#i have a lot more questions but they sort of veer off the main topic

[diealittlesometime]

Touch of Ruin

──── 004. Undercurrents

pairing ☆ natasha x reader, wanda x reader

chapter summary ☆ As you continue to mentor Wanda, Natasha's unease grows, straining your relationship. Meanwhile, a new threat demands the Avengers' collaboration, but the mission's success only drives Natasha further away, troubled by your bond with the other.

word count ☆ 2.2k

SERIES MASTERLIST || MAIN MASTERLIST

The gym at the SHIELD facility was bustling with activity, the air thick with the sound of grunts and clanging weights. Yet, in one corner, a quieter, more intense form of training was taking place. Wanda, her focus razor-sharp, was attempting to harness her powers under your watchful guidance.

"Concentrate, Wanda. Visualize your target and nothing else," you instructed, your tone both commanding and encouraging.

With a deep breath, Wanda raised her hands, her fingers twitching slightly as red energy swirled around them. She nodded, acknowledging your advice, and with a sudden thrust, directed the energy towards the dummy target across the room. The burst was well-aimed but more forceful than intended, tearing the target apart.

"Better, much better," you praised, clapping lightly. "You're getting a handle on it."

Wanda flashed a grateful smile, the intensity of the session still visible in her flushed cheeks. "Thanks to you. I never thought I could manage them like this," she gestured to the wisps of energy dissipating into the air.

"It's all you, Wanda. I just guided you a bit," you replied, your tone light, trying to bolster her confidence further.

As you both walked towards the benches lining the edge of the field, Wanda's demeanor shifted slightly, a thoughtful expression crossing her features. "You know, I’ve been wondering," she started hesitantly, "about you… about your story. You've helped me so much, but I realize I don’t know much about you, beyond the training."

The directness of the question took you off guard, not because of the personal nature of the inquiry but because of the implication of how much Wanda valued your relationship. You considered how much to share; the scars from your past were always a sensitive topic. "Well, there's not much to tell that’s not SHIELD files and mission reports," you began, offering her a half-smile. "But I guess, like you, I’ve had my share of struggles with my abilities."

Wanda nodded, sensing the weight behind your words. "It means a lot, you know, having someone who understands. It’s… it’s made a big difference."

The sincerity in her voice warmed you, and without fully realizing it, you found yourself sharing more about your past, the challenges, and the few triumphs. Wanda listened intently, her eyes never leaving yours, a silent support that you hadn't realized you needed.

The gym became a sanctuary of sorts, a place where the complexities of your lives as Avengers could be set aside, if only for a moment, to focus on the shared goal of mastering Wanda’s powers.

In the quiet moments between exercises, conversations veered away from techniques and strategies, delving instead into personal anecdotes and shared experiences. Wanda spoke of her upbringing in Sokovia, the devastation wrought by war, and the guilt she carried for the role she played in her homeland's turmoil. You, in turn, opened up about your own struggles, the isolation that came with your destructive abilities, and the slow journey towards acceptance and control.

With each revelation, the bond between you strengthened, rooted in a mutual understanding of the burdens you both carried. It was a connection that surpasses words, an unspoken camaraderie born from shared pain and shared growth.

Yet, amidst the growing closeness with Wanda, a subtle undercurrent of tension began to simmer beneath the surface of your relationship with Natasha. Though you had hoped that your reassurances and continued dedication to your partnership would alleviate any lingering unease, it seemed that Natasha's doubts only grew with each passing day.

The signs were subtle at first—a missed meal together, a strained smile in the corridors, a slight hesitation in her touch—but they soon escalated into something more palpable, more insidious. It was as if a distance had formed between you, a gulf widening with each passing interaction, until it felt like you were standing on opposite shores, shouting across an unbridgeable divide.

You tried to ignore the growing rift, burying yourself in the distractions of training sessions and missions, but it was impossible to escape the weight of Natasha's silent withdrawal. It gnawed at you, a constant reminder of the fragility of the bonds you had worked so hard to build.

One evening, as you returned to your shared quarters after a particularly grueling training session with Wanda, you found Natasha sitting alone at the small table in the center of the room, her gaze fixed on a mission report spread out before her.

"Hey, Nat," you greeted her softly, the tension in the air almost palpable. "How was your day?"

Natasha looked up, her expression guarded, her usual warmth replaced by a distant reserve. "Fine," she replied curtly, her tone clipped. "Yours?"

You hesitated, sensing the barrier between you growing thicker with each passing moment. "It was… good. Productive," you offered, trying to keep the conversation light.

There was a pregnant pause, the silence stretching between you like a yawning chasm. You could feel Natasha's eyes on you, probing, searching for something you couldn't quite name.

Finally, unable to bear the tension any longer, you spoke up, the words tumbling out in a rush. "Nat, is everything okay? You've been… different lately. Distant."

Natasha's gaze flickered, her mask slipping for a fraction of a second before it snapped back into place. "I'm fine," she replied, her voice brittle. "Just busy, that's all."

But you could see through the facade, could feel the weight of unspoken words hanging heavy in the air. It was clear that whatever was troubling Natasha ran deeper than mere busyness, deeper than she was willing to admit.

Before you could press further, a shrill alarm pierced the silence, signaling an incoming mission briefing. With a shared glance, you both rose from the table, the tension lingering between you like a shadow.

The mission was urgent, demanding the full attention and cooperation. As you gathered in the briefing room, you couldn't help but notice the strained atmosphere, the feeling of unease that pulsed through the air like a living thing.

Natasha, as always, was the picture of professionalism, her focus unwavering as she absorbed the details of the mission. But even her stoic facade couldn't entirely mask the tension that coiled beneath the surface.

As the briefing concluded and the team dispersed to prepare for the mission ahead, you found yourself lingering behind, your gaze drawn inexorably to Natasha's retreating form. There was a longing in your heart, a desperate desire to bridge the gap that had formed between you, but you knew that some wounds ran too deep to heal with mere words.

With a heavy sigh, you turned away, steeling yourself for the challenges that lay ahead. The mission demanded your full attention, your unwavering focus, and as you stepped into the waiting aircraft, you pushed aside thoughts of Natasha and the fractured bond between you, focusing instead on the task at hand. But as the aircraft soared into the night sky, carrying you towards the looming threat that awaited, you couldn't shake the feeling that something had shifted, something irrevocable had changed.

As the aircraft hummed through the sky, each member of the team was wrapped in their own thoughts, preparing for the confrontation. Your mind, however, was split between the mission and the unresolved tension with Natasha. This internal conflict added an extra layer of weight to your already burdened shoulders. Despite your efforts to compartmentalize these concerns, the emotional turmoil subtly eroded your usual sharp focus.

The mission location was a stark, remote island that seemed almost untouched by time. Upon landing, the team quickly mobilized, each member slipping into their role with practiced ease. The sense of unity in purpose was palpable, but so was the underlying strain in personal sense. You found yourself occasionally stealing glances at Natasha, trying to gauge her state of mind, but her expression remained an unreadable mask, her attention fixed on the objective.

The threat was a rogue faction equipped with advanced, experimental technology, posing a significant risk not only to the local area but on a global scale if their plans came to fruition. The strategy was clear: infiltrate the base, neutralize the threat, and secure any intelligence related to their operations.

As the operation unfolded, you found yourself paired with Wanda. Her powers, now more controlled and precise, were crucial in navigating the labyrinthine corridors of the enemy stronghold. Her focus was impeccable, and you couldn't help but feel a surge of pride in how far she had come under your guidance.

Navigating through the shadowed corridors, your communication with Wanda was minimal yet effective, a testament to the mutual understanding and trust that had developed between you. She cleared pathways with her energy, manipulated electronic locks, and provided cover when needed. It was during these moments of cooperative silence that you could see the reflections of your earlier self in her — the raw potential slowly being honed into something formidable.

"You're doing great, Wanda," you whispered after she discreetly disabled a security camera with a flicker of red energy, her control precise enough to leave the surrounding equipment untouched.

"Learning from the best," she responded, her voice low and tinged with gratitude. The brief smile she flashed your way was not just an acknowledgment of your compliment but a recognition of the deeper bond that had formed through the countless hours of training and conversation.

However, despite the satisfaction derived from Wanda's progress, your mind couldn't entirely shake off the discomfort regarding Natasha. During a brief moment of downtime as you waited for the next phase of the mission to commence, you saw Natasha coordinating with other team members, her leadership as assertive and effective as ever. Yet, there was a stiffness in her movements, a forced distance in her interactions that she usually didn't display. It was subtle enough that others might not notice, but to you, it was glaringly apparent.

The mission pressed on, demanding your full attention as you approached the main control room where the rogue faction's leaders were believed to be. The team split into two groups: you and Wanda were tasked with entering the control room and securing the area, while Natasha and others handled the extraction of information and prisoners.

As you and Wanda breached the control room door, a burst of chaotic energy greeted you. Hostiles armed with unconventional weaponry attempted to barricade themselves, but between Wanda's telekinetic abilities and your tactical expertise, you quickly subdued the threat.

Once the area was secured, and as you awaited Natasha's team to join you, Wanda leaned against a console, wiping a bead of sweat from her brow. "Every time I think I’ve seen it all, something new comes up," she commented, her gaze scanning the high-tech equipment around her.

"It never really stops, does it?" you replied, checking your weapon before holstering it. "But you handle it well."

Wanda’s expression softened, her eyes meeting yours with a mixture of respect and something more—a depth of emotion that hadn't been there before. "Thanks to you," she said quietly. "You’ve made me feel like I’m really part of this team, not just an outsider with too much power and nowhere to put it."

Before you could respond, Natasha’s team entered, breaking the moment. Natasha's eyes briefly met yours, a flicker of something undefinable passing between you before she redirected her focus to the task at hand. Her professionalism was impeccable, but the personal connection that once defined your interactions felt strained, almost as if she was purposefully maintaining a barrier she hadn’t before.

The completion of the mission brought a mixed sense of relief and tension. While the team had successfully neutralized the threat and secured valuable intelligence, the dynamics within the group, particularly between you, Natasha, and Wanda, remained subtly altered. The ride back to SHIELD headquarters was quiet, the usual post-mission debriefings and conversations replaced with introspective silence.

Upon returning, the debrief was thorough. Natasha led the session with her usual efficiency, outlining the mission's successes and areas for improvement. However, her interactions with you were perfunctory, lacking the warmth and private smiles that once punctuated even the most serious debriefs.

As the meeting disbanded, Natasha lingered by the conference table, organizing her notes and avoiding unnecessary conversation. You paused by the doorway, watching her for a moment, contemplating whether to bridge the gap with conversation or give her the space it seemed she might need.

Deciding on a middle ground, you approached quietly, stopping a reasonable distance away. "Natasha, if there’s anything we need to talk about…"

She looked up, her face unreadable. "We’ve covered everything mission-related. Good work today," she replied, her voice steady, her eyes briefly meeting yours before shifting away.

The formality stung more than you expected. "I meant about us, Nat," you pushed gently, feeling the rift widening with every guarded word she spoke.

Natasha set her papers down, her posture stiffening slightly. "I think it’s clear we’re both busy, and things are running smoothly. There’s no need to complicate matters," she stated, a hint of finality in her tone.

"But it’s not, is it? Something’s off," you persisted, trying to reach the part of her that might still want to resolve whatever this was between you.

Natasha sighed, a rare sign of her patience waning. "Maybe I just need a little space," she suggested, not unkindly, but with a firmness that suggested this was not up for further discussion.

The conversation ended there, leaving a lingering sense of unease as you both walked out of the room. The space she requested was given, out of respect and perhaps a hope that distance might restore what closeness had begun to erode.

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

I listened to Elis James and John Robins on the Comedian’s Comedian podcast, as I somewhat recently passed the point in their radio show when they recorded it. It was a really good episode, even by the standards of that podcast, which are high. Very little messing around with basic explanations of stuff that we could find on their Wikipedia pages anyway, they jump straight in with analysis.

I cut out a few clips as I was listening. I meant to write a paragraph or so about each of them. I am coming back here after finishing the post to say I ended up writing a lot more than that. This one gets out of hand. It mainly stays on the topic of the podcast episode and the radio show, occasionally veers off into some personal stories of my own, makes tenuous connections between the two. That's what's below the cut that I'm adding because not everyone needs to be subjected to that.

I particularly liked this one, from the very beginning:

First of all, Elis James definitely has met another person who will start a radio episode by sighing and just saying whatever's actually in their mind instead of trying for slick broadcasting. Elis knows him very well, the mother of his children is frequently recording lines to put in that other broadcaster's shows. However, there is the key difference that Daniel Kitson's doing that on an obscure radio station (well, two obscure radio stations as he used to do Triple R in Melbourne, but hasn't for a long time, so I mainly mean Resonance FM in London) that doesn't pay him any money, while John Robins is doing it on a commercial radio station that was presumably a significant source of his income and is definitely the main source of his career success. It's definitely more a risk to try in that context.

Anyway, I'd like to put the above clip next to this one:

I'm now three years into following this radio show/listening to various podcasts and other things they've done alongside it, trying to go mostly in chronological order, and I would say they do this in one form or another approximately every six months. Just explicitly state the status dynamic between them, which is that Elis is more successful but John is funnier, this creates a couple of sources of mild tension that can be funny to listen to and give them something to play into as a double act, but it also balances out enough so their entire relationship isn't going to implode like Jon Richardson and Russell Howard. It's always a bit weird when they actually say that out loud, comedians aren't really supposed to tell us what level of status they've decided to assign themselves/each other for any given moment.

Elis James frequently says John Robins is a better comedian than him, which also a bit weird because it's the sort of thing you'd say as a joke, but he never sounds like he's joking, and it's... I mean, I was going to say it's objectively true, I guess it can't be given how subjective comedy is, but it is pretty clear cut. And it seems to genuinely not bother Elis James, which I used to think was odd, but I guess it makes sense. I've been teammates with people whom I know are better athletes than me, and we can still be friends, and if anyone asks who's better I can be honest about that. It sure would make that easier if I also somehow won more medals than they did (to continue the somewhat stretched analogy of Elis James having more TV work so that balances the scales), though sports tend to be more of a meritocracy than arts so that doesn't really happen.

