tightest bits of storytelling.

1. Rear Window (1954)

Rear Window is such an amazing film, with Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly absolutely killing their roles, that I think you could watch it every week of your life and never get tired of it. It just works on so many levels, with it ultimately being Hitchcock’s treatise on the power of film. As Stewart looks in on the various homes of his neighbors, imagining their lives, watching their secrets, and filling in the blanks with his own details, we can put ourselves into his shoes. We do the same thing when we watch characters on film: we pause scenes, wonder about backstories of characters, and elevate random bystanders to legendary levels. Watching Stewart slowly descend into (possible) madness and paranoia is a fascinating experience, and it solidifies Rear Window as Hitchcock’s best. Don’t forget that it also made for one of the best Simpsons episodes of all time.

  What do you think? Did I get them all correct? Let us know in the comments below, and keep up with us over on Twitter or in our Horror Group on Facebook!

  The post Murder, Mystery, and Macguffins: The 13 Best Films of Alfred Hitchcock appeared first on Nightmare on Film Street - Horror Movie Podcast, News and Reviews.

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[blacknovelist]

I have been meaning to ask you this all day, ever since the question popped into my mind while at work: Are Inko and Mitsuki still best friends in the Ageswap AU? Or at least friends? Or aren't Izuku and Bakugo still neighbors in the AU? Speaking of which, Bakugo as a father is something that you haven't talked about. EVER! How is Ageswap!Mitsuki, the daughter of Bakugo, different from Canon!Mitsuki, Bakugo's mom?

Oooo, thank you for reminding me that I haven’t yet discussed most of the parents-turned-kids in Ageswap, anon!

Inko and Mitsuki are indeed still best friends in Ageswap AU - though Inko is in the heroics medicine course, it’s still attached to the general department, and she has all her classes with Mitsuki. Izuku and Bakugo are not, in fact, neighbors in the AU, but they live close enough that Inko and Mitsuki hang out a lot after Izuku moves to a ward closer to UA (and subsequently, Enji, Tensei and Mitsuki).

Mitsuki’s still fiery in Ageswap, of course! She and Inko are both very voice-of-reason, though as a result, when the two of them get into situations, they get into SOME DAMN SITUATIONS, if you know what I mean. They’re brilliant young women but way too smart for their own goods, man. Overall, her personality wouldn’t be that different from her canon self, shifts in her relationship to Katsuki aside, of course. Calm and good at talking to people, she probably gets on well with the rest of the class. But she doesn’t suffer fools at all, and anyone who has to take even a bit of her rage even once doesn’t dare try to get at her again - she might not have Katsuki’s explosion quirk, but she’ll still take you down.

As for the matter of never really talking about characters being fathers - I didn’t bring Mitsuki (or any of the other parent-turned-kid’s) up before, nor when that one Anon asked about fluff concerning the Ageswap UA fam, mostly because the situation involving them in the AU is kind of complicated. Lioness and I want to keep Ageswap AU as ship-free as we possibly can - which is the reason Toshinko is a *variation* of Ageswap, not the main canon despite its popularity - and as such, we don’t want to assume or impose any ships onto the Ageswap adults either (though neither of us particularly ship among the kids nonetheless). We’re in on this ride because Ageswap is fun and we love found family above all else. As a result, it becomes difficult to actively work all the parents-turned-kid into the backstory and story of Ageswap’s pre-canon and canon, especially since a lot of canon 1-A’s parents are still nameless and/or faceless.

Since most of them aren’t active parts of the plot (Uraraka’s parents in Ageswap would go to school focused on construction and learning how to make buildings more durable against attack and Jirou’s parents in Ageswap would probably go to music school, for example), it just becomes a complicating factor to try and work them into the AU at this point in time - the current only exceptions as far as placement goes, apart from Enji, Tensei and Inko, are Mitsuki Bakugou (a gen-ed student and probably Bakugou’s kid), Masaru Bakugou (also in general ed) and Todoroki’s Mom (a support student) who doesn’t have a name. 

So, most of the relationships of the Ageswap UA crew and the statuses of the the parent-turned-kid’s are basically up in the air and up to you guys for interpretation, honestly.

[blackfemmecharacterdependency]

This finna be long AF.

Okay. So, that little mantra at the beginning I wanted to put into the story in some deep and meaningful way, but ultimately was like - IDK how, so I slapped it right onto the front like it was a quote 😂😂😂

It was supposed to be a collection of a couple of convos/thoughts she had when she was institutionalized, but it took me so long to write the chapter that I never padded it with backstory.

Long story short, this is a thing me and me have discussed and in IT whenever Grace is speaking to herself, that's how we usually speak to ourselves - accusing ourselves of the worse parts of what we've done and making ourselves feel bad instead of encouraging ourselves. That was a thing that I had to try to come out of whenever I got into modes, and it's a thing that a lot of us could stand to try to come out of. It doesn't make the trauma go away, but it's like a version of loving or caring for yourself through it.

One thing about my own trauma from various things is that it's felt like a fixture that gets weaker over time, but every now and then whenever Something happens to add to it, it comes flooding back like it's still standing tall. And, I don't know exactly when I attached that idea to a rotting tree, but like, I can almost imagine this presence of the old, big tree that doesn't produce any fruit or have usuable wood, but somehow keeps standing and has more branches that sprout every time I'm forced to look at it again.

