#i love a lot of the gen 1 characters but there were only a few of the kids i really liked oof 😅

[tallestgrace]

What is your opinion on HTTYD: THW?

This is honestly such a hard question for me omg, because my opinions on it are very mixed.

Long story short, it’s a good movie, but an insanely lackluster How to Train Your Dragon movie.

Short story long, I’ll give the reasons why I didn’t like it so much;

1. Characters were acting OOC

This has been complained about far and wide, and it mainly applies to Toothless, but he was so incredibly out of character. They took a majestic, sassy, and loyal dragon and randomly made his some slobbery love-crazed dragon, who now has almost no regards for his best friend of over six years? Yeah, no, that is poor, sloppy writing if I’ve ever seen it.

Leads me into my next point,

2. Toothless and the Light Fury’s development

It’s not plausible, it wasn’t smooth, and it made me so mad. I understand that this is a children’s movie, yadayadayada, and that they are dragons, but for me their ‘development’ went way too fast. Like what, this movie takes place over the span of a few weeks? And Luna, who is a very untrusting dragon, who should’ve taken a lot more time to bond with Toothless— because of his associations with humans— is basically like, “Oh yeah, let’s mate for life (probably the dragons equivalent of marriage).” Then there’s Toothless, who seems to forget everything he ever did with Hiccup for six years and now wants to run off with the Light Fury.

3. That damn epilogue

Couldn’t stand it. For me, I think that the directors handled this horribly. One, they should’ve brought all of the Dragon Riders, not just Hiccup and Astrid. Two— and don’t be head me for this— get Zephyr and Nuffink out of there. I’M SORRY 😭!! If it makes you feel better, I also think they should’ve ditched the Light Fury and Toothless’ hatchlings as well?

I just think that it only should’ve been them, one, because it makes more sense, and two, (let me use my Gen Z slang real quick) It gave me a huge ick? To me it kind of felt like the directors were saying,

“See guys? Even though Toothless and Hiccup were best friends for six years, and they were devastated to leave each other, they got married and had children, and that’s all you need to be satisfied and happy!! Trust! There are no other goals in life but those!!! 😽👉👈”

There’s more reasons, but these are my main three 🤷‍♀️ Tbh, I could go for hours, about The Hidden World AND that poopoo looking live-action movie 😔

No pressure tags for people’s thoughts that I want to hear on this take— @blueorchid1707 (🦐🦐🦐)@ap0calypticdrag0n (I AM SO SORRY TYLER, I WILL MESSAGE YOU TO EXPLAIN MY GHOSTING BUT POSTING 😭🙏) @thereweredragonshere @booksandfairytales

[grasshopperdoingdogpaddle]

Respectfully, I completely disagree with your interpretation of Omi and Fung's relationship. And I mean respectfully. Complete /gen. It's just interesting how two people can walk away from a show seeing such different things.

I never picked up on any hostility like you talk about. (In my brain, I am legit confused why you think Fung dislikes Omi. Lol!)

In my viewing I saw 1.) Fung holding Omi to a higher standard of behavior because he's been at the temple longer and shouldn't need a relearn certain things while the others are learning some of these expectations for the first time. and 2.) Fung refusing to play favorites while in charge of training. I always got strong "I'm not Mom at school." vibes.

Which could easily be a reaction to the other monks judging Fung for potentially being too soft on and emotionally invested in their choosen one because he raised him. Like A:TLAB, only instead of saying "Get bent!" like Monk Gyatso, Fung said "If I keep strict boundaries, can I still be his teacher?" But that's just conjecture.

Anyways, I just felt like throwing my two cents at you, cause clearly we had very different experiences with these characters.

No disrespect taken. When I watched growing up, I had also figured that Omi and Master Fung were close and had a father-son bond, especially off-screen. Master Fung always came off as stoic to me, so I assumed he was the type to love more subtly and quietly. After all, Omi was an orphan who grew up at the temple, so his master would basically be his dad in my mind!

I was surprised to come back to the series and see that there's so little warmth and so much tension in the relatively few interactions we actually do get between Master Fung and Omi.

Omi's got this really strong, really unrequited affection for Master Fung. While Master Fung seems surprisingly consistent in just... whatever this is. Even in their private moments.

When it's not that, it's both trying to be professional and dispassionate.

Master Fung grows a lot in the background over the course of the series. In particular, you can tell he regretted the tone with which he handled Raimundo at the beginning of the series. Master Fung actively takes the steps to be a more open person to them over time.

He strives to become better, in response to the others needing him to be better.

Master Fung has quite a few moment where he lets down his walls and shows a soft side.

It's simply never directed at Omi, from what we see.

He does break past the stoicism for Omi quite often, but what slips out in those moments is anger or annoyance.

I was so surprised that a relationship I had assumed was probably a pretty close father-son bond as a kid is a cold and stone-walled master-and-least-favorite-student thing in hindsight! It is definitely fascinating and explains a lot about Omi, though.

[scourgeofmyownbrain]

Ironhide, Ironhide, Ironhide. It's the Ironhide Height Chart, everyone! Ironhide did not show up as much as I thought he would, Ratchet too. There's only like 8 universes where he shows up (in a meaningful way).

Quick Disclaimer, if any of the images look weird, it's because I had to stitch a few separate images together to create a full body shot of the character. And Yes, I am aware the TFO ones look stupid, these characters show up in background shots or for like 3 seconds tops. I didn't have anything else.

Here are links to my Bumblebee Chart, my Optimus Chart, my Megatron Chart, my Shockwave Chart, and my Ratchet Chart. For future reference, all these charts will be filed under my "Transformers Height Charts" tag and my "aka the adventures of a..." tag.

Master Post

Explanations and Sources below the cut.

RID 2001 - ~13 feet (TFWiki, lucky me, this one was easy)

Unicron Trilogy Energon - ~13 feet (No source, I got this number by assuming Optimus's height between Energon and Cybertron was the same and then comparing Ironhide to Optimus. For the uneducated, the Unicron Trilogy has given each of its 3 seasons separate names and 3 separate art styles.)

Gen 1 - ~16 feet (TFWiki, No additional comments)

WFCT - ~16 feet (No Source, but this design is identical to Gen 1 so who am I to complicate things.)

One V1 - ~16 feet (Pre-cog.*deep breath* Okay, so this movie doesn't have any actual numbers, aside for some bullshit ones from a Walmart Promotional. I've been using the Knightverse Optimus number as a baseline since these were at one point said to be vaugly canon to each other. And the Bumblebee-Optimus scaling is the same. I got this number by comparing Ironhide to Optimus. Idk man, this movie has made me develop a twitch.)

Animated - (Animated has no actual numbers, but the lovely @phoenix-inanis has provided a frankly astounding resource with their own calculations for the heights of all the TFA characters. Go look at it, it's wonderful -> https://phoenix-inanis.notion.site/TFA-Height-Chart-f6ad2960ca8c4c5b859ee4958723aaa4?pvs=4.)

One V2 - ~18 feet (Post-cog. Again, no numbers, plus I can't actually find a full body picture of this form. My method of "knocking off or adding two feet" has been pretty accurate so far (I got Bumblebee right), so I'm just going to keep doing it. God, my head hurts...)

Bayverse V1 - 22 feet (TFWiki, mr bay is my favorite he gives me heights for free)

Bayverse V2 - 24 feet (TFWIki, yes, for some reason, Ironhide just grew a few feet in between the second and third movies. This happens a lot)

Aligned Cont. WF/FOC - ~25 feet (So, I had nothing, and I had to look into the trailers for the game to get fucking anything. I was able to get a comparison between him and Optimus, and I was able to guestimate, but it was not perfect, and I probably need to actually play the games to get a better comparison. Also, once more, ALC coming in with the steel chair and snatching first place for being freakishly tall. why does this keep happening?)

Front and back layers separated for your viewing.

[ladyhoneydee]

AO3 Wrapped 2024

As a notorious fanfiction fanatic, once I learned of the wondrous AO3 Wrapped earlier this year, I just knew I would have to run my stats! It's taken me a few extra days since December 31, but here they are!

I'll be putting the cool basic graphics first! For people who are curious about more detailed tag breakdowns (more relationships, genres, fun niche tropes, etc) of what I read, look under the cut!

Here is the link to make an AO3 Wrapped of your own! My friend @minimum-underdrive spent hours improving upon the lovely coding made by soupbanana on github, and we would love for as many people to use it as possible!

Graphic Breakdown:

Slide 1: Pretty sure I audibly gasped and maybe yelled when I saw that word count for the first time! Yep, I sure do read a lot of fic, lmao. Ironically, I didn't actually read Delicious in Wilds in 2024—I was briefly checking something in it. But since the AO3 Wrapped code uses everything that appears in your history, here it is! My actual longest fic read in 2024 was Rage Against the Calamity by BCWill (@bugcatcherwill), which is currently ongoing at 626,657 words.

Slide 2: To quote my friend @louwhose: "wow I am so surprised that Dee, great reader of all things loz, got those fandoms and that character", lmfao. The order is also not surprising given which LoZ game duology has the most fics written for them!

Slide 3: Zelink...zelink...then—WAH! Hehe, sorry to jumpscare you with a Parks & Recreation ship. I had a...phase...after rewatching much of the show this summer. And for anyone curious, the AO3 Wrapped code decides your top authors not by how many words you've read by one author, but by how many fics you've read by one author. As a result, all of my top authors write lots of oneshots: Mistress_Lrigtar (@mistresslrigtar), Fyreflare (@wouldyoustilllovemeifiwasawyrm, and ZeldaElmo (@zeldaelmo) are pillars for zelink, spitecentral (@marinsawakening) wrote a lot of gen oneshots this year, and nocturne-of-forest (@nocturne-of-forest) is the current mvp for midlink oneshots.

Slide 4: This slide—with one very notable exception—was not too surprising to me! Fluff, angst, and hurt/comfort are genres and therefore get tagged for lots of different premises. Now Selectively Mute Link, on the other hand, was not something I expected to appear in my top 4 AO3 tags, and did in fact make me cackle upon reading it. I was somewhat surprised to see that my top rating was GA, as I would have expected T, but I'm certainly content with it, lol.

Detailed Breakdown!

The coding behind this basic graphic is wonderful and concise. However, I wanted to learn much more about my reading habits than just this brief takeaway could show me. Fortunately, as long as you (or a friend of yours, in my case, since I know zilch about coding) know how to run specific commands, almost every detail you want to know about your reading stats is findable.

As such, instead of just my number one fella Link, here are my...

Top Characters

Link (Legend of Zelda): 1307

Zelda (Legend of Zelda): 1071

Impa (Legend of Zelda): 196

Ganondorf (Legend of Zelda): 136

Purah (Legend of Zelda): 130

Midna (Legend of Zelda): 129

Mipha (Legend of Zelda): 121

Urbosa (Legend of Zelda): 119

King Rhoam Bosphoramus Hyrule: 114

Revali (Legend of Zelda): 101

My top characters definitely reinforce the fact that BotW/TotK were my top games within the LoZ structure! Everyone but Midna appears in one or both of those games. However, Link and Zelda (who appear in many games and AUs) have an almost ridiculous lead on everyone else, and the characters who only appear in BotW/TotK all share very similar numbers (between 101 and 130). As a result, I'd surmise that several hundred of the fics contributing to Link and Zelda's numbers come from other LoZ games or AUs that aren't game-specific, and several hundred are BotW/TotK fics (or BotW/TotK-specific AUs) that focus specifically or solely on zelink.

Top Relationships (both romantic and platonic)

Link/Zelda (Legend of Zelda): 840

Link & Zelda (Legend of Zelda): 287

Leslie Knope/Ben Wyatt: 87

Link/Midna (Legend of Zelda): 60

Midna/Zelda (Legend of Zelda): 29

Impa & Zelda (Legend of Zelda): 28

Link & Midna (Legend of Zelda): 27

Link/Sheik (Legend of Zelda): 27

Aryll & Link (Legend of Zelda): 20

Link & Mipha (Legend of Zelda): 19

More big differences here! Zelink is clearly my OTP, and you can tell that I click on a big proportion of everything written for them (1880 zelink fics were posted or updated in 2024), and that they are the most popular ship in the LoZ archive. Midlink is a substantial jump down, but since I also read a very high proportion of all posted midlink fics (113 fics posted in 2024), this is largely due to the paucity of the ship within the archive. Same and worse for Midna/Zelda, which being f/f (on AO3, a notably m/m site, and in the primarily f/m LoZ fandom) has unsurprisingly low numbers.

Fun fact: Link/Tetra is my 14th place ship at 16 fics, which means that if you count all possible incarnations of Zelda, my grand total of romantic zelink and zelink-adjacent works is 883!

Now onto Tags. I knew immediately that I would want to split tags into more categories, since AO3's system of "Additional Tags" containing everything from genres to warnings to author musings means that everything under the sun is lumped indiscriminately. As a result, any fun niche tag (enemies to lovers, for example) gets buried under the mass of Fluff and Angst that almost every AO3 user would have populating their top stats (especially if they read as widely as I do). As a result, I have split my top 50 tags (minus tags like "zelink", "Other Additional Tags to Be Added, and spoiler tags), into three kinds: Genre, Setting, and Fun!