There's also truth in the thing John said about how one of them has to come up with content for the radio show - they're on the same official footing, co-hosts rather than calling anyone a sidekick or whatever, but the vast majority of the funniest stuff gets said by John, and more than that, John drives most of the discussions. He usually comes in with more features and stuff prepared, he establishes a lot of the running jokes and keeps them going, he's the one who will lead most of their offshoots into weird little sketches and characters. His timing is incredible sometimes, every once in a while he'll have an episode where he's got Lee Mack levels of being able to jump on everything that gets said almost immediately and be funny every time. He seems like he can decide, pretty much based on how he's feeling at the moment but possibly also based on a sense for how much potential something has, whether to wrap up a thread in one incisive sentence or to draw it out. And it's almost always John making that decision (if it isn't the producer telling them to get on with it, that is, but it's rarely Elis' decision). Sometimes I can hear John work out the comedic potential in something they're talking about before Elis does, and Elis will start to move on but John will bring it back and guide him toward it, and eventually manage to push Elis into whatever joke John had figure out would be funny but only if Elis said it.

Having said that, and this is a tangent but discussing whether Elis James is funny just made me think of it, I've been wanting to give him credit for something. At some episode sometime in 2016, Elis James was telling a story about someone he admired, and the story was about something fairly serious, and at the end of it, John asked "Is he a laugh?", which was quite a funny thing to say in the context, it's annoying me that I can't remember the exact story but it was something like that. And it was funny to hear John be so efficiently dismissive of the sort of weird story. But later in the episode, John told one of his stories about one of those vaguely depressing things he does, like obsessively do his taxes four months in advance or drink rum alone at 2 AM and get sad while watching Queen documentaries - one of those types of stories - and at the end of it, Elis asked "Are you a laugh?" And after that, for several months, Elis James brought that back the exactly perfect number of times. I don't know how he did it, how he got it so perfect every time. He didn't drop it for long enough for regular listeners to forget that he'd made this a running joke, so it would lose its power as a callback. But he didn't say it often enough for it to start to get overused and less funny (not that those guys would ever try to milk more from one bit than it should be expected to bear... but of course we're all on email). There is such a small sweet spot, such little room for error in the frequency with which you can bring back a joke and not fall into either of those traps, and he got it perfect every time. Every time he'd said it, I'd have a moment of surprise because he'd left it just barely past the point at which it had been long enough since I'd heard it for it to get really funny again, and every time, I'd take a moment to admire his timing. He kept it going for quite a while, occasionally responding to John's depressing anecdotes from his own life with "Are you a laugh?" So, well done to Elis James, he can be funny too. Also, I mean, obviously he is regularly quite funny on the radio show, just not as funny as John Robins. It's fine, most people aren't as funny as John Robins. I'm not as good at underhook setups as my friend I hung out with the other night, but it's fine, we manage to get on with our lives.

Anyway, that was only very tenuously related to the topic of this post, let me see if I can find my way back. John Robins and Elis James having an odd balance of tensions created by John being funnier but Elis being more successful. I'm not sure that's as true now as it was in early 2014 to early 2017, which covers the period of radio episodes I've heard so far. At that time, Elis had recently had major roles in two sitcoms (Crims and Josh). He'd had one Welsh-language stand-up special released on the BBC and I think was working on recording another one. He'd done some panel show spots, more than John I think. I think he's started on his BBC television travel show with Miles Jupp. He'd gone to Europe to do TV and radio things about the Welsh football team. John Robins, meanwhile, had released the audio from a couple of his stand-up shows himself on Bandcamp, had been on Mock the Week twice and one of those times was a fucking disaster, a couple appearances on As Yet Untitled, and I think he occasionally got on things like The News Quiz but less often than Elis James did. I think he had a pretty good stand-up career going by then, but it hadn't really translated to other stuff. And John complained at times that he didn't get as many reviews and publicity as his stand-up profile deserved, though it's hard to tell if that's true or just his bias. He had a job for a while doing TV warm-up gigs, but then he got fired for what sounds like a combination of drinking too much and being too harsh for the "keep it light" atmosphere. The disparity between his profile and Elis' was probably for two main reasons: 1) Elis has the significant USP of being one of the only comedians who's fluent in the Welsh language so that gets him some stuff, and 2) the reasons outlined in that second audio clip about John having pissed everyone off.

I think their positions are different these days, though. I'm into the March 2017 episodes right now, in a few months John Robins is going to win a Perrier Award, so he can't keep complaining about not having a significant enough stand-up profile after that. That turned into a Netflix special, a significantly bigger deal than Elis' Welsh-language BBC iPlayer special. And then in 2018 he hosts a panel show, which I have downloaded but haven't watched yet, I'll wait until I get there chronologically. To be honest I'm slightly dreading getting there because I have a feeling it might be terrible. I don't think it was hugely successful because I'd never heard of it before I started looking up John Robins things this year, and I went really deep down the panel show rabbit hole in the last few years, I watched some quite obscure ones but never came across this. It also only lasted one season. But still, he hosted a panel show on Dave. That's a TV career.

And now, obviously, he's on Taskmaster. And seems to be playing large rooms in his latest stand-up tour. A tour that I'd assumed would get filmed for another TV special, though he's mentioned recently that he's planning to put it on Bandcamp like his earlier shows, and I do appreciate him keeping it real for us despite now being a Taskmaster star with a huge tour (as much as this shouldn't make sense because there can be visual humour in stand-up, I tend to prefer audio-only stand-up that's usually closer to how it actually sounded in the room, over filmed versions that get more edits). On the other hand, Elis had a TV series about Welsh comedy a few years ago. A podcast with some football players. I've just looked it up and apparently he hosts a football-based TV show on Sky, so that's nice. But the gap in TV-based success has probably closed.

But that discussion they had in that second audio clip - about John Robins not getting stuff because he's (rightly and justifiably) reaping the consequences of being a dick with a substance abuse problem, and Elis James valiantly taking on the role of Robins Apologist - that really nails, for me, what I enjoy so much about their dynamic. I think that my favourite dynamic. I fucking love anywhere where two people get that one going. That dynamic that's summed up by this post htat I remember from ages ago and have somehow just managed to find because Tumblr's terrible search function decided to work for me today:

It was about a year ago that I had the extremely clever idea of adding that Taskmaster screenshot to that other person's text post, but I maintain that it's hilarious. Guy Montgomery and David Correos were so much fun because of this. At the time, I considered instead using a screenshot from Taskmaster UK season 5, with the speech bubble pointing at Mark Watson looking at Nish Kumar. There are so many example of two people whose comedy show interactions have been hilarious because they're based on one person making terrible decisions and the other person looking at them like "I'd follow him to hell and back but I wish he'd just stop going there." And not always a him, it doesn't have to be a him! Danielle Ward and Margaret Cabourn-Smith had some good "I'd follow her to hell and back but I wish she'd just stop going there" energy on Do the Right Thing (with Danielle Ward, of course, in the Correos/Kumar/Robins position).

I'm sure I realized until right now, as I write this, how much this might be my favourite dynamic in comedy because it also characterizes my favourite relationships in my own life. And I am genuinely not sure whether that's a me thing or whether most people can slot most of their relationships into one where someone's the David and someone's the Guy, in terms of who keeps driving things to hell and who follows out of loyalty but also apologizes. When I was in high school, and also for most of my twenties, my nickname among my friends was "loose cannon" because when they were trying to be careful and diplomatic in the political battles within the increasingly high levels that we reached in the sporting world, I was the person who once yelled at my coach in a hallway because I was so angry at the way he treated the athletes, and had a letter in my coaching file by age 22 that accused me of not caring about common courtesy. A letter from a coach who refused to work with me anymore because I was insufficiently courteous, so my best friend had to liaise with him on everything while asking me to please not upset more people and further alienate our team. And I have wonderful friends who tell other people that I don't hate them, really, I just seem standoffish because I'm shy, and later on they tell me that I really need to work on my poker face/ability to be around people I hate without making it incredibly obvious that I hate them. In addition to being genuinely shy. When we tried to get someone from my team elected to the provincial board, we knew from the beginning that 1) I would do all the actual work for both the election campaign and, if successful, the role itself, because I know and care the most about the issues and am good at admin stuff, and 2) I could not be the candidate because I hate most people and everyone I hate knows I hate them because I have no diplomacy skills.

Though I do also have one friend who coaches a team in another city and he knows he can call me pretty much any time and ask me for pretty much any favour and I will do it, and I will edit his emails and do his research for him to help him fight his stupid pointless battles and to try to keep him on top of things even though he can't keep track of anything and keeps making wild badly planned decisions, and people ask me why I don't just let him fail and walk away, and I say I know he seems like a brash asshole with no ability to think ahead, but he's a really good guy, really, once you get to know him. It's got back to me that most people in our sports community assume I am or was sleeping with him, as that seems like the only explanation for why I would stick by a guy who's clearly an idiot. The truth is much weirder, he was my university teammate in 2013 and one time he was in my corner when I had a panic attack in the middle of a match at the university national championships, and he saved me and got me through it and I managed to go back and win, and that's why I had to do things like sleep on a hotel room floor for a week in Atlantic City because he'd talked me into going on a provincial team trip where he hadn't booked enough rooms (or planned anything), because he'd earned my eternal loyalty. Oh God, I just remembered how during that trip he stopped to gamble in front of children, and I ended up yelling at him in the middle of the street in Atlantic City, "You know, I argue with people about you!" And he said, "What people?" And I said "People who think you're not responsible enough to run a provincial team trip! Which is everyone! I get into big arguments with them and you make it hard when you do shit like this!" But a few years later he was the first person I called when our mutual friend died because I realized in that moment, that's the person I trust most in the world.

Anyway. What was I talking about? Elis James and John Robins. I think I was talking about Elis James and John Robins. Okay, turns out listening to people talk about the friendships that you base on blind loyalty and apologism brought some stuff up for me. I think I have, in recent weeks, at times blamed my overly emotional posting - my posts that start out as comedy analysis but then go into oversharing about my person life - on the fact that I'm going through some emotionally difficult stuff as I'm trying to avoid drinking. But that's not the case here, I think I was always going to go on that tangent. I haven't seen my friend from out of town in a while, I'm a bit worried about him. I think he might be ruining his own life again. Something was going to connect to that. Rhod Gilbert reminds me of him.

Anyway. Anyway. Elis James and John Robins. Solid double act dynamic. Weird balance of status and tensions, enjoyable running thread of loyalty and apologism. Amazingly, I'm not done, here's another clip I cut out of that ComCom interview:

This is the second time I've heard John Robins tell this story, and I had the same reaction as the first time, which was: Oh my God oh my God oh my God, how were you ever able to sleep again? The horrible sharp pain of this story keeps me awake at night, just imagining what it would be like if that happened to me, and it didn't even happen to me. How could you ever sleep if it did? John Robins frequently tells stories from what he calls the "shame well", those things that happen where you obsess over how you did something wrong and regret it. John is constantly making jokes (or just statements) about how he lives a life mired in shame and regret. But still, I don't see how he can just casually throw this one out there like it's just another shame well story. It's so much worse. It's the worst one I've heard. I would hide under my bed for the rest of my life.

John Robins went on Adam Buxton's podcast in 2016, I have listened to that episode and it's not great. You want to talk about dynamics created by a differential in status - I think that one went way too far, to the point where nothing could really happen. There was this huge discrepancy of John Robins meeting his hero, which will often make someone sort of adorably giddy but not in this case, he just seemed a bit out of it and subdued. While on the other side, Adam Buxton appeared to have no idea who John Robins was, so not much discussion got generated. It wasn't a complete disaster, but I could understand why John didn't plug that one on his radio show, despite plugging most of his podcast appearances.

Anyway though, if I can manage to get past the sheer horror of the first part of that clip, the second part was sort of nicely validating. Because I am slightly weary of how much my trip down the Elis and John rabbit hole has got quite intense quite quickly, even by my standards of comedy obsession, and possibly taken a turn for the parasocial. I mean, I am currently writing a multi-page post about an interview they gave and it includes several paragraphs about my own life that are only tenuously related, in a way that I can say "Look I do the same thing as these guys I've never met."

The intensity of that has definitely been accelerated by the fact that I happened to, by a genuine coincidence, get into this show at the same time as I decided to try to slow down and/or stop drinking, and God, a lot of the ways in which John Robins talks about alcohol and anxiety resonates. And yep, I'd feel weird admitting it because I know it's sort of inherently creepy to say "they feel like my friends" about some people you've never met, but since John Robins said it first I think I can admit those headphones do make a difference. Might be another reason why I prefer the Bandcamp comedy to a Netflix special.

They touch on this throughout the ComCom interview - not so much in the clips I cut out but throughout the whole thing, it really is worth a listen if you're interested in this - the way their radio show gets so many letters from people who thank them for talking so honestly about mental health issues, people who say they've dealt with their own difficult shit and find this radio show has helped. Probably lots of shows get similar letters, but I think it's safe to say this one gets more than most. The Bugle used to read out their correspondence and Andy Zaltzman wasn't getting people every day saying "Thank you for making me feel less alone in my depression."

They really are good at that, at hitting the exact right balance of honest without being overbearing about it. For a show that spends so much time talking about symptoms of mental health problems, they almost never use the words "mental health". They never sit down and say "let's have a talk about what it's like to live with anxiety." They just describe their week, in more honest detail than you would normally hear on commercial radio. And leave in the parts where they panic about every decision they've ever made and get drunk alone in the middle of the night and cry because they think they've done everything wrong. And by "they", I mostly mean John.

I do like their word, "darkness". I didn't realize, when I first watched The Darkness of Robins in 2022 (a show John first performed in 2017, won a large award for it, released as a Netflix special in 2018, but I watched it in 2022), that that title's been around for ages. Elis James made a joke in an early radio episode, from 2014, about how someday, John should do a show called The Darkness of Robins, where he just lays bare all his anxieties, all his weird toxic quirks and control freak tendencies and oceans of shame and regret and various addictions/self-medication and cynicism and bitterness and anger and deep self-loathing. Elis said this as a joke, the joke being that you can't just put all that in a comedy show. But they kept the joke going for years. John did the Richard Herring podcast, in which he talked a bit about some of the more difficult mental health struggles he's had, and when he plugged it on the radio show, instead of saying "I talk about some of my more difficult mental health struggles", he said, "There's a fair bit of the darkness of Robins in it." And then he started casually referencing it on the show, describing a night when he might have drank too much and had a panic attack with a causal and sort of joke-y "I got overcome by the darkness for a little while." And then they started describing those emails from listeners who say it resonated with "[Person] has emailed in to say they've been afflicted by a touch of the darkness, sorry to hear that." And I just love that word. It's used with enough genuineness to make it clear that they're not making fun of mental health problems, they really do have them and it does feel dark. But also with enough irony - obviously there is irony in using a term as grandiose as "The Darkness of Robins" to describe panicking at 3 AM about something bad you said in school - to make it feel like it's not an after school special. I also like that they found a way to let that word mean no one has to name a diagnosis, to narrow their issue down to a loaded term like "I suffer from clinical depression", when not everyone who has that is diagnosed, not everyone is comfortable naming it, not everyone finds it easy to separate their symptoms into clear-cut causes. They can just use a shorthand like "the darkness".

