#i love elodie so so so much i want to give her SO MANY WEIRDO FRIENDS

[frenchy-and-the-sea]

Hi Frenchy!!

If you're still taking asks for the OC Matching Game you posted a little bit ago, I'd love to play dolls lol!

I offer up my most recent character, Elodie! She is a high elf, wild magic sorcerer in a fantasy college campaign. Her backstory is that she was "blessed" (cursed in her opinion) by a fey god at a young age, which granted her wild magic powers. Elodie hates her wild magic due to it's unpredictability and danger levels, especially compared to the rest of her family who are highly talented wizards. She certainly compares herself to them often and is more than a bit jealous that they have the gift of magic without having to deal with surges all the time.

Elodie's personality is extremely type A, rigid, and focused. She's kind and polite, but very anxious and overly direct in social situations. She's an overachiever, and a perfectionist. She's used to people shying away from her due to being the Not Normal Weird Wild Magic girl in her town, so she tends to self-isolate by default.

Currently in the campaign, Elodie is going to magic college to try to "cure" her wild magic. She is very studious and intelligent, and values those traits in others. She also thrives off of academic validation haha! She is someone who believes with enough research and effort, she can un-do the laws of nature and stop herself from being a sorcerer lmao.

I hope you have fun with this one lol! Elodie is one of my more challenging characters to get along with, so I'm curious to see who you'll come up with hehe!!

oh also supplemental pinterest board and playlist. not necessary for character evaluation but just in case you wanted to check them out!

(Matchy Ask Game, ho!!)

ELODIE!! MY BELOVED!! I love her whole premise so, SO much, I'm so glad you sent her over! Because here's the fun thing: I have two completely separate ideas on who to saddle her with!

The first is a bit of a strange option, because he's technically a backstory character: specifically, my grave cleric Wyn's brother, Atticus! He actually spent some time in college himself, because his parents absolutely demanded that he take some time before taking over the family business to get some higher learning done. He's also a very academic soul, excelling in everything from magic to science to business, but he's distinctly lacking in a lot of social situations that are not dictated by tradition, or by a specific goal. He can't MINGLE, is what I'm saying. He doesn't know how to HANG. Put him at a party with no one that he's particularly trying to wheel and deal with and he will awkwardly stand by the punch bowl trying to figure out what to do. (Workaholic personality, GO!) If I had to slap a class on him, he probably would have been a wizard too, but he's one of those jack-of-all-trades learners and doesn't exclusively stick to magical study: which is to say, I think he and Elodie could have some WONDERFUL conversations, provided one of them figures out how to get over the hurdle of The First Interaction LMAO.

There's also that bit at the end that you mentioned, when she's trying to Academia her way out of being a wild magic sorcerer. Turns out, Atticus is doing the same thing! He's just doing it to Academia his way out of dying from the typical tiefling lifespan, which he thinks is terribly short and not fair considering elves and gnomes and whatnot can live three to four times that length. I think he would see Elodie's goal as something that she is doing to be more comfortable with herself, and would see his own struggle reflected there. And lbr, he would probably want to help. (Not that she needs it, he would say. I think he's very quick to recognize her abilities, and one of his more charming points is that he isn't shy with his praise of hard work LMAO)

THE OTHER OPTION IS. LESS FOR SIMILARITY LMAO.

You see, ever since you told me about Elodia, I've wanted so, SO desperately for her to meet my trickery cleric, Fizz. She is Elodie's opposite in almost every way. Despite what people say, she's actually fairly intelligent, and spends a lot of time reading and pursuing knowledge; but she's also a devoted acolyte of the party god, and BOY does she act like it. She also went to college for a time, but dropped out in order to pursue her clerical abilities, and no one was even remotely surprised. She loves people, and she loves to be social, and it is her highest goal in life to unstick the people around her from the monotonous rigors of their day to day. She wants people to find out ways to pursue happiness to selfish degrees, and she is so goddamn stubborn that she will doggedly attach herself to anyone that she thinks could use her help, EVEN when they get annoyed with her. One of her favorite people in the whole world is a bard that used to run the other way when she approached him in school. He doesn't do that anymore. >:) One point for gnomish charm.

Tl;dr, I would pay good hard spending cash to see how Elodie would react when this fiery-haired little gnome in about four different highly saturated colors descends upon her, declares them friends, and then spends no small amount of time carefully trying to convince her that her wild magic could be useful, actually. FUN, actually.