We all knew that I wouldn't completely leave my personal feelings out of a stalker AU, right?

Jalicia is going on a journey to get through the fog. If you think about it, about the type of person we've set her up to be, these things she's going through are things that she normally wouldn't have had to go through. Heath wasn't really letting her have to deal with no shit. Remember when she was really little and Xander was gettin his ass beat by stewards? Heath kept her from seeing it and distracted her with a conversation so she would have to focus on that instead of even hearing what was happening around her (and even though it was buried in her subconscious), she didn't even think about it again until after he was gone and Xander was crying. So, we should assume that was a typical aspect of their personalities. Heath shielded her from a lot of things, or at the very least was a blanket for things that she couldn't be sheilded from. Jalicia is in the fog, mostly because she's never had to go things alone before. The others have all had their times where they didn't have anybody else to lean on. But she's, once again, blooming later, because they just kinda had to try to grow in whatever fucked up soil they were planted and she was literally groomed by somebody who was naturally capable of nurturing.

She has to figure out things on her own now, and to be fair, yes it hurts her to see everybody else around her loved up on and stuff, but she's probably also suddenly acutely aware that a lot of people who she's heard complain about couples and love and romance and things the entire time she was good with it were probably having their own lonesome shit happening too. So, she's not really like, "Look at me mourn and be single right now," so much as, "Damn, is this what it feels like to be alone? Is this why heartbreak songs are so popular? Do other people often feel this lonely and sad? Do I get to feel better if I let go?" And the only person she's been talking to - though their convos are still up for interpretation at this point - is SIMON. and Simon, while very delusional in a variety of ways, is a realist. Most likely, you can presume that he's given her pragmatic advice from a reasonable and analytical place. That doesn't apply to HIS situation, but he would certainly think it applies to others' situations.

Not as long as I thought since I lost half of it and I'm not doing it again, so the end.

17. Where the Heart Is

“You’re not dying and you didn’t die. You survived and you’re alive.”

“I’m not dying and I didn’t die. I survived and I’m alive.”

PTSD in branches, like a rotting tree that keeps growing…

Grace woke up late in the day. She had been sleeping all day and whenever she finally climbed out of bed, she searched for her chair, but didn’t see it. She groaned, struggled to pick herself up, though her upper body strength was usually amazing. The gsw and surrounding damage made it harder to get up. Getting out of bed on her own literally had become a small victory. Where is my chair? Where is Simon? 

Keep reading

[dying-of-thirst-here]

The Light of Providence and the Spiral of Death: FFX and FFXV Compared

This is a pretty lengthy stretch of meta comparing FFX and FFXV’s attitudes toward death. Since that obviously ties into their plots, this will contain copious spoilers for both games.

The stories of FFX and FFXV do not remotely resemble one another. They do, however, in my opinion, contain parallel situations whose resolutions go in completely opposite directions. There isn’t anything particularly significant in that except that they are both major titles in the same series; I don’t know if they share any writers’ credits, but I would tend to assume not.

Both games depict sets of characters who’ve grown up in cultures that glorify self-sacrifice on behalf of a greater good. Their narratives, however, show wildly different depictions on the worthiness of that glorification.

These are not going to be brief rundowns, but I’m going to try to keep things simple. Like, I know one of the risks of being unsent in FFX is turning into a fiend, I know afterlife stuff happens in FFXV, but things like these are not really relevant to what I’m talking about. Yes, I am aware the main character in FFX also dies. But Tidus is not Noctis’s parallel in FFX; Yuna is.

So lemme start by laying out the cultural contexts we’re working within.

FFX: Just Don’t Climb Mountains with Corpses on Them. Don’t.

So Spira, the world of FFX, has a problem: it’s actually kind of hard to die. In fact, in some situations it might be impossible to die.

Okay, we don’t have to oversimplify: anyone can die in FFX. But unless a ritual undertaken by a specialist is performed immediately… not a whole lot happens when you die. You remain in the world of the living as something like a ghost, but you are for the most part indistinguishable from a living person. These ghosts are called “unsent,” due to the ritual performed for the dead being called “the sending,” as in sending them to the afterlife. Unsent can and do blend into the rest of the population and live relatively normal lives, not necessarily bothering anyone. Obviously, this is kind of fucked up, and no one wants to end up unsent or have their loved ones become unsent, so the sending ritual is treated as a matter of urgency… officially.

It almost goes without saying, then, that most of the people in positions of significant power in FFX are dead. Leaders hold onto their power by letting their deaths go unannounced and staying where they are, unsent. There are two examples in the game of massive unchanging power structures made up of unsent that exist solely to protect and perpetuate themselves. The game’s story is about how everyone who lives within the cultures that uphold these power structures ultimately suffer due to the people in power being unwilling to let go or accept change.

I know that’s a strange place to start explaining the religious atmosphere of FFX, but populating the upper reaches of power with undead incumbents is exactly the sort of situation where you’d want to weed out powerful up-and-comers. The religion itself – the worship of a figure named Yevon – dominates Spira’s culture, and it promotes faith to the point of such zealotry that people do actively seek to die for it. There a number of ways this works (Yevon is very complicated and you, reader, have presumably played FFX and do not need it explained in great detail), but we’ll focus on the two big ones: the fayth and the high summoners.

