#i know so many spoilers for this campaign it's ridiculous so it's really taking the wind out of my sails
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this is so embarrassing. crying over the death of a chocolate bunny. i will miss the deeply untapped potential for his character arc and for zac oyama to get to excel at doing something way more interesting than what anyone else is doing. mister lapin i saw your political intrigue!!!!!!!!!!
#lapin cadbury#i'm more mad than anything#like i get that no one is safe and that's the whole point#but man why'd they have to kill the one character who was actually complicated and was doing something really unique#AND SO EARLY...............#like killing anyone else would arguably have had a bigger impact on everyone AND would not have bothered me as much#save me amethar amethar you're my only hope classic lou wilson nuanced roleplay please save me amethar save me please.........#i know so many spoilers for this campaign it's ridiculous so it's really taking the wind out of my sails#to lose the one character i was actually really invested in and didn't know a lot about#just to replace him with a character whose most redeeming quality is apparently his combat skills......#i watch combat episodes on 1.25 speed they simply do not compel me that much..........#PLEASE zac and lou are my favorite IHs and zac was doing something SO FUN AND NEW and it's just over by episode 6?????#fucked up...... sick and twisted............#d20
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Oh I was wondering why my remix was getting notes againâ100% a worthy cause!
To give a serious reason why Steph deserves this win though:
As Iâve seen others mention, Stephâs time as Robin was ridiculously short, this is because the role of Robin was more or less given to her as a consolation prize/a way to build up hype by writers/editors at DC because they had already decided to kill her off in a big event:
"You know, me and Stephanie, we go way back. The story with Stephanie Brown goes, they came to me as Executive Editor with the "War Games" story, and said we're going to kill Stephanie Brown. I knew Stephanie Brown for who she was, and said, 'I don't know, if this is going to be the big ending to your story it doesn't feel big enough at the time, because the character wasn't strong enough yet.' So I said, 'Why don't we make her Robin for a short period of time, build some interest in her, and then we kill her!'" -Dan DiDio (x)
And despite during the actual scene of her death having Batman tell her she really was Robin:
(Batman #633)
In the aftermath, Dan Didioâthe same man from the quote above, who served as vice presidentâexecutive editor at DC during the events of Stephâs death and would later become co-publisher of the companyâclaimed her time as Robin didnât really count:
In one of many questions about controversial or fan favorite characters, two female audience members questioned Didio about Spoiler and short-lived Robin Stephanie Brown not getting a tribute in the Batcave. âShe was never really a Robin,â responded Didio on the companyâs official opinion of the characterâs status in the eyes of Batman. (x)
Luckily Steph came back to life (comics are just like that sometimesâit gets established her death was faked to begin with despite it being intended as real when originally written) and then she went on to be Batgirl for a little whileâUntil DCâs continuity reboot in 2011 wiped her from existence altogether for a few years (which was met with fan outcry and a campaign of sending Waffle Mix to DC editorial while asking for her back). And even when she was eventually reintroduced, her old history (as both Robin and Batgirl) had been wiped clean.
It would take another several years for her history from the old timeline to be acknowledged, but eventually we got there:
(Detective Comics #980)
And nowadays her time as Robin is referenced and acknowledged pretty regularlyâshe gets to be in the Robin groupings and had a story in the 80th Anniversary Special (coincidentally, guess who stopped working at the company around the same time she started getting these more frequent acknowledgements đ¤)
(Covers for Robins #1 and Robin Vol. 3 #5, Variant Cover for Robin 80th Anniversary 100-Page Super Spectacular)
It has been a long and torturous journey for our dear Stephanie Brown⌠her resilience and the way she manages to keep coming back and proving herself no matter how much sheâs knocked down both in-universe and by writers in real life, thatâs why I want her to win. Her time as Robin was short but had a big impact on a lot of people, and she was denied the acknowledgment she deserved for far too long of a time.
She really was Robin.
Everyone needs to VOTE FOR STEPHANIE because without her we wouldn't have the 'Batman is mad at me again' remix
Okay, yeah at this point you guys have convinced me.
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Speaking of Halas, it was briefly brought up in the most recent episode that he might've been digging around in the ruins of Aeor some time before he got stuck in the gem, and to me it seems pretty likely: the first thing they found of his other than the Happy Fun Ball itself was some winter weather gear stashed separately (I think) from the rest of the pocket-dimension-thing, which may not have been an intentional hint to Aeor but is interesting nonetheless; what do you think?
In episode 125 he said he hadnât gone; granted heâs not exactly a trustworthy guy but I donât see a good reason to lie about this and he did provide what information he knew. I do think thereâs a chance he had considered it and may have been preparing, but I donât think he necessarily went himself. Itâs not totally clear how long after Aeorâs fall Halas lived, since he was living in the midst of the calamity, the timeline of which is vague.
I have two separate alternate possible answers:
1. The boring and practical one: he lived on a flying city that at least spent some time floating over what is modern-day Zemni Fields, ie, high altitude and in a cooler region of the world.
2. I think thereâs sometimes a hesitancy to incorporate fourth-wall/meta information in theories, but in actual play I think the best theories often at least take it under consideration (and the worst often deliberately do not). We know that Matt did not initially intend the Folding Halls of Halas to stay with the party, but Twiggy gave it to them. We know Matt incorporated the permaheart into the build when the party was frustrated during the Angel of Irons arc and had indicated they were going to see Yussa, and additionally included the notes that became Widogastâs Transmogrification, but had Twiggy kept the ball, those would not be closed-off avenues - they would just be in different places. The fundamental secret of DM-ing is that the DM is frantically shifting the set pieces around from time to time based on what the players want or need while making it seem like consistent, real scenery, and Matt is very good at doing this in game but heâs pretty honest out-of-game that he does it.
So the cold-weather gear in episode 45 very well might have been meant, at the time, as a hint for when the Aeor shoe dropped that Halas could be a resource,. But in episode 45, Iâm sure that while Matt had outlined the character of Essek Thelyss he couldnât have predicted the Mighty Nein could reliably count on him, or the Dynasty at all, when they finally got to Aeor. He didnât know how exactly the Aeor arc would happen nor precisely when. So any theories I have need to incorporate the simple fact that sometimes, Chekhovâs Gun shows up in episode 45 and actually doesnât really mean anything, because the first act was assuming a very different second act and the use of the Chekhovâs Gun metaphor when discussing actual play is a very tricky thing. Which is to all say: the cold weather clothes were just a *Tim Curry voice* Red. Herring.
I already got pretty off topic above (something something Clue The Movie jokes something something âtoo lateâ) but I wanted to add one more thing which is that Halas interests me less as any sort of plot hook or resource, even though he could indeed become one if someone gets possessed, or if Yussa is rescued and decides to go 0 for 3 on resisting wizardly temptation, and more so as worldbuilding. I can only explain this by bringing up the Neal Stephenson book The Diamond Age, a post-cyberpunk classic I love very very much. It famously opens with a chapter describing an almost ridiculously stereotypical tough guy loner fringes of society archetypal character of the cyberpunk genre, follows him as one of a few early viewpoint characters, and then (minor spoilers, but not really) he gets killed within the first 50 pages. The point of that exercise is to indicate that this is post-cyberpunk instead and the story isnât about him.
To me, Halas is in a way, playing a similar role. Heâs a powerful mage involved in politics, some form of immoral or amoral, doing all kinds of necromancy and pursuing immortality...and heâs literally crystalized and stagnant. I mean, itâs not terribly subtle - the previous campaign ended with the defeat of Vecna, god of being a wizard who does immortality shenanigans.
I donât, to be fair, know if this is deliberate, but weâre currently in a story where elements of the Age of Arcanum may come back depending on what goes down in Aeor (Devexian being merely one of many potential hooks/causes) and the impact it might have on the arcane is fascinating, and Halas helps set that stage.
#the only thing that will make me want C3 to not be in Issylra is if it's EVEN MORE FOCUSED ON WIZARD STUFF#critical role#long post#meta#known gem wizard hotsauce lutefisk#Anonymous
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So, Iâm watching Persona 5 Royal for the second time... (ie: there WILL be spoilers present!!)
Around Shidoâs palace, the Phantom Thieves talk about how the people want to put their trust in Shido. How everyone ONLY wants to talk about Shido. Along with this, they say how the people would like to not have to deal with responsibility and just leave all their worries to, you guessed it, Shido. He seemed like the perfect candidate.
I got to thinking though. All of this sounds extremely familiar. To whom you may be asking?
Maruki.
Although, it isnât the peopleâs choice if theyâre blindly putting their trust into some politician. No. This choice is left up to the Phantom Thieves, or more specifically, Joker.
As the player, you have to decide to put your trust in Maruki and choose his reality (the bad end), or stick to your ideals and choose the true reality (good end).
It just makes me think, upon choosing Marukiâs reality, it truly is no different than the people choosing Shido. Akechi had a right to be upset at Akiren.
Akiren and the Phantom Thieves the entire wait for Shidoâs change of heart kept saying how ridiculous it was that the public felt the way they did, but upon being in the publicâs very same shoes, upon having to make a similar choice, some of the Phantom Thieves were swayed (even if for a short period of time ... it still took joker waking them up).
Choosing Marukiâs reality goes against everything they stood for. It is letting someone else take their worries, their fears, their sadness.
Shido had a similar message in his campaign, which is why so many people were willing to put their trust in him.
Who is to say Maruki wasnât going to stray down the similar path?
Donât get me wrong, I do really like Marukiâs character and I want to believe he had good intentions.
But what if he didnât?
What if he just had a better put together mask.
Or not even that! What if, because Akiren and the other thieves had gotten so close to Maruki, they didnât see through it? They could have been looking at him with tinted shades. Maruki, while goofy and clumsy, is extremely intelligent.
Even so, we know the reasons for why he wants this alternate reality. With his past, and now he wants others to be happy. Itâs earnest and genuinely kind of him.
Although, is he that blind to how meaningless happiness is without sadness? You canât genuinely feel happiness without knowing what sadness felt like.
As I said, Maruki is intelligent and Iâd like to think he knows that.
So why?
Is Maruki similar to Shido?
Or did he always have good intentions?
I find his palace extremely fascinating. There is so much there to just ... analyze. Along with the other endings?? His character truly can be as big a mystery as youâd like to make it.
#persona 5 royal#persona 5#persona 5 royal spoilers#p5r maruki#persona 5 maruki#p5 joker#akira kusuru#ren amamiya#makoto niijima#p5 third semester#p5r#p5r spoilers
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List of Differences Between MDZS and CQL/Untamed
I havenât seen a comprehensive list of differences between the Modao Zushi novel and Chengqingling/The Untamed. Someone in one of my Discordâs asked earlier today, and in reply, myself, Joythea, @floofz, HeadphonesGal, and mustache apologist compiled this list, based on what we remembered. Iâve reproduced that list here with permission of the people involved in the conversation. Iâve tried to include what happens in both the novel AND CQL for each item, but in general, the list was more written as, âhere are things that happened in CQL that didnât happen or happened differently in the novel,â with an eye toward explaining it to someone familiar with the novel but not with the live action adaptation.Â
Note that this contains...like...all the spoilers. Also, I am not an expert on either the novel or the live action, though Iâm better acquainted with the second. As a group we did our best to make sure this was accurate, but Iâve transcribed and expanded it for posting and I canât promise I havenât made mistakes. PLEASE CORRECT ME IF IâM WRONG and I will amend it (thatâs why I used a read more - so I can make changes without it getting all messed up by reblogs of different versions)!
General Concept/Overarching Differences:
Death, Fierce Corpses, and Puppets: Censorship means that none of the things they hunt in the Untamed are actually dead. Once, theyâre even able to explicitly âfreeâ a group of controlled puppets and they revert to being regular people. At times this means certain events are...extremely poorly...explained, such as what happens to Wen Ning, where itâs never explicitly said that heâs dead - itâs instead implied that Wen Ning was on the verge of death and that Wei Wuxian controlled him and was able to save him. However, though itâs never explicit that there are essentially zombies in CQL, it would be difficult to explain events by any other interpretation. Much like with homosexuality, they flirt as close to what the censors will allows as they can and allow a viewer to infer from there.
The Yin Iron: In the novel, there is no Yin Iron. Wen Ruohanâs motivation for his actions is simply more power and is entirely âhuman.â The Wen donât do demonic cultivation. Xue Yang doesnât have a piece of the Yin Iron, and his ancestor didnât create it (obviously, since it doesnât exist). In the novel, the âFounder of Demonic Cultivationâ is clearly meant to be Wei Wuxian, whereas if the concept of âModao Zushiâ ever came up in the Untamed it would be ambiguous at best who was being referred to, since both Xue Yangâs ancestor and Wen Ruohan could theoretically deserve the title. Since there is no Yin Iron, many of the things ascribed to the Yin Iron obviously donât happen, nor does it drive the plot in the âpast,â nor does it play a part in the death of Xuanwu, nor is it what Wei Wuxian uses to craft the Stygian Tiger Amulet.
While this isnât explicit, it seems (at least to me) like everyone is a few years older in CQL than they are in the novel. For example, in the novel, the Lectures start when the young cultivators are all 15 - 16 years old. That...doesnât really fit with how they look in CQL? I personally think theyâre more like 17 - 18 in CQL, and then events proceed from there. However, their ages arenât stated in CQL canon so this is open to interpretation.
Technically, WangXian is subtext in the Untamed, by the slimmest of obfuscations. Seriously, itâs so borderline to being canon that calling it subtext is slightly ridiculous but since itâs never ACTUALLY explicit...I guess that makes it subtext. Also, ya know, thereâs porn in the novel.
Characters and Characterizations:
Mo Xuanyu: Mo Xuanyu isnât gay in the Untamed, unlike in the novel. In the novel, itâs said that Mo Xuanyu falls out of favor with the Jin clan because heâs made inappropriate sexual advances on Jin Guangyao. In the Untamed, the implication is that he made similar advances on Qin Su. In both, itâs also implied these werenât the real reasons but itâs also never explained what actually did happen. Also, in the novel, he favors wearing thickly caked makeup to obscure his appearance (and subsequently Wei Wuxian does the same) whereas in CQL while makeup is mentioned heâs basically only ever shown or discussed as wearing a mask.
Wei Wuxian/Mo Xuanyu: In the novel, Mo Xuanyu sacrifices himself and Wei Wuxian takes over his body. However, in the Untamed, Wei Wuxian is more...reborn?...whole, in his own appearance (the logistics of this, or if he was ever dead, or where he was if he WAS dead, are never explained). He wears a mask because if he didnât, everyone would (and ultimately does) recognize him.Â
Wei Wuxian: In the novel, doing demonic cultivation clearly twists Wei Wuxian and some of his actions are either accidental but still his fault, or intentional. For example, the torture of Wen Chao is intentional and brutal, and the loss of control of Wen Ning at Qiongqi Path is accidental but still his fault - a result of his hubris and poor decisions. In CQL, a second flute is played at Qiongqi pass and also when Wei Wuxian fights the cultivation clans outside the Nightless City - both of the major times when Wei Wuxian ostensibly loses control. Though Wei Wuxian himself thinks itâs his fault, itâs actually not - the person responsible is Su She - and Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji eventually learn this. However, CQL does still show Wei Wuxian being changed by the resentment. His temper is more volatile and his trust more limited; for example, he loses his temper with A-Yuan at one point, which doesnât happen in the novel.
Lan Wangji: differences in Lan Wangjiâs characterization are a little harder to quantify but in general in CQL he seems more open/expressive/comfortable in his own skin, and less prone to anger. For example, when he steals Wei Wuxianâs first kiss on Phoenix Mountain in the novel, he loses his temper and destroys an entire grove of trees. This...would not be in character for Lan Wangji in CQL (and of course they donât kiss in CQL). However, putting it in definitive terms is complicated. For another difference, in the novel, Lan Wangji confronts the cultivation clans to protect Wei Wuxian, and thus is given 33 strikes with the discipline whip. In CQL, his actions are more ambivalent in Wei Wuxianâs defense...certainly, he doesnât stand against everyone else in a pitch to save Wei Wuxianâs life...but heâs still explicit enough for Lan Qiren, who has him beaten 300 times with a stave. (the end result is still âcovered in scars,â just different punishments.)
Jiang Yanli: Jiang Yanliâs role is expanded from the novel. She accompanies her brothers to the Lan clan Lectures, and she carries a sword, implying sheâs a cultivator, though she never uses it. The back-and-forth related to her engagement to Jin Zixuan is also expanded. Furthermore, sheâs with her brothers when they flee Lotus Pier, and at Wen Qingâs outpost when they are in hiding, for at least part of the time. (but not enough of it to be involved in the Golden Core transfer). The overall result is that she feels much less âfridgedâ in CQL than she did in the novel (or at least, thatâs how it felt to me - obviously, some of these bullet points are subjective to varying extents).
Luo âMianmianâ Qingyang: In the novel, sheâs a member of an independent cultivation sect and sheâs first introduced during the Wen Clan indoctrination. In the Untamed, sheâs a Jin clan disciple and she attends the Lan clan Lectures, and is shown to have a good relationship (friendship, not romantic) with Jin Zixuan. She later renounces her membership in the Jin clan when the clans turn against Wei Wuxian after the end of the Sunshot Campaign.Â
Wen Ruohan: In the novel, heâs just a badass mo-fo power hungry pain in the ass. In CQL he is a demonic cultivating megalomaniac who uses the Yin Iron to be, like, Comic Book Evil.
Wen Qing and Wen Ning: Unlike in the novel, where Wen Ning is introduced outside of Lotus Pier, and Wen Qing is introduced after Wen Ning needs a place to hide Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian, in the Untamed, Wen Qing and Wen Ning attend the Lan clan Lectures. Wen Qing is there under instructions from Wen Ruohan to seek the Yin Iron; he blackmails her by threatening Wen Ning. Furthermore, Wen Ning is unusually susceptible to spiritual influence as a result of an encounter with the Dafan Mountain Goddess/Fairy statue when heâs a child. The statue kills their parents and starts to drain him, but Wen Qing saves him. Sheâs not able to heal the damage to him, though, and itâs implied this is part of why itâs possible for Wei Wuxian to raise him using demonic cultivation. Wen Qing in particular has a much greater role in CQL, and she has a romantic subplot with Jiang Cheng. She bears a sword, and sheâs also shown to do spellwork and influence people using acupuncture needles.
Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen: In the novel, we first meet them at Yi City, when their story is already tragic. In CQL, they are introduced right after the Lan Lectures, and are therefore older.
Xue Yang: As with Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen, he is introduced earlier in CQL than in the novel. In CQL, he also possesses a piece of the Yin Iron that he manages to keep hidden and a secret despite multiple attempts by different parties to obtain it (itâs hinted at times that heâs in cahoots with Wei Wuxian, but this is just a character smear). His ancestor created the Yin Iron, and heâs known to be an expert on demonic cultivation.
Meng Yao/Jin Guangyao: Meng Yao is introduced much earlier in CQL than he is in the novel, as we see him when the Nie cultivators are welcomed to the Lan lectures (and weâre shown upfront and immediately that Lan Xichen treats him more respectfully than most others do). In the novel, we donât find out much about the evil things heâs done until Wei Wuxian does Empathy on Nie Mingjueâs head; in CQL, more of that is shown âon screenâ as it occurs. For example, heâs shown conspiring with Xue Yang in the Unclean Realm, and right after that is when Nie Mingjue catches him slaughtering another officer (which none of the other characters know about). He also saves Nie Mingjueâs life during that scene, painting him as morally ambiguous and complicated from a very early point. We also âseeâ as it happens the incident in right after the fall of Nightless City, where Nie Mingjue goes to kill Meng Yao and is prevented by Lan Xichen, and there are more explicit indications that heâs manipulating Jin Guangshan and is involved in the plot to turn everyone against Wei Wuxian.
Ouyang Zizhen: Ouyang Zizhen appears only briefly in the novel, during the Yi City arc. In CQL he has a much expanded role and is a pretty much perpetual fourth to Jin Ling, Lan Sizhui, and Lan Jingyi (especially post Yi City). Heâs present most of the times they meet, and involved in Jin Lingâs confrontation with Wen Ning, and is present at the Second Siege of the Burial Mounds, where he intervenes with his father on behalf of Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji. And heâs one of the best beans.
Sequence of Events:
In the novel, when Wei Wuxian awakes at Mo Manor, the Lan clan disciples come and they find an evil left arm that kills and possesses people. In CQL, they find a sword that does the same. This leads to changes throughout the plot in what, exactly, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian are searching for. In the novel, they pursue the pieces of Nie Mingjueâs body to various sites. In CQL, they instead are led to the same sequence of places by a sword spirit which turns out to be Baxia.
When Mo Xuanyu raises Wei Wuxian in the novel, Wei Wuxian has three curse scars representing three people that need to die: Madam Mo, Mo Ziyuan, and...one of the servants I think? In CQL, Wei Wuxian has a fourth cut that represents a fourth person he must kill: Jin Guangyao.
Because the risen dead donât exist in the Untamed, the Dafan Mountain Goddess/Fairy statue incident plays out a little different. For example, Wei Wuxian doesnât figure out whatâs happened by observing graves, he figures it out by seeing âspirit grass.â However, the outcomes are essentially the same from a plot point of view.
In CQL, the extended flashback to the lectures starts right after Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian meet (right after Wen Ning is summoned and then flees). I donât remember exactly how the timeline/intermingling of narratives from different points in times is structured in the novel but I know itâs different. They spend far longer in the âpresentâ before going to the past, and jump back and forth a bit more too.
In CQL, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji have an early bonding period during the lectures (the lectures over all get more attention/time than in the novel) when they are drawn into a cave in the backhills that they enter through the cold spring. Within, thereâs a guqin and a bunch of rabbits and the...spiritual embodiment?...of Lan Yi, who is introduced as the first female leader of the Lan Clan, a close friend of Baoshen Sanren, and the creator of the Chord Assassination Technique. Lan Yi acquaints them with the existence of the Yin Iron. Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji also engage in a symbolic hand-fasting during this scene. In the show, this is where the bunnies come from; Wei Wuxian doesnât capture them and bring them as âpresentsâ like he does in the novel.
In CQL, between the Lectures and the Sunshot Campaign, Lan Wangji, Wei Wuxian, Jiang Cheng, and Nie Huaisang do some night hunting together. Among other things, during this time they meet Xue Yang, Xiao Xingchen, and Song Lan, when Xue Yang slaughters the Chang clan. This obviously has major implications for the role and age of these characters in CQL versus in the novel, when none of the three are met until Yi City. This time spent night-hunting is also when the flower spirit mini-side plot takes place, but it doesnât get much screen time and isnât as prominent as in the novel, nor is the entire âWei Wuxian woos her where no one else didâ thing a feature of the show. Also, they encounter the Dafan Mountain Goddess at this time.
The Wen Clan attacks Cloud Recesses in the novel because of perceived improprieties, and Lan Wangji is injured while trying to protect the library. Lan Xichen disappears, and Clan Leader Lan is killed. In CQL, Clan Leader Lan is already dead at this point and Lan Xichen is in charge of the clan (while itâs never explicit, itâs implied that the age gap between Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji, and between Nie Mingjue and Nie Huaisang, is greater in the show than it is in the novel). When Wen Xu attacks, they hide in the cave where Lan Yi appeared to Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, but the disciples who arenât members of the Lan specifically canât enter, so Wen Xu begins to massacre them. To prevent that, Lan Wangji emerges, and thatâs when his leg is broken. (Su She is also prominent in this scene in CQL, but heâs not in the novel.)
During the Indoctrinations, in CQL itâs shown that Wei Wuxian is afraid of dogs after Wen Chao locks him in a dungeon room with one. This also serves as bonding time with Wen Ning, who helps Wei Wuxian with medicine that Wen Qing has provided. This scene doesnât take place in the novel; in the novel Wei Wuxianâs fear of dogs is almost entirely shown through his interactions with Fairy.
Also during the Indoctrinations in CQL, thereâs a lot of friction between Wen Chao and Wen Qing because Wen Qing keeps trying to help the prisoners in small ways. In the novel, Wen Qing hasnât been introduced at this point in the story.
Wei Wuxianâs Death: In the novel, Wei Wuxian retreats to the Burial Mounds, the clans unite against him, storm the Burial Mounds, and kill him - Jiang Cheng gets credit for the kill, but in actuality, Wei Wuxian's own resentment-controlled undead tear him apart when his magic backfires. (see this comment for more info) In the Untamed, after a battle outside the Nightless City, Wei Wuxian realizes how wrong everything has gone, destroys the Stygian Tiger amulet, and throws himself from the mountain. Despite a âteaseâ that Jiang Cheng stabbed him, itâs later shown that no, Wei Wuxianâs death was suicide despite Lan Wangji trying to save him and Jiang Cheng deciding not to stab him.
Wen Chaoâs Death: While itâs implied in CQL that Wei Wuxian has been tormenting Wen Chao, itâs nowhere near as explicit as in the novel. Itâs loosely suggested in CQL that perhaps Wen Chaoâs condition when Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji find him is the result of fear and self-neglect - basically that Wei Wuxianâs torment is causing Wen Chao to hallucinate frightening things. Instead of, you know, Wei Wuxianâs torment causing him to eat himself.
In the novel, Wei Wuxian is dead for 13 years. In CQL, heâs dead for 16 years.
Wei Wuxianâs resurrection: In the novel, because Wei Wuxian doesnât look like himself, he doesnât realize that Lan Wangji has recognized him because he played WangXian, so he engages in multiple behaviors to try to disgust and drive Lan Wangji away (all of which fail, of course, because Lan Wangji knows the truth). In CQL, because Wei Wuxian looks like himself, when he wakes up without his mask in Cloud Recesses he immediately knows that Lan Wangji has recognized him and thereâs no further mystery in that regard (except for how Lan Wangji recognized him while he WAS masked, which is the same in both - because of the song). (Lan Xichen also subsequently recognizes him while heâs masked, at an earlier point than he does in the novel unless Iâve badly misremembered. Which is always possible).
The Yi City arc is quite different between the two. Honestly, I skip the most painful parts of the Yi City arc, including the entire flashback sequences, because I knew theyâd fuck me up right good without being worth it, so Iâm not able to go into depth here, but. Some examples include:
Because in CQL, Xiao Xingchen, Song Lan, and Xue Yang were introduced during the âpastâ timeline, theyâre considerably older than in the novel.
Due to censorship, A-Qing is not a spirit as she is in the novel. Instead, sheâs still alive but sheâs had her tongue torn out and been blinded by Xue Yang. She ultimately sacrifices her life to help Wei Wuxian et al kill Xue Yang.
In CQL, itâs shown that Xiao Xingchen would leave a sweet on Xue Yangâs pillow every day, and when Xue Yang dies the last gifted sweet falls from his hand.
(if anyone reading this wants to help flesh it out please do chime in because I know itâs incomplete but I Cannot with that bit of the story.)
During the Second Siege of the Burial Mounds, in the novel, after Wei Wuxian paints himself with the lure talismans, he and Lan Wangji are on the verge of being overpowered when the corpses of the Wen clan members that Wei Wuxian saved rise from the blood pool and help protect them. In CQL, the Wen clan members are hung by the Jin clan and left for the birds outside of the Nightless City, so they could never have been in the blood pool, even if such a thing would have made it past censors (which it never would have).
The novel contains pornographic content, including an illicit kiss that Lan Wangji steals from Wei Wuxian during the Phoenix Mountain hunt, and actual sex, with their first time being before the confrontation at Guanyin Temple.Â
During the Guanyin temple confrontation, in the novel thereâs extensive discussion of Jin Guangyaoâs childhood in the brothel, including information about his mother and why he spared Sisi as opposed to all the other prostitutes. Further, itâs explicit that the Guanyin temple has been built on the site where that brothel used to stand and that the coffin Jin Guangyao is digging up is meant to contain his motherâs body. The entire temple is dedicated to her. In CQL a lot of this is simply not explained or left ambiguous.
In the novel, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian are married and return to Cloud Recesses. In CQL, they travel together for a time, part ways, and then are reunited. Lan Wangji becomes the Chief Cultivator, replacing Jin Guangyao.
...thatâs everything we came up with. Alright, everyone, whatâd we miss? :D
#mdzs#modaozushi#the untamed#untamed#chenqingling#resource#i don't even know how to tag this#i hope this is helpful and doesn't seem biased#obviously i have my preferences as do we all but I tried to just list what was different#without assigning value to one or the other#because i know i've wished for a list like this a time or two#if folks do suggest changes or additions#i will add them when i'm able#but make no promises of promptness#sorry
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The Dread Lands of Ravenloft - Mod Van Richtenâs New England In-Table Campaign [Session 6]
Session Highlights
Did you know that this is technically the partyâs third official combat? Weâre a pretty role-play heavy group.
Theyâve angered six very hungry vampire spawn last time! During the lead-up to this session, my players were so scared of TPK. But, spoiler alert, Iâm not that cruel. I planned this out to a T!
Side Note: Any art that I share of NPCs within these highlight posts is my (Mod Van Richtenâs) original and fan art. Any art that I use for my players that wasnât created by myself but by other artists is kept private and within our friend circle.
Abrascus Barbarian (4) Path of the Ancestral Guardian Race: Tortle Background: Haunted One
Direthorn Rogue (4) Swashbuckler Race: Drow Background: Urchin
Flopsy Barbarian (4) Path of Wild Magic Race: Rabbit Man Background: Experiment
Mangus Monk (4) Way of the Open Hand Race: Half Elf Background: Urchin
Neracahne Wizard (4) School of Evocation Race: Eladrin Background: Noble
Nyra Rogue (4) Phantom Race: Fairy Background: Noble
CW: decapitation, sensual themes, gender dysphoria
Letâs see how the battle went under the cut!
I made a grave error when writing session 5's recap. I missed a lot of details! Good thing my players don't read these bc they would laugh at me for missing this!
Nyra made two discoveries during the day. While inside the Blue Water Inn, she notices something while Ismark is flirting with Rudy. There's a spirit hovering near the half elf. He looks like a young human boy, and he seems slightly surprised when Nyra suddenly tries to talk to him aloud. After the spirit fades, she hears a voice telepathically:
"I wonder if she can't hear me either."
At the dinner, Nyra can't help but notice the same phenomena again. Instead, she sees multiple tortured spirits around the dinner table and throughout the mansion. It appears that they're all in agony.
The session begins back on Direthorn, who was away from the other adventurers most of the day. Theyâve been trying to scavenge for where they can find more pie, without realizing that Flopsy still had pie left despite not being addicted anymore. Theyâve gone through garbage cans and different alleyways in vain, scaring townspeople all the while with feral noises.
Theyâd been so caught up in trying to find pie that theyâd completely forgotten about the Baronâs dinner. The only thing that snaps them out of it is Vasili, who catches them scavenging through garbage in the noble district. He snaps them out of it by asking where their friends are. They have no idea, for they werenât with all of them when they went to the coffin shop earlier that day. Shortly after the conversation starts, however, Adelaide rushes out of the manor and comes up to Vasili to exclaim her worries. She was worried about Escher, but she was also able to tell Vasili and Direthorn where they were. With that, they head straight to the shop.
By the time that the official combat begins, Direthorn, Vasili, and Adelaide are at the entrance. Here are some very notable highlights:
(A/N: Nyraâs player wasnât able to play for the encounter, but she allowed me to use Nyraâs stats to run her on autopilot during the fight. Unfortunately, I had shit dice rolls)
We had two critical hits: One from Mangus and the other from Abrascus.
Vasili was able to very quickly join the fight, and he had a very powerful rapier. Its blade was pure black, and a lot of its damage was necrotic.
This is the first time that Adelaide shows off her spellcasting to her new friends, but unfortunately itâs not as effective as sheâd want it to be.
Izek and four guards arrive at the scene a couple rounds into the fight to help.
Mangus got the first kill of the fight.
Flopsy dealt the most damage in the fight.
Direthorn spent most of the fight antagonizing one vampire spawn in the back corner of the shop. They have spiderclimbing ability and were able to climb up to the window right above the door. Afterwards, they proceeded to mess with this one spawn until it got bored of them (aka: Izek hit them with his hurl flame ability)
We had four critical failures:
Vasili accidentally stabbed Flopsy with his ridiculously powerful rapier.
Mangus lost his quarterstaff by throwing it across the room.
Nyra accidentally pierced Neracahne with one of her arrows.
Abrascus accidentally strikes Adelaide with his greataxe, which leads to major consequences.
After Abrascus hits Adelaide with his greataxe, she looks so angry as she tries to cast a spell on him with little success. However, Escher also saw what happened, and he then cast the same spell on Abrascus, which did success. Abrascus ended up going unconscious because of seeing horrific images.
After the fight was over, Henrik was under arrest. Henrik was terrified and constantly tried to say that he was innocent and was framed. Izek did let the party briefly talk to him, but that ended up being inconclusive. Henrik said he couldnât say the name of the person that made him do it. Aloud, Flopsy simply said, âIt was daddy,â which made everyone very uncomfortable. Again. Henrik was crying out that he was innocent as he was being dragged out of the shop. Vasili left shortly after.
Because the investigation was a success, the adventurers are all considered âguests of honorâ during the Festival of the Blazing Sun. What this means for them is that food expenses are all paid for during the festival, and theyâre allowed to spend the festival with the baron at his table whenever they wish to.
Ismark arrived with Rudy during the aftermath. One of the vampire spawn was burnt to a crisp by Izek, and Rudy proceeded to decapitate the body. After this, Rudy looked at everyone in confusion, claiming that they needed to decapitate the corpses and then burn the bodies in order for them to die. Flopsy looked confused and told him about how he killed Doru. Even though Doruâs head was bashed in, Rudy tells Flopsy that because he wasnât decapitated, then heâs technically still active and can eventually regenerate from that.
Rudy is dumbfounded by the partyâs lack of knowledge, until he realizes that theyâre not really from here. He explains to them that because Barovia is run by a vampire, then vampires that live here are stronger than vampires that would typically be found in the Material Plane. So, it takes more effort to kill them. However, after seeing that Flopsy has Van Richtenâs Guide to Vampires, he seems really disappointed that he doesnât know more about vampires. That is, until heâs given the book and sees that many pages on how to kill vampires are missing. Flopsy tells him that heâd gotten the book like this from Vasili.
When Abrascus wakes up, heâs suffering from an effect of longterm madness, experiencing tremors and feeling shaken up. Rudy quickly takes care of it before it gets too out of hand, and he and Ismark work together to heal the adventurers. When Rudy does this, he holds onto his pan flute while Ismark plays his balalaika to cast his healing spells.
More Content Warnings: Misgendering, trans pregnancy mentioned
Before restingâŚ
Abrascus ended up staying behind at the coffin shop to sleep in one of the coffins. Rudy took exception to this, and he told Flopsy to place a holy symbol on top of the coffin. Just in case. Ismark stays the night with Rudy when they all part ways.
When the rest of the adventurers return to the manor, Flopsy goes inside and can hear Adelaide crying while Escher is tending to the wound caused by Abrascusâ greataxe. Sheâs devastated that someone she thought was her friend would hurt her like that. Escher tries to assure that things like that happen sometimes, but he will do anything to defend her. Adelaide then asks him, âIs Father going to do something to him?â His answer to her is to not worry about that, for thatâs his business.
Flopsy soon makes his presence known, or rather, Escher begins to notice him. He stops talking with Adelaide, and she decides to go see what the girls are up to at the guest house. This leaves Flopsy to continue the conversation he had with Escher earlier that day.
Flopsy insists that Escher needs to tell him who his host was so that he could become a vampire too. Escher refuses to give the name, for itâs too dangerous, but Flopsy can conclude that Strahd is Escherâs host. To challenge that, Flopsy asks, âWhat if I ask her other dad?â That makes Escher go from deflective to immediate defensive, now that he knows how much Flopsy heard. Itâs then that he tells Flopsy that Adelaide having two fathers was supposed to be kept a secret. Escher is transgender, and he left his old life to escape a forced marriage. How that led to him being in Barovia and being one of Strahdâs consorts is unknown.