Top Genre Tags

Fluff: 324

Angst: 286

Hurt/Comfort: 226

Romance: 130

Fluff and Angst: 105

Emotional Hurt/Comfort: 97

Angst with a Happy Ending: 89

Character Study: 73

Domestic Fluff: 67

Light Angst: 67

Smut: 66

Humor: 64

Friendship: 60

Angst and Hurt/Comfort: 36

Fluff and Smut: 33

Tooth-Rotting Fluff: 33

Romantic Fluff: 29

Found Family: 27

Fluff and Humor: 27

Slice of Life: 27

Hurt No Comfort: 26

Being an FFN transplant to AO3 at heart, I decided Genre tags were those similar to FFN's genre tagging system. I decided to keep in specific genres, like "Tooth-Rotting Fluff" or "Light Angst", to show the deviations within wider genres, and the kinds of angst or fluff that I'm most likely to read. When all tags are lumped together, the overall lumpable categories are Fluff: 618, Angst: 609, Hurt/Comfort: 359, Romance: 226, Smut: 99, Humor: 91. With that math done, I interestingly am almost balanced when it comes to fluff and angst! Personally I'm quite pleased to see Character Study as #5 on the list when you lump the overalls—I do love a good character study, and they never get as much attention as shipfic, so I'm happy to have contributed!

Top Setting Tags

Post-Canon: 111

Alternate Universe - Modern Setting: 97

Canon Compliant: 97

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence: 96

Pre-Calamity (Legend of Zelda): 85

Alternate Universe: 52

Post-Breath of the Wild: 44

Post-Game: Tears of the Kingdom (Legend of Zelda): 41

Alternate Universe - College/University: 33

Post-Calamity Ganon: 29

Post-Twilight Princess: 27

Setting tags refer to when or where a fic takes place. Of course, most fics, especially oneshots, that fall within a certain game will not include tags about that, and not every fic set Pre-Calamity or Post-Canon will tag such. Not all Alternate Universes will tag the plain Alternate Universe tag, and may skip straight to "Sci-Fi AU" or such. However, I think this is still pretty interesting! Most of what I read revolves around canon, and I'm basically just as likely to read things that are explicitly canon-compliant as are specifically canon-divergent. Yet, unsurprisingly to anyone that knows me, AUs form a strong contingency of settings! Modern AU being so high makes me laugh, but if you combine all 3 AU tags that appear on this list, I have 182 AU works--meaning that around 10% of everything I read this year was some flavor of AU!

Top Relationship Trope Tags

Slow Burn: 123

Established Relationship: 96

Mutual Pining: 77

Pining: 71

Friends to Lovers: 59

Love Confessions: 38

Enemies to Lovers: 31

Idiots in Love: 31

Eventual Romance: 29

Pre-Relationship: 28

First Time: 28

When I tell you I chortled at there being two separate pining tags, and them being right next to each other! It heartens me that the pining is more often explicitly requited, hehe. Otherwise, I think this is really interesting! Despite most romance works in both fanfiction and published media being about getting together (which is reflected here), my number of Established Relationship fics is also quite high. Which honestly makes sense, because I love a good established relationship where characters have to face an issue together. When it comes to the Big Three of romance tropes—Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, and Idiots in Love—I think these fell right where they belong. Friends to Lovers is my preference of these, Enemies to Lovers is common among BotW fics, and Idiots in Love is my special little guy.

Top Fun Tags (including romantic tropes)

Selectively Mute Link (Legend of Zelda): 133

Slow Burn: 123

Established Relationship: 96

Talking Link (Legend of Zelda): 94

Zelda (Legend of Zelda) Needs A Hug: 85

Link (Legend of Zelda) Needs a Hug: 79

Mutual Pining: 77

Pining: 71

Link (Legend of Zelda) Uses Sign Language: 70

Oral Sex: 68

Grief/Mourning: 64

First Kiss: 60

POV Zelda (Legend of Zelda): 59

Friends to Lovers: 59

Canon-Typical Violence: 58

Vaginal Sex: 52

Mute Link (Legend of Zelda): 43

Happy Ending: 40

Cunnilingus: 40

Falling In Love: 39

Vaginal Fingering: 39

Love Confessions: 38

POV Link (Legend of Zelda): 36

Blood and Injury: 33

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD: 33

Explicit Sexual Content: 33

Masturbation: 32

Enemies to Lovers: 31

Idiots in Love: 31

Eventual Smut: 30

Trauma: 30

Nightmares: 30

Trans Link (Legend of Zelda): 30

Eventual Romance: 29

Pre-Relationship: 28

First Time: 28

Worldbuilding: 27

Kissing: 27

Anal Sex: 26

My favorite highlights from this:

Four of these tags (a total of 340 tags!) are about how Link communicates, and that's not even including the tag I myself tend to use for a non-talking Link (Nonverbal Link)! I love the diversity in how he communicates and how we as writers convey that fact, lol.

Apparently, I've read more Oral Sex fics (68) than Smut fics (66). I love what that says about how people tag.

I literally have only 4 more fics in my biggest smut-related category (68, Oral Sex) than I do for Grief/Mourning (64). Guess I'm nearly as sad as I am horny??

Zelda needs more hugs than Link, despite appearing less often in fics. I wonder if it's because of BotW, and many Pre-Calamity fics would be more likely to hug Zelda than Link?

There are more POV: Zelda tags than POV: Link tags, even though Link is in 300 more fics than Zelda overall. I have a feeling that's because Link is seen as the default, so people are less likely to tag for his POV specifically.

Nightmares and Trauma having the same value is hilarious to me. Did it just so happen that all fics with Nightmares also tagged for Trauma and they are the exact same fics? Were some fics with Nightmares lacking Trauma, but the math ended up matching regardless?

Trans Link ended up on there!

Worldbuilding ended up on there! Hell yes!

Bonus Info

I forgot to save this data and I've already read too many fics in 2025 to run it again, but my Rating stats for 2024 went General Audiences (711) -> Teen (in the 600s) -> Explicit (~275) -> Mature (~158) -> Not Rated (<50)!

Three of my top 50 tags were related to events! Zelink Week 2024: 40, Whumptober 2024: 37, Zelinktines: 37

In conclusion...I read a LOT this year! I already knew that, but it's one thing to know it, and one thing to see your data all written out. And now that I have this information, I'll be able to compare 2024 to 2025 when December rolls around once again!

If you want to find your own AO3 Wrapped stats, once again, here is the link! Unfortunately I can provide no advice on how to get the program to provide more tag details the way I got into for my Detailed Breakdown, but if enough people want to find that information and can't figure it out, my friend and I might post some sort of guide!

If you got this far, thanks for reading—I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into my LoZ fanfiction obsession!

[real-total-drama-takes]

Sighs so I’m sure a lot of people here saw that tweet that blew up about a TD movie “supposedly” being talked about by the production crew. I really don’t think this is going to happen and I wish everyone would shut up about it because a movie just doesn’t really work with TD’s format but what’s really pissing me off rn is how everyone is saying if this movie happens it’s for sure gonna be about gen 1. I into another fight with a genwunner about this and need to share some points I made:

So like, think about it: logistically, gen 1 coming back, at least not without pissing off some of the same fans who act like any TD content that doesn’t involve gen 1 isn’t feasible. First off, there’s the voice actors. Some of the gen 1 characters VAs no longer live in Canada and legally wouldn’t be allowed to be hired again to work with Fresh so they’d have to be replaced. Not to mention there’s several POC characters who have white VAs; you’re going to piss people off no matter what happens there (yes, I am on the side that POC characters shouldn’t be played by white VAs, but yeah there’s some people who very strongly disagree with that). Given how much genwunners whined about Chris’s VA change, I have no doubt they’d whine here too.

Second, a lot of genwunners complain that the reboot lacks the “edgy humor” of gen 1. The thing is, too much of the humor from gen 1 just wouldn’t fly today. I tried rewatching Action during the summer and literally could only get about 5 episodes in before quitting because of how disgusted I was by the constant misogynistic jokes. There’s definitely misogyny in the reboot too, but at least Chase and Ripper aren’t spewing it out literally every five fucking seconds like Duncan. There’s just so many jokes in gen 1 where the punchline is racism, homophobia or the characters being sexualized. That last one could be fixed if they visibly aged up the characters and stated that they’re all adults now, but given how many people have said the complaint that Owen wasn’t aged up for his reboot cameo is “ridiculous” I don’t think the genwunner crowd would be too fond of that idea. A highly profitable studio like WB isn’t going to approve a show with problematic humor without seriously watering it down before release because it’s 2024 and they know their studio releasing content like that marketed at children could get them labeled as problematic and lead to a drop in profits.

Speaking of which, a gen 1 movie probably wouldn’t do too well at the box office. Total drama is marketed at ages 8-16, the majority of whom were not alive during 2007-2010 when the first three seasons were airing. Given how successful the reboot was in both the US and UK, it’s safe to say that it’s very likely the reboot was popular with its target audience. When all the kids who watched the reboot hear about the movie, they’re gonna be really confused about why a total drama movie doesn’t have the total drama characters they’re familiar with in it. I know there’s plenty of people who grew up with gen 1 who are still active TD fans, but not a lot of adults care that much about shows they watched as kids and haven’t thought about in years. I’m an adult who loves cartoons (and there’s nothing wrong with that) but there’s def quite a few shows from my childhood that I haven’t thought about in a long time because I grew out of them and I certainly wouldn’t be opening my wallet to buy a movie ticket or streaming service subscription should I hear a movie was made about one of said shows. Again, there are plenty of people who grew up with the show who still care, but I don’t think the majority of the people who watched TD as kids who are well into their 20s now are gonna be all that excited about a movie. I could definitely be proven wrong on this one, don’t get me wrong, but still

As I said before I don’t think a TD movie is actually gonna happen and that tweet was just a rumor/misinformation, but if a TD movie does happen it needs to be about the reboot cast. It just doesn’t make sense for it to be about a cast that isn’t up to date with the standards of what is socially acceptable for children’s shows in the 2020s.

-🐈

[iateyourvitalorgans]

The change in attitudes towards our mounts in Star Stable Online

'About a magical bond between a girl and her horse!' now it's more like, 'Got to collect them all, they are all so cute!' (fair tho).

As a point of reference, I played back when Silverglade had walls and you couldn't jump in it — and all horses were gen 1, and also, obviously, the whole thing with the nostalgic sound tracks. Anyways, I feel like back then we were a lot more connected to our horses. Maybe it's because some of the breeds kind of looked too similar to the starters back then, but I remember even (a few years later for me) in gen 2 we didn't have that big of a 'consumerism culture' (although players were buying more than before, fair tho the horses were cuuUUUTEe) like we do with today's gen 3? Back then, I just remember having a lot of options to customise our character and choose a horse that matches the sport we're interested in — or maybe to find a breed that meant a lot personally. But, we'd stick to it, and it'd be like "my horse" or "my [horse's name]" instead of "this horse". Is it just me? I don't know. At least I felt that shift in attitude in myself towards my horses in the game. I wouldn't even refer to them by the names I had given them, just the breed and coat colour. I didn't cherish memories of quests or other player interactions with them or involve them with social dynamics — or even look back at what stage at the game I was with them... It was a constant 'getting bored and needing a new toy', only really logging on initially because I miss the quests, and the community like: the disco at Fort Pinta, and the picnics and cafés with people and etc... But yeah, then I'd have all of these horses that I had forgotten I even had because they're just rotting in the stable. Taking care of them nowadays is just for horse XP rather than just... love for my cute pixelated horse, you know? With that revelation, I decided to focus on sticking to having two main horses as my mains and pay strict attention to them by putting the rest in turn-out (so that I would see 'my BAAaabIIEeees' instead of 'Voilà, my collection!' if that makes sense??). I put my Jorvik Warmblood (starter horse) who I named Knight on my nearest right side (so I can always think about them and cherish them)... then my main horse Sunshine (who's a Selle Français) and my main pony Snowprince (who's a Welsh Pony). I really hope this technique works out, but I also think that at least being aware is pretty important too.

[aceofwhump]

Hi Ace! How are you? I was going to ask if you have any fic recommendations of 911?

Oh my god yes so many lol. I hope you like Buck whump, gen, 118 family stuff!

Bring me back by Stennerd Summary: It's been months since the tsunami and Buck had been doing just fine. All it took was walking through water to bring it all crashing back.

Kindness: What Connects Us by FandomLife54 Summary: Still off balance, Buck slams his left heel onto the roof, heaving forward to catch the collar of that yellow shirt. And there’s no conscious decision making here. It’s all instinct, and he’s grateful for it. If he’d given his overzealous mind the chance to consider another way, he would have missed his shot. Instead, his arms hurl the boy into the hands of another survivor… And his right foot misses the edge. OR Buck catches Chris before he rolls off the firetruck, and it's him who falls back into the retreating waters of the tsunami. Unconscious and seriously injured, he's unaware that his team has been searching for him, never giving up as the days pass.

Of Bikes and Concussions by datleggy Summary: Buck gets into an accident on his way to work in the morning, and before he can explain why he's late, he gets thoroughly chewed out and the rest of his day goes way downhill from there.

denial's hard, breathing's harder by carefulren Summary: After a water rescue that almost ends badly, Buck comes down with a cold. At least, that's what he keeps telling himself despite getting worse.

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger...Right? by McGeeklover Summary: Four Times we could've seen so much more Buck Whump, Eddie caring and 118 protectiveness and one time it could've been a lot worse.

Radio Silence by madamewriterofwrongs Summary: “Don’t worry, we’re on our way to you.” “No.” His halting voice echoed through the radios gathered around the truck and everyone stopped. Eddie kept running. “The whole quadrant’s unstable. Sweep’s done. It’s not safe.” Bobby was going to have a long talk with him about his self-sacrificing habits. For now, he kept his words calm and authoritative; for both their sakes. “None of that, you just hold still. Are you injured?” There was silence. Around him, the paramedics and firefighters of the 118 waited with bated breath. “Pretty bad.” There was little humor in his voice, though they could hear him trying. “My head. And uh, hahaha,” his laughter came as a gust of air. “I’ve been impaled?”