It has been good, to have this radio show for the last couple of months that have brought some darkness into particularly sharp focus, as I decided to quickly remove the maladaptive self-medication. I've tried to stop writing about it so often the way I did earlier in the year, but as a little update on how that's going, still bad. Not enjoying it. Getting mildly parasocial about some guys on the radio might not be hugely healthy, but it's a healthier coping mechanism than whiskey, I guess. I'd really like some whiskey. Anyway I'm fine.

I do think that's why I find that Adam and Joe story so incredibly painful, though. I get paranoid about whether I get too parasocial about the comedians I like, I try really hard to be self-aware about it and be super clear that I know what I'm getting is a curated public persona and I do not actually know these people, and I am mortified at the thought of being one of those fans who thinks they actually are my friends and therefore they should know something about me. No one should know me. I hang out on Tumblr because it's the one social media platform where I know no famous people are searching their own name or anything, everyone's just an anonymous nerd. The thought of anyone knowing me makes me want to hide under my bed for the rest of my life. Though having said that, John Robins and Elis James are always very nice about people who write in with darkness emails.

Amazingly, I'm still not done this post:

Throwing this in just to say, once again, that I'm sorry for having also thought this but in my defense it's not just me. I am truly sorry that when I first heard John Robins got sober, my first thought was... but he's still going to be bitter and angry and annoying and plagued by regret and self-loathing, right? Because that's kind of the cornerstone of his comedy and is what I love so much about it. I mean obviously I want him to be happy, but could he release a couple more stand-up hours first?

I feel genuinely guilty for having thought that, especially because I do hold the sort of political belief that it's bullshit to say one must suffer to make great art, van Gogh did his best work once his mental illness was being treated, and all that. I do believe it applies to more contemporary things too. Jason Isbell made his best music after getting sober. I think James Acaster's best stand-up show might be his current ones, and it's a "let me tell you how therapy has made me healthier" show. But John Robins did base a lot of his comedy on being bitter and angry and annoying and plagued by regret and self-loathing. That's sort of my favourite thing about it.

I felt slightly better when I re-listened to his 2014 show (recorded in 2015) This Tornado Loves You, and was reminded that he admitted that himself:

That's John Robins talking about how his comedy has suffered because he's too happy in his relationship with Sara Pascoe, a relationship that has ended a 20-year search for happiness. And it goes with the clip I posted before that from the ComCom episode, of Elis James saying it's nice that John's relationship with Sara Pascoe recently ended, because it's given the quality of his comedy a real boost. And maybe they should just ruin John's life regularly to keep it that way. So it's not just me who had that horrible thought.

I'm feeling the need to clarify, once again, that of course I don't genuinely think that's a good thing. Obviously it's good that he got sober, for his sake but also, reports suggest his latest show Howl is excellent. I think Howl was written partly while he was drinking and partly while he wasn't, but performed after he'd quit, and the fact that it's done so well suggests that people can, in fact, make their best stuff after getting their shit together (I haven't actually heard the show, he's said he'll release it on Bandcamp sometime soon-ish, probably). And even if his comedy did get worse, which it clearly hasn't, it would still be best that he quit drinking because suffering wouldn't be worth great art, even if it were required for it. That's how it works. Drinking is bad for you. I definitely don't want to drink any whiskey right now. It's fine.

But. But. I recently re-listened to John Robins' episode of Isy Suttie's podcast, The Things We Do For Love. This is a rare instance that I've heard of a comedian being genuinely drunk while recording something. It's happened before that comedians will claim to be a bit loose and tipsy, but not usually so drunk that they're slurring their words. John Robins on Isy Suttie's podcast was slurring his words. He kept losing track of the question and interrupting at inappropriate moments. It's one of those things that makes me say "Oh, yeah, you really needed to quit drinking. This really was affecting your career, that's just a guy who showed up to work too drunk to effectively do his job."

But it was really funny. It made me laugh so many times. At one point he gets furious because Isy Suttie asked him whether he knows how to drive a car. Later on he threatens to murder her and Elis for their sitcom money, which would have been an okay joke but tbere was a bit of a sense of line crossing when he also threatened their child. (Fun side note that has nothing to do with John being drunk: at one point Isy tells a story about her ex-boyfriend, John Robins asks what the ex's name is but she refuses to say, which is weird because I know. It's weird that I know something about Isy Suttie that John Robins didn't, at least on that day.) It's a mess. It's hilarious. I feel vaguely guilty for finding that so funny, the same way I do about the episodes of No More Jockeys where Mark Watson gets properly drunk - that guy's probably got a problem too, I probably shouldn't laugh at it so much, but I also find those the funniest episodes. I have the say, the episode of Adam Buxton's podcast where John Robins was sort of awkwardly reserved would probably have been funnier if John had gotten drunk before it.

My best defense for that is I would not want John Robins to actually be drunk when he performs stand-up, or certainly when he writes it. Being drunk made him funnier on a podcast interview where he's supposed to tell off-the-cuff stories, because off-the-cuff stories get better when someone's filter has been broken down. But also, in his actual stand-up, or even his actual radio broadcasting, John Robins is doing a thousand little things at once to make what he's saying funnier. He's the master of the well-timed pause and the carefully chosen word. None of that would be any good drunk. So I maintain that you don't need to suffer addiction to make great art. It might help a bit to make funny tangents on an interview podcast, but not the actual substance. Also, however funny I found it, I don't think he was proud of that one. On the radio show, John plugged his appearance on Isy Suttie's podcast before he did it, but not one word about it on the radio after it had been recorded, even though most of those things he'll plug both before and once they're released. Though in a later episode of her podcast, Isy mentioned that the first guest she'd had on was a very drunk John Robins, who called her the next day desperately asking her to cut out the sexually explicit story he'd told using an old girlfriend's real name.

And she did cut it out, it's not in the podcast, as it shouldn't be, because it's not responsible to tell sexually explicit stories in something that's being recorded and will be published, if the audience knows the real name of the person you're talking about. Having said that, I've finally reached the point in the radio show where John's doing WIPs of The Darkness of Robins, where he does just that about Sara Pascoe, and I'm having a bit of trouble morally justifying how much I like the show in spite of that. I think I'll re-watch that show tomorrow, for the first time in nearly a year and a half. I'll see how that goes. I remember it as being very, very good. But also, in the last few weeks, I've had three different people watch it because of my posts about John Robins, and all of them came back to me to point out that the stories about Sara Pascoe are pretty inappropriate to tell on stage. I'm still holding out hope that I'll hear him clarify on the radio show that he did run that stuff by her before saying it publicly, or at least before recording it for Netflix.

Anyway, this post got a bit out of hand. I've tried for the last couple of weeks to slow down on my posting about the Elis/John radio show, and the posting about my personal life, but I seemed to have built up a lot to say and put it all in this one. I'm doing fine.

[genericpuff]

…Here is something a bit more serious I wanted to ask…

How do feel when it comes the fact that plenty of sexual themes inside LO are being told incorrectly to a young audience (I keep hearing on how most of Webtoon readers are still around 12-16 year old girls)?

Specially with the fact that Rachel keeps on sexualizing Persephone after some scenes showcasing her trauma….

I hope I’m not overstepping my boundaries here…thanks again for listening.

You're not overstepping at all ! This is actually a topic I've gone off about in the past at length on reddit and in chatrooms like Discord so I'm always happy to divulge about it and talk about it. It's a problem that goes way bigger than LO but I'll try my best to keep it focused on LO for the sake of getting to the point.

Before I get into it, obligatory TRIGGER WARNING for discussion surrounding sexual trauma/abuse/etc. and how it's romanticized and marketed in Webtoons media.

There are so many comics in Webtoons library that are just skeevy beyond belief for the stories they're trying to tell. Whether it's gratuitous oversexualization of its characters to the point of being absurd, to the implications of the romances in these stories that often border on non-consensual/toxic, Webtoons seems to be using these types of things as its main draw in a lot of their "big money" series - or at least, the ones they tend to market the most.

Now don't get me wrong, I've got a strong stomach for weird/creepy/dark shit and I'm capable of having suspension of disbelief when reading stories like this. I'm an SA survivor myself but despite this, I'm no stranger to dark romance or stories that 'toe the line' or even overstep it completely between morally acceptable and morally apprehensible, a lot of these kinds of stories have actually helped me overcome and heal from what I've been through. Suspension of disbelief is important and this is, after all, fiction, where we as creators are able to explore taboo or 'forbidden' topics in ways that either interest us or empower us or just feel like fun to write.

But there's still a line to be drawn because I'm an adult person who has literary analysis skills and is capable of picking apart these stories and what they might be consciously - or subconsciously - teaching us or portraying. Kids and teens? They basically are what they eat. This isn't to say teenagers are stupid or anything of the sort, but I was a kid too once and I know I internalized a lot of media that I straight up shouldn't have been consuming at the time. And I do think a lot of webtoons on the WT platform specifically dangerously veer into that territory all for the purpose of money and clout.

Again, don't get me wrong, I love morally questionable or otherwise abrasive characters, I think they're fun to write and fiction is a great way to explore those kinds of dynamics (and I've had pals weirdly thank me for how much suffering I put my characters through LMAO). But I'm also not gonna sit here and bullshit people into thinking my main projects are meant for teens. They're not. My main protagonists are in a shitty toxic relationship that should not be romanticized. My main character is a hyperbolic self-insert reflection of how awful I used to be as a person and how I was at the center of all my own problems for years. You should be 18 at minimum if you want to read my work because the stuff I write about isn't appropriate for or wouldn't be able to be observed and accepted as just fiction the way most mature adults can.

Now I'm not saying my work is "deep" or anything like that, it's stupid fun weeb shit. But it's the kind of stupid fun weeb shit I wouldn't want a teenager internalizing or taking to heart. It's why I'll include plenty of disclaimers to remind people that my stuff is a work of fiction and I simply enjoy exploring these kinds of tropes and dynamics through my characters, but I do not condone their behavior or the things I represent in my work. I fully respect other creators and writers who do the same.

Rachel is not one of those people. Rachel doesn't do this. She tries to claim to be progressive while completely misrepresenting the things she writes. She doesn't actually care about these topics, she just wants you to think she cares about them. Don't get me wrong, there are other series on the platform that are absolutely problematic when it comes to this sort of thing (Webtoons looooves marketing them, blech) but Lore Olympus is the absolute pinnacle of irresponsible, the sum of everything that's wrong with Webtoons.

It gets constant special treatment - often times being put in the banner reel every time it updates and in the prime spots no less that are rarely ever given to other - far more thought-provoking and well-written - series that could really use the ad space.

It markets itself to kids and teens despite having subject matter that either isn't handled responsibly OR should be taken with a level of suspension of disbelief that a lot of teens/kids aren't capable of having.

And the subject matter that it does try to handle responsibly is flubbed entirely because they're leaving it up to the writing 'skills' of a privileged white woman from New Zealand who's either never lived these experiences or, those that she has, couldn't even write them into a narrative when she tries because she still exists with internalized biases that completely miss the mark because she's never tried to look at things with a viewpoint outside of her own.

She's just not a writer, full stop. But because it's Webtoon's golden goose, they market the shit out of it anyways and give it preferential treatment. And of course, they market it to kids and teens because it's cute and colorful, and kids and teens will be more likely to overlook its blatant problems because they don't have the literary analysis skills yet to identify them.

The other side of the coin they market to? The adults who don't think these problems are problems to begin with. These are the same adults who celebrated 50 Shades of Grey and After as if they're masterworks of fiction. Overall very shitty, problematic people. At least the teenagers have the potential to "grow out of it". The adults who defend Rachel like their life depends on it are grown up but not mature or empathetic in the slightest towards those who have found their own stories and experiences trivialized or otherwise misrepresented completely through LO.

I know, that's undoubtedly a lot of hot takes, but this is such a massive problem in romance stories today. I get it, it's "drama", and it's been around since the harlequin novels of old, but the way it's pushed and romanticized and presented as if it's somehow "couple goals" by the people - often women - who write them is getting to be exhausting.

At this point I put Rachel Smythe right up there with Anna Todd and EL James - ego-driven female "writers" who wrote shitty fanfiction that got a lot of views and happened to fail upwards in their success, but when you dig past the subscriber count numbers and the clout, they themselves are not that profound or well-read in any meaning of the word. They're just people with huge deeply-rooted issues who write problematic romances instead of going to therapy.

And that's all I'm gonna say on that.

[maxwell-grant]

Jumping off from my previous question/suggestion, might I please ask if there are any superheroes you think would make fine Pulp Villains and any Supervillains you think would make convincing Pulp Heroes?

I'm gonna go ahead and remark that I'd personally suggest to anyone who's trying to create pulp characters inspired by superheroes (which would be probably about 90% of you who may want to do that sort of thing) to flip the script around a little. As in, don't try to create pulp analogues to the Justice League/Avengers upfront, but play around with some of the lesser-known icons and filter those through your idea of what “pulp” means (which is gonna be quite different than my own or anyone else’s). 

I’m not gonna really mention characters I’ve already talked about before like Vandal Savage or Namor, instead I’ll pick new ones and see what can be highlighted about them.

Regarding “Superheroes who could make fine/convincing Pulp Villains”, even though he’s a character I've read basically nothing on, Martian Manhunter definitely leaped out to me as an obvious option. He’s a Sci-Fi Superman who takes the first half of the name to an extreme that borders on comical, except he’s not a square-jawed white man, he’s a 1.000 year old green alien from Mars with shapeshifting powers who can look as monstrous as the artist desires. He’s the product of an advanced civilization and genetic modification, and on top of the Flying Brick powerset and shapeshifting, he also has incredibly powerful and extensive telepathic abilities, he can become invisible, phaze through matter, use telekinesis and other weird abilities. A lot of pulp stories closer to sci-fi were based around the idea of taking one of these abilities and extrapolating horrific consequences for them, and J’onn has those by the dozens. He also has an extremely mundane weakness that would allow him to be beaten by Macready with a blowtorch if that’s where the story ended.