The fayth are people who have willingly had their bodies sealed within statues that worshipers form temples around and pray to. So first of all, they are officially sanctioned unsent. You can interact with ghostly versions of their human forms. Their primary method of interacting with the living world, however, and the reason they’d die in this horrible way to begin with, is that a fayth can take on the form of a fantastical and powerful creature which at that point is referred to as an aeon. The interchangeability of these terms varies; both the statue and the unsent ghosts are called fayth, but the dragons and the kirin and the fire demons and their ilk are always called aeons, even though the dragon and statue and ghost are all the same ‘person.’ I want try to avoid getting into these games’ weird vocabulary too deeply, but the distinction here is important when talking about summoners.

If you, hypothetical reader, have not played FFX but came across this essay and thought 'eh, fuck it,’ I respect that decision, and though you must be familiar with the summoning tradition in Final Fantasy as a franchise, you might be wondering why a strong religious culture would require people entombing themselves so they can become miserable unkillable fantastic beasts. You will probably not be surprised that this is where things get horrible.

The specialist mentioned earlier who needs to be called in to perform the sending for the dead is a role within Yevon called a summoner. Yes, like the summoners from almost every Final Fantasy game. Summoners train and work intensely with a fayth so they can form a bond that enables the summoner to call on the fayth’s aeon. Summoners are also the only people who can perform the sending, for… a reason, most likely. Becoming a summoner is a lot of work, though, and some villages lack any resident summoners at all, which is probably one reason there are so many dead people hanging around and getting away with it.

So that’s a summoner. Not all summoners are high summoners – in fact, there are only a handful of high summoners acknowledged in the game – but during certain cyclic periods of Spira’s history, all summoners want to become high summoners, or they come under a great deal of social pressure to attempt to become a high summoner. A high summoner’s job is to die.

The narrative that Yevon has embedded in its culture – and, to be fair, very much what appears at first to be going on – is that Spira is under a sort of curse that calls forth a massive sea monster unsubtly referred to as Sin. It appears without warning to destroy villages and ships; Spira consists of a number of small landmasses that contain a lot of coastline, so during the periods in which Sin is active, Spira’s population lives in constant terror. These periods of activity are not set to any kind of predictable system or cycle. Sin will vanish for years, and then it will just appear again one day. The only thing that can send Sin back into its temporary banishment is the most powerful aeon in Spira. This can be obtained by first earning the approval of a core set of the fayth (which itself involves walking most of the length of Spira, since the fayth are all located in regional temples), then climbing a mountain that kills most people who manage to make it that far, then getting into the dead city beyond the mountain and locating and praying to the fayth whose statue is unhelpfully based there, who will then hopefully grant you access to the aeon that can destroy Sin.

All of the other aeons have names – Valefor, Ifrit, Ixion, Shiva, Bahamut – but this one does not. It’s simply called the Final Aeon. It costs the high summoner his or her life to call on it - the high summoner doesn’t even get to see the fight - and then both Sin and the Final Aeon vanish.

The people of Spira believe the high summoners are laying down their lives to save everyone else’s, and they are granted the status of something like a saint in death. In actuality, the high summoner’s death sets off the conditions to begin the cycle of Sin eventually reappearing again.

But hey, we have to believe in something, right?

FFXV: The Once and Future Kings

So… FFXV has strange ideas about Christ figures. Not Xenogears strange, but… like, there’s official artwork strongly suggestive of the Triumphal Entry only there’s a chocobo instead of a donkey??

There is nothing in the story or setting that is actually thematically Biblical at all. JRPGs! What can you do.

This is going to be a little more difficult to lay out, because FFXV doesn’t really believe in things like backstory and exposition. Which I actually like in fantasy fiction, but it’s going to make explaining the self-serving power structure in this game a matter of interpretation here and there. Bear with me.

There are a number of regional cultures in Eos, FFXV’s loose floating jumble of continents, and none of them seem particularly religious. But they do have six gods, and they physically exist within the world. No one worships these gods, exactly. They are looked on with awe and respect and fear, but there are no organized religions around them that we see. This was a terrible oversight on the part of the ancient people of Eos, because these gods historically needed something to distract them from destroying everyone’s lives constantly. Eventually they all just agreed to go to sleep, I think.

But despite the lack of organized religion, Eos has an interesting figure known as the Oracle. There is only ever one Oracle at a time, and the role is passed down within one of the royal bloodlines. The Oracle’s power is that she can wake up the gods and speak and understand their speech, which is a great idea, probably.

The Oracle is a universally popular figure. During the game’s time frame the role is fulled by Lady Lunafreya, and the radio newscasts and newspapers you can find suggest a culture of celebrity worship of Lunafreya herself. She’s got other things going, like she’s a white mage and sorta princess, but the gods she’s supposed to commune with don’t seem to command much influence.

BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO THINK we’ll come back to that

Anyway, the Oracle ties into The Prophesy. Yes, FFXV is a The Prophesy story. Everyone in FFXV knows The Prophesy. But there are also aspects of The Prophesy that you have to have explained to you by a rock or a dragon, so there’s The Prophesy and then there’s like The Gnostic Prophesy–

I really, really like FFXV. I do not The Prophesy stories. FFXV is a really bizarre example of a The Prophesy story, so honesty I kind of give it a pass. It’s just… okay, look

There are books scattered around the world that are parts of a cosmogony explaining bits of Eos’s mythology. The cosmogony explains that the gods picked the Oracle’s bloodline, and another magic bloodline kind of self-selected itself and established its own kingdom, Lucis, to whom the gods entrusted a supposedly wondrous but frankly pretty evil crystal; the royal family can tap into it kind of like a magic battery, so it does have its non-evil uses, but using that way drastically shortens the king’s lifespan, so… yeah, still pretty evil. This cosmogony also frequently mentions that someday the world will get dark and awful and then a king of light will make it better, yay, monarchism and a passing familiarity with Latin! It says it fancier than that, but that is pretty much all it says regarding any future bad times that I saw. This seems to be what people mean when they talk about The Prophesy, so most of the people in Eos can be forgiven for having no idea what that’s supposed to mean. Unfortunately, that does not include Lunafreya, who has one of the gods just like hanging out with her all the time, nor does it include the current King of Lucis, Regis, whom the crystal… talks… to? I don’t know, but when Regis’s son Noctis is five years old the crystal somehow tells Regis that Noctis is going to be the king of light. Oh, hey, guess how the king of light saves the world?

I’m doubly assuming that if you’re reading this you have played FFXV, so yeah, after two thousand words we are finally preparing the cabin for our final approach to my narrative comparison: he has to die.

Regis knows this. Lunafreya, a close childhood friend of Noctis’s, knows this. Noctis does not know this. Neither of them ever tell him. Noctis spends the game walking toward his death blind. And to make sure this point isn’t lost on you, it turns out that this isn’t the first time the conditions of The Prophesy, vague as they are, have been met. There was a king of light chosen by the crystal who predated Noctis by some two thousand years, and what happened to him was arguably worse than death. No one warned him, either.

The king of light is a venerated figure in Lucian artwork and poetry. He’s also a lamb for the slaughter. Even Christ got a heads up.

The Meta-narrative

“Meta-narrative” can mean about a dozen things depending on what school of postmodernism you’re incorrectly quoting, so I’ll be clearer: it’s the story that the story tells about itself. We know what these stories are both about, but how are they about them? The characters in FFX venerate and aspire to be as great as the high summoners, but what does the game itself think about what the high summoners have to do? What does FFXV think about what Noctis has to do? What are the games’ respective opinions of dying for a cause?

Well, that is of course up to interpretation. Neither fate is what can be comfortably regarded as a “good” death: the circumstances surrounding the high summoner and the king of light are very different, but in both cases they are lied to in order to put them where the real power of their respective worlds want them. Yevon wants to maintain the status quo to a degree that is obsessive and stagnant. The gods of Eos want to eliminate their own mistake, the previous king of light, which should tell you how much priority they’re giving The Prophesy.

I can’t speak on behalf of the culture that produced both of these stories, but I can say with some confidence that in Western culture we regard the concept of dying for the sake of others as a very noble calling. FFX has to make you look at that ideal from different angles to make its point about how much a single life sacrificed willingly can destroy the people left behind who didn’t get a say. It does this repeatedly: Wakka’s brother, Seymour’s mother, whichever of those two Crusaders you decided to doom, but it does so with the most impact when the game reveals the nature of the Final Aeon. There is no fayth in the ruined city. In order to obtain the most powerful aeon a summoner can call upon, they have to offer up the soul of one of their companions to be turned into a fayth.

What’s that? You’re balking at sacrificing a friend in order to save the world? But you were perfectly willing to sacrifice yourself! Your friend stood with you for your entire journey and is already mourning your impending death; going along with this plan is a way to follow you to the very end. It may even be seen as a relief from the burden of guilt and grief.

In order to become a martyr, you have to go through with murder. All the high summoners you’ve looked up to your entire life achieved what they did through killing someone they loved. Someone who had been willing to die for them every step of the way there.

The last high summoner had two companions with him on his journey. The surviving member of the party didn’t survive for very long. And with no one to perform a sending, he was left to become a ghost.

That is what FFX thinks of the nobility of suicide.

The Greater Good

FFXV’s situation is harder to make emotional sense of, not least because because the end of the game presents a scientific problem with a magical solution. The world has done dark because… parasites… release of light-absorbing particles into the atmosphere… yeah, human sacrifice ought to do the trick.

But let’s set the plot aside. The plot’s excuses for killing Noctis don’t literally matter, because, you know, The Prophesy. Ardyn has to die, Noctis has to die, and then Ardyn has to die extra, and thus the sun returns. But how does the story itself feel about this?

FFX never shows the audience how a person is turned into a fayth. It never shows us how the high summoner dies. But FFXV shows us Noctis’s suicide-by-summon in brutal, extended detail. We’re finally faced with Noctis at the edge of death begging the ghost of his father to kill him; Regis hesitates, and then he runs Noctis through. Regis kills Noctis. This can’t be a death we’re supposed to feel good about.