Safe by MadalineGrace Summary: Arguably, a fire station was one of the safest places to be. Where else could someone be surrounded by powerful rescue equipment, stores of medical supplies, and a dozen highly trained first responders? In the event of an emergency, there were few places Buck would rather be. Maybe his love for the job had clouded his thinking, lulled him into a false sense of security, he mused as he stared at the growing lake of blood beneath him. After today, it was safe to say that that illusion had been shattered…

We Lived Through the Wreck of Our Hearts by soft_satan for autumnchills Summary: When the door to the supply closet burst open, Eddie skidded to a stop only feet away from them, his blood turning ice cold in his veins. A tall, wild eyed man had an arm wrapped around Buck’s neck and a gun pressed to the side of his head

Here Comes the Boom by valix33 Summary: 5 times someone new learns about Buck’s fear of thunderstorms post lightning strike and 1 time everyone is prepared. Canon through 7x05. More character tags will be added with each chapter but trust the entire 118 family will feature here.

[freezing-kaiju]

IT'S TIME FOR THE NEW 12 EPISODE POLL!!!!! WE BEGIN, WE ENTER, WE LOOK ALIVE! E LOOK TO THE PAST! You voted for familiar creators and friend recs i the past, and the friend recs tend towards longer shows so those'll be for when Dirty Pair's done, but for now, let's go with Familiar Creators!!!! SO!!!

NINE! CHOICES!

Canaan, a TYPE-MOON and Kinoko Nasu story as well as a returnee to the poll. A yuri story involving a Middle Eastern mercenary’s quest for revenge and simultaneous effort to protect her beloved friend, a photographer investigating various things in Shanghai.

Akudama Drive, by Too Kyo Games and Kazutaka Kodaka, of Danganronpa fame. A fake crime-doer and a bunch of very real crimers do One Last Big Heist in the cyberpunk future while being hunted down by the government. Previous poll near-winner, I’ve heard it’s fun, tragic, and possibly even based. Comes most highly recommended of these shows.

Chaos Dragon: Sekiryuu Seneki, by Urobuchi, Nasu, the Durarara guy, one of Kamen Rider Blade’s two writers Shou Aikawa, and two of their friends. It’s a TTRPG adventure! where they each play only one character! God, I NEED to see a show where Gen Urobuchi writes ONLY ONE character! Ultimately it’s a story about a small kingdom’s king trying to stop two larger countries from destroying his smaller one, which feels interesting bc it’s rare to get any TTRPG campaign where there is A Protagonist...

Girls’ Last Tour, source material by the shimeji simulation author, Tsukumizu. Cozy adventures through an apocalyptic dying world. I don’t do well with apocalyptic settings, but I love Shimeji Simulation a lot and I’ve heard so many good things about this one that I wanna give it a shot.

Mermaid Forest, by Rumiko Takahashi, of Ranma 1/2 and Urusei Yatsura. Two immortals who ate mermaids travel to find another mermaid in the hopes they can make them mortal once more. One of those classic kinda tales, and I really wanna see a rumic story that’s.....not 150 eps long...

Magical☆Shopping Arcade Abenobashi BY Hideaki Anno, of Shin Kamen Rider, Shin Godzilla, and Shin Ultraman. What if you were isekaied but it was just into a mall. A wacky hyperdimensional mall. The tone seems extremely lolrandomxd, and it’s one of Anno’s few 12 ep works.

RErideD: Derrida, who leaps through time, character designs by Yoshitoshi ABe of serial experiments lain and Haibane Renmei fame. Guy who made robots gets frozen and wakes up to a robot war, oh fuck. Oh fuck, he’s supposed to protect his best friend’s daughter! AAAAAAAA! Disaster!!! I’m not sure whether he leaps through time any more than once. though.

Katanagatari, by NISIOISIN, creator of Bakemonogatari and Medaka Box. What if a swordless swordsman teamed up with an ambitious shogunate villainess to fulfill her scheme of stealing 12 legendary swords. One of them quality straights kinda shows NisioisiN loves making, seems to have a fun power system that I wanna experience. One of the ones I’ve seen around on tumblr that made me wanna get into liveblogging.

Kino’s Journey, scripted by Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 and Perfect Blue writer Murai Sadayuki, a writer I really think deserves more credit. Does crazy good work in adaptations. Nonbinary adventurer and talking bike go through different parables, functioning as observers of different forms of society and different ways of life.

[99corentine]

How To Write Good by Corentine

THE DRAFTING PROCESS, PART 1/2

Hello, people were interested in some writing tips by me so I, uh, sort of kind of cranked out a writing guide in a few hours. I’m not sure if this will be a very comprehensive or helpful guide but let’s give it a try!

⭐ Starting disclaimers: Please remember as with all things that my method is not necessarily the best method, everyone is different and over time you’ll find your own process.

I write romance, so my advice is skewed towards writing that and I’m not sure how helpful it will be for gen fic. I publish fanfic chapter by chapter to AO3 so it’s also skewed to someone doing the same, not someone writing a full novel they want to get published. 

I’m going to be using GOL HAH DOV (GHD) for writing examples because, well, it’s a finished longfic so it’s as good a reference as any, but obviously GHD is not everyone’s cup of tea. I’ll also occasionally reference Tooth for a Tooth (T4T) which apologies is very far from finished, but the Baldur’s Gate 3 fandom is vastly different to the Skyrim one, so it’s useful to cross-compare them.

Also worth bearing in mind: I have been writing fanfiction since I was about 13, and I’m now 33. That’s 20 years of experience. Do you know what I wrote when I was 13? Hot garbage. Writing is a learned skill that, much like playing a musical instrument or learning literally any other craft, you must put time and effort into to improve.

However although ‘practice makes perfect’ is fundamentally true, that’s also kind of lame advice. So here is what I personally do, which may be helpful in figuring out what you want to do. 

STEP ONE: YOU NEED AN IDEA FIRST DUMMY

Think of a fic idea. Probably you have lots of vague ideas. As I’m trying to turn something from a daydream into an actual writing project, I tend to ask myself these questions:

⭐Who is it about?⭐

Pick your pairing, romantic or otherwise. Think about what you like about the character and what traits you want to emphasise in your writing. If you’re writing about fan character x fan character, what makes them go well together? What causes tension between them?

If you’re writing fan character x original character, do remember that your readers are here for the fan character, not for your OC. There is no getting around this, your OC is not what brings people to the fic. GHD’s Chrysanthe was largely intended as a blank slate, quite literally, I made him an amnesiac because the point of the story was Miraak not Chrysanthe. 

Over time I was able to shape him into something more distinctive (softly-spoken, stoic, paladin-like, secret tricksy side only Miraak brings out, gets more dragon-like as the story progresses) but that was a gradual thing. Your readers will hopefully come to love your OC as you do, but it takes time for them to get invested. I’m very grateful that people did come to root for Chrysanthe – but make no mistake, if the story had no Miraak in it, people wouldn’t be reading it. Your OC is always a vehicle for the fan character.

⭐What are the overarching themes of the story?⭐

A cohesive story has a theme that repeats throughout, and picking one early on will let you write with that theme in mind. As an example, the themes of GHD are:

Soulmates / we were destined to meet each other

There’s no-one else like me / you and I are the only real ones here

One’s a hero one’s a villain

Zero to hero / hero becomes progressively more badass

Redemption arc but the villain is never fully redeemed – for GHD this turned into the repetition of Miraak’s theme he’ll never be pure but for you he’ll try and later Chrysanthe’s I love you exactly as you are

Your own themes might be something like best friends who don’t realise they’ve been in love this whole time or can’t live with you can’t live without you. Tropes count towards this too, so something like soulmates, Modern Coffee Shop AU, hanahaki, all of that stuff is a story theme.

⭐What does this fic do that other fics like it don’t?⭐

GOL HAH DOV was sort of easy mode in this regard because there aren’t many fics featuring Miraak at all, so writing anything was already doing something different. Of those existing fics, I wanted to see more where Miraak was evil and scary, and you should be the change you want to see in the world (of fanfic), so I decided to write it myself. I get a lot of comments on Miraak’s personality, so I assume this is mostly what makes GHD stand out!

I’ll use T4T as a contrasting example, because Skyrim is old and Miraak is niche, but Baldur’s Gate 3 is new/popular and Astarion is a fan favourite. That means there’s a veritable sea of fic about him, so what can you write that will stand out from the many, many other fics out there? It doesn’t have to be the only one of its kind or anything, but it does need to have something special about it.

You’ll want to either go for a strong theme or trope (i.e. soulmates, magical spell curse, we’re both monsters), or change the setting (canon divergence, ‘what if X happened instead?’, or even outright alternate universe and a brand new plot). Personally, I choose to follow the source material but go off-script. I gotta say, nothing makes me sadder than seeing plot and dialogue lifted straight from a game with zero changes made to it. That’s a personal preference obviously, but I think if you write a fic it should strive to do something different to the rest.

⭐Do I have enough enthusiasm to finish it?⭐

This is more applicable to longfic, but you really need to be in love with a story to see it through to the end. Be realistic with yourself, how much free time and energy you have – if you start it, do you think you can finish it?

I have a whole planning process (detailed later) and sometimes I start planning out an idea just to realise I don’t really have the enthusiasm to actually write the whole thing. This is fine! Even just planning is still a writing exercise, and it might spark some different ideas.

Once you have your idea, and you’re confident you’re going to actually write it… then for the love of all that is holy, do not share it in detail with anyone. You can pitch an idea to see if people will be interested but if you go into specifics about story events or certain scenes? You basically get the endorphins from having ‘created’ it, only you haven’t actually created it, and now you’ve had the chemical pay-off you probably never will. Keep your ideas to yourself until you’ve actually written them.

STEP TWO: WRITE THAT DOWN

In terms of writing software, I use Scrivener, which is a paid-for software but is not subscription based (I wouldn’t pay continually for software unless I was reliably writing every day, and sometimes I go ages without being in the mood to write). Scriv’s word processor isn’t the most intuitive thing, but I like its organisation features. This is what a work in progress looks like for me:

That’s essentially a folder (the story) containing a bunch of word documents (the chapters). You could break it down even further and have a chapter folder with each document being individual scenes, then stitch it together later - if writing is a daunting process for you, it’s useful to break it down into small, manageable chunks. You can do this in other software obviously, I just find Scrivener the most visually pleasing.

Set up your writing document, and let’s get to planning what we’re actually going to write!

...Apparently tumblr has a word limit I've exceeded, so I'll write the next bit separately. Here's PART TWO.

[starleska]

just finished watching Megamind vs the Doom Syndicate and i have some thoughts!! please do take this with a grain of salt as i'm just one person; i absolutely do not want to rain on anyone's parade!! if this is your favourite movie, don't worry about the gripes of some stranger on the internet 🥰

let's start with the positive!! despite what some people are saying there are things to enjoy about the film, and i think that lies in the fun of Megamind's old crew. although Behemoth looks a little phoned-in and Pierre Pressure was an easy joke, i really enjoyed the designs for Lady Doppler and Lord Nighty-Knight. the scenes they were in with Megamind were definitely the most engaging!! but that's...about where my enjoyment of the film ends. i think the film's biggest sin is the enormous amount of exposition-dumping and telling rather than showing. there were so many times where characters just...stated things about themselves, or spoke aloud why they were feeling the way they are. they're like...character notes that a writer jots down to keep track of emotional journeys. it really breaks the immersion and makes the characters feel mechanical, clunky, and a bit of a hivemind. Megamind and Roxanne in particular feel quite stripped of their original personalities, which is such a shame. then there's drastic reduction of chemistry between Megamind and Roxanne. canonically, this movie only takes place a couple of days after the events of Megamind, but the two are barely affectionate with one another to the point that it's weird. perhaps it was written as them being comfortable with one another, but at times it almost felt like there was dislike between the two of them...especially from Roxanne's side!! Megamind is hardly recognisable compared to his lovestruck counterpart from the first movie, and Roxanne's bold, caring nature seems to have evaporated. it makes it very hard to get invested in their relationship at all 💔 speaking of Roxanne, i find it such an odd choice to make Roxanne have an existential crisis about being dissatisfied with her life just a few days after the events of the previous film...you'd think she'd want to take it easy for a while! i feel this characterisation of Roxanne does her a lot of disservice, and reduces her more to plot functionality. Roxanne doesn't strike me as the kind of woman who'd be starstruck re: some kid's online following and decide she's inadequate by comparison. again, a lot of the things we love Roxanne for were just quite...absent, from this movie. you could predict what she was going to say well ahead of time, because she was just following the beats of the plot 😓 and the time-retcon...isn't it a bit weird that Megamind is a complete Internet n00b? it's one thing for him to be a bit out-of-touch with Gen Z (as he's relatable to us neurotypicals given his alien grasp on certain concepts), but he seems completely baffled by the concept of streaming and followers at all, and this movie takes place in a post-2020 timeframe. it's odd because Megamind is already established as a tech genius in the first movie, and we know he's somewhat affiliated with Internet slang by his use of LOL : ) when texting Roxanne!! perhaps this is a small nitpick that can be explained away, but it seems like a baffling choice and an excuse to write in a trendy character for the kids to relate to 😵 then, moving onto Keiko...she wasn't terrible by any means! but i wish she was more than a social media influencer to get Megamind with the times. if she's Megamind's number 1 fan, surely she would have been his fan while he was a villain...couldn't that have made for an interesting moral dilemma along with the return of the Doom Syndicate: having a child trying to follow in his previously-villainous footsteps? what about Keiko being taken under the wing of the Doom Syndicate after Megamind became a hero? 👀 those are my thoughts for now...i do hope all those talented Megamind fans will build upon these flaws in the movie and create more compelling stories from it 🙏💖

[dynamitesunshine]

Here are thoughts on Ultraman Leo:

I jumped into this series because I saw it was airing on YouTube for its anniversary and thought I could watch it as it airs, because I have an easier time watching stuff like that. I was also, in the middle of picking what series to watch next and watched a bunch of Ultraman and Kamen Rider movies and specials.