He was also a law enforcement officer from Mars who became a police detective and it’s even right there in his name, and again, I have never read anything he’s in (I should probably pick the Orlando mini), I know he’s for all intents and purposes a generally nice man who tends to job a lot in crossovers and cartoons, but the idea of taking all those great vast and horrifying alien powers, combining all of them into a single character who also happens to be the last survivor of a doomed planet (and one who actually lived through it’s collapse), and then making that character a former cop trying to resume his work on Earth? 

That is a Pulp Supervillain begging to happen, and a particularly horrifying one at that. And hey, speaking of The Thing-

Now, Plastic Man’s potential for horror has already been explored quite a bit in some of the darker DC continuities like Injustice and DCeased, and it’s quite funny seeing a lot of these turn Plastic Man into The Thing because there were quite a handful of Wold Newton pages that ran with the idea that Macready from the original story was Doc Savage, and that the secret chemicals that Eel O’Brian was hit by that gave him his powers were actually samples of The Thing contained in one of Savage’s labs. Regardless, the idea of a former street crook suddenly gaining bizarre shapeshifting abilities that allow him to reign terror on his gangster associates could make for a great premise as a pulp crime story that veers into horror as the gangsters gradually figure out what is Eel O’Brian’s deal, and then the story can take a more tragic turn.

The thing about Jack Cole’s Plastic Man that modern takes on the character neglect is that, while Plas was a lively roguish anti-hero (arguably the first of it’s kind in comics), he’s still for intents and purposes “the straight man” (HA, right, Plastic Man being “straight”). He’s the relatively sane hero who plays off Woozy’s wackier misadventures and the imaginative madness that Jack Cole paints his adventures with, and it makes for an interesting contrast considering Plastic Man is already a weird character, having to ramp up the strangeness of the world around him so that he still remains the sane man. There are ways to twist this into something quite horrifying, even tragic for Plastic Man as he either struggles to maintain coherency, or embraces the shifting chaos the world’s spiraling into for better or worse (and definitely for the worse towards those on the receiving end of his vengeance, or even his humor).

Now, onto the flipside, regarding Supervillains that could become Pulp Heroes -

Normally I’d not mention the Batman villains here, because I already have a lot to talk about in regards to them as is, they comprise some of my favorite comic characters, but I pretty much have to make an exception for Two-Face in this topic, as not only a pretty obvious option but one with even case studies to prove it, as not only do we have The Black Bat, a 1930s costumed pulp hero with an identical origin story and several other conceptual overlaps with Batman, as well as The Whisperer, a young hotshot police commissioner who dresses up as a disfigured vigilante to kill criminals without consequence (and who’s somehow less of a maniacal asshole in his secret identity than in his regular one), but it turns out that there actually was a 1910s pulp hero called The Two-Faced Man:

Crewe was created by “Varick Vanardy,” the pseudonym of Frederic van Rensselaer Dey (Nick Carter, Doctor Quartz), and appeared in three short stories and two novels and short story collections from 1914 to 1919, beginning with “That Man Crew” (The Cavalier, Jan. 24, 1914). 

Crewe is “The Two-Faced Man.” 

He is in his forties and has gray hair and a “sharply cut and handsome profile—until one caught a view of the other side of his face and saw the almost hideous blemish that nearly covered it, and which graduated in corrugated irregularity from a delicate pink to repulsive purple.” 

Crewe is two-faced in another way. Crewe is a saloon owner in below Washington Square. But he has another identity: Birge Moreau, portraitist and socialite hanger-on. Crewe uses both his identities to solve crimes as an amateur detective.

The only person to know about both of Crewe’s identities is a police inspector who is also Crewe’s friend and who Crewe helps in pressing cases - The Encyclopedia of Pulp Heores by Jess Nevins

And speaking of obvious picks for Supervillains turned Pulp Heroes,

Assuming I even need to make a case for Kraven the Hunter other than just presenting this cropped panel from Squirrel Girl and in particular the art painted on the Kra-Van, or even just telling you to read Squirrel Girl and it’s take on “The Unhuntable Sergei” (I had no idea most of the people saying “Kraven’s arc in Squirrel Girl is as good if not better than Kraven’s Last Hunt” weren’t actually joking in the slightest and I speak as someone who has Kraven among their absolute favorite Marvel characters, it had no right being that good), I’m going to quote the brilliant Rogue’s Review from The Mindless Ones that lays down in painstaking detail why Kraven could make a killer protagonist in that horrifically over-the-top pulp fashion

One thing that strikes me writing this, is how well Kraven could hold his own comic. There’s always room for a book spotlighting a ruthless, hardcore, gentleman bastard, and Kraven’s raison d’etre makes him supremely versatile, so well suited to any genre, any environment. It’s odd that more writers haven’t jumped on the fact that in a universe where off-world travel is possible – indeed, common – a hunter like Kraven would have a field day. 

I can just imagine the opening scene – herds of weird cthuloid bat creatures grazing in the gloomy green nitrogen fields, bathed in lethal, bone splintering fog, when, suddenly, LIGHT! from above and an unholy bellowing: “CTHGRGN fthgrgnARAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHGN!”

They look up in fear and then they start to run – ploughing into and over each other, tentacles flailing, as from the space-ship’s docking bay Kraven silently plummets, barely dressed for the cold, a glowing knife smothered in elder signs jammed between his teeth. 

You should have seen him one night previous, sipping alien tokay around the Captain’s table with the other guests, discussing the morning’s hunt; and the way he insulted the Skrull dignitary by forgetting himself and accidentally sporting his favourite piece of formal wear: his boiling unstable dinner-jacket of many colours, fashioned from the hide of one of the Ambassador’s super kinsmen.

Whoops!

Midway through Kraven explaining how the best way to irreparably damage a symbiote is to wait until its bonded with you and then seriously maim yourself, the Skrull decided it might be a good idea to simmer down, while his beautiful Inhuman lover hung on every word.

The deeper I get into this the more convinced I am that the MU’s hunter-killer extraordinaire wouldn’t limit himself to bloody planet Earth. And neither would he limit himself to this dimension, or universe or timeline. The guy’d be just as at home leaping, sword raised, onto the back of a T-Rex in the Savage Land, as he would be ploughing through werewolves in the graveyards of Arkham or tracking a howling Demon across Mephistopheles’ realm. 

He’d work perfectly in all these environments because he has a damn good reason to be casting a bloody swathe through them: wherever there’s big game, you’ll find Kraven.

The next choice I guess is an oddball, but not that much of an oddball if you know already what is my main frame of reference towards Marvel

I don’t think people appreciate enough that the main reason Shuma-Gorath has anything resembling a fanbase has nothing whatsoever to do with the comics he was in, but entirely because, when Capcom designers had a list of Marvel characters to pick from to work on Marvel Super Heroes, they took a look at the diet Cthulhu and went “gimme THAT one”, and then went all-in in giving the alien squid monster a funky personality along with a great stage and music and animations and all that great fighting game character stuff, and now he’s maybe the most popular Dr Strange villain along with Dormammu and Mordo, despite having ZERO film appearences or major showings in comic sagas.

Capcom's designers redefined Shuma-Gorath from a nebulous cosmic evil into a comically smug cartoon bastard who can rant about devouring all dimensions and souls horrifically while also cracking poses and zingers like “How do you expect to win a fight with only two arms?” and having dinners with Dhalsim or hosting Japanese game shows in his endings, and it kills me that none of this ever made it’s way into any depictions of the character outside of MvC. 

So that’s kinda what I’d go with. I’d take Capcom’s Shuma-Gorath, depower him a bit obviously from his canonical power, and run with the premise of his MvC3 ending where he decides that, well, if he's the unlikely savior of this pathetic planet and these wretched human dogs like him so much, and he’s clearly having a much better time here among them than he ever had drifting among the stars cealessly consuming life, then maybe he can take a break from all that eldritch business and keep up hosting the Super Monster Awesome Hour and maybe fight whatever PITIFUL villains think can take HIS planet. I mean, he’ll probably still end up destroying the planet by the end, but why not give this hero business a try?

Just until he gets his full powers back of course. 

I mean you can’t deny he DOES look pretty good in that bowtie, surely The Great Shuma-Gorath wouldn’t be so unmerciful as to deny these vile wastes of flesh something good to look at in their brief and miserable lives.

[guqin-and-flute]

what's your favorite thing that you've written?

OKAY. SO. This has been in my askbox for a month (or two??) now and I keep waffling because I don’t want to give a throwaway answer cause I really enjoy meta questions about writing. But I’m someone who has a really hard time with choosing favorites of things because it depends on the mood I’m in--and I didn’t want to just leave this as a ‘Oh, I like a bit of everything’ because there are definitely things that I enjoy more than others. 

And I know it’s not as serious as all that, but this was fun to ponder, so I’ve decided to make a list of my favorite things about some of my favorite things I’ve written!  Under the cut cause it kind of got long.

[ Peony to Lotus ] - (Yes, I’m gonna do whole AU’s. If I did break downs of my top fics in each one, this would be so fucking long and no one wants that) One of my favorite things about veering off so early in canon is that it feels less constrained than some of the ‘verses/ideas that branch off later. It feels more like I’m being more original rather than paralleling what’s happened because so much changes. My favorite thing about this ‘verse is continuously finding more and more ways to just be completely indulgent in my happy endings. It’s truly like a playground for me. 

[ 3zun Raise A-Fu ] - The things I love most about writing this is the sheer number of POVs that can change each scene. A fic from A-Fu’s point of view can be hilarious, whereas if we looked at it from JGY, it might actually be heartbreaking. There are so many different opinions and life experiences within the cast and I’m enjoying trying to keep everyone balanced and represented. I’m also in love with outsider POV because it’s like talking to the readers above the main character’s head and sharing an inside joke. I also enjoy the fact that this also probably has the widest range of emotional genre’s of all of the series’, from deepest angst to humor to pure fluff to plot. 

[ MBMSAM ]- I get to be intensely fucking weird and let my ADHD brain jump from topic to topic the way it likes best and you all seem to enjoy it.  I like that I can pretend to be funny 😁

[ The Untamed Goose Game ] - I made angst about a goose and people cared. 🦆

[ Rarepair Fun ]- ‘What if’s’ are so fun to explore and I end up convincing myself to care about them as I write them out (I’m looking at you, Yaoli <.<) 

[ One shots ] - A lot of people seem like them! Even the ones I’m ‘eh’ about! That’s one of my favorite things about making any sort of art--there have been several times when the thing I was most disappointed in is someone else’s favorite. It helps me remember that everyone’s looking for/at something different and there can be worth and joy in all the things you make, even if you don’t see it.

Ultimately, though, my favorite thing about writing them has been the fact that people are invested enough to put themselves into the creation process with prompts and ideas and suggestions. I love that they have all been things that aren’t completely my own and we have all created them together. 

Thanks for the question! I had fun answering it!

[desperatelyseekingroleplay]

Looking for Canon/OC and Canon/Canon RP partners.

Hi, my name is Cici and I'm looking for some long term fandom roleplay partners! I'm a 20 year old female so any partners aged 18+ would be ideal to account for any possible NSFW. I will roleplay with you if you are younger, but no younger than 17 and no older than 30. Also, if you are under 18,  our roleplay will automatically be SFW.

Reply length and time: one to two paragraphs minimum per reply in third person and my timezone is GMT.  One-liners are a turn off for me. Two to three replies a day minimum, and I veer towards trying to write multiple replies a day. If you can't reply often, that's okay as long as you state it beforehand. I like a lot of OOC chatter whether it's in general or about the RP.  I like to build up a friendship of sorts with my partner so it's easier to set up plot points or even just gush about characters. So if you're into that sort of thing, I'm your gal!

My RP preference is CanonxOC, but I will also write Canon/Canon. Doubling is essential-in return, I'm more than happy to write from any of the characters and ships below. Also open to both canon and AU'S for fandoms.

Fandom and Character/ship list:(Bold and Italics=RP's that I'm looking for at the moment, but I can also write every ship mentioned here)

Free! Iwatobi Swim Club: I write Haru, Makoto, Nagisa, Rei, Rin, Sousuke, Sejiuro, Momo, Gou and Izuru.

Ships: MakoHaru, Regisa, Haru/Rin, SouRin, Rin/OC, Izuru/Gou, Gou/Seijuro. 

Yuri on Ice: I write Yuuri, Victor, Yuri P, Otabek, JJ Leroy, Pitchit, Mila, Sara and Seung-Gil. 

Ships-Victyuuri, Otayuri, Yuri P/OC, JJBek, MilaSara, Pitchit/Seung-gil. 

Ouran High School Host Club: I write Haruhi and pretty much the entire Host Club.

Ships-TamaHaru, Tamaki/OC, Kyoya/Tamaki, Kyoya/OC, Hikaru/OC,Kaoru/OC.

Mystic Messenger:Zen, Yoosung, Saeyoung, Jaehee and MC. (Note: I've played all of the routes except for Unknown/Ray/Saeran but in future, I'll probably roleplay him as well.)

Ships-Zen/MC, Saeyoung/MC, Yoosung/Saeyoung, Jaehee/MC.

Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus: Percy, Nico, Will, Leo, Annabeth, Percy, Reyna. Ships-Leo/OC, Solangelo. (Note: The ships list for this fandom could get longer in the future, as I'm currently trying to get back into this fandom.)

Fandoms that I may possibly roleplay in the future and am trying to get back into: Fruits Basket, Harry Potter, The Umbrella Academy, Stranger Things, Haikyuu!, Studio Ghibli, Black Butler, The Mortal Instruments/Shadowhunters.)

AU'S I will roleplay-(both Fandom and OC.)

Actor AU, Band AU, College AU, Demigod AU, Fake Dating AU, High School AU, Journalist/Reporter AU, Royalty AU, Social Media AU, Youtuber AU.

Limits: I don't mind smut, but I'm not looking for a purely NSFW based RP. Overly angsty topics such as death, family issues are fine for me to RP but I draw the line at rape, gore, or any overly descriptive violence.

Contact: I'm submitting through my main blog @caoimhediva if you have any questions or would prefer to set up RP on Tumblr.

However, my preferred platform to RP on is Discord, so if you want to contact me on there, my tag is fancifuldreamer#8377 .

I hope this ad interests one or two of you! It seems like a lot, but I do try to be flexible, so don't be afraid to reach out!

[tubaterry]

“The military would just refuse to follow orders”

It’s a pretty common response to “fascism needs to be actively fought.” Comforting, naive and mostly wrong, but definitely common.  I’m in the US - I’ve heard it before but this is my first time hearing it in our current national context. Stewing on it led to a very uncomfortable moment.