Escher makes a promise to Flopsy. If he were to tell anyone that Escher was a vampire and that Adelaide is a dhampir, he would know that it was Flopsy that did it. Essentially, he was going to kill him if he told.
Direthorn, Nyra, and Neracahne all go back to the guest house when everything was cleaned up. Some time later is when Adelaide comes over to see them for comfort. They all decide to have a girlsâ night where they drink wine and get to know each other. Adelaide quickly starts getting tipsy, and Neracahne and Direthorn immediately pounce on that as a way to get information out of her. They ask her about her papa, and she tells them that he had raised her mostly on his own and that sheâs her favorite person. They then ask about her mom. She seems confused, and after some explaining, she tells them, âI donât have a mom.â They ask if sheâs adopted, but that also needs to be explained to her. She says no, and then she explains how Escher came out to her when she was a child.
Even though Escher had said that her body is similar to hers, that doesnât change the fact that he is a man. Even if he gave birth to her, that doesnât change the fact that itâs her father. Sheâs very adamant about that, but sheâs relieved that Neracahne and Direthorn respect that. The conversation gets a little more personal when they start asking about who her other dad is. Theyâd noticed that when she laughed, Adelaide had fangs. She gets scared when trying to explain herself, and it eventually comes out that her other father is Strahd.
When Escher came to Barovia, he was with his party of adventurers in Vallaki. The way that Adelaide described their union was that it was⌠not exactly a conventional one. But in the end, theyâd âmarried,â but before Escher could be turned, they found out that he was pregnant with Adelaide. They had to wait until after she was born, or else risk her dying in the process. Escher had almost died when she was born, but Adelaide perceives that her papa turning into a vampire saved him. She also tells them that although Strahd hasnât really been in her life during her childhood, she knows that he cares about her.
She begs them not to tell and makes them promise. Even though they promised her that they wouldnât do anything to hurt her, Adelaide knows that people will kill her if they find out. They will also kill Escher, and even though it seems like she knows a lot of people hate Strahd, she doesnât want him to get killed, either. She soon relaxes once sheâs reassured, and theyâre all able to open up about their personal lives and experiences.
Direthorn talks about being orphaned and running away from the orphanage at thirteen. Theyâd been alone for the longest time, after theyâd lost their best friend. That makes Adelaide feel a little sad as she expresses her sympathy. Neracahne then talks about how she ran away from an arranged marriage. As sheâs explaining her story, Adelaide perks up. She exclaims, âThat sounds a lot like my papa!â
She then tells Escherâs story to them, or at least, what she knows of it. Escher was a student at a wizarding school before he came out, and he excelled in his studies. Something happened, however, that made him earn his teachersâ ire. He had crafted his very own spell, which was the spell demonstrated at the coffin shop against Abrascus. In response, the teachers lambasted him and told him to stick to his studies. Escher was angered by this and felt like he was being held back.
That story felt so familiar to Neracahne. Sheâs heard something similar to this in the past.
Adelaide continues the story. After Escher dropped out of school and took up apprenticeship with a necromancer, he started his transition. It was shortly after this that Escher was forced into a marriage. She didnât quite remember the name of his husband. â...Reginald?â It was their wedding night that Escher used his spell against someone for the very first time. After his husband was knocked unconscious, Escher escaped and became an adventurer.
Now this was too familiar to Neracahne. Itâs then that she remembers a story that she overheard when walking through town one day. That personâs name wasnât Reginald. It was Roland, who was a middle-aged elf that was a well-respected noble. Heâd just stepped out of a chapel holding his head. Different people asked what happened to him, and he started talking about his wedding that was roughly a week earlier. He took a young wife and thought that the union was a success. But then, âthat crazy bitch stabbed me in the shoulder,â and she then had cast a spell on him that made him go crazy. She then disappeared without a trace.
Itâs then that recognition spread across Neracahneâs face. She realizes in that moment that her old friend is Escher.
After the revelation, the night between the girls continues as normal until they all fall asleep together.
Thereâs one unfortunate problem that night. Mangus was left alone to wander. He didnât know where to meet everyone, so he ended up in the dark manor while everyone else was at the guest house. Not a single light was on inside the manor, except for in the closed off study. He checks the door and sees that itâs locked, annoyed that he didnât have any thievesâ tools on him to try and break in. He doesnât dwell on that thought for long. When he realizes that whoeverâs in there is coming out, he hurries to hide so that heâs not noticed.
From his hiding spot, he can hear Vasili walking out of the study, lightly beating something against his hand. He didnât see what it was, but it was something with a bit of weight to it. Mangus then hears Vasili go back into the room and douse the fire before leaving it with the door locked shut behind him. In the pitch black manor, Mangus hears Vasili walk up the stairs. Mangus tries to go back towards the study to check the door, but in the process, he hears Vasili call, âI know youâre down there.â
Vasili then walks down the stairs in the pitch black manor, appearing to navigate fine despite being a human. Mangus is a little perplexed and tells him that he was trying to find the others, to which Vasili laughs and tells him that heâs in the completely wrong build. But Vasili does offer to take him back to the guest house.
On the way there, Vasili engages in small talk with Mangus in the dark. He asks about Adelaide, but Mangus canât seem to get his words out. During his fumbling, Vasili asks Mangus to look at him. Itâs here that suddenly Mangus finds himself to be charmed. He sees Vasili as a trusted friend to be protected. He can tell him anything, so he does. Heâs able to get his words out that heâs interested in Adelaide in a romantic sense, but heâs still trying to process his feelings. Itâs what Vasili says that causes the air around them to still.
âYou better be careful with that. You do not want to get on Escherâs bad side. Or mine.â
Itâs then that Mangus letâs Vasili bite him, revealing himself to be a vampire. After a considerable amount of damage, he says this to Mangus:
âYou will not speak of what happened here, you will not tell anyone I spoke with you, and, if I can help it, you will not remember what happened here.â
Flopsy soon comes to the door to the guest house after theyâre done, and Vasili briefly engages in pleasantries before going back to the manor. Flopsy drags Mangus into bed to sleep, and from the other room it sounds a little bit awkward. But the session ends there, as the adventurers take their rest.
#curse of strahd#curseofstrahd#curse of strahd campaign#ravenloft#ravenloft 5e#ravenloft campaign#dungeons and dragons#dungeonsanddragons#dungeons and dragons campaign#dnd campaign#mod van richten#dread lands of ravenloft
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Marvelâs Loki Episode 5: MCU Easter Eggs and References
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This article contains Loki episode 5 spoilers.
Marvelâs Loki episode 5 is a big one. Yes, we knowâŚlast week felt like that. And the one before it, too. But this one really IS, with the entire episode taking place (as DoGâs Kayti Burt put it) on top of a literal âtrash pile of MCU and Marvel Comics Easter eggs.â
With that in mind, letâs have some fun with all the incredible Marvel references they managed to sneak into Loki episode 5.
Journey Into Mystery
You probably already know this, but Journey Into Mystery was the book that first introduced the Marvel Comics version of Thor, with Loki following shortly after. The title eventually was just renamed Thor since the Asgardians had become the primary focus of the book for years by that point. However, Journey Into Mystery was revived a few years back, with its primary focus being on the adventures of Kid Loki this time around.
Thanos Copter
The Lokis pass a helicopter with âTHANOSâ on the side. This is a reference to Spidey Super Stories #39 from 1979. The all-ages comic featured a story of Spider-Man and the Cat (Hellcat) taking on Thanos, who was on the hunt for the Cosmic Cube. He flew around New York City in his own helicopter with his name on the side. The reference comes up as a joke here and there, including an issue of Deadpool. Even Thanosâ giant two-sided blade weapon from Avengers: Endgame has been considered by many to be a sly reference to the Thanos Copter.
Ecto-Cooler
While the Lokis are all drinking wine, Kid Loki is shown drinking Hi-C Ecto Cooler. The Slimer-based citrus drink was a tie-in to The Real Ghostbusters cartoon of the 1980s and lasted into 2001 due to its popularity. Afterwards, it became a fondly-remembered relic to time. Ecto Cooler made a brief return in 2016 to coincide with the Ghostbusters reboot. Sadly, thereâs no news of it coming back for the upcoming Ghostbusters: Afterlife movie.
Speaking of Kid LokiâŚ
Kid Loki
Kid Loki seems to be wielding a flaming sword, which looks an awful lot like Laevateinn, the sword he wielded in the Loki: Agent of Asgard comics.
Polybius
In the background of the Lokisâ lair, we see a Polybius arcade machine. Polybius is a long-running urban legend. Supposedly, back in 1981, an arcade machine was set up in Portland, Oregon, watched over by various men in black. The game was so addicting that it caused fights to break out and horrible side-effects to its players. We wrote more about the decades-old mystery of Polybius right here.
Pretty sure thereâs an old Williams Space Pinball machine in there, too but thatâs not as wild as Polybius.
The Void
Fittingly, the realm where all the pruned victims end up is called the Void. In the comics, the Void is a dark, inexplicable, and possibly biblical entity that acts as the evil side to the Sentry. During the storyline Siege, the Void murdered Loki, which facilitated his rebirth as Kid Loki.
Alioth
Alioth first appeared in Avengers: The Terminatrix Objective #1, the same 1993 comic that also introduced Ravonna Renslayer to the worldâŚand one that features Kang as its central villain. HmmmmâŚ
Oh, and Alioth was co-created by Mobius M. Mobius inspiration/model Mark Gruenwald, who gets another shout later in the episode.
Vote Loki
The âpolitician Lokiâ who we see leading (inasumuch as they can/want to be led) the loose coalition of Variant Lokis is modeled almost exactly on the version of Loki from Marvelâs Vote Loki story by Christopher Hastings, Langdon Foss, and Paul McCaffery. In it, Loki ends up running for President, with his ridiculous campaign built on the âhonestâ deception of openly lying to the American people inadvertently aided by a credulous news media. Itâs a good read and you should check it out.
This episode also engages in the old MCU/Star Wars tradition of someone getting a hand cut offâŚin this case itâs our pal, âVote Loki.â
Frog Thor
A frog resembling Thor is shown in a jar labeled âT365.â Wouldnât you know it, Thor #365 is the issue where Loki transforms Thor into a frog. Yes, it was a whole thing. Walt Simonsonâs run on the Thor comics is really spectacular.
âFrog Thorâ also got a mention in Thor: Ragnarok, during the âplay within the movieâ seen as âLokiâ apologized to âThorâ for turning him into a frog.
You know, thereâs even an independent wrestler with a Thor Frog gimmick. Life is beautiful sometimes.
Classic Loki
So it appears that Classic Loki is basically what would have happened if âourâ Loki survived the opening of Avengers: Infinity War, which he did by allowing Thanos to kill a duplicate while he disguised himself as some debris. Classic Loki went into hiding and developed a taste for brighter greens and yellows, and aged into Richard E. Grant, before he was pruned by the TVA and found himself here in the Void.
Classic Lokiâs line about âthe god of outcastsâ comes from 2019âs Loki #5, by Daniel Kibblesmith and Andy McDonald:
âI am Loki. God of outcasts. They see themselves in me. And I in them. All of us, alone together. Itâs why my stories always end with someone trying to put me in a box. And begin with my spectacular escape.â
Later in the episode, Classic Loki and Kid Loki literally âexit stage right,â in what feels like a very deliberately âstageyâ moment that plays on the Shakespearean overtones of all of this.
The Living Tribunal
On the ground in the Void thereâs a large severed headâŚand itâs that of The Living Tribunal, a cosmic entity created by Stan Lee and Marie Severin back in 1967. The presence of a Living Tribunal (even one who is dead at this present time), whose entire purpose for being is predicated on the existence of a multiverse, means that the TVA is trying very hard to cut all ties and any evidence of the fact that the multiverse is already out there.
U.S.S. Eldridge
The USS Eldridge was a real Cannon-class destroyer in the U.S. Navy in use from 1943 to 1992. It was supposedly sold for scrap after it was decommissioned but Loki posits that perhaps it was an unwanted Variant in the Sacred Timeline. Perhaps this is because the ship was rumored to be subjected to the âPhiladelphia Experimentâ that was supposed to render it invisible to the human eye. The story is sadly probably a hoax.
Thereâs a not exactly great 1984 movie called The Philadelphia Experiment which adds time travel to the equation, making this little callback even more Loki appropriate.
Is That Stan Lee?
At about 9:38 thereâs a mural in the TVA headquarters. On the right thereâs a guy in prescription shades, with a familiar moustache and salt-and-pepper hair. Weâre not saying thatâs Stan Lee, butâŚ
The Castle
Yes, we know, that ominous castle sure looks like Doctor Doomâs home of Doomstadt, butâŚitâs probably not (or is it?). More likely, this is Castle Limbo, home of Kang the Conqueror (orâŚis it?).
We unpacked these possibilities some more here.
The Music
The âheroic Lokiâ theme at the end sounds like itâs about to break into Wagnerâs âRide of the Valkyries.â
Speaking of, the regular Loki theme is very similar to the part of the Delfonics âReady or Not Here I Come (Canât Hide From Love)â that was sampled for Missy Elliottâs âSock It To Me.â The original (also sampled for the Fugeesâ âReady or Notâ and Dr. Dreâs âStill D.R.E.â) was about the inevitability of love, and Missyâs song was about sneaking into somebodyâs house to get your back blown out, so basically the same thing. Could have some bearing on Loki and Sylvieâs story.
The music that plays during the âLoki brawlâ is this showâs equivalent of Scooby-Doo chase music. Thatâs a good thing, by the way.
Pixar, is that you?
Was that the Pizza Planet truck? Mobiusâs ride, a station wagon with a slice of pizza on top, immediately brought to mind the popular Pixar easter egg/elaborate timeline mcguffin that has appeared in every Pixar movie to date. Also, very nice touch having Lightning McQueen himself drive it.
An even nicer touch is the license plate on the car Mobius is driving: GRN W1D. As in âGruenwald.â As in (say it with us, kids!) Mark Gruenwald, the Marvel writer and editor who Mobius is based on.
Ant-Man
At one point on the ground in the Void we can spot a gigantic Yellowjacket helmet. Yellowjacket is the codename for several size-shifting superheroes in the Marvel Comics, but is best known to MCU fans as Corey Stollâs Darren Cross from the first Ant-Man flick.Â
Guardians of the Galaxy
Thereâs lots of crashed spacecraft, one of which kind of looks like the Dark Aster (Ronan the Accuserâs ship in Guardians of the Galaxy), and there may be a Helicarrier hanging around. Thereâs also a flying saucer that vaguely resembles the ship from John Carpenterâs The Thing, and a pirate ship that if Doctor Doom were actually the villain of this show (he isnâtâŚorâŚis he?) would make us think of that characterâs very first appearance in Fantastic Four comics, where he sent Ben Grimm back in time to become Blackbeard. No, really.
Miscellaneous Time Variants
The fate of the Lokis is reminiscent of What If? #12, otherwise known as What If the X-Men Had Stayed in Asgard? At the end of the story, after tasting defeat yet again, Loki begged Those Who Sit Above in Shadow to allow him to rule Asgard. They agreed by sending him far into the future at the end of time. As reality started to break down, Loki went out laughing in the face of oblivion.
The bus ad at the beginning is for Calum Ross, who is an editor on the show.Â
The shot of all the Lokis walking as the camera swoops overhead is very much reminiscent of Peter Jacksonâs Lord of the Rings movies.
Loki and Sylvie are cold in The Void. But wait a minute, arenât they both Frost Giants? Why then would Loki conjure a green blanket? Unless he wants a convenient excuse to cuddle up with his VariantâŚ
Loki is drinking âRoxxiWineâ pinot noirâŚout of a boxâŚwhich is a nice touch.
Is that weird, very large plant in the bowling alley hideout supposed to be a Variant Yggdrasil? Or waitâŚwhat if thatâs Plant Loki?!? Heâs green, isnât he?
Next to Alligator Lokiâs kiddie pool thereâs a copy of The Mystery and Lore of Monsters, a 1930 book by Charles J.S. Thompson.
The tower we all keep thinking is Avengers Tower is in fact Qeng Tower, the headquarters of Qeng Enterprises, the company that Tony Stark (mistakenly) sold the old Avengers tower to in the comics.
cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });
Spot anything we missed? (Probably, right?) Let us know in the comments!
The post Marvelâs Loki Episode 5: MCU Easter Eggs and References appeared first on Den of Geek.
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Hey David? Why is ours such a cruel and merciless God?
mirrorfalls said: (If you don't know what I'm talking about, your inbox should be filling up with more specific deets riiiiight about now.)
cheerfullynihilistic said: THE SNYDER CUT
Anonymous said: You donât seem to think Supermanâs public rep will take another beating from the Snyder Cut coming out. Honestly I thought youâd be way more upset than you seemed on Twitter.
Anonymous said: So uhh, against all thoughts and logic the Snyder cut is being released? Maybe as a mini series? Thoughts?
Anonymous said: SNYDER CUT!
Bullies. Jocks. Guys angrily asking if we know who their father is. Assorted dudebro nerd-oppressors of America:
You have failed us. You have failed us so hard. What else do we even keep you around for if not to head this shit off at the pass? Shame on you.
Okay, so seriously: Iâm actually gonna put most bitching and moaning under a cut, because I know firsthand there are as many as several non-slavering maniacs out there who dug Man of Steel and Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice and who are simply and entirely reasonably excited that theyâre getting this movie after all. I donât feel like throwing a wall of text at them shitting all over this, so Iâll lead off with I think some fairly even-handed commentary on the real-world circumstances here, rambling speculation regarding the production, and some cautious optimism about the actual movie/s. THEN Iâll get to what I imagine most of you are here to see.