After all, NOTHING is more trickery-coded than wild magic!

[reactingtosomething]

Kris Reacts to The Defenders (cont’d)

"For Whatever It’s Worth, I’m Glad You’re Here.”

Find my off-the-cuff mini-Reactions to the first five episodes of The Defenders here. A full-sized Reaction with some others may be forthcoming later in the week. SPOILERS AFTER THE JUMP for the rest of the season. Some non-spoilery, mostly Daredevil-related thoughts first.

I feel even more strongly than before that to get very much out of The Defenders, you really should watch both seasons of Daredevil. There are for sure lots of quality Jessica-Luke moments, don’t get me wrong, and in the unlikely event that your favorite Defender show is Iron Fist, Colleen Wing gets a surprising amount to do. But the most important non-Defender characters, including significant villains, are from Daredevil’s supporting cast.

I love Matt Murdock (although not as much as Caroline loves Matt Murdock), but he has got to stop referring to New York (or is it just Hell’s Kitchen, or Manhattan? I’ve never been sure) as “my city.” Especially when Daredevil never really gave us a sense of what either the Kitchen in particular or NYC in general means to him. In fact, I’d love a moratorium on all superheroes referring to “My City,” especially if we rarely see them interacting with the people and places of “their” cities in meaningful, specific civilian capacities. The bar here is set by Luke Cage, which in two episodes does more to flesh out Harlem than the entirety of either Daredevil or Jessica Jones (which are otherwise the best entries in the Defenders series) did for Hell’s Kitchen.

The Defenders shares a composer, John Paesano, with Daredevil. This is not surprising, as these shows also share showrunners, Douglas Petrie and Marco Ramirez (who were producer-writers under Drew Goddard and later Steven DeKnight in Daredevil s1). What is surprising is how much I like the music in these shows. It’s pretty melody-light, and vaguely “atmospheric,” and there’s a lot of repetitive percussion, which all taken together is generally a style that annoys me. But what usually annoys me about that style is that it’s intended to blend into the background, to not really be noticed at all. And Paesano’s music, while it isn’t always super prominent in the sound mix or anything, uses simple but still hummable leitmotifs that -- even if in your experience their overall impression is to blend in -- can be recognized as very Of This Show. In other words, unlike many movies that have melody-light or even effectively melody-less scores, often with aggressive percussion, things scored by Paesano actually have musical identities (including Mass Effect: Andromeda, whose musical identity is probably the second-best thing about it, after combat).

Take the first music we hear in season 2 of Daredevil, “The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen”:

At first this seems like it’s just gonna be generic chasing-and-punching music, from literally any post-Bourne action franchise, but around 1:14, the ostinato that’s the backbone of the title theme kicks in. It’s much faster than in the titles, but instantly recognizable. Even if you don’t consciously recognize it in the moment, you probably feel a distinctly Daredevil vibe. It goes away again for a bit as the action of the scene ends, but returns as we see Matt (relatively) clearly for the first time in the season, a devil perched on a chapel.

This music from the climactic fight of the s2 finale, “They Have Nothing Now,” is another good example, riffing on both the ostinato and the main melody that starts about 18 seconds into the title theme.

Contrast this with the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, which do have a melodic instrumental theme, but which you almost certainly don’t associate with the movies or the characters. Partly this is because it’s just OK, but mostly it’s because what anyone remembers about those soundtracks are the needle drops of the Awesome Mixes. Don’t get me wrong, the Awesome Mixes are cool and all. But they also consist of music that most people would not specifically or exclusively associate with Guardians. Weirdly, the same composer worked on Atomic Blonde, which takes a similar approach to its music. This always seems to me like a missed opportunity. It’s like your movie or your show is somehow incomplete. What is Star Wars without John Williams? Or Batman: The Animated Series without Shirley Walker, 30 Rock without Jeff Richmond, Battlestar Galactica without Bear McCreary, Game of Thrones without Ramin Djawadi? What is Wonder Woman’s No Man’s Land without “No Man’s Land”? 

Anyway, all this to say that I’m a weirdo who REALLY LOVES A LOT that when a character briefly plays an instrument late in The Defenders, what they play is the show’s simple, vaguely Danny Elfman-esque title theme, rather than some overused classical piece.