FFX is less interested in the deaths themselves than it is in their aftermaths. We don’t see the aftermath of Noctis’s death. We don’t know what his friends do after he dies. Noctis’s death is the end of the story; it’s the note FFXV decides to go out on. The story presents it as very sad, but also as the right thing for Noctis to do.

You can certainly make that argument considering the scale of what his death achieves. I believe that is what the game thinks, with its final shots of the sun rising over various game locations. Noctis was the only person who could do this, and he was strong enough to go through with it even though he emphatically didn’t want to.

Tidus basically ripped reality apart in order to save the next person slated to die as high summoner. He didn’t cry at their last campfire. He… well, he murdered his dad, look, FFX is complicated and deeply invested in its metaphors.

But it’s striking to me that none of Noctis’s friends try to brainstorm another way out of this. That’s the direction any other Final Fantasy game would have taken, so I suppose it’s to FFXV’s credit that it doesn’t do that. But have his friends really just… given up? None of them even declare they’re willing to continue to live in perpetual darkness for the sake of keeping Noctis now that’s he’s finally come back? Any one of the three has the background and motivation to at least suggest it, even if Noctis disagrees.

They cry for him, but they don’t believe they can save him. They grew up believing in the king of light that would save them.

The King Must Die

This is a question that can only be applied very broadly, because both games have their individual answers, but I find it interesting and am therefore ging to pose it anyway: why, on a thematic level, is Yuna spared and Noctis killed?

Again, it’s entirely up to interpretation, but I think a lot of it has to do with character agency. From the beginning of FFX to the end, Yuna makes her own decisions and carries them out, even when the rest of the party opposes her. She decides she wants to become a summoner, and she does. She decides she wants to embark on the journey to attempt to become a high summoner, so she gathers her friends and off they go. When she’s asked to partake in a political marriage, she recognizes that the situation is weird, but it’s still her choice. She ends up basing her decision on information only she has access to, so for a while her friends have no idea what the hell she’s doing, but whatever, she’s doing it anyway! And when she’s faced with the question of which of her friends she’s going to sacrifice for the Final Aeon, she doesn’t. She refuses. She was indeed willing to die herself, but she does something no one else has done and draws the line there.

It’s easy to forget this aspect of FFX, because Yuna is quiet and timid and kind of an idealized white mage type character. She cries over her impending fate. But that was still a fate she chose for herself, and she rejects it as soon as she realizes that entire high summoner aspiration is a lie.

Noctis is never given the opportunity to make decisions like this. As a prince, he’s locked into his fate regardless, and on top of that the crystal declares that this prince in particular was born to die. He is told half truths about this - he knows he’s fated to be the king of light, but neither his father nor Lunafreya will tell him what that means. One bit of party banter even has him complaining about The Prophesy being “vague.” Like Yuna, he’s to be a part of a political marriage, but he was informed of this, not asked. The gods jerk him around with migraines, bad weather, and occasionally just showing up and telling him what to do. When he’s finally told the king of light’s purpose, he’s essentially been imprisoned by one of the gods, Bahamut, and he again just is being informed. You’re going to die. Bahamut then proceeds to hold Noctis captive for ten years. He lets him go when he decides Noctis is ready to be sacrificed. There is nothing approaching a choice in any of this.

To add insult to this, Bahamut’s explanation for why Noctis has to die is largely unrelated to The Prophesy and is manipulative as hell. Yes, the world is shrouded in darkness, that’s bad, agreed. But his version of The Prophesy introduces an entirely new character. The Accursed! The Usurper! You’re kindly given a dialogue option to ask who the hell we’re talking about now, and oh, you mean Ardyn. Your previous chosen king of light. The one you tasked with curing a plague, allowed to get sick himself doing so, and subsequently denied any kind of access to the afterlife because you think his illness is gross. So he’s just stuck being alive and sick and increasingly vengeful forever. ….oh, hey, I think that’s my pager, I’ll just, uh, be a minute

Bahamut also tells Noctis that he has to sacrifice himself for the people because so many people have sacrificed themselves for him. Okay, whose deaths are we holding Noctis responsible for here? Is this still about Jared? Because we avenged the FUCK out of Jared!

My point is, by the end of the game we’ve gone well beyond denied agency; Noctis has ended up kidnapped and imprisoned. As of this writing, we don’t know what was going on with Noct during those ten years. If he was sleeping, dreaming, being brainwashed by a dragon – we don’t know. What we see is him telling his friends that he’s made up his mind to do this, but being back with them is weakening his resolve. He doesn’t want to go. He wants to stay with them.

But he does go. He restores the light, though he doesn’t live to see it.

FFXV admires Noctis for fulfilling his destiny, but it has no reason to. It never gives him the option to choose another path. This cup will not pass from him.

Noctis’s life was short and painful, and he had ten years of even that stolen from him. But he loved his friends. For them, he found the courage to walk back to that throne room alone.

[kanralovesu]

Why Does Everyone Like Gabriel Dropout?