See, I was in the Marine Corps (the most hypermasculine of the US armed forces) for four years.  I was single with no kids, so I lived on base through most of my enlistment - I spent more or less 24/7 with the people in question here.  Short of still being in and/or doing widespread surveys, I’m pretty confident in my judgement of the kinds of people in the military; the typical mindsets, habits, and social structures.

On twitter I tossed out sardonically that at least based on my marines’ facebook posts, “The military would just refuse to follow orders” isn’t a platitude I can put any stock in.  But maybe it’s worth digging in and thinking about it outside of my own experience.

What kind of people join the military?

Well, all stripes.  The US military is “all-volunteer”, meaning we have no conscription - you only sign up if you ‘want’ to. In that context, there are two main groups of people signing up: self-selection and circumstantial pressure.  In my intuition (ie no data, just going on personal experience) I’d guess that the “pressured by circumstances” group is significantly larger.  That group is primarily defined by a class thing - last I checked, military representation more or less matched the demographics in the vicinity of the poverty line.

The second group are self-selectors.  They, each for their own reasons, tend to have joined up with some kind of purpose in mind.  Sometimes it’s specific training (aviation people especially), sometimes it’s family tradition.  Sometimes it’s nationalism.  Sometimes it’s extremists using it as a legitimate (legally speaking) path to getting proven combat training.

What kind of people turn it into a career?

This, I think, may be the more important part - beyond just the on-the-ground practical decisions, leaders define culture and values. Just like anywhere else, and regardless of an inclusive or exclusive style, leaders attract and keep people who work well with them.  And there are good leaders and bad leaders who have all sorts of worldviews.

Generally speaking though, the people who succeeded in my neck of the Marine Corps and stuck around were the ones who kept their boat-rocking to a minimum.

So, who makes up the military? It’s mostly made of the same status quo custodians as in the rest of the country, with a notable overrepresentation of right-wing types and people from rough-to-desperate backgrounds.  Then when you consider especially how much of the country is at least defacto segregated - This is great white nationalist recruitment fodder

But white nationalists aren’t a majority.

You’re absolutely correct.  And honestly I’m veering off-topic with that - it’s important to remember that they’re still there and their ranks are growing, but we can safely assume those groups are gonna be gleefully ‘just following orders’.

That’s a lot of preamble, get to the point.

Fair. It’d be disingenuous for me to take literally “The military would just refuse to follow orders.”, the core idea if you take the time to work out the implications of the statement is “Enough of the military would refuse to commit atrocities that their orders couldn’t be carried out”.  This deserves counter-questioning:  

What constitutes enough? and How many would refuse?

Well, now that I’m here I don’t have a hard answer.  However, I think history points to the answer to the first question being significantly higher than the answer to the second.

Maybe most wouldn’t actively participate.  But that’s not the same as having anyone actively stop a war crime.

When we murdered hundreds of civilians in My Lai (serious trigger warning here for multiple types of atrocities), one person did anything to stop it.  (If you can stomach the linked article, note the instagator of the massacre used the “just following orders” excuse.) The one person who stepped in was a helicopter pilot who put himself and his crew between the murderers and the civilians being targeted, ordering his crewmembers to open fire on the US troops if they didn’t stand down.

Wounded Knee massacre: no intervention

Sand Creek massacre: no intervention

Ludlow Massacre: no intervention

Highway of Death (First Iraq war): No intervention

Abu Ghraib: No intervention

And just for a direct comparison with today: We killed 1,800 Japanese-Americans in our internment camps.  Do not expect anyone in the military to stop us this time either.

“The military would just refuse to follow orders”

No.  No we wouldn’t.  And as someone who knows people in positions where the they may be confronted with this same decision... I hate that in order to type this out honestly, I have to say that I expect all of them to make one of the wrong choices.

[buzzdixonwriter]

Colonialism

You back into things sometimes.

One of my many guilty pleasures is old school pulp, which I first encountered with the Doc Savage reprints in the 1960s, then old anthologies, then back issues at conventions, and now thanks to the Internet, an almost limitless supply.

And to be utterly frankly, a lot of the appeal lays in the campiness of the covers and interior art -- brass plated damsels fighting alien monsters, bare chested heroes combatting insidious hordes, etc., etc., and of course, etc.

Once past age 12, I never took these covers or the covers of modern pulps such as James Bond, Mike Hammer, or Modesty Blaise seriously; they were just good, campy fun.

While my main focus remained on the sci-fi pulps, I also kept an eye on crime and mystery pulps, war stories, and what are sometimes called “sweaties”, i.e., men’s adventure magazines.

Despite the differences in the titles and genres, certain themes seemed to pop up again and again.

Scantily clad ladies, typically in some form of distress, though on occasion dishing out as good if not better than they got.

Well, the pulps that drew my attention were the pups made for a primarily male audience (though even in the 1930s and 40s there were large numbers of female readers and writers in the sci-fi genre).  Small wonder I was drawn to certain types of eye candy; I had been culturally programmed that way.

That’s a topic well worthy of a post or two on its own, so I’m putting gender issues / the patriarchy / the male gaze aside for the moment.

What I’m more interested in focusing on is the second most popular characters to appear on the covers (and in the stories as well).

The Other.

The Other comes in all shapes / sizes / ethnicities.  Tall and short, scrawny and beefy, light or dark, you name it, they’ve got a flavor for you.

“Injuns” and aliens, Mongols and mafiosi, Africans and anarchists.

Whoever they were ”they ain’t us!”

Certain types of stories lend themselves easily to depicting the villainous Other.

Westerns, where irate natives can always be counted on to launch an attack.

War stories, where the hero (with or without an army to help him) battles countless numbers of enemies en masse.

Adventure stories, where the hero intrudes in some other culture and shows them the error of their ways.

Detective stories, where the Other might be a single sinister mastermind but still represents an existentialist threat.

And my beloved sci-fi stories?

Why, we fans told ourselves our stories were better than that!  We didn’t wallow in old world bigotry, demonizing blacks and browns and other non-whites because of their skins.

Oh, no:  We demonized green skinned aliens.

Now I know some of you are sputtering “But-but-but you wrote for GI Joe!”

Boy howdy, are you correct.

And boy howdy, did we ever exploit the Other with that show.

I never got a chance to do it, but I pitched -- and had Hasbro accept -- a story that would have been about the way I envisioned Cobra to have formed and been organized, and would focus on what motivated them.

They were pretty simplistic greedheads in the original series, but I felt the rank and file needed to be fighting for a purpose, something higher to spire to that mere dominance and wealth.

I never got to do “The Most Dangerous Man In The World” but I was trying to break out of the mold. 

For the most part, our stories fit right into the old trope of The Other.

Ours were mostly about the evil Other trying to do something nefarious against our innocent guys, but there’s an obverse narrative other stories follow, in which our guys go inflict themselves on The Other until our guys either come away with a treasure (rightfully belonging to The Other but, hey, they really don’t deserve it so we’re entitled to take it from them), or hammer The Other into submission so they will become good ersatz copies of us (only not so uppity as to demand equal rights or respect or protection under law).

These are all earmarks of a very Western (in the sense of Europe and America…with Australia and New Zealand thrown in) sin:  Colonialism.

Now, before going further let’s get out terms straight.

There’s all sorts of different forms of colonialism, and some of them can be totally benign -- say a small group of merchants and traders from one country travel to a foreign land and set up a community there where they deal honorably and fairly with the native population.

The transplanted merchants are a “colony” in the strictest sense of the term, but they coexist peacefully in a symbiotic relationship with the host culture and both sides benefit, neither at the expense of the other.

Oh, would that they could all be like that…

Another form of colonialism -- and one we Americans are overly familiar with even though there are all sorts of variants on this basic idea -- is the kind where one culture invades the territory of another and immediately begins operating in a deliberately disruptive nature to the native population.

They seek to enslave & exploit or, failing that, expel or eradicate the natives through any means possible.

It’s the story of Columbus and the conquistadors and the pilgrims and the frontiersmen and the pioneers and the forty-niners and the cowboys and the robber barons.

It’s the story where different groups are deliberately kept separate from one another by the power structure in place, for fear they will band together and usurp said power structure (unless, of course, they band together to kelp make one of ours their leader, and build a grand new empire just for him).

It’s the story where our guys never need make a serious attempt to understand the point of view of The Other, because they are just strawmen to mow down, sexy lamps to take home.

I think my taste in sci-fi and modern pulp writing in general started to change around the mid-1970s.

Being in the army quickly cleared me of a lot of preconceptions I had about what our military did and how they did it.

The easy-peasy moral conflicts of spy novels and international thrillers seem rather thin and phony compared to the real life complexities of national and global politics.

Long before John Wick I was decrying a type of story I referred to as “You killed my dog so you must die.”  Some bad guy (typically The Other) does a bad thing and so the good guy (one of ours -- yea!) must punish him.

Make him hurt.

Make him whimper

Make him crawl.

Make him suffer.

The real world ain’t like that.

Fu Machu falls to Ho Chi Minh.

As entertaining as the fantasy of humiliating and annihilating our enemies may be…we gotta come to terms with them, we gotta learn to live with them.

That’s why my favorite sci-fi stories now are less about conflict and more about comprehension.

It’s better to understand than to stand over.

. . .

The colonial style of storytelling as the dominant form of story telling is fairly recent, dating only from the end of the medieval period in Europe and the rise of the so-called age of exploration.

This is not to say colonial story telling didn’t exist before them -- look at what Caesar wrote, or check out Joshua and Judges in the Old Testament -- but prior to the colonial age it wasn’t the dominant form of storytelling.

Most ancient stories involve characters who, regardless of political or social standing, recognize one another as human beings.

And when gods or monsters appear, they are usually symbols of far greater / larger forces & fates, not beasts to be subdued or slain.

Medieval literature is filled with glorious combat and conflict, but again, it’s the conflict of equals and for motives and rationales that can easily be understood.

It was only when the European nations began deliberately invading and conquering / dominating foreign lands that colonialism became the dominant form of storytelling.

It had to:  How else could a culture justify its swinish behavior against fellow human beings?

Even to this day, much (if not most) popular fiction reflects the values of colonialism.

Heroes rarely change.

Cultures even less.

We’ve kept The Other at arms length with popular fiction and media, sometimes cleverly hiding it, sometimes cleverly justifying it, but we’ve had this underlying current for hundreds of years.

Ultimately, it hasn’t served us well.  

It traps us in simplistic good vs evil / us vs them narratives that fail to take into account the complex nature of human society and relationships.

It gives us pat answers instead of probing questions.

It is zero sum storytelling: The pie is only so big, there can’t be more, and if the hero doesn’t get it all, he loses.  (John D. MacDonald summed up this philosophy in the title of one of his books:  The Girl, The Gold Watch, And Everything.)

It’s possible to break out of that mind set -- The Venture Brothers animated series brilliant manages to combine old school pulp tropes with a very modern, very perceptive deconstruction of the form -- but as posted elsewhere, imitation is the sincerity form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness, so while I certainly applaud The Venture Brothers I don’t want to encourage others to follow in their footsteps.

Because they won’t.

They’ll pretend they will, but they’ll veer off course and back into the old Colonialism mindset.

We need to break out, break free.

Here in the U.S. it’s African-American History Month.

The African-American experience is far from the Colonialism that marks most white / Western / Christian storytelling (and by storytelling I include history and journalism as well as fiction; in fact, anything and everything that tells a narrative).

It’s a good time to open our eyes, to see the world around us not afresh, but for the first time.

Remove the blinders. 

I said sometimes you back into things.

Getting a clearer view of the world I’m in didn’t come from a straightforward examination.

It came from a counter-intuitive place, it found its way back to the beginning not by accepting what others said was the true narrative, but by following individual threads.

It came from Buck Rogers and the Beat Generation and Scrooge McDuck and the sexual revolution and Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance and the civil rights era and Dangerous Visions and the Jesus Movement and Catch-22 and the Merry Pranksters.

It came from old friends, some of whom inspired me, some of whom disappointed me, and yet the disappointments probably led to a deeper, more penetrating insight into the nature of the problem.

This Colonialism era must come to a close.

It can no longer sustain itself, not in the world we inhabit today.

It requires a new breed of storytellers -- writers and artists and poets and journalists who can offer 

It’s not a world that puts up barriers by race or gender, ethnicity or orientation, ability or age.

There’s ample opportunity for open minds.

All it asks of us is a new soul.

  © Buzz Dixon

[withwitandhope]

//Finally finishing The Bodysnatchers, because I don't feel well and needed to do something non-strenuous before I go back to grading and finishing up detail-type things. One thing I find interesting that I can't recall having been mentioned before is the state of grace that exists inside the TARDIS. (It's basically this book's big deux ex machina.) Evidently, there's some sort of circuit for that that the Doctor fixed not long before this novel, along with several other things that prove quite helpful in the book's resolution. But basically, what that does is prevent anybody from being harmed while inside the TARDIS. Obviously not something that was functional at the time of the movie (which the books, unlike the audios, pick up immediately after).

Also, I literally just watched the movie last night with the commentary track from Paul McGann and Sylvester McCoy. And I recall McGann talking about how much he enjoys the audios because they can explore darker, heavier topics than can be effectively dealt with in the TV series. (Although this last season dealt with some pretty heavy shit. Not that prior ones haven't, but I remember the most recent season most clearly.)

I get what he means there. There's this underlying thread in the narrative of the main range audios, at least, that Eight is largely driven by guilt and isn't terribly concerned with preserving his own life. Charley calls him out on his negligently suicidal actions on at least two occasions that I can think of off the top of my head - first in Embrace the Darkness and again in everybody's favorite nightmare, Scherzo. That's touched on briefly with Ten and again with a bit more weight with Twelve in the show (I've honestly blocked out most of Eleven's run), but never with the sort of matter-of-fact heavy handedness as in Eight's audios. In the show it's played mostly as fatigue. The Doctor is tired of all of it and just wants to rest. In the audios, Charley blatantly calls him out as behaving suicidally, in pretty much exactly those words. (In Scherzo I know she says exactly that, but in Embrace the Darkness I believe it's more along the lines of, "That's exactly what you want, isn't it? You want someone to kill you." Along with the comment that he can't bring himself to do it himself, which has obviously changed by the time we get to Scherzo.)