So totally in a vacuum: this is a cool, good thing. Iâm the notorious theatrical Justice League-liker, but at best it was a compromised product due to the original creator - who like it or not clearly had an incredibly ambitious personal vision for these characters and their world - suffering a horrific tragedy forcing him off the project, and leaving his final stamp on blockbuster culture and a world heâd devoted years of his life to a flop with his name on it when he couldnât even truly call it his own anymore. At worst, said tragedy was taken advantage of by suits to ditch him in the home stretch so as to try and shove out something ostensibly more marketable. But now because of a...very loyal fanbase, the manâs getting the opportunity and resources to rise like a phoenix and see at least some of his vision through in a huge way. Thatâs pretty remarkable.
Not in a vacuum this is fucking horrifying. Iâve already seen folks poo-poohing the reflexive fears that this will âset a precedentâ, and they were right enough that I deleted my initial tweet on the subject because I didnât think I could express my own opinion with any nuance in the space of 280 characters. Yeah, nerd whining definitely shaped Rise of Skywalker (another movie I enjoyed in spite of the circumstances of its creation). Hell, Sonic the Hedgehog crunched its CGI team prior to unceremoniously firing them to redesign his model thanks to outcry. Thatâs already a market force, and just to be clear upfront, if we canât agree the predominant mode of operation for #ReleaseTheSnyderCut has been a toxic nerd harassment campaign when they spammed posts memorializing deceased actors and chased Diane Nelson off Twitter, weâre not gonna be able to have this conversation. And directorâs cuts are you may have noticed also already a thing. But this isnât changing direction on a project thatâs already going to exist no matter what, this is turning back 3 years later on a commercial flop and dumping tens of millions of dollars into it, explicitly in response to that harassment campaign. Itâs not *actually* going back and, say, remaking The Last Jedi, but by god to the naked eye itâs gonna be as good as for plenty of fanboys, and probably to some shortsighted execs as well. This is a new thing, and in this context it is a very, very bad one. Hopefully one that wonât amount to anything.
As for the movie itself: what the hell is this thing going to end up being? I assume with this sort of cashola being pumped into it weâre not getting any slapdash greenscreen or storyboarded sequences, but four hours? Is it really just going to be an expanded and revised version of what we saw in theaters, or is this including content that would have been in the originally planned Justice Leagues 2 and 3? My understanding is that those were already compressed into a single Justice League 2 before plans collapsed altogether, were they maybe filming side-by-side and thisâll be the whole shebang? If not is Snyder going to hedge his bets and end this on a clean note, or keep it ending on a cliffhanger in hopes HBO will throw another $250 million his way to keep going? Does DC want to keep going? Would they give into fan pressure on releasing after all what was widely publicized as the first film of a duology or trilogy with dangling threads if they werenât going to be at least watching the numbers to see the feasibility of returning to this in a bigger way? Not that I think WB execs would piss into Snyderâs mouth if he were dying of thirst at this point if he simply asked to be able to do Justice League 2, but if he floated that if they instead just give him a liiiiiiiitle more money he can finally deliver unto them their very own Avengers - one that they can work on even during quarantine since itâs mostly just VFX work left - and hey if it works out heâs got a sequel or two cued up and ready to go? Maybe they look at their scattered plans and say the hell with it and end up giving this a theatrical release and sequel with Snyder holding the reigns again if this ends up a killer app; stranger things have happened, if not many, and somehow this is already happening in the first place after all. Alternatively, if this succeeds, could they go âthanks and good on ya, totally do another, but itâs gonna be an HBO exclusive so youâre only getting a hundred million, figure it outâ? Would Ben Affleck return? How much reshooting will he be willing to commit to even for this? And most importantly, since this is potentially going to be serialized as six âepisodesâ, will We Got This Covered count this as another âwinâ since their bullshit rumor mill algorithm spit out âJustice League HBO TV showâ recently?
As for the project itself: I ainât subscribing to HBOMax for this bad boy, but once it becomes more widely available I canât claim I wonât probably watch it. Itâs basically a new movie about the Justice League, and if thereâs anything I WOULD wanna see Zack Snyder do in the DCU, itâs the movie finally moving past pseudo-realism (aside from some of those dopey costumes) and leaning all the way into godlike superbeings bludgeoning each other through continents. I absolutely wanna see his aesthetic take on the Green Lantern Corps, and New Genesis, and time travel, and all the other weird promises of where his movies were going to go climaxing in a ridiculous super-war across all spacetime. Itâs the same reason J.G. Jones was an exciting choice for Final Crisis before he had to leave, seeing a guy known for his work in an ultra-real grungy superhero style starting there and building up to seeing his version of absolutely wild cosmic spectacle. And no, to respond to one of the initial asks, Iâm not worried about the impact on Superman. Everyone seems to have accepted this is its own distinct thing whether they like it or not, I think him getting to complete his âarcâ will quiet down many of the folks who like to yell at every other version as retro nonsense since now theyâll be able to be smug about having had the best take rather than pining for a lost finale, and Iâm not interested in further Superman movies at the moment anyway with Superman & Lois in the pipe (which I was originally paranoid would be endangered by this when rumors first started floating, but if itâs been brewing since November then if they wanted to strike that down to âmake roomâ according to their Byzantine ever-shifting rules, they would have by now). Far as Iâm concerned, as long as the other DC movies get to keep doing what theyâre doing during and past this - even Pattinson in his corner, however that works - then totally let Snyder work out all his Wagnerian superhero bullshit for another flick or two. If nothing else, maybe weâll learn what the hell that diagram up there is supposed to mean. And a plea I want to clarify upfront is wholeheartedly sincere: weâre already down the rabbit hole, so let Snyder to literally whatever he wants with his non-theatrically released Justice League. Zero input or veto power from outside parties. If he wants Flash to hang dong or Superman to say fuck or Batman to learn heâs Steppenwolfâs secret dad or Cyborg to learn he needs to eat babies to fuel his machine parts, let him go for it. Whole point is this is now his thing for people who want his thing.
Okay, beneath the cut the filter comes off, so go ahead if thatâs your jam.
Hahahahahahaha this is gonna be such a fuckinâ shitshow you guys, Jesus Christ.
Theyâre giving the dude who did BvS and wants to make an Ayn Rand adaptation someday $30 million to take another crack at this monstrosity! 30 goddamn million smackaroos for four fucking hours of by many accounts roughly the same basic movie, except now presumably with what little coherency, fun, and clean character work the theatrical cut managed to pull off excised in return for weighty staring, ponderous pseudo-philosophical musings, hackneyed symbolism, aimless mythology teasing, and Steppenwolf I understand being decapitated by Wonder Woman at the end rather than taken back to Apokolips. I didnât even spoiler mark that shit because donât you dare pretend you care about the fate of Steppenwolf. I wonât have it.
I used to wonder if I was indeed missing the forest for the trees with these movies, that I was so inflexible in my personal image of these characters - even though I appreciate plenty of alternate takes on them and even some stories that bend or break what I consider their ârulesâ, just not these - that I was incapable of grasping or appreciating these films on their own merits as works of art using those archetypes in wildly different ways; even I could see there were good moments and interesting ideas on display despite seemingly failing to come together. No matter how much I personally deconstructed how and why it wasnât working, I couldnât do it to my own satisfaction to the point of stamping out that niggling little worry with how many folks whose opinions I respect love âem. Until I finally remembered that the Cadmus arc of Justice League Unlimited is totally the same basic story as BvS, centrally driven by an even worse take on Superman, and thatâs still one of the best superhero stories of all time. These just stink by any merits, and while I think Justice League absolutely has the potential to be the most *entertaining* of the bunch, itâs not going to magically become *good* in the eleventh hour. Not to lift up Joss Whedon of all people as some kind of savior, Iâm on the record that my love for Justice League as-is is some kind of inexplicable alchemical accident, but I promise that there is not going to be one single addition to this movie thatâs going to make up for the removal of âJust save one personâ.
Also Iâm already not looking forward to dudes tweeting âwhoa, heâs splitting it up into a serialized narrative, reflective of the sequential nature of the charactersâ primitive native pictorial medium! Or mayhap in ode to the pulp film adventure serials which inspired those in turn! Even the Justice League childrenâs cartoon for dumb babies, which was itself...made up of episodes! Thatâs three references in the structure of the thing alone! The manâs operating on an entirely different level!â âGod, isnât it amazing how much better he understands the source material than youâ, they shall say, about a man who I understand just very confidently referred to Doomsday in his livestream as having destroyed Krypton in the comics. Again, donât you say they wonât, just the other day I saw folks tweeting they just realized that since Jor-El wears armor over his bodysuit that technically means Supermanâs whole costume is underwear which means Snyderâs totally honoring that without putting him in ugly dumb red panties so checkmate, dorks.
(Okay, in fairness, I know Snyder was saying thatâs his take on what happened to the moon in the past of the movies and maybe I only misheard that he thought that also happened in the comics, and itâs trivial information anyway. Still sucks though, that seeming out-of-nowhere Jax-Ur shoutout was like the one thing I liked about that otherwise interminable Krypton sequence. And why is there a second Doomsday? You did Death of Superman already!)
And further SPOILER thoughts below on the reported plots of 2 and 3:
Itâs also an amazing, perfect sort of narrative synchronicity that the hypocrisy of Man of Steel in presenting Superman as a savior would (will?) be matched by the movies also rejecting that promise long-term. In there, Jor-Elâs musings on the capacity of every living thing being capable of good, the closest the film has to a singular moral statement, are proven wrong when Zod has to be put down like a mad dog, and rather than the one whoâll bring us into the sun, Kal-Elâs presence draws ruin from beyond the stars to our world. And again in BvS with Doomsday. And again in Justice League 1-3, where in spite of claims by Snydercutters that itâs okay for Superman to be a really lousy take on Superman because itâs totally supposed to take several movies after putting on the costume and calling himself Superman, including his own death and resurrection, for him to really, like, become Superman, man, he remains a liability to the end. His death lures in Steppenwolf, the Kryponian matrix in his genes is Darkseidâs goal, he becomes the villain of the first act of Justice League 3 - possibly of his own free will depending on which version youâve heard about - and at the final showdown, itâs Batman who sacrifices himself to stop Darkseid and save the world and inspire the rise of superheroism, because Batman, you see, rules, whereas Superman, stay with me here, drools. A letdown given BvS was just about the one major story of the last 30 years to unambiguously conclude Superman is better than Batman, but not a shocker. None of what I understand goes down in these - iconography from the likes of Fourth World, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Death and Return of Superman, Rock of Ages, Final Crisis, and Injustice reused but stripped of all context and thematic weight that gives it meaning (even Injustice is built on the premise of having a âgoodâ Superman to contrast the dictator); Lois being the âkeyâ because of her connections to two men, one she married and one she bears; time travel that even by the very generous suspension of disbelief applied to it in a genre like this operates by two obviously completely different sets of rules in its only two uses, and is then used to write the entire second movie of the trilogy out of continuity in the first act of the third, making one and a half of these movies pointless - is shocking. Itâs just more empty notions and unfulfilled promises offered up to a fanbase staking everything on the idea that all the tampering, all the wild swings, all the meandering, itâs all building UP to something, not possibly just a dude who doesnât understand these characters but wanting to look very clever with them before building up to one more rad punch-up. So yes, make these movies. Let what can be gleaned from them as worthwhile be revealed, leave the rest of it up for examination to be judged as it deserves and let it, finally. Finally. Be done.
#Justice League#Snyder Cut#Zack Snyder#DCEU#Worlds of DC#Superman#Man of Steel#Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice#Superman & Lois#DCTV#Analysis#Opinion
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Stories you want to writeâŚ
⌠but for some reason you havenât yet.
Tagged by @ravenclawnerd (thank you!). This will probably be hideously long so Iâll put it under a cut. Iâd tag people but I honestly have no idea whoâs amenable to playing silly meme games at this point or who has already been tagged. >.>
Dragon Age: I would love to finish âApotheosisâ but I honestly do not know where to take it. Iâve attempted the next chapter like five distinct times - as in, I didnât rewrite, I reread what Iâd already posted and started from scratch - but at this point I would also need to replay all of Inquisition to get back in the headspace for it. /sigh I mean like, I WANT to dig into the lore! I WANT to make up weird shit about the ancient elves! I want Ghilanânain to be a horrific Tzimisce fleshcrafter who everyone was too scared of to even write down most of her atrocities! I had so many cool ideas but I just could not make them Be A Story, for some reason, probably because I usually write one-and-done shortfic. Possibly the answer to this is I should write springboard meta and dump my ideas into the fandom sea and see if they find a new home somewhere else.
Seven Kingdoms: The Princess Problem: I wanna write the Horrible Persuasion AU for Calanthia where she succeeds at Katyiaâs Legacy and everything is beautiful for the Kingdoms and she watches her friends make plans for what to do next and then she goes home and pines for six years (while also taking a hammer to the world to fix a few last things that bug her) and spends the final year of the Summit cycle AGGRESSIVELY campaigning to be a chaperone so she can go back to the Isle and see Jasper again. Because writing this involves spoiling literally everything about W6 and W7 and all the secret chains, I cannot write it yet.
Seven Kingdoms: The Princess Problem : I wanna write the Horrible But Not AU fic for post-Summit Valya (this not being an AU is ENTIRELY your fault, Tina). I mean, itâll end happily and no one dies! ... thatâs a lie, one person dies, but in keeping with the death in the game because they are not a nice person and they deserved it and itâs plot-important. Itâs not MAJOR character death, anyway. This ALSO has spoilers coming out its ears and can therefore not be written until the spoiler ban is lifted.
Star Wars Crossover: I still kinda wanna write the Sequel Trilogy (lie I have still only seen two of them) PacRim AU I outlined but also outlining it appears to have killed the actual Urge To Write It so that will probably never happen.
World of Warcraft: I'm noodling around with the idea of Wrathion-centric BFA fic because Iâm just like âyou are such a fucking disaster and I love you so much but you need to work through some shitâ so it would be a lot of him being like 'what is this feeling? itâs awful. I hate it.â (It starts with Anduin being mad and Wrathion making Surprised Pikachu face and carries on from there, I love them both SO MUCH). Also there was a sequence of drabbles no not ficlets actual 100 word drabbles yes I am a fandom old and YES I WILL DIE ON THIS HILL but Iâm not a good enough writer to post those b/c my writing requires padding or you can see all the problems so clearly that I die of shame.
Detroit: Become Human: I desperately want to finish the sequel to my DBH fic âComfortsâ because I LOVE NORTH SO MUCH and she deserved better but the fic I set out to write involves understanding tactics and strategy and writing a battle and I canât even write a fight with three people and have it be interesting so thatâs a whole lot of NOPE. Itâs been I donât even know how long and I still have not figured out a way to not write that part but also I really needed to fix canon with a hammer because the âgoodâ route is ridiculous and would not actually have worked, itâs like eight deus ex machinas in a trench coat which WHILE APPROPRIATE FOR THIS FANDOM is also something that makes me grimace so there does, in fact, need to be some war shit which unfortunately I am not equipped to write.
Pillars of Eternity: I think I am ALMOST to the point where Iâve processed enough of my fury at Obsidian that I can try to do a soft Eder-mancing rewrite of all of PoE2. Almost. Maybe. Iâm not there yet. Honestly though they were so fucking MEAN about it that I will never be out of salt even when I stop being full of rage.
Changeling: Haunted Housewarming fic with Nora and William mostly grown up and moving into a fixer-upper that happens to be haunted as heck and/or be a genus loci. I have been debating whether I want the spirit to fixate on Nora rather than William because it would be hilarious. This would not be a horror fic, it would be silly fluff with ghosts.
Red Embrace: Hollywood: This is another entry in the âby god if you wonât give me a happy ending I will write it myselfâ fic sweepstakes, because I am a simple creature with simple needs and you donât get to say something includes romance if there are NO happy endings damn it THAT IS NOT WHAT THAT WORD MEANS. Anyway yeah I want my little not!Malkavian to clue in enough to avert major disasters and then to be like âfuck this shit Iâm out~ fuck this shit Iâm out NO THANK YOU~â except also to try to convince her boyfriend to go with her. (Based on Randalâs path with Saoriseâs ending, I feel like thatâs in the realm of possibility but also I am still feeling kind of sadface about the No Happy Endings thing so it hasnât gotten done. Like Obsidian, this felt like an authorial choice to be deliberately cruel and Iâm gonna have to get past my desire to bite people before I can write anything soft and fix-it-y.
Star Wars: The Old Republic: cultural miscue mutual pining slowburn with Arcann and Hylira because that is my JAM and the in-game romance is rushed because most of Knights was rushed but there was Potential and that potential lodged in my brain. I started this last year and occasionally flail at it but the problem is that I donât want to BE WRITING it I want it to be WRITTEN.
Star Wars: The Old Republic: Honestly also I just wanna rewrite Knights so it irks me less. Senya and Vaylin had a Force-bond (I am prepared to fight about this) and it makes everything more fraught and also makes the way they âfridged Vaylin about twenty times WORSE except they never actually dealt with that or paid it off at all. I will most probably never even try to write this one, I just want it to spring into existence from my id.
Original Fiction: The thing thatâs lived in my head since high school and is therefore unlikely to ever get written. I do still like it, though. Also Iâm proud of baby me for going â--and the elves are imperialist fash dickheads who commit war crimesâ because apparently Iâd picked up on enough of the racist tropes in the fantasy I inhaled on the regular to be like âexcept weâre calling all of that out as bad because it is.â Like, good job, baby me.
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GO Rom Com Spotlight: @racketghostâ
The fabulous @racketghostâ has claimed Zack and Miri Make a Porno to adapt for Good Omens in the Good Omens Rom Com Event.
For reference, hereâs some information about the source material!
Synopsis of Zack and Miri Make a Porno: Lifelong friends and now roommates, Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) are buried under a mountain of debt. When the electricity is turned off, they realize that desperate times call for desperate measures. They decide to make an adult film to raise some cash. Though they swear that having sex will not damage their friendship, their business proposition quickly turns into something much more.
We spent some time chatting about how the adaptation is coming so far, as well as future plans for it! Now, get to know @racketghostââ (also racketghost on AO3) a little better!
