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mcrmadness · 4 years ago

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Rambling about my (dä fan)art...

I was writing another post and this kinda got out of hand and turned into me talking about my art overall. I’m gonna put this under the cut because I don’t know if people are interested in my art nor especially in my thought about it and my “art history” basically, but if you are, then I hope you enjoy.

And yes, this is gonna be about my die ärzte fanart mainly!

So let’s start with the HELL coverart drawing because that’s what I was talking about originally:

I’m extremely happy with how the drawing turned out in the end and I like that feeling of success when I’m happy with something I have created. That is not always self-evident with myself. More than often I have plain hated my drawings or have felt like there should be something done differently, or something that I could always improve at and do better. So this feeling where I’m actually content and happy with what I have created is something new and different. I have a dopamine rush every time I look at that drawing. I like the drawing. I think it looks nice. And I’m extremely happy about this fact and I am not afraid of admitting it. Perfectionism is a curse and a gift. It can sometimes make your life a living hell when something that is perfectly good still feels like it’s not enough. When everyone else sees that what you have done is actually good or even great but your brain just keeps repeating how it’s shit and everyone else is just delusional and that they don’t see what you see. And this is like the polar opposite of that feeling. It wasn’t other people who were delusional, it was you and youself all along. You were the one seeing the image in your head and the drawing not matching that image. Other people saw only what you had created and couldn’t compare it to anything. And that doesn’t mean it was never good.

So whenever I do these comics and comic style drawings nowadays, I just feel so happy. I feel that I am no longer failing them, I feel like I can draw the image I see in my head. I finally feel like I can draw, I have some skills, I’m not a professional and maybe not as good as everyone else but I’m good at what I’m doing. This is my thing and I’m good at it and it’s enough. And I love it when I feel like I’m improving. For years I felt like I was stuck, like my skills would have been glitching somehow, I didn’t get better no matter how much I drew. But I guess I tried too much and was too harsh on myself because I believed that a drawing is good only when no reference photos have been used. And I sucked at drawing without them. I still do! I was staring at the Hell coverart the whole time I was drawing! I wouldn’t have been able to do this if I didn’t! And this feels particularly good also because this is the first time I have tried something different with these comics. I have never tried to draw a photo or existing picture with this style. I have only drawn my comics and those I have created all by myself. The clothes come from what I have seen in videos and photos but the plots are created by me alone, with a idea coming from somewhere actual usually, as inspirations do.

For comics I do look at reference photos of people sitting or standing, or I look at the mirror, or even take photos of my own hand to be able to draw something. And that’s lots of fun and also challenging because I’m mixing there my old habit of portrait drawing with my less serious comic book style but I really really do like the combination. It also makes me feel that I am memorizing what I draw and the next time when I need to draw that same posture, I no longer need the reference photos because they’re no in my brain. And in my muscle memory. My hand remembers how to do the lines now.

Here you can see one of the sketches I did in 2018 - I had this image in my head and I wanted to draw it and I just... drew it in my sketchbook. Didn’t use pencil. But now I’ve noticed I like doing these on proper paper instead of the sketchbook AND it’s so much more fun to first draw the sketch with the pencil and then draw on it with the fineliners. That I have always done with the comics (apart from one) because they take more time than these quick sketches. But here you can see Farin’s legs on the first image - I think I might have looked at reference photos for that but then it was so much easier to do the to the comic I made in 2019.

I have now also figured out that a big part of my style is not to draw just simple straight lines. I like making those sketch-like lines even with the marker. They look more rough but that’s something I like seeing with my art. That’s what I was missing when I was staring at the lines I had drawn before and hated every detail of them. They were too clean and neat.

^These two I have also drawn on my sketchbook in 2018 and I don’t really know why. I guess I was still a bit stupid and didn’t really realize I’m drawing again. But anyway, they both were inspired by my own fanfiction I have written a long time ago. It’s one of my favorite self-written fanfics and it had these two scenes I just saw in my head and felt like I could try drawing them. Maybe that’s why they are in my sketchbook, I wasn’t sure if they were going to turn out even good... The marker around the second one obviously was shit and the paper wasn’t good for it, and I never finished with it so it looks a bit weird. Do I need to say that I really enjoy drawing very small, repetative details, like those tiles? It’s so soothing, almost like a therapy.

I think that quitting antidepressants in 2013 has done so much good for my creativity. If you compare my work from 2011 to 2019, the difference is huge - all are just parts from my comics:

Can you guess see the difference? But have to admit I am jealous for myself for how I have drawn Farin’s hair to the 2011 one and maybe have forgotten to color Farin’s arm but... I actually had so long pause from drwing (~8 years) that I forgot how I did that and had to use THAT as a reference when I was trying to draw late 80s Farin’s at some point last or this year :D

Anyway, my style with the shadows is a little different when I use colored pencils than when I use markers. This is from my latest comic from this year, where I experimented with Promarkers the way I had never done before and I really like how it came to be:

I have owned this set of Promarkers (black + 5 greys) for years and have never really used them, apart from the black which I usually used for the thick lines anyway. And wanted to see if I could find some use for the greys too! (Yes that’s Bela back there - this comic was an alternative ending for Für Immer music video :D)

And I wanna end this post with a face progress comparison for all three. During this I also noticed that before I used to draw their side profiles and it was really difficult to find images where I’d have drawn from from the front. And nowadays I have mainly drawn them from the front and it’s hard to find side profiles! Interesting! Here’s one of Farin and Bela from a drawing I made this year:

Also the hand that was so much fun to draw but I also took photos of my own hand in that posture in order to even draw that - that was fun! :D

But here are the last three images - using the HELL one as the last for each, of course:

Bela has always been the easiest to draw. And the first one of these three is actually from my first ever Bela&Farin comic! I didn’t color their skin back then. With the next ones I already did color their skins too but I used darker colors to do the shadows. Nowadays I do the shadows with fineliners. Or it depends - that 2019 one doesn’t have that lol.

Damn it was so difficult to find something where I’d have draw Farin from the front :D And I see the HELL one literally is my second (or third) time drawing Farin with his grin. Or if you count all those numerous extra mouths I drew because I failed the first one, then I have drawn his grin at least 15 times by now. I probably can draw his teeth with no reference photos from now on.

I haven’t drawn Rod too many times. I can actually count about... 5 times? And then there’s only 2 times when I’ve drawn his side profile but he’s at the background. I don’t know if I’ve ever really succeeded at that, I usually try to draw his head a more round and his eyes smaller than for Bela and Farin and I was actually bit worried for the HELL one and was wondering if I’m going to ruin the whole thing. But in fact, that was actually easiest of them to draw. And STILL I’m surprised by how alike he looks in that last one. In fact, I think his dacial features are perfect for a carricature drawing so you don’t need to do more than a few lines for the mouth and it looks like his mouth. The middle one was for a drawing I made for a friend and with this I actually looked at photos so that I could draw some of his hairstyles from the 90s and I liked this one the best and it was also quite easy to draw too.

Do I even have to say that I’m not extremely motivated what comes to drawing? I feel like my creative has become what it has never been before. I still don’t really know what to draw but I just feel that whatever it is I’ll start next, it will be good. And if it doesn’t... who cares? I had so much fun with those extra mouths of Farin which was maybe visible from the video I filmed, and that is what makes drawing worth it. Before I took the drawing process so seriously and a mistake felt like the end of the world but now I laugh at them and make fun of them and don’t take them too seriously. And I always have ways to fix these, or I can redraw. Just like I did with Farin’s mouth (or a half of his face actually) for this newest drawing. The most important thing is that I’m having fun and enjoying what I do, that way usually the outcome will also be a success.

I have now at least 2 dä comics on my to-do list (I don’t remember if there’s a third one too) + one pencil drawing that is halfway there. It will take one more night/day for it to get it finished. I also have probably 5 ideas for self-comics etc. in my sketchbook and I try to find some time to work on those. Or actually I have a plenty of time. Adhd, time blindness and executive dysfunction just make it feel as if I didn’t :D Can’t wait to get working on my next drawing projects, tho!

(I wish I knew how to make art for a living even but that’s a topic that will need its own post which I’m probably do in a near future if I don’t forget :D)

#mcrmadness’ art talk #mcrmadness draws #the post has lots of text but also quite a many images #dä fanart #die ärzte #I have been drawing dä comics since 2010 - the old ones are very stupid but whatever :D #long post

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fatedfuturist · 5 years ago

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things about my interpretation of tony stark. updated june 07, 2020.

here’s my exhaustive explanation for how i am not canon-compliant with the events and characterization of the mcu.

the reason for this is… well, there are several reasons, but i don’t want to stir shit up or just, in general, stomp on anyone else’s love for the mcu. and don’t get me wrong— i do love the mcu! but there are parts i’m critical of for personal reason, as we all have opinions on certain things. bc, yeah, you can love something, or someone, and still be logically critical about it or them.

anyway, here’s where my interpretation differs…

as per stated on my rules: i take inspiration for tony from multiple sources, including the mcu, marvel comics, the television show: avengers assemble, and my own personal headcanons. TONY IS ALSO ASIAN (SPECIFICALLY CHINESE) AMERICAN!!

i will admit that saying this isn’t particularly helpful if people don’t know, specifically, where i differ in terms of my interpretation of our dumbass genius. some of this info is scattered about on my blog, but here, it’s all consolidated into one post.

chen kun is my face claim, and i do use stuff from tony’s story from the mcu as a base. however, there are events and moments from the movies, that i selectively ignore due to personal preference; and then i build on top of my foundation with ideas, themes, and/or events from other sources such as the aforementioned sources listed above.

throwing this all under a read more because, like i said: exhaustive list. very. very. very fucking long. i’m serious– read at your own risk.

howard stark was an extremely abusive and absent father for all of tony’s childhood; tony did actively seek attention and approval from howard because he was rather aware of how famous he was and wanted the acceptance and validation from his dad; there wasn’t much shown in the mcu regarding his relationship with his father, but my inspiration for his father-son relationship comes from the comics;

an example of his verbal abuse: “you don’t want to be a sissy, now do you? stark men are made of iron!” (Iron Man, 1968);

an example of early exposure to alcohol: at age five, howard forced a drink into tony’s hand (which he did drink), stating that it would teach him “to be a man,” and that it’d “put hair on your chest” (Iron Man, 1968);

yes, this means that tony ‘forgiving’ howard in endgame is completely chucked out the window;

tony loses his parents the night of december 16, 1996 (not 12/16/1991), at the age of seventeen;

jarvis, the family butler, was more of a father to tony than howard ever was, and yes, this is why he names his first fully-functioning AI system jarvis;

tony was close with his mother, maria; she was his safehouse, and she taught him to be gentle and loving, and she also taught him the piano, which tony still periodically practices during his own time in private. in an avengers assemble episode, there is a piano in the tower that tony protects twice, which i reckon is because it has connections to his past with maria;

tony ain’t an old grandpa. i don’t see him being older than, like, 35–40 in the present time for my writing (chen kun is 44). this comes from comic and avengers assemble inspiration, which has been fairly ambiguous since they never mention his age. for plotting purposes in the mcu though, yes, he can be like 42–52 if needed.

tony is, by default, single unless otherwise stated. the reason for this is simply because i’m not big on tony / pepper in the mcu, and it’s not because i don’t like pepper (i love her as a character as an individual), but i just saw that the way they were written (so, this, yes, blames the mcu writers) was completely trash; they sort of redeemed it in endgame, but... in general, they had a lot of potential but then some writing choices pretty much ruined the ship for me;

this means that morgan does not exist unless otherwise specified and discussed, though i do enjoy the concert of tony being a dad to his own kid and breaking that cycle of howard’s shitty parenting;

i’m going to be as honest and transparent as i can: i do, for certain, love writing stevetony. they’re my primary ship. not simply in mcu dynamics, but from the comics and avengers assemble. however, like some can attest to, i will never force a ship on anyone. if you express no interest in them romantically? that’s fine. we can write them simply as good friends and comrades. i won’t stop writing or plotting with you if you don’t like them in a romantic dynamic. if you do like it that way? cool. i know it might be intimidating to discuss this given i look like complete trash for them, but i never choose who i will/will not write with based on whether we ship or not;

tony, publicly, hints toward being bisexual and biromantic a lot of the time as he’ll practically flirt with anyone at all times, but he never really openly admits it due to his oh-so ancient internalized homophobia (thank you for that one, howard and societal expectations of the time);

justin hammer is a long time rival in the industry, and often meddles with tony and his work all the time. it’s nothing new. the lack of foundation established in IM2 doesn’t provide much insight into their relationship. long story short (taken from avengers assemble): hammer is a punk bitch who’s jealous and tony is tired of him and will gladly beat his ass any day of the week whenever he drives a tank into his front door (which happens more often than not).

tony is fantastic with children. he loves getting to interact with children because he knows how excited they are to see him and/or iron man (seen in both the mcu and in the comics). this type of attention he’s okay about. if he can inspire children to do good things and be good people and be heroes in their own right, then he’s doing his job;

tony fosters the intelligence and dreams of bright individuals all the time by offering scholarships for high school graduates and post-secondary students, and also provides internship opportunities (equal opportunities regardless of race, sex, gender, religion, disability status, age, etc.)

we only see this occur with peter and harley in the mcu, but there are other kids— like riri williams! tony sees these kids for the bright minds that they have and he wants to help them and keep them safe as he knows these are the brains of the future.

let me run over iron man 3. like i said, i ignore some shit from the movies. tony doesn’t initiate the clean slate protocol, he doesn’t throw the arc reactor into the ocean, and he doesn’t remove the arc reactor from his chest. he will get surgery to get the shrapnel removed because if i were the follow the pain that comes with the comics, tony would literally be always on the verge of death at all times, requiring a chest plate to be recharged constantly to make sure the shrapnel doesn’t get closer– see? that’s a lot and i’m... lazy.

the reason for those choices are simple: clean slate protocol undoes his character progression;

the arc reactor is just a part of him as a person, stands as his heart;

avengers movie nights, (video/board) game nights, and training days exist and you will never be able to pry that out of my hands. tony always shows up fashionably late with coffee and pays for when shit gets broken by thor. team building exercises exist plenty within avengers assemble, including the fact that they share chores and decides who gets to do the next load of laundry from whoever chooses the short stick from the bunch.

