#i enjoy him but he's really only interesting when he's either being an anti villain

[crim-bat]

Jason Todd stans when you point out that Jason isn't as well written in any of the niches he's written into compared to others more specifically dedicated to the role: you don't UNDERSTAND that you can't COLOR CODE characters into ROLES without NUANCE

Me: lol. Rofl. Lmao even

[fintan-pyren]

Contains spoilers for the entirety of Unraveled

Fintan's name appears exactly 5 times :(

I was hoping that it would be more than that, since Fintan and Keefe went to the human world together a lot in Lodestar, but...yeah.

VERY low on Fitz (25 mentions). I was really hoping that we'd get a bit about Keefe's friendship with Fitz, but the fact that they're friends is barely acknowledged. It's a very anti-Fitz book overall, probably the most negative portrayal of him that I've seen in any book, which was really really disappointing. Alvar says he's "a selfish snob with a terrible temper, and he’s never going to treat her the way she deserves." Keefe responds with "You just hate your brother", but doesn't really defend him.

This is insane, but...I'm not 100% sure that Fitz isn't going to end up with a genuine villain arc. It seems unbelievable, but I could actually see things going in that direction.

Not much about other characters either.

Linh, Biana, and Marella aren't mentioned at all, Wylie is mentioned once by Sophie at the end.

He does think of Dex when he goes to Disneyland, and talks about his technopath abilities at other points, but not a lot. He and Tam do appear in the scene where they go track down Keefe at the end, though.

The named characters that appear (discounting the scenes at the very end which we saw in Stellarlune) are Cassius, Alvar, and Eleanor. Cassius and Eleanor are one encounter each.

There are a few other humans who he talks to (such as Blue Haired Girl, Man with Husband, Sapphic Waitress, Zookeeper, Cemetery Man, Old Couple, several librarians, etc), but none are named, and none stick around for more than a scene.

We get some cool elvin perspectives on human things, and get some answers to questions such as "how do the elves deal with timezones", "are elves vegetarian or vegan", "is gay marriage allowed in the lost cities", "when does the series take place", etc.

We don't really get info about the overarching plot. We learn that Eleanor faked her death, we learn that Dr Wright was an astrophysicist looking into alternative energy sources prior to his death, and we learn that he suspected that he was in danger prior to his death + burned his notes, but not much else. Keefe checks every street in London, and doesn't find the green door, which makes me think that the house might have been burned.

Cassius likes cheetos and art and isn't abusive anymore

Alvar likes face masks and pancakes

It honestly ended pretty abruptly. I was anticipating a final confrontation and some big revelations, but Eleanor still being alive is the only real revelation, and I think we all kinda expected that, since Shannon killing a little kid would be a bit weird.

Unfortunately, I didn't end up enjoying it as much as I did at first, due to the last point. But the Keefe and Alvar dynamic is cute, and they have interesting perspectives on the elvin world, so I'd suggest giving it a read anyways.

[devilheartsblog]

Here’s Part 2 of some ideas I’m doodled for my Winx rewrite

Last post seemed to do better than I expected and I’m glad a few people enjoyed it. So here are some more things I want to work with.

I like Artu and Roxy’s relationship but I would have also liked some backstory on them and more depth. Like Gantlos said “it’s just a dog”. How did Roxy get Artu? Is he adopted or bought? Is there a reason he doesn’t like anyone outside of Roxy and Klaus?

In my rewrite, yes. Abandoned as a puppy, a kid Roxy took him in after her mother left her dad unexpectedly. She basically raised Artu and he means a lot to her, but she never socialised him since she herself isn’t social with people (so while Artu may tolerate someone’s prescence he doesn’t like being touched or seen upclose). Roxy raising Artu is also why she gets pissed and earns her fairy form but doesn’t want the fairy gig since it ended up hurting her dog, because as a fairy the wizards are after her and Gantlos hurt Artu.

Speaking of Gantlos

Gantlos my beloved you’re so fucking bland the only personality trait you have is having fucked up pointy hands and a cool hat <3

Ok in all honestly I like his apathy to animals and the Winx in general, but that also applies to the other wizards to some extent. At least you can say something about the other wizards; Orgon’s voice is top tier, Duman has really cool powers and design, Anagan’s banter with Flora’s entertaining. This one’s technically a headcannon I made cannon in the rewrite. I did my research btw.

Gantlos has a pretty intense fear of deers also called Elafiphobia, even asking Duman to not shapeshift into one. It’s pretty bad, seeing a deer gets him pretty close to a panic attack. I’m not going to spoil why but I’ll say it’s a consequence of the Great Fairy Hunt. In fact all the Wizards despite being the cause have been affected by the fairy hunt, either overall or because of a major event. Gantlos’ deer phobia is also why he doesn’t like/care about animals initially, I mean, why should he like them? Just cause they’re cute? Hah!

Apart from Riven and Musa I hate the melodrama in season 4 it’s so shit. Since in my version Sky isn’t in the story cause king stuff, Mitzi is narratively cremated and Nabu doesn’t die, on top of planning to expand on Anagan and Flora’s relationship as rivals and Anagan “flirting” with her, it’d be weird for Helia to be like “eh”. Like even if Flora can hold her own I think he’d at least be a little concerned and annoyed at Anagan.

So yeah, Helia’s conflict is having a case of Impostor syndrome because Anagan’s a foil to him; confident, extroverted, confrontational, and actually bounces off of Flora really well. (Like, I don’t ship Anagan and Flora but the people who do I don’t blame them, it sounds more interesting) Even if Flora doesn’t reciprocate Anagan’s feelings, Helia feels inadequate and is anxious Flora will lose interest and might even break up with him since he’s the anti-social poet of the group. Timmy could even help after his confidence arc in Season 2. He’s not overprotective of Flora like wanting to fight Anagan since it kinda goes against his pacifism but the narrative doesn’t care about that as much as I do :/

And lastly I think it’s be neat if we saw a more fleshed out dynamic between the Wizards, the best I can think of is when they’re protected by Syllia and Duman almost slips their plan to which Anagan says he’s being whoosy, Orgon complains about being protected by fairies while Gantlos is fine with it.

A lot of the rewrite is focused on fleshing out the wizards because I want complex villains grr, and they’re perfect for it. The Earth Fairies? They’re good but they’re dead in my rewrite soooo-

I like to think Orgon is pretty manipulative of them. Was he always like this? No, but he’s desperate to secure the disappearance of magic from Earth, and his manipulation gets worse and worse as the episodes go on, in the end being threats and guilt-tripping. He still cares but mostly how the wizards can be of service to the Black Circle. And yes Duman is his favorite because he has the best powers. Shapeshifting will always be OP and the best power in my heart.

Anyway that’s all folks. If I make a part 3 it’ll probs cover some other stuff like Jason Queen, which I like his character, it’s perfect for Musa’s development (until they made Bloom the fucking main singer like WHYYY) or perhaps talk about Klaus or Morgana, Tecna and Timmy and more about Nabu. Anyway I’ll go watch some more nostalgic minecraft videos and webtoon rants. See ya!

[diamond-jester]

A random rant about Harley and Joker's relationship

Am i the only one that finds how, when discussing this pair is it always either 'Joker was never abusive, they're just a villain couple' or 'Everything bad Harley did during her time with Joker is his fault, she's a blameless victim'?

Putting it like that is an hyperbole, i know. But i really dislike how people act like she's has to either be a blameless victim or that you can't acknowledge the fact their relationship isn't healthy while still finding the couple interesting. In general i feel people think she's not her own character if she's at the Joker's side.

Harley is at her best when the story acknowledges those nuances and works with them, rather than ignoring her faults.

You can acknowledge the fact their relationship was never healthy while also acknowledge it that the way it is shown has changed through comics and adaptations. Just compare Btas' 'he used his lies to slowly change the way she thought, having an effect even he didn't expect: Her falling in love' to Suice Squad's 'He tortured her for months to make her see things his way'. (Funny that i see SS be considered the romantized one).

In general recent versions leaned into the unhealthy aspect of their relationship to the point that they can't be shown together without making the plot be about them breaking point. This ties with how much Joker has been turn into an edgelord, which a whole otger topic in itself. It also results on earlier aspects of Harley being tied to the Joker in a way they weren't before, like her accent or her costume.

The most bizare version of this is in Kill the justice league, where Harley acts as if Joker chose her outfits in the prior Arkham games... Though those game explicitly told us she chose them.

I also dislike how her redemption has been tied to if she is in relationship of the Joker, with the implication that if she isn't with him then she immediately won't be a villain anymore.

I recommend watching 'Harley's Holiday', as it shows the fact her path depends on her own mistakes, the whole episode serving as a prove that her getting depends both on her putting the effort AND her being allowed to. It doesn't depends on her relationship status, it depends on her.

The reason is that i don't enjoy how her reedemption arc has been presented since the N52 era is that the story rarely bother to hold her acknowledge the pain she's provoked. Later version of hers tend to jump into her broken up with Joker, without acknowledging her actions before.

The story acts like she had a gun over her head all the time, when she's often part of his schemes, laughing at his side as they cause destruction. Fuck, some adaptations has her complicit in Jason's murder. EXPLORE THAT. Explore her guilt, how she feels abut her actiobs and the harsh fact she enjoyed some of the atrocities she commited. Let civilians and/or batfamily hold her accountable, don't giver her a pass because 'Joker made do it :('. Her being given the 'anti-hero' feels like a cop out made to let her hurt others without exploring the moral issues in her actions.

Let Harley be her own character, explore those darker themes that she comes with. Excusing them or shying away from them makes her harm.

I like Harley and Joker because of the story they tell, not because a false belief that they are a 'healthy relationsip'. Ignoring their story hurts both characters, too.

[makedonsgriva]

Do you mind if I ask your top 10 favorite characters (can be male or female) from all of the media that you loved (can be anime/manga, books, movies or tv series)? And why do you love them? Sorry if you've answered this question before.....Thanks...

Omg hi! First of all thanks for asking! I haven’t answered this question before and I absolutely do not mind answering this. This is a tough one though because I��ve consumed so much media and love so many characters it’s so difficult to choose but I will give it a shot nonetheless. Also these ten characters are not in any particular order.

Laurent Of Vere: Laurent is introduced as the frigid and dangerous prince of Vere in the book 1 of the captive prince trilogy. I HATED this man on my first reading but as the trilogy progressed, I just fell in love with him. He had an astounding amount of growth and character development. Not to mention his qualities and traits make him an all around admirable character. I may not be putting the characters in this list in order but Laurent is definitely my favourite character of all time.

Fleabag: Fleabag from Fleabag is another character I deeply love. She is funny, she is selfish, she is a tragedy of her own doing. It’s the way she is so deeply flawed yet so damn loveable at the same time that gets me. We are all fleabag at the end of the day aren’t we?