* * *
goromcom: Here it comes, my silly tags question. You know how if you open a Tumblr chat with someone you haven't chatted to before, Tumblr tells you two things they post about? I wanted to tell you that yours reports that you post about "#aziraphale is baby and #ineffable husbands." I am DYING at that first one, because correct tag is correct!
racketghost: Oh my gosh, that is amazing. I use that tag an unholy amount. But I mean, he is baby, soâI think itâs warranted!
goromcom: You chose to adapt Zack and Miri Make a Porno as your rom com. I'd like to disclose to you at this time that I am the one who added that to the masterlist, and was secretly hoping someone would take it. And you have! :) Has this movie been a favorite of yours, or is there some other reason you chose it?
racketghost: AH! I remember when the prompts were being claimed and I think it was you who said OMG someone took Zack and Miri and I wanted to stand up and say, it was me. Iâm the absolute loon! I am SO GLAD you added it to the master list. Itâs an under-appreciated romance movie (I think because it gets covered up by all the wonderful, wonderful filth).Â
I will confess that I chose this movie because @summerofspockâ and I were chatting about which movies to take (I originally wanted Pretty Woman! Anyone who has read Strange Moons knows why) and we were discussing which movies would be the hardest to adapt. And then I sort of coughed up an idea for Zack and Miri and Summer went full supportive-cheerleader mode and pointed out that pining-while-also-having-sex is sort of my entire wheelhouse. The rest just clicked. Sheâs wonderful. <3 (I have also always loved the movie. I really adore Kevin Smith. It is my duty as a native of New Jersey!)
goromcom: What's your favorite moment of your chosen rom com, and are you looking forward to presenting it in your adaptation? Any loose plans for that scene that you can share? (I will inline spoiler alert for the answer if it seems necessary.)
racketghost: I think my favorite part of my romcom isnât necessarily a moment or a scene, itâs more that Zack and Miri are the very dearest and closest of friends that we get to see over and over again. They have a wonderful platonic intimacy that I think mirrors Crowley and Aziraphale very, very well. Lots of bickering and long-suffering sighs and many an eye-roll. But also a fierce protectiveness. Like, this is MY best friend and yes they are ridiculous but only I can say so. I hope to capture that intimacy!
goromcom: Do you plan to stick very closely to the story beats of the original movie, or make bigger changes?
racketghost: Oh no, my story isâŚ. Very, very different from the original. It will follow the same story beats to a degree but I am flipping this from an ensemble cast thing into a just-the-two-of-them thing. So thatâs a big change!Â
goromcom: What's an interesting decision you've made in your planning so far--a notable casting decision, a changing of venue, or some other plan you have to paint Good Omens all over your rom com?
racketghost: Well, anyone who has read my other stories knows that I am clearly incapable of writing anything that isnât hopelessly full of angst. So I have upped the stakes quite a bit and basically scrapped the entire mood of the movie. I also really twisted the idea of someone turning off the power, so to speak. There are bills to pay! Itâs set in a canon-universe so they arenât worrying about keeping the lights on. Basically, Zack and Miri Make a Porno but make it goth.
goromcom: I am blatantly stealing this last question from The Good Place: The Podcast, but here goes: Tell me something "good". It can be something big or small. It can be a charity you think is doing good work, or you can talk about how great your pet is.
racketghost: Let me begin this by saying YOU are wonderful for managing this wild bunch and starting all of this. You are doing an awesome job and I really appreciate all the work you do for us!
Second, my dog Jackson is the goodest boy of all the good boys and I love him forever.
And third, I am a big fan (and so is Jackson) of a grass-roots organization called The Surfrider Foundation. Iâm basically an unevolved ocean creature (when did I sprout these legs?) and I think the preservation of our oceans is one of the highest and most important campaigns we can all work toward. They do regular beach cleanups you can join in and they help preserve oceanic habitats, educate people on single-use plastics and residential water consumption, and champion making informed choices on sustainable seafood. Theyâre non-profit and staffed by some truly wonderful hardworking humans who just want to preserve this great, beautiful blue planet and all the things living in it. Crowley and Aziraphale would be fans, I think.
goromcom: Aww, thanks for that first bit. And Jackson and The Surfrider Foundation both sound amazing.
So GO fans, make sure to watch for...and I am giddy to be saying this...a canon-compliant adaptation of Zack and Miri Make a Porno.
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C2E97
So this episode was... a lot. There were some transformations and revelations and monologues (and also a party)! Donât mind the sound of sobbing, that is just me attempting to deal with my many emotions because this episode gave me many emotions. But without further ado, here are my thoughts and liveblogs about Campaign 2, Episode 97 of Critical Role:Â âThe Fancy and the Fooled.â Beware of spoilers!
- Caleb rolling a low perception check and getting distracted by a cute little dog on the wharf is very relatable to me personally
-Â âHey whatâs that ship called again?â / The Audience:Â âBall Eater!!!â / Travis:Â âYeah, yep. Never had 3000 people shout that at you before.â ASDFGHKL BYE
- Sam/Nott: âThe Balleater is classy, it sticks with you, it really makes an impression.â / Liam/Caleb: âBad aftertaste though.â Please never let these people name anything ever again Iâm đ
- Fjord being too shy to say his shipâs name is such a funny bit we love
- wait a minute
- WAITÂ
- .........
- ESSEK!!!!!!!!!!!
- me @ me about my love for essek: Congrats. You played yourself.Â
-Â âIf I tattooed your bicep, Yasha, I would have intimate knowledge of your bicepâ Every day I hope for Jester/Beau/Yasha OT3 as the endgame.... pls i am begging...
- I love the Ruby of the Sea so much, and I am so proud of her for agreeing to go to the party with the Mighty Nein! Thatâs so exciting!
- Caleb: âAnd youâre sure youâre ready?â / Nott: âNo, but Iâm going to do it anyway.â Honestly I think I really needed to hear those words right now for a lot of different reasons
- âFjord, Iâm sorry that I call you weak, but itâs only because I know youâre strong enough to take it.â Awwww đ
- âCaleb, I love you and youâre the second love of my life. Thank you for being with me.â âI love you too, Veth the Brave.â I will be over here in the corner, just a small sobbing puddle...
- VETH IS IN HER TRUE FORM AGAIN I AM SO HAPPY AND PROUDÂ
- âAnd I will just sort of - just hug Caleb.â I will literally never stop loving these two, their friendship and their relationship in general is just so special to me. Messes together, a great loyalty for you, the second love of my life đ đ
- Fjord sounds so offended when he says âCaduceus, you think I look terrible??â I love them both so much
- Beau: âYasha, Fjord, fish market?â / Yasha:Â âIt is my favored terrain...â I LOVE IT WHEN YASHA FLIRTS BACK FSKLDLKJD (also rip Fjord third-wheeling their fish market date)
- Yasha:Â âThose are beautiful...â / Beau:Â âI mean, you are too.â LETS GO LESBIANS LETS GO
- I love Beau and Fjordâs friendship so much, them watching the Ruby of the Sea and interrogating the Dragonborn (who was nobility apparently?? what was up with him??), these two are the buddy cop comedy duo we deserve!!
-Â âThereâs nothing worse than betraying those you care about before youâve even come to care about them.â Ya girl be going through it over here
- Calebâs speech/the quote âYou were not born with venom in your veins. You learned it. You learned it.â is so powerful and is making me tear up why did I choose to watch this at half past three in the morning Iâm đÂ
- Caleb kissing Essek on the forehead to symbolize Fortuneâs Favor, which gives people a second chance (and which Essek taught to Caleb in the first place), I know Essek himself said thereâs no path to redemption for him, but please Mr. Mercer.... spare Redemption Arc pls sir....
- âMaybe you and I are both damned, but we can choose to do something and leave the world better than it was before.â The Molly callback đ And the first part of the quote âmaybe you and I are both damnedâ itâs all��so muchÂ
- Also the quiet, pained way that Caleb says âSo be itâ ...Â
-Â âYou can certainly tryâ I LOVE YASHA SO MUCH
-Â âMy intentions were never good, they were importantâ I canât tell if heâs true neutral or neutral evil but either way that was a brilliant lineÂ
- Okay, it is 3:45am and this episode made me cry (thanks Liam OâBrien) and I am very tired and drained but that was amazing and I am overwhelmed with emotions but I donât quite know what emotions. That revelation about Essek is A Lot to Process (though Iâve been rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender recently and now all I want is a Zuko-level redemption, even though Iâm not sure if heâll ever get any redemption at all.) But I am glad that Veth has her body back and I am glad the Ruby of the Sea went out in public with her daughter and I am glad that Fjord has a ridiculous hat. There is some hope in this world at least hehe âĄ
#critical role#c2e97#cr#my liveblogs#you were not born with venom in your veins#you learned it#uggggh that was so good this was all so good and i am so sad :((((#what an excellent reveal for a liveshow though! i can't imagine getting to experience that live!#honestly in my top 10 favorite critical role episodes that i've seen so far i love it
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Tips on Character Development
(AKA the convoluted way I do things)
Ok, so, wow. This ended up being like super ridiculously long. Sorry about that. I just got done adding "a thing or two" and it ended up being longer than what I originally wrote.
So, a while ago I responded to a post on Reddit asking for help developing a character. My comment seemed to help a few people, so I figured I'd add a thing or two and post it for anyone else who may find it helpful!
TL;DR: I think Personality tests âMyers Briggs and Enneagram â used in tandem make a pretty complete, rounded character. Add in some Pinterest Character Inspiration boards to that and you've got some preeettyyy developed characters. Also, OneNote rocks my world.
If you wanna read my entire process, keep reading. If not, just read the first few paragraphs and you'll get the idea. If you donât care, ignore me and scroll on, friend.
The Personality Tests
When I started getting my MCs together, I took a Myers Briggs personality test for each of them! 16 Personalities is a really great resource because you just answer how your character would and it gives you so much information on what type of person they'd be. If you go to that second link, it goes deeper into their theory and what each aspect of the test results actually mean. If you're looking for that, scroll down to the Five Personality Aspects part of the second link. I think the entire thing is neat, so I recommend the read. Anyways, I've done this for my protagonists, as well as my main BBEGs, and some minor characters that I was kind of struggling with.
From there, I also looked up what Enneagram types they'd line up with according to their Myers Briggs type. That site talks a lot about what the Enneagram personality stuff is all about. It's worth a read. The whole concept is pretty neat. Your personality type is similar to the personality types that are near you, but also reflects to the types across from you. Or something... I'm explaining this poorly, I know haha.
There are a few ways I went about relating the two personality tests. I didn't want to take two different tests. I really like the Myers Briggs because it's all about decisions, but I like that the Enneagram talks a lot about how they interact with each other and the world. It kind of gave me a more rounded vision of who they are. Instead of taking two tests, I used this site to find a correlation between the Myers Briggs type and the Enneagram type.
There are 9 Enneagram types. Russell Rowe (not Crowe, I know, I thought it too) does an AWESOME job of breaking them down... into 15-20 page PDFs.
Enneagram Type 1
Enneagram Type 2
Enneagram Type 3
Enneagram Type 4
Enneagram Type 5
Enneagram Type 6
Enneagram Type 7
Enneagram Type 8
Enneagram Type 9
You can easily find any of those by Googling "Enneagram Type x Russell Rowe" and it'll pop up as literally the first thing. But I linked each of them to the above list. I have each of those PDFs saved into my OneNote folder for each major character, good or evil. I highlighted things that really stuck out to me for each character.
After reading through all those, I was able to figure out if that was truly who I wanted my character to be. Is that personality type and Enneagram type truly who I envisioned my character? If yes, move forward. If not, retake the tests. I retook my one MC's Myers Briggs test 3 times, I think, and once I rounded it out with the Enneagram type, I really got her how I wanted her, so don't get discouraged if you read the results and don't feel like it fits your characters!
This is the point where I kind of venture off into more of how I do things, so I won't feel bad if you don't want to read my word vomit from here on out. I kind of just talk about the benefits of questionnaires vs the personality test method, how I use OneNote to keep track of my character development, and visual inspiration using Pinterest.
If you decide to keep reading, thanks! Also, buckle up, because it's a lot...
Personality Tests vs Character Questionnaires
So, I use Scrivener, but I also have used Bibisco (free!) in the past. Bibisco has a really, really detailed questionnaire that asks questions I hadn't even thought about. How does this character eat? What are they usually dressed like? What's their favorite type of music? Are they a pessimist or an optimist? A realist? Are they book smart or street smart? There's like... literally HUNDREDS of questions on there. It also asks about family members, relationships, sexuality (I think, but it's worth adding), past events that occurred before the book.
While I am a perfectionist, I started with the Bibisco stuff and then ended up falling off the wagon with it because it took so excruciatingly long to complete one for each character. I already had a pretty good idea of how each of them would act and I didn't really want to put myself in a box creatively. Sometimes my characters just grow organically as I write and I make discoveries about them that way!
The Bibisco questions, and questionnaires overall, are so helpful, but again, they can be so so time consuming. If you have the time (and that's your jam) I totes recommend it. Bibisco so in-depth and has so many questions that I honestly hadn't even thought about. But I have 4 main characters, and 2 major minor characters, and 1 BBEG in my first book alone. I just could not handle like hundreds of questions per person. And tbh, the Myers Briggs and Enneagram was enough for me!
All of that to say, the way Bibisco breaks down their information and some questions it asks are really cool and helpful. While I don't answer each question it has, I do like to think of just in general, how does Kein act? How does she carry herself, talk, laugh, cry? Does she belly laugh or is it more of a quiet giggle. When she cries, does she try to hide it and push everyone away (spoiler alert, yes), or does she cry openly and ask for help?
OneNote is your super organized best friend forever
I compile all of this information into OneNote, which... is honestly a post in and of itself (something I would be more than happy to do if people were interested). OneNote is just the most amazing way to keep track of everything in my world (venturing past char dev here, for a tiny second).
I first discovered how useful it was when I started my homebrew campaign for dnd and it has been so invaluable ever since. Especially for the worldbuilding I am currently doing for my fictional world. I'm also pretty sure anyone who has Windows and the Microsoft Office Suite, has it for free. So if you do have Microsoft Office, I HIGHLY recommend checking out OneNote for book/character organization.
In OneNote, I have different collections set up for worldbuilding, chapter notes, a to-do list, a timeline, and most importantly (or relevantly) for characters. I have a section for the protagonists, the villains, the good guys, bad guys, and then misc neutral people. Though, usually, people in my book fall into the good or bad sections. I have neutral people for things that have happened historically, but that's neither here nor there.
Within each section, say, the Heroes, I have a "page" for each of my main characters. Their title page is just a bunch of random notes that I hastily added on the go, but the subpages are where it's at. Each subpage is based off the Bibisco (see above) sections. Personal Data, Physical Features, Behaviors/Attitude, Psych, Ideas/Passions, Interpersonal, Life Before the Story, Conflict, Evolution, and Visual Inspiration.
The psych section of Bibisco is a very in depth 64 questions on their psychological profile. In my OneNote, this is more or less where I put my personality test results and I highlight important information. Instead of answering 64 questions that answer whether or not Kein is outgoing or shy, the personality profiles answer those for you, quite easily.
For example, Kein tested as ISTP-T. She is an Introvert, Observant, Thinking, Prospecting, and Turbulent. Even just looking at that last sentence, it tells me more about my character than any 64 questions about how hardworking, free-spirited, or vain (all Bibisco questions) she is.
I really like how Bibisco broke down the information, but how it goes about char dev doesn't work for me personally. So I modified it to work for me! Instead of answering all those questions, I read through the questions and the personality profiles I have in the Psych section. In the other sections, I just type a blurb or two about how Kein behaves, her passions, and her interpersonal skills (or lack thereof). Instead of reading through a numbered list of questions and answers, I can just read the blurb or highlighted sections in the personality section and be reminded of her overall personality instead of how she acts in one rigid sense.
I think that's why I like the personality tests the mostâ they give you a more generalized sense of your character instead of how they act in a linear or flat scenario. How do they walk, for instance, is one of the questions, but that really hinges on a lot, right? What's the scenario?
Is Kein coming home from a successful scavenging mission, standing tall and proud, but letting someone else take the spotlight of success? (Introvert vs Extrovert). Or is she folding into herself, thinking about all the things she could have done differently, while sheâs being scolded? (Thinking vs Feeling).
How a character, walks, talks, laughs, and generally holds themselves really depends on... you guessed it! Their personalities! Which is why I really like the personality test route.
One extra bit, OneNote lets you do 3 tiers of folders, so I can have Kein>Physical Features and then one more set of subpages under Physical Features. I find this useful for character development that happens over the course of your writing. For example, my MCs fight a pack of wolves at one point (this first book of mine is very Man v Nature). They all walk away with injuries. Under my Physical Features page, I have a subpage for Developments. I either just have notes there, or a table set up by chapter. It'll say, Ch# in the left column, and then it'll have a set of bullet points for things that changed in that chapter.
Ch# - Kein attacked by a wolf - sustained a bite to shoulder and claw slash across her stomach. (A note: for wounds, I'll sometimes add pics, but as long as you can visualize it, it's whatevs).
It goes for other aspects of character development too though! If a romance is blossoming, I'll add notes chapter by chapter using the table system I noted above. If an injury causes someone to move/walk differently I make a note of it. Especially for injuries that I need to remember like, ok, she has fractured ribs. She ain't climbing that cliff sideâ they're going to have to find a different way or they're going to have to figure out how to get her up it.
Side note for the injury and time keeping â I made an entire post about how I do this, so check that out if youâre interested.
A small bit on visual inspiration
When coming up with a visual of my characters, I turn to Pinterest. Pinterest is the bee's knees for visual character inspiration. If you have a general idea of what you want your character to look like, just search "character inspiration" and then adding any descriptors. Sometimes I don't find what I'm looking for, so instead I'll search "model" and then the descriptors. My MC has red hair and freckles. I searched "character inspiration red hair female" and "model freckles female" and tons of pics popped up.
I created a board named "Character Inspo_NAME" on Pinterest for each main character. A nice spring board for visualizing my characters. It ranges from boots and ripped jeans, to faces of models/people, hairstyles and accessories.