But I've veered off course and into "why does C.S. play Eight like that?" Getting back to the point of "darker topics than the tv show," the end of The Bodysnatchers. I won't get into all the gory details, because frankly they're disturbing and gory, but there's a big chase scene in which there are some pretty grisly scenes described in detail. The books, unlike the tv show, are definitely not meant for the whole family. They fit more closely with how McGann says American audiences at the time the movie aired viewed Doctor Who, which was as a show for adults, not a family show. I'm American and I grew up on it, so that was a surprise to me, but my parents were obviously some of the odd ones out. (Or at least my dad was, but this is also the man who used to read me the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe as bedtime stories...) But it's just interesting how much range the series has, even without branching out into all the spin-offs - although I am reaching into the EU here.

And one interesting thing in those scenes is that there's a point where Sam, who likes to think of herself as tough and unflappable, has to stop running and duck into an alley to throw up because of something she's witnessed. Now granted, Sam is only 16, but to be completely honest, I probably would have done the same and 16 is long since passed for me. And much like Charley frequently does in the audios, Sam had cornered the Doctor at a point just prior to that and demanded to know how he manages to just shake this stuff off. He pretty much dodges the question before finally admitting that he doesn't. He just supresses it, because generally in the moment if he stops to have a breakdown, people will die as a consequence. So he just pushes himself through it and doesn't really ever give himself time and space to process everything. Whiiiich is probably what leads to moments like the ones in the audios where Charley ends up calling him out on doing something suicidally reckless.

I've wandered a bit off course here. I meant to just talk about the state of grace, but there's a lot involved in the end of that novel. And it does get back to Eight being this very dynamic and nuanced character, because despite all of that being true about how he has these suicidal low points, the unbridled exuberance he has for life at other moments is no less genuine. Eight is really a more interesting and real charcter for how well those two things are interwoven, something that's played with a bit in Caerdroia. Or at least, I think that's part of what I find so interesting about him. Those aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, either. He can display both nearly simultaneously, although the depression will generally dampen his enthusiasm a bit. But I think it's that sort of writing and (in the case of the audios) acting that makes him perhaps the most interesting Doctor, at least to me. And I also think that perhaps what has played a big role in him developing is that fact that the overwhelming majority of his material is in the EU, away from the screen of the family program that is the tv series.

[davidaccampo]

Breaking Down Comics

A friend of Amanda Donahue, one of my co-creators on THE MARGINS, asked me some questions, and they were so good I felt it was worth dusting off Tumblr to answer. Thanks, Nick, and I hope these rambles give you something worth your while! 

Below are Nick’s two questions and my VERY long answers.

Sooo, my first question would just be how you got into it. Is it your primary form of writing?

Great question. So, is it my primary form of writing? Hmmm. I just finished a commitment to a set of 4 interactive mobile game scripts that took up quite a chunk of the last few months. In that time frame I also released a one-shot licensed 22-page comic and a 12-page digital creator-owned comic. So, on balance, I don’t think it’s currently my primary form of writing, but it’s definitely my favorite form, and it’s a medium and industry that I’m both very familiar with and passionate about, so whenever I’m given the chance to write comics, I take it.

However, comics as an industry is a difficult one to navigate. With the two biggest publishers owning incredibly popular franchises, the prime means for writers to make a living on comics is to essentially write super-heroes that you don’t own. And that, in itself, is neither good nor bad. It’s just worth noting that if you want to make comics your primary form of income, then DC and Marvel are going to come into your orbit in some shape. And that type of writing will come with its own set of thrills and challenges.

On the flip side, creator-owned comics and graphic novels can be an extremely fulfilling creative experience, if financially tricky to produce and sell. But the comics industry is still intimate enough that you can find ways to make and sell your comics. There’s a lot more to talk about there with regards to distribution and comics retail, but that’s another conversation.

It’s also worth noting that while the prevailing understanding is that digital comics sell only a fraction of the numbers of printed comics, it’s also a very accessible platform. With time and effort, you can put a comic book out to a global audience.

I may have veered slightly off topic here, but I think the point I’m trying to make is: if you want comics to be your primary form of writing, they most certainly can be. And you can and will make comics passionately and whole-heartedly, and you’ll put them into the world.

But making a living off of them is much more complicated scenario and every creator out there will have different advice for you, but be prepared for an equation that’s pretty familiar to any who has ever freelanced: less control = more money. Generally speaking, of course. There’s always a Walking Dead situation, if all the stars align.

Oh, and I never answered the first part of that question — how did I get into it? I’ll try to bullet point my personal path, which is super wonky, but probably not much stranger than most writers.

It kinda went like this:

Dave’s Writing Career: A Timeline

I always loved comics. In high school, I even wrote and drew 80 pages of a comic that was a horrible pastiche of Marvel/Epic’s Elektra: Assassin by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz and DC’s The Question by Denny O’Neil, Denys Cowan, and Rick Magyar. However, in my 20s, I’d attend conventions and discover that I had no idea how to move from fandom into professional writing.

I went on to study English and Creative Writing, thinking I’d write prose novels.

Then I moved to LA and fell in with a crowd of Hollywood screenwriter types. I wrote a few screenplays with a writing partner, Jeremy Rogers, but when nothing really came from it, we decided to make our own short films.

We made 3 short films that went into film festivals.  At this point, I was tired of spending so much time and money making 10-30 minute films that didn’t result in much. We hatched a new plan: what if we availed ourselves of the iTunes platform and released an audio drama as a podcast?

Wormwood: A Serialized Mystery was the result. It allowed us to tell long, serialized stories, much like my first love: comic books.

Toward the end of the Wormwood run, an illustrator named Jared Souza contacted us. He’d adapted scenes from Wormwood into sequential art, and  was curious if we ever thought about turning it into a comic book. We jumped at the chance, and with Jared we wrote and drew an 12-page mini-comic that we printed and took to the San Diego Comic-Con. Hermes Press was interested in our book, and they offered us a deal shortly after the show was over.

From there, I kept thinking about what else I could do with comics. I partnered with Chris Anderson for Lost Angels, and we made another 12-page mini-comic as a sales pitch, and we were offered a digital-first deal with a new publisher, Comicker.

And it keeps going from there, but that is the long and windy road telling stories in a LOT of different formats, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Learning the strengths of one format does help you to understand the strengths of another. For example, for Wormwood we could really lean into long, twisty passages of monologue because it was all about the actors’ voices. However, as soon as you bring that to comics, you realize the amount of word balloons those monologues would take would utterly cover up any artwork on the page. And so you adjust.

Which is a nice segue to your other question…

Secondly, I'd love to hear how you work things out. As far as layout in regards to story. The most challenging aspect for me is to convert my thinking from imagining in film to now these static images. Do you put a lot of thought into that area, or do you focus mostly on the story and then sort of work that out as you are getting it down?

My initial thought is: “I do both.” But let’s break those up.

In terms of static images: think about the key moments. The perfect still frame of film that sums up the core of a moment of story in your mind. You want to build out from there.

But almost more importantly: think about the gutters. The space between panels. The gutters are actually where all the magic in comics reside. I recommend reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. McCloud is great for understanding how a reader processes the information when we’re as absorbing art in a sequence. And the key is the gutters: The narrative “time” between panels can last a millisecond or a millennium. And the reader understands that from the context. So you’ve got to figure out how much you can get away with in between panels.

A panel exists in one moment in time. One action can occur. Imagine a father and son playing catch. What’s the most important part of that scene? The father throwing? The son catching? That’s two panels. Or, it could be a wide shot of the two, the ball in mid-air, but that wide shot probably should take up as much space on the page as two close angle shots of throwing and catching.

So, you ask yourself: what’s the emotional context of the scene? Is it important to show the father about to throw the ball (perhaps metaphorically teaching his son)? Is it important to show the son catching that ball (perhaps showing the son absorbing the lesson)? Is the activity itself the most important part (the wider shot might work best). It really depends upon the what you want to get out of the scene.

Another example: A man sits in his living room. There’s a knock at the door. He answers. It’s his landlord.

How many  panels is that? The only concrete answer I can give you is that it’s ”more than one” — because the of multiple actions involved.

It could be two panels: 1) the man sits reading a newspaper, but his head is cocked because he’s JUST heard the SFX of knocking on his door. 2) he’s standing at the open door and the landlord is asking him for a rent check.

It could be five panels: 1) the main sits reading a newspaper. 2) We show the front door, with knocking SFX. 3) The man opens the door, but we don’t show who it is, building suspense. The man is nervous. 4) we reveal it’s the landlord, standing there, arms crossed and angry. 5) The landlord asks for the rent check.

How important is that scene to your overall story? Five panels is roughly a whole page. Do you want to spend a whole page to show that the man is late with his rent?

That’s brings us to the next part of your question, and the other aspect that’s really important to comics: page count.

Page count is crucial because of the amount of time it takes an artist to draw a page, and also because of the printing costs. A standard issue of a comic is roughly 20-22 pages. So you’ve got to start by knowing how much space you’ve got (some writers will refer to this as “real estate”).

As a general standard, I’m going to assume that you’re looking at a mini-series or story arc that’s probably 5-6 issues, at 20-22 pages per issue. That works for comic book issue publishing, and it collects nicely into a graphic novel.

Even if I know I’m writing a graphic novel (as we did with The Margins), I tend to think in those general terms because it helps me break the story down.

So, I might start by assuming I have 5 chapters that are each 20 pages. Then I figure out — where is the best place to end Chapter One? It shouldn’t just be a moment of pivot — a cliffhanger, something that pushes the reader to start the next chapter as quickly as they can.

I’ll use the film THE MATRIX for this example, but I’m doing this from memory, so this may not be the best story breakdown.

At first thought, knowing I have 5 chapters of 20 pages each, it seems to me a great end to the first chapter might be Neo waking up in his pod in the real world. I mean, you have to read Issue #2 if that’s where Issue #1 ends, right?

If that’s page 20, you now have 19 pages to get there. And you have to get through: Trinity and the agents, Neo following the white rabbit, Neo meeting Trinity, Neo getting a call phone from Morpheus, Neo taken by the agents and getting the tracker put in him. Neo getting the tracker removed. Neo taking the red pill.

That’s a LOT! (It’s probably more than 20 pages, but please bear in my I’m just using this as an example.)

Next I’d think about: how much real estate do I give to Trinity vs. The Agents. Maybe four pages. The first two are the fighting and running across the rooftops. The second two could be a DOUBLE-PAGE SPLASH (two pages that make up one giant image) of Agent Smith ramming his truck into the phone booth. That’d also make for a good title/credits page.

I can probably script that, but I first have to think if I can get though the rest of it with 15 more pages. Ack!

Luckily, the next bits contain a lot of conversations, so we can probably get away with 5-9 panels per page, lots of back and forth conversation, condensed onto fewer pages. And that’s key because we’re going to have to go to larger panels for key action sequences like Neo climbing out on the building ledge. Neo getting the tracker put into his belly.

To be honest, at this point, I’d probably have to rethink some of this — this feels like too much for 20 pages. But hopefully that example shows you how I approach the process. It’s basically taking the whole story and then breaking it into issue-sized chunks, then pages, then finally panels.

And as you think about panels, you do want to make sure you have a mix. Some kind of big splash page is important — it allows you to focus on the biggest moments, and it also gives the reader a bit of a chance to relax, slow down and take in the art. A sequential page can have more panels, but it becomes denser, and each panel can contain less information — one or two dialogue balloons, limited backgrounds, etc. The more panels, the less room and detail each panel can contain.

Personally, I like to think about most of my sequential pages being about 4-8 panels, peppered with one or two splash pages. I can bump up or lower the panel count as needed. If you start by thinking about 3-4 panels for big cinematic action and 5-9 panels for dense conversation or smaller actions, then you’ll probably find yourself with a decent balance through your comic.

Those are my long-winded answers. I hope this helps. There’s much more to talk about in terms of craft, but this covers most of what I think about when breaking down a comic book story.

[withloveishi]

When You Have 64 Crayons But Only Use Goldenrod (Southeast Asian Underrepresentation in the Context of “Asian” Culture)

TO NOTE: I will be using Japanese culture and experience to synthesize some of the broader points I’m getting at, mostly to exemplify what I mean by the East Asian experience. In doing so, I surmise some similar cultural and experiential examples in other East Asian countries (i.e. Kpop, Kdramas, etc.). If you have problems, you can bring them up with my non-existent care for your opinion, at least on this point.

ANOTHER NOTE: I talk a lot about East Asian and Southeast Asian representation full knowing that there is also a deficit in South Asian representation in the states. I am unable to elaborate on the experiences of South Asian people (because I don’t have any experiences to elaborate on, nor am I South Asian) but, they also deserve the same amount of representation at Southeast and East Asian people.

ANOTHER ANOTHER NOTE, BUT IT’S AN OPEN NOTE: I am not any sort of *insert subregion of Asia* Cultural Studies Major. So deep anthropological analysis and citation of scholarly journals is not in my arsenal. All I’m doing is using some of my life experiences and observations to draw some vaguely profound, and mostly bulshit conclusion to a very large issue. If you have a problem with that, just let me know.

Being in college has challenged me to think about all parts of my identity, not just the parts that are most convenient. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always played into and written about my experiences being Japanese far more than my experiences being Filipino. And why did I do this? I’m not quite sure (After all, I am not very smart), but I do have theories about my generally fucked up view of identity. Considering the external culture and people I have always surrounded myself, East Asian culture was just more recognizable than Southeast Asian (SEA) culture. In order for me to seem more relatable or recognizable to others, I play off of my Japanese identity more. And if you don’t understand this, try this little exercise.

Which do you recognize more?

Anime or Teleseryes

Ramen or Sotanghon

Japanese or Tagalog

I’m hoping many of you are smart enough and have figured the point I’m trying to get at. But if you haven’t, then keep reading. I’m sure you’ll catch my drift the more you read more paragraphs of my point, reiterated less and less eloquently each time.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m very pleased to see a rise in East Asian representation, both in the form of pop culture that has found its way to the states, like anime and kpop, and in the stories being told from the East Asian perspective. However, it’s kind of odd to see “Crazy Rich Asians” and “Attack on Titan” be the height of East Asian representation, and the tag on your clothes that say “Made in Cambodia” as the height of SEA representation. Even then, “Made in China” occurs more frequently than that, so really, there’s just no SEA representation in comparison.

The point I’m trying to (unsuccessfully) get across is the relationship between the amount of representation something gets and how that influences what we believe is reality: a concept simultaneously not new and entirely new. From the Vietnam War to Instagram, it is a concept that has reappeared time and time again, and but one no one seems to learn from.