Baz: Baz from Carry On trilogy had to be here like the list won’t be complete without my poor little meow meow. He is one of those few characters who is very very close to my heart and it so hard to not love this dramatic gay vampire. Just love his snark and he is so funny??? I love it so much. Not to mention he truly is one of the kindest characters I’ve read.

Penelope Bunce: Another character from the Carry On trilogy. Penelope means the world to me because as a brown person, I don’t get to read a lot of books which feature brown characters. So seeing a character who is the best friend of the protagonist and has a major role in the series, it’s very refreshing and reassuring to me. Penelope is smart, stubborn, never admits she might be wrong but her growth over the three books is amazing. I will always love her.

Eren Yeager: literally one of the most tragic characters I’ve seen till date. As the protagonist (antagonist? anti hero? Idk anymore) of attack on titan, Eren is one of the most iconic characters I’ve come across till date. His unconditional devotion for his friends and his character arc from being the righteous hero to someone who becomes completely disillusioned by the end, it’s fucking amazing.

Geto Suguru: I have a beef with Jujutsu Kaisen and the reason is that Gege Akutami came up with absolutely amazing characters only to under-utilise and shit on their character arcs with his half assed plot. Surprisingly though, Geto’s character arc is amazing. I love it when heroes lose the sight of their goals and become the villains instead and Geto does that. His character development is really good and I love him for that. Incredibly realistic and refreshing to see.

Jiang Cheng: Jiang Cheng from MDZS remains one of the most relatable characters I’ve come across ever. Like I feel him on a spiritual level. The complexity and depth of his emotions, his actions, being so fucking good but never being good enough… good lord my heart straight up bleeds for him. I will always love Jiang Cheng.

Xue Yang: Hear me out okay. I know Xue Yang from MDZS is a psychopath. I’m not a Xue Yang apologist either. What he did to Xingchen was appalling to say the least. But Xue Yang is undoubtedly an incredibly well written character. He loved or should I say obsessed over XXC in such a sick and twisted way, it made for a very interesting read. The way he deluded even himself into believing that his extreme actions were all to torment XXC and not because he enjoyed his company and liked him… like girl be ffr right now who tf are you kidding. But yeah love me an insane psychotic gremlin.

Violet Evergarden: Violet from Violet Evergarden is one of the most heartbreaking characters I’ve come across and also one of the most unique. I’m a sucker for stories that tell the most human stories and Violet as a child soldier discovering these emotions, thoughts and vivid lives of people while coming to terms with her own trauma really gives her a special place in my heart.

Howl: Howl from Howls Moving Castle is one of my favorites because he is a hot babygirl. As simple as that.

Thanks so much for asking! Sorry it took me a while to get back to you but I hope you liked this list 💗💗💗

[volfoss]

MT-001->MT-003: Jungle Emperor/Kimba (1950-1954)

TW: Discussion of racism (specifically anti-black racism)

Before I get into the plot and well. everything bad about this, I want to quickly explain that this is the first out of 400 volumes of Tezuka's that I will be reading/reviewing. This is absolutely the worst of his works by far and I need to very much emphasize that for anyone who wants to read the 5.5 pages of notes I took (that are under the cut, due to length).

Summary of Plot: A white male lion is known for terrorizing an African village, and they make plans to hunt and kill him. These plans end up succeeding, and his mate, who is pregnant with his son, is captured and taken onto a ship. She gives birth on the ship and pleads with her newborn son, Kimba, to escape and become the king of the jungle, like his father was. The story follows Kimba as he tries to follow in his father’s footsteps, but in his own special way.

Characters: Kimba/Jungle Emperor is a mixed bag when it comes to characters. On one hand, Kimba and his family manage to be entertaining without speech. Their motives are very clear and they are written sympathetically. Jacques the rat is a really good addition to the cast and adds a lot to Kimba as a character. The animal characters have a pretty interesting dynamic with each other, and I feel the little screen-time the villain got was pretty decent. I’m not normally a very big fan of stories centered around animals in the specific way that this does it, so the aspects of the charming animals could be better for someone who enjoys that sort of thing more.

On the other hand, the humans are not written in a super in depth manner (at least not compared to his later works that I’ve read). The protagonists quite honestly fall flat most of the time and don’t lend a ton to the story. The worst of the badly written humans are the African characters. They are horrifically reduced to the worst stereotypes possible, given how Tezuka wants to portray them as “tribes-people”. They are portrayed as stupid and are shown as rather backwards. The best example of the latter is early on, when the leader offers “the best hut” to one of the white characters and when he goes to investigate it, all the promised amenities are either broken or just there for props. They are also portrayed as overly violent and also docile towards the white characters. I cannot express enough how this ticks every single anti-black stereotype in media box.

Another horrific part of this is their treatment of Merry. Merry is one of the two children, and in Volume 1, is kidnapped by the “Jungula Tribe” (as that is what this group is referred to) and by Volume 2, has formed an alter ego (or something along those lines, it’s not really made clear but it is handled badly) named, and I kid you not, Conga (or Konga, depending on the translation) and has taken over the tribe as their leader. She does this by creating electricity (which is pretty clearly implied as something that the tribe she now leads had never seen before, and treat it as something mystical and magical) by rubbing her pen against a cheetah pelt. Her taking over the group is seen as a sad thing but only specifically in the way that the other child that was her friend, feels very disconnected to her and cannot relate to her (and not the frustration that Tezuka was leaning into yet another trope of the white person having to lead the black tribe because they just know better. This is handled in that specific manner with her being pretty abusive towards the other characters, and is only really refuted in the manner of now there’s “good” people to lead them (who are white/Japanese) and the only big difference in the leadership is it is less abusive).

There is also ritual sacrifice, regarding the Pygmy (the specific group is not specified (otherwise I would be referring to them as such, as Pygmy is seen as a derogatory term) and this is how they’re referred to in canon) and many jokes about their short stature. They are shown trying to ritually sacrifice one of the white characters, and it is treated as horrific (but also with tones of comedy, as Tezuka constantly uses slapstick to show dumb the Africans in his work are), which from as far as I could find, was not something factual for the actual groups mentioned. Most of the groups mentioned seem to either be slightly made up (Jungula is one that I could not find any proof of anything similarly named existing) or slightly spelled off (but wouldn’t make any sense geographically, such as Gura (literal translation used here, the fan translation I’m using here just refers to this group as Donga, despite the katakana being “グラ”). This detail doesn’t really factor in with the already HEINOUS amount of racism but it is very interesting to me, as I feel it’s just another excuse for him to be using many stereotypes and mash them together, instead of portraying a nuanced version of any of the groups mentioned. Quite literally, they check off every single way to NOT treat African characters and there is no way around this part of Kimba, as these characters appear in pretty much every chapter. They are absent in Chapter 1 and 2, and I state this solely to make it very clear that in 21 chapters, the racism is present in nearly every single one. Genuinely and sincerely, there is no reason to read Jungle Emperor/Kimba for the characters (or really anything other than reading all of his works, like I’m doing) as they are all pretty flat and the very obvious issues are present throughout the entire work.

Art: As always, Tezuka excels at drawing animals in a very specifically stylized way that still lends to how they would appear realistically. Kimba as a character has an instantly charming design and is drawn in such a way that all of his movements exude a lot of character. But unfortunately, the elephant in the room for the entire read through was how he chose to depict Africans. With the setting (and it being written in 1950), I did not expect it to be good but it is unfortunately a topic that is often ignored in mainstream discussions of Kimba/Jungle Emperor (often, I find what is most discussed is using Kimba/Jungle Emperor as a punchline to talk about Disney stealing the Lion King’s concept from this), and is one that I’d like to discuss in the review. They are a very prominent part of the story (given the setting) and to put it very lightly, this is the worst instance of this in his work. It appears again in (given this is the first thing I’m reading in this chronology, I’m sure that there will be more instances, but this is just from what I’ve read going into it) Black Jack and lesser known works such as Hungry Blues, but this is by far the closest to minstrelsy (with how the Black characters are drawn and portrayed, it very much leans into how older media (Hollywood specifically) tended to derive Black characters down to simple and offensive tropes). It absolutely does ruin any enjoyment, as it is VERY glaring vile and present in nearly every chapter.

Ending: The ending is very bad with how Tezuka clearly viewed Africa as a place to be mystified, with how the final words are. I feel that again, a lot of the messaging in this is stuff that appears in his later works but they are a lot more clumsily handled here (for many reasons). It was a very frustrating ending with how most of the Black characters died, and after that, the white and Japanese (implied) characters from different countries realized their differences (with no mourning for the dead, which happened when ANYTHING tragic happened to any of the non-black characters).

Misc: This was the work I was dreading the most, and reading it first has really just been a very frustrating experience due to just HOW blatantly vile it is. To get into the Lion King comparisons (as that is the typical mainstream knowledge of this manga), there are certainly some similarities. Kimba/Jungle Emperor focuses a bit more on the human side of things (in terms of being pretty blatantly anti-zoo (with the second chapter focusing a couple pages on Kimba’s mother telling him how living in a zoo would be no good life for them, and how zoos are discussed on Chapter 3 of Volume 1) and anti-poaching (most clear in the entirety of the first chapter) instead of animal life and drama there, like the Lion King covers. Honestly, a lot of the plot isn’t super similar unless you’re looking at it from a VERY broad lens (I know I see the scene of the stars forming the dead parent’s face cited a lot here, the fact he has an animal companion that watches over him (even a bird for a bit of the plot) a bit is similar (again broadly), there being an evil lion, and the dead parent plot point), as it really does just focus on different subject matter. It is more of a generational tale than Lion King.

Honestly, I think how Kimba discusses the difficulty for him to grow up for a bit in a normal household (with humans feeding and clothing him) and then having to return to the jungle is really interesting. It gets into his struggle with how he wants to be innately kind (and more “human”/domesticated) but he obviously still has those animal urges built in (a scene that really exemplifies this is in Chapter 5 of Volume 1, where the villain taunts him about the fact that Kimba is upset by a gazelle dying and won’t eat from it, like a normal lion would). It tackles a lot of topics related to how humans can be bad (specifically, the way that one of the humans (who is pretty clearly exploiting the African characters) was a guard at a Nazi camp and you are very clearly not supposed to like this character) and even how, in Chapter 5, Kimba bringing “civilization” to the jungle (he gets the animals that listen to him to build paved roads, restaurants and set up farming practices similar to what humans do) is something that makes some of the animals suffer. There is unfortunately also a lot of really poorly handled colonialism (specifically, in chapter 10, where the “good guys” take over the Jungula tribe and dress them in traditionally European clothing and it is seen as a good thing, as they are no longer under control of Conga. The way that it is handled in this is very muddled, and the way that Kimba bringing “civilization” to the jungle animals is a net positive is a very odd thing to me). It does have some of Tezuka’s trademark anti-war messaging but it honestly just really does not work well here given the rest of the topics. There are definitely glimmers of what COULD be a better manga in this but unfortunately it is buried under far far too much racism.