I mass pin things and then I comb through and look for stuff that really resonates with a characterâ a few pics of models, some outfits, particular accessories or items, shoes, clothes, hair styles!! With those few, more narrowed down pics, I place them into my Visual Inspiration folder in OneNote. I can reference it if I need to remember what someone is wearing or what a particular item someone has looks like. Or just in general if I need a bit of a boost, it helps to write a character's description if I'm looking at the character inspiration.
Iâm certainly not, like, the best person to go to for visual inspo stuff. There are so many other people out there who do these amazing aesthetic and mood boards and all kindsâa stuff like that and itâs so so so amazing. So, donât take my word for it in this area, because Iâm certainly not the authority here. Iâm just givin yinz an idea of how I do things.
I hope this helps! Maybe I should have added memes or something.
Anyways, thatâs all folks. Good luck! Feel free to ask me any questions if you have them! Also, I'd love to hear comments on my process, or how anyone else does their character development!
i also feel like this entire post is a mess so thanks for reading if you made it to the end. also let me know if any links donât work or anything like that.
#writeblr#writing tips#character development#writing#writing advice#writing tools#writing community#characters#original characters#ocs#writers helping writers#character inspo#character inspiration#novel writing#nanowrimo#i did this instead of writing
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Dialogues With A Dreg, Part Four
Spoilers for Destiny and Destiny 2 ahead.
Hello, Guardian.
Letâs drop the allegory for a while. I donât think it was working to begin with, and I prefer to speak plainly instead of in prose.
I love the game you serve as the protagonist in, at least mechanically. Part of the reason Iâve put nearly a thousand hours in piloting you around and clicking on enemy heads is because Iâm chasing that satisfying âpopâ when somethingâs brain explodes after I get them with a linear fusion rifle. I guess itâs better than being addicted to drugs or alcohol or video games with gambling mechan- oh shit god dammit wait, fuck, thereâs Eververse here, I forgot.
Anyway, Destiny 2 has my full buy-in when it comes to gameplay, as I think itâs grabbed many folks in its three-year lifespan. Iâm not as big a fan of the many modes to choose from in the game, and I think the story â when looked at holistically â is more-or-less a wash. But one aspect I canât ignore is one Iâve tried to reason out in these Dialogues: Bungie, the gameâs developer, wants me to live at least part-time in this world, and there are certain ramifications that come with that.
I first noticed these ramifications during the Faction Rallies in D2Y1, when it asked me to pick a faction and fuck shit up across the solar system. I picked what I thought was the coolest-looking faction, a group of (it turned out) thanatonautic, neoliberal warmongers calling themselves Future War Cult. They basically killed themselves over and over to see the future, and as a result they want Guardians everywhere to become absolute war machines. But as far as I could see, they were a âbetterâ option than the other two factions: Dead Orbit, who just wanted to get the fuck out of the solar system and away from the Traveler, our slumbering charge, and New Monarchy.
New Monarchy is the MAGA hat gang of Destiny 2. They want to keep humanity safe by locking them inside the Last City, forming an eternal Guardian-led kingdom, and ruling with an iron fist. Yeesh.
In my first Faction Rally, I fought hard for FWC. I liked the gear they were giving me, not to mention the guns I could earn from them. They had an aesthetic I liked, and the story of thanatonautics is interesting enough for me to want to know more about how all that worked. But I didnât like the insistence that we âreclaimâ the far-flung reaches of the solar system, as if they belonged to us inherently. I didnât like the ramping-up, constant drumbeat for war they were throwing out. Even if Lakshmi-2, FWCâs leader, seemed like the eye of a hurricane â calm, yet clearly still dangerous â the hurricane she was the center of was starting to irk me.
Iâm sorry to say I didnât drop FWC in subsequent Rallies, even if I wasnât as enthusiastic about them as I was initially. If I could pick again, though, I know now Iâd pick Dead Orbit. They had it the most right, plus Peter Stormare plays Arach Jalaal, the factionâs leader, which is just cool.
But the winner of pretty much every rally was New Monarchy. I couldnât see the appeal, even if you stripped the clear trump-ass bullshit away. But a LOT of other Destiny 2 players fought for them, and they were the victors constantly. Bungie took the Faction Rally away in D2Y2, but it basically put me on an inexorable thought track to where we are today.
Simply put, I think the world that Destiny 2 is advocating for is at best a fascist one. At worst, weâre talking about reinstating the divine right of kings. Not only does mortal humanity lose in this bargain, but every other living creature inhabiting our solar system suffers for it as well.
Now, Guardian, I can see that this is an unwelcome statement to hear. I get it. After spending the entire five years of your existence thanklessly putting around the solar system and killing gargantuan, god-level threats to humanity and life itself, watching some nerdy, doughy writer cast aspersions on everything you do probably extends past irritation and into wishing you could shoulder-charge me into Glimmer particles. But I want to be clear: yours isnât the only video game world â or even the only sci-fi world in general â that does this. As Nic Reuben (the original Destiny 2 fascism warner) put it in his 2017 post on the subject, Bungie writers are âblindly following a set of culturally encoded science-fantasy tropesâ:
ââTrue leaders are born. Itâs genetic. The right to rule is inherited.â Any time you play as a really, really ridiculously good looking person killing mobs of ugly things for a vaguely defined reason, youâre witnessing this kind of ideology first hand.â
One thing I would like to point out, though, before we continue: Guardian, I know you personally. Iâve fought as you across the stars. I know you donât inherently want to rule over anything. You are intentionally a blank slate, you never voice your own desires except for that one time when a possessed Awoken prince killed your best ramen bud, and I want to believe that the only thing you want â which is the only thing I want â is to race Sparrows on Mars. But the version of you I play as is not the only version of you that exists. There are over a million of you. And aside from that million iterations of you that exist in this game world, there are others who absolutely want to rule. Itâs high time to interrogate this world.
Fantasy Space Fascism: The Game
In his book Against the Fascist Creep, freelance journalist and Portland State Ph.D candidate Alexander Reid Ross defines fascism as âan ideology that draws on old, ancient, and even arcane myths of racial, cultural, ethnic, and national origins to develop a plan for the ânew man.'â He continues:
âFascism is also mythopoetic insofar as its ideological system does not only seek to create new myths but also to create a kind of mythical reality (ed. emphasis mine), or an everyday life that stems from myth rather than fact. Fascists hope to produce a new kind of rationale envisioning a common destiny that can replace modern civilization. The person with authority is the one who can interpret these myths into real-world strategy through a sacralized process that defines and delimits the seen and the unseen, the thinkable and the unthinkable.
âThat which is most commonly encouraged through fascism is producerism, which augments working-class militancy against the âowner classâ by focusing instead on the difference between âparasitesâ (typically Jews, speculators, technocrats, and immigrants) and the productive workers and elites of the nation. In this way, fascism can be both functionally cross class and ideologically anticlass, desiring a classless society based on a ânatural hierarchyâ of deserving elites and disciplined workers. By destroying parasites and deploying some variant of racial, national, or ethnocentric socialism, fascists promise to create an ideal state or suprastate â a spiritual entity more than a modern nation-state, closer to the unitary sovereignty of the empire than political systems of messy compromises and divisions of power.â
Ross, A. R. (2017). Against the Fascist Creep. AK Press.
The Destiny franchise begins with you, a freshly-reborn Guardian, shooting and punching your way through a hive of vaguely-arachnid aliens your Ghost companion calls âFallen.â You find a decrepit jumpship deep in the heart of the Old Russia Cosmodrome, which your Ghost fires up and uses to take you to the âlast safe city on Earth,â a walled metropolis underneath the Traveler. You first meet with the Vanguard triumvirate, Titan Commander Zavala, Warlock Ikora, and Hunter Cayde-6, and then, after completing some tasks for them, you are granted an audience with the Speaker (voiced by Bill Nighy):
âTHE SPEAKER: There was a time when we were much more powerful. But that was long ago. Until it wakes and finds its voice, I am the one who speaks for The Traveler.
âYou must have no end of questions, Guardian. In its dying breath, The Traveler created the Ghosts to seek out those who can wield its Light as a weaponâGuardiansâto protect us and do what the Traveler itself no longer can.
âGUARDIAN: What happened to it?
âTHE SPEAKER: I could tell you of the great battle centuries ago, how the Traveler was crippled. I could tell you of the power of The Darkness, its ancient enemy. There are many tales told throughout the City to frighten children. Lately, those tales have stopped. Now⌠the children are frightened anyway. The Darkness is coming back. We will not survive it this time.
âGHOST: Its armies surround us. The Fallen are just the beginning.
âGUARDIAN: What can I do?
âTHE SPEAKER: You must push back the Darkness. Guardians are fighting on Earth and beyond. Join them. Your Ghost will guide you. I only hope he chose wisely.â
Bungie. Destiny. Activision Entertainment, 2015.
This introduction to the world of Destiny is⌠shockingly reductive. Even playing the campaign when this happens, my first thoughts were, âwait so weâre not even smart or good enough to hear the childrenâs scary stories about the history of this world? what the fuck?â But over the course of years, we find out more and more about the so-called Golden Age of Humanity, the tools humans built with implied assistance from the Traveler, the various rich families and corporate megaliths that consolidated power over people across the solar system in the years and decades leading to the arrival of the Darkness and the ensuing Collapse.
Not only that, we start to get a pretty clear image of what life was like immediately following the Collapse. Humanity was almost driven to extinction, and the people left alive after this apocalypse soon wished they were dead. The Traveler âdefeatedâ the Darkness but in the process put itself into something similar to an emergency reboot mode. It deployed the Ghosts, who resurrected people who could, as the Speaker put it, âwield its Light as a weapon,â but the first of these âRisenâ were nothing short of horrific. They used their Ghostsâ regeneration and resurrection powers to become regional warlords, subjugating what few mortal people remained, draining the desolate wastes of what few resources they had, and basically sealing the deal on the âDark Ageâ brought on by the Collapse. It wasnât until the advent of the Iron Lords that these warlords were defeated and the âage of Guardiansâ could begin, but even the Iron Lords did some pretty heinous shit â like use a whole town of mortals as bait to lure in a band of warlords on the run.
But when it comes to creating a mythical reality, the Speaker has his formula down pat. Donât get too bogged down with details, paint the conflict in stark good vs. evil, literal âLight vs. Darknessâ broad strokes, and mythologize the actions of Guardians (but most importantly, our Guardian). And oh, what fodder for mythology we are.
By the end of the first campaign, weâre the hero who severed the connection between the Hive, the Vex and the Traveler and tore out the heart of the Black Garden. By the end of The Taken King, weâve slain a god-king. In the Rise of Iron expansion, we stop the spread of a virulent nanoparticle with murderous intent called SIVA in its tracks, using nothing but our fists. In Destiny 2, we become the Hero of the Red War, the one who put an end to a Vex plot to sterilize all worlds, and who killed a Hive Worm God. We avenge our fallen Hunter Vanguard, we kill a Taken Ahamkara. We are the hub on which the spokes of history are turning.
In terms of video game power fantasies, I really truly canât imagine a better-feeling one. Itâs basically pure uncut dopamine being transmitted directly to the pleasure centers of the brain, one Herculean feat at a time. And if we were the only Guardian, if we were not part of a larger world, if everything around us was in a vacuum, I donât know if I would be writing this article. But Bungie has been very clear about wanting to make a world where our actions do materially affect our surroundings. As such, we are essentially a walking propaganda tool for the Consensus, a pseudo-democratic government over the Last City, consisting of faction leaders, the Vanguard and the (now-presumed-dead, hasnât been replaced) Speaker.
The Consensus wants badly to declare the advent of the New Golden Age, a time in which Humanity can finally emerge from under the shadow of the Traveler to pick up where it left off prior to the Collapse. The problem we supposedly face is the never-ending onslaught of Enemies. Four alien species showed up on our doorstep after the Collapse, all seeking to finish us off (according to the Speaker): the Fallen, the Cabal, the Hive/Taken, and the Vex.
Of the four-ish races of enemy, only one can said to be truly, deeply âevilâ in the sense the Speaker intends: the Hive and Taken, led by Taken King Oryx and his sisters Sivu Arath and Savathun, the only force in the galaxy more fascist than the Guardians. The Vex are a race of machines whose only focus is on making more of themselves, a threat similar to SIVA. The other two alien forces, the Fallen and the Cabal, are certainly antagonistic toward Guardians but our initial reasons for fighting them are, frankly, butt-ass stupid. Basically, we fight them because theyâre there. They have the audacity to land on planets that âbelong to usâ and scavenge resources from them. Until the Red Legion showed up on Earth, we basically only ever fought Cabal on Mars, and thereâs really no reason as to why.
The Fallen, or Eliksni, on the other hand, end up coming off more as the tragic victims of our flippantly rampant genocidaire practices than actual âenemies.â Theyâre probably the weakest alien species we come up against. Their backstory involves them living in peace under the Traveler before their entire society was caught up in a Collapse-like âWhirlwindâ and destroyed. Rather than give them Guardians, like it did with us, the Traveler instead just up and peaced out, leaving the Eliksni for dead against the maelstrom of the Darkness. The surviving âFallenâ got in their skiffs and desperately chased the Traveler across the heavens, stratifying the remnants of their society into âhousesâ and developing religious devotion to machines like Servitors in the process.
They tried to take the Traveler back at the Battle of the Five Fronts and Twilight Gap, and lost. Their armies were shattered, and weâve been nonchalantly killing them en masse ever since. They are the âparasitesâ our Guardian must exterminate, along with the Hive, Cabal, and Vex. When we make friends with, or even simply allies with, a Fallen (like Variks the Loyal, Mithrax the Forsaken, or the Spider), it is made clear almost immediately that this 100 percent doesnât change the relationship we have with the Fallen as a group. Variks is absolutely subservient to Mara Sov and the Awoken. Mithrax wants to create an Eliksni House that bows down to Guardians and Humanity for being âbetter stewardsâ of the Traveler than the Eliksni was. The Spider makes it clear that he only wants to grow his crime syndicate, but that we can help him out if we want. Never once does the Vanguard or the Consensus reach out to these allies and try to broker peace. And in-game, we simply donât have an option but to fire on and kill Eliksni in droves. Kill or be âkilled,â right?
When it comes to Humanity itself, while we never get a chance to actually leave the Tower and walk through the streets of the Last City, there are at least hints as to the deep class stratification at work here. You canât get much more on-the-nose than an ivory tower of immortal beings overlooking an enclosed human race. Guardians atop humanity, the Speaker above the Vanguard over the Consensus over the people, and you, the very fulcrum on which history pivots, functionally over everything else. But in the mythical reality of this game, itâs really the Traveler Ăźber Alles, and humanity underneath the Traveler has become a wonderful, diverse melting pot without class, without fear. An ideal state where the walls keep Darkness at bay and humanity can discover the joys of tonkotsu ramen yet again.
A Light Story Vs. Lore Steeped in Darkness
Destiny has a reputation, unfairly earned, for being an okay game with a bad story, or at best a nonexistent one. The story isnât really all that bad, itâs just poorly implemented up front, and I think my willingness to engage with the gameâs world to the extent that I have is a testament to how powerful and evocative some of the beats in Destinyâs writing truly are. If we dissect the game we can separate the writing of the âstoryâ from the writing of the âlore,â and in watching the plot develop over the past few years, we can see a gradual unification of these two areas start to occur.
This is helped greatly by third-party resources like Ishtar Collective, and by mechanical decisions Bungie made in D2Y2. Adding the lore back into the game with Forsaken was a good idea; choosing to fully integrate the lore into the world starting with Season of the Forge was a great one.
A side-effect of this lore-plot unification is a dismantling-in-real-time of some of the gameâs most beloved and widely-spread legends, like the legend of Shin Malphur and Dredgen Yor. Even our personal legend is challenged in this way, and itâs a really neat way that Bungie writers new and old are critically engaging with their work. But it also really throws into stark relief some of the issues Iâve laid out in this article so far.
Take, for example, the lore book âStolen Intelligence.â
Presented to us as intercepted secret Vanguard transmissions, âStolen Intelligenceâ shows us exactly what the Vanguard really thinks of our actions, and what their goals really are. It was part of Season of the Drifter, which overall had a âtrust no oneâ vibe to it, but some of the entries here are BLEAK, yâall.
Hereâs an excerpt from the first entry, titled âOutliers.â
âFallen armed forces continue to fall back from active fronts across Terra. Factions of House Dusk remain active in the European Dead Zone. Throughout the rest of the globe, refugee attack incidents have dropped by more than 70 percent since the conclusion of the Red War â largely attributable to depressed Fallen and human populations rather than any significant change in interspecies relations.
[âŚ]
âThe recent trending emergence of so-called âcrime syndicatesâ (cf. report #004-FALLEN-SIV) is emblematic of the continuing destructuralization of Fallen society. Likely an artifact of multi-generational colonization of human strongholds, this agent believes that because these syndicates have no relation to indigenous Fallen culture, young Fallen are appropriating and imitating human mythology in absence of a strong cultural heritage of their own.
[âŚ]
âVIP #3987, another former confederate of the Awoken, is a lesser-known personality known as Mithrax. Scattered field reports suggest that like #1121, #3987 styles himself a Kell of the so-called âHouse Light,â an otherwise unknown House apparently founded by #3987 himself. We have secondhand accounts that Mithrax has engaged in allied operations with Guardians in the field, though we have not as yet been able to corroborate these accounts with any degree of veracity. This agent is inclined to treat these reports with a healthy degree of skepticism until otherwise confirmed, as they may be propaganda from Fallen sympathizers in the Old Russian and Red War Guardian cohorts. We have requested intelligence records from the Awoken which may further clarify the matter.
âIn addition, whatever the findings of said intelligence records may be, it should be stressed that one or two sympathetic outliers cannot be relied upon to erase the wrongs of past centuries, nor should their good-faith efforts to correct the sins of their forbears be taken as sufficient symbolic reparation.