So, I watched the first episode and immediately resonated with Gen's character, he's just happy-go-lucky, courageous, and fighting past his trauma. The whole Sports center aspect was fun, and everything was just stuff I enjoyed seeing, so it was really difficult to just catch up with where YouTube had and just watch once a week, lol. So, I kept watching it among of my anime.

This show is like a bunch of different shows as it goes through the season. It starts with the Training Arc, then goes into the Hokkaido Arc, the Ultra Horror Arc, the Japanese Folklore Arc, then is more Ultra Lore, then is the Saucer Creature Arc to finish it.

This show is intense at so many times, in the beginning Gen fights the Kaiju, loses then has to train in some intense or over the top ways by UltraSeven, Dan Moroboshi. Especially the infamous being chased by a Jeep scene, lol.

I was shocked that characters like Tooru and Kaoru were gonna be main characters after their father gets killed in episode 3, thought they were just 1 off kids, like I've seen in other toku shows, but they're main characters, and that helped make the show better when using characters like that for stories.

MAC was probably the worst done defense unit I've seen in Ultraman, because you barely learn about any of these characters besides Dan and Gen, which is all you need actually, lol. Still, they had good support characters like Momoko, the previously mentioned kids, and some of the staff at the Sports Center that Gen worked at too.

It's a very awesome show, the action is great, Gen is one of my all-time favorite Ultras, the action is a lot of fun and there are some crazy episodes. The folklore episodes are intriguing how they merge the stories in with lore of Ultraman Leo. There were quite a few horror episodes that were good, and some disturbing, especially with that clam Saucer creature.

This show is absolutely brutal at times, from the most intense episode of can Ultraman Leo and Astra manage to reforge the Ultra Key and stop the Ultra Planet (as it was called back then) from crashing into the Earth, or the Saucer creature annihilating half the cast.

Ultraman Leo himself did a lot of cool things in battle, like making smoke pipes into Nunchaku, using his mantle, to multiple different techniques he learned in training.

Also, this show has some of the best Kaiju Designs in Ultraman and I love a lot of them here.

I loved Astra, even though he only comes in to help his brother at times, it's still nice; I know he gets way more in recent specials. Still, the little bits we see of him, I enjoyed because he goes out of his way to help out his brother. Would like to have seen him explored more, but the part with the Ultra Key was great with him. Also, Ultraman King is wonderful saving Leo or helping them when they need it, I love his design. Ultraman Jack's episode he returned in was absolutely amazing, one of my favorites of the show, and I want to watch Return of Ultraman now. Love seeing Sevenger too, he's best bot.

I just really loved Ultraman Leo/Gen Ootori a lot, he makes mistakes, but he doesn't let them keep him down and makes up for them. I think that is what I resonated the most with, never let your screw-ups stop you from being a hero. Also, a good support system helps.

One of my favorite Ultraman Series and I definitely recommend it to everyone.

[wesleycrushers]

Hey, I need the lore on the Wil Wheaton national TV fiasco. I'm intrigued.

I apologize for letting this sit in my inbox for a hot minute, being an adult with responsibilities and stuff is stupid 😒 (especially when you have an uncontrolled chronic illness on top of it, but anywho)

my time has finally come

okay I lied just a little because it wasn't technically Wil Wheaton that made fun of me, but you'll get what I mean in a moment

So about ten(ish) years ago, Wil had a short lived series on Syfy called the Wil Wheaton Project and for those unfamiliar, he would basically discuss the geek news of the week (like, I know Gotham was airing at the same time, so he would often talk about the latest episode) and there were sketches and guest stars and things of that nature.

But, let me give you some context on me ten years ago, so I can really paint the picture of how batshit this was for me. So, I would've been around 19, maybe 20, at that time, and I had just watched Next Gen for the first time and instantly fell in love (it was actually the first star trek series I had seen, and it's what got me into it). But, not only did I love the show and characters as a whole, I was OBSESSED with Wesley in particular (and Data, but that's not relevant to this story), and at that point in my life I was so much worse than I am now in the sense that, when I was fixated on a certain character, I was FIXATED. Which made me want to look up what Wil was doing in the present day. (it certainly didn't help that i developed a brief little crush on adult Wil). Like, I bought and read his book, I watched and rewatched every movie of his I could get my hands on (Toy Soldiers and Stand By Me in particular were practically playing on a loop), I would rewatch the Wesley episodes like. It was bad lol

So, when I found out he was going to have a new show on Syfy, ofc I was super thrilled and my ass was SEATED from day one when it first premiered. I would faithfully watch it every single week while live tweeting. But, obviously the only episode I ever missed live ended up being the one where I was mentioned lmao I can't remember exactly why I couldn't watch it right away, it's been ten years lol But, I think I was just out or something so I had my DVR set. Normally I would've just watched it the second I got home, but my Mom really enjoyed it as well so I promised I would save it until the next night so we could watch together. As soon as I said good night to her, I logged onto twitter and. all these random people were tweeting me and retweeting a couple of my tweets and I was like "????" I used twitter a lot back then, but I still like. my following was very modest, and I was only involved in one (1) fandom on there, so things like that did not happen to me. And what's worse, the first few people that tweeted at me didn't really explain why?

BUT THEN. I got to one that I still remember it to this day both because it's when I was sort of clued in to what had happened and also because the tweet itself was kinda funny to me. It said something like "just watched the wil wheaton project and immediately had to run to twitter to see if you're real, I'm so glad you are. Have a good evening!" and that's when the adrenaline kicked in. I saw a few more tweets mention the Wil Wheaton Project so at this point I'm literally shaking lmao and I ran into my Mom's room to show her and to freak out a little so she's like "alright, let's go watch it"

And we're watching it, and everything's normal, Wil's just talking about the nerdy stuff that happened that week and I'm just getting more confused as to what I had to do with this BUT THEN

(as a sidenote, they obviously showed my twitter username, but I'd rather not repeat it here because I started it when I was a very young teenager and I no longer have access to it and I'm sure there's stuff on there from past me that would get me doxxed and killed on the "we piss on the poor" no nuance website)

Anyway, he had this segment with Skeletor where Skeletor would read mean tweets, and since this was the season 1 finale (which, unfortunately, also turned out to be the series finale), Skeletor was reading tweets disparaging the Wil Wheaton Project. AND THEN ALL OF THE SUDDEN, MY TWEET POPS UP ON THE SCREEN BEHIND WIL AS HE SAYS SOMETHING ALONG THE LINES OF, "I happen to know a lot of people like watching the show. For example, [REDACTED] said, 'My Tuesday isn't complete without a new episode of the #WilWProject :)'"

and that's about where I burst into (very excited!) tears lmao my mom had to lovingly shush me because she was trying to hear what was being said but I was too busy crying

So, then Skeletor made comment about how I must be a woman of sophistication before he pulled up another one of my tweets that read, "I love sitting on countertops and I don't know why" and then he said one or two more things making fun of me and my love of sitting on countertops and that was about it lol

But the thing is, those two tweets were not back to back. I was a young millennial on social media, I was posting every damn thought that popped into my head lmao and idk when they started planning out the next week's show and writing the jokes, but there's about a 50% chance that either Wil himself or someone on his team saw some of tweets where I talked about how adorable I thought Wesley was in his uniform 🤦🏻‍♀️ (I like to imagine my absolute nightmare scenario where Wil and maybe a few writers are all sitting around some table and my tweets are just projected onto a screen in the front of the room or something. I don't want to be corrected if that's not what happened, I'd rather just live with that image forever 😂)

Anyway, I can't remember exactly how long it was after that happened, but I believe it was at least a few days, Wil posted on his website that unfortunately, the show had been canceled. Except he titled that particular post with "if you like sitting on countertops..." which was so bittersweet for me. Like, I was obviously super bummed his show hadn't made it but it was so exciting that I wasn't just a blip on his radar, like I was still a part of the running gag! And, as I said, it's been a decade since this happened but I still think of it at least once a year on the anniversary, if not more often, because it was legit one of the top 5 moments of my life lol

I've always hoped that I would get to go to a convention or something and meet him so I could be like "I'm the countertop girl!" but sadly, especially with COVID, that hasn't happened yet. Perhaps someday :)

[game-boy-pocket]

I was curious to see if there were any Tamagotchi related things on tier maker, and there were, unfortunately a lot of them were either too tedious to do ( rank every new Gen 1/2 Shell!! ) or I couldn't play with since I'm still a bit of a Tamagotchi Pleb who's only run a few devices so far or not familiar with connection era stuff. But here's at least something I know, vintage character designs ( I actually wish they included the other vintage era devices but whatever )

So, don't get me wrong, I like most of the characters here. The only reason I put Tamatchi and Tongaritchi on "Don't Like" is because 1. They just stand in place instead of moving around the screen ( which isn't bad on it's own but ) 2. They're teens and I feel like they take forever to evolve and are the most boring stages in the game. I don't like the Japanese secret characters that much, but they're both better than Bill.

Also no hate to Pochitchi, but the cat is SO MUCH BETTER!

Yes I love Babytchi even though it's literally a smiley face, and I rank it higher than the other two "literally a smiley face" tamas for seemingly no reason.

[epicspheal]

hi cami! hope youre doing well! id like to ask.. have you seen that pokemon zensho is now fully available in english? i only found out recently lol. you can find it at mangadex! if you have, what are your thoughts on it?

Hi there @soulsilvers I'm doing well thank you for asking! Yeah, I actually didn't know that they full translated Pokemon Zensho until I got this ask, so thank you for alerting me to this I appreciate it! So of course I had to read it all last night! Link here for anyone who wants to read it! It was so cute honestly. First Pokemon Concierge, now Pokemon Zensho making me cry and I'm here for it honestly. Like you said on discord, it definitely is very rushed at only 9 chapters. I definitely would've loved to see it have a few more chapters to explore more about Red and Blue's friendship (well here called Ash and Gary) and going through the league (I always feel like the elite four part of the Kanto story always seems to get the short end of the stick). Despite it's rushed nature, it does make up for it in being the most true-to-gameverse adaptation. But what I appreciated the most was the details that were added were very grounded. Like the problems the gym leaders were facing felt real. It was cool to see how Giovanni became the way he was because it has been hinted at that he's not always been the ruthless Team Rocket boss but something made him that way. I've grown to like Lt. Surge a lot over the years and I feel like his arc was really wholesome too. Many people criticize Kanto for it not being particularly story driven (which to each their own, some people like story drive gameplay some don't, groups are valid), but to say it's completely devoid of story is false. The theme of Gen 1 besides exploration is relationships. It's why the key driver is the rivalry (and strained friendship) between Red and Blue. The orphan Cubone, Agatha and Oak, even Mewtwo's existence plays on the concept of relations in a subtle way. Zensho takes this concept and runs with it throughout as Red travels through Kanto. Much like Pokespe, Pokemon Zensho does a good job at bringing smaller but notable NPCs into the fold and it was done in a way that was not overbearing (looking at Marvin from SwSh Pokespe taking Hop's spot). It was cool to see the SS Anne captain and Game Warden get some more screentime. Also props for this manga low key making non-binary Bill canon! I know some people who read it may not like this version of Red not being "badass" in that he does earn some of his badges without actually defeating the leaders but I think the way it's handled here was okay. I think part of Red's character is supposed to be how he puts caring for others first despite being so talented at battling and I think it's okay that there are adaptations that don't just fall into him being a legendary battler who sweeps everyone. Even though this is a retelling of Red's story I would say if I'm honest this was really Blue's story. Blue got a lot of focus in this manga and outside of Pokemon Generations we don't really get to see into Blue's mindset. I appreciated as you mentioned on discord, how despite everything it did still focus on the fact that Blue was still Red's friend despite everything. It's not something that's focused on a lot in gen 1 adaptations. And of course the rest of the Oak family gets some shine too. This is probably my favorite portrayal of Oak in that it retains some of his flaws but humanizes him too (although I wish they had devoted some time to his and Agatha's rivalry). And Daisy...even with her limited screen time very much still shone especially with her calling out Professor Oak for his harsh words towards Blue. And then of course the revelation of what happened to Blue and Daisy's parents. Give those kids (and this Professor Oak) a hug. This is definitely my favorite of the four Pokemon manga I've read thus far and if we ever got a short miniseries for the Gen 1 games again I would hope it would take more of the Zensho approach and be game accurate while still expanding on little lore details.

[meetinginsamarra]

20 Questions for Fic Writers

I've been tagged by @totallysilvergirl and @calaisreno TYSM!!

1. How many works do you have on A03?

51 in total

12 "real" fics and 21 ficlets and 18 covers (I didn't know how to embed on AO3 back then)

2. What's your total A03 word count?

271.977

3. What fandoms do you write for?

Sherlock BBC

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

Mutual Attraction , Learn My Scars, The toe that didn´t belong, The embers still glow when I´m sober , Gravity is missing from everything

The last three are in fact a series called Here I Am

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

Of course! Always and quickly. I love comments, they make my day and fill me with happiness for hours. Not kidding!

6. What's the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

None of my fics end angsty. Some of my ficlets might, possibly Time

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

They all end happily.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

There had been a few very weird comments on "Mutual Attraction" that were rude or offensive. Some had been deleted by the cowards who posted them later.