tony has had anxiety and depression since he was a child. it just didn’t really flare up and get identified as a real, tangible mess of emotions and thoughts until he’d been kidnapped (and nearly died, at that). it got worse when he failed to address it until after IM3. into the present-day, tony deals with anxiety, depression, and PTSD all the time, but has improved (…sort of) when it comes to handling all of it, and certainly has grown to recognize similar symptoms in the people he cares about;

on another hand, tony has displayed symptoms of ADHD, but it’s not officially diagnosed, and some of these symptoms include, but are not limited to: hyperactivity (staying awake for days on end) and hyperfocus (hyper-focus on work), distractible (easily distracted when he’s not focused on something), rambling (talks a lot and often makes rather intuitive connections due to how busy his brain functions), impulsivity and recklessness (self explanatory), constant need to move around and/or do something (in meetings, he will be moving somehow, whether it’s tapping fingers or feet, or shifting around in his seat);

there are days where he feels inferior due to how human he knows he is (in comparison to most of his team), and other days, he feels as though he’s more machine than he is man. these feelings fluctuate depending on how he’s doing with his mental health, and/or if he hears and/or sees anything about him that points toward either idea;

there is always overwhelming guilt for those he can’t keep safe or people that die; tony doesn’t like to kill anybody (unless it’s robots, because… they’re robots, not human lives); though, if pushed far enough with no other choice, he will throw conventional morality out the window for the sake of protecting all that he believes to be for the good of the world;

tony isn’t jacked. he isn’t captain america fit, but he isn’t particularly thin, either. his body is sort of like a runner’s build (for visuals, refer to valerio schiti’s comic art of tony). i interpret tony’s body as a slight bit slimmer. he exercises, and being in the suit also is its own form of exercise. god forbid we discuss his eating habits, though. and–– he also isn’t short short, but he isn’t tall, either. he sits at 5’10”, which might be a little below the average male, but that’s about it.

speaking of eating habits, simply put: tony can’t cook for shit and that’s it. he’ll try to cook for his significant others’ on the occasion, but he can’t be blamed if he burns everything.

tony isn’t ‘woke’ or perfect, as it’s imperative to remember he grew up as rich and with financial and some social class privilege (since he was rich), despite the abuse and harassment he experienced during his youth. it’s taken him time to recognize this, and he realizes it really doesn’t cost anything to be a better person, which is why he tries to be better when it comes to his tone of voice when discussing certain topics he has no authority to be speaking of, and by taking action with simple manual labour when it comes to chores (so he doesn’t hire other people to do shit for him). he also knows he can’t be a man of ‘all bark and no bite’ when it comes to supporting people and causes, hence why he actively advocates for female and youth empowerment through both words and actions.

in regards to ca:cw events, i would prefer to ignore them. for specific-plotting purposes, this can be dropped, but i prefer the events of avengers assemble when it comes to ‘civil war’. it’s actually really simple:

tony was not honest about his intentions with the team regarding a robot that was initially made for him by howard, which ended up with an ultron reboot that nearly risked loads of civilian lives and the team’s lives;

steve confronted tony about it when they returned back to avengers tower. with tony’s insistence that everything was now fine, steve decided to resign due to tony’s dishonesty and lack of trust in the team;

this splits the team in half, where steve takes— well, they decided to leave since they didn't like tony's lack of honesty— natasha, the hulk, and the falcon to work under SHIELD as the ‘secret avengers,’ and tony, clint, and thor remain as leftover avengers (later with the addition of ant-man and temporarily, spider-man, in some missions);

in the end, they all join back together after learning to appreciate their differences and reconciling under the fact that there wouldn’t be any more secrets that could risk the world, and the team’s safety;

if i am to follow the events of the mcu— between ca:cw and infinity war, he develops nanotech for his armour, which is embedded into his very skin to accommodate for nanobots, which interacts via neural transmissions (visuals here);

tony recognizes that he lost his temper and let his emotions get to him in the moment, which fucked up shit that could’ve been talked through and fixed;

tony is an alcoholic. he recognizes that he always will be, though he’s always working toward sobriety. he certainly relapses every so often when things are rough and he feels as if he has no other options, but he’s aware that relapsing is part of the process of recovery. he has attended AA meetings (alcoholics anonymous), and has been AA sponsors for people in the past;

to skim through the events of infinity war and endgame should these be part of the things you’re curious about (this is getting really long and i’m sure you’re tired of reading this—how have you gotten this far?):

after returning from space, tony took a few months (~ five) to recover from those three months of malnutrition, dehydration, and the wound of thanos’ stab. tony sealed the front of his injury, but he sure as hell wasn’t seen dealing with the back end. during this time, he’s able to regain some muscle mass;

he lives on his own, retreating to the cabin to escape from the responsibilities of being a fallen hero who ultimately failed the people he was supposed to protect.

during the five year gap, he keeps in contact with the other avengers, but very rarely. they’re the only ones who know where he lives;

like i said— tony does not say any of that forgiving bullcrap to howard. victims of abuse don’t have to forgive their abuser, parent or not. let’s just imagine the entire interaction didn’t happen at all;

tony doesn’t die;

he used the infinity stones; but, to maintain consistency with what the mcu established w/ thanos: he sustained significant damage to his right arm, up to the shoulder and neck. it’s gravely scarred. the overall function of that arm also diminished greatly. vision out of his right eye is not as sharp as it once was, either;

a year of recovery and physiotherapy later, tony decides to amputate and go for a prosthetic. he works with shuri and wakandan tech to build an arm;

despite the end of the looming, world-ending thread, tony still battles resurfacing trauma. not every day is happy, but he is working toward recovery. there are days he doesn’t remember chunks of what happened due to the power of the infinity stones; sometimes, he doesn’t even want to remember it, anyway;

tony retires. sort of. for the most part. if the world really needs iron man, he’ll be there;

tony may have handed CEO-ship to pepper, but he still handles a lot of work for stark industries, and that’s what he primarily does post-endgame.

the multiverse and realm-traveling happens a-fucking-lot

#✧ i just want to feel like i’m still living. ≻ headcanon.#well fuck this took over an hour #and now i need to go to bed lmAOOOO #the formatting seems a bit whack bc i just copied and pasted it from my notes #but oh well #MFDSJHFDJSDFS #fuck this got long #long post //#tw: long post

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marshmallowgoop · 5 years ago

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Doing yearly writing reviews isn’t really a thing. But once you start doing ‘em, it doesn’t feel right to stop, you know?

Seeing progress in other arts is of course a lot easier than seeing progress in writing, but I think there is some forward movement for me, especially when I also consider my compilations from 2017 and 2018.

In regards to 2019, I’ve selected various kinds of writing for this post: analytical essays, opinion pieces, news articles, creative fiction, and maybe some works that can’t be categorized so easily, too. It was a very difficult year on many fronts; I dealt with job struggles, financial insecurity, destroyed relationships, medical hardships, seemingly endless cyberstalking and online harassment.

But there were good things, too. New friendships. New passions. New outlooks. I feel like I’ve learned and grown a lot more in these past couple of months than I have in a long, long time.

The end of 2019 is more than just the end of one year. It’s also the end of a decade. But I think the best advice I’ve received all decade comes from this year:

✄ Sometimes, you have to say yes to saying no.

✄ If you can’t do something well, do something poorly!

✄ The best option may be to simply not engage.

✄ You don’t have to apologize for disappointing others.

✄ Your worth isn’t measured by how much you “accomplish.”

✄ You have rights: the right to have your needs and wants respected, the right to make mistakes, the right to determine your own priorities, the right to not be responsible for the actions or problems of others, the right to express yourself, the right to be human. It’s not selfish or narcissistic to stand up for your rights.

And, since it is the end of the decade and all, here’s also a comparison between one nerdy fandom essay from August 2010 and another from August 2019:

2010 (with added spaces because yes, this really was just a huge block of text originally):

Also, in my own opinion, nobody really gave a damn for Xion all that much save for Roxas. I mean, yeah, Axel cared a little, but in the end, he got totally mad at her, got mad any time she was mentioned, got mad whenever Roxas worried about her, got mad when she showed up at the clock tower. She was his friend, yeah, and he didn’t want her to go, but in the end, he would have chosen Roxas above her anytime.

The other “mean villains” didn’t really care. Luxord didn’t care, Demyx didn’t care, Xaldin got exasperated once at her, but overall didn’t care, Xigbar didn’t care, Xemnas outright said he didn’t care, Saix was rather cruel to her, but really, in the end, he didn’t give a damn for her. The others weren’t around long enough to have an impression on her. I think even Riku didn’t really care all that much for her, in all honesty. He just wanted his best friend back.

Also, you have to keep in mind that we played the game through Roxas’ perspective, and it’s in my personal belief that he fell in love with Xion. And if you’re in love with someone, when she gets into a coma, or goes missing, or ignores you, you’re gonna be upset, and talk about it. So Roxas did.

But you know, he doesn’t actually do a lot of it until the end of the game. Before that, it’s all about the THREE of them. He loves his friends (even if he doesn’t know it), and he wants them to be together forever, but when Xion goes missing or whatnot and they can’t ALL have ice cream together, he gets upset.

2019:

I’ve written more on the subject here, but to keep it short, Ryuko only tries to take Nui’s life when she’s convinced herself that she’s a monster, and her development is less about her becoming less okay with killing people and more about how she won’t let her anger and rage control her. What makes Ryuko’s attitude so different in the end isn’t that she’s reconsidered her thoughts on murder but that she’s composed. Come episode 22, Ryuko ain’t saying that she’s gonna kill anyone to sound tough or to intimidate. She keeps her cool even against her worst enemies.

But that’s just what I think! Maybe I’ve interpreted the character all wrong. But Ryuko’s freak-out after she goes berserk and hurts others in episode 12, her devotion to defending even people she’s just met… I just struggle to see her as someone who’s actually a-okay with killing. The fact that Ryuko’s perfect fantasy in episode 20 depicts her as a sweet girl without any of the violent tendencies that she has in reality also points this way; not to mention, Ryuko outright admits that her picking fights and causing trouble are bad things when remarking on her childhood in episode 8.

And Ryuko? She doesn’t want to be bad. All the poor girl’s ever wanted is love, and I can’t imagine she’d ever think that getting angry and killing people would get her a lot of that.

Progress may be slow, but it does happen.

At least, I think so.

Image Texts

January 2019

And personally? I find that sweetness just absolutely, utterly charming. When I understood what the rap was trying to communicate, I couldn’t imagine listening to the song without it. Heck, even before I understood, I found the “without rap” edits empty and barren. No matter how “silly” the lyrics might come off, the unabashed cheese is fantastic. The rap section that I was once “meh” about legitimately became my favorite part of the song.

Plus, I really can’t stress enough how sad the song is when it’s purely Ryuko. The official [nZk] remix replaces Senketsu’s rap with a reprise of Ryuko’s first verse, which recounts how she and Senketsu met. And it’s tragic! She says, “But I’m all alone,” and she is. Senketsu isn’t singing with her, no matter her claim that she can hear his voice. Considering what happens to Senketsu in the end, his absence in the song hits even harder.

Full post: https://marshmallowgoop.tumblr.com/post/182361051017/oomoj-marshmallowgoop-the-rap-is-good

February 2019

The focus then shifts away from Ragyo, but Kill la Kill ain’t at all done with building the audience up yet. As the scene moves to the following day, viewers are met with quick, close-up shots of Uzu’s note to Ryuko, timed right to the beat of “Blumenkranz.” Uzu wants to duel, and we soon get to see his full request in an engaging low-angle shot where Ryuko looks up to this sign looming over her. The weight and gravity of the situation is effectively conveyed: the smooth transition from Ragyo to here, as well as the music and shot composition, let us know in no indirect terms that this fight isn’t something to be brushed off. Uzu’s duel is a big deal, and it’s very much connected to Ragyo’s expansive empire.

And the tension just keeps growing. Ryuko’s reaction to Uzu’s note is presented with a dramatic canted, high-angle shot. The camera—which is just slightly tilted—peers down at both Ryuko and the sign, communicating a sense of danger and unease. Viewers already know that the upcoming battle is important, but here, we also understand that it’s not going to be easy.

Full post: https://marshmallowgoop.tumblr.com/post/182841724817/all-the-discussion-around-episode-6-of-kill-la

March 2019

Kill la Kill the Game: IF is currently being featured at the 2019 Game Developers Conference that runs until March 22nd in San Francisco, and a flurry of new gameplay videos are now available for viewing. Notably, these videos feature full English subtitles for the character dialogue for the first time since EVO 2018 last year and never-before-seen stages, such as what seems to be the Fiber Castle in the Kiryuin Manor.

Full post: https://marshmallowgoop.tumblr.com/post/183766224117/kill-la-kill-the-game-if-gameplay-footage-from

April 2019

I mean, Kill la Kill ended over five years ago now. There’s been fairly minimal new content ever since—an OVA in September of 2014, a few pieces of merchandise here and there, a small crossover with Grand Summoners last year. And then, not even 11 months ago, out of seemingly nowhere, there was confirmation for a full-blown Kill la Kill video game. That we now know will be released in just 14 weeks!

Lots of jokes were made about the announcement for a game so many years after the series finale, but, like, seriously, as a longtime Kill la Kill fan, it’s hard to wrap my head around. Ever since the show ended, I’ve dedicated over half a million words to writing about it, spent tens of thousands of yen on books and Blu-rays and CDs, devoted nearly 60 GB to my own GIFs and edits. I’ve loved this thing to death. I’ve always found more and more that I want to write and create from this series, but I never really imagined nor expected that we’d ever get much more official content from the original creators themselves. And now we are getting so much more, and???

Full post: https://marshmallowgoop.tumblr.com/post/184228103137/kill-la-kill-the-game-if-releases-on-july-25th-in

May 2019

Kiznaiver: Oh, I was so excited to love this show! I was lucky enough to see an advanced screening of the first two episodes, and I was totally hooked. It was drop-dead gorgeous—and probably the prettiest series Trigger has ever put out—and I was very intrigued by the plot and characters. I remember just coming back to my hotel room at like 3:00 am after the premiere, utterly filled with excitement. I mean, Kiznaiver was directed by Hiroshi Kobayashi, the episode director behind the two episodes that got me hooked on Kill la Kill (episodes 5 and 18)!

But… my excitement quickly died. The story tried to develop way too many characters in way too little time, and I never enjoyed the romantic pairing of Katsuhira and Noriko, finding it shallow, undeveloped, and nonsensical (in a bad way), which… kind of ruins a lot of the series when that’s arguably the heart of the whole thing.

Kiznaiver is still super, super pretty, though. That last episode’s animation got me shook.

Full post: https://marshmallowgoop.tumblr.com/post/184700944732/so-have-you-watched-the-other-stuff-studio-trigger

June 2019

I do recognize that many, many matters do not warrant conversation. I do recognize that the phrase “I’m just trying to have a conversation” can be—and has been—utilized as a means of directing criticism away from inflammatory, unacceptable, inhumane remarks. I in no way feel that hateful, discriminatory comments should be promoted.