I want to take a small moment to analyze a section of this essay written on Kimba, as I think there is a lot to unpack.

From the section covering The Roles of Africans in Kimba:

“Fans of Kimba may have wondered why there are no Africans to be seen in Kimba’s jungle; or for that matter, why no English version of Jungle Emperor is available. The problem is ironic and must have struck hard at Tezuka: the depiction of the African tribes in Leo can only be viewed by any modern person as racist.

This takes a moment to process and absorb because so much of Tezuka’s work explores (and attacks) the tenants of racism. Indeed, works as early as Astroboy seem to focus on racism-as-an-evil with such a deliberate ferocity that we can (and must) conclude that any such accusations regarding Tezuka are false. Let’s also not forget his own slogan: “Love all creatures! Love everything that has life!”

We might then wonder how it is that Tezuka has produced these images which offend modern sensibilities and which necessitated the replacement of African natives in Kimba with white hunters and ultimately prevented the publication of Jungle Emperor in English. It must first be said that very few of Tezuka’s human caricatures are particularly flattering–even of himself. What we find offensive in these drawings however is their stereotypical nature.

It is my opinion that the resources that Tezuka first drew from for the creation of his native characters are in fact the problem. More than likely Disney is the culprit here; though one might also consider the depiction of natives in the 1933 feature film King Kong. Most telling however are the now deleted sequences involving a black centaur in Fantasia. Other works by Disney from this period along with this sequence were clearly not meant as racist, but we can only judge from the perspective of the 21st century.

One possible source for Jungle Emperor’s Africans: a censored scene from Fantasia 1940. Though this type of depiction of Africans was common in US comics and animation in this period, we know Tezuka was particularly interested in the works of Walt Disney…”

To get into my thoughts on this part of the essay, we first have to discuss the material mentioned as potential inspirations for how badly these characters are drawn, mainly Fantasia. Fantasia was released in 1940, a decade before Jungle Emperor came out, and the racism was about as bad as in Jungle Emperor. It had many racist scenes in the specific Pastoral Symphony scene of the film, that were then removed in 1969 (source). I do also want to cite a slightly lesser known Disney work from 1925 that is nearly exact to how the Africans are drawn in Jungle Emperor: Alice Cans the Cannibals. I am not saying that this is where he got the inspiration from, simply to bring up the point that there was a lot of media that would treat Africans as cannibals and prone to human sacrifice. This essay gets into a lot of the early Disney racism in a very in depth way that might be of interest in regards to this point.

In a similar way to Fantasia, Jungle Emperor also had to be redone, given how the original pages were nearly lost during the making of the anime in 1965. This led Tezuka to have to redraw a lot of it (which you can most certainly tell which parts of it were redrawn, given it was done in 1977 (for the collected Kodansha volumes)) and unfortunately, the racial caricatures are still present in this updated version. (source) I did want to make this comparison solely for media that is viewed somewhat similarly in the mainstream media (with not much discussion around the racism) that got revised later on. This is a thing however, that Tezuka would improve on in some of his works, but that fact does not even remotely begin to erase what he put in the Jungle Emperor. Even if the art was not as blatantly racist as it was, the way these characters are written is still drenched in stereotypes that obviously do still harm Africans now. In comparison to Disney doing all that they can to erase the existence of the material (and how, even in the modern day, they very clearly struggle to hold themselves accountable (specifically referring to Song of the South)), I’m not sure that I prefer the approach here with there being clearly enough fans of Kimba to fan translate it (as the version I’m reading had two different teams) and to praise it while doing so.

I feel that the insistence that it was just caricatures and not blatantly racist really falls flat when you consider how the characters in Kimba are treated. As I mentioned in the personality section, they are really just very flat stereotypes (with no names, as far as I remember, outside of the Chief) and do pretty blatantly fall into what is racist media. The various groups portrayed in Kimba are not done so with much compassion for them as characters and they are quite honestly just used as slapstick or to boost up other characters (whether by being villainous, and driving the heroes to oppose them or by, in a large panel depicting most of them dying (relatively graphically for this manga as well, with one character being shown in the jaws of an animal), which then brings the heroes together (not due to their death but because, seemingly, with them gone, the other characters realized that they (as the characters were from two unnamed countries) are not so different after all)). They are not even remotely given any compassion or depth compared to every other character and it really just falls into the old tropes of refusing to see Black characters as deserving of that depth (which quite honestly does feel like what happened here). They are shown more as a group and never really focused on them as individual people (as EVERY other character is given that).

There isn’t really a good way to handle the presence of very blatantly racist material in media, but I do think the repeated insistence of a lot of fans to insist that it wasn’t intentionally bad (or that it was just of its time) is not the way to go. Even if at that point, he had experienced the war (bringing this point up for a reason, stick with me), there are later examples of his work that deal with depicting Black characters in a caricatured way, most notably Hungry Blues. That was published in 1977 and still used similar caricatures (although the character in question leaned a lot less into stereotypes personality wise, as it was based off a real person he had met during the war). It is a very inexcusable part of his works and is something that is objectively the most prominent in Kimba (which is part of his early works). Even if a lot of his other works DO have very well handled anti-racist messages (Message to Adolf is one I can think of off the top of my head, Astro Boy also handles similar topics), this one objectively does not and I think it’s important to examine this in a critical way, instead of just brushing it under the rug. If you want to read one of his works that handles racism, anti-war, and the other messages he is known for, there are MANY that handle them better and not like this.

As a white person, I’m aware that my viewpoints on this matter may not hold as much weight as someone who would be affected by how these characters are drawn but I do believe with how little discussion of the very very blatant racism in this there is online, it is something that needs to be brought up. For further reading on the topics of stereotypes of Black characters in media, I found Donald Bogle’s book on the matter to be a very interesting read (although it does focus on Hollywood throughout the ages, some of the things in here did also apply to this) (link) and Henry T. Sampson’s book focusing on animated portrayals of Black characters (specifically, Chapter 3: Way Down in the Jungle: The Animated Safari) (link) to be very related to the topic at hand and be very excellent companions to reading about the topic of how anti-black tropes in media can be impactful and were very much part of the time period.

Overall Thoughts: I clearly had a lot to say on this one, as it is a topic that I do sincerely believe should be getting more coverage in regards to discussing this media. As a manga, it truly was one of the worst ones I’ve ever read, as the plot was pretty rough and the very obvious racism was well, obvious. On one hand, I do wish it was better and that when it was revised in the 70’s, that Tezuka took the time to show that he had grown from the mindset he pretty clearly had in 1950. On the other hand, the only value this has (in my opinion) is a very good case study on what not to do when writing African characters, as it truly fits every stereotype in different ways. I would not recommend this to a single person, it is easily by far the weakest of his works that I have read so far. The characters felt pretty flat and a lot of the moments clearly meant to be tragic fell pretty flat for me. The generational aspect was interesting but due to every other weakness of the work, just did not work for me.

[travllingbunny]

Who was the poster who talked about how "Draco in leather pants" is rooted in misogyny and crossed out the girl in fangirls and basically accused all the tropers who posted if being "nice guys" who thought all women wanted to be with jerks? In my experience it's not misogyny, it usually is female fans who often take conventionally attractive male villains and either woobify them or make them into perfect prince charming's. Even villains who have commited horrible crimes like rape or genocide

(pt 2) I typically see this done with characters like Draco Malfoy, Professor Snape, Anakin Skywalker, Billy Hargrove, Loki Laufeyson, Voldemort, Kylo Ren, Michael Langdon. Almost all of the characters on this list have said and done truly horrific things yet it is mostly women I see treating these characters these way. Most male viewers/readers don't really have an interest either way in these villains male or female and don't really go out of their way to defend them in this manner.

This anon sent an ask in 4 parts, and since there's a lot to unpack here, and this will be a long answer, I'll answer the first two in this post, and then the second two (which address a different issue) in another.

Anon, I'll start with the sentence here, because what you're saying is blatantly inaccurate.

Or rather, it's possible that most men, for all I know, don't have that kind of attitude to these specific characters you listed. But it's definitely not true that male fans typically don't idolize and whitewash villains.

In fact, it's equally well known and has been for years that there are many villains, or anti-heroes of the very morally dark variety, who are idolized mostly by men, particularly straight men, including many who don't just enjoy them as villains or anti-heroes but idolize them as cool "badasses" and heroes who in fact, never did anything wrong ; even their crimes were fully justified, and/or their ideology and worldview is in fact completely correct (even when the narrative is going out of its way to show it really isn't).

This has happened. for instance, with villains like The Joker from The Dark Knight, Tyler Durden (...yes, I know - and this only makes it eveb funnier), Negan on The Walking Dead (way before the show gave him a redemption arc, at the time when he was unquestionably the main villain), and even MCU Thanos (which I find particularly mind-boggling - I could understand it with villains like Vulture or Killmonger, but Thanos' ideological motivations are incredibly stupid and nonsensical). I will never forget how Negan fanboys during season 7 argued that he was really so against rape and therefore a good guy, and not a rapist himself - and that his "wives" were not sex slaves but "golddiggers" in consensual relationships with him, ignoring not just Negan's power over the entire community but the fact that the show explicitly showed that at least some of the women were directly blackmailed by the threat of harm or death of their loved ones, and at least one escaped the community so she wouldn't be forced to become his sex slave.

Tywin Lannister is a great example: this is someone who's, among other crimes, guilty of ordering child murders (including that of an infant), mass murder (including an eradication of an entire extended family), gang rape of a 14 year old girl, of sending the worst monsters he could possibly find to commit countless other murders, rapes and torture, who's also a terrible, abusive father to all his children, a major hypocrite, blatantly classist to the point he barely considers common people human, and his overriding motive isn't anything noble but his own arrogance and easily hurt pride. But even when the author goes out of his way to show that his legacy turns to sh1t the moment he dies, you'll still find a ton of fanboys who buy into Tywin's own rationalizations for his actions and will argue that he was in fact the best, smartest political and military leader in the series, and that every crime he committed was justified. Those fanboys even included the GoT showrunners David Benioff and D.B.Weiss, who, oddly enough, included most (if not all) of Tywin's crimes and awful behavior in the show, but still described him as "Lawful Neutral" (?! Funnily enough, he is neither lawful, nor neutral) and parroted the character's own hypocritical justification for the Red Wedding as something they thought the audience should take as gospel truth.