9. Do you write smut?

Yes, I have written porn and enjoyed it. I also write gen and everything in between. Depends on the story.

10. Do you write crossovers?

No, because I define "crossover" as a mix of two existing universes, like Sherlock x Star Trek for example. I have written several AUs though. Alternate Universes with the same characters of my show but placed somewhere else.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

I have been offered three times but declined because I personally am not comfortable with it.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

No.

14. What's your all-time favourite ship?

Johnlock

15. What's the WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

I have this fairy tale AU sitting in my drafts for literal years. 20k written and several attempts to take it up again, it is mostly plotted but just resists being finished. *sigh*

16. What are your writing strengths?

Learning by doing, I guess? I think of myself that I am versatile. Maybe writing movie-like action scenes. I remember that's been said in comments.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

I honestly do not know. (Which is not me saying I can do everything perfectly!! I just try whatever I want.) Finishing the above mentioned fic possibly.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

If it fits the story, why not? I write in English which is not my native language, so I could do German and some French and Italian, too.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Sherlock BBC.

I've actually never written anything before I started with Sherlock fanfic. I got this idea and it grew and I began to write it down just for me so that I would not forget it. Then I thought, why not write it into a fic? I've been reading a lot fanfic already. Over the course of two years (writing on and off) the idea had turned into a 94k fic. I only started posting "Mutual Attraction" when it was completed on AO3.

I still think it's funny because just imagine this. Never wrote a word of fiction before, not even in my native language. Then, first thing I produced is a novel-length fic written directly in English. Still seems surreal to me.

20. Favourite fic you've ever written?

I love all of my babies and will not choose a fave one. There are only faves in categories.

"Mutual Attraction" was my first and longest fic.

"Wretched and Divine" was the one that made me find my dear friend and beta @peageetibbs

Technically, I am most proud of pulling off "Learn My Scars" because it is 38k written under a huge amount of pressure due to daily posting for Whumptober 2022. Five weeks of intense writing madness but very rewarding, too.

AU and plot-twist wise it would be "The 13th Book ".

---------

So many people have done this but I think @shiplocks-of-love @shelleysprometheus @cumbercurlygirl have not been tagged yet. And anybody else who wants to share, please.

[popculturebuffet]

Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes Retrospective Part 1: Breakout (Episodes 1-7) (Comissioned by WeirdKev27)

Assemble all you happy people and welcome to the first of many looks at one of the greatest cartoons in marvel history, an adaptation that honors the source material while streamlining and improving it to create something impressive. One of the best adaptations and one of the last before the MCU was in full force. It's a show unlike any other, it's Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes.

And the timing isn't concidential. While i'm a few months off, this year marks the 60th anniversary of the avengers, the first time the team assembled and hulk was a clown for a bit because the 60s. And since I both hadn't really talked about the Avengers on this blog despite being a massive marvel nerd and because i'd rewatched this very arc a few months back, I was happy to jump on it when Kev suggested this. He won't be sticking around for the rest of the retrospective, but I plan to cover this series on and off for the foreseable future as i've only seen about half of it and hadn't rewatched it in years and it was about damn time I did. And i'm glad I am as this is one of the sharpest shows in marvel history.

For those less familiar Earth's Mightiest heroes was a cartoon that ran for two seasons from 2010 to 2012, and was a fan faviorite for most comic nerds like myself, as what I caught of it I love. It's not hard to see why either: EMH is a giant love letter to the Avengers history and Marvel in general: Ciro Nireli, Christopher Yost and Joshua fine, who developed the show, all were clearly fans and thus try to cram as many iconic foes for each of the avengers as they could into this show, from cameos to arc villians to our big threats, just about every major avengers threat you could want makes it's way into season 1.

It's also a smart remix: The show takes after the earliest days of the team, starting with the original roster of Iron Man (Tony Stark), Ant-Man/Giant Man (Hank Pym), Wasp (Janet-Van Dyne), Hulk, and Thor (Odinson), while soon adding cap as happened in the comics, as well as adding longtime mainstays hawkeye and black panther soon into the season, with many of season 1's episodes adapting early avengers tales and the art style is a very stylistic jack kirby style art, while still being it's own thing with a bit more expression and some anime styling in the eyes and how the action unfolds.

That said it's clear the crew was also aware those early tales could use a coat of paint and thus the series takes from all across the heroes histories, combining Kang's first apperance with the later epic kang dynasty for instance, or setting up Carol Danvers becoming Ms Marvel as soon as Captain Marvel debuts. It's a streamlined approach that feels like what the ultimates should've been: honoring the past but looping in the present, with the classic avengers being assembled using the breakout arc from the new avengers. More ont hat later. The result is a fresh take on the cast that feels awesome.

It also feels unique as this was before a LOT of change swept through the marvel universe and productions: the x-men and the ff still show up beofre their LONG unecessary hiatus due to marvel being dicks about not owning either's film rights, the mcu was just budding so only iron man is modeled after that version as Cap and Thor's films would air the same year as EMH, and Black Widow is a recurring character rather than part of the team, though it was hinted they might have her join up eventually.

It also happened before a lot of comics biggest events of the 2010s, which like the MCU stuff isn't bad at all, it's just neat to see just how diffrent things were: Carol Danvers wasn't captain marvel yet, next gen heroes like Ms Marvel or Miles Morales weren't around, and ideas like Jane as Thor or Sam Wilson as Cap hadn't happened. It's an intresting time capusle of a comics brand before it changed forever.

So opening this capusle is a treat. As for this batch of episodes, EMH started in a unique way: With shorts. See at the time cartoons were just starting to captalize on the concepts of minisodes, tiny shorts in continuity usually distributed via youtube. Most shows just have some skits, like Lapis trying to destroy her phone thinking Steven's trapped or Tilly Green getting buried in cats

EMH decided to get ambitious with theres: TWENTY shorts, all from what I can tell intended to be repackaged as full episodes, all setting up important stuff for the series and serving as introductions to our main cast before they all assemble properly, including later additions Captain America, Hawkeye and Black Panther.

It's an approach I respect: much like the MCU was doing around the same time, it allows the writers to set up each character, get to know who they are as a person, what their deal is and put them into place for the series proper, essentially giving them their own solo series like they had in the comics. It's a great idea and makes these feel like characters who had their own lives and plenty of adventures BEFORE we step into them, and makes the idea of them coming together all the more awesome. It also fits the avengers well: the x-men and fantastic four are largely their own spheres of the marvel universe and most members of those teams were created for them. With the avengers it's marvels' best and brightest all assembled into one massive dream team, so showing said team's adventures. We even get setup for later additions to the team: Black Panther gets a short detailing his origin story and Hawkeye is a key part of hulks before getting his own.

I have only two gripes with this setup: the first is that it's long. It's well done and important but it's still a LOT of setup, and both times i've found myself happy to get to the end: Glad I took the journey but thankful we can get to the main event.

The other is the structure: as a result of them being shorts every non-thor episode here has one segment that serves as an epilogue to the others.. but really dosen't lead as effortlessly in. It feels like the episode ended and we're now just in an extended post credit's sequence. Not a bad one, all of these are necessary and important, it just shows why this type of structure wasn't repeated: it has it's limits, and they show at the end of almost every episode. You could for instance cut out the kang bit that starts the cap one and the kang segment that ends the cap ones and have a cohesive story. Their still GOOD shorts, it's just clear they don't quite work as a cohesive episode, which woudln't be an issue if these shorts also weren't clearly part of the season order.

Still I admit these are minor complaints. They drag the presentation down slightly.. but not enough for me to not have enjoyed this episode pile. So assemble under the cut as I break down the first 7 episodes of Avengers: EMH

Iron Man is Born! (Micro Episodes: Iron Man is Born!, HYDRA Lives, Behold, The Mandroids!, and Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.)

So our first episode. .is third on disney+. Getting this out of the way if you watch these on disney +, start with this one, as disney mildly messed up the airing order. It isn't as bad as say Ducktales was at first, which was so bad the creators had to ask directly, but it's still very noticable disney coudln't be arsed to.. move two episodes on the list they gave people down a few slots. Then again this is the same company who won't give us the weekenders dammit, so i'm not surprised, just mildly in convinced.

Anyways this short follows Iron Man and as we go through our mightiest heroes, I thought it'd be fun to give my own personal history with each character. As I said, I really haven't gotten to dive into the avengers on this blog. I've covered Avengers #200 and Avengers Annual #10 this year but the former is more a Brotherhood of Evil Mutants story guest starring Ms Marvel and the Avengers, and the former.. is a nightmare from which there is no waking where only The Scarlet Witch and the Vision are remotely in character. Neither were really a time to talk about the team, the members of said team, or anything besides deep hurting and an antidote for said deep hurting that involves Carol Danvers verbally bitchslapping the avengers. Which is awesome, but not really a time to go "Gee this is why iron man is so great".

So starting with the cool exec with a heart of steel, I'm a pretty big iron man fan. I love Tony as a character a guy whose arrogant and overly macho at times.. but deep down is a man who just wants to make a better world after helping burn it to the ground for a profit. Someone who can be an arrogant know it all ass.. but also someone who once you've got his loyalty, he'd die for you. A man struggling with addiction, but whose also a poster boy for getting better.

I became a fan of Tony's around the movie, as before that I only really knew him as "that guy who was on spider-man once", "that weird cartoon I watched once or twice" or "That fucking asshole who ruled the superhero community with an iron fist and kicked every dog he could find post civil war".

Thankfully the movie changed that, and along with finding out his fascinating history and the utterly awesome run by Matt Fraction that launched alongside the movie, something I badly want to cover in some form at some point, I was a fan of shell head for life. My favorite runs for him aren't anything suprising: Fraction's run with invincible iron man, Dennis O'Neil's awesome epic run that sees Obdiah Stane break tony with every intention of having his enemy relapse and see's tony rebuild himself while Rhodey puts on the suit, and of course the classic Layton and Michillne run that introduced Tony's Alcholism in the first place.

The movie is important to this series as it not only launched the MCU, but said MCU incoming is likely why it happened, and while it was still young enough at the time to not impact this series heavily for most characters, that wasn't going to happen with tony. Tony, his CFO Pepper and his best friend and military liaison Rhodey, are all heavily modeled after the movie versions. That said given said versions are entirley accurate to the comics and all the MCU did to Tony was give him even more swagger.. this isn't remotely a bad thing and making sure kids had the iron man they were familiar with dosen't hurt the series. The suit's still more designed after the then current bleeding edge suit from the comic, one of my favorites. I have no issue with using stuff from the MCU, the mcu is mostly great. My issue is when latter stuff kinda.. ignores the comics except to bring in more people to punch.

Iron Man is Born gets tony down pat, in large part thanks to his VA, Eric Loomis. To my shock Loomis hasn't done a ton outside of play tony in this show and various video games but damn if few do it better. He gets the swagger, the desire to do better, and the stubborn ass refusal to let people help him down PERFECT, as does the writing. This is tony stark. Leading with him was also smart given, again the movie would be fresh on everyone's mind.

What's also neat about this one is it dosen't put tony up against any familiar foes. We'll still see some in Breakout and like the other heroes here he's already well experienced by the time the series opens up. The only thing close to it is Ultimo, a giant robot he fights in cell phone footage at the start of the episode, and even then that's just to establish Iron Man Slaps.

No instead it sells Tony's obession with his tech not hurting people by putting him up against some HYDRA robots using his tech. For those less familiar with marvel stuff, HYDRA are a bunch of snake themed nazi offshoots who are everywhere and generally the go too mook to punch in the face in the marvel universe. Who dosen't want to punch a snake nazi? Except bob. He's just there for dental. Oh bob.

The fight with said HYDRA bots is awesome: not only are they well designed, but it's classic iron man stuff: his suit running out of power, and tony having to use his brains, and hold out against his suit rapidly draining. Been used before? Sure. Helps establish how Tony fights and how his suit is both super strong and has a logical weakness in battery life? Yup.

And the best part is.. while HYDRA are his main threat... the real conflict simmering underneath this one.. is Stark vs S.H.I.E.L.D. the world's top super cops and shady assholes. Wether their being actually helpful or being obtuse and trying to obstruct the hero largely depends on the day, with the MCU making them more helpful and less greasy.

See SHIELD is mad Tony stopped making weapons. Tony is mad they won't quit bugging him about that, as he simply.. dosen't want to be an arms dealer no more. Which is fair. He made their weapons, and as he makes clear to Rhodey who also wants him to work closer with SHIELD, he's still HELPING them. He just won't build weapons. As we find out in breakout he built the Vault, one of four supervillian prisons , this one specializing in tech criminals. So he hasn't STOPPED helping them, he just wont' give them tech to go kill people with, which is fair. While they don't give his origin, at least not yet, it's very clear whatever version of it taught him the same lesson: just because someone else fires the gun dosen't mean you won't have blood on your hands.

So naturally SHIELD"S reaction to Iron Man taking down HYDRA.. is to try to arrest him

Yeah Tony has.. done ABSOLUTELY nothing wrong here.. and Nick Fury, for all his flaws we'll see in VERY short order, is not so stupid as to fire and orders them to stand the fuck down. The fuck is implied.

Tony trying to help them.. instead gets them to fire on him as the SHIELD Agents are using mandroids powered armors using tony's tech.. and unlike the comics where he BUILT the mandroids for them as a compromise, no lethal weapons but still a way to be on even foot with superheroes, here they just flat out used his blueprints to make their own weapons and expect him not to be mad. He has no right to get mad at them for doing this, he sold them the goods and clearly gave them enough legal room to do whatever, but they have no right to be mad at him for SAVING THEIR LIVES.