Simultaneously, however, “conversation” should not automatically be a dirty word in the field of analyzing and seriously engaging with fiction, and thoughtful reactions should be supported and striven for. Nothing in fiction is ever black and white. There are so many nuances and complexities to the storybook realities of our media. I want commentators and critics of fiction to be passionate about listening, considering, and rethinking those nuances and complexities. Isn’t that why we do this work at all? To share our own point of view and open ourselves up to others?

Full post: https://marshmallowgoop.tumblr.com/post/185289615202/we-need-to-change-the-way-we-seriously-discuss

July 2019

Initially, I was really bummed by this lack of development. But as I thought about things more, I… didn’t mind so much. If this dream or universe or whatever is something that Satsuki “experiences” before the events of the anime, of course she won’t grow as a character here. Maybe this game is kind of the Kill la Kill prequel I’ve been begging for for over half a decade.

And as much as I didn’t get anything, I thought the ending bits between Ryuko and Satsuki were so good.

Like, I suppose Ryuko’s absorbing the Life Fibers or something?? But wow, pretty.

And the part where they talk before Satsuki disappears? That’s my kinda anime bullshit. It’s the kinda anime bullshit I wanted from the OVA between Ryuko and Senketsu.

Full post: https://marshmallowgoop.tumblr.com/post/186648065467/goop-plays-kill-la-kill-the-game-if-satsuki

August 2019

That book, Log. 2, is a fan doujin from Kotaro Nakamori, who worked as an animator and animation director in Kill la Kill. There’s a bunch of assorted fanart in there, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Nakamori is a fan of Urusei Yatsura and wanted to make a little crossover between that series and Kill la Kill.

Personally, though, as someone not too familiar with Urusei Yatsura, I kinda just saw the image as oni-Satsuki (with oni being demon/ogre-like creatures in Japanese folklore). Oni are traditionally depicted wearing tiger skin loincloths, and Lum herself is definitely basically a space oni. So, I saw the cover and got super excited about oni-Satsuki because I love oni a lot, haha.

Fun fact: character designer Sushio has also drawn Kill la Kill characters as oni for setsubun, a celebration that’s held on the last day of winter (February 3rd). During setsubun, you might see folks dressed up like oni—who get beans thrown at them in an effort to bring in good luck and chase naughty demons away.

Full post: https://marshmallowgoop.tumblr.com/post/187228888187/do-i-see-satsuki-wearing-lums-outfit-in-your-last

September 2019

Though I don’t see it much anymore, I remember lots of comparisons between Ragyo and the villains of Saturday morning cartoons back in the day. She was described as a generic, two-dimensional “evilz for the sake of evilz” baddie and criticized for her simplicity.

And though I did admittedly agree to an extent—I craved a lot more depth and insight, particularly in regards to her haunting line about “still having something of a human heart” whilst brutally attacking her own daughter in the final episode—I also found Ragyo to be a remarkably compelling, powerful, and horrifying villain even without tons of backstory and explanation. Perhaps my write-up on her first scene in episode 6 best details why; this woman has such a presence, and the visual language of the series amplifies that presence spectacularly. Ragyo’s intimidating and scary without the audience even needing to know anything about her.

And… I’d say that’s a good villain. That’s exactly what a villain should do.

Full post: https://marshmallowgoop.tumblr.com/post/187987858537/on-ragyo-kiryuin

October 2019

And, though there are no visuals, so I can’t be sure if it’s an “Ocean of Light” or not, the fourth Drama CD also has the same kinda deal happening. In the CD—which takes place immediately after Ryuko learns the truth of her origins—Ryuko’s pain manifests as an explosion of light that knocks both her and Senketsu unconscious and pushes Senketsu away from her. The sound effect here is familiar, and I’m personally convinced that this is another “Ocean of Light” moment.

Which brings me to the “light” part of the terminology. Light is often associated with good, yes, but light is also associated with heat, and heat is associated with pain. In the Drama CD, Ryuko’s light is so hot that Nui even remarks that Senketsu “almost burned” from it, and when Mako embraces Ryuko after swimming through her “Ocean of Light” in episode 12, Ryuko’s touch scorches Mako’s skin.

I’ve already written an essay on the symbolic and narrative use of fire, warmth, and heat in Kill la Kill (that you should totally read because it’s actually maybe Kinda Good, Maybe), and relating to that, I see the “Ocean of Light” as a physical representation of Ryuko’s fiery spirit. That fire can be used for good, and that fire can also be painful, but no matter what, that fire is a part of Ryuko.

Full post: https://marshmallowgoop.tumblr.com/post/188247077227/i-always-wanted-some-explanation-you-are-smart

November 2019

She looks around her cottage. Her eyes find the walls and the furnishings. Her eyes find the scratched floors and stained wood. She does not voice it to the once-emperor, but she had never been able to remove the stains from the attack. Her son's blood has painted the brown wood red. It is a reminder of what she cannot remember. It is a reminder of the past she has forgotten.

“This home feels so desperately lonely,” she admits. “I do not know who is missing. But it is not complete.”

The man is quiet. He did not expect to find himself feeling sympathy for the woman's plight. Perhaps she is a fool, to have given her heart to a demon. But kindness ought not be punished, he thinks. Or has he grown so cold that he believes it should be?

December 2019

🏀 Michiru and Shirou’s relationship may be the focus, but Nakashima emphasizes that Michiru’s relationship with Nazuna is also involved in the story in a big way.

🏀 Nakashima stresses the importance of depicting teen girls realistically. Two women screenwriters are on board: Kimiko Ueno and Nanami Higuchi. Both wrote for Little Witch Academia. Ueno also wrote for Space Patrol Luluco, and Higuchi was behind the production reports in Trigger Magazine (and, interestingly, wrote the script for the anime adaptation of BEASTARS).

🏀In regards to Michiru and Nazuna’s relationship, producer Naoko Tsutsumi (also an animation producer for Kiznaiver and Little Witch Academia) provides input as well. Nakashima says that they greatly value and take to heart the opinions of the women creators.

Full post: https://marshmallowgoop.tumblr.com/post/189928986922/otomedia-winter-2020-bna-brand-new-animal

#shut up goop #goop makes a (kinda) personal post #ramblings #writing #on to 2020!#right before the new year in my time zone as per usual lol #image texts under the cut #kill la kill #kingdom hearts #brand new animal #kiznaiver

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darspeaksout · 6 years ago

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Questions & Answers on Writing

Tell us about your WIP!

It takes place in the Philippines and follows the story of two friends who are part of the same church, but throughout the story they drift apart. Ten years later, now adults, each is recounting the story to a loved one; one is telling it to his five-year-old daughter while the other to his co-worker.

Where is your favorite place to write?

My room, at night.

What is your favorite/least favorite part about writing?

Favorite - making sense of my own experiences and letting people in on issues they probably don’t think about on a day-to-day basis. I also love creating dialogue.

Least favorite - I find it difficult to describe abstract, philosophical concepts that not everyone can easily relate to, such as how a person feels during worship or the spiritual connection one feels simply by sitting inside a church. (My current story has to do with religion so I run into this problem a lot). It’s not so much of a challenge for me to write these experiences for my characters, but when I begin to edit my draft I know I’ll have to find a way to introduce these things in a way that everyone - whether spiritual or not - can appreciate.

Favorite character you’ve written?

It’s too early to say.

Favorite/most inspirational book?

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Beautiful prose, eloquent style, solid voice, religious theme. Hands down the best book I have read.

Describe your writing process

Everywhere. I’ll start with the opening for the story, then jump all the way to the ending, then I’ll fill in some parts in the middle, and do some touches here, touches there. My process isn’t linear at all, which I think is common for many writers. I also think it’s important to not just stay home all day and lock myself with my laptop; in order to write meaningfully I must also go outside, experience the world, and really feel. Writing isn’t just about putting the right words down on the page, it’s a highly empathetic art - it involves a lot of feeling. That’s why it’s normal for me to be working on my story while simultaneously going on a trip whether nearby in nature, or a city across the world. I also like to read books of authors I admire while working on my project, to study their style and improve my own but also to get away from my own head for a while.

What does it take for you to be ready to write a book? (i.e. do you research? outline? make a playlist or pinterest board? wing it?)

What gets me going to write a book is my Idea, and yes - with a capital I. I ask myself, what is my Idea? And why do I want to tell it to the world so badly? This Idea keeps me up at night, is the reason why I’m always so restless, and is what fuels me. For my current story, I’ve had to research places in the Philippines because that’s where my story takes place, and I’ve only lived there for a few years before moving to another country. I have also conducted interviews of girls’ perspectives of being part of religious organizations for my female lead. Traveling also plays a role into how ready I am to tell a story, specifically to describe a location, accurately. I need to make sure I get all the details right, and so for my writing to read as authentic and not forced.

How do you deal with self-doubt when writing?

Prayer plays a huge role. I start every writing session with a prayer, as I do with each morning before I tackle the day ahead. When I pray, I’m able to calm myself and be in the right mental space to write as honestly as possible. It also reminds me that my talent and passion were given by God, and that even though at times I may doubt myself and in how many people my story will reach, ultimately what I am meant to do with my writing is bigger than any self-doubt. When the love is stronger than the fear, the goal will be accomplished.

What things (scenes/topics/character types) are you most comfortable writing?

Scenes - heavy with dialogue. Working on my current story, I realize that I feel so at home writing dialogue. Perhaps this is from watching so many Filipino movies, which have the sassiest and most sarcastic characters you could ever come across. That’s why I love crafting villains and power-hungry antagonists.

Topics - religion, masculinity, family, platonic relationships

Character types - the one who struggles with self-acceptance, and worries that others won’t love him if he reveals his true self.

How do you cope with writer’s block?

I don’t care what anyone else has said to you; there is no “trick” or “hack” to get over writer’s block. The cure is simple: just write. I think people experience writer’s block often because they’re scared to take on the project in the first place. They’re scared because they don’t yet fully know their story, because they have confidence in this scene but are worried about another, because they don’t know how the people around them will receive it. To combat writer’s block, you really just have to surrender all your worries and just do it. It’s about channeling the drive to sit yourself down at your desk, open your laptop, and write. Write something, even if it’s garbage. Write something, even if you won’t end up using it in the final draft. In the outlining process of my story, for example, I was debating if I should include this whole supernatural element and mythical legend in my story. I spent pages upon pages developing this possible subplot, only to scrap it because I decided it wouldn’t contribute to my story. I didn’t end up using it, but at least I was productive and wrote something! I still persevered even though I felt stuck. And producing content I decided I wasn’t going to use, only gave me a clearer vision of what I did want to use. What’s also key is that you do not stop. Dedicate some time every day to write, depending on what suits your schedule. Don’t miss a day. Even if you’re just going to write two pages of dialogue but don’t have the narrative, just do it! What’s important is that everyday, you’re making progress.

Any advice for young writers/advice you wish someone would have given you early on?

You might think that your ideas are crazy and that no one could possibly relate to them, but you’d be surprised. We’re all pretty much the same even though we come from different walks of life; everyone is capable of feeling, empathizing, laughing, crying, getting angry, getting hurt, etc.! So if your characters are doing at least one of those in your story, I guarantee you someone will be able to relate. Just tell your story.

What aspect of your writing are you most proud of?

My tenacity and how I never stopped.

Tell us about the books on your “to write” list

Hmm... I don’t think about this often because I’m still drafting my first story. But eventually I would like to write a story about two friends who become rivals, as they are driven apart by competition in a prestigious university.

How do you stay focused on your own work and how do you deal with comparison?

I’m able to concentrate over long periods of time mainly because of prayer. It also helps that I’m very open with my friends and they support me on my writing journey, so talking about my plans only fuels me even more to write every day. As for comparison - I don’t compare myself to others. Whenever I read another writer’s work, whether they’re a National Bestseller or simply just starting like myself, I ask myself, “what do I like about this piece?” “How can I use some of their techniques and twist them so I can make them my own?”

Do you like to read books similar to your project while you’re drafting or do you stick to non-fiction/un-similar works?

Both. Reading books or watching movies - consuming any artistic medium, really - which relate to my specific topic provides some insight into the genre I’m working with, and how much I would like to deviate from the norm. Consuming content that is dissimilar to my story is something I still find to be useful, because it doesn’t matter what kind of writing it is: if it’s good writing, it’s good writing. And it can always teach me something new. For example, I’d say my current story is leaning more towards contemporary young adult, but I just read After Dark by Haruki Murakami, which falls into the genre of magical realism. I went into that book seeking to be entertained and inspired, and I was surprised to see that my story and Murakami’s share similar themes.

Unpopular writing thoughts/opinions?

Sometimes, the book isn’t better than the movie.

Post the last sentence you wrote

“With that, Guang Fu offers me a sympathetic smile and steps into the building. All the way below I can hear a ship’s horn as it leaves the harbor, and the push and pull of the gentle tides.“

Are there any books you feel have shaped you as a writer?

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood

Crazy Rich Asians (the entire trilogy) - Kevin Kwan

South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami

What is the first line of your WIP?

“It was a sunny afternoon in Manila when I dropped my girlfriend off at her house.“

#writing #amwriting #literature #writers

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rustyyart · 4 years ago

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I did a thing! Drew some actual OCs for the first time in a while. This post is about to get long so I’ll put the rest in the break. These were my first ever OCs so I have a LOT to say. Not that anyone’s reading so I’ll just use this as a time marker for future me.

Tbh I’m pretty sure the redesigns had long sleeves besides the tube top. Whoops.

Drawn: December 4, 2020

You asked for it.

Heart

My first ever OC as far as I can remember? I might’ve created Amber before her, but all of my OCs were named “Girl” or “Boy” for an embarrassingly long time. Hell, these are still named after their symbols. First drawn in 4th grade when I was nine, Heart was originally on the Titanic and was created when I was bored in class and remembered I had seen part of the movie Titanic the night before. She played the part of Rose and I mostly drew the part where it sank LMAO. She gets home to her sister (Flower) and is like “It sank” and Flower is like “Aw.” and then they go off and played video games. IDK I was a master of comics.

Heart is in a really weird place. She was this really tough tomboy who protected her more feminine sister and got into trouble a lot. She’s always been a self insert, but from 2009 - 2011 she was more of a power fantasy. She talked back to teachers and spent tons of money on whatever 9yo me wanted at the time. I remember Flower scolding her that they could only play on the computer for half an hour once a year.

When I hit middle school, and thus a new school and new people, she became a shy, almost reclusive character to fit me. I discovered anime when I was 11, so she got tsundere style mood swings. Sun and Cloud were created around that time, I think. Embarrassing real world counterparts later and she, like me, can/could barely function in their presence. A complete 180 to original her. Wow, a look into Heart’s character progression and I see myself devolving into the hermit I am today.