[âŚ]
âWe have come too far to pull our punches now.â
Bungie. Destiny 2: Forsaken â Season of the Drifter. Lore Book: Stolen Intelligence. Outliers. Activision Entertainment, 2019.
Hereâs another piece of âStolen Intelligence,â about our relationship with Cabal Emperor Calus:
âRelated to the above, #3801âs aggressive propaganda campaign appears to have been successful. Despite #3801âs recent inactivity, sentiment polls captured in the Tower at regular intervals over the last several months indicate that he has successfully swayed a significant percentage of the Red War cohort to believe that he may be a potential ally. Given our history with the Cabal as well as the events of the Red War itself, this is shocking and perhaps attributable to a case of mass traumatic bonding.
âIt is my strong recommendation that the Vanguard pursue a reeducation curriculum before #3801 invites any Guardians of the City to defect to his service, a possibility which we have documented in multiple previous reports.â
Bungie. Destiny 2: Forsaken â Season of the Drifter. Lore Book: Stolen Intelligence. Passivity. Activision Entertainment, 2019.
Other entries detail the efforts of the Vanguard from keeping ostensible âconspiracy theoriesâ from being published in the Cryptarchyâs journals; show the apparent oddity of mortal-Guardian âintegrated neighborhoods;â and discuss the ongoing surveillance of the Drifter, a rogue Lightbearer who has survived since the early Dark Ages and who uses Darkness-aligned technology to run a PVEVP game called âGambitâ.
There are many other stories like these, scattered throughout the lore. Stories of Cryptarchy students being banished for making fun of New Monarchyâs leaders, of Guardians messing with Hive technology being burned alive and killed fully by the Praxic Order for their crimes of experimentation. Stories like these wouldnât happen â couldnât happen! â to our Guardian, because theyâre too important, but are seemingly everyday occurrences to less consequential members of this society. In the real world, weâd call that an increasingly oppressive police state. In Destiny 2, itâs just flavor text.
There was a degree of narrative complexity added to Season of the Drifter that hadnât been in the game prior. The entire season was essentially boiled down to âwhich side are you on, the Drifterâs or the Vanguardâs,â and in our path to make a choice, we heard from various bit players in our world. The Drifter told us his story in greater detail than perhaps we needed (and how much of it is true is debatable), but his story is also the story of a less morally-pure Guardian class. Everyone from the warlords to the Iron Lords did heinous shit to humanity while the Drifter watched, and it hardened him. The Praxic Warlock Aunor goes all in on her adherence to the Cityâs propaganda and ideology, trying to show us how untrustworthy the Drifter is. She ends up revealing more of her orderâs goals than perhaps was wise.
This narrative complexity is nice, but it still betrays the game in a fundamental way. We now have the documents. We know what Guardians are actually about, and how theyâre not exactly shining beacons of unwavering good like the Speaker would have had us believe. Regardless of declining Fallen activity, of a shift in Fallen culture, of actual living Fallen who want to ally with Guardians, the Vanguard is still adamantly pursuing âextirpation,â which is a fancy way of saying genocide (Iâm not kidding, it literally means âroot out and destroy completelyâ). We know the Vanguard and the Praxic Order have a hard-on for exile, reeducation and information suppression.
On top of everything, the narrative complexity was not met with any kind of mechanical complexity. Even with proof that the Vanguard wants to kill every Eliksni in the system, conscientious objectors donât get to opt out. The narrative path that forks between the Drifter and Aunor converges again by the end of the quest. The âconspiracy theoristâ that has been trying to publish paper after paper detailing exactly how the Nine worked with Dominus Ghaul to sneak his fleet into City airspace undetected was proven right by lore WE FIND IN THE GAME, but that doesnât change our combat relationship with the Cabal remnants anywhere in the system, and homeboy still gets his papers rejected.
Ikora and Zavala, our remaining Vanguard members, insist repeatedly that Guardians are not a warfighting force, that the Vanguard and the Consensus is not an authoritarian organization. But everything we do says otherwise.
âA peace born from violence is no peace at all.â
Guardians do not get to choose their paths in the world of Destiny 2. The paths laid out before them lead to a life of warfare, of pain, of endless murder. Ostensibly, they are agents of good, trying to beat back the forces of evil, but if you look too close you see that really theyâre just a bunch of indiscriminate killers with a mandate from the Orb God. Desperate to get out from under the heels of warlords, the Guardians created a fascist society, and adding insult to injury they pretend itâs a democratic, free one. Killing the Fallen is genocide, but you can literally never stop killing them because the game wonât let you. The only right way to play at that point is to turn off your console and go outside.
Destiny 2 isnât the only video game to fall into this trap. As Nic Reuben said in the follow-up piece to his first story on how Destiny 2 is fascist, âIâm not saying Destiny is propaganda, just reliant on some of the same narrative tricks that make propaganda so powerful. At the same time, I donât think that itâs too much of a stretch to say that games like Call of Duty make certain assumptions about what is justifiable, righteous slaughter and what is terrorism. Replace modern military hardware with future tech, replace terrorists with alien races that have traits synonymous with cartoon portrayals of traditionally marginalized social groups, and youâre effectively playing through the worst aspects of Call of Duty with a new coat of a paint.â
There is one glimmer of hope in the game. One sliver of lore that gives us pause and helps make the game bearable in its current state. It comes in the form of Lady Efrideet, former Iron Banner handler, youngest member of the Iron Lords, and a Guardian in self-exile from the City, the Vanguard, and its fascist dogma.
Lady Efrideet is one of the most fearsome Hunters in the Destiny universe. She is known as one of the best marksmen, if not the best one. She is impossibly strong, having once thrown Lord Saladin bodily off a mountain into a Fallen Spider Walker, destroying it. And she is also one of the only named pacifist Guardians who isnât a member of the Cryptarchy. Her story is the story of the fall of the Iron Lords, as well as the beginning of the SIVA crisis, many years before our Guardianâs rise is documented.
But it isnât SIVA or the Iron Lords that weâre interested in. Instead, we know that after SIVA was sealed away, Efrideet snuck away from Earth. She saw the deaths of everyone she knew and her will to fight was shattered. If this was the result of fighting for the Traveler, she didnât want any part in it. So she took to the stars. In doing so, she ended up in the far reaches of the solar system, beyond even where we currently roam. It turns out, a small enclave of other Lightbearers, hesitant or unwilling to use their powers to kill, had also fled to this part of the system and had established a colony. Itâs there that Efrideet resides, and itâs there Iâd like to go.
Unfortunately, our Guardian is too âimportantâ to the vast tidal forces at work in the Destiny universe for us to be able to leave for the outer reaches whenever we want. Because we are the hub on which the wheel of history turns, and there is no escaping that now, if ever we could. We are death, the flattening of a complex and intricate universe into one of simple shapes, the sword logic in a human/Awoken/Exo body. We are needed for the plans of the Nine/Mara Sov/Hive Queen Savathun to come to fruition. When or if the Darkness ever does come back, we will be the force that faces it and, win or lose, shape our future afterward.
Sometimes itâs nice having a video game place your character on a linear track. Games like Half-Life or Titanfall present to us simple choices in otherwise-complex story environments: progress, or die. Our characters are not immortal, but they have help from the technologies around us, are tenacious, are resourceful, are quick to adapt to changing situations. In Destiny, we simply exist. We canât truly die. Even when it comes to the rules of the game, our immense âparacausalityâ causes us to shrug Darkness Zones off as mere inconveniences where other Guardians have died their final deaths. Because we are necessary. The Vanguard and Consensus need us to justify their horrific fascist policies. The great forces at work in the background need us to work as a pawn. Even Bungie itself needs us, powerful, trapped beings with a sense of right and wrong but no agency to actually act on those ethics, to continue its game.
I havenât preordered Shadowkeep yet. For once Iâm glad weâre not focusing on the Fallen or the Cabal. Going to the Moon means weâll pretty much just be dealing with Hive, to say nothing of the unreal Nightmares weâre supposed to face. But Iâm still undecided as to whether I even want to order Shadowkeep in the first place. If Lady Efrideet can go to the edge of known space and live peacefully with other pacifist Guardians, maybe I can put my controller down and step away, once and for all. It would be nice to have the extra space on my Xbox Oneâs hard drive. Other games exist to be played, and having the time and energy to do so would help me here, with No Escape.
But even then. Iâm not expressing agency as a Guardian, but rather as the person who controls you, Guardian. While I go off to play other games, you sit and wait in stasis. Even if I donât play, there are a million iterations of you willing to commit genocide daily for cheap rewards (shoutouts to the sixtieth Edge Transit drop in my inventory this month alone). Sure, itâs just a game. But this is what having a dynamic world means in practice. There are consequences to your actions. There always have been.
There is no reason why Humanity couldnât share the Travelerâs gifts with, at the very least, the Eliksni. There is no reason why we couldnât just ignore the Cabal in a state of mutually assured destruction, given how small a faction the Red Legion was relative to the Cabal armyâs full size. Of the two remaining enemies, the Vex are less evil than they are simply a thing that wants the universe to be like it, and thatâs threatening to diverse life throughout the universe, not just Humanity. The Hive/Taken are the true enemies in the game, but even they are directed, pawn-like, by their Worm Gods.
There is, likewise, no reason why the Risen had to organize in the fascist context they did. They could have created a society in which everyone could come and go freely, where ideas and actions could be given and received absent interference, where a true âgolden ageâ could have sprung up naturally simply by living together harmoniously and using the Light the Traveler gave them to create, rather than destroy.
But thatâs not how this story shakes out.
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So dare I ask what the nightmare in detail is regarding Brexit right now?
@tollers-and-jack said: Iâm asking for the rantâŚ
@rhymeswithtessa said:Â Iâm a big fan of your rants gimme your thoughts on brexit
@onlymorelove said:Â Ahem. I am interested in your rant. If you feel like sharing. đ
Ahaha wow. Apparently this is something the people really want to hear about. Disclaimer, just remember that you asked for this, and that this is, as Captain Holt would say, a trigger for me. So if this periodically devolves into incoherent screaming/application of capital letters and exclamation marks, and what have you, just know that.
So⌠I wrote these posts soon after Brexit in 2016 explaining what a spectacularly stupid idea it was even then. If I said anything optimistic in those posts, in a sort of grasping-at-straws-maybe-this-will-work sort of flailing way, please disregard it. We have had empirical evidence of how this played out. Spoiler alert: it failed. It failed so comprehensively on every possible level that it seems almost ludicrous for a supposedly modern political system, but this is 2019, the world is dogshit, and we are all retreating into our little late-capitalism xenophobia bubbles with our right-wing strongmen and our populist rhetoric and the UK is now a global laughingstock. Which believe me, the ex-British Empire richly deserves, especially given the part that anti-immigration paranoia played in this whole debacle, but also, I live here and really would Rather Not.
I do not even know how to sum up the ridiculousness of the past few months, where â almost at the end of the two-year period of triggering Article 50, with just a very short amount of time to the original exit date (29 March 2019) â the UK finally managed to secure a withdrawal deal. Mind you, it was a shit deal that both sides hated, but by golly, It Made Brexit Happen, and since the Theresa May-bot has only been able to repeat over and over that she will Make Brexit Happen, there you have it. Not surprisingly, it proceeded to be comprehensively defeated in Parliament by the largest majority ever seen since World War II. It then was subject to surface-level makeovers and cosmetic tinkering about the backstop in Northern Ireland (since among many other things, the ardent Brexiteers forget that oh yeah we share a land border with an EU country and peace in Ireland is kind of a thing that should be paid attention to). The DUP (Democratic Unionist Party) of Northern Ireland, whose 10 MPs prop up the minority Tory government, absolutely hated it and would not support it, since it would effectively introduce different regulations for NI than the rest of the UK and thus jeopardise the, you know, United Kingdom. Plus it would require the EUâs assent to end the arrangement, and also we canât have that. Because reasons.
The deal was then thumpingly defeated for a second time, people got worried because uhhhh arenât we supposed to leave the EU in like a week, Parliament had to institute emergency measures and hold a series of votes on Brexit alternatives, those also got defeated and May would not even commit to honouring the will of the House, 6 million people signed a petition asking for Article 50 to be revoked and the Brexit process cancelled (the biggest in parliamentary history) and got ignored. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage led a pathetic procession of 200 diehard Leavers against literally 1 million people in London calling for a new referendum, the deal got defeated for a third time after they had to do all kinds of fancy-dancing to get it back for yet another vote, they got the EU to agree to a crunch extension to 12 April, and now that that is three days away with absolutely no consensus in sight, have sent May back to Europe to beg Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron to extend the deadline to 30 June. They actually had to pass a bill (by one vote) forcing her to do this in order to avoid a no-deal Brexit. The EU is justifiably exasperated with this utter, unbelievable incompetence, the fact that the hard right wing of the Tory party pulled this absurdly irresponsible jackshit without any clue how to do it, and the way the UK still thinks it can just pick an a la carte deal where weâre great and the EU sucks and blue passports and blah blah Great Britain is Great!!! And there has been absolutely no collective awareness from either major party that maybe, just maybe, trying to undo a legal and political and cultural alignment that has existed since at least 1973 when we were a founding member of this project, in two years, with no idea how, to please a xenophobic lying campaign, WAS A STUPID FUCKING GODDAMN IDEA!!!!!!!!!!!!
(we pause while the blogger breathes and drinks heavily)
Anyway, that is the short version of Nobody Still Knows What The Fuck Is Going to Happen. Technically if we stayed in the bloc past 22 May, weâd have to hold elections to the European Parliament, which bitch bitch whine whine, the Brexiteers donât want to do. Maybe we think weâre entitled to more special treatment (no scratch that, we definitely do) because we canât sort our heads from our asses and have been so wildly and bogglingly arrogant and incompetent that it would almost be funny if peopleâs lives and livelihoods and futures werenât at stake. And we have the goddamn European Research Group (aka the hard Brexit wing) yapping about how no deal wouldnât be that bad and we should just take it on the chin because Blah Blah Blitz Spirit, Nationalism Patriotism Our Freedom From The Tyrannical EU. (Sidenote, if someone just punches Jacob Rees-Mogg in the elitist Little Britain face, you donât know where I was, God I hate him so much.) Every single business, manufacturer, industry, finance, medicine, food, education, you name it outfit has been warning that no, actually, no deal would be catastrophic and the UK is not remotely prepared for it. To the point we have the military on standby to deliver basic goods if it happens??! How. How is this acceptable??!?!? I donât understand??!?!
(And the Brexiteers who are like âthis is Britain letâs all just hunt hares and grow food in our back gardens,â which, yes, is something I heard actually said, are out of touch to a truly stupendous degree. Yes Iâm sure that a modern first-world country wants to resort to subsistence farming to feed its 66 million people. Do they. Even. Hear Themselves. Racism is a hell of a drug, my friends! And if you want to be like âoh no itâs not about racism/anti-immigrant sentiment, itâs about the economy,â letâs just say that the newsreader covering a Brexit march said that heâd never seen so many white people in one place and was forced to apologize, because racist white people donât like it being pointed out to them that they are racist white people. That tells you a lot. And the Leave campaign has been convicted multiple times for breaking electoral law and just flat-out Lying to the public, so the people who voted Leave thinking they were in fact getting a better economic deal were deceived outright and have indeed often expressed regret that they were so wildly and deliberately deluded. So anyway. Fun!)
I cannot emphasise enough the sheer, staggering arrogance and delusion of the people who proposed this project and then forced it through, because the British public has believed throughout its entire history that itâs better than the whole world (see again: imperial nostalgia and Oh No The Foreigners Are Coming and etc) and has been fed for a good 25 years on this point on a lot of bullshit stories about how terrible and Liberal and Anti-British the EU is, because the British popular press is a flaming dumpster fire (you think Fox News is bad, and it is, but so many of the tabloids are basically Fox News UK). So the Brits feel as if theyâve been so unfairly repressed by the EU and need to Take Back Control (once again, there is a very long history of this rhetoric of the English being supposedly attacked and repressed by foreigners, dating back to the idea of the âNorman Yokeâ resulting from the Conquest, which became a big deal in the 19th century â I am a historian, I can pull receipts for days on this). Once again, they think they can just do whatever they want, the EU is the bad guy for not giving it to them, that we should set ourselves on fire and jump out the window rather than sit at the table like grownups with the rest of Europe, and just take our ball and go home and yet still think we are entitled to preferential treatment.
I justâŚ. I donât even. I DO NOT EVEN. I seriously lack the words.Â
So we may get another rolling series of short-term extensions, we may not, nobody can come to any agreement on what should be done, May promised to resign to get the deal through, the deal did not get through, the whole setup is so unsustainable that it feels like a general election is an inevitability, and the obvious solution would be another referendum to see if the people even still goddamn want this. But the Brexiteers, for all they bluster about upholding the will of the people to leave, resist this with all their might (what are you fucking afraid of? If youâre so confident that youâre still the majority, you should WANT another referendum to confirm it, but youâre cowards and you know youâd lose and youâre tied to this stick of dynamite for Ideology Reasons, god damn it). The message has been always that We Must Deliver Brexit and This Is What The People Want, while the people are breaking records saying that no, actually, weâd like another say, because everyone has now seen that this is an absurd shitshow that cannot be accomplished (and ONCE AGAIN WAS NEVER! FEASIBLE! IN THE FUCKING FIRST PLACE!!!!) and it hey, actually was not a bad idea to be in the EU.Â
This is again, the alignment of the entire post-WWII political and legal world. It confers countless benefits, freedom from tariffs, the single market, a customs union, visa-free travel, no roaming charges, the right to live and work in 27 other countries, etc. But because the ex-British Empire (which really wishes it was still the British Empire) has its fragile racist panties in a bunch about other people coming to live here (when as ever, the problem isnât immigrants, itâs austerity budgets and the Tories absolutely gutting government and NHS funding and social programmes and thinking that the solution to knife crime is to punish teachers for not noticing their students getting into it), they have decided this is actually the best course of action. Because we donât want those Non British People telling us what to do. Ew gross.