It's also something that commonly happens with villain protagonists, or morally dark antiheroes who are protagonists of their stories. In those cases, one of the main reasons is the fact that a lot of people always expect the protagonist to be the Hero of the story, the Good Guy - especially if the characters starts off sympathetic. Walter White is a very well known example of a villain protagonist that many viewers, and I'be be surprised if most of them were not straight men, identified with and idolized to the point they heaped an incredible amount of hate on the character of his wife Skyler for simply disagreeing with his actions, and even to the point that the actress got harassed and threatened. Tony Soprano and Vic Mackey got similar treatment from many fans, and Don Draper, a pathetic man with a ton of personal issues, somehow became the epitome of Coolness that straight men wanted to emulate.

But in spite of all that, fandoms and TV Tropes have been going on for years only about how bad and stupid and awful it is that certain villains get whitewashed or idolized by female fans, supposedly mostly for being attractive. Cue the "Draco in Leather Pants" trope and similar monikers. I dunno, I'd say that's kind of sexist (and also heteronormative), don't you think so?

Even with the well-known fact that one dude back in the 1980s shot a president not for any political reason but because he watched Taxi Driver and overidentified with Travis Bickle, I haven't seen the fact that many men idolize male villains brought up as an issue - until a few years ago with the panic around Joaquin Phoenix's Joker (which is a bit odd, that this one got so much criticism and not the earlier ones, but maybe that's a sign of the changing tides of the Western society and pop culture). Before this, people would sometimes mention tropes like "Misaimed Fandom", but no one came up with a trope called something like, say, Tywin Sh1tting Gold, to complain specifically about men idolizing villains and dark anti-heroes and justifying all their actions. Instead we got a lot of hang-ringing about oh those airheaded women and the way their minds just don't work when they see a hot dude!

But maybe I'm wrong? Maybe the "Draco in Leather Pants" trope is in fact meant to be an all-accompassing one about people of any gender and sexual orientation whitewashing villains, or just generally whitewashing the flaws and defending the morally wrong actions of their favorite characters? Let's take a look at the Television Trope Draco in Leather Pants page. On top of it, there's a quote that's supposed to summarize what it's about:

"I guarantee you Satan's going to have no problems on this planet because all the women are gonna go 'What a cute butt!' He's Satan! 'You don't know him like I do.' He's the prince of darkness! 'I can change him.'"

— Bill Hicks, Pussywhipped Satan

...Oh.

And now to answer your question: it was @dinamitelove who answered my old post where I criticized this Television Trope, and said, among other things, this about the origins of the trope: "God knows I wasted too much of my time on TV Tropes, and there are a few things I have to say about it. Most members, at least back when I was around during 2009-10 were male, and its sexism was pretty evident on the example pages. Draco in Lether Pants was one of the most egregious examples of this. (...) There was that horrible sexist assumtion that has been around since fiction became massive about the dangers of women consuming it, because their “highly sensitive minds could not distinguish fiction from reality” and that could be dangerous for society (see Madame Bovary). That idea got married with the “Nice guys finish last” idea to create this trope. Althought I have to say that recently, I’ve been seeing it around here amongst female bloggers to attack other fangirls. I guess this idea became an easy way to attack other fangirls for liking stuff I don’t like."

And considering all I pointed out above, I think they were probably right. (Also, in that old conversation, it's been pointed out that fangirls later started throwing the same accusations/mocking each other the same way. But that doesn't necessarily mean there aren't misogynistic assumptions involved.)

Now, I'm not saying that there aren't many fangirls who are really very annoying in how much they're willing to whitewash and justify crimes and awful actions of their favorite male characters who they find appealing in a romantic and/or sexual way. That's certainly true. But it's not unique to female fans, it's not always moticated by romantic or sexual desire, it's not unique to male characters either (as you also pointed out in your asks 3 and 4, which I'll answer in another post).

Plus, sexism isn't the only issue I have with the Draco in Leather Pants trope and its trope page. I got so annoyed with that page that I wrote this post sarcastically tearing it apart. Because that page is a huge mess, from the quote above and the description of the trope, to the various examples people have added to it. As I've already pointed out in that post, the description is incredibly imprecise and full of incorrect assumptions (”A form of Misaimed Fandom, when a fandom takes a controversial or downright villainous character and downplays his/her flaws, often turning him/her into an object of desire and/or a victim in the process. This can cause conflicts if the writers are not willing to retool the character to fit this demand.”) - For starters, it's not like villains, let alone controversial characters who aren't necessarily villains, aren't often 1) deliberately presented as sexy and desirable in canon, and/or 2) given sympathetic qualities and tragic backstories or even are actual victims (of rape, abuse etc.) in canon, and/or 3) shown to have some good qualities and a potential to be better people or get redemption. And with the imprecise wording like "villains or controversial characters", you can apply that to almost every character.

No surprise that the examples people added are an even bigger mess. Examples include canonical villains, heroes turned villains, villains turned redeemed heroes, anti-heroes or even flawed heroes. Many of the characters mentioned were definitely deliberately portrayed as sexy in canon (and a few even literally wore leather in canon) and promoted as such, and/or were love interests of the heroes. Many of them were abuse or rape victims in canon, had PTSD, are shown crying and having emotional breakdowns, etc. So, basically, the people who added them to the page were complaining that the fans were "woobifying" chararacters that were already "woobified" by the creators, or putting characters in "leather pants" who were in leather pants to begin with.

(I haven't read or seen much of Harry Potter, but a few people also pointed out that even Draco Malfoy doesn't fit this - since he was, a child, and more of a school bully antagonist and not some Big Bad monster.)

It would make a lot more sense if the trope was simply about fans defending their faves at any cost and whitewashing them or justifying their actions, which often happens. However, that's tricky too - because while that happens a lot, you know what else often happens in fandom debates? Haters portraying the characters they hate in the worst light possible, even making up things that are not in canon, but more often insisting on the worst possible intepretations, or denying even the obvious good qualities the character has, or even denying or downplaying the character's victimization or disability, because those don't fit with the the idea of them as 100% mousache-twirling evil monsters.

Both of these things come from a similar place: the tendency to see things as black and white, and it gets worse when fandoms try to make liking fictional characters into a morality contest. Fandom debates are often terrible because people on opposing sides start ignoring nuance and get more entrenched in their views because it's all about defending their fave or attacking the characters they hate (or pointing out the hypocrisy of the opposing side of the fandom).

Then you get debates that sound like this:

A: How dare you say that [my favorite character] is a ____!

B: Err, they did this horrible thing, which means they are.

A: But in their society, this thing is not considered bad as it is in ours, because [mental gymnastics and really messed up arguments]

but you may also get this:

A: This character (X) is disgusting and evil and anyone who likes them is immoral, bad and an idiot!

B (fan of said character): How is X worse than your fave, Y? Y is also a murderer and a terrorist and war criminal, same as X...

A: Oh yeah, well X is worse because... [throws some random accusation that makes no sense]

B: WTF? That's not true.

A: X"s fans are so annoying! You can't realize that X is a villain! You think X is perfect and you keep whitewashing X!

Or, how about this:

Fan 1: writes a post about a character focused on their disability, which is 100% just about the real life medical facts of how having this particular condition would affectthem.

The post angers a whole bunch of fans who hate said character, who mock it and rant in quotes, saying things like "Now you are babying war criminals!" "How dare you compare X to real canon disabled characters! Missing a body part doesn't make him disabled!"

Bizarre? I didn't make up this example. It's almost word by word what happened on Twitter a couple of months ago.

What's normal defense of a character and what's whitewashing often depends on whether you're a fan or a hater of said character. The line isn't always clear. And tropes like "Draco in a Leather Pants" are often just used by people who want to complain and rant about the fact that, shock horror, some fans dare like the characters they hate, orr prefer them to their own (obviously superior) fave. Most of the examples on that page read exactly like that.

[m1ckeyb3rry]

A

SHSHSH THANK YOU no im taking that /srs give me back my chronically online time PLEASE but omg tiktok binge it’s been awhile im excited to see some fire edits!!

FRRRRR no because that chapter had all the nagi antis sitting down him caring for chigiri was the highlight of the chapter and yes LMAOO Isagi shoves him to the ground after he finds out about the injury I believe so that makes it sm worse HAHAH

LMAO REUNICLUS SCAMMING AS A SIDE HUSTLE so real imagine there’s a little makeshift tacky mystical booth just set up on the side of the street where reuniclus just sits in waiting for people to pass by to gaslight

I can just imagine all the villainous edits of Karasu that are about to come to life after this weeks ep we’ll fr be watching them like “Lmao no my friends THAT is what we call a silly little closeted loser”

Wait 6-8 miles daily is kinda insane that sounds like it would be really time consuming too LOL the respectful tag has me laughing imagine someone catching you giving a presentation through zoom while on their horse with the respect and etiquette aside that would be funny like “is she pulling out PowerPoint on my horse”

WOOHOO TIKTOK PALOOZA!!!

Barou edits always hit I’ll never forget that first one you showed me that fr had some really strong conversion magic in it

Ok yk I was about to pull out the “Mira clown moment caught in 4K” before I watched but then I watched and realized I’m also part of the circus that edit was a little too good

LMAOOO The Isagi fisheye camera scene always has me reeling like bro wtf is that it’s giving that one boba eyed hamster

STOP I DIDNT KNOW IT WAS A REFERENCE TO THE AIRHORN SOUND FX EITHER???? Ok now that makes more sense I thought he was just ad libbing some random noises

HAHA the tabieita one is so funny im crying its fr them the visuals also have me giggling

AHAHAHAHABAHA TOO TARGETED its giving Aiku and niko getting yelled at Barou for the stain

These were so good i needed this tiktok brainrot session fr LMAO

Also wait about your recent post with the censoring I instantly jumped to itoshi because it’s usually slander but then I realized in this context it’s probably not considering you’re talking about your theme so KARASU???