Moving on... spoilers below!

There’s a lot about The Defenders that doesn’t work, and we’ll get to some of it. But unexpectedly, what’s stuck with me -- perhaps its single greatest achievement -- is that after the shitshow of his solo series, it renders Danny Rand pretty likable. Or at least, much easier to empathize with, much more often, than in Iron Fist.

In episode 6 when he’s tied up and Luke is babysitting, Luke (sarcastically) asks him to recount again the story of how he earned the Iron Fist by punching a dragon in the heart. Danny has a very bad sarcasm radar, and complies, and Luke has to remind him that he doesn’t give a shit or even really believe him (EVEN AFTER ALL THE WEIRD SHIT THAT’S HAPPENED). And Danny gives this sigh that back in Iron Fist I probably would’ve found petulant and childish. It does still feel, for lack of a better word, very young here. But I also found myself honestly feeling bad for the guy. He’s trying so hard, and in episode 4 he was the only one who (this is crucial) like the audience was rooting for the team to be a team, yet everyone keeps treating him like an annoying little sibling. Also, he’s telling the truth, he’s been telling the truth since he got back to New York (admittedly in the least persuasive ways possible at the start of Iron Fist), and since he got back to New York almost no one has believed him. And finally there comes the one guy in The Defenders who doesn’t have to believe Danny because he knows that Danny’s telling the truth: Stick. But then Stick is the one who wants to take Danny off the board at the top of episode 6, pulling the rug out from under him just when it seemed he had an all-in ally and even a potential mentor (something he realized he still needed very badly late in Iron Fist). This can’t be a fun place.

So that sigh actually carried some decent emotional weight for me. All the more because Luke immediately realized he’d genuinely hurt Danny’s feelings, and not just “get over yourself, you privileged white boy” feelings but “this is a central part of his identity that I’m mocking mercilessly” feelings.

Now, to be clear, Danny is an annoying little sibling. But Iron Fist never really recognized this, because it wanted Danny to be an imposing, menacing badass when what it needed him to be -- what The Defenders makes him -- is sweetly goofy and eager-to-please, a puppy who just happens to also be a trained killing machine. Danny’s the kind of guy that the cast of Leverage would call “adorable” with equal parts condescension and fondness, the kind of guy about whom you might say “bless his heart” and actually kind of mean it.

It should surprise no one who knows me well that despite all of the above, I Extremely Approve of Elektra pretty easily outclassing Danny in their fight at the end of episode 7, Iron Fist or no Iron Fist. 

But as Caroline mentions in her thoughts on her Patreon (and as she discussed in her Daredevil s2 reviews), it’s never super clear what it means for Elektra to be “the Black Sky.” For that matter it’s still unclear (though more deliberately) what the full potential extent of Danny’s Iron Fist powers is. And I think The Defenders could’ve gotten a lot more mileage out of parallels between Danny and Elektra as “living weapons.”

In general I’d hoped, perhaps foolishly, for a lot more from Elektra than we got. I didn’t have any problems with the acting, to be clear; I’m basically in love with Elodie Yung, entirely on the strength of her absurdly charismatic performance in Daredevil. But because Elektra doesn’t come back to life with her memories, Yung has to spend most of The Defenders keeping that charisma locked away, until a Plot Twist (Elektra killing Alexandra!) that I’m not convinced entirely works. I went along with it wholeheartedly anyway because it meant Yung got to unleash her full powers again. Or it would’ve been her full powers, if there’d been a lot more time to flesh out exactly what and who Elektra 3.0 is. 

We get a complete-ish answer by the end of the show, when it becomes clear that Elektra not only has her memories of Matt back but is still in love with him. But this is a character whose main challenge in her first life was that she was never permitted to figure out for herself what she wanted to do with that life, and “hijack the Hand’s plan to return to K’un Lun, and more importantly become immortal” -- though immortality certainly makes sense as a thing Elektra would want -- doesn’t come close to concretely addressing the ultimately relatable existential crisis (what is my place in the world?) that she faced in Daredevil. 