So let me just get this one out of the way. I HATE Gabriel Dropout. I dropped it midway into episode 2 (I looked at the next episodes briefly to write this). This was a huge surprise because I LOVE the concept of Gabriel Dropout. I mean seriously, this is even a better concept in my opinion than “Dragon Maid”. And you know for the first episode, I could see its untapped potential despite it kind of falling flat. (Read my post on that episode here http://kanralovesu.tumblr.com/post/156023895098/im-skeptical-about-gabriel-dropout-first ) At that point it was just me being skeptical because I did have fun watching the first episode. Oh boy, then I got to the second episode. The jokes I thought weren’t funny the first time came back, the characters continued to be one dimensional and the comedic situations just strayed further and further from the original premise. So my big question for today is: Why do people like this show?

I want to compare this show to two other shows airing this season, Konosuba and Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid. Now, you might be thinking to yourself “Why compare it to those shows, they are clearly on a completely different league of comedy. This is just a stupid gag comedy!” Well you’d be surprised. The particular heresy I’ve heard is that Gabriel’s Dropout is BETTER than Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid. 

So, let me tell you why that’s bullshit. The two shows have very similar premises all things considered. Magical thing is nerdy thing. Dragon is maid. Angel is NEET. The shows also have a cast of supporting characters which are the same magical thing but have their own personalities and what not. The key difference that I want to point out is how Dragon Maid BUILDS on it’s premise whereas Gabriel Dropout ABANDONS it. The fact that Tohru is a dragon drives 90% of all jokes in Dragon Maid and that’s because the writers know the strength of their premise and how to use it to create comedic situations. Tohru interprets things in a medieval way, like seeing a seesaw as a catapult. The writers put Tohru into new situations but continually use her dragon nature as the punchline. The opposite is true for Gabriel Dropout. Gabriel is supposed to be a NEET who loves video games, yet we hardly ever see her play games or even reference them. Its almost like that was never the intended focus to begin with. More comedy in the series has been drawn from making fun of Satania than making fun of games. Worst of all sometimes Gabriel references games as if she were what people THINK a gamer is. Notice how in the beach episode she just references how she’s surfing the internet with zero specifics. Notice how we don’t even know WHAT Gabriel likes to do on the web. What’s her favorite MMO? What message boards does she troll? Overall it just feels like he nerdiness (supposedly the core focus of the show) is underdeveloped. 

We can carry this on into the other characters of the show as well. In Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid we get a sense of how being a dragon effects each of the side characters. For example, look at how Fafnir approaches an RPG differently than a human. He happens to love treasure, a very dragon thing to do, and so he falls for all the traps (Lets also just take a moment to realize that Dragon Maid in that episode made more specific game references than the entirety of Gabriel Dropout). Now lets compare him to Raphael. She embodies the idea that the show is trying to pitch which is that these angels and demons are acting the exact opposite as to how they should be. This is great in theory, as playing off what a magical thing SHOULDN’T do is also a great use of the premise (See Konosuba). The problem is that these characters are simply too one-dimensional to be good, almost as if the fact that they’re demons and angels was meant to flesh out the character by itself. The premise was used as an excuse for bad characters. Better writing would have used their angel-ness to introduce more interesting things about them. Lets pretend for a second that Raphael had more behind her sadism than she does. Perhaps in heaven school she just had this one teacher who was so freakin happy all the time and it made her sick to her stomach thinking about it. She would mess up and expect punishment but only a cheery “You’ll do better next time”. This drove her to have the feelings she did now. That in itself would be a funny backstory but then the rest of the episode would build on that joke by introducing a new teacher at their current school similar to that teacher. Its not that hard to build jokes off of complex characters. I’d argue its just as easy as writing jokes for one-dimensional characters. The hardship comes in coming up with a character’s actual motivations instead of just taking what they do for face value.

Ok, ok, but this is just a stupid gag comedy so why do I need complex characters, and hell why do I need to stick to my premise anyway? Plenty of shows make great comedies using only a high school setting so even with just that it should still be a passable show. Well, ok, I’d definitely argue that you NEED complex characters and you NEED a strong premise to create a GREAT show, so why is Gabriel Dropout bad and not just ok? In my first discussion of Gabriel Dropout I said the pacing and constant payoff with no setup was the shows reason for failure. Ironically, the second episode did fix this but in fixing it drove down the quality of its punchlines. After watching bits of the next few episode I became convinced that the new problem is the quality of the jokes. 

So lets drag Konosuba into this and compare its idea of comedy to the running joke from Gabriel Dropout which can be summed up by “Lets all make fun of Satania”. Konosuba has a similar joke named “Lets all make fun of Aqua”, so its not like Konosuba is the bigger man or anything. We all love to see people get made fun of, its just human nature (Just look at Fail compilations). However, making fun of Aqua is funnier because she is an asshole. We make fun of her in jokes featuring instant karma. Just look at the first OP of Konosuba where Aqua makes fun of Kazuma for falling into the lake only to fall in herself. Now look at Satania. Arguably she is the most redeemable of all the characters. She may be a pompous idiot like Aqua, but we see she isn’t an asshole. Making fun of a redeemable character is less funny. I think the reason why Satania has become a fan favorite of the series is her constant torture by literally everyone. People identify with her the most because we like the underdog. There is a reason why characters who are in school are often bullied even if they’re not even nerds or anything that would warrant bullying. Watching a character get treated unjustly makes us connect with them, not want to laugh at them. It really surprises me how much Gabriel Dropout wants to make laughing at Satania be a thing. The dog is the perfect example of a running joke established for this sole purpose. This dog is by far the biggest bane of my existence in this show because the humor derived from his has no setup and bad payoff. He’ll appear out of fucking nowhere just in the nick of time to harass Satania and it feels like the ex machina of jokes. 