And they are as while Tony takes down the last hydra bot that suddenly wakes up, when he shows up at the hellicarrier, RIGHTFULLY pissed at being fired on and having them make their own iron man.. maria hill, Nick's right hand and like the comics a total asshole, PUTS A GUN TO HIS HEAD

I mean yes she has him surrounded by shield agents and if fighting them tony would half to hold back.. but he's still a man in a mostly powered armored suit that can suplex a train, while your only strategy is "hope he's really scared of a hand gun".

Fury wisely asks her to stand the fuck down, again fuck's implied, and we get a really compelling argument with him and tony: Tony has every right to not want to sell weapons, while Fury makes the point that with supervillians ont he rise they NEED this tech to compete. Tony still wins in my eyes mostly because while yes he's witholding tech and what not.. SHIELD... isn't hurting. They made the mandroid armors, they have the tech to compete with the hydra bot likely bodying them because it has the element of suprise. THey have a giant hellicarier, tons of staff, and plenty of super powered allies help keeping the various super prisons safe. Granted all four prisons are about to become paper mache, but that's not down to SHEILD being stupid. While Tony dosen't SAY it to his face, which given this is tony is a fucking achivement... the issue isn't that Fury can't handle these or the various super powered heroes out there don't have this covered for now. It's that Fury dosen't have CONTROL over it. IT's a problem inherent in most versions of Nick: it's not enoguh to be the world's top cop he has to CONTROL the situation, the info everything. He's often resonable sure but he puts control over what makes sense and antagonizes valuable allies simply by not respecting they want autonomy.

Our backup story is really just "why nick fury is badass" and "Why hydra is super dangerous". Turns out Fury has their leader, Baron Strucker. Strucker is an egotistical nazi who frequently runs hydra and is Nick's arch enemy and opposite number. So this whole mech thing.. was a smokescreen to get one of their agents, The Grim Reaper in.

The Grim Reaper in the comics is the brother of Simon Williams, aka Wonder Man. We'll get into him more next time as he has a full episode coming up, but long story short, he died, Grim blamed the avengers, and then he tried to kill his brother when Simon came back because he'd put simon on a pedestal. Here the two are pretty much detached and Grim is instead hydra's top enforcer, single handidly breaking in and wrecking up the place, only stopped, and captured alongside strucker, because Nick Fury is that badass. He also life drains fury a bit, giving him his signature white streak from the comics.

Thor The Mighty (Microepisodes: Thor the Mighty, The Siege of Asgard, My Brother My Enemy and the Isle of Silence)

As I said Thor the Mighty is the only one of these episodes that feels like a mostly cohesive 22 minute episode. I mean you can still see the seams where the shorts were, but it's one 22 minute story instead of one long story and one short one connected to the first. It's also not suprisingly my faviorite, but not just for this reason but for having some gorgeous action, great character work and a hell of an ending.

Before all that we have to talk about the god of thunder. Thor's a character I love, I mean I have a mjonr I got a yard sale somehwere around here. But he's also one i'm pickier on story wise: you either have to REALLY sell the scope and granduer of asgard, as done by Walt Simonson, god among men, and currently Al Ewing or do something fresh with it like the start of Jason Aaron' srun, Donny Cate's recent run or my all time faviorite thor story, J MIcheal Strazenzki's run. Thor's not a bad character but there is a tendency to focus on ye olde english and not on him as a person.

EMH thankfully sidesteps that. It shows thor as fucking awesome and has him do cool stuff.. but it also emphasises who the odionson is and WHY he prefers our world over his own. We start with his daily routine: finding some supervillians to punch. He fights the wrecking crew. The Wrecking Crew are villians I like, marvel's designated Jobbers. If you need someone to get their face punched in these are the guys. They CAN be dangerous, see the avengers storyline under sige where the four of them together bodied a slightly frazzled hercules, but their primary there to show up and get knocked down: their strong enough to fight thor, having asgardian enchanted construction tools.

But still not SO strong that say spidey , the runaways or whoever needs a pick me up this week can't body these jackasses. So their the perfect starter foe for thor: powerful enough to give him a good scrap, but not nearly as strong as what he faces on his home turf.

It also serves as a handy intro to Thor's love interest, Jane Foster. The film takes her from a doctor to a paramedic, ironically years before the comics would do the same, and it's a great update: Since Thor isn't spending time as mortal doctor Donald Blake here, there's no real reason for her to be at his practice as a nurse then doctor. Instead she's in the field trying to save lives just like him, and is shown to be fearless DESPITE being a squishy human, getting out to help someone the wrecking crew hurts without any hesitation while her partner cowers in the car instead of helpign. I mean .. I get it , supervillians, but yoru a fucking emt man. Your job is to save lives even at your ownr isk.

Thankfully thor provides backup. And cleans house. The Wrecker TRIES to hold jane hostage, with Thor chastising his lack of honor.. before smacking him in the back of the head with mjonir because hammer's don't respect chilvarly. Thor and Jane hit it off, and I like how even if Jane's entirely in this series to be thor's love intrest.. they give her personality and a reason he falls for her: she's just as dedicated to her job of helping people, and Thor is awed by the fact that DEPSITE not having the powers of a god and being at high risk she does it anyway. Which for us is a normal thing but for thor.. sums up why he likes Midgard so much. On asgard heroisim happens all the time, death is an endless cycle. Here humans are fragile.. but the best of us try to help each other anyway.

Thor is played by Rick D Wasserman and as you can wager i'm mostly focusing on the main cast's voice actors for this review. I"ll point out some others, for instance Jane is voiced by VA legend Kari Whagreen whose also played Charmcaster in the ben 10 franchise and Saturn Girl in the awesome Legion of Superheroes cartoon i'm bound to cover at some point, it's just EMH has a MASSIVE cast and introduces a lot of characters in the span of these 7 episodes, so adressing every single one is a lot to ask. I will try to adress the most important ones and some in future reviews as the voice cast here is positively stacked.

Which makes it weird that once again one of the main cast is a pretty low key voice actor: like with Iron Man, Thor's va did his voice for Marvel Vs Capcom 3 and Marvel Ultimate ALliance 3, but otherwise hasn't really done much else in the main roll. And given just how well Rick slides into the roll of thor as if he was born for this it befuddles me.

But we, and the god of thunder, have bigger issues..s pecifically frost giants thor writing shorthand for "We wanted something big for him to hit" I can only think of one run in recent memory that hasn't invovled thor hitting a frost giant in the face.

Turns out their invasion is being led by Loki. Loki here is another intresting time capsule as a combination of Tom Hidelston's standout performance in Thor and Avengers and character defining runs I need to read and finish respectively from Kireon Gilleon and Al Ewing placed Loki squarely in the anti hero position. As such instead of the genderfluid trickster we know and love, this is the old school loki they were for much of their run and what loki at present is deeply afraid of becomiing again: manipulative, evil and hellbent on burning down everything his dad and brother built.. if with a dope horn helmet. He at least has that.

As such this loki gets into a badass fight with thor, with Thor BEGGING his brother to reconsider.. but it falling on deaf sweet horn helmets. Loki wants to burn it all. Thankfully Thor is able to beat him and being thor does it in the most badass way possible.. gatherting a GIANT STORM above him before focusing all it's energy into a massive lightning bolt. And those horns are really good conductors.

Odin, who sat this one out as his powers are weak at the moment, more on that in a sec, punishes Loki by banishing him to thei isle of silence. It's one of his faviorite pastimes. The other is questioning his son's life choices, wanting Thor to stay to guard Asgard while Odin takes a nap. It's why he was weak: Once a year Odin enters the odinsleep for a few months, to a week to a day. Whatever's narratively convent. It's how he recharges.

Thor.. dosen't want to as he's needed on earth and the two get into a snit and what I like is it's well ballanced: Odin isn't wrong to want his son to protect the kingdom that will one day be his.. but Thor isn't wrong that the warriors three and sif, his best friends and badass warriors, can do the job and Thor is only one call away if needed. Odin bringing up Jane dosne't help as Odin comes off as being a spying dickhead which.. he is. He entirley is. So Thor leaves in a huff.

And so we get our final segment.. which unlike the others ties in directley. We see Loki in the isle of silence, which is neatly depecited as a black and white void with no sound. Loki is visited by the Enchantress. The Enchantress is a powerful sorceress whose vane as she is obessed with thor, but dosen't understand he's just not that into her for being you know.. manipulative, cruel and trying to kill his friends. Turns out, in classic loki fashion, this was ALL his plan. ALLL of it.

He set up thor to run into the wrecking crew by spying on them taking a job for the Leader, more on him later, having the Enchantress disguise herself as a regular woman , i.e. just a green dress, and point thor their way. Fun fact: She and jane have the same VA. Funner fact: Loki is voiced by Scottish actor Grahm McTavish of the Hobbit and Outlander fame. Both do a terrific job.

Loki then pretended to be Baulder, Thor and Loki's third brother and painted what Thor was doing as egocentric hot doggin and grand standing and the Jane thing as more serious than "They just met". All of this was part of a larger scheme... all going to plan.. and neither the god of thunder nor his neglectful dad have any idea they were played. Granted Loki's scheme would fall apart of Odin brought up that conversation with baulder to the brave himself, but while a risk.. Loki still wasn't TOO reckless with this: in any other thor story this would be highly stupid. Here it's risky, but with Odin going into the Odinsleep soon and Loki's plan HINGING on his dad being in the odinsleep anyway, it gives his plan a VERY small window for fuckups.

And what is his plan?

I genuinely forgot what his grand plan was other than "conquer asgard" but we'll find out as the season unfolds. For now we move on to another hero..... some call him a man, some call him a monster.. but is he both?

Hulk Vs the World ( Microepisodes: The Coming of the Hulk! , Hulk Vs the World, This Monster, This Hero!, and Beware the Widow's Bite!)

Now we talk about the strongest one there is, the man whose wrecking the town with a power of the bull, ain't no monster clown, he's that loveable and ever lovin Hulk. And sometimes immortal, grey and what have you but point is Hulk slaps.

Yeah like Tony I love me some hulk: I haven't read nearly enough of his earlier stuff but I adore the late 80's early 90's run of peter david, one i'm just one digital omnibus away from having the complete run of at the time of this writing, and Al Ewing's recent and incomprable Immortal Hulk, which I REALLY need to cover and just. .haven't. Hulk's just a good character: A man with DID who turns into the literal represntations of the emotions he represses: his rage, his childlike innocence that his abusive dad made sure he never had, his need for a father, his hornier and more traditionally masculine traits... Hulk is an endlessly fascinating character.

And the show does him good, partly by exploring a key part of Hulk's marvel history: the fact that for the vast majority of it.. he's an outsider. Oh sure Hulk will show up for crossovers if needed and what not, but most of the time people treat him as a giant monster to be put down instead of simply an angry, powerful being tired of people trying to kill him. Hulk is oft pegged as a monster, and can often turn on his own allies thorugh bad luck or simply a poopy mood. Most people in Hulk's suppporting cast care about BANNER not hulk, while Bruce is often hunted simply because.. he has a mental illness. Granted most mental illnesses can't suplex a train, but many people genuinely don't seem to CARE that Bruce isn't responsible for what hulk does. Hulk is part of bruce banner.. but he's NOT bruce. And the poor guy is constantly hunted for something he tries to cure or control but often simply can't.

EMH emphasies this as when we meet Bruce he's deshevled, in a hat, looking like the unibomber and getting harassed by the police like one. And this is a Bruce who as we learn later ACCEPTS that hulk is part of him: he dosen't LIKE turning into a rage monster, no one does, but he acknowledges the big guy can do things he can't and that curing him simply hasn't worked. He's someone trying to manage his condition: until now staying away from population centers and only going into them.. because he's worried.

This is also our intro to our second of the four supervillian prisons, the Cube. The Cube is a heavily locked down place for radiation based supervillians, mostly gamma mutates like Bruce himself. And in a fitting shift instead of being a place to stash away or rehabilitate their foes.. the cube is basically one giant lab and Bruce fears it's purpose.. is to create a hulk SHIELD can control. It gives a reason to why he runs: Sure the Cube has facilities to help.. but one hulk is already incredibly dangerous and barely managable. Now imagine if say it goes wrong and hulk ends up with no brain or concense like the current hulk, just PURE. RAGE.

Or they succed in making a super solider with gamma power.. but he simply dosen't want to do what they ask and has all the power of a hulk but none of the restraint, and all the ingellgence to misuse it.

Or you get someone with repressed issues and DID like bruce.. but you get something darker than a cranky teenager who just wants to be left alone

Granted that last one didn't turn out so bad but Bruce's point is easy to see just looking at the comics or basic logic: Making more monsters is way too big a gamble and as we saw with SHIELD in the Iron Man episode, they aren't exactly moral paragons to begin with. Fury will go to any lengths to make a safer world... so whose to say even IF best case scenario we get a she hulk style transformation... that fury can be TRUSTED with that power.

So Banner goes to get some answers. Bruce is played by Gabriel Mann, who played Alan M in the JOsie and the Pussycats film I need to cover, and also played Bruce in Wolverine and the X-Men, which shares a universe with this show. More on that later. He does a great job selling Bruce's fear but also compassion.. he wants to CURE the target he's after, Absorbing Man.

Absorbing Man, aka Crusher Creel, is another frequent Jobber of the marvel unvierse, though unlike the Wrecking Crew he's slightly less of a joke, though like them he started with Thor. Unlike them he became more of a hulk villian and a general marvel villian. If they need someone dumb and powerful, Crusher is their go too. In the comics he also has a wife Titania, also a super villian. They have an adorably healthy and happy marriage.