Obviously Heart (as a concept) is a major part of my person. RustyyHeart with my older usernames being Heart*something*. I probably just exposed more middle school cringe to the internet than I’m preparing for, but whatever. RustyyHeart was a rebrand to get away from the feminine nature of the word “heart” or straight up announcing I was a girl. I’ve since accepted the name Rusty instead, despite 14yo me fretting it sounded like a guy’s name. RustyyHeart was the work of a random name generator and I’ve loved it ever since.

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Flower

Heart’s twin sister Flower has been about the same the whole time she’s been around. Besides the Titanic sinking, she’s been by Heart’s side almost all the time. I made them have drama here and there, but they’ve always made up somehow. She isn’t particularly based on anyone, but would occasionally mold into whoever was my best friend at the time. I made her because I always felt lonely whenever I couldn’t hang out with my best friends from school. Go a step further, make a twin sister.

I’m drawing a blank on her character development, to be honest. Flower has just kind of been... there. Generally upbeat and happy and always slightly better at everything than Heart. Pre middle school, she was basically Heart v2 except she did the Dreamworks face way less often. Post middle school, she was the accidental pretty girl and Heart was jealous. She gained a bust sometime after my discovery of anime and I even occasionally made sure to draw that she wore frilly underwear. Can you tell I watched the wrong kind of anime way too young? Flower unintentionally ended up stealing the interests of Sun and Cloud.

I’m not proud of her design at the moment, but I like that I kept the pigtails on the sides of her head instead of moving them. It makes her stand out in comparison to Heart. I don’t really know if I’ll leave either’s outfit like this, granted Heart hasn’t changed much since 2012, but I want to fix them into real characters instead of whatever young me threw together.

I also noticed that somewhere in a redesign phase, Flower got significantly lighter than Heart. I made this whole post and idea about this specifically. Teenage me actually committed colorism against my own OCs. Heart was redesigned in middle school to be “ugly” to mimic all my crushes turning me down, while Flower was “pretty.” I realized that while drawing the two for the first time yesterday. Heart is overweight, darker skin tone, and painfully shy. Flower is hourglass figure, lighter skin tone, and outgoing. Something’s wrong here. In all my comics and drawings they were identical in tone or it wasn’t colored at all. I changed the skin tones within the past couple years. Holy internal bias.

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You wanna talk forgotten, dumpstered OCs? =D has got you covered. Yes her name is “Equals D” and I hate it too. She’s probably my first exploration into bisexuality TBH and was based on Kari from the Incredibles. She first met Heart and Flower when they went to a spa and she was their... idk servant I guess. She washed their hair because that’s what 9yo me thought happened at spas. I made her a punching bag character, Heart and Flower making fart noises to get on her nerves. Again, comedy genius over here. Imagine the twins’ shock when I made her their permanent live in babysitter, once again taking from her source. So they Home Alone her until she’s like “I find farts funny too!” and the twins were like “:o She’s cool!” Bam! Conflict solved!

I’m impressed at the fact younger me drew her differently than the other two. She had braces and a ponytail. Ok, I didn’t say it was an original design, it’s more of a fan art situation, but I tried something different. Every girl in my comics had the swirl pigtails besides her. She eventually lost the braces because I got tired of drawing them and they started escaping the boundaries of her mouth every time. I remember in the original comic I drew her smiling for the first time in a good amount of pages and put braces on with a caption “Remember these?” I was the only one reading my own comic YES I remember my own stolen design.

I think I changed her to older sister in the redesign in middle school. How weird would a permanent, live in ex-spa employee be? She’s the no-nonsense type who frequently injures herself attempting to be a mother figure. Think Nani from Lilo and Stitch being her main source from that point on. Her only appearance in the comic before I stopped writing it was her burning her hand and hitting her head making breakfast. She drives them to school and they never come home~~~ AKA I got started on my self insert fanfiction phase where my OCs got locked away for 2 years. She never got any attention since then and has only changed designs away from Meroko from Full Moon. Showing your stomach was strictly forbidden in my hyper holy Christian household growing up, so having her have her stomach out was a mark of being an older person. Winking Equals D, later renamed Jix, is/was near constantly shirtless as he is a male version of her and I had no guys IRL to base him off of.

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WOW that was a lot. Thank you for getting through it! I’m sorry I rambled so much. It’s 7:13 am and I finished =D at 6:08. I wanted to get all my feelings down so if I ever redo them, I can look at this and see what I thought. Feel free to leave a suggestion. I want the twins to keep their pigtails and =D to keep a ponytail though, just to keep their origins together. I’ve tried renaming them Scarlett, Flora, and Nina, but the names just don’t stick.

#My OC: Heart #My OC: Flower #My OC: Equals D #The thing on Flower's head is a headband and I still can't draw those RIP #It's actually fun to draw in younger me's doodle style with the db legs #Heart's cowlick was actually only on the left side whoops

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mybodyliberation · 4 years ago

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Big Body, Big Moves I Sponsored by Asquith

Big Body, Big Moves I Sponsored By Asquith

This post is sponsored by Asquith an eco-friendly, ethical and sustainable activewear company. Their mission statement is product, planet, people. They design collections for ethical everyday wear, ethical yoga wear and ethical Pilates wear, and as you already know, I'm on a journey to be as conscious of the planet and people as I can.

Asquith have just launched a brand new range of their active and loungewear, though their sizing currently stops at an 18 a lot of items are very generous in sizing and there are items that would absolutely fit upwards to a size 22/24 and so I would say explore the website and look at the materials and their flexibility stretch. They are also looking at extending their sizing, so do keep an close eye! Prices are slightly higher, but these items are worth saving for and investing in, especially if you are looking for longer lasting activewear.

If you want further details on their mission statement, their ethical practices and sustainable materials, head over to https://www.asquithlondon.com/our-mission/ and have a read!

The team also sent me some PR samples (that include their sustainable bamboo yoga set) to try and asked me to talk about my journey with yoga, which was perfect because ya'll know I have been incorporating that into my movement more consistently. I’ll link those items at the end of this post! If you’re looking for sustainable and ethical activewear to invest in this season, definitely consider Asquith.

Sporadically throughout my 20s I encountered yoga and I was never able to begin and sustain a consistent practice. I would go to classes or follow videos and look at all of the able bodied white cis people and feel miserable because not only did they not represent me but it enforced this idea that I couldn't be further from a "yoga" body.

I would lose time comparing my own bigger body to those around me, wondering how many hours of yoga it would take just so I could keep up or fit into the narrative that I saw around me.

I was so focused on the external aspect of yoga as a practice that there were no real benefits for me and so I was trapped in an endless cycle of giving it ago, feeling inadequate, quitting and going back round again.

That kind of approach isn't sustainable and its no wonder I was never consistent.

The same cycle was about to begin again except this time I realised I wasn't prepared to go through the same cycle unless something drastically changed. If I was going to invest energy into this and do it, I wanted to do it properly and I wanted to do it in a way that accommodated who I am today.

A woman who has shed the years of self-deprecation and body hate and who is now incredibly proud of this body and knows that it is capable of so much.

That's why this time as I tentatively looked at how I can incorporate a yoga practice into my lifestyle, forever and not just for a few frustrating weeks, I knew that there were several changes I needed to make and I want to share some of them.

1. Representation Matters

Going forward I didn't want to be building a practice by following instructors that would get me trapped into the aspirational part of yoga that says do this practice for this amount of time and you will have this body. No. I needed someone that looked like me. I needed a body that looked like mine. I wanted to feel whole in body and be led in a way that affirmed all the things that are already great about my body right now, not all of the things that could be great just because I'm doing yoga. That's why instructors like Valrie Sagun and Jessamyn Stanely have been so important in supporting me in building a practice. Finding instructors that make you feel incorporating is attainable, is paramount!

2. The Process is Part Of The Journey

Just because we can't instantly slide into the splits or just because our warrior 3 pose isn't perfectly symmetrically and flexible doesn't disqualify the importance of continuing the practice nor does it negate the work going into doing what your body is doing as you move through poses. For a long time I thought that if I wasn't achieving the finished look for a pose than I was failing. I was negating the fact that part of the pose is adventuring through it. Part of the process is just being in the process. It's recognising that there is no finished product. There is no final and perfect pose. It is ever flowing, fluid and moving. And settling in that might be uncomfortable at first but it will release you from expecting the impossible.

3. Limits Are Okay

For a long time I refused to let myself be limited by body. I wouldn't allow myself to recognise the difference between moving through a sensation of discomfort and then out and out pain! It is more than okay to honour your body and where its at right now. If you are returning to child's pose often, lean into that. If you are using straps and blocks more than someone else in a class, embrace that. You are on your own journey and you want your body to have a sustainable journey not one that lasts a short period because you've pushed it too hard.

4. Your Body IS A Yoga Body

You don't need to have the body of anyone else but YOU. Comparing yourself to the other people you see doing yoga will only act as hinderance to the physical and spiritual growth you can do taking up this practice. When you find yourself getting lost in comparisons or feeling discouraged, affirm the truth. Your body IS a yoga body. It is a good body because it belongs to you! You don't owe anyone a different kind of body. The one you have is powerful because it houses your unique spirit which is what makes you, you!

5. There's No Finish Line

It seems silly, but I wish someone had said that more often whenever I was exploring yoga. I thought that there was a finish line. I thought I had to reach the ultimate zen, the ultimate flexibility and then I would just kick back and move onto something else. Except that is not at all how this practice works. If you want it to be, yoga will be part of your life for the rest of your life. It will grow with you, it will mould to you, it will take you wherever it is you need to go during the place you are in your life in any given moment. It's not just about mastering a series of complex poses, it's also about honouring the alignment of your emotional, mental, physical and spiritual needs and progress. It's linking into a greater divine connection and grounding yourself to a present that allows you to embrace and celebrate who you are and where you are right now.

Since I have been taking up this practice in a way that works for me in the times that work for me, I have realised that I am capable of so much more than I realise. I see my body do amazing things and I am intuitively responding and honouring its needs. I realised that yoga truly is for everybody. It doesn't need to be this excluding club that only serves the few. It isn't about trying to live up to any stereotype or any ideal. It can represent me and i can take up space within it.

Body confidence and yoga are remarkably similar practices. Both require the art of affirmation, practice, the unpacking of harmful or toxic things, the healing of trauma, the releasing of tension, the progression and growth of who you are becoming.

There's no end date, it isn't linear, but it is worth the exploration because in the journey you will find freedom.

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https://www.asquithlondon.com/flow-with-it-leggings-galaxy-gal/

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spellboundinks · 7 years ago

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How do you get so much followers? I don't mean to be rude and sound rude, but it's very discouraging to see a post about how much followers you got, not just you but everyone else.... I'm trying everything, but i don't get that same amount. You're barely on and post about your original works. Again, I'm sorry if I'm being rude, I'm just very upset and frustrated with my writing and everything. Please don't take it personal, I don't mean to take it out on you. I'm so very much sorry.

Oh please don’t be discouraged/sad anon!! Sometimes it’s just right place right time tbh. But I try to be as involved as I possibly can. I respond to people’s comments. I continuously followed people when I first started (because a lot of people do follow back). I’ve made writer friends on tumblr by asking about their work and gotten follows from them that way. Also meeting people on groups like the Queer Writer Guild on Discord and the WIP Book Club on Slack. What especially helped was my coming up with the idea for the WIP Book Club and getting almost 20 people so far on board. Quite a few of them have tumblrs that I now follow and we reblog each others’ content. Honestly it’s just as much about the support you give other writers as it is the content you yourself provide. I also have a couple of posts about supporting writers that became fairly viral because those posts aren’t as common as they should be on tumblr. I know how frustrating it can be though to not have the followers/likes/reblogs you want. My art blog in comparison to this one has maybe 10 followers? I started that blog the exact same day as this one too. It is especially hard to get followers for sideblogs. Because sideblogs can’t be shown when you ask questions or when you follow people which are two huge ways to bring attention to your blog. And just so you know, I’m not “barely on”. I am on a hell of a lot of the time. I might not reblog posts as often as other tumblrs but I am on whenever I have spare time looking at content, saving other content to read later, liking things, etc. My friend Hayley can attest to the ridiculous amount of time I spend on this site because I spam her with posts. But I also do have responsibilities. I’m in college and that takes a lot of priority. I don’t always have time to write original content. When blogs have a decent number of followers, no matter how long their blog has been up and running, it is not because they aren’t putting in the effort (unless they’re really lucky or had followers from other social media sites prior). Either they have put a lot of time and energy into creating their work or they spend a lot of time digging through their dash for the best content they can scrape up. Also, it might help to realize that I haven’t been sifting through my followers for spam bots in at least a month cuz I’ve been too busy. So I’m sure there’s at least a few dozen that have added to my follower count. Is that gonna stop me from celebrating milestone numbers tho? Hell no. I need a little positivity every once in a while. And you do too. Everyone does.

I sincerely hope that things turn around for you and that you get the followers you want. But please don’t take the perceived success of other blogs as failure on your part. It’ll only make you feel worse, trust me. Everyone progresses at different speeds. You have all the time in the world to become a booming tumblr blog and I know you have it in you! So go enjoy what this hellsite has to offer!