So why is this show popular? Should I just say that people have shit tastes? I think its more than that. I think the reason WHY people have shit tastes is because they are illiterate to what is good and what is bad. A show like Gabriel’s Dropout is good for a quick laugh to some people. People don’t realize that there is little to no development on the premise because they’ve already picked it up and started watching as if it were as good as what that premise is. I think the people who say Gabriel’s Dropout is better than Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid only see the show for what they claim to be rather than how well they’re executed. I’ll admit I love the idea of angels being filthy otakus more than I like the idea of a dragon being my maid, but one of those shows takes their premise and delivers on it and the other doesn’t. I think people love Satania because she’s the butt of the joke not because she’s a good character. I think the other characters (namely Gabriel) are relatable purely based on their descriptions not how they actually act. Overall, I think this show throws a lot of ideas at the audience it knows they’ll like (such as angels, video games, and chuuni demons) and then delivers just enough base comedy to convince you that their show is entertaining, assuming that an uneducated audience doesn’t notice or doesn’t care that their promises are not kept.

TLDR:

Gabriel Dropout is bad. I said it. When compared to Konosuba and Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid this becomes even more clear. It has a great premise that it doesn’t develop while Dragon Maid has, in my opinion, a worse premise and yet executes it perfectly. To put it in perspective, Dragon Maid has used more direct references to video games in one episode than the whole of Gabriel Dropout has so far and gaming is not even in its premise. In first episode the show had decent punchline but with no buildup, whereas all subsequent episodes have had better payoff but horrible punchlines. Comparing the “Everyone make fun of Satania” joke to the “Everyone make fun of Aqua” joke from Konosuba, we see that Konosuba’s works because we hate Aqua for how much of an asshole she is, whereas we don’t hate Satania because she is clearly one of the more redeemable characters. Konosuba has it even better because making fun of Aqua is not as overused as making fun of Satania is. Overall, I think people think Gabriel’s Dropout is good because they aren’t educated in what a good show is and therefor they’re not looking for the things they should. People latch on to Gabriel’s Dropout because of its amazing premise not realizing how badly its executed. 

What are some of your experiences with people talking about Gabriel Dropout? What do people say they like about the show? I really want to know how people stand here because its still partly an enigma to me how it can be almost as popular as Dragon Maid while being so much worse.

[notthenoodleman32]

5 Ways to Use Myers-Briggs for Characters

I must now put my foot in my mouth. Once upon a time, I rather publicly said a big fat NO to the idea of personality-typing, particularly when it came to using Myers-Briggs for characters.

Some of you may even remember this gem from my book Outlining Your Novel:

In general, I'm not a fan of using personality tests (such as the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) to flesh out characters. Trying to force a character to fit a personality framework, rather than allowing him to evolve organically, can leave you with a cardboard cutout, instead of a unique and compelling character.

The irony today is that I have two great passions: writing and . . . Myers-Briggs.

Some of you are now cheering wildly, since you share these intermingled passions. Others of you are crinkling your noses and going: Huh? And still others might be ready to hang up the phone, insisting Myers-Briggs is a pseudo-science, little better than zodiac descriptions.

So . . .

What Is Myers-Briggs and How Can It Help You Write Better?

In its simplest iteration, Myers-Briggs is a system of sixteen personality types, based on formative analytical psychologist Carl Jung's idea of cognitive functions. The system assigns each personality type a label of four letters based on eight possible choices (which I was very excited to get to include in our newOutlining Your Novel Workbook software).

Introvert (I) or Extrovert (E)

Sensor (S) or Intuitive (N)

Feeler (F) or Thinker (T)

Judger (J) or Perceiver (P)

From these choices, a type emerges (for example, my type is INTJ). Each of the resultant sixteen types can be given a general label or personality description which isbasicallytrue. Take any MBTI test online (even the one on the official MBTI site), and that's what you're likely to get.

That's all fun and good, but if that's as far as you're taking the possibilities of Myers-Briggs for characters, then it reallyis kinda like the zodiac. Hence, my initial rejection of the system's usefulness for typing my characters

But Myers-Briggs is so much more than just descriptions of sixteen different types of people. The true beauty of Myers-Briggs arises from its analysis of the cognitive functionsSensing, Intuition, Feeling, and Thinking-which can then be expanded yet again into introverted and extroverted versions of each function.

For example-and not to totally blow your minds or anything-but alltypes include both introverted and extroverted functions, as well as judging and perceiving functions. The Introvert/Extrovert and Judging/Perceiving labels merely exist to tell us which functions a specific type extroverts (for example, as Judgers, INTJs like me extrovert our Judging function of Thinking) and which function is dominant (for example, as Introverts, INTJs like me lead with our dominant introverted function of Intuition).

If you're new to these ideas, then your eyes are probably crossing right now, and that's okay, because a full-on discussion of cognitive functions is far beyond the scope of this blog. Indeed, it took me several years to really get my head around the underlying psychology.