So naturally Crusher.. wants nothing to do with this and wants to instead punch the hulk. He gets his wish.. but then gets plenty of punches back. The Hulk here is based more on then recent Planet Hulk Storyline: Hulk is still not super smart, but isn't thuggish like say Joe Fixit or sadistic like Devil Hulk. He's just savage hulk if given the chance to learn and evolve: all the power, all the rage.. but with SOME smarts and dry quips. He eventually flattens Abosorbing Man easily after a brief fight.

Hulk himself is played by Fred Tatiscore. Much like Thor and Iron Man's VA"S, Tatiscore is marvel's go to for the hulk for adaptations, and has played him a LOTTT: Ultimate Avengers 1 and 2, Avengers Next, Avengers Assemble, Hulk Vs(Also part of this continuity), Wolverine and the X-Men, Hulk and the Agents of SMASH, Ultimate Spider-Man, Marvel's Spider-Man (Cartoon), The Incredible Hulk Tie IN game, Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, All three Marvel Ultimate Alliances. If you want someone mean and green you go with Fred and that's JUST his rolls as hulk. Fred is a prolific voice actor with a WIDE list of credits. This isn't even his only roll in this SERIES, but we'll get to that. If you want a good gravely voice, Fred Tatsicore is your man.

So Hulk is no sooner done punching his daily asshole when General Ross shows up.

So for those who haven't had the distinct pleasure of meeting this twatballoon before, General Ross is one of Hulk's two main arch enemys, the other one we'll meet later. He's the old man who ruins everything, a hard nosed general who already didn't like banner and hunts him and hulk like a monster, and is LARGELY responsible for both the hulk being treated like a monster (though his earlier, far shadier versions didn't help), and for Banner being hutned like one. If someone's going to fuck a situation that could've helped the hulk up, it's this fucking guy. It's shown here brilliantly as one of his men questions WHY banne'rs here.. and ross dosen't care. He can interogate banner later, not getting that bruce wont' want to help him.

Ross charges in with a bunch of smashable robots, but is ordered to stand down by the Black Widow and Hawkeye, in their classic outfits. For Nat it's .. really the same as the movies, for Hawkeye.. he has an actual costume instead of purple spandex and maybe sunglasses... please bring this outfit back.

Thankfully Clint isn't a piece of cardboard like the MCU , though he is an agent of SHIELD since Thor was in production and the Ultimate Unvierse existed. The two plan to subdue the hulk.. yes the martial arts master who is great in hand to hand and the expert marksman... think they can take down the hulk. or at least hold him off. Hulk is less than impressed but has bigger worries as Ross FIRES A MISSLE AT TWO SHIELD AGENTS DESPITE BEING ORDERED TO STAND DOWN

Seroiusly ross you fired on two fedral agents. I'm shocked he wasn't disohnorably discharged but he's gotten away with worse in the comics.

Thankfully hulk beats missle.. and we get a heartbreaking moment as Ross's stupidity and the hulk reflecting the missle nearly downs a hellicarrier... Hulk saves it.. and is taken in anyway. Always hunted, always alone with Banner's cries of having actually made the hulk work and not wanting to be cured falling on the deaf ears of Doc Sampson, usually Hulk's therapist here just a scientest.. and an asshole. Hawkeye though buys it.. unfortuantely he thenf inds out Black Widow is seemingly a tratior and she betrays HIM, framing him for working with hydra. So yeah this one ends with our heros impreioned for doing nothing wrong, the bad guys ahead and things about to get so much worse.

And if you thought we were done with downer endings well.

Meet Captain America (Meet Captain America, The Red Skull Strikes!, If This Be Doomsday!, Come the Conquerer)

Almost forgot this till I was done with this section: So I fucking love Steve Rogers. Loyal to nothing but the dream, kind, thoughtful and a badass through and through. That said when it comes to solo stuff it's hit and miss. I've come around to Ed Brubaker's run as while the winter soldier itself has lost a little impact with the fog of ages, Bucky's turn as cap is great, what i read of Ta'Nesi Coates run is fantastic, and I love Mark Gruenwald's lengthy run. I like cap, he can just be very hit and miss for me on his own, but usually if he's in a team he slaps and there's a reason he's key to the avengers.. and getting his own episode despite not being there for the origin story.

Meet Cap is a fun WII adventure, reminding me of the First Avenger despite coming first. It's got a lot of silver age charm and pep to it as Cap breaks into a hydra castle with the Howling Commandos. The Howling Commandos are Nick Fury's WWII running buddies in the comic and his dad's friends here. The roster's mostly the same, characters I don't really know and who won't be relevant to this show so i'm not going into... except one. He's still not relevant to the show.. but it's a cameo I can't not mention. One of the commandos here is...

YUP. As one of the many subtle hints this is the same continuity as Wolverine Vs X-Men and it's prequel Hulk Vs Wolverine, Logan fucking HOwlett is on the team. He dosen't go snikit either because he dosen't have bone claws in this continuity or simply to keep that under his helmet but it's still neat to see him. THey even got Steven Blum for this tiny apperance. There's small hints like that here and there, with another in the next episode we'll get to but sadly a combination of diffrent networks and Nick screwing over WATXM meant we never got an actual crossover, and Disney screwing over this series meant we never got a fully absorbed finale either. And as should come as no shock as a giant x-men nerd, I plan to cover WATXM after this show.

Anyways, cameos aside it ventually comes down to Cap and Bucky. Bucky is cap's sidekick, and unlike the mcu he' skept to being around 17. This is also one of his first apperances in animation after the landmark winter soldier story recontexutalized Bucky from "Child sidekick who really REALLY shoudln't be fighting WWII" to "that being a propoganda and Bucky being Cap's stealth man who does the stuff too dirty for america's symbol".

As a result this version, at least as Bucky, is voiced by Robin voice actor Scott Melinville, an excellent bit of meta casting given Bucky comes off as a fairly blatant robin clone. The two's banter is genuinely heartwarming as you really get a sense of their friendship.

Cap himself is played by Brian Bloom, who like most of theset voice actors continued the roll for Marvel Vs Capcom 3, it's sequel Infinite, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 and unlike the rest recently in Midnight Suns. He's awesome and plays Steve Pitch Perfectly.

So the two's target is Red Skull, Naziism incarnate. He's pure evil, one of the most horrifying villians in the Marvel Universe and one of the few most other villians will nope out of working with being a literal nazi. And not just a snake Nazi, though as he does here he will work with Hydra. He was taught by Hitler himself. Fun fact that's pretty brutal: he has in fact met Magneto, Marvel's #1 holocaust survivior, who held his contempt of the guy long as he could when forced to work with him for acts of vengeance..a nd then first chanc ehe got Erik buired the guy in a bunker with this chilling as it is awesome sequence

This is just one long fun pulp adventure as Cap punches out hydra agents and i'ts revealed the Red Skull was experimenting with the 9 realms of norse mythology and marvel comics. Well 8, he's already on Midgard. His various captured norse creatures escape from fairies to a frost giant he almost kidnapped. it's fun chaotic brawl as many a nazi is eaten and we get some really cool lighting. We also get a mention of a Baron Zemo. This will be importnat later.

The Baron himself is absent though, and rather than being the one escaping on a rocket it's the red skull. And anyone familiar with the comics just tensed up a bit and really even if you aren't.. the fact that this is Cap's origin story, he's getting a full episode, and it's WWII kinda tells you this won't end well.. and it dosen't. Steve prepares to sacrifice himself.. only for Bucky to tell him "The world needs cap more than it needs bucky" and push him off. The Skull and the boy wonder apparently die .. and seemingly so does cap.

Well.. KINDA, as our last short happens: see the cap shorts kicked off with someone watching and we find out it's Kang, the Conquerer

For those who haven't heard of him or seen him thanks to the MCU, and the less said about his actor there the better, Kang is from the 30th century, a time of peace, love and no traffic accidents. And it was BORRRRRIIINNNGGGG to him, so longing for the past he only read about he stole a time machine, and ended up in a savage post apocalypse he eventually conquered and made the bedrock of his empire, using his time travel tech, vast army and genuine stategic knowhow to conquer civlizations throughout time and space.

Here though he seems to have just conquered this future, which is still a lot... but is about to be a little as it's in danger of being erased.. thanks to Cap. Kang is puzzled since if Steve DIED.. then how is he fucking up Kang's day? We get a really cool seuqence of Kang traveling through the previous parts of the episode, trying to figure out what he missed.. and finding steve frozen. Steve lived.. and thus his future will die. He plans to go back and stop this, but his future starts deteroating already, leaving him with just one warship. He TRIES to get his girlfriend Ravona on the ship in time.. but interfernce means she comes in and thus is stuck between fading out of existance. Kang's able to put her in stasis... but to save his empire steve rogers must die.. in about half a season.

Yeah Kang... dosen't come back up for a while and while it baffled me.. the more I thought about the actual two part premire.. the more i relaized why this was there.

The Man in the Anthill (The Man in the Anthill, Enter the Whirlwind, The Big House, Welcome to Wakanda) We end our slew of origin stories with the introduction of Ant Man and the Wasp, my faviorite avengers out of this intial lineup. I love all these characters but Hank and Janet are some of my faviorites in all of marvel. I became a huge fan of Hanks after reading Dan Slott's run on Mighty Avenger where Hank, follow his ex wife Jan's death, takes up the wasp mantle. He also gets into the greatest pissing contest in all of marvel history with reed richards... though in his defense, Red started it

It was a burn so fucking awesome that the rest of Reed's team were all asking him to please, for the love of god call back and apologize. He did not and suffered the consequences. Again story for another day.

With Jan it took some more time but this series and various awesome apperances, chiefly her time in Zeb Wells uncanny avengers and what i've read of Roger Sterns avengers, sold me on the winsome wasp. For good stories for each, for Hank there's the aformentiond Mighty Avengers, Avengers Academy where he serves as headmaster, and West Coast Avengers for his redemption after his mental breakdown and abuse of Jan. For Jan I recommend Stern's avengers, The Unstoppable Wasp which follows Hank's Daughter and Jan's adopted daughter Nadia but heavily features the OG wasp, and most recently the Wasp mini series from king of awesome Al Ewing and it's currently running Followup, Avengers Inc, both things I intend to cover some day.

So for those less familiar with them or more familiar with the MCU versions, Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne were founding avengers and the first Ant Man and Wasp, going in and out of the team to retire. They were in love.. but sadly hank's obession with work, undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and Janet marrying him while he thought he was someone else because Hank having a mental breakdown was the PERFECT time to marry him, the marriage fell apart, hank had a large scale mental breakdown and well.. you likely know the rest. Both would rebound with Janet finding a new indpendence and sense of self and Hank , after hitting rock bottom.. .finding the will to live on and atone for the various mistakes he made, first as just Hank Pym then as a superhero but not wearing a costume. I love these characters, their rich history, their powers just all of it. I also love these versions of them: With the baggage of his mental breakdown and the infamous and horrifying slap gone, Hank is back to his roots as a science hero, finding his work the neatest thing in the world, while Janet is back to being hank's younger girlfriend , a social butterfly, and the one helping him get to do all his science stuff by doing the promotion, the last one a clever addition. It takes her later swagger and better writing by writers who knew how women worked as opposed to silver age stan lee who while many impressive things.. could not write a woman who wasn't some form of a sexisim. Likewise Hank ignores jan but it's more "he's a workaholic" and less him ranting about her being a stupid woman and friviolus and I wish I was making this up. It takes the best of them in the silver age, mondernizes and makes it awesome

They also each get a short spotlighting them: The first has Hank researching some Vibranium near wakanda when he has to deal with Klaw. Klaw is a recurring avengers bad guy, black panther bad guy and general punching bag. He's not yet to full costumed villian here, instead just having a giant sound canon instead of having said canon as a new hand. He and some mercs break in to steal the vibranium.. and get utterly wrecked in the best way possible as Hank shrinks, easily dispatches them in a scene straight out of a hroror film as each mook goes unconcious, tehn in an awesome moment, when Klaw uses his really big gun fulla sound to try and blast hank, hank GETS BACK UP and presses a button.. shrinkign EVERYONE present. Also while again i'm not pointing out EVERY villian's va i'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Klaw's is mark fucking hamill.

As for Hanks, Hank is played by Wally Wingert, who for once for this show DIDN'T play this character again in Marvel Vs Capcom 3 because Capcom wasn't awesome enough to include an ant man. THey DID include MODOK who Wingert also plays and got to reprise so he still got a well deserved paycheck. He's also been in Bleach and is the voice of Cubot in Sonic. Who knew. I also love the ending: Jan comes in, we get her adorably just throwing her arms around hank.. and then hank casually asking his girlfriend to go save the mercinaries before his ants eat them

The next one focuses on Jan and also shows the contrast between the two. Hank has super powers.. but prefers his research and rehabilitating criminals, not wanting to fight them. In contrast Jan recognizes sometimes you gotta throw hands, action is her reward, and gladly speeds into battle. We also see that while this hank hasn't spiraled yet.. he still has control issues, showing up wot Jan's battle with Whirlwind and telling her to back down, despite her both making the vallid point they can help people and that she can handle herself. And given she stings teh fucker in the eye and beats a guy with tornado powers with just her stingers and some inginuity yeah, hank ease off there bud.

Jan is voiced by Colleen Ann O'Shaughnessey, a va I grew up with as the Voice of Sora on digimon, a role she STILL has to this day. And if that and Jan wasn't enough she's also Jazz Fenton, a characte ri'll be looking into next year. For now though she just rips as Jan, whose the best of the founding 5. I mean their all pretty great and Hank comes close, but Jan's sarcasm, energy but also her heart and talent make her hard NOT to love.