- Karasu anon

AHAHAH OKAYYY i didn’t want to be a hater in case you were enjoying your offline grass touching time 😭 can’t enter my bad influence era…just hit 1k it would be tragic if i got cancelled already 😰

HELP OKAY THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT ngl isagi is so funny because he actually has 0 chill i feel like people never get his characterization quite right he’s either way too sweet or too much of an asshole but he def is a good mix of being nice while also whipping out the sass at the slightest provocation 🙂‍↕️ nagi and chigiri bffs is so cute fr…yk if you think abt it this just makes the oaeu more canon because chigiri helps reo in wingmanning nagi when aiku ends up one-sidedly beefing with him LMAOAOA

I’M SO HYPEEEE I NEED VILLAINOUS KARASU EDITS idk why my fyp has only been yuki and otoya edits (i mean no complaints because i love those two as well) I NEED KARASU 😫 i need the barou editors specifically to get on it idk what it is with them but they put crack into all of their work i need karasu getting THAT treatment 🤤 meanwhile i’ll be giggling because yes he’s gorgeous amazing problematic king but he’s also the og mature healthy sassy pining love interest of all time 🥹

HAHA yeah it def was time consuming i was only able to do it because there was literally nothing else to do all day 😭 but yeah LMAOAO can you imagine someone just taking an exam while riding your horse atp i’d just be befuddled like what even…

BROOO BAROU EDITS ARE ALWAYS FIRE IDK HOW THEY DO IT they always pick the perfect songs scenes transitions intros EVERYTHING we may also be biased as barou lovers but still

DKSHXJSJZ I WILL ALWAYS DRAG YOU DOWN WITH ME DW 😜 you see the vision though…like wdym rin looking kinda fine rn…IMPOSSIBLE!! HAHA the isagi fisheye took me by surprise too i was like oh hello when it popped up ngl

LITERALLYYY i thought he was just making weird cute sound effects?? i was like okay…who are we trying to impress her buddy…but mimicking the air horn is so in character and funny it has me crying 😭 i love him sm that man has never taken anything seriously a day in his life

THE TABIEITA WAS SO GOOD BUT PLSSS i just know oaeu aiku and niko hop on ALL of the tik tok trends…imagine aiku teaching niko tik tok dances and niko introducing aiku to new brain rot terms as they release 😫 my goat duo fr

YAYYY brain rot sessions always go hard i’m happy i could’ve provided!! and AHH episode two super soon i’m hype!! can’t wait to see my favs back on screen

WHO ELSE WOULD IT BE BUT TABITO KARASU 🤩⁉️ i’m so attached to having a nagi theme though like he’s my baby…my shining star…my number one…my brand…but KARASU ugh i love him sm too it’s so hard 😭 decisions decisions

also unrelated but this request is taking sooo long the word count is kinda insane though 😰 HOPEFULLY tmrw will be the day it finally drops!!

[project1939]

100+ Films of 1952

Film number 109: The Big Trees 

Release date: February 5th, 1952 

Studio: Warner Bros. 

Genre: Western 

Director: Felix E. Feist 

Producer: Louis F. Edelman 

Actors: Kirk Douglas, Eve Miller, Patrice Wymore, Edgar Buchanan

Plot Summary: Jim Fallon is an ambitious huckster who sees an opportunity to log Redwoods when an amenable law is passed in California in 1900. Once there, he bumps up against a Quaker community who owns the land he desires, and they are adamant that the Redwood are never cut down. 

My rating (out of 5 stars): **3/4

This is a “some parts are interesting” and “some parts are ridiculous and bad” kind of film. I didn’t feel like it was a total waste to watch it, but it’s not one I would really recommend either. (Unless you’re someone with an interest in Redwood trees!) Minor spoilers ahead. 

The Good: 

Kirk Douglas. He is perfect as an anti-hero- charming, confident, and sleazy all at once. I almost didn’t want him to change his ways and turn into a good guy, because he’s much less interesting then. 

Giant Redwoods in real life. There was clearly some location shooting, and it was pretty cool. I only wish the print of the film was better. 

The character Yukon Burns- he was a loveable imperfect hero. 

The scene of a railroad bridge collapsing. It looked so impressive I’m not sure if they used models or if it was a full-size special effect.  It was probably models, but it was very effective.

Having an anti-hero/villain be the protagonist. I always enjoy it in films, even when I hate the character, which I definitely did here. 

Some of the music. I loved the opening theme. 

There were two really good scenes with the Redwoods- one where Jim was measuring the circumference of a tree and the camera tracked around it with him, and one where a guy showed the rings on a cross section and illustrated how far back in history they went. There was the invasion of England by Norman conquerors, Columbus discovering America, George Washington and the Declaration of Independance, Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, etc... 

Go Quakers! I love Quakers for being hundreds of years ahead of the Western world when it came to women’s rights and racial equality. They were strident abolitionists and committed pacifists. They don’t often appear explicitly in many Hollywood films, so I like that they got a nod here.  

The Bad: 

The plot could be very convoluted and hard to follow, especially in the beginning. I’m not someone who generally struggles with understanding the plots of films, so it got pretty frustrating at times. 

How many different documents can there possibly be in a movie? So much of the plot depended on different government papers- applications, land claims, contracts, state law, federal law, etc. If you like paperwork, here’s a little p*rn for you! 

There were moments that stretched believability to the point of distraction. 

The love story between Jim and Sister Chadwick. I was super pissed that she inexplicably fell in love with such a malevolent creep. 

Some of the music. As I said, I loved the main theme, but many times the non-diegetic music was way too heavy-handed. 

Quakers getting violent at the end. An unfortunate Hollywood trope is making the pacifist Quakers become violent at the climax of the film- see Friendly Persuasion for another example. Pacificism is always portrayed as a nice idea, but something that “real men” have to dispense with in a crisis. 

Was Jim’s turnaround believable? 

[themattress]

It seemed perfectly clear to me when I finally watched the first film that Todd Phillips held nothing but contempt for Arthur Fleck. He wasn't an anti-hero or tragic villain in Phillips' eyes: he was a pathetic sicko.

Phillips has been on record many times stating that while yes, he thinks Arthur is pathetic and not worth admiration or emulation, he does love him as a character and has sympathy for him. In fact, he loves him to a fault, which is why Folie a Deux insists on focusing on him rather than the Joker, retconning the ending of the previous movie where he became the Joker and then outright saying he never was the Joker (and never will be given what happens to him at the end). It's like reading The Killing Joke and becoming obsessed with this guy:

Arthur isn’t portrayed with empathy: we don’t get a sense for who he is besides “sad” & “unhinged.” He’s clearly creepy & unsettling even before he turns violent and the movie makes a point that his perspective isn’t trustworthy. His fictional condition is used to make him inhuman, not relatable.

I, and I suspect many others, didn't get that out of the movie at all. Until he turned violent, Arthur was being depicted with empathy: he needed help and the people and systems around him were failing him at every turn. Even after turning violent, he's still allowed a degree of sympathy with the revelation of his mother's abuse of him. That's not "inhuman"...like, at all.

The same is true of the film’s alleged social criticism about inequality and mental health treatment: the film portrays those who are angry at the system as, at best, delusional, and at worst nihilistic. Sure, Thomas Wayne is an asshole but he’s also normal. Neither Arthur nor his fans are.

People failed by the system turn angry and ultimately nihilistic, susceptible to mob violence and following false idols, and harming/killing the same ones upholding the system that failed them ("you get what you fucking deserve!")....how is that NOT a criticism? "Society must be better or it will be undone by monsters of its own creation" is a message that's been applied in plenty of works before. If you think it's invalid because said victims are shown turning into monsters, you are advocating for the teeth to be taken out of the message. It's very naive.

The closest the film has to a point of view is, IMO, Murray Franklin, the Johnny Carson like night show host who Arthur murders in the final act. He’s treated as a voice of reason and his derisive rejection of Arthur is treated as “calling it like he sees it:”

Except that Arthur clearly has a point when he calls Franklin out for being in a privileged bubble and not knowing how it's like beyond the confines of his studio, and how making fun of the powerless rather than the powerful wasn't a wise move. Franklin is clearly not a bad person, but he's not perfect and not meant to be the film's point of view. The film's real point of view, if it has any, is probably meant to be Arthur's psychiatrist ("They don't give a shit about people like you, Arthur. And they really don't give a shit about people like me, either.")

I think it’s perfectly clear in context Murray’s shock and dismay is supposed to be relatable while Arthur’s admission to enjoying killing is supposed to be monstrous

Yes, this is true. Almost like both characters have some solid points! Funny, huh?

The movie is about Arthur & so the fact that he’s such a vapid, uninteresting character means the film is also very hollow. Not only does it have little to say about mental illness or inequality but it also doesn’t have anything interesting to say about violent psychopaths.

It's a movie about a guy becoming the Joker. It honestly doesn't need to say anything other than "this is how he became the Joker". I think that's what most people wanted from it.

So it’s easy to see why people projected messages on to it the film doesn’t actually support: because there’s nothing actually going on underneath the surface, for all its obvious aspirations to “high cinema.” The movie gets by entirely on its trappings: it looks and feels like a 1970s Scorsese film and even if you haven’t seen Taxi Driver or The King of Comedy that lends it a uniqueness that makes it stand out. But scratch below that and there’s nothing there.

Spoken like a true film snob who doesn't know a thing about comic books.

Also can we talk about the homophobic trappings of Phoenix’s performance? I can’t be the only one who noticed the effeminate mannerisms and gay lilt Phoenix and Phillips gave Arthur nor the way his obsession at Murray Franklin reads as homoerotic.

His obsession with Franklin was not remotely homoerotic, it was quite blatantly presented in the movie as Arthur's longing for a father figure since he didn't have one in his life, which is also why he latched onto Thomas Wayne so strongly when he thought he could be his father.

And "effeminate mannerisms" has been something of a Joker thing for ages.

Also worth pointing out that the central villainy of Wayne, that he had an affair with Arthur’s mother and possibly fathered him, is revealed to be quite possibly all a delusion by said mother and not at all real.

Um, no. Not "quite possibly". Again, the movie was very blatant about the fact that it was a delusion and not at all real, that Wayne was not Arthur's father. Wayne wasn't meant to be a "villain" either - he was an arrogant, out-of-touch jerk, yes, but beyond that nothing he did was objectively wrong. Even him punching Arthur was him being a protective father over Bruce.

Nuance. Please....learn it.

The thing about Joker 2's mutual rejection of the first film's fandom is it seemed perfectly clear to me when I finally watched the first film that Todd Phillips held nothing but contempt for Arthur Fleck.

He wasn't an anti-hero or tragic villain in Phillips' eyes: he was a pathetic sicko.

The hysteria (which I participated in) about whether the film romanticized lonely angry men completely missed the point, as did fans of the film that claimed it was a sympathetic portrayal of mental illness or economic inequality: the film fit neither narrative.

Instead, Joker is a deeply cynical, almost voyeuristic film about watching someone who's already beneath contempt following an almost inevitable spiral into mindless violence, which the mob eats up because they're dumb sheeple.

Arthur isn't portrayed with empathy: we don't get a sense for who he is besides "sad" & "unhinged."* He's clearly creepy & unsettling even before he turns violent and the movie makes a point that his perspective isn't trustworthy. His fictional condition is used to make him inhuman, not relatable.

The same is true of the film's alleged social criticism about inequality and mental health treatment: the film portrays those who are angry at the system as, at best, delusional, and at worst nihilistic. Sure, Thomas Wayne is an asshole but he's also normal.** Neither Arthur nor his fans are.