#asks #anon

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herotheshiro · 4 years ago

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so in abt 2017-18, i came across this manga called sneaky red by thanat. most of the 1st volume, translated, got posted online but i knew there was a continuation. while i don’t remember too much specifics abt my reaction to it then, i distinctly remember being affected by it and by that i mean ... liking it. i remember that i had the feeling of wanting to read the 2nd volume and even a year ago (almost the date!) on this very blog i noted that i “wanna read all of [their] works so bad” and at this point i had only ever read sneaky red so going off of that, i liked it apparently.

fast forward 2-3 years to tonight, where i finally forced myself to finish reading the series since the free month-long futekiya trial is ending soon. and well ... i thought i would be satisfied afterwards since i’ve wanted to finish reading this series for literal years but all i felt was ... disappointment. i’ve had the futekiya subscription for abt 1/2 a month already but i’ve been putting off reading sneaky red bc i mean i’ve read the 1st volume, i knew it was abt abuse pretty much and i wasn’t really into reading something so depressing (i had to reread the 1st volume in this read bc i legit have not touched the manga since whenever i read it last). and ... yeah it is a downer to read with little positive payoff. [putting under cut bc WOW this got long]

let’s get this straight, my perception of what this author is trying to do is this: two guys meet, one of them (A) has anger/emotion management issues and is quick to react with his fists and the other one (B) just so happens to get off at pain (...no further comment at this) ... which is coincidentally a “nice” set-up but A wants to turn over a new leaf bc eventually he feels bad whaling on B all the time ... except suddenly turning over a new leaf when you’ve been living and thinking a certain way for almost two entire decades is not that easy. which alright tl;dr, an abuser/someone quick to physical violence trying to reform. a rather heavy topic to tackle for your debut work ... and unfortunately i don’t think this author really succeeds in doing so. 1st volume was written in 2013 and is their debut work and it definitely feels like a new author work ... the story developments are kind of unclear at times and misaki (i think that was his name?) just accepting getting beaten up by a rando is just so incredibly sad to read bc like ... wtf? i cannot figure out how they came to love each other. i mean haru i can kind of see bc they kind of implied that misaki was one of the 1st ppl to have hope in him even though he himself felt like he was a lost cause, but misaki i just have no fucking idea what happened there. like lust turning into love? idk man falling in love from physical abuse frankly makes no fucking sense esp since it’s not even implied that misaki has low self-esteem or something that would make him accept this treatment. i legitimately would like to go back in time to meet me from 2-3 years and ask them what the fucking hell made me like this manga bc it’s messed up and the topics aren’t even handled that well! this is truly a manga that somehow depicts abuse as being shitty but also romanticizes it somehow?? even though i legit just read it a few hours ago i’m starting to mix up what happened in vol 1 and 2 so let’s just move on to vol 2 now.

vol 2 was definitely more put together in terms of story progression than vol 1 (i mean, being done 3 yrs later i would hope so). i did like it a bit more than vol 1 and there were some cute scenes bw misaki and haru but ... the scenes where misaki still went to see haru even after some seriously messed up scenes being like ‘i still love you’ ... really rubbed me the wrong way bc it kind of felt like a ‘you can heal abusive behavior through love’. i mean yes haru acknowledged his behavior and treatment of misaki was absolute shit and that he’d try to change, but also that ch where they kind of just substituted bdsm as a more socially acceptable way for haru to hit/hurt misaki during sex? BRO THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS !! i mean there were some scenes that felt realistic (misaki instinctively defending himself when haru raised his hand) but at the same time it also felt like the author didn’t really know what they were doing. like i get it, haru is supposed to be a nice person who just so happens to react badly to things but ... these kinds of things you kind of legit need professional help for. simply learning to depend more on friends/SOs, completely cutting out your toxic fam from your life... that kind of stuff is not really enough to help you heal. i mean this is a japanese manga, and ik east asian culture has ... thoughts on mental health care but the way the story was presented just didn’t feel realistic at all. yes they did show haru struggling to hold his emotions in check, i did like the scenes where haru was in his own head and saw his brother berating him for his behavior, and i do appreciate they didn’t merely just 180 change his personality and pretend it was easy to change for the better but ... idk. i just simply did not enjoy reading this story and about this relationship, i felt like their issues never really got resolved or are moving in a more constructive direction. i mean i guess this happens irl (bc ppl do stay in abusive relationships despite how bad it gets) but like i just had no fucking idea what misaki even saw in haru in the first place which sounds mean to haru but it’s true ?? like you gotta be attracted to SOMETHING first right, is it just bc he’s nice sometimes (this is worrying bc i’m someone who is weak to ppl simply being nice to me but also bruh if someone is beating my ass idk if i can be attracted to that) ?? it legit at times reminded me of bj alex which is an extremely unfortunate comparison in my book and you know what i just remembered that misaki was attracted to haru partly bc of his looks so uh yeah the comparison holds up.

i don’t even know if i can say i’m glad i read through these 2 volumes of sneaky red. apparently a 3rd volume is getting published next month and i’m like WHAT THE FUCK ELSE IS THERE TO TALK ABOUT ?? i saw a graphic of the side pairing (story covered in motion emotion) on the back cover which i got a lil excited abt bc i am intrigued by that pairing but like ... what else is there to talk abt re: sneaky red’s pairing. they’ve gotten together, they’re growing up and dealing with adult worries (jobs), and they’re moving in a more “positive” direction with their relationship (i.e., haru is opening up more to misaki) while attempting to hurdle the lingering issue of haru’s abuse -- what else is there to cover ... i think this artist really likes this couple which like makes sense for them since they’re their first published OCs but it’s prob just gonna be more senseless writing. the translated caption was like ‘the sequel of the famous debut work is here!’ and i’m like sneaky red is popular? this very unclearly written thing? but then again ppl liked k!lling st@alking and some of harada’s works that are OUT THERE are popular so i guess the fetish for abuse/hurt is strong ...

i didn’t really say anything coherent in this post bc deadass i don’t even remember what the fuck i read even though i read this manga like mere hrs ago which goes to show how much of an impact the story had on me (hint none). abuser stories are usually pretty hit or miss stories i feel, although tbh i don’t think i’ve ever read a hit story because the abuse is usually romanticized or somehow resolved without any issue which is frankly unrealistic and kind of dangerous to be telling people. i admit i don’t have personal experience with abuse (thankfully) so i guess i can’t really say stuff abt how realistic it is or not but ... just very disappointed with the story. i am still struggling to figure out what i liked abt this manga so much back then. i do like the art style a lot bc it’s unique compared to what you see in other BLs but the author’s writing is just very unclear sometimes ... it’s definitely improved since 2013 but ... hah. it was not really an enjoyable read. i legit wanted to stop reading at times but i’ve wanted to finish it for so long so i pushed on ... maybe i should reread so i can more definitively say what exactly i disliked but i don’t wanna read this again.

#sometimes i look at how long my posts are and i'm like there are ppl out there who READ all of this?#like i mean I'M forced to as the writer but ... far too many words. but i got a lot of things to say sometimes even though i'm prob repeatin #i used to tag the author but ik they have a tumblr and idk if i want them to see my posts bashing them lol #esp since i don't say anything constructive #i mean... i didn't censor their name though. yike #reading

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nerdybookahs · 5 years ago

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Writing about my Top Games of 2019 was a bit too short-sighted, apparently. I have seen others talk about their games of the decade – most recently Rakuno’s post. And then I figured that I could add another “top games” post here. I mean, it is my blog and it has been filled with lots and lots of talk about games… not in the past decade, but close (I started in March 2011)!

So let’s see… which games deserve to be called favourite or even best games in this time span? Should it be the games that gave you the most hours of entertainment? Or should a game of the decade be one that surprised you somehow? That was breathtaking in graphics (or audio, etc.) or just so immersive, you still think about it? I’m not going to dwell on these questions for too long and will go with my intuition, which means that it will probably be a good mix of all of these points. There is no ranking of games as I did in my other posts. Each of them earns a spot in its own way.

I tried to remember what I did at the beginning of the decade. At that time, I had more or less stopped playing LotRO and Warhammer Online was about to close, but I had left that one much earlier already. Despite not playing either Rift or Guild Wars 2 anymore nowadays, both have been my MMO home for quite some time. Rift (launched March 2011) most of all for its open world events and its housing system. Guild Wars 2 (launched August 2012) also because of the open world events and the horizontal progression at endgame. Even though I found the living world season 1 to be too stressful with its content being available for 2 or 4 weeks and then disappearing forever, in hindsight I still think it was the best content they released (not every single piece of it, but taken everything together). If only it hadn’t been time-limited. But most of all, I love the game for the community. Being a part of Dragon Season (our guild) has given me the opportunity to get to know so many amazing new people and I remember many fun hours spent together, doing guild missions or our guild events.

If I go by time played, other than the MMOs, I will have lots of city builders and management games come out on top. In some cases, this is certainly fitting and these games belong in my top list. With others, the advantage of being a game that is built on taking a long time to play would be unfair. So, out of the long list of games from these genres, Tropico 4 (launched September 2011) immediately comes to my mind. The music, the humour, the gameplay. I love everything about it and it’s a game that I can still launch and play and have fun with today. Then there is Jurassic World Evolution (launched June 2018) which belongs in my top list simply because it amazes me how real the dinosaurs seem and when I think back to my early days of playing on the C64 and how amazed I was by printing out birthday invitations made on… the C64 or the Amiga, I actually don’t remember… It was certainly pixel art, that’s for sure… But let’s get back to the past decade: My inner child is still amazed by graphics like these! And my inner child who loved the first Jurassic Park film is also amazed that suddenly, she can create her own park on her PC!

One thing I do not like is side-scrolling games – except for Terraria (launched May 2011) where I think it works perfectly. I especially like how open the world feels despite being 2D only and how immersive it is despite the simple graphics. However, once Trove launched (July 2015), I more or less stopped playing Terraria. I know, Trove isn’t a Terraria-clone, but it fills the space of digging through the world for me. Part of the appeal of Trove is certainly having a lot of other players around. I just like seeing others around me, even if I usually play on my own.

Whenever I played Civilization, I kept whining that there is too much of a focus on war. I didn’t want to fight! Also, the stacks of doom in Civilization IV were annoying. I wanted to conquer peacefully through culture instead. And then I found the first Warlock game (Warlock: Master of the Arcane, launched May 2012)… and I conquered through war. And I loved it! The game has a sequel, Warlock II: The Exiled (launched April 2014) which I like even more. So, the game series as a whole is in my top list.

L. A. Noire (launched November 2011 for PC) is one of the first games I actually played through. And the immersion level has been amazing! I’m still not happy about the ending, but I guess that just shows how much I could identify with the main character. Another detective game is Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments (launched September 2014). Ever since playing this game, I want more like it! Unfortunately, the sequel, Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter, couldn’t win me over like the other one did. And then there is The Painscreek Killings (launched September 2017) where your task is to figure out who killed Vivian Roberts. Other than that, you’re on your own exploring the now abandoned village. I did not like the little extra play sequence at the end, but other than that, it was a really good game. There is no guidance where to go first and what to do next. There are no quests or missions and no direction. I did manage to figure out everything in the end and it was a very enjoyable journey.

Life is Strange (launched 2015) cannot be missing from my list. If I did any ranking, it would be very high up. I’m still pestering bookahnerk to pick up the game and play through it because I want to hear his opinion about this one moment (no spoiler!) where you need to make a certain choice. I think you only have this one choice in order to advance, so it’s basically not a choice. But I sat here with tears in my eyes imagining how I’d feel if I was ever asked to do something like this by a person close to me.

Last but not least, I haven’t listed any action RPGs (as you may have noticed, I did dig through my favourite game genres to detect all possible games). There is definitely Torchlight 2 (launched September 2012) followed closely by Grim Dawn (launched February 2016). In this case I say “follow”, because I feel that even though I’ve been playing it for a long time, I haven’t even seen a third of the content that Grim Dawn has to offer. And yet, it is such a strong game with an interesting world and very compelling classes. Torchlight 2, on the other hand, seems like a lightweighted action RPG in comparison. But it has the pet system and no matter which ARPG I’m playing, I always wish I had a little helper like that who I can send to town to sell all the items I found. It saves so much time and adds convenience, but not at the expense of immersion.

I’ve got one honorable mention: The Secret World/Secret World Legends (launched June 2012). I absolutely love the idea and the atmosphere of the game! However, I find the gameplay itself too clunky and I never liked how combat felt, including the character’s animations. So while it has something that makes it very memorable for me, I just couldn’t play it for a long enough time. Hence, the honorable mention. It tried, but it didn’t really succeed with me.

I guess that’s it – unless I forgot some game now which I probably did. There are so many more games that I enjoyed playing, of course. But these do stand out for one reason or another.

My Top Games of the Decade Writing about my Top Games of 2019 was a bit too short-sighted, apparently. I have seen others talk about their games of the decade - most recently…

#favourite games #games of the decade #grim dawn #Guild Wars 2 #jurassic world evolution #L. A. Noire #life is strange #pc gaming #Rift #secret world legends #sherlock holmes: crimes and punishments #Terraria #the painscreek killings #the secret world #torchlight 2 #tropico 4 #Trove #Warlock II: The Exiled #warlock master of the arcane

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bakathief · 7 years ago

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Keep on drawing!

A few months ago @mintchocolateleaves did a post where she compared her writing and how it has changed over time and after reading that I thought “yes, this is something really cool to do!” Not only because you see your own development but also because it can be inspirational to people who just get started? So yes, here is a little throwback about my drawing, mainly on my comic/doujin history.

So, I have always liked drawing but I only really got back into it in 2009 when I got back into DC. And I was drawing almost nothing but DC. I have all my pictures still on my deviantart and I did think about deleting some of them but at the same time I thought that it might be nice to see. Because I tried all kinds of tools for art and all sorts of styles. I uploaded my first comic was about Kaito and how he learned about Toichi’s death. I drew it in 2010 and, well, it’s... it’s cute.

I honestly think that this should feel anyone better about their art, honestly. Anyway, this was my first comic, it was 11 pages long and I used fineliner and pencils. Published in 2010. Yay. However, I enjoyed story telling so I soon decided to do another doujinshi, something a bit longer. Back then I ADORED the fanficition Mayonaka by dragoon-sama and just decided “I’m gonna draw that!” So I started uploading “Mayonaka” one month later, which I worked on until 2010. I tried my pencil style, then moved to digital drawings...

... and then switched again back to traditional. (I tried digital art, I did!)

I fell in love with the hatching style, which I am still using up to this day. But as I said, I tried plenty of styles and eventually settled on the one which was the most enjoyable one. After two years of drawing Mayonaka I lost my motiviation for this doujin since the original fanfiction wasn’t updated anymore and I can’t think of a plot that seemed worthy of this amazing story. So I started thinking about my own story, which is how Shadow Chase was born in 2012.

I, yes, the drawings are cute, but they ARE better than 2010. And I LOVED drawing comics so I just kept doing it. (Also, for anyone else who’s drawing comics, I always work10 pages ahead which helps me staying motivated. I always found it very depressing when I uploaded a page that I just finished and had to start from scratch again or else I wouldn’t have anything to upload). So yes, that page was from 2012 and the following one is from 2017.

It’s not perfect but I am very proud about my progress! And while my main influence remains to be DC, I was also influenced by other mangas I enjoy reading like Bakuman, The World God only Knows and others. When I saw something in a manga that I really liked I would try to adapt it in one of my comics at some point. I also read books on different drawing styles and Animation, and looked at lots of art of other people and whenever there was something I really liked I started experimenting myself. The message I want to tell : Just keep drawing. Like, no matter how bad you think your art is or how slowly you seem to make progress, just keep going anyway and try whatever you want! Just don’t stop drawing, because in order to improve you need to continue drawing. Just for fun I did a redraw a few days ago of the first picture I had ever uploaded on DeviantArt and I’m quite excited about another comparison in a few years. To anyone who reads this and might be insecure about their drawings now, just keep drawing in a way that you’re enjoying it and don’t be afraid to try new things or show your work! The more experience you get the better you’ll become. <3

#my art #doujinshi #rambling #shadow chase #bakathief

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julianlapostat · 7 years ago

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A Semiotic Survey: Assassin’s Creed

I used to be a big fan of the Assassin’s Creed games. Not anymore. I am not exactly a hater or critic, but I have passed into indifference. A full list of why I have lost respect for the games is not of interest to anybody other than myself. So I thought I’d give some of my reasons by looking at the games from the angle of semiotics, namely the boxart, and its choice of setting. It is my contention that Ubisoft’s AC games are reflective of the dialectic described by Edward Said in Orientalism. But it is an Orientalism that is subtle, and so pernicious...and it is also an Orientalism that is deceptive because it takes advantage of the Video Game medium’s general neanderthal culture to get a pass as being a cut above the worst...Anyway, let’s begin.