The third short and the final one focused on our duo is the big house which reveals the third of the prisons: The Big House. Focused more on rehabilitation, the Big House was made by hank, housing a LOT of characters i know. Whirlwind tries to escape. If your curious who this schmuck is, Whirlwind is the closest thing Jan has to an arch enemy: he started out fighting her and hank then started stalking Jan who didn't take it well. He's incapaciated as the big house shrink's it's prisoners. Whirlwind is put back inside.. but is insured by the Mad Thinker that they'll be out soon. It's just a matter of time. The Mad Thinker is a long time fantastic four villian, a mad genius and.. that's basically it. He does have an awesome android though

He's a very good dude.

As for Hank and Jan theyt alk to Nick Fury who wants to recruit them. Jan's all for it but Hank says no.. that being said, it's not just Hank not wanting to be a costumed superhero: he dosen't TRUST nick, dosen't think he genuinely wants to rehabilitate criminals, and dosen't trust shield. And given what we've seen.. he's right. Jan follows Hank's lead, if reluctantly while fury.. berates hank for actually carrying about reform and building villians "Comfier jailcells".

With that we get one last standalone to set up episodes later this season: we see the origin of The Black Panther as his dad dies in comnbat fighting Man Ape, whose not NEARLY as cool or nearly as fun in the comics or this cartoon. Man Ape kilsl his dad with help from Klaw while T'Challa's people.. all agree to this trial by combat bullshit.

T'Challa not taking this shit heads off, takes the Panther Mantel and plans to find Allies. To be continued next time, same as cap. I love the animation on The Black Panther as he skulks around. So damn cool. He's voiced by James C Mathis III a voice actor primarily known for playing the character in this and Marvel Vs Capcom.. infinite this time. He's fantastic. And with that it's time for the MAIN EVENT BABY

Breakout Parts 1 and 2

So here we are, the big one. The reason we're all here> the Main Event. Breakout is the proper premiere for the show, airing before the repackaged episodes above though taking place after. And like the MCU with those episodes in mind it feels like a well built up climax to almost everything in the shorts, while setting up the rest of the season, with what wasn't setup for this being setup for later in the season like Cap, Kang and Black Panther.

Part 1 has the characters still in their own corners of the marvel universe before fate assembles them: Tony breaks up an arms deal between AIM, a bunch of super scientests in neat beekeeper suits who function as world conquerers or arms dealers depending on the day, and Lucia Von Bardis, one of Doctor Doom's minons in Latveria. Iron Man easily stops the sale, especially since it's his tech their selling and warns Doom via his proxy: do not come for his stuff again. He then drops them off at the Vault, talking to Jimmy Woo who sadly isn't as in to close up magic here but has noticed it's security is off and asks Tony for help since he designed it and it's not a weapon. Tony agreees.. but also wants him to make an appointment because Tony is a lot of things.. but he's also a massive asshole no matter where in time and space you find him.

Banner is still in the cube, trying to warn Dr. Sampson of two things: the cube is not a jail but an incubator to make another hulk, and that filling a jail full of super strong gamma mutates and gamma research is a ticking time bomb... and given bruce blew himself up with one he should know.

Thor.. is having a far chiller day of stalking Jane as she does her job since as an EMT she finds trouble and he dosen't exactly have a thor signal. And because she fascinates him, not getting how creepy that sounds. Jane finds it charming, partly because he's built like a norse god and partly because she gets this is less "I need to call shield a god is stocking me" and more "He's REALLY that clueless he dosen't get this is a felony".

Finally we have Hank and Jan on the hellicarrier, with Hank doing mods to the big house and arguing with Nick and Jane sorry she can't take maria hill's offer... only to realize hank had a point when maria won't answer a simple whose that.

It's then chaos breaks out.. as does every super villian at the 4 prisons with the Hellicararrier, which houses the big house, also going offline. Oh and Nick's house just blew up, but that happens every tuesday. You can just ignore that one, don't know why I brought it up.

As you'd guess most of our heroes are soon caught in the middle of it: Iron man flies back to the Vault, getting a heads up from Pepper that SHIELD"S in chaos, but finds all his foes have already kitted up and gang up on him including Crimson Dynamo, his russian equilveant and Blizzard, a villian i've always had a soft spot for who gets a truly awesome look here

Is his look baiscally just captain cold and mr freeze smushed together now? Sure? Does it look fucking dope? yes.

Thanks to SHIELD being stupid though, Iron Man isn't the only hero there and despite nearly blasting him earlier, Hawkeye helps for a sec before fleeing to clear his name. I like this setup for hawkeye as in the comic's hawkeye also started as a costumed criminal thanks to a misunderstanding, a nice way of meshing his mcu/ultimate self with the og. Hawkeye is also one of my faviorite superheroes, and something I can gush about later when Clint properly returns to the story. For now he's just awesome as always.

So Tony decides to escape by BLOWING THE FUCKER UP with his enemies inside

Yeah the civilians have apparently evacuated and the villians scene DO come back but you'd think after a few months after this Tony's go to wouldn't be "Cave a building on them and let god sort it out". Then again this IS Tony Stark we're talking about....

Bruce is IN one of the prisons and thus has a harder time, though there is one silver lining: Dr. Sampson.. is now fully on his side, having realized from the buildling falling apart that Bruce was right about this being a powder keg and promising to help. Granted it's a bit too late but still. The radiation abound has also given the good Doc super strength

Zzzax shows up. Zzzax is an energy being the hulk fights on and off, a big zappy man made of electricty who has a name that's as fun to say as it is to type. Naturally this brings out the other guy and Hulk fights him, winning becasue of course.

In the core of the cube and it's control rooms is the Leader. The Leader is Hulk's arch enemy and polar opposite: Hulk is pure rage and strength, the Leader is a calculated super genius with the durability of any other guy. And unlike the other villians in the other prisons.. Leader has no intention of leaving, to the bafflement of Absorbing Man and Abomination. Abomination is Hulk's other arch enemy, a KGB agent who got caught in a gamma ray blast when Hulk tried to kill the hulk with.. .the same thing that makes the hulk, being almost as strong but retaining his mind.

Leader sends the two to fight hulk as a distraction but once Hulk has them down he flees with Sampson.. and the Leader has his minons back off, explaning WHY he wants to stay in prison: he's going to change the world. And impliclity, what better lair for a super genius gamma mutate than a giant gamma based lab and former prison? It's almost like putting the lab next to the dangerous criminals was a bad idea waiting to blow up in their faces.

Before we move on Leader is played by horror legend Jeffery Combs, most famous for playing Herbet West in Re-Animator and it's sequels. Combs is a large ham supreme, a true craftsman of playing hammy bastards with no morals, and is perfect casting for the Leader, and SHOULD have played him in the mcu. Then again given how little the MCU has acctually DONE with the leader thanks to universal, it's a blessing in disguise. They can use him another way. Lots of mad scientests with no morals in marvel. Leader's story will be continued later, but I coudln't just.. pass by Jeffery Combs. I'm not made of stone.

As for Hank he gets the shit beat out of him by the people he was genuinely trying to help. Which is just.. sad... the problem wasn't hank's idea, a deluxe prison with creepy robots where he genuinely tries to reform people.. it's just most of the criminals were either people he brought in, resenting him automatically, or simply didn't WANT to change. Had he tried it on like the beetle or screaming mimi or someone who genuinely had the potetial to reform who knows what he could've done. Thankfully he's backed up by Jan and the fact he can become a really big man, a GIANT man if you will.

While this goes on Thor.. has a date. Jane gladly listens to his daddy issues, Baldur the Brave had visited earlier.. and Odin hasn't let up on the "come home thing". Jane breaks down "ancient asgardian things beyond your understnading" into what it is "You had a fight with your dad" and tries to convince him to go home and patch things up.. but then thor hears the explosions in the distance and goes to help.

So the bad news is a bunch of our heroes villians are free, with the only ones who aren't.. now running the prison. The WORSE news is that there's one more prison that didn't have a superhero on duty as Thor was out to lunch: the raft, a secret fourth blacksite prison hinted at earlier, containing the highest security cases... and one of them just woke up from a ten year nap, radaiting with power and rocking the helicarrier.

This yelling bearded man is Graviton, also played by Fred Tastiscore, whose hamming it up from here to eternity. He wants Fury dead and tha'ts where part 1 ends.. with him holdling fury hostage and sinking the hellicarrier.

Part 2 opens up with the origin of Graviton: Franklin Hall was a physcist for SHIELD before Fury tried to shut him down... for good reason as while Fury was trying to do this Franklin not only refused but his experiments blew up in his face. Then rather than help Hall.. fury locked him unconcious in the raft. Even the breakout didn't let him out it turned out ot be Baron Zemo. Baron Zemo is one of my faviorite super villians, a genius tactician and son of a nazi what cap fought. Naturally he tells franklin he's been down here for a while, then skedaddles. Unsuprisingly we'll be seeing the martial artist whose so skilled and cunning he's in the same jail as the guy who can make gravity his bitch.

Graviton is distracted by Iron man, who shows up to fight.. but tony gets a refresher in Gravity and gets bounced all the way to the endless cornfields of Kansas. Trust me having been in the car as someone's driven through them, that joke is not an exageration. Ther'es plenty of towns, intresting places.. but also large stretches of corn and nothing. So much corn and nothing.

While Tony calls for a backup suit, Thor tags in, while Hank chews Fury out, especially relevant since Fury refuses to tell them anything at first calling it classified... despite the giant exploding gravity man fighting a god above them.

As for Hulk... Hulk needs a snack. Prison hasn't done wonders fo rhis appittite so he stops at a diner, asking them to get help for Sampson... when Hulk has another guest: his brain buddy bruce who urges Hulk to help as he's the only one that can. Hulk makes the valid if misnthropic poitn that if no one's helped him, why should he.. but Bruce poitns out all the good he can do.. he can be more than the monster they see him as and he knows it. SO Hulk agrees to serve as backup.. provided Bruce make one concession: Hulk becomes the dominant personality and bruce comes out , as we find out later, only once a month.

As we wait to see the results of that deal, Thor gets plumeted to the bottom of the sea and Jan decides she isn't going to stand by anymore.. while Hank is like "NO YOU'LL GET HURT. LISTEN TO ME. " because he hasn't gotten Jan dosen't CARE she can get hurt, knows the risk, and is doing the right thing comma jackass. Jan.. actually puts on a decent showing as her stingers, small lasers , aren't affected by gravity. She is.. but Hank catches her having gotten his giant head out of his ass, while Thor regains Mjonr and tony joins back up. The avengers have.. mostly assemebled.

They still can't make much of a dent though: not only are they still very new at this tea-m thing, but Graviton is still strong enough to body a god: a scientest, a fashioin icon, and billionare mass attempted murderer aren't really going to turn the tide. Unluckily for Franky he decides to get braggy.. and gives too good an intrance cue NOT for someone to stomp in and ruin his day

Graviton: I'm stronger than all of you! I'm the strongest one there is! (BOOM) Hulk: You sure about that?

Hulk is here and easily beats the stuffing out of Graviton. We get a truly EPIC moment too as Graviton tries increasing the gravity on him which only works for seconds at a time as Hulk KEEPS, GETTING, BACK UP. With the others helping, and sometims just.. rushing him, Hulk is able to land the final blow on Graviton. My faviorite moment during this is Wasp lasering a container in half, confused someone's helping him... before Janet helpfully pipes in he's the bad guy. THe two will be incredibly close after this and given they both like hitting things and impulsive desicions, easy to see why.

Well almost final, He still has time to weakly rant before Wasp shuts him up.

Naturally SHIELD"S response to Hulk saving the day, the future avengers lives, and stopping an evil they created.. is to point all their guns at him. This time though Hulk has something he didn't have back in Vegas: Friends. Iron Man refuses to let SHIELD take him and everyone else gladly joins in, Jan naturally being the second most vocal behind tony.

Fury reluctantly gives in, and admits he could use the five's help: the various prison breaks have unleashed 74 other super villians and someone needs to round them up.

Hank.. turns him down, getting one last callout and a very damming one: they CREATED this mess: while Franklin made himself into a living god instead of trying to cure him or turn him into a force for good they locked him away an dhoped he'd never wake up, and new york nearly got leveled. I forgot to mention it somehow but motherfucker LEVITATED manhattan.

Tony does concede Fury has a point:.. not about joining SHIELD, they suck dirty ass in thunderstorms. But about working as a team:

Iron Man: One on one, we can each take down a villain or two, but 74... none of us can do it alone. Together we have a chance. What we did here, it can change things. The world needs us, but not as S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. As a team of our own. Together, we can avenge the wrongs caused by all these villains. Wasp: We can be Avengers. Hulk: Huh. Good name.

And thus.. a team is born. Hulk agrees to stay for now and everyone else, even pacifist hank seems excited. And even Fury, while not exastic, dosen't really poop on their parade. He is worried about one thing though: Who was behind this?

So yeah.. the first 7 episodes of EMH, the breakout two parter in paticular, are amazing. It sets up the world, fleshes out the cast, and gives us some great hooks going in: how will this team mesh? can hulk be accepted by the rest of the world? Who caused the Breakouts? What's loki's plan? How is leader going to "Change the world"? What did steve do to destroy Kang's timeline? All valid questions we'll answer another time but for now we've got 7 pretty excellent episode an da great start to one of the greatest avengers tales ever

Sometime Next Year: The avengers loose a member, gain an icon and a king and deal with their growing pains, ionic men, dougboys, ape men, living sounds, and a bunch of hulks. See you then and thanks for reading.