The closest the film has to a point of view is, IMO, Murray Franklin, the Johnny Carson like night show host who Arthur murders in the final act. He's treated as a voice of reason and his derisive rejection of Arthur is treated as "calling it like he sees it:" Arthur is a terrible comedian.

Likewise, though this exchange has become memetic as a way of talking truth to power, I think it's perfectly clear in context Murray's shock and dismay is supposed to be relatable while Arthur's admission to enjoying killing is supposed to be monstrous.

The problem is... the movie is about Arthur & so the fact that he's such a vapid, uninteresting character means the film is also very hollow. Not only does it have little to say about mental illness or inequality but it also doesn't have anything interesting to say about violent psychopaths.

So it's easy to see why people projected messages on to it the film doesn't actually support: because there's nothing actually going on underneath the surface, for all its obvious aspirations to "high cinema."

The movie gets by entirely on its trappings: it looks and feels like a 1970s Scorsese film and even if you haven't seen Taxi Driver or The King of Comedy that lends it a uniqueness that makes it stand out.

But scratch below that and there's nothing there.

Ultimately, I'll admit to a certain schadenfreude with the second film bombing so terribly, because it honestly feels like what Todd Phillips' efforts deserve: a film where the only real ideas it had were that the mentally ill are contemptible and empathy is for the stupid.

*Also can we talk about the homophobic trappings of Phoenix's performance? I can't be the only one who noticed the effeminate mannerisms and gay lilt Phoenix and Phillips gave Arthur nor the way his obsession at Murray Franklin reads as homoerotic.

This, along with what I've read of Harley's (excuse me, "Lee's") portrayal in Folie a Deux gives me no sense that Phillips' contempt for Arthur has less to do with violent masculinity rather than a general abhorrence of the neurodivergent and those outside a straight, white male neurotypical POV.

**(Also worth pointing out that the central villainy of Wayne, that he had an affair with Arthur's mother and possibly fathered him, is revealed to be quite possibly all a delusion by said mother and not at all real.)

[mazeinthemiroh]

Can i ask for a txt headcanon with them as anti heroes?

txt as anti heroes

genre: headcanons; general, anti hero! au

warnings: none?

pls like and reblog if you enjoy! feel free to request anything <3

anti hero - a person who may lack conventional heroic qualities and attributes

soobin

the one who tries their best

soobin is a hero, in his own mind

when considering the technicals, he has sound morals and a smart head on his shoulders

but he lacks in confidence. he gets overwhelmed by self-doubt and is taunted by his own fears. and then he gets down about himself

perhaps he is not the most assertive person or the more confident person. doesn't mean he isn't a hero, right?

his main enemy is himself, really

he holds himself back from reaching his full potential. and then he beats himself up about it because he knows deep down he can do what needs to be done

yeonjun

the one who prioritises himself

he is looking out for one person and one person only

and that's himself

why should he bother helping others?

the only time he is likely to do things for other people or 'fight for justice' in any sort of way is if it is convenient to him

or, of course, if it benefits him in some way

for instance, he will help someone in a state of crisis if he has taken a romantic interest in them, in hopes they would be one over by his supposed 'gallantry'

and the worst part is, he gets away with it

and it doesn't help that he's drop-dead-gorgeous either

beomgyu

the circumstantial one

only becomes any sort of 'hero' when the responsibility is forced upon him

typically, he's minding his own business

sometimes he will do things that are morally wrong in order to achieve some sort of goal. and he will do it without any regrets

however, when a crisis arises and no one else is around to help, he is faced with a choice:

1) carry on with his day and pretend he hasn't noticed. or 2) actually be a hero

these circumstances force him to reluctantly take the role of a hero

at the end of the day, he is mostly morally-sound

taehyun

the one with a troubled past

taehyun does things as a consequence of his own trauma

this world has turned him pessimistic and cynical, slowly but surely. there is no wanderlust or joy in his life. or, at least, it is very rare.

he feels nothing about the world. his world has gone down a bleak and dismal spiral

his cynicism makes his own morals more clouded and grey

so when confronted with any sort of 'villain', he is ruthless. blinded by his dark past and his own strained and fragmented perception of the world around him, there is literally nothing left to lose

hueningkai

the confused one

hueningkai typically drifts to what the majority wants. he goes along with the crowd in fear of being different or standing out too much

he will go on with things even if he knows they are morally wrong

if he falls into a bad crowd, like a gang of some sort, he'd do things to convince the main gang members that he is one of them

overall easily influenced

however, before it goes too far, he has the courage to fight back against these influences and hold his own ground

proves to be extremely courageous, and his good morals are still flickering inside somewhere

[mikrokosmos]

Bruckner – Symphony no.7 in E Major (1883)

Every now and then I see a composer described as “you love em or hate em”, and the longer I listen to classical music and see how people talk about it, the more I think this attitude can be used for any artist. Especially since extreme opinions are algorithmically given the most attention, and our way of communicating our tastes is equally encouraged toward extremes and hyperbolic language. Nothing can be “just” good, or ok, or interesting, or flawed; it’s either the best, or the worst thing ever. But maybe that attitude is more for Netflix shows or the latest Hollywood movie than for classical music.

Anton Bruckner didn’t escape this mentality despite living nearly two hundred years before the digital era began. When he was alive, the divisiveness in the public discourse was due to living and working in Vienna while loving Wagner. Side note on the “War of the Romantics”; on the aesthetic side there was the disagreement between developing traditional forms (the side of Brahms, C. Schumann, & supporters) versus letting new views on harmony and subject matter dictate how to structure music (Liszt, Wagner, & supporters). But there was another significant side that isn’t always focused on; being supportive of Jews, or being anti-Semitic. Not only was Wagner a musical radical in the way he conceived of opera, musical time, and harmonic development, but he was also a vocal anti-Semite, and his general dogmatic way of insisting on his views for every other subject was just as strong when it came to his bigotry against Jews. Supporting Wagner’s side of the ‘war of the Romantics’ didn’t only mean to support the new music aesthetics; it also implied that you were part of a growing movement of anti-Semitic German nationalism.

I only bring this up because I can assume that the hostility that Bruckner faced from the ‘conservative’ side of Vienna – including the ‘villain’ of Bruckner’s life story, music critic Eduard Hanslick – is more understandable if the stakes are higher and more consequential than “the music was too long and I don’t get it”. Despite his love for Wagner, Bruckner was more akin to the Wagner fans today who enjoy the music while ignoring or outwardly dismissing the evil side of Wagner’s art. I recall a story about Bruckner (one of the many stories used to talk about his ‘simple’ personality) where he had attended Gotterdammerung, and was enthralled by the music from beginning to end but asked “why did they burn her at the end?”. The music was more compelling to him than the content of the opera’s plot.

That could explain Bruckner’s musical aesthetic; taking after Beethoven’s 9th, focus on abstract music as the source of drama, but expand the use of harmonies, drama, and volume as if it were a Wagnarian opera. Its why, to me (and other fans), Bruckner’s symphonies feel like an emotional or spiritual journey despite being abstract music with no “meaning”. It also is why I’ve avoided writing and posting about Bruckner before. Like Mahler, it’s hard to capture the music in words and articulate how I feel about what’s happening in the music, but I’ve covered all of Mahler’s symphonies because I’d loved him a lot more than I did Bruckner. Only recently has my view of Bruckner warmed from “I like him sometimes if I’m in the mood” to “I love him and can’t get enough”.

Really by accident, or fate, I decided to listen to this symphony again two weeks ago, and Bruckner finally ‘clicked’ with me. I’d first heard him by picking up a few cds from my library, and putting him on in the background while I played old video games (in this case, Age of Empires 2). I thought he was epic, but hard to sit through and unless I was in a “Lord of the Rings” mood, I didn’t want to listen. A few weeks ago, Richard Atkinson came out with a video on Bruckner 6, which made me want to listen to him again. I decided to listen to the 7th again, and I finally connected with Bruckner’s soundworld.

One more note before going into the 7th; another reason Bruckner’s music was criticized in his life; it was for a relatively conservative orchestra where each section is noticeable. But that was because Bruckner was not trying to blend colors in an ‘orchestral’ way, but rather how one would write for the organ, which was his main instrument. So when we hear a Bruckner symphony, we are hearing the sounds he created for church services magnified through an orchestra, a kind of recreation of ‘sacred’ music but in a secularized context where one doesn’t have to think about any specific doctrine or view of the divine, instead you experience a sublime connection that is more uniquely ‘your own’. This is one example of how music was being treated as a replacement religion in Europe after the Enlightenment.

The opening movement of the 7th to me feels like a sunrise with the slow unveiling of the main melody. which rises in an arpeggio that evokes the drone prelude to Das Rhinegold. From this comes a seemingly endless melody that gradually develops with a group of themes played through. Long songlike melodies are rare for Bruckner’s opening movements – usually he uses motivic patterns – so the multiple distinct melodies in this work helped to give it the unofficial nickname “Lyric”. As the music builds tension we see another example of why some ‘hate’ Bruckner: intense build ups are created, but instead of climaxing they ‘stop’ and start over. After this first bursting episode, we get a dance-melody that, to me, sounds the most like “organ music”. Bruckner picks these melodies apart into his own way of development; counterpoint and modulation. In a way, bringing Bach and Schubert together. Every Bruckner opening movement ends with a grand coda where the music reaches its most extreme height, finally bringing us the climax we’d been denied by the previous build ups. Here it is only the first part of the opening melody, the rising arpeggio, over a long pedal point, and the volume and scope of the music rises with it into a transcendental glow of sound.

The adagio is the most famous movement of the work because it also has a long passionate melody, here in the minor and with darker colors from the use of Wagner tubas. Bruckner wrote this movement knowing that Wagner was dying, and it is like a musical memorial to him. That may sour the music for a lot of people, but it could be better to think of it as music in memorial of other music, for its own sake, and not for any toxic ideologies. This movement has two main melodies; a somber melody with unexpected modulations, and a bittersweet melody that tries to be uplifting. This movement is unique for a Bruckner symphony in having a cymbal clash, which was rumored to have been added to the score the moment Bruckner had heard the news of Wagner’s death. But that story isn’t true, the actual story is that a friend told him he should use a cymbal instead of a triangle for that moment. As usual, the more interesting ideas stick around to form a kind of mythos over music that we love.

The scherzo movement, again following Beethoven’s lead, is thunderous. The main melody is based on arpeggiated open fifths falling downward, and when the full orchestra blasts it, it feels like being under a cascading wave. Again, the writing is organ-like in the colors in the sections as they contrast each other like hands and feet over the keyboards and pedals. The trio makes me think of the kinds of ‘schmaltzy’ Viennese dances that would come up in Mahler’s symphonies, just one example of how Bruckner influenced Mahler’s style.

