#i mean after all she had her redemption arc in bw too

[transingthoseformers]

OverpanKid!OP anon

Sentinel and Blackarachnia would have interesting reactions.

If Overpan figured out what happened on Aracha-7, Sentinel would be in deep slag. Thankfully, while they don't see eye to eye, Optimus doesn't want Sentinel dead, so while his parents are tearing into Ultra Magnus (not literally but the little twitches in Trepan's digits and Overlord's glare say other wise, though they can't act on it. While they are of neutral alliance and can't be prosecuted, Optimus isn't and they wouldn't put it past the Council prosecuting their son for their actions) Optimus pulls Sentinel over to the side like;

"Hey, I think we need to have a chat and bury a few hatchets before you get buried by them."

They have a long overdue conversation and who knew that the threat of your old pal's parents ripping you to shreds would be the key to healthy communication? There's still a long way to go for them but they've made up for now. Though upon learning Trepan - a mech with a very explicit reputation - was an Autobot, makes Sentinel a bit curious. He's been under the impression that their faction can do no wrong, but realizing this mech as committed atrocities that have been struck from the records, makes him wonder what else they've been hiding. (I like to believe that Sentinel genuinely believes in the Autobot cause, but he's so young and fully indoctrinated with the the wool pulled securely over his eyes, he's ignorant of the darker side of the Autobots. Trepan showing up is his glimpse behind the curtain. I don't hate Sentinel, he's a jerk and needs to learn his lesson, but I think he can be redeemed.)

Blackarachnia on the other hand, well, her mental state isn't the best, so she's probably gonna end up extremely conflicted once she learns that sweet, goody-two-shoes, Optimus is the son of two of the most terrifying mechs in the universe.

I'm sure I can figure out some way to reunite these three again. Sentinel's got a good start but Blackarachnia is gonna be tough.

Makes perfect sense, it's totally TFA Autobot of the autobots™️ to blame whatever Overlord and Trepan do currently on Optimus

Nice to see Optimus and Sentinel work something out... Even if it's under threat of two of the most terrifying mecha in the galaxy who just happen to be your friend turned rival's parents. Sentinel had to have been terrified lol

And you're right about Sentinel. He does honestly believe everything autobot wholeheartedly, especially after Archa Seven. This being a turning point in that could have interesting interesting results, especially as you put it tfa Sentinel imo too can be redeemed with careful work.

Yeahh BlackArachnia already had several reasons to be wary, but she's going to be Extra reevaluating her interactions with him after learning of his past before the academy. Though, considering their interactions in canon I think BlackArachnia is severely tempted to accept his help (at least that was the tone I saw in the show, with the whole tragedy angle— especially in the episode where she was working with meltdown and meltdown double crossed her) and considering bw BlackArachnia I feel like we'd definitely see her go through a redemption arc of her own (thought I don't see her becoming an autobot again. I've thought before about her declaring as neutral before though...) Her learning about Trepan and the worse sides of the autobots cannot help her opinions on them.

[theseviolentdelights597]

Black Widow Thoughts and Spoilers

🔹Why don't they have Russian accents?

🔹Natasha never had a Russian accent

🔹Bio-goomin-feasants

🔹why does SHIELD want them?!

🔹 God why do all the best superheroes have an extensive amount of trauma?

🔹ok now they're russian

🔹Wait they were just undercover

🔹Not even 10 minutes in and I'm already sobbing. TY

🔹She went to Norway

🔹Yelena!!

🔹*Sees dude sleeping in her bed* No no no no no no no no. Why why why why why why why? You you you you you

🔹So Budapest was a safehouse

🔹The Budapest pronunciation thing is literally the best thing I've seen in my entire life

🔹THE HAIR DYE

🔹Natasha reciting James Bond is just *chefs kiss*

🔹Well I guess we'll never find out about Budapest

🔹Well Taskmaster came earlier than I expected 🔥💥

🔹Does Sokovian head tilt

🔹It's the flip for me!

🔹This girl fight is too dramatic 😅

🔹Nat speaking russian is just 👌🏻

🔹"What bullet does that?" "Not bullets. Arrows." 🏹 CLINT

🔹Maybe in English next time. Speaks in Russian

🔹Yelena says Tony Stark. Me: "Don't speak his name!"

🔹SHUT UP, BUDAPEST WAS AN ASSIGNMENT WHERE CLINT AND NAT WERE SUPPOSED TO TAKE DOWN DREYKOV SO SHE COULD BECOME A SHIELD AGENT. I CAN'T

🔹Roof scene!!

🔹Hits multiple things, still nails the superhero landing

🔹She's still wearing Clint's necklace 😭

🔹my plan was to drive us away. That's a shit plan

🔹Ok here comes the human battering ram

🔹Oh shit he's back 😂

🔹Ok Cap

🔹Now he's going to track her like a wounded deer

🔹Tik tac toe lmao

🔹it's like fighting a mirror

🔹 Well, the truth rarely makes sense when you omit key details

🔹BARTON!!!!

🔹The braided pig tails 😭😭😭

🔹Ha bullshit

🔹Did you ever wish for kids? I want a dog. Same Yelena, same

🔹Yelena's "Ha" is hysterical

🔹Me thinking tab means life. "You know, you're getting dangerously close to running out your tab." Me: "Nah, she's got two more movies before that happens."