When people (especially non-Southeast Asian people) are surrounded by predominantly East Asian culture and experiences, the SEA culture and experiences get lost among popularization of these things. When our surrounding floods us with the culture of East Asian countries without another frame of cultural reference, our frame of what is considered Asian is becomes predominantly, if not entirely, consumed by East Asian ideals. To some of you out there, I’m sure it feels somewhat ridiculous to excuse the existence of an entire chunk of Asia, but it happens. Now I’m not asking for the hit drama Pangako Sa ‘Yo to hit Netflix any time soon, but there needs to be a way where we shift our lens of what we call Asian from just considering East Asia to the literal whole of Asia. Or conversely, using East Asian, Southeast Asia and South Asia to describe these regions separately.

     However, the million dollar question (or however much money my opinions are worth in this world): why the fuck do I care so much? Well, I’m sort of obligated to, because it’s in my blood.

    In my own life, I’ve veered towards adopting a more Japanese externality. Why? Because people care more about you if you do that in my area. I wanted people to either relate to me or find some sense of understanding or who I was on what could be considered, “an authentic portrayal of myself”. Because after all, saying I’m Japanese is not a lie, it’s just not entirely the truth. If I say I’m Japanese, people then find some common ground with me, either on the basis of Anime or Manga, or just how much they “love Japanese people”. When I say I’m Filipino, many people react with, “Oh, isn’t that where *insert really awful political or social news headline here*?” or “Duerte?”. For me, it’s just more convenient to open with being Japanese. But why do I ignore that literal fact that I’m only half Japanese; probably for a couple main reasons:

Like I said in the beginning, I’m half Japanese and Half Filipino, I had a choice. Many of my friends who are fully SEA are confronted with their identity because both their parents are of SEA decent. There’s no work around to your identity. You deal with it because that is fully who you are. Me, on the other hand, have the foot on two different borders. Being half Japanese gave me an escape to having to confront my Filipino identity. Because being Japanese is on the “more culturally familiar ground”, I just chose to lead with that.

My mom never really elaborated on her experience as a Filipino woman. I don't think she was ashamed of it, but she never really cared to talk about her childhood, or her experiences emigrating to the states for school as a Filipino woman. Those were never topics of discussion between me an her. So, it naturally faded to the background, especially coupled with my dad’s poignant conversations about his experience and my grandma’s experience being Japanese.

Consider that last point. The non-existence of my mom’s Filipino perspective to things allowed me to adopt an almost entirely Japanese externality to myself, and feel okay with doing that for a very long time of my life. By mentioning this, I’m trying to make it a point that I understand how easy it is to dismiss the SEA viewpoint when it is not the reality we have to face head on. When we both have a path to ignorance laid out for us, plus all signs telling us to follow that path, it’s really hard to do otherwise.

Unlike many of the people at my college, I am not the most socially aware person. So I’m not always quite sure how to go about tackling these really large-scale issues. But here’s my take on forming a somewhat organized opinion on this issue.

In a world where our trajectory is heavily influenced but our unchoosable characteristics (like race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.), it become increasingly more important to then at least categorize people by vaguely correct assumptions. The matter of the fact is that East Asian people and SEA people are not on same platform. When my mom had me, she refused to teach me Tagalog for a long time, because she was under the belief that Tagalog would make me dumb, or seem dumb. She was under the impression that by Tagalog being a SEA language, that it would make me seem inferior to others. Conversely, if I knew Japanese or Mandarin, I would be considered smarter and more articulate than other people. This is the world we live in. So, to use the identifier “Asian”, we are asking people to reach a certain expectation that they are simply unable to achieve.

However, assuming you don’t care about any of that, look at it from a black and white perspective. To use “Asia” or “Asian” to describe anything but the continent of Asia or someone from Asia is just the more incorrect term. If you have the option to be specific and correct, why not do that? “Southeast Asian” is just two more syllables than “Asian” and “East Asian” just one. It’s very simple.

The matter of the fact is that we cannot allow SEA stories to become lost, especially at the foot of East Asian culture. And the only way for that to happen is to give it an equal opportunity to represent itself. More Southeast Asian perspectives being represented in TV and movies, more education of Southeast Asian culture not cast in a negative light, and pushing the teaching of Southeast Asian languages. This is how we do it. And no, a new documentary on the corrupt government in the Philippines is not the representation I’m asking for. For now, documentaries on street food in Vietnam and fun little tourist advertisements for the Himalayas will have to do.

I know this was a long post, and I’m sure I missed a lot of things. This might have pissed some of you off. I didn’t intentionally try and miss anything, but if something irked you really badly, I’m happy to re edit this post. As always just let me know. It helps me gain more perspective on an issue I am still trying to understand myself.

If you read this far down, let me know! I’m always excited when more than zero people read my writing, and even more so, when they enjoy reading it. Thanks so much for your time kids, and I’ll see you whenever.

[montesquedemeadowshire]

Titan Academy PT 2

“He’s…a bit overwhelming, isn’t he?” Cameron asked, after the door had closed behind the Senator.

“Quite,” replied the headmistress, with a small quirk of her lips.  She rose and headed towards the door. “Now, Cameron, Tracy, please come with me, and I’ll show you to your respective quarters.”  

Cameron and Tracy followed Miss Carmine as she glided from the room, stopping briefly to allow Cameron to rush back into the office to collect his forgotten luggage.  His fellow human student was looking notably impatient by the time he rejoined them, but the headmistress’ expression was undisturbed. She continued along the passage, her students in her wake.  

Now that he had his mind about him enough to look around at the school, Cameron noticed that while the building looked like a perfectly normal specimen of its sort, a closer look revealed some interesting differences.  For instance, both the doors and the ceilings were built about two feet higher than in a normal school, presumably to better accommodate larger-than-normal students. The posters, too, revealed slight differences. Many were of the normal, vaguely inspirational posters one would expect to find.  However some indicated sentiments not normally found in a human school. Cameron lagged behind slightly as he read a poster showing what appeared to be a young male vampire being surprised by a photographer. It read AKWWa! Always Know Who’s Watching!

As he hurried to catch up with the two ladies once again, he overheard Tracy asking Miss Carmine something.  “Excuse me, ma’am, I don’t know if it’s considered rude or not, but what…er…race are you? Is that right?”

Miss Carmine continued to glide down the corridor, but Cameron thought he could hear a smile in her voice as she answered.  “As to your second question, we haven’t quite landed on a term we’re all happy with yet. Some prefer race, others ‘species’, etc.  As a result no one has quite figured out which terminology to be offended by, so you should be alright with whatever version you’d prefer.  

“As to your first, I am what is traditionally known as a vampire in America.”

Tracy stopped short momentarily, and Cameron noted a distinct nervousness to her expression as he passed her.  She was walking alongside him a moment later, brow furrowed in thought. “But, ma’am, you were just out in the sun…I thought that…well, you know, that wasn’t possible.”

“Cameron?” Miss Carmine replied as he looked askance at Tracy.

“Actually that’s a common misconception,”  Cameron began, quickly warming to one of his favorite topics.  “as we now know, vampire are perfectly able to be out in the sun, and suffer no significant ill effects from it, aside from a possible higher likelihood of major sunburn over extended periods of time, though the evidence for that is still anecdotal.”

Miss Carmine glanced over her shoulder and nodded approvingly.  “Very good, Cameron. Personally I feel that I am a bit more susceptible to sunburn than most, but as you say that is only anecdotal evidence.  I think you’ll find, Tracy, that many of the more common rumors about the sorts of students we have here at the Academy are distortions of the truth, at best, or outright fabrications at worst.  Though, admittedly, many of them have at least a grain of truth to them.”

“Like that vampires require blood to survive?” Tracy inquired.

“Exactly.  While we can ingest and metabolize human blood much differently and better than humans, we do not actually require it on a regular basis to survive.  On the other hand, our enhanced abilities require us to expend our own supply of blood, and so to survive we require…outside assistance, lest we succumb to anemia.”

“I suppose that makes sense…” Tracy said, obviously pondering all this as they walked.  The three walked in silence for a while, as the headmistress led them from the school building back out into the burning sun, which seemed to have lost none of its heat as it had descended.

Tracy, Cameron, and Miss Carmine proceeded towards a rather large complex of

buildings some distance from the school.  The older woman spoke up again as they entered the shade of the buildings.  “These are the dormitories. You will be staying here for the year. The upper floors are the student quarters, while the ground floors are various amenities and staff quarters.”

Cameron and Tracy looked around, somewhat bewildered. There were six buildings, all of which had at least three stories, and seemed to be about the same size as airplane hangars, if not larger.  Cameron asked for them both, “Um, Miss Carmine, I didn’t think the Academy had that many students yet. That is…last I’d read, there were only about one hundred going here?” He was beginning to feel rather uncomfortable, afraid that Tracy was going to think he was showing off by knowing so much about the school.

Miss Carmine looked back at him, smiling slightly once again.  “Partially true. Our attendance numbers last year were in that vicinity, however we have doubled our numbers over the summer after the success of last year.  We also built the dormitories to accommodate the numbers of students we hope to have, rather than how many we currently do. Finally, well…That will be easier to show than to tell, I suspect.”  As she finished speaking, she veered aside onto a branch of the sidewalk which led into the nearest dormitory building.

Cameron hauled his suitcases around and hurried after her as she opened the door to let them through.  Immediately, his eyes widened at the sight before him. The building seemed to be built around a massive pool, equal to several olympic-sized pools set together.  He vaguely registered that Tracy had stopped beside him and was also goggling at the sight. As they watched, he noticed that the pool actually appeared to be an extremely close approximation of a beach, from the sandy shore to the waves breaking upon it.  

Tracy stammered, looking slightly wild eyed at the headmistress, who was looking quite proud of herself.  “But…how…this isn’t…I mean…”

“Quite impressive, isn’t it?  The finest engineers we could find designed each of the dormitories.  In truth, most of them accepted a reduced fee due to their excitement over the challenge.  You see, many of our students have special requirements to live comfortably. The merfolk and kelpies, for instance, become very uncomfortable if they are not immersed in salt water at least once every…36 hours or so.  Beyond that they face serious health concerns, and so we designed this dormitory to fit their needs. The water is a close approximation of clean ocean water, and the pool goes to a depth of around 500 feet, sufficient for even those students who prefer higher water pressures.  The upper floor is also an aquatic environment, similar to a very large rooftop pool, composed of fresh water. Fortunately none of our students who prefer fresh water require extreme depths, so we were able to construct it without the gradient of this pool.”

Tracy was recovering from the shock of the building’s interior rather quicker than Cameron, it seemed.  “So then, it’s not a matter of the buildings being built for a lot of students, but rather that a lot of the students require special accommodations which take up a lot of space, right?”

“Quite right.  There are refrigerated dormitories, extra-heated ones, some of a more…open construction such as this one.  It was all quite an undertaking, but we knew it would ultimately be worthwhile. We do hope you’ll agree.”

Cameron tore his eyes away from the miniature ocean and smiled broadly at the headmistress.  “Yes ma’am!”

Tracy was looking askance at Cameron, he noticed, but she addressed Ms Carmine rather than him.  “I assume there are more…well…standard dormitories where we’ll be staying?”

“Indeed,” the vampiress replied, gliding once more out the door behind them, leaving them to follow.  “Most of our students who do not require special accommodations live in the Arcana dormitory, straight ahead.  I’ll show you both to your rooms now, if there are no further questions?”

There weren’t, as it turned out, as both Tracy and Cameron were quite eager to see their rooms.  The first floor of the Arcana dormitory was occupied by many of the staff members, as well as a sizeable commissary serving food from various nations. “As it’s the building with the most ‘neutral’ ground, it made sense for the main dining hall to be located in Arcana,” Miss Carmine explained as they entered.  “Speaking of which, there is someone you need to meet before we go upstairs. Please wait here for just a moment.”

[evakuality]

Recently I saw an ask on another blog that had a bunch of blatant biphobia in the midst of a message against homophobia and fetishization of gay men. As a pan person I am just so tired of the subtle bi/pan phobia that seems to be everywhere. If there's one thing straight and gay people can come together on, it's bashing bi/pan people. I see it too often in Skam fics, especially around Even, and some of it is called out and some is not. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Oh anon, I’ve been sitting on this for a few days and I’m sorry.  It’s just so big and overwhelming a topic and as a bi person myself I find all this very hard to talk about objectively.  Having said that, I’ll give it a go.  First, please come back about fics and what you see in fics because I’ve been scanning my brain and I can’t remember anything specific.  I do know that back before I had to pull back from reading so much due to mental overload I did get a sense that there’s a sort of accepted way to show Even in fics and that sometimes that expected way can veer into ‘he’s going to cheat’ territory.  Is that what you mean?  Or something else?  I’m happy to talk more about it if I get a little more direction.

The thing is, as a whole I agree with you.  Bi/panphobia is so endemic that I see it everywhere and sometimes it can feel like maybe I’m just oversensitive and seeing it when it’s not really there.  But then I think about it and I notice some things that can be really blatant and then I remember that yeah actually, it’s a thing and it’s so accepted in some ways that people casually do it without even necessarily meaning to.  Take Skam itself, for instance.  In my meta series, I happen to be up to the last clip of episode 2 and since I’m watching them within context of the episodes I’ve come up against the song ‘That Girl’ while preparing that meta.  And I actually like the song, I like the music, I like the way it sounds and I’m sure it was very heartfelt for the singer as he explored his own complicated feelings about the situation he was apparently in.  It’s just … really really bi/panphobic.  

This idea that bi/pan people can’t be trusted to stay within a relationship with someone of the same gender because being with someone of the opposite gender is easier is so insulting.  It’s really hard not to take that personally, particularly as someone who didn’t even come to terms with the idea that I am bi until after I was married to someone of the opposite gender.  Then, of course, it’s not just the song itself, it’s that it’s so specifically and explicitly tied to Isak and Even, with the suggestion that Isak thinks this way (the song starts playing as he’s watching Even and Sonja together, after all).  I know that at the time they wanted to create some tension around Even to make everyone wonder if he really could or would be interested in Isak and stay with him even if he was.  It’s just.  It sucks that they used something so explicitly bi/panphobic to do that.  

And obviously, later in the show we also have the age old and really damaging idea that bi/pan people like Even will a) cheat on their partner and b) go back to their opposite-gender partner if things go a bit wrong with their new same-gender partner.  The messages in the song are backed up by the text itself later.  As much as I like to minimize what happens (Even does tell Sonja immediately after he spends that first day with Isak, after all), the fact is that he was still with Sonja when he was actively pursuing Isak and they were still together when they kissed.  Then he did go back to her when Isak hurt him with his ‘mentally ill people’ line.  Then later, we’re to take Sonja’s words at face value when she says Even never really loved Isak, that he was just a sick idea.  That all buys into this stereotype of bi/pan people as fickle and untrustworthy.  And again, I know they did all this to play on the audience about how real what Even felt was and to hide what was really going on.  I get that from a storytelling PoV it works to muddy the waters and misdirect the audience.  It’s just, again, they bought into bi/pan stereotypes to do it and it sucks.  