The last movement makes me think of the symphony as being symmetrical: the first half was made of two long movements, one bright and transcendent in the major, the other darker and tragic in the minor. The second half is made of two shorter and livelier movements that have the same major/minor characters. Here, the finale is a dance that opens with the violins playing the main melody, followed by a counter melody that’s more for rhythm than humming along. These ideas play in counterpoint in the winds until dying down in the strings, introducing a softer group of melodies. Later a large wave of unison octaves play out across the full orchestra, an inversion of the opening dance melody. This movement is in arch form, where the order of melody groups plays again in reverse order (1, 2, 3, 2, 1), though melodic ideas are used repeatedly, in the Bruckner fashion of breaking up motivic blocks. As with his other mature symphonies, the movement ends with another grand coda, where the arpeggio of the opening melody to the whole symphony returns, and reveals that the main theme of the final movement is based on this melody.

Movements:

Allegro moderato

Adagio: Sehr feierlicht und sehr langsam

Scherzo: Sehr schnell - Trio: Etwas langsame

Finale: Bewegt, doch nicht schnell

[demonsfate]

An interesting theory someone posed on Reddit. I find it to be plausible. But honestly, I don’t think this is it. I don’t blame Kazuya, but instead I blame Lars (which I do enjoy Lars mind you, he can’t help what the writers did to Jin) because I’ve seen this pattern happen so many times in media - especially comics.

Jin suffered from Character Assassination™️ Think about it. This was the first game in which they introduced a brand spankin new protagonist since Jin’s debut. Obviously, Jin would be a protag that would easily be compared to Lars - and some fans may not like it, some fans may get into debates on why Jin’s the better protag. What best way to steer clear of this and hype the new MC up? By ruining the old MC. If the old MC is now a horrible, horrible person who lost all his compassion, and tells people to die constantly, and is the result of a million deaths - then no one’s going to like him anymore. Therefore, it’s no competition that Lars is the better MC for a fresh new start. I feel this is even more obvious with the eye-rolling Alisa “death” scene. The infamous one where I keep laughing at how unnecessarily, and uncharacteristically cruel Jin is about a frickin’ robot’s shut down. That scene was BLATANTLY written to get both Lars (our new MC) and the audience furious at Jin and his behavior. It was BLATANTLY trying to write Jin as hateable as they can - especially when the robot girl in question is this perfect waifu material girl who is very sweet, very pastel design, and agrees with everything MC does. It doesn’t matter how it makes no sense for Jin to behave this way, how much the fans know Jin wouldn’t behave this way because this goes against everything his character was, what mattered is Jin’s now an irredeemable asshole and we have a shiny new protagonist. Don’t think too much about it.

The only reason why they made Jin a “plot twist” anti-hero(? if you can even call him that) is because they realized they already did this shit with Kazuya. And Jin in this game was already far too much like Kazuya. Therefore, it makes him a little different. A little more “surprising.” (Except with Jin, it wasn’t surprising at all when the writing is pulled out of their asses and it falls apart once you really start analyzing Jin and what the character is supposed to be)

Character assassination is a common ploy and marketing trick by companies when it comes to media - a way to either trick the audience into loving a Brand New Character, or to get rid of a character they simply got bored of / no longer like. As I said above, it happens so often in comics, but it can happen to any long ongoing story regardless what type of media it is.

Of course, it’s safe to say they’ve realized their mistakes. While Jin was absent in TK7 for the most part, he was set up to be the main protagonist again in TK8, and many of his more antagonistic intros/win animations were removed in TK7. And Harada, recently, has even acknowledged that yeah, he noticed how most of the fans didn’t like Jin being an “almost” villain.

Now I don’t know if this is it or not - I could even go as far to say it is both, to make Jin feel more like Kazuya so they can get their sweet, sweet mishima asshole money because Heihachi and Kazuya do so well, and to also hype up new MC at the same time. But I strongly believe it was to hype up the new MCs (Alisa, and especially Lars) It just makes the most sense when you think about it.

[ruby-whistler]

There are three types of misinterpretation of c!Dream in my opinion; and by that I mean anyone's take ever, whether it's a c!Dream anti or a c!Dream apologist or a c!Dream enthusiast. That's right, I'm making an essay about how in my mind everyone is wrong. This is how I lead debates please don't unfollow me-

1. misunderstanding or overdramatizing evidence

c!Dream apologists; g-guys. I'm not saying he isn't traumatized, but look. I really used to believe he was just everyone's victim and hurt and mentally unstable, and I'm not saying he isn't at all, but I changed my mind because I feel like the evidence doesn't,, point that way at all. Your emotions are valid, but your takes are very removed from what the rest of the fandom thinks because you take little hints and try to make them into some big angsty point within canon.

The evidence we have proves he is more ruthless than anything; even the content creator says that. He doesn't say why he does progressively more ruthless things, and he does say it's for his ideals and out of good intentions, but he doesn't say anything about him being hurt into doing it.

I'm not saying he isn't hurt. But making analysis of an entire character based on something that is barely supported by canon isn't the way I roll and I feel like it's one of the reason why people assume all c!Dream apologist are going to woobify the character,, because some of them really do that.

I don't mind portraying him as hurt by what's happened in canon, because that is a completely safe conclusion, but jumping to the victim side of the scale seems a little bit like painting a completely different picture than what actual canon says. (Note: talking about pre-Pandora c!Dream here.)

There is tragedy in someone being driven by the environment, circumstances and themselves deeper and deeper into corruption, but it feels like by only considering that the entire character is limited to one side of the argument.

I like to also see the side of him that will hurt people because he thinks he has to, because he wants to succeed above all, the side that will ruthlessly murder and manipulate and be calculative and clever and even self-destructive about it because he believes that'll get him towards his ultimately selfless goal.

That's my morally complex bastard.

A lot of people seem to be mistaking or ignoring that for the sake of saying he is just... hurt and that that is an explanation of his actions, and even though they don't use it as an excuse, it feels a little cheap.

And here we come to the core of the problem: an emotional vs. rational explanation for the character's actions.

Because the thing is, with enough evidence, you will see that nearly (we'll get to that in a bit) everything he does can be explained rationally. Everything is connected, everything is the most logical and efficient and merciless route straight from point A to point B, because c!Dream is fascinatingly smart when you look deeper into it.

He knows what he's doing. He knows his actions are awful, and he doesn't care - not because he would be some evil person, but because his mindsets cause him to justify such things, and mindsets are more complicated than feelings.

There is a lot to explore in that direction of the character, but that is material for another essay.

In short, people seem to enjoy removing all of his agency in favor of explaining his actions emotionally rather than from a rational standpoint which results in inaccurate analysis.

Do I think it is completely understandable he attacked L'Manberg?

Absolutely.

Do I think c!Wilbur painted him as a villain to benefit his own power?

Yes.

Do I think he utilized the villain persona as an intimidation tactic and often went overkill with no regard for anything but accomplishing his goals and that he slowly became more and more willing to do bad things of his own accord because he became determined and distrusting of the world to the point of committing horrible actions?

100%.

Analysing that part of the character is the most interesting part, when you consider it - and an important one as well.

2. ignoring evidence

c!Dream antis; please. Stop saying he doesn't care or explaining his actions with obsession or assigning him personality traits or motives that he literally doesn't have in order to demonize him I beg of you.

It's so many basic and easily debunkable assumptions that can be explained with what we actually know of his motives. People will ignore both canon and the authors' words to paint him as some monster with no nuance, which he is not.

We only know so much about him, but people will ignore and deny even the little bit we have for the sake of making him the literal personification of evil and erasing the fact that he is a complex and human character. Just accept he can be accurately analysed beyond hate and let people do it if you don't want to do so yourself.

3. assuming the evidence we have is everything you need to determine a final approach and that nothing outside of the presented evidence exists when certain details prove otherwise

c!Dream enthusiasts; this was the only and biggest problem I've had since being introduced to much more rational interpretations of the character - which is emotions, and one of the biggest reasons why c!Dream gets dehumanized in the first place; the fact that we have little to no showcase or explanation of them in canon.

You see, c!Dream is a reserved character. He likes withholding his plans, withholding his feelings and information from the world.

However, since all we can really get out of watching his actions alone is the rational side (and that is deliberate by both the writer and the character, narratively and personality-wise) people slowly begin to assume there is no emotional side to his actions at all.

Which I find,, untrue. Between the people who erase the rational side of the character and those who erase the emotional side, there is little middle ground, but I don't really find either of them right either.

Because neither would be an accurate representation; just because he doesn't actively showcase his feelings doesn't mean he doesn't have them, and the few inconsistencies that are too small a detail for us to put everything together show that he does have an inner emotional world beyond what we see.

The character does work beyond what we know, and expecting that everything can be explained purely by rationality because that's all we see of him seems a little bit jumping the gun.

It leads to a less person-like view of a character who in reality simply doesn't like showing people the way he feels, and I don't really find that fair to him. It is best to accept there are things we can't say for sure, or to say an emotional interpretation can also be valid at times.

It is both important not to deny him agency and not to deny him the ability to be genuinely hurt by others or changed by his environment.

Both of these can coexist, especially in

the correct interpretation

Ok this is a joke.

I have literally no idea. I'm just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks - he confuses me beyond belief. The only person who knows about both the emotional and rational side of the character enough to have their interpretation unquestioned is cc!Dream - but when we do try to find answers, it is important for us as well that we do not ignore any aspects or possible aspects of the character, because that is the only way to get useful results out of our analysis.

Sorry this was crit of basically every take about the character I have ever seen but I needed to get my thoughts out.