Full Disclosure: 1) The following post is based on some posts that I did on Ubisoft Forums under the username VestigialLlama4 (NOTE: This was a machine generated username when I signed on to Xbox 360, although I do wish I did come up with a name like that). 2) When I use the concept Semiotics, I am referring to how Roland Barthes described it in his Mythologies. Where a sign or a symbol in the wider society and media suggests by its message two meanings, one it’s stated and obvious one, and the other is the unstead meaning, what Barthes referred to elsewhere as “the structuring absence of the text” i.e. the underlying assumptions and context communicated by message, setting, and location. I am also simplifying and paraphrasing M. Barthes’ concepts to give a general sense of how I’m approaching this. So let’s begin...(Knuckles Crack). Now Assassin’s Creed is what they used to call “a hot mess”. Assassin’s Creed is famously muddled and filled with a bunch of concepts from multiple genres and not in a way that works in that Alan Moorean “it all fits” kind of way. It has two plots, one is set in the present day as a framing device, but the bulk is set in the historical period which is a game-within-the-game.I am mainly going to treat AC games as a historical fiction sandbox because that to me is how the games make sense, and how it markets itself anyway. When the first AC1 game came out, there was a lot of praise for the games having an Arab protagonist. You have a game set during the Crusades where you play the Arabs and not the Western Knights...doesn’t that just sound totally rad? Then years later they made a game AC3, where you play a Mohawk during the American Revolution. Isn’t that also rad? And then we have three whole games where we play white English dudes, including one of whom who is technically French but has an English accent. Now the upcoming game Origins stars an Egyptian, which makes it 10 games in 10 years : 7 of whom star Europeans and white protagonists, and only 3 of them having non-white protagonists. And this is of course the main games...I am not counting some of the DLC, and side-games, since those are for the already converted and not the general public. Within the gaming world, AC is noted for having a “progressive” reputation. And I am not going to lie, relative to what other games and other companies put out, AC does look pretty interesting by comparison. Yet, that’s still relative to the video game world, and not by other standards. Let’s look at two sets of Boxart covers...one is covers of the games set in Europe or having European-colonies as settings, and having white protagonists, and the other is games with non-white protagonists.

Notice the composition of the images. The protagonists are all centered, staring authoritatively at the camera, and basically with a sense of “cool”. There’s noting claustrophobic about the space they inhabit. They make room for themselves, and the background expands for them. Now look at these guys.

This is Altair, the Syrian Protagonist of the very first AC game. He is centered like the rest above but his body is looked at in a slanted angle...there is a sense of claustrophobia, emphasizing the crowd surrounding him. His expression underneath the hood has an unmistakable sense of "hope-the-security-camera-doesn't-see-me''.

This is Connor Kenway, aka, Ratohnhake;ton, of AC3, a Native Mohawk in the American Revolution. Again he is centered, but like Altair, he is surrounded, and his body is slanted from an angle. His body attitude is more heroic than Altair’s, but there’s a sense of limitations and closing around him, with the opposing armies and himself in the center, suggesting that he is doomed regardless of who wins that fight.

And now the latest AC game. I chose a low-res image to make this post feel less lengthy. But you will notice that then Egyptian protagonist has his back to the audience, his figure is tiny, dwarved by the huge pyramid in the background, and the intermediary scenery. So fundamentally, when Ubisoft portrays and markets non-white protagonists in AC games they are shown as different from their white protagonists and heroes. They are shown as somewhat marginal figures, somewhat vulnerable, and in the case of Origins’s Egyptian, a bug at the bottom of a pyramid, as if the box-art is emphasizing how powerless he is. The unstated “structuring absence” is that fundamentally white protagonists are easy-to-market and identify-with power fantasies commanding cool, authority and power, while non-white protagonists are symbols of marginality, vulnerability, and/or surrounded and dwarved by their settings.

Now of course this is just marketing and it has nothing to do with the content. A thorough discussion of the content of these games would take several posts and a longer investment of time and resources. I will point out that whenever AC does a game with a white hero, it’s in a setting and context, where the protagonist’s class/race/religion/status is not under threat or oppression. Whereas in the case of Altair, AC1 is set during the Third Crusade where the hero spends time discussing peace with Richard the Lionheart...AC3 is about Connor spending time and hanging out with Washington and American patriots. From this you get a pattern, the non-white, non-European can only be playable if his setting is one where white Europeans have affected with their presence and policies. We can’t say, have an AC game focusing on the Assassins attacking corrupt Iranian rulers or leaders like in the novel Alamut which inspired this game, or when they oppose Mongols, when this was in fact the lion’s share of the interactions of the real Assassins...We can’t have an AC game set among the Mohawks in the Pre-Columbian era. We can only have a game where they interact with Washington and somehow walk the fine line between demonizing the American Revolution and still sort-of defending it. The upcoming ORIGINS is interesting for this particular doublethink...the game is marketed or sold as being set in “Ancient Egypt” but the setting of the game is the reign of Cleopatra in the end of the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty, an era where Egyptians were second-class citizens in their own land, and set to be occupied by the Romans. The real Ancient Egypt, the time of Rameses II, the Eighteenth Dynasty among others is washed away...because we can’t have a game of Egyptians among Egyptians where their culture and perspective is not filtered with “the regard of the Other”. To return to the issue of the box-art...you can see Ubisoft’s duplicity in their marketing of Watch_Dogs (a fairly mediocre series of GTA Clones)

The first game has a white hero...centered, authoritative, powerful, and the classic Nuremberg angle of the camera angled low to see the mighty vigilante-fuhrer in his trenchcoat from high.

Here’s the sequel with Marcus, and look at the boxes ticked...dwarved by setting, back to the camera, and eye peering out in the "hope-the-security-camera-doesn't-see-me'' angle... What does progress look like, take a gander at the cover for Dishonored: Death of the Outsider:

This shouldn’t feel fresh and almost a revolution, and yet it does. Fundamentally, the marketing and the choice of settings in the Assassin’s Creed games reflects an Orientalist view. The East as being Other, incomprehensible except from the perspective and mediation of the West...only here the orientalism is more pernicious because of the rarity in the popular culture and in the video game medium of any non-white, non-European perspectives.

#assassin's creed #dishonored death of the outsider #billie lurk #ratohnhaké:ton #altair ibn-la'ahad #cleopatra #orientalism #edward said #roland barthes #watch_dogs #watch_dogs 2 #ubisoft #VIDEO GAME METACOMMENTARY

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odanurr87 · 8 years ago

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The problem with Star Wars Rebels

At the behest of several friends and acquaintances I decided to start watching the animated series Star Wars Rebels. I had previously watched The Clone Wars, but eventually gave up on it for a variety of reasons that I may explain in a separate post. I am currently on episode 14 of the second season of Star Wars Rebels, yet I feel I am able at this time to try and pinpoint some of the issues I’ve been having with this series.

Let me preface this by saying Rebels is not a bad show, at least I don’t think so. I think all fans, both old and new, can agree it’s entertaining, there’s a lot of humour, and voice acting is very good. Some might even delight in meeting familiar characters from the Star Wars Universe, like Leia, Lando, or the droids, or learning new bits of lore, such as the origin of the Rebel B-Wing starfighter. I do believe that someone (relatively) new to the Star Wars Universe will find more to enjoy in Star Wars Rebels than an old fan like me, but I am trying and I will keep on trying.

Speaking for myself, I come with a lot of Expanded Universe (EU) baggage, and retcons are not something that I take to lightly, especially when they’re gratuitous or badly done. My head is filled with details that fleshed the Star Wars Universe, details provided by the EU, so when I see something in Star Wars Rebels (and in The Clone Wars too) that overwrites that data an alarm goes off at the back of my head and I’m taken out of the experience even if for a tiny bit. The Clone Wars is perhaps the most egregious culprit as Dave Filoni messed with continuity (LucasArts wasn’t owned by Disney then) resurrecting already-dead characters (e.g.: Darth Maul) and completely altering Mandalorian culture, among others.

However, retconning is only (a small) part of the problem with Star Wars Rebels. I believe there are more basic issues with the series that I’ll do my best to outline in this post. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at what happened a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

The origins of the Rebel Alliance... kinda

Star Wars Rebels follows the adventures of a young group of mercenaries turned freedom-fighters 5 years before the Battle of Yavin (BBY). The show starts as a young thief by the name of Ezra bumps into a group, led by Kanan, a former Jedi-turned-mercenary, in the process of stealing supplies from the Empire. These will be our heroes for the remainder of the series. Besides Kanan and Ezra, we have: Zeb, a Lasat male honor guardsman who acts as the muscle; Chopper, an astromech droid that’s in charge of opening every door and repairing everything that doesn’t work properly; Sabine, a Mandalorian who has a penchant for art and blowing stuff up; and Hera, daughter of Cham Syndulla (from TCW), top-notch pilot and sharing the lead together with Kanan.

From left to right: Sabine, Zeb, Hera, Kanan, Ezra, and Chopper.

Comparisons with the gang from the Original Trilogy (OT) are self-evident and are not the focus of this post, nor of this particular point. As the show progresses, we come to learn that his group, while operating independently, does strike against the Empire every now and then. Circumstances eventually force them to make a stand, and thus we learn that they were actually operating as a cell, and that there are other Rebel cells operating throughout the galaxy. In short, what we have is a small window into the origins of the Rebel Alliance.

Putting aside the (non-canon and Force-powered) story of The Force Unleashed, which also depicts the origins of the Rebel Alliance (and is incidentally very good at it), one obvious question comes to mind, do we really need this story? Do we need to know exactly how the Rebel Alliance came together to stand against the might of the Empire forged by Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader? To my mind, the answer is no. History has shown us that rebellion is commonplace in empires that abuse their power and oppress their people. Therefore, that a rebellion would surface in the span between Episodes III and IV doesn’t come as a surprise. Would I want this story to be told though? If executed properly, the answer is yes.

Planting the seeds of rebellion.

George Lucas tried to show us some of this in Episode III with a series of meetings between Bail Organa, Mon Mothma, Padmé Amidala, and a few other senators, where they discussed the future of the Republic and what they might need to do to save it. Unfortunately, those scenes got cut for the theatrical release. Maybe they were a tad too on the nose, maybe Lucas thought it would remind people of The Phantom Menace’s politics. I am perhaps one of the few who finds that politics are an integral part of the tale of the Republic’s downfall and who believes they don’t have to be detrimental to a story. Just look at the excellent The Legend of the Galactic Heroes for reference. Whether you’re a fan of the light novel series by Yoshiki Tanaka, or the (superior) anime version, it’s a story fraught with history, politics, economics, religion, and warfare, that finds the right balance between all these elements. If Star Wars Rebels were to combine these elements half as well to tell us how the Rebel Alliance was formed, it would make for one hell of a story.

Unfortunately, so far Rebels has made no attempt to do so. There are many basic questions that remain unanswered. For instance, if Hera’s (she’s their commanding officer now, right?) band of freedom fighters is just one cell out of many, does that mean that there’s some sort of centralized power structure? The story seems to suggest the rebels were disorganized before Hera’s group rallied them into action but it’s never really clear. At the same time, it also suggests Hera was already taking orders from some form of command authority back in their early ‘independent’ days. Which one is it?

If there is a commanding body to the rebel movement, is there a larger plan beyond ‘sticking it to the Empire’? How exactly are the rebels planning to overthrow the Empire, if indeed that is their goal? Are we even at the point of calling it the Rebel Alliance? It would appear that at least the rebel group working with Hera is mobile and doesn’t have a base of operations. Is this the same for other cells?

My head is filled with dozens of questions that scream (a bit of hyperbole, okay) to be answered, but the show remains oblivious and chooses to plunge through regardless. To be perfectly honest, I doubt the creators themselves know the answers. It is this internal confusion that throws me for a loop. Perhaps they believe these are trifle questions not worth pondering. I beg to differ. If you choose to tell a story about the origins of the Rebel Alliance, thoroughly exploring said origins is a must; at the very least I would expect it to be internally coherent and not sow confusion every two episodes.

This ties neatly into my second point, which is...

The Force is too strong with this one

When old Ben Kenobi tells Luke how the Jedi were once the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic, one has the sense that he’s talking about a distant memory, something that happened a long time ago. Indeed, watching the OT, you get the feeling that most of the galaxy believes that the Jedi were nothing but a myth. General Motti went so far as to question Vader’s sad devotion to that ‘ancient religion.’ Tarkin is adamant that Vader’s the only Jedi left. Even though he’d be proven wrong minutes (and an episode) later, the universe of the Classic Trilogy has all but forgotten the Jedi.

When Luke picks up the Jedi mantle it’s an incredibly boon for the Rebel Alliance. Not only have they now a powerful symbol to rally behind, for the Jedi were considered bastions of the Republic, they also have someone to stand against the powerful Darth Vader. This was further reinforced by the EU. Sometimes a story would feature people who would dabble in the Force, or people who pretended to be Jedi, but in the end, the notion that Luke was the last of them was ever present.

Luke Skywalker, last (hope?) of the Jedi.

The Prequel Trilogy (PT) was the first to create problems for this narrative. After all, the events of Revenge of the Sith take place 19 years before the events of A New Hope. I would hardly think that 20 years is enough time for the galaxy to forget about the Jedi. Even less so when you consider that the Clone Wars would have spread the Jedi throughout the galaxy, making them known even in the most distant Outer Rim worlds.

20 years ago there were thousands of Jedi. Now there are none. Revenge of the Sith tried to explain this through Order 66, just one in a long series of orders drilled into the clone army that instructed them to eliminate their Jedi commanders and every other Jedi they could get their hands on. The film shows us they were mercilessly efficient at that and very few Jedi managed to survive the betrayal, the most notable examples being Obi-Wan on Utapau and Yoda on Kashyyyk. But as the film also shows us, not all Jedi were killed by the clones, either on the battlefield or back at the Jedi Temple. Obi-Wan managed to get a message out warning any surviving Jedi of the fall of Coruscant and the clones’ betrayal, and instructing them to stay hidden until... whenever. There’s a very funny deleted scene from Episode III where the clones dress up as Jedi to trick Yoda and Obi-Wan with predictably bad results.