So, to be totally honest with you, I’m not surprised that this sort of attitude has seeped into the fandom.  It’s hard when we watch media and we are conditioned to perceive things as more ‘true’ when they come from the main PoV.  So, not to get too off track here, we get Noora’s relationship in S2 romanticized when it shouldn’t be because there were some really harmful messages in there about ‘healthy’ relationships, and we get Isak being shown as being a bit bi/panphobic when they tie that song directly to him and even in the kitchen later when he calls Even out on Sonja.  And, obviously for Isak he has reasons for the way he feels.  It makes sense that he confronts Even about Sonja and his tendency to go back to her because the show did it already.  The show set that up.  But what that does is give the show’s audience, and by extension the fandom, permission to also treat Even in a bi/panphobic way.  Because, unlike Isak’s ideas around pride and what it means to be gay, the show never actually addresses this issue.  But that’s because the show itself obviously isn’t aware it has this issue.  

And that’s the biggest problem I think.  This attitude is so entrenched in our society, and so generally accepted, that I’m not sure we’ll ever recover from it.  But it would be nice, yes, to go a short time without running up against it in my media and my fandoms.  I feel you, anon.  It’s hard to read that stuff about your representation.  It’s hard to see your representation shown the way Even sometimes is both by his show and by his fandom.  There are enough bi/pan writers and creators in this fandom that I think there’s still a reasonable amount of fic, art etc that deals with this well.  But when a lot of people are a little uncritical of the media we consume and take its messages at face value … well, it’s difficult when that media is unconsciously perpetuating the stereotypes that hurt us because it does then seem to come out in the fanworks people make.  

Having said that, I know I’m not immune.  My Isak can sometime be a little bi/panphobic because to keep him in character and refer back to the source, sometimes that stuff does slip in there.  I try to ‘teach’ him about it, but sometimes it’s hard to do and I’m not sure that what I try always works, and so I’m not saying any one of us is perfect.  So I guess it’s just being aware of the stereotypes that do exist for lgbt+ people and being aware of whether we’re unthinkingly endorsing them or not.  It’s thinking about whether we’re showing lgbt+ people having happy endings alone together behind closed doors because that’s what’s expected, that it’s still somehow something to be hidden.  It’s checking that we’re not perpetuating the idea of bi/pan people as flighty and incapable of settling down.  It’s about thinking, basically, rather than just accepting what our media gives us without question.

[mittensmorgul]

What do you think of Cas talking about how he never really understood emotions or regrets til he was human in 9x11? I think he feels emotions as an angel, so I always kind of interpreted it as he never realized how hard it actually was til he was in a human's shoes and without powers. Tho I just saw someone talking about how ooc that scene was. What do you think?

Hi hi. This sorta makes me nervous to reply to, because I have no idea what post you’re referring to, or how that person was talking about Cas in 9.11 as being ooc, specifically, so I feel like I’m walking into a potential minefield right from the jump. Thanks for that!

So with the disclaimer that I have zero idea what post you’re referring to, compounded by your statement that you think Cas feels emotions as an angel so anything I respond with is automatically confrontational just on that level, but I do believe Cas there in that scene in 9.11.

And I’ve written about it numerous times in the past, so this is just my off-the-cuff attempt to rehash multiple thousands of words of meta into a short(ish) reply, and not in fact any sort of groundbreaking new line of thinking here. For that, I have a tag for that episode, several different “cas vs humanity” tags with many more posts on this topic, which I have spent a considerable amount of time and effort into writing… at least more time and effort than it takes to reflexively dismiss Things I Don’t Wike as “OOC” without actually committing any additional mental energy into explaining WHY.

I think Castiel’s entire character arc beginning in 4.01 is this journey of understanding about himself, and about humanity. I’m actually in the process of writing a HUUUUUGE long treatise on this exact thing, which at this rate is probably gonna take a month to compile… it’s just too much… :P

Beginning in 4.07 we learn that Cas has doubts, and that this is NOT NORMAL for an angel to experience. Cas told us himself in 4.02 that angels are soldiers, warriors of God, and not (in Dean’s words) Michael Landon. Angels serve God and Heaven’s orders. Period. They don’t question those orders. And yet, after just a few episodes Cas is already veering from that “programming.”

Because yes, we learn later (and pieces of this information don’t fully come to our attention until S8 when we meet Naomi and can understand what being sent back to Heaven for “Bible Boot Camp” actually means for an angel… torture, literally poking around inside their basic wiring and “fixing” them so they don’t question their orders anymore…), angels are reprogrammable, rebootable. If they “break,” just switch them off and back on again. If that doesn’t fix them, you can tinker with their software until they’re in perfect working order again.

How can a being that’s so completely malleable like that (and its implied that Cas has been “fixed” this way before) truly understand human free will and emotions?

By 4.22, Cas had just had a fresh round of reprogramming in Heaven and had walked away from Dean at the end of 4.20 with the reminder that he serves Heaven, not man, and certainly not Dean. He questions what is even so worth saving about humanity, since all he could see was pain, guilt, anger… He couldn’t understand why humans would choose to endure suffering when they could be at peace. Dean lays it all out for him: BECAUSE IT’S REAL, and not some charade. Cas begins to understand. He makes his first major gesture of rebellion against his orders, and is cast out of Heaven because of it.

He struggles with the consequences of his choices all through s5, coming very close to becoming human himself by the end, but he is restored to his old angelic self in 5.22 and tries to teach what he’d learned about humanity to the rest of the angels, teaching them that they don’t have to follow Heaven’s orders, that they can observe and experience the glory of humanity for themselves if they want. But in s6 he takes that to an extreme that’s entirely untenable…

Just because you can do what you want doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want. Or so Dean told him in 6.20. But Cas still doesn’t get it. He’s just replaced the notion of “God’s will” with his own will, and willfully trampled over everyone else’s free will in the process… That’s just not how any of this works, and it took dying in 7.01 for him to understand his hubris, and to repent for his actions.

Throughout s8, he dealt with all of this in a horrifyingly disillusioning fashion, this tenuous balance between what he believed were entirely his own choices that were influenced (without his conscious awareness) by Naomi’s orders to him all season long. He believed he was acting fully of his own volition, but had been manipulated by Naomi from the start. He was actively prevented from making amends for his s6 actions, and that had to cause a lot of internal conflict for him.

He knew he wanted to redeem himself to Dean, to make amends with Heaven, to do whatever he could to atone for his actions… and for reasons he couldn’t understand, he was prevented from doing so, yanked around by the narrative against his will again.

It took him falling and becoming fully human to be free of that angelic programming that has the capacity to override these sorts of “human things” like a complete understanding of human emotions. All through early s9 he begins to understand humanity in a way he never could as an “observer.” BEING human is not at all the same as STUDYING humans, you know?

And that scene in 9.11 is just two episodes after he steals another angel’s grace in a situation where he felt that was his ONLY option. He had no other choice, he did what he had to do. He referred to what he’d done as “barbaric.” I mean, he is not happy with what he was forced to do there. And two episodes later he’s lamenting the loss of his ability to connect with human things now that he’d been “graced up” again.

How is that out of character?

HE LIKED BEING HUMAN. HE REGRETTED WHAT HE’D DONE IN 9.09. HE FELT LIKE HE’D BEEN FORCED TO SACRIFICE THAT EXPERIENCE OF HUMANITY BECAUSE OF HIS DUTY.

I don’t doubt that angels have feelings. It’s clear that they have ~some~ kind of feelings. But what they feel is in no way akin to human feelings. And that’s how I understood his lament in 9.11, that he regretted the loss of his ability to feel these things as a human does, instead of how an angel does.

Even in s10, when we meet other angels who refuse to return to Heaven and want to be left alone to experience the wonders of life on Earth, we have some compare/contrast examples between how Cas experienced humanity in his very own body AS A HUMAN, as opposed to how other angels who are inhabiting vessels that are still occupied by human souls. Hannah was our MAIN pov on just how unusual Cas really is in this respect. And I think this is significant, from 10.07:

HANNAH: I’m sorry, Castiel. I’m not going with you. I’m done. It’s hard letting go… of a story, a mission. But what of the humans whose lives we sacrifice in the name of that mission?CASTIEL: What of them?HANNAH: We always said the humans were our original mission. Maybe it’s time, Castiel – time to put them first.CASTIEL: Where is all this coming from?HANNAH: Being on earth, working with you, I’ve felt things. Human things – passions, hungers. To shower, feel water on my skin… to get closer to you. But all of that was nothing compared to what I felt when I saw him.Her husband – his anger and his grief. And Caroline was inside of me, screaming out for him, for her life back. These f-feelings, they aren’t for me, for us. They belong to her. I know it’s time to step aside.[Hannah smiles, leans forward and kisses Castiel on the cheek. Castiel nods.]Goodbye, Castiel.

This is how an angel occupying a vessel understands these “human feelings.” As alien, foreign, not fer her. But Cas? He’s different. He’s not in a vessel, but in his own body. All those feelings are his. Regardless of how he’s able to experience them, we know from this scene that Cas is different now. His experiences have changed him.

Gah, I’m just rambling now. I should probably take all this mental energy and put it into that long meta I’m trying to write instead. :P

[a-faekindagirl]

I am just curious to what you think. Regardless of all the rumors and spec, do you think there is any hope for JMO staying in one way or another next season? Of course it is her choice and whatever she does, I will respect, but I am curious where you stand in all of this. Especially if Colin comes back.

So I’m going to preface this by saying that after this ask, I do not want any more questions about this. The potential fate of the show/cast is not something I want to focus on leading into the Captain Swan wedding or season finale. I want to focus on the show and all the goodness coming our way ❤️

Anyway - 

I think there’s a very good chance of JMo returning. The show has, at most, one season left, reboot or no reboot (no offense to Adam and Eddy - but with a big cast departure from an already struggling show, it’s just not going to fly), and I don’t think Jen would abandon it with only a year to go. Whether this would be in a regular or reduced capacity, I don’t know. We have no idea what this “reset” is going to look like for the returning mains - they may not even be the focus. But Jen sounded perfectly willing and even happy to return in that podcast she did a few months ago. She loves Emma,and she loves OUAT - but like she said, she’s not going to stay “forever.” That brings me to my next point.

I think JMo would stick around, UNLESS a) Adam and Eddy wanted to branch off in a story direction she REALLY disagreed with, or b) ABC wanted to lock her in for more than 1 or 2 seasons. 

In either of those events, I think she’d opt to depart. Jennifer is very protective of Emma, like she said, and I think protecting Emma’s journey/happy ending would be more important to her than staying 1 more year. The same goes for being contracted for multiple seasons - Jen said she can’t see herself staying on the show forever. If ABC wants her to sign on for 1-3 more seasons or nothing, I think she might walk (to be clear; I don’t think ABC would ask this of her, because I’m sure they know the show won’t last that long). 

As for the horrible scenario of a show without Emma AND a show with Killian and no Emma, I have to veer slightly off topic and say I think the “reset” would have to be some kind of AU or prequel. You cannot take every core member of the Charming family away (Hook and Regina are family, but only be extension), plus Zelena and Belle, and have the show hold together with only Hook, Rumple, and Regina (taking who was in talks to come back into account). It wouldn’t, it would fall apart, because thats dozens of dynamics gone, and there’s like 0 ways they could account for that in the story, realistically or satisfyingly. 

Anyway, Colin; people are going to side eye me for this, but I think if Jen left, Colin would opt not to return. I think maintaining the integrity of Hooks story and Emma’s story and the Emma/Hook love story is very important to Jen and Colin. Plus we have no idea what sort of personal dynamics might play into his desire to leave or stay - I don’t gather he’s particularly close with Lana or even Bobby in the hang-out-outside-of-work way like he is with Sean, MRJ, and JMo (and maybe Gosh - haven’t there been spottings of them hanging out), so that could influence any decision he makes. You have to like working with the people you work with in a job like acting (I think he and Bobby get along great - Lana, well, I’ve seen and heard some things that lead me to believe they’re not so close), and Colin seems like a guy that takes awhile to get comfortable with someone, and prefers being comfortable with those he works with.

That’s not me being a Colifer shipper (ew), or being emotional instead of practical/biased instead of objective, or thinking Colin doesn’t value his job over “smaller” things like a television story (lbr he’ll have no problem finding a job after Once) - I’m just going with my gut based off of what I know about the man. I think his decision could be influenced by his relationships with those he works with, as well as not wanting to risk negatively impacting the story his character was part of for 5 years. There’s also always a chance he’s just ready to move on in general.

I think just about the only way Colin would want to stay on the show if JMo and the others depart is if they offered him a big, fat pay raise, or if, like I said, the story wasn’t a continuation of what’s happened so far. I don’t think he wants this “reboot” to screw with Killian’s journey or Captain Swan’s happy ending any more than we do. 

Frankly, if JMo leaves, I think the only way Colin would stay on for a reboot that could potentially screw up Killian or Captain Swan’s progress is if his contract isn’t up like the others (since he signed on later), and he can’t get out of it. 

JMo, Bobby and Lana’s contracts were up, so if they’re on for a 7th season, they would have had to resign. Colin’s contract may be different since he came on later (Emilie too - she wasn’t a regular until s2, but she apparently wasn’t invited back anyway) - so if his isn’t up for renweal, Colin could damage his good standing in the industry by insisting on rescinding it if ABC really wants him to stay. So as much as he might not want to fuck up the story they built, he has to put his livelihood first. There’s also legal issues in that scenario. 

But yeah, there are a bunch of reasons I think JMo and Colin are kind of a package deal, their desire to maintain the integrity of the last 5 years of narrative (which is an assumption on my part, but one I’m confident in) being the foremost. 

Wow, that got really winded. I think I had a lot of pent up frustration from watching the fandom be so on edge over this, plus my own uncertainty. Anyway, friend, I advise that you put it out of your mind. We’ll know when we know, and we’ve got SO MUCH AMAZINGNESS ON THE SHOW TO FOCUS ON RIGHT NOW.

(plus, the looming writers strike may render this all pointless anyway - an aging show like OUAT with steadily declining ratings that’s banking on the audience to tune in for a made-over new season with a halved cast of beloved characters? easy pickings for the chopping block - that is if it’s even getting a 7th season, it may not have been renewed)