[balillee]

my unpopular dsmp opinions, some of which genuinely should be popular

c!dream has crossed the moral event horizon and is irredeemable. once you cross that threshold, you're no longer a 'morally grey' character.

pre-recorded, heavily produced lore killed the lore. it was cool, sure, but you completely misunderstand the magic that the smp had when people watched it initially. the story is improv and that's how we like it. we can tell the cc's have lost interest in it, you can admit that to us, we'll understand, just stop lying to me.

c!dream's pov isn't necessary to understand his character or his motivations. if you've watched literally any c!primeboys stream he's basically spelled it out for you.

i don't understand how fans can dislike l'manberg or have claimed to be against it since the beginning. i honestly don't get it. what's so bad about wanting your own spot where you make your own rules and skirt accountability that has been used to technically oppress you before - and, before someone who never saw the earlier streams tries to disagree with this, the og l'manberg crew were imprisoned for shit that everyone else on the server was practically encouraged to do. also, what do you have against fun and happiness?

i think some of you forget that 'hybrids' aren't a thing, discounting c!ranboo. there's no piglin hybrids, c!techno is just a pig. there's no avian hybrids, c!phil is just a man with wings. there's no creeper hybrids, c!sam is just a creeper who's indecently exposed from the hips down. canonically there's no hybrids, and therefore no hybrid discrimination. people ran with that concept too much.

the loss and the fanon rewriting of the early lore up until pogtopia has ruined fandom perception of c!dream and the og l'manberg boys. c!tommy is more morally white than you think he is, and c!dream has always been a villain - he massacres and he kills and he destroys and he schemes and he always has broken his own rules. no wonder the boys wanted their own space after how they were treated.

i think ranboo oftentimes forgets his own lore. he brings stuff up that c!ranboo may have done, such as exploding the community house to frame c!tommy, holding onto Cat, and it goes absolutely nowhere. we've gotten all of these developments in his story but they have never been expanded on, and we're nowhere closer to figuring out his relationship to c!dream and what his other side is and honestly i see no hope that we'll be any closer to knowing even by the end of the year.

your characters don't all have to be morally grey for the story itself to be morally grey. this is fiction - some people can be nothing but evil and others can be nothing but good. being purely good or evil doesn't mean that you're one dimensional, either.

c!dream apologists have ruined c!dream for me. he's not a good person. how about you let me enjoy a villain for who he actually is, rather for than your percieved woobified ragdoll you pass off as c!dream.

the story was better when there was a central writer. it was brilliant back when wilbur wrote it to be that the environment drives the characters and the story, and it was really good in early s2 up until techno's execution day when it was more character driven. since then, the amount of autonomy people have over their characters without any central 'director', as it were, has been a detriment to the story overall. there needs to still be one overarching figure or director or writer.

not everyone is a main character. just because they have a pov, doesn't mean they're a main character. some characters have such little impact on the overall plot and describing everyone as a main character oversaturates the story and makes some characters seem more important than they are.

the egg lore had so much potential up until it didn't. all that built up threat that we were expecting and we still don't even know what the egg wants really other than just controlling people. does it hatch?

genuinely, if there's no major plot developments by the end of the year (and let's be honest, it's a very big possibility at this point), a few of the more prominent members of the server should do a podcast style stream talking about where the story would have gone, because at least then we would have gotten somewhat closer to a conclusion.

c!techno is a villain and an asshole and a bad person. he stops caring for people once their interests don't align with his or if they look at him funny. he makes meta-jokes about his own tyrannical and oppressive nature. stop taking that away from him. he's a bad person. cc!techno does a fabulous job portraying that in a comedic manner and the balancing of him being a deeply flawed person with deeply flawed morals and ideas with his comedically-portrayed stubbornness and lack of willingness to hear out opposing viewpoints is incredible. i want to like characters who are arseholes for the sake of being arseholes, and who refuse to take into account the hurt they've caused either out of self-righteousness or because they don't care, so let me. he's the anti-peacemaker, LET ME HIM ENJOY HIM FOR THAT!!!!

i think tommy and wilbur's way of doing lore is my favourite. relies heavily on improv, voice acting, sprite acting and facial expressions. really shows off the acting props and they pull off the emotional moments well for the insanity of the creative medium.

i'm not a fan of fan-music. i find songs about media i'm into difficult to listen to. coincidentally i'm also not a fan of shit like slam poetry or live music/musicals/pantomimes.

the death of l'manberg killed people's motivation to go on the server casually. i've talked about it more in depth before, but destroying what was a central, driving environment for the story killed momentum and motivation. imagine in an episode of she-ra, the princess alliance just nuke the freight zone and all of the members of the horde just have to deal with it. that would be shit.

until season 3 has some momentum, i'm counting the end of the smp as january 20th. that had a conclusion. season 3 has... whores, technoblade and tommyinnit. that's about it.

i wasn't a fan of the development of c!tubbo joining las nevadas. i preferred snowchester and the walled city conflict. give c!tubbo some backbone and some badassery. also tubbo where's the fucking nuke bro if you're shelving that plotline just tell us on like an alt stream what the plan was i beg

add like 2 or 3 new people to the server so that michael mcchill has someone to talk to and so that there's something always happening on the server. it gives the og's more motivation to return if things are happening in and out of canon and it'll help with momentum, and who knows? maybe they can write their own story/stories.

i really think that c!sam is an underrated character. he's multilayered, extremely interesting, and the dichotomy of his loyalty to his job and how far down the rabbithole that's taken him versus the genuine love he has for his friends that drives him to do what he does out of wanting to do right by them is brilliant. i don't talk about c!sam enough.

STOP HAVING FUCKING VILLAIN ARCS!!! I'M FUCKIN SICK OF IT!!!! i want to see more characters who see everyone else being absolute selfish, abhorrent cunts and go 'if nobody else is going to be a good person, i fucking will'. GIVE ME SOME MORAL WHITENESS!!! IT'S INTERESTING AND MORALLY GOOD CHARACTERS ARE FUN!!!

let tommyinnit build cobblestone towers. everyone bullied him too much for how ugly they were and the one he built outside of the prison looked genuinely really nice. it gives the boy something to do.

i'm a fan of the revive book and the canon lives system. don't ask me why, but i think it might just be the morbidity of it. it adds to c!dream's god complex persona, and i think the fragility of death itself is a really fun concept. not enough fan cc's have made connections with that and c!mumza, and it could make for cool fanfic.

ranboo your house is fucking ugly. it's an eyesore

c!niki, and to some extent now c!jack and c!fundy, are boring me and ruining my mood. i think c!jack is the closest to being an actually interesting sympathetic villain, mainly because nobody else seems to realise that c!niki is a villain. not a good one imo, but she's a villain. c!jack just has the problem of starting a new project over and over and over and over again and because of the slow in momentum for the primary cast, there hasn't been a lot of recent development for him.

not really a dream smp opinion, but if philza went full geordie accent, i would love it. i want him to, in canon, say shit like 'me n ye' instead of 'me and you' and use geordie dialect. i want him to be physically unintelligible because it's funny.

i don't really know what's up with c!foolish but i think he's a dumbass. he had a while to think about c!q's proposal and then changed his mind about joining the guy to admitted to letting him die just because. moron

i wish there was more c!eret lore. i wish he was an actual king with an actual kingdom and actual subjects and royal advisors. c!eret is far too fucking cool to be the king of nothing and nobody. fatten up the kingdom and the castle with people who work with c!eret, and don't just make it tyrannical and dictator-y to prove the point of the server's 'anarchists'. make it a healthy working environment, please - if you want moral greyness, have 'anarchists' who claim to care about the welfare of the server oppose a kingdom of happy people under a fair and just ruler because their ideologies clash.

the server needs more characters who oppose anarchy in more peaceful ways, or passively wish for systems to be a part of. i think a chaos vs order conflict ending only in mutual understanding where everyone understands that they should just leave each other alone would slot nicely into the story that's been created so far.

you need to have watched all of the previous arcs to understand the story. i've seen people argue that they don't need to know about earlier lore to understand the prison, but that's the equivalent of only watching the final season of pretty little liars and expecting to understand the context of what's going on.

some characters aren't that morally grey. some characters, take c!tommy for example, are definitely on the whiter side for the morality scale, he's just an asshole. he's abrasive and rude and a dickhead but he also doesn't agree with terrorism, he's patriotic, he strives for a better world, he's apologetic, but he's also a fucking BITCH.

you can add onto this if you want, but not if you're a c!dream apologist. nobody likes your opinions

[robin-nightwing-agent37]

I completely agree with you on the Nightwing solos. I’m sick of certain writers nerfing Dick in the name of  “nostalgia” when really all it is, is fanservice to a  particular minority of DC consumers who dont venture beyond the DCU/DC cartoons.

I miss the days where villains like Deathstroke would show how brilliant and strategic and epic Nightnight is as both a fighter and a hero. I always loved reading comics where Deathstroke was involved in the plot as either a begrudging ally or the main antagonist because he always pushed Dick. In all aspects.

We didn’t get a bubble headed idiot as we seen in recent solos, we got someone who was challenged mentally, morally, and physically. It made Dick’s character, as well as the plot, interesting and refreshing.

Dick and Slade have always had that certain type of chemistry, that particular brand of respect/hate partnership and rivalry, that made those comics the best and most intense.

I always loved that rough, obsessive, almost dark side of Dick (omg but not in the whole “Ric” way bs) that Slade, and other villains or anti-heroes brought out in Dick.

It brought so much depth and realism to his character, as well as making the goofy, witty and yes, sometimes ridiculously daring side of Dick all that more loveable. Dick is only second to Superman when it comes to being the most approachable and trusting hero. He’s also seen and referred to as Batman’s light. It’s a great character trait for Dick. And I love it.

But making him that goofy hero 24/7 as these Nightwing solos have been doing as of late really devalues that aspect of his character and makes his character boring, ridiculous, and overall cheap.

I just wish the fans and the writers would take Nightwing more seriously these days.

I love including Deathstroke as one of Dick's main re-occurring villains! Because the history between the two is just so amazing and deep and it's criminal not to explore it. Deathstroke being admirable of Dick's skill set, but still hating him is always an interesting idea to me. I don't like it when Deathstroke is portrayed as friendly or willing to team up with Dick. I want straight animosity between the two characters. I again always loved the idea of Dick being more rough around the edges and very stoic. Like a cross between Captain America and Aragorn almost lol TBH, I prefer Dick to be described outside of being the light to batman's darkness. Dick is more than just a batman side character and at this point, his mythos should reflect that. He is charismatic, approachable, and trustworthy. But he is also isn't perfect. He can be mean, overbearing, and selfish at times as well. Goofy and incompetent, he is not. I'm fine with exploring Dick's more laid back non-serious side, but that should only come out when he is just enjoying himself with some friends during a night out or something. Not when he is trying to get rid of a deadly criminal.

I think writers DO take Nightwing seriously, it's just there isn't much to do with Nightwing at the same time. Most stuff created for Nightwing gets given away to other characters. Most of his best personality traits and skillets have already been given to Barbara Gordon and Tim Drake respectively, since the 90s.

I don't think Dick will ever be allowed to truly be different and great until he is away from both Titans and Batfam tbh both those parts of the DC world kind of hold Dick back. He is blending in, instead of standing out with those two groups. I think Dick needs new content to interact with. Remember, it took creating an entirely new property (New Teen Titans) and mantle (Nightwing) for Dick for him to become popular in the first place. It'll probably need to happen again. It took Batman almost 40 years to actually gain traction as a character and even then; it wasn't until after Killing Joke (1988) that Batman became the powerhouse he is today. So Nightwing still has lots of time to play catch up.