Anyway, as I was saying, no matter how efficient the clones might have been, it stands to reason that some Jedi other than Obi-Wan and Yoda would have survived the purge. Again, going with EU material, the Dark Times comic series show us as much as Darth Vader begins his quest to eliminate any and all surviving Jedi, and he’s very good at it. Any Jedi that might have survived that second purge where probably in hiding during the events of the OT, right?

Wrong. In Star Wars Rebels, Kanan notices that young Ezra is strong in the Force and undertakes the daunting task of training him. So now we have a Jedi Master and Padawan, fighting together with the Rebel Alliance, five years before the events of A New Hope. In fact, the events of season three of Star Wars Rebels take place as close as 2 BBY.

What?

It gets better. Joining them in their struggle in season two is none other than Anakin Skywalker’s former padawan, Ahsoka Tano, who’s also working with the Rebel Alliance! As if that weren’t enough, we also have the Inquisitors, an organization of Force-sensitive agents working for the Empire to hunt down Jedi. By episode 14 of season 2 I counted at least 3 Inquisitors and there are probably more if the “fifth brother” and “seventh sister” quotes are any indication.

Um, well...

There’s more. Darth Maul makes an appearance at some point in season two and definitely returns in season three. Kanan and Ezra travel to a Jedi Temple where they both receive guidance from Yoda himself. Holocrons pop up, and the Bendu monks get transformed into Bendu, a Force-sensitive individual who represents the center of the Force.

...

Where should I begin?

If it was hard for me (or anyone, really) to believe the galaxy had forgotten about the Jedi over the span of 20 years, you can imagine it’s even harder for me to believe they’d forgotten about them over the span of 2 years (and that’s if Rebels ends at 2 BBY, it could end at 0 BBY!). I suppose one could argue that the galaxy is a big place, and that even dozens of Force-powered individuals running around waving their lightsabers like mad might get unnoticed by the galaxy at large. I can see myself conceding this point. There could’ve been Jedi rebels spread throughout the galaxy waging their own personal little wars against the Empire, careful not to attract undue attention to themselves.

Unfortunately, Kanan and Ezra seem to do everything in their power to stay in the Empire’s spotlight. Furthermore, they’re irrevocably linked to the Rebel Alliance, to the point that Princess Leia Organa herself saw the pair wielding their lightsabers and using the Force! Such a tale would’ve certainly spread like wildfire throughout the rebel cells, reaching both the Core and the Outer Rim. The Rebel Alliance had found not one, not two, but three Jedi (so far) to rally around and bring the fight to the Empire... 5 years before they found Luke Skywalker and 9 years before the Jedi, um, returned? Revenge of the Jedi’s starting to sound awfully better now, isn’t it? Pity the Sith got there first.

To further compound the problem is the matter of Ezra’s training. At the rate this is going, he’ll end up having more training than Luke ever did in the OT. He’s had access to a Jedi Temple, two Jedi who’re around almost full-time (Ben died fairly soon and Luke cut short his training with Yoda on Dagobah), two holocrons, and there may be other things I’m not aware of yet. Perhaps Marvel intends to fill the gap of Luke’s training with novels and/or comics? My point is that Ezra seems to be turning too powerful too easily and Disney will have to pull off another Order 66-like stunt if they’re going to get rid of him, Kanan, and Ahsoka by the time Luke arrives.

Will this be Kanan and Ezra’s fate?

We already had an episode in season one where Vader fought more eager, less experienced, versions of Kanan and Ezra and couldn’t (or wouldn’t) defeat them. I believe there’s a similar episode in season two with pretty much the same results. Do the creators intend to go The Force Unleashed route with a final showdown between the Emperor, Vader, Kanan, and Ezra, where Palpatine wipes the floor with the Jedi? The Inquisitors are useless after all. Will they instead go into hiding like their fellows? That would be quite the reversal given everything that’s happened on the show but it wouldn’t surprise me. Not anymore.

A galaxy without stakes

The struggle between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire is more than well documented, at least under EU material. Even if we’re talking canon sources, only recently we had Rogue One, a new Star Wars movie set around 0 BBY that tells the story of how the Rebels got their hands on the Death Star plans that Darth Vader is so keen on getting back in A New Hope.

Rogue One is, in essence, a war drama in the vein of the old World War II films I used to watch, like The Guns of Navarone or The Dirty Dozen, sharing more similarities with the former than the latter. It’s a film that attempts to show us the Alliance’s darker side and the lines they’re willing to cross to defeat the Empire, all the while driving the point that war is not a clean and clear-cut affair, with multiple rebel groups having different goals and methods to go about it, and civilians often getting caught in the crossfire. This movie does not shy away from death, having the largest body count since the Death Star blew up Alderaan in A New Hope. Okay, maybe not that high.

In Rogue One, war is hell.

Perhaps more so than A New Hope and Return of the Jedi, Rogue One succeeds at making the Empire feel powerful and menacing, to the point the Rebels actually consider giving up on the entire endeavour. Indeed, the Rebellion in Rogue One, while an organized force, is no match for the Empire, less so when the Death Star is put into play.

Far superior at showing this was The Empire Strikes Back during the Battle of Hoth, when the full force of the Empire was brought to bear on the Rebel base. A blockade around the planet was enforced by Star Destroyers while AT-ATs under the command of experienced General Veers led the ground assault against the Rebel forces. The Rebels put up a valiant effort but the outcome had been clear from the start: this battle was already lost; all they could do was delay the Imperial forces long enough for the evacuation to be completed. Even then, the evacuation was no simple affair. The Rebel transports could not evade nor outgun the Star Destroyers around the planet so they had to use Echo Base’s powerful ion cannons to disable them long enough to make the jump to lightspeed.

This is what it took to (temporarily) disable a Star Destroyer in Episode V.

Even our heroes are not safe from the Empire in Episode V. Luke learns a painful lesson when he hastens to rescue Han and Leia at Bespin, losing a hand in a duel with Vader that nearly cost him his life. Han is tortured, frozen in carbonite, and handed over to a bounty hunter. Later, in Return of the Jedi, a more seasoned Luke Skywalker pays the price of underestimating the dark side of the Force, something both Ben and Yoda warned him against. Had Vader not turned against the Emperor right there and then, Luke would’ve been toast. Of course, the Rebellion would’ve won the day nonetheless, right?

It is true that the depiction of the Imperial forces is uneven even among the movies of the OT. For the excellent Battle of Hoth we also have the (underwhelming) Battle of Endor, where the Empire’s forces are defeated by a small Rebel strike team working together with the primitive Ewoks. To be fair though, the size of the garrison on Endor is a lot smaller than the forces deployed during the Hoth battle and the terrain is a lot trickier and particularly well-suited for guerrilla tactics, where the advantage of numbers can be severely hampered. As a side note, there’s also a deleted scene from Return of the Jedi where we see Commander Jerjerrod’s conflict at being ordered by the Emperor to destroy the Endor moon, thereby killing friend and foe alike. No doubt Palpatine intended to use this to leverage Luke into submitting... or forcing him to use the dark side to strike at him. Quite the deviously cunning fellow Palpatine.

Well, that looks impressive.

Still, the sense that the movies and the EU convey is that the Empire, at the time of the OT, has a vast and fairly competent military, but suffers from corruption and internal power struggles, as does any large organization given enough power. Why would anyone expect anything less? The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) was perhaps the most effective and efficient military at the time of the Clone Wars, comprised mostly, but not excusively, of highly-trained clones. I’m uncertain whether the clones’ rapid-aging is something that’s still canon (I somehow doubt it), but in any case Star Wars Rebels tells us that the Empire started phasing them out after the events of Episode III, replacing them with regular people, probably drafted from the many worlds of the Republic/Empire.

I’ve seen many people use this argument to explain away things like why the stormtroopers have such bad aim but that’s ridiculous. With the right training and the right tools/weapons, the Empire could still have the most powerful army in the galaxy, and guess what? They do have the right training and the right tools and weapons. Rex himself admits that the Empire did use the clones to train new recruits and pass down their knowledge. The Empire also obviously kept all the vehicles, weapons, and technology they used to fight the Separatists, acquired some new ones, and upgraded others.

There’s a popular, misquoted I believe, phrase that says, “There are no bad soldiers, only bad officers.” Possibly a re-interpretation of a quote attributed to Alexander the Great, “I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.” Regardless of the exact wording and of who said what, the point is clear: soldiers can only be (shown to be) as good as the person commanding them.

Yang vs Reinhard: Two sides of the same coin.

This is a point that the excellent Legend of the Galactic Heroes illustrates time and again. For all his clever strategies, Yang Wenli cannot help but follow the orders of the corrupt and self-serving, but duly elected, government of the Free Planets Alliance, with disastrous results. All Yang can do is stave off defeat and live to fight another day. On the other hand, the Empire’s own master strategist, Reinhard von Lohengramm, has carte blanche to deal with the Alliance as he sees fit, and surrounds himself with officers that have the talent and skills to defeat his enemy, regardless of their background.

Which is the case in Star Wars Rebels? Well, I guess it’s neither. The Imperial forces in Rebels are depicted as grossly incompetent, there’s no other way around this, hardly better than the battle droids from The Clone Wars. The stromtrooper effect is brought to bear in full force in this show, so much so that even the main characters are forced to comment on how bad the stormtroopers’ aim is. Officers fare no better, being made a mockery of, like missing a shot at point-blank range, and falling into the usual tropes of caricaturesque villainy, like having a fat Imperial officer steal a fruit from a vendor and daring him to stop him.

If I had a penny for every time I’ve seen this scene...

Rebels tries to revert this by introducing mildly competent characters like Agent Kallus, Tarkin, the Inquisitors, Vader, and even Thrawn in season three. Unfortunately, the more these characters are foiled (and they’re foiled a lot), the less effective they are at trying to reinforce the notion that the Empire is a force to be reckoned with. Halfway through season two, Kallus and the Inquisitors are more of a bad punchline than anything else. Tarkin and Vader are better off since their appearances have been few and far between. The only fear that the Empire seems to have sowed so far is among its own, as Imperial officers are made to account for their failure with their lives. It’s difficult to take the Empire seriously if it takes so little to foil them.

Only recently I watched an episode where Princess Leia tries to indirectly deliver ships to the Rebels. The plan is for Kanan and company to steal the freighters while Leia’s delivering supplies. The Imperial officer on the planet, in what shall hence be known as “that time that the Empire did something smart,” aware that Alderaanian ships have fallen into Rebel hands under similar circumstances, secures them with gravity locks and adds a pair of (old?) AT-ATs for further security. The Rebels are initially stumped and grimly reach the conclusion that, at best, they’ll be able to steal one of the freighters but not all three. However, as is the case with the show, they manage to steal all three. The gravity locks are easily disabled by Chopper working together with an escaped Imperial prisoner who just happened to build gravity locks while in captivity; the AT-ATs are easily destroyed by the Ghost (that’s the name of Hera’s ship by the way), while Kanan chops off their legs with his lightsaber; and the stormtroopers are their usual useless selves.

Guess Luke forgot that trick in Empire Strikes Back, and Dark Empire, and pretty much every other story ever.

The Empire’s ineptitude on its own is enough of a problem but there’s another that adds to it, and that’s the familiar trope of plot armor. Yes, our main characters have it, a lot of it. Our small band of freedom fighters can do no wrong or get seriously injured. They can easily defeat the toughest of enemies and they always get away with anything no matter what.

As an example, in that very same episode I mentioned above, at a certain moment a Hammerhead-class cruiser fires at the spot where the Princess, Kanan, and Ezra are standing still. My initial thought was, “How are they going to make it out of that? ‘cause that cruiser is bound to pack a punch.” The end result was nothing but a bit of smoke, a punch no more powerful than if a couple of stormtroopers had fired their blasters. The Hammerhead-class cruiser is not equipped with blasters but turbolaser cannons, and their discharge on ground troops should feel like artillery was raining down on you. However, this is far from the only example where the rules bend around our protagonists.

Perhaps the most egregious example though is the one I saw recently. I was watching episode 13 of season 2, “The Protector of Concord Dawn.” The Rebels are searching for new hyperspace routes not monitored by the Empire and they come upon the idea of using the hyperspace corridor through the Concord Dawn system. While the system has no apparent Imperial presence there is a Mandalorian colony on the planet Concord Dawn and so the Rebels try to negotiate safe passage with them. To make a long story short, the Mandalorians aren’t keen on the idea and shoot down a bunch of Rebel A-Wing fighters. Sabine’s the only one who makes it back to the fleet in one piece whereas Hera also makes the jump to lightspeed... with a half-destroyed A-Wing.

I mean, take a look at that. Are you seriously telling me an A-Wing managed the jump to lightspeed in that state and wasn’t torn apart in the process? Give me a break! And you know what the worst thing is, worse than that even? It was completely unnecessary! Indeed, having Hera captured by the Mandalorians would’ve been the perfect excuse for Kanan to mount a rescue op and return. Hera didn’t need to be safely tucked inside the belly of a Rebel frigate recuperating. But then Sabine wouldn’t have had a reason to seek revenge, would she? More on that later.

At the end of the day we have an Empire that’s less of a threat and more of a joke with every passing episode, and protagonists who can get away with anything with no consequences. A perfect example of this happens early on in the series when Sabine infiltrates an Imperial airfield to blow up its TIE fighter contingent. The reason behind this is unclear, or maybe that’s what I’d like to think, because otherwise the show would suggest she did it for the lolz and because she’s an artist. Right, an artist of death, there’s nothing disturbing about that.

Anyway, the stormtroopers are soon alerted to her presence and, in typical Rebels fashion, she toys with and taunts them until one stomtrooper notices something odd on the wing of a TIE that looks a lot like a bomb. Sabine promptly makes her escape while the bomb blows up on the stormtrooper’s face. I’m not kidding, look, here’s how close the stormtrooper’s face was to the bomb:

And he lived. Yup, he and his buddies lived to tell the tale in their next encounter with Sabine in the airfield where she again blows up the TIEs, thereby reassuring us viewers that Sabine’s actions are completely harmless and that the stormtroopers will live to get blown up again. Isn’t that funny? I’m guessing that showing the shockwave from the explosion chopping the stormtrooper’s head off in a kids’ show would’ve been too funny, right?