Sigourney Weaver is able to sell a desire for immortality as Alexandra Reid’s overriding concern because we meet her getting a (vaguely defined) terminal disease diagnosis, and because we spend a lot of time with Alexandra dwelling on her physical fragility and on her concerns about legacy. Yung’s Elektra doesn’t have that way in, and the writers don’t have the time or space in the last act of the season to do more than gesture broadly at Elektra’s desire to finally decide her own destiny. I think the reason this doesn’t land as well as it ought to is that it’s framed as a Villain Monologue, delivered to Danny, a character with whom she doesn’t have history. She doesn’t have this conversation with Stick (she just stabs him), and worse, she doesn’t really have it with Matt outside the chaos of a fight scene, though at least they get that last (?) kiss.

There’s a lot of lazy dialogue in The Defenders, especially in the finale, though thankfully these actors for whom we have a lot of banked affection just about pull it off. The last line of the cold open -- Luke’s “let’s go do something crazy” -- is... just kind of there? Which is a weird choice for the first big punctuation mark in the climactic chapter of this crossover event. He could’ve said that at basically any other point of the show; this should have been a line he could only say at this moment. 

Trish’s “Jess is a good friend speech” to Karen is not great. It’s not awful, either, but it’s not all that specific: Jess doesn’t do any of the things most of us in the real world ask our friends to do, “but when it comes to the real stuff, the stuff that’ll last forever...” What is that stuff? That Trish is interrupted by Malcolm and Foggy with some Bad News feels a little like the writers just didn’t know how to finish that sentence. How exactly are Matt and Jessica good friends? Yeah yeah yeah, they save your life, cool, standard superhero. But what’s the last time Matt in particular was 100 percent emotionally there for you? I do remember Jess and Trish’s friendship being my favorite part of Jessica Jones, but it’s been almost two years and some details would’ve been nice. 

Actively bad is the exchange that ends this scene: “That was the epicenter.” “Of what?” “Everything.” That’s just -- come on. That’s nowhere near as profound as it seems to want to be. That Midland was the epicenter of the earthquake is PLENTY to convey to the others that “ohhhhh that WASN’T a natural earthquake and shit’s about to go down.” In the abstract, “EVERYTHING” may sound more important than “the earthquake.” But the latter was a major inciting incident of The Defenders, and because none of these characters actually knows all of the other pieces the Defenders themselves are concerned with, the specificity of the earthquake is what should have been prized.

(In general, though, I did love that Karen and Trish got a scene together.) 

Luckily the best lines -- or at least, the best line readings -- of the episode come in the scene immediately afterward:

JESS: If you’d told me a week ago that I’d be here, with you two, about to blow up some building and fight ninjas to save New York... LUKE: (sigh) MATT: (chuckle) For whatever it’s worth, I’m glad you’re here. JESS: What? MATT: No, circumstances could be better, I’m just saying, you know -- I’m glad we found each other. LUKE: I’m not hugging you. MATT: (resigned sigh) JESS: You guys ready or what? LUKE: No. MATT: ...No. JESS: Sounds about right.

The sheer endearing-ness and tonal perfection of this moment is hard to convey in writing. Charlie Cox’s delivery of Matt’s “No” in particular is just terrifically world-weary. The other thing I need to say about this scene is that I identify a weird amount with Matt’s series-long resistance to the team culminating in a belated moment of emotional openness, only for him to be met with the realization that the emotional availability of others doesn’t work on his schedule. 

It’s possible I’m reading way too much into this. After all, I also identify with Luke’s resistance to hugging it out.

(My favorite dialogue in the show is probably still the “Are those pork?”-through-“God, you’re weird” exchange of episode 4.)

Another dialogue thing that stood out to me in the finale was the repeated trope of The Moment I Saw You.

Elektra, to Matt: “We’re together. Something I’ve wanted since I first laid eyes on you.”

Claire, to Foggy, about Matt: “But there was no talking him down. He had his mind made up the day I met him.”

This isn’t remotely unique to The Defenders, but it is a trope I tend to find annoying. I don’t think I believe in love at first sight, is probably part of my problem here, and I guess I get it if your mileage varies on that particular account. But it also feels lazy that it happens twice in a relatively narrow span of time, and about the same character, no less. Arguably more importantly, this is -- I know I lean on variations of this word a lot -- such an unspecific thing to say, in a show that had SO MUCH specificity at its disposal in the solo series. Why “since I first laid eyes on you” rather than a callback to something Matt said that night, or to their Sexy Sparring Session? Why “the day I met him” rather than a reference to Claire stitching Matt back together, or finding Matt in a literal dumpster?