As people have said, itâs like trading a gourmet three course meal for a bag of crisps and feeling self-satisfied about it, because boy we sure showed them. It has been bungled to a degree truly stupefying to everyone who isnât a marching Brexiteer ideologue, Labour haveâŚ. really not inspired any confidence whatsoever that theyâd be able to handle it better (since they have wildly see-sawed between what they will and wonât support, if theyâd revoke Article 50 or support a new peopleâs vote or so on) and the Prime Minister has failed on an utterly fundamental degree to build cross-party consensus or engage with other European leaders or display any ability to consider alternatives. The Tories have truly felt that they can ram this through without any reference to anyone or anything else, and fuck consequences, I guess. The British economy has already lost approximately ÂŁ66 billion as a result of Brexit uncertainty and loses more every day, every major firm is moving its headquarters to somewhere they can take advantage of EU law, this will leave us poorer, more isolated, less secure, with fewer options, and generally a worse deal in every imaginable way, and yet, because again, racism and xenophobia is a hell of a drug, there are still some factions who feel like yes, this is absolutely what we should do.Â
It is truly a slow motion car crash of nightmares, itâs completely avoidable and yet nobody has the backbone to do that, Parliament and the PM have completely broken down, nobody is listening to the British people for whom they are supposedly doing this, and once again, the British Empire absolutely 100% deserves this. But as someone who lives here and would actually kind of like to get a job here, Jesus Christ. Jesus. Christ. JESUS. CHRIST.
#politics for ts#brexit for ts#did i say everything#i'm not even sure i did#god#long post#romancelvr#ask
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Ghosts of Christmas: OL Edition
Merry Christmas, everyone! Samta passed over us this year, but Cait delivered some Twitter blocks/lumps of coal to long-time fans.Â
Regardless of which man you think sheâs really with, she blocked a fan for wishing her, her co-star, and the cat they both cuddle with, a Merry Christmas.
Cait is not a happy person for a number of reasons.Â
The show sheâs on isnât what it used to be. She missed the opportunity to grab an exec producer position before she got stuck acting in a season with several problematic storylines that go against her social-justice beliefs.Â
Fans and critics praised the show when she was willing to do nude scenes and are complaining that it is chaste and lacks passion since she asked not to do them. She wonders if this decision is hurting the show.
She is the lone OL person singled out for GG recognition and sheâs wondering how the hell that happened when the competition is especially tough this year. She knows people are questioning it. The thought of winning is upsetting rather than exciting.
A core group of fans still donât believe sheâs really engaged, despite her repeated insistence that she IS and NOT to Sam Heughan.Â
She is contractually obligated to keep acting and promoting a show that she doesnât like and wouldnât watch if she wasnât on it. She wouldnât read the books if she didnât have to because theyâre ridiculous and sappy. The author is completely off-putting and she has to tolerate her for the sake of production.
Her own network used her, her co-star, and the chemistry between them to sell the show and entertain fans between seasons so they could avoid âspoilersâ even though the storylines come from 20 year old books, and the writers changed very little of them.Â
The network would rather sell her hot, beefcake co-star than her so she has to share stories about her private life to get press on the night of her 3rd GG nomination, the same night that women in show business are wearing black to unite int the #metoo movement.
Her time off from filming the show is limited so sheâs cannot take all the film opportunities sheâs offered. She grabbed a role in a Matt Damon/Christian Bale film and a voice over role in a Netflix project, but she doesnât feel comfortable sharing about them either because theyâre not as big as she hoped, or sheâs mourning the better opportunities she couldnât take because of her obligations to OL.
She was forced to play up the chemistry she had with her co-star and disrespect her real-life love to promote the show. She cannot be excited about her engagement publicly because she doesnât want to be talking about it in the first place.Â
Or she has to hide that she and her co-star are together (and the fruits of their relationship) to comply with a no-frat clause, keep him the object of fantasy, and be considered a âserious actressâ to the general public. She looks at Kerri Russell and Matthew Rhys and is horrified that she let some asshole men manipulate her into thinking people wouldnât take her seriously if she were in a relationship with Sam (âCate Blanchett didnât date any of her co-stars.â).Her longtime friend and PA is helping her and Sam hide by being her public fiancee. She sees how people donât take him seriously and that his physical appearance has changed since the engagement announcement. She feels guilty for putting him in this position, one he cannot abandon (like one of Samâs fake g/f) because he needs the job, and his absence would cause a stir because of his public role.
The strain of all this makes her reluctant to deal with fans. She cancels cons and withdraws from SM interaction unless it is necessary. She is sad and disappointed to see that support is down for her WCC t-shirt campaign and the issues sheâs passionate about donât reach as many fans. They seem to prefer Sam.
The stress of all this has made her feel much older than her years. She knows thereâs a video on YouTube of her making fun of Nicole Kidman for getting âwork doneâ but she gets work done, too and hopes no one notices.
Sheâs dreading having to make a public appearance at the GG next week, and going back to work on S5 in February.
She wishes OL would end as soon as possible, but it was renewed for two more seasons. An earlier end would be a relief, but also evidence that she couldnât do her job well.Â
Did I miss anything?
TL;DR Cait is a Scrooge for a number of reasons. Rather than deal with them, sheâs taking her unhappiness out on fans.
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well. that was it.
**spoilers for prompocalypse part 2**
Y'all this is it. The end-end. The last recap, at least for Fantasy High.
I honestly could have gotten this up yesterday but I wanted to give myself a hot sec before it was really over.Â
But, no way out but through. Letâs get to it.Â
We start back up right where we left off with no break in between. Cast still freaking, Brennan still gaping.Â
âWhat the Fuck.â âBrennan 2019
Anyway, Kristen once again appears in corn heaven and sheâs very not chill about it. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. On the plus side, she runs into Doreen in heaven who is young and hot again (which Iâm sure Fig would appreciate knowing) and also apologizes for her traumatizing speech to Adaine during her death.
Helio playing beer pong. I wonder if that was always a facet of his personality or if Brennan just decided to yes-and all of Allyâs suggestions of him being a frat bro.
The angels being like, âPlease be nice to God. Heâs our dad,â was kinda adorable.Â
âWhy are you dressed like a weird stripper?â/âItâs too hot in here. Heâs the sun!â
So while the gang has been living out Breakfast Club + Stranger Things, Aguefort has been Weekend and Bernieâs-ing Heaven apparently. I want to say wild, but tbh thatâs pretty on brand for him. The wild part is that he was able to knock out GOD. Like, how even?
Aguefort tells Kristen that Sol is one god of many and she says, âCool, I always thought that,â as if this is new information but, living in a D&D world, shouldnât she definitively know that already? Like, the gods in fantasy worlds are pretty blatant about letting their presence be known and there are clerics/paladins who arenât Heleoic but still have powers.Â
OK I have a bone to pick with Ms. Kristen Applebees. You get a chance to talk to the primordial source of all divine power and magic and you (1) ask who youâre allowed to bone and (2) create a TERRIBLE god. Just truly TRASH. She created a reaction gif god. Itâs not even a physical representation of the concept. Like, I thought she meant something like Yass from Wreck it Ralph 2 but no. Just a literal Yes! Like, you can trash talk Helio when you come up with something better, girl. Also, wild that you can justâŚwalk into a room and do that. Like you have to knock out Sol first but still. Wild.
âYouâve created a new deity and already youâre fed up with it. I would say thatâs par for the course.â
I low key thought Kristen was going to get the option to deify herself. I think because I had just rewatched The Gamers: Dorkness Rising and that figures in to the plot. But, thinking about it, she wouldnât have gone for that I donât think.
Aguefort flipping out at Kristen saying that friendship is the greatest magic of all, and rightfully so. Thatâs BS.
Since when does Kristen have dog tags?
Anyway, as we all suspected, the chronomancy line from episode 1 wasnât a random line of dialogue, it was a chekhovâs gun.Â
I mentioned this in an earlier post. Brennan didnât seem too concerned that the party was wiping and I think this is why. I think he had two paths for this fight to take. In one, Riz successfully rolled for police and like 6 helpful NPCs plus his mom show up. Thatâs enough to beat the dragon without dying and Aguefort shows up having Die Hard-ed his way out of heaven. In the other, Kristen dies, goes to heaven, and basically that same series of events happens. Chronomancy saves the day. I think he was shocked because the roll dovetailed so perfectly with the story beat.Â
âIs Arthur Aguefort black? Hell yes. My brotha.â Gonna be honest, I basically had that same reaction when they showed his character portrait in ep 1.
Kristen and Arthur jump back into the battle and Arthur gets possessed by Mr. Gibbons. I guess heâs just been hanging around as a ghost this whole time? Because this seems to lend credence to the theory that thatâs who possessed Fig in the arcade but didnât we see him go to the afterlife (which, I have a question about that too later). But I feel like that must have been Brennanâs way of sidelining him for the fight so they didnât have like a level 20 wizard making it too easy.
âOh, and Jawbone!â Murph loses it.Â
Jawbone stuck in Goldenhoardâs mouth like that meme of the dog smiling, stuck in a fence.
Gorthalax is like, âI donât feel great sleeping next to this dude.â Fig meanwhile is all, âI wanna sleep between his legs.â She says this at least twice.Â
So everyone just have a freaking picnic and takes a nap in the middle of this fight. Canât say I saw that coming exactly.
Fabian tries to stab Dayne, who is already dead, during the time stop.
âWhat the fuck do they teach you at this school?â
âAre you talking about the time thing orââ/âYeah Gorgug! The time thing!.â
âWeâre gonna kill this motherfucker, sweetie.â
I love Sklonda so much.
Jawbone is a salad guy.
OK so I know people were shipping Sklonda and Gilear and it was like, âBut how would that work with the height difference?â so Brennan, the absolute madman, decides to pair her with the GIANT DEMON???
Adaine about Gilear: Cucked again.
Everyone treating the DRAGON like a JUNGLE GYM.
âItâs basically Jeb Bushâs Campaign.â Ally, with the fury of 1000 suns: EXCUSE ME?
âI bless, [Riz], your mom, and [Fabian.] Are you the only ones with vendettas?â
âI think weâre all pretty blessed.â Gorgug/Zac is so good.
Adaine, who has all the wisdom and intelligence points of the entire party at the moment: You need to stay safe because the reason that we died is that you died.Â
The shot that shows everyone on the giant dragon and then the foreground fuzzes out and shows Adaine a safe distance away in the background is hilarious.Â
Ice guitar pick. Sweet.
Yeah, Siobhan really shoulda got healing potions out of her jacket, not the freaking wand. Hilarious. The only thing helpful about that was it hinted he was vulnerable to frost damage which they could have guessed.Â
I wonder what Brennan had in his notes about the freaking city in Adaineâs jacket. Itâs wild they werenât more curious about that.
I low key loved Emily buffing Murph the whole fight.
âHell yes Sklonda!â
Ragh: Giving a gay pride speech./Adaine, who doesnât want to get knocked out again: STAB HIM IN THE DICK DUDE.
And, speaking of, OWWW.
Fig shapeshifting to Dayne. The hell Emily!
And another eye gouging.
Fabian is incapable of doing a single thing without doing some ridiculous parkour stunt first.Â
Kristen,not twenty minutes after Riz said it would be crazy to go inside the dragon: Can I climb inside the dragonâs mouth? (Adaine: KRISTEN!)
Gorgug saving Skonda and Riz going, âThanks for saving my mom!â from across the room.
Brennan is narrating the epic final battle and what cool thing everyone is doing and Kristen is just being digested.Â
Riz was my second choice for the coup de grace until it turned out that Kal ate his dad and then he was my first choice. Riz!!!!
What a badass moment for him. The image of him casting a shadow on the wall is super dope.
Everyone flipping off Kal as he dies.
Riz and Sklonda are making dragon casserole bay-bee!Â
MURPH FAILS WITH BARDIC INSPIRATION AND BLESS AT A 12 DC.
Aguefort. What a chaos monster.
âI fucked that bird! It is my paramour!â
Hold up, hold up, hold up. Did Kristenâs freaking Yes god kick Sol out of his own freaking heaven? WHAT?
I love that what Adaine got out of this experience was, âWait, so my powers are bullshit?â
âEverything in this world is bullshit, Ms. Abernant.â Preach.
âSo is the sun just a yes now?â/âMaybe.â
Literally 6 cop NPCs. Like they all seem like theyâre morons but Iâm sure it would have helped!
âFuck it dude, itâs worth asking.â
âAre you my dad?â/âI was about to ask you the very same thing.â/âWhat?â
âTAKE HIS EYE. CUT OUT HIS EYE. YOU WANT ME TO BITE IT OUT FOR YOU?â
Brennan really likes the word bud.
Freak the fuck out all the time and just fuck things up.Â
They got their ice cream later! And Adaine says thank you to Basrar, even though heâs not even there.
Adaine as the 7 freed maidens (way to go Sandra-Lynn) are re-killing Goldenhoard: Us and them are the only good students.
Gorgugâs nat20! What a WILD time for the dice to give that to him.
âYou gotta ask. I ask everyone if theyâre my dad.â
Gorgugâs dad (Gorbag) has just as low an intelligence score as his son. Itâs hilarious but also sweet.
THE VULTURE
I thought that Digby and WIlma just found Gorgug in the woods? Maybe Iâm not remembering right. I would guess that was their version of the stork story but they straight up told him what docking was soâŚ
âDo any other federal agents want to step to Arthur Aguefort on the grounds of his school?â
The Aguefort way!
I wonder what Sam has to say about her former BFF selling her out like that and also getting murdered.
It seems like Gorgug was put on the guest list for hell by accident (his relieved reaction was adorable) but I thought that was orc heaven?
Interesting Gorthalax still has pull in hell when heâs a high school coach now.
BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL
How did he watch the fight? Do they have pay per view in hell?
âI doubt Cathilda will end up here.â
Bill is just such a maniac. I love him so much. I wanna say I canât believe that killing the devil dril tweet was serious but I can. Itâs Bill.
Bill and Fabian having a casual convo in HELL.
Oh my God, Fabianâs mom stabbed Billâs eye out and he proposed on the spot. No wonder Fabian is so into Aelwen. Itâs in his DNA.
What a dope ship.
I canât believe Emily tricked me into thinking that her end speech wasnât in service to some nonsense. She held it together for so long but I should have known bc itâs EMILY.
âYoung lady, I have no idea who that is and Iâm telling you right now yes. I will make whoever that person is vice principal.â
Adaine: UhhhhâŚ.we should find Zayn.
Aww, Zaynâs parents were also terrible elves.Â
Unwanted Wingwoman Kristen Applebees
lol at Adaine casting Ray of Sickness on everyone suggesting she date ghost Zayne. Great callbacks to the early eps all around.Â
Donât @ me, but Adaine w/ a ghost boyfriend who also had terrible elf parents might be kinda sick.
âTomorrow, weâre gonna start training you on how to actually swordfight.â Uhhh, I kinda love Fabianâs mom now?
She literally hasnât been sober in 15 years. Icon.
âI didnât know you spoke Tornado.â
Siobhanâs late season tendency to just flip things/people off is hilarious.
Wild that Adaineâs parents just legit DITCHED her that hard and she was like, f âem. Clean break.
âSheâs helping me spread something.â
Gorgug has so many friends now!!!!!
Lol, Fabianâs whole journey has just been about becoming captain of the Owlbears.
Riz got his PI License.Â
Lou and Fabian immediately being so mad at the idea of his mom (Hallariel?) getting with Gilear. Emily/Fig having an equal but opposite reaction.Â
âMama, I will kill this man.â/âIâll kill you first, itâs not up to you.â
Sandra-Lynn gets with Jawbone. Did Brennan just roll to pair up everyone?
Also, the group is almost all related or quasi-related now. Gorthalax got with Sklonda which makes Fig and Riz sorta siblings. Gilear got with Hallariel making Fig and Fabian sorta siblings. Jawbone sorta adopted Adaine and he got with Sandra-Lynn, again making Adaine kinda siblings with Fig. Plus Fig claimed Gorgug as a sibling a lot of eps ago and if Kristen sticks with Tracker then sheâll marry into this mess. Crazy!
Fabian totally dipping on the sequel hook because heâs gonna be busy trying to break Aelwen out of jail.
Iâve been keeping up with the fanart but there was some in here I hadnât seen and it was super dope!
Iâm so glad we had the after epilogue-epilogue. It was a very nice send-off.
Adaine using her oracle authority to get Zayn back into school! Sheâs so good.Â
Lol and she helped Basrar so he can grant other wishes. I love that this is the NPC that she decided she was going all in for.
Riz and Adaine join AV club! Idk why I love that detail.
Riz cutting off Adaineâs very good question about her jacket w/ his PI talk.
âTheyâre our rivals.â/âInto it.â
âIs âThe Ballâ not your real name?â I love Fabian so much.
Zac doing Gorgugâs excited crack-y teenage voice when heâs just concentrating on that and not playing the game is so adorable. Heâs just so sweet and enthusiastic and a good kid.
âGuess that tin flower worked, huh?â I cry.
I love that Gorgugâs happy ending is basically just that he has friends now. And thatâs literally all he wanted starting out.Â
âFIG! GO TO BARD CLASS!â
Aww, Ragh and Gorgug are friends now.
I knew it! I at some point pitched the idea of Ragh ending up with one of the AV guys so he would be w/ someone who had enough intelligence to keep him from dying and Iâm 90% sure itâs somewhere on my blog but I canât be bothered to find it right now. But anyway, heâs in the lgbt club w/ Ragh and Kristen so itâs def a possibility!Â
âMy bitch sister? Donât you fucking dare.â (lol, if that happens then the group will be even more related)
Fabian considering recruiting the Cubbys for his rescue attempt of Aelwen.
âGilear!â I love that Fig loves Gilear now but still calls him by his first name.
And that was Fantasy High!Â
I have at least two more posts in the hopper: And epilogue retrospective type deal and also the official JQ37 ranking of all the adults in Fantasy High.
Thanks for sticking with me this far you guys. I canât draw to save my life and I donât really do fic so this is the one little way I can contribute to this thing I love so much.Â
Itâs been real and Iâll see you all soon for an epilogue because, no surprise, I have more things to say.Â
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