All of this, the fact that the Imperials are useless, that the Rebels are invulnerable, that actions have no consequences, it all adds up to one simple, inevitable, truth: there are no stakes in this galaxy. Sure, a rebel fighter will be blown up from time to time, but who cares, you never knew him anyway. But wait, a protagonist gets captured! So what? Getting him out is as straightforward and repetitive as going to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters. It’s no big deal, just send in the A-Team, they’ll extract him and blow up half the Empire while they’re at it. There’s a blockade around the planet where the Rebels are at. So what? The A-Team will blow stuff up and escape with no casualties. Who needs a planetary Ion Cannon?

But there are AT-ATs!

Made out of paper apparently.

Inquisitors!

They sure don’t live up to the name.

Darth Vader himself!

One appearance so far and he fails to capture or seriously cripple the Rebels in any way.

Um, Thrawn?

Look, I’m sure the creators thought that they were upping the stakes every time they introduced a new villain but I would question whether there were any to begin with. Like I said before, are we going to go all the way up to the Emperor to finally get things done? For all its faults, the Empire wasn’t that useles in the OT.

In a galaxy without stakes there’s little reason to care about its characters or their struggle and eventually you have to wonder, why is there even a struggle at all? When the show makes me ponder why the Rebellion hasn’t beaten the Empire already you know there’s something wrong somewhere.

What the Rebellion stands for

There’s a traditional narrative that the Rebel Alliance are noble idealists who rise up against the tyranny of the Galactic Empire to deliver peace and freedom to all peoples throughout the galaxy. That’s no secret, the opening crawls of the movies reinforce this by describing the Empire as ‘evil’ and having ‘sinister’ agents, and that ‘dreaded’ Imperial Starfleet, whereas the Rebels are ‘freedom fighters,’ and they have a Princess. Nobody doubts that the Empire are the bad guys here and the Rebel Alliance are the good guys.

Recently, Rogue One attempted to tint that narrative with shades of grey, at least on the part of the Rebels. Yes, the Rebels had spies, and assassins, and bombers, and they did terrible things in the name of the greater good. Our own history tells us that sometimes even the good guys can take extreme measures to end a conflict. Just consider the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. The U.S. used a superweapon to raze two cities to force the Japanese Empire to surrender. There was a reason behind the madness though. Oblivious to the development of the atomic bombs, the Allies had been working on a plan, codenamed Operation Downfall, for the invasion of Japan. Projected casualties for this plan were high and some estimates even reached the millions of fatalities on each side.

Depending on how you look at it, where you stand, war can be seen as an abstract, white vs black, a fight between the forces of good and evil. But from the battlefield, things aren’t always so clear cut, it’s not always easy to tell what’s the right thing to do and what’s the wrong thing to do.

Welcome to the harsh reality of war: she’ll be fine.

As I was watching “The Protector of Concord Dawn,” I was struck by Sabine’s anger at how the Mandalorians cut the Rebels to pieces. Hera almost dying now convinces Sabine that the Protectors are bad, what hardens her resolve to seeing them killed. Maybe it’s not said in so many words but the subtext (to be honest, there isn’t much sub) is there. After all, how dare they shoot at Hera when all the Rebels wanted was to negotiate for safe passage... and bully the Mandalorians into submission if that didn’t work. In fact, if memory serves, that was the original plan proposed by Commander Sato, a show of force meant to say, “you mess with the bull, you get the horns.”

Even Kanan, who initially suggests to try the diplomatic approach, soon changes his tune once the Protectors make it clear they won’t help the Rebels. But let’s explain exactly what the Protectors’ role is, shall we? The Protectors of Concord Dawn are a small group of Mandalorian warriors, led by Fenn Rau, who helped train clone troopers during the Clone Wars and even fought with the Republic in a few battles. Disillusioned by the result of the war, Fenn Rau has opted to bend his knee to the Empire, what I guess amounts to making sure no Rebel ship passes through Concord Dawn unscathed. The Protectors don’t have many resources, maybe as much as two dozen fighters, so it’s doubtful the Empire expects a lot of results from them. This means the Protectors are no direct threat to the Rebels unless the latter insist on using the Concord Dawn hyperspace corridor, which they do. As a result, the Rebels blow up most of the Mandalorian starfighters and kidnap Fenn Rau who, out of the blue, decides not to pursue the Rebels nor report their presence to the Empire. That doesn’t get him out of cuffs though.

Using blackmail to get things done. The Empire would be proud.

How was the Rebellion any better than the Empire here? Aren’t they abusing their power as they accuse the Empire of doing? The fact that Sabine was so eager for the Mandalorians’ blood is equally disturbing. What does she think happens to the stormtroopers they shoot or the fighters they destroy? The stormtroopers aren’t droids, the TIEs aren’t unmanned. These are people, good and bad, who are serving the Empire for a variety of reasons. But Rebels isn’t keen on exploring this, is it? Worse, it seems the writers are oblivious to it. Perhaps they expect us to go along with everything the Rebels do just because they’re the good guys?

When Anakin Force choked Poggle the Lesser in The Clone Wars it didn’t make his action any less bad because he was fighting for the good guys and we knew it. Everything in that scene suggested he was doing something bad, that he was drawing closer to the dark side. When Cassian shoots that man at the beginning of Rogue One you know he’s doing something bad, everything in that scene plays to that effect. Cassian’s momentarily disturbed by it and later brings up the subject of all the terrible things he’s done in the name of the Rebellion. At least he acknowledges it, Rebels doesn’t even try to ponder the matter. Kanan and company don’t even stop to consider that perhaps it wasn’t the right thing to do. That perhaps they could’ve left the Protectors alone, that perhaps they could have tried to recruit them at some other time and continue to look for another hyperspace route. What happens the next time the Rebels ask for something and they’re told no, do they take it by force regardless?

These are questions that should naturally occur to any of the protagonists but, sadly, don’t. If they did, it would certainly elevate the show’s value in my eyes. To clarify, It’s not the fact that the Rebels do questionable things that I find disturbing, what I find disturbing is the fact that they don’t find anything questionable about them and that we, the viewers, are not meant to regard them in such a light. They’re the Rebels and their cause is just or, in other words, the ends justify the means.

To be fair, this was just one episode and it may very well be the only one. Turning out script after script for each new episode is probably no mean feat, and some episodes are bound to be tighter than others, but it had me asking all the wrong questions about Star Wars Rebels.

Conclusion

Having written all of this one might be led to believe that Star Wars Rebels is a terrible show, a stain on the popular franchise built by George Lucas and now owned by Disney. But like I said at the beginning of this post, it’s not. Rebels is far from the only show where its protagonists have plot-armour, or the villains are incompetent. It’s not the first show that suffers from narrative issues and it certainly won’t be the last. It’s certainly not the first one to mess with Star Wars continuity, oh no, Lucas was doing a fine job at that before Disney, with as recent an example as The Clone Wars.

What Star Wars Rebels is, is lazy. Its depiction of the fight between good and evil is one we’ve seen countless times before, and one we’ll see countless times hence. It’s easy to show the Imperials as incompetent bullies and the Rebels as invincible do-gooders, and it gets tiresome to watch the same tropes repeat themselves over and over again. One can go as far as saying it insults the viewer’s intelligence when the good guys’ actions are never challenged, even when they may be morally (or otherwise) reprehensible, or when the laws of the universe are knowingly ignored, damaging the narrative for the sake of drama.

There are no consequences to speak of that invite discussion, no stakes to make us care about the protagonists’ struggle. And it’s important that we care, if not for them, at least for the fledgling Rebel Alliance in their struggle against the mighty Empire. But if our protagonists don’t take the Empire seriously, why should we? Why should I? Might as well be just another day at Tosche Station picking up power converters.

#star wars #star wars rebels

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jam2289 · 5 years ago

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An Email About Writing, and a Reply

A friend sent me an email recently asking some pertinent questions about writing.

Here is part of the email from Sharon.

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Have you ever coached a fantasy writer? How silly do you consider this genre?

I have this dream to finish my story before I die and that’s not looking as good as it used to! Years go by really fast as it turns out.

What’s a good first step for this process? Or, do you have a series of essays on how to get off your butt and just write?

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Those are good questions, and hard to answer questions. Here is my response.

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I quite like fantasy.

My writing coaching has just been on the skill rather than on projects, so I've mostly played with tiny little stories that we make up at the time.

There is no correct process for writing, and no correct writing time frames. Patrick Rothfuss worked on his first book for 14 years before it came out. Stephen King took 30 years to finish the Dark Tower series. J. K. Rowling had all seven books planned in detail before she began the first. Her planning took 5 years by itself. C. S. Lewis just did it one book at a time. George R. R. Martin has a general idea of where he's going, but no detail.

Writing only requires writing. So it's whatever works for you. I only really make progress when I'm doing articles for the blog where I'm going to publicly post them soon. I just happen to like that. If you can block out a certain time to write, do that. If you can set a goal of writing a certain number of words a day, do that. None of that works for me, my conscientiousness scores are just too low to handle it. But, writing in little bursts of inspiration has worked for many people as well.

It's whatever gets you going. If you feel like writing detailed plans and that will get you putting things on paper or screen, then do that. If there's a scene you're excited about, then write that. Gabaldon writes her books completely out of order just based on what she feels like doing at the time, and then arranges the scenes later. Robert Louis Stevenson made a list of chapters and then wrote Treasure Island chapter by chapter, and read each to his family by the fire that same night. When he wrote Jekyll and Hyde his wife awoke him in the middle of an inspiring nightmare and he wrote it in three days. When she didn't like it he burnt it and rewrote the entire thing again, all while being on doctor prescribed bedrest.

As for fantasy being silly, it is no more silly than any other genre. A western can be silly or serious. Fantasies are communicating personal and collective archetypes, patterns of interpreting and acting within the world, just as all narratives are. The Emperor Has No Clothes is an important work detailing deception, self-deception, authority, social structures, the value of innocence, fraud, and more. The Chronicles of Narnia is a Protestant religious work, and The Lord of the Rings a Catholic one. Harry Potter has an almost unlimited number of important subjects, not the least of which is the exploration of the good and evil that divides us all within ourselves, how the evil within being incorporated into us protects us from the evil without, and how by dying unto self we may be reborn. So, fantasy is not so silly. It allows us to have fun while confronting subjects of the utmost importance, and maintaining enough distance to allow us a less reactive perspective on emotionally engaging topics.

Finally, writing does require a leap of faith. That's why it's an adventure in itself.

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Letter writing is a lost art. But I like it. I'm reading the letters exchanged between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson right now, along with the letters between John Adams and Abigail Adams. They offer some of the best insights into history, and into people, that I know of. And, fictional letter writing as in Johan Wolfgang von Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther" and Ovid's "Heroides" give you a different feel than that of other literary works. (Technically that's its own field of study called epistolary writing.)

Emails are not letters. But sometimes they start to feel like that, and it feels good. Here is a slightly edited reply from Sharon.

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Wow Jeff this is such a great email, you should post this to your blog as is! It’s very motivating just reading about how other authors work. I usually imagine them as tirelessly holed up in book laden studies writing away for endless days.

I know it took Tolkien about 20 years to finish LOTR etc. and I often think maybe that is why it is so good.

The thing that has gotten me writing finally is that I just tell myself no one will ever see this...

Constructive criticism I take VERY well but someone saying “wow this is just a piece of garbage” I’d have a hard time with.

And everyone knows that “no filter” is sort of the new norm.

Thanks social media.

I guess I will just jump in and do whatever and see where it goes.

How are you enjoying isolation?

Feels pretty normal to me, I kind of live in a pumpkin anyway!

Have you written a book yet? Or mostly essays?

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She has a lot of good points in this email. I've had the same concerns.

I wrote an article about other writer's writing processes a couple of years ago called "The Write Process", and it did help give me a well-rounded perspective on the reality of writing. There are many interesting ones that could be added to the list, like Michael Crichton writing scenes on 3x5 cards until he had a shoebox full, but just knowing that a dozen famous writers all disagree on almost every aspect of writing is quite helpful mentally and emotionally. Here's that article: http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2018/01/the-write-process.html

Then there's the whole can of worms on being on both ends of creating and criticizing. One important realization is that critics and creators aren't writing to each other or for each other, they are writing for a public, otherwise it would be in private correspondence. I wrote about that idea more in "Critics and Creators": http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2019/02/critics-and-creators.html

My last response reflects some of those ideas.

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Lol. I was thinking the same thing about making that an article.

I agree that it's very motivating to see how other authors do it, and to realize that they all completely disagree. For instance, Shonda Rhimes is a prolific television writer known for Grey's Anatomy. She says that if you write every day you're a writer, if you don't you're not. Her favorite writer is Aaron Sorkin. He wrote The West Wing and various movies. He says that 90 percent of a writer's time is not writing. When he's writing a movie he usually thinks about it for about 18 months and then writes it in 6. So, by her definition Shonda Rhimes' favorite writer isn't a writer.

If keeping your writing close to the chest works for you, do that. Social media is crazy. I've even gotten some death threats for my political article on Antifa. I've had a number of insults for my writings on grief, where I'm developing an original theory. But, I've also had a lot of good compliments and people sharing my work. I'm certain that by this time my article on suicide has saved a few lives because of the circles that it's been shared in.

Isolation isn't too big of a deal for me. I teach English online and spend most of the rest of my time reading, writing, watching, and meditating.

I've written over 300 articles. Which would come to over 2,000 pages in a book, but no book yet. I'll probably make some article collections this year.

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In addition to the over 300 articles I also have notes for more than 200 additional articles. I'll never run out of things to write, I'm guessing that the more I write the more I'll fall behind in comparison to the ideas that I have yet to write. I've been urged to write books about my adventure traveling out west mountain climbing, and my couple month road trip, and my near-death misadventure in Africa. Those would all be interesting, but I lived them, so it's not that adventurous for me to write about them. I do have some major works that I want to tackle in this lifetime though.

Out of all of the projects that I have started and have in mind there are two that would compromise major life works. One is a philosophical work creating a new structure connecting epistemology, ethics and morality, and political economics in a better way. The other is a literary work to compliment "Prometheus Bound" by Aeschylus. I do not know if I can accomplish either of those in this lifetime, they both still feel a little out of my reach in terms of mental insight and writing skill. But, there are other projects that have been growing which are unique and could contribute quite a lot to society, such as my original theory of grief, a new literary analysis method, work showing the emergent nature of morality in art, the historical pattern of abolition, my unique experiences and insights into meditation, and some of my current work in applied politics. So, my work has just begun.

Whenever we set out on a new venture doubts and concerns spring to the fore. Those are the things that make us stronger in overcoming them. And throughout history, letters have contributed to the overcoming of many such obstacles. Just maybe, it's helped in this case too.

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To read more from Jeff go to JeffThinks.com or JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com

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