(I liked that Claire and Foggy got an “our mutual friend” scene, but as others have said, it’s super weird that Claire and Matt never had a moment.)

There’s probably also something to say here about destiny and purpose, which ties into Elektra and Danny, and into the formation of the team itself, but again the show didn’t really make the time for that. I'm absolutely not suggesting that they needed 13 episodes -- I just don’t think they really managed their time well -- but with so many characters to serve, maybe 10 would’ve been interesting? To give Elektra a more robust arc post-Alexandra, if nothing else?

(About Alexandra -- I read some reviews to the effect that Sigourney Weaver held the first few episodes of The Defenders together through sheer force of will and Sigourney Weaver-ness, but I did not feel that way at all. I mean I thought she was very good, but the writing mostly wasn’t deep or clever enough for her to take the character of Alex anywhere near the level of Cottonmouth or Kilgrave or Wilson Fisk, and I think this “Sigourney Weaver is the best thing about The Defenders” take was mostly wishful projection on the part of people who know her corpus much better than I do. I’ve seen Alien but not Aliens; #sorrynotsorry.)

I did love that both in the premiere and the finale, Luke got to call back to Pop’s “Forward” mantra, without repeating the full “Forward always, always forward.” It was a nice way to show that Pop’s philosophy is thoroughly a part of him now, and that -- unlike Jessica, the person he’s with for the second callback -- he’s really deliberately thinking about his future.

I also liked, or wanted to like, that Jessica said maybe they could get coffee, but I wasn’t entirely sure what was intended by this. See, in Luke Cage, “coffee” turns out to be a euphemism Luke uses for sex, or at least a one-night stand.  But he’s with Claire now, which may be a reason he doesn’t deliver the established winking response from his own show: “I don’t drink coffee.” (Misty said it to him back then; he replied, “Neither do I.” I don’t think Luke not drinking coffee was a thing in Jessica Jones, and even if it was, it would totally be in character for Jess not to remember.) Apart from the lack of a callback response, my uncertainty comes from “we should get coffee” almost inevitably meaning, in my experience, “we are definitely not going to make the effort to get coffee,” even if we’re both totally sincere about wanting to catch up, which seems like a relatable social phenomenon Jess would snark about. 

To backtrack a bit -- that big fight scene in episode 7, against Gao and Bakuto and Murakami? It was... not shot well. Way too claustrophobic, and at least by the high standards of Daredevil, way too choppily edited. Most of the fights in The Defenders were underwhelming -- really missed Philip Silvera’s work -- but that one in particular stood out as a mess. (Caroline remarked that it’s a shame the fighting styles of the team aren’t better differentiated, at least in the show’s latter half; this is particularly true for Matt and Danny. It’s interesting that although Finn Jones is overall much better at the action here than he was in Iron Fist, the fights in The Defenders do lose a fair bit of the wushu character that previously distinguished his hand techniques, at least, from Matt’s.)

Anyway, I could probably say more -- I’m particularly sorry I haven’t done justice to the Jessica-Luke dynamic, or to the Daughters of the Dragon -- but I’ve lost most semblance of a train of thought here, so I’ll stop. I do recommend checking out all of Caroline's Random Thoughts, and, as always, the episode reviews over at The AV Club. (As of this writing the AVC is currently on episode 5.)

Though I did want a lot more from The Defenders in a lot of ways, as with the pretty strange and uneven Age of Ultron it was still a lot of fun to spend time with these characters, both alone and together. This was very much a show that did not manage to be more than the sum of its parts, but at least many of those parts were very pleasant. And frankly, I’m glad the run of episodes 6 through 8 was the last thing I watched this weekend, rather than the trainwreck (Tormund banter, zombie burning, and Dany’s winter wardrobe notwithstanding) that was this season’s penultimate episode of Game of Thrones.

I’m also cautiously optimistic about the possibility of a Luke Cage-Iron Fist team-up show, and to a lesser extent even -- I can’t believe I’m gonna say this -- the next solo season of Iron Fist (which will have a new showrunner -- Scott Buck is helming Inhumans, something about which I have strong feelings that we just can’t get into right now -- and add Simone Missick’s Misty Knight to its roster). If that’s not an endorsement, I don’t know what is.