Suffice it that Myers-Briggs is far more than the simple fill-in-the-blanks personality quiz I initially assumed when I wrote that misguided passage inOutlining Your Novel. If you're interested in learning more about Myers-Briggs for characters, I recommend:

1. This amazing Tumblr account, which types popular characters and offers insightful discussions on the functions.

2. The bookWas That Really Me? by Naomi Quenk, which specifically addresses our weaker functions (i.e., the ones not visible in your type's name, which, for me, as an INTJ, would be Introverted Feeling and Extroverted Sensing).

3. Play very carefully with online Myers-Briggs tests. They're a good place to start to help you figure out the basics, but they're only accurate perhaps 50% of the time. Most of them do not take into account the introverted/extroverted cognitive functions and often skew results toward Intuitives over Sensors.

5 Ways to Use Myers-Briggs for Characters

Interestingly, Myers-Briggs was created by author Katherine Cook Briggs, who was searching for a way to better explore and understand her characters. Writing good fiction must always arise out of a quest for meaning and understanding inlife. We cannot write comprehensive and complex people until we first are able to recognize and understand the complexities we find in ourselves and those around us. Indeed, the key to writing great characters is psychology itself.

Here are five ways I now use my understanding of Myers-Briggs for characters that are bigger, better, and more realistic.

1. Keeping Characters in Character

Perhaps the most obvious advantage of any personality-typing system-but especially one as intricate as Myers-Briggs-is that it gives us a basis against which to test our characters' consistency. An understanding of the personality types, and especially the cognitive functions, will give you a litmus test for your character's actions.

What would someone like this do in a situation like this? How will his brain work to provide him options and solutions? It's not just about saying oh, yes, this personality type would be impulsive, while this type would be more calculated. It's about understanding the actual thought patterns that create these visible actions.

2. Creating a Variety of Personalities

My entry point into using Myers-Briggs for characters was a curiosity about whether my characters might all share the same personality (please, no), or perhaps even whether they might all sharemy personality. So I started doing basic typings on all my characters, just to see what I'd find.

I did find some patterns (I tend to favor SP characters, and I hardlyever write characters of my own type), but what was most fascinating was the realization that Iwas instinctively creating varied casts. Now that I consciously understand what I'm doing, I'm able to use Myers-Briggs to help me write even more diverse personalities, which in turn creates more colorful and complex story possibilities.

3. Creating Inter-Personality Conflict

Once you've peopled your story with a cast of varied personality types, you can then take advantage of the inherent conflict that arises between types who share no or few cognitive functions-and who therefore often struggle to understand one another's motives and choices.

This is a fabulous way to create interpersonal conflict even between characters who are allies. In fact, this is one of the reasons Marvel'sThe Avengers andCivil War ended up working so well.

Tony Stark (ESFP) and Steve Rogers (ISFJ) sharezero cognitive functions and consistently clash with each other's values and methods as a result. Even better, it sets up their stories with the ability to explore more personal issues of relationships and contrasting character arcs-born not arbitrarily, but of consistently realized personalities.

4. Brainstorming Character Motives and Actions

Ever get yourself and your character stuck in a plot corner, in which you're uncertain how your character will get himself out? You can use an understanding of the cognitive functions to figure out how your character's brain works. And, unless he's the same type as you, his brain probably wouldn't come up with the same first option as you would.

For example, in writing my ISTP protagonist in my historical-superhero work-in-progressWayfarer, I repeatedly returned to his dominant functions (Introverted Thinking, Extroverted Sensing) to help me determine his actions and mindset, as well as the way in which he interacted with characters around him. This was particularly useful when playing him against the main relationship character, a nine-year-old girl, who was an ENTJ (whose dominant functions are Extroverted Thinking and Introverted Intuition).

Their contrasting views of life (the protagonist's ability to live and react in the moment; the girl's skills for thinking about long-term consequences) not only created fun opportunities for some of that interpersonal conflict, it also allowed their skill sets to nicely complement each other's.

5. Learning More About Your Characters

Our characters provide neverending depths for us to explore. Just as with any complex human being, there is alwaysmore to discover about them. Myers-Briggs can provide a framework for helping us dig ever deeper.

Currently, I'm working on the sequel to my portal fantasyDreamlander. I've already written an entire book about these characters, so I know them very well. And yet, I'm still discovering new things. In considering how best to keep the characters consistent with their cognitive functions, I've opened up new areas of understanding and possibility.

For example, just yesterday as I worked on a scene in the POV of my female lead Allara (one of my few INTJ characters), my growing understanding of my own Introverted Intuition led me to a deeper and more realized understanding of howher brain must work and how this would have influenced her entire backstory-and thus her future story as well. The new possibilities for making this character better, more realistic, and more thematically potent are incredibly exciting. And I would never have found them without the insights Myers-Briggs has provided me into my own life.

***

Myers-Briggs offers a theoretical framework through which we can interpret our own lives and the world around us. Seeking a greater understanding of life is worthwhile whether you want to use it in your writing or not. Be warned, it is a deep rabbit hole, every bit as complex as (more than?) story theory itself. But the deeper you delve into both personality-typing and story theory, the more insight they're able to bring to one another.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinion! How would you describe your protagonist's personality? Tell me in the comments!

The post 5 Ways to Use Myers-Briggs for Characters appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.