🔹Ursa coming in clutch like the fandom does when we run theories

🔹Those white suits came faster than I had plans for holy shit 😍😍

🔹 it's okay, the girls won't make a scene but the men will

🔹Oh wait she was talking to Alexei 😂

🔹Superhero landing!!

🔹Yel you look like you're from star wars

🔹HA

🔹Yelena sees avalanche: "That would be a cool way to die."

🔹Save the GSD!

🔹Farewell douchebags!!

🔹Alexei trying to talk but the girls have their headphones on is basically every adult ever

🔹A: "What's with the aggression, huh? Is it your time of the month?" Y: "I don't get my period, dipshit. I don't have a uterus." N: "Or ovaries."

🔹A: "Whoa look at you all business." N: "Trust me this isn't pleasure."

🔹Y: Can we throw him out the window now?" N: I think we should wait till we get to a higher altitude."

🔹I'm not crying you're crying 😭

🔹Y: Crimson Dynamo. A: It's the Red Guardian. Y: Get out!

🔹Fires dart. A: "They think...." Fires 7 more 😂

🔹Melina is such a traitor

🔹The Red Room isn't down, it's up

🔹Y: " this is a much cool less way to die."

🔹PLOT TWIST!! I did not see Natasha using the camouflage to pretend to be Melina

🔹The ear piece debacle 😂

🔹The fact that all of Nat's earrings are real because Scarlett has those same piercings

🔹Taskmaster is Dreykov's daughter!!

🔹DON'T YOU DARE HIT HER

🔹 They took phenomenal care in making Taskmaster look as masculine as possible

🔹Wakanda Forever! 😂

🔹*Uses hands* Damn it

🔹Superhero landing! Y:"That was disgusting." 😂

🔹ACA SCUSE ME

🔹Babe stop letting yourself get hit

🔹Damn girl you smart but OUCH

🔹She did the cap shield thing

🔹YOUR SAVIOR IS HERE!

🔹I didn't realize you could unbreak your nose like that

🔹The music during this air fight is amazing

🔹Character arc redemption: BW leaving Antonia the first time but not the second

🔹You can't kill off Yelena, I saw the trailers B

🔹When Natasha saves Yelena but then Taskmaster comes to fuck up a cute moment

🔹I KNEW she was going to let her go

🔹ok, let's go

🔹Okay, but her pulling TaskMaster's sword was hot

🔹It was real to me too... I'm sorry I'm sobbing 😭

🔹N: "Everybody good?" M: "I am clearly injured."

🔹 "Besides, if it can work out for the four of us, you know, there may be some hope for the Avengers. Little bit." 🖤

🔹Y passing down the vest like I read that she was going to 😭

🔹N: Don't worry I got this. Me: Not in two movies you won't

🔹The whistle 🗣

🔹she died her hair and I'm sobbing 😭

🔹She's in Yelena's vest too omg

🔹If no one gets off that jet to greet her then it's not worth it

🔹So she did help Steve break everyone out of prison

🔹 if the post credit scene isn't Yelena finding out that Nat's gone was the movie really worth it?

🔹Yelena is at her grave and I'm sobbing

🔹Go away Val you aren't even supposed to be here

🔹Now she wants Yelena to go after Clint.. He didn't kill her, he didn't have a choice 😭😭

🔹Omg killing Dreykov's daughter was the red in her ledger

[dreadnought-dear-captain]

You Asked, I Told - Part 2 of 2

More Endgame and Baghdad Waltz spoilers ahoy!

This is such high praise, and I’m really humbled to receive it. Well, I would be lying if I told you I’ve never daydreamed about giving up my current career to write. I imagine many fic writers fantasize about this. But it’s hard work to break into, as you’ve implied, and there really aren’t shows out there like the old Star Trek that have open submission policies, so my understanding is that you’ve got to hustle to get your shit out there. I am not a person who has that kind of hustle, I’m afraid, nor the confidence in my skills, and I really do love my current career deeply. But I probably won’t stop writing any time in the near future, because it’s my sole creative outlet, and who knows what the future may hold. I appreciate your kind words very much and will endeavor to keep improving my skills to deliver better character arcs than Endgame did. I hope my next fic will be better than BW, in terms of craft and consistency, though people will probably be lukewarm on the subject.

Okay, I don’t want to go full SALTMODE (edit: I totally did), but let’s talk about this Steve who goes back to Peggy. Can we agree that Endgame Steve is about 110-180 degrees different from the Steve Rogers who went into the ice? And, really, why wouldn’t he be? He’s been through horrifying, horrifying things and placed the burden of it on himself, whether he earned it or not, because he’s Steve Rogers and that’s how he Steves. And he’s had five years to disconnect and sink into himself and pine over Peggy the Idealized Woman/Past and probably get horribly stuck in his grief process over Bucky and Sam and everyone else, and I imagine he just get all sorts of messed up after failing to reverse the snap. So, why would Peggy want this guy? Would she even recognize him? And then there’s our poor Ice Steve. I mean, shit, he was the one who Peggy probably really would have wanted, but did Endgame Steve just leave that guy? Did he set him loose? Tell him about Bucky? Help him find Bucky? Who’s this Bucky guy again…?

And now that I think of it, if Endgame Steve came back to her, would he say he’s from the future? Would he lie and say he’s Ice Steve (fat chance pulling off that one)? Because if he didn’t lie, she would absolutely insist that they find Ice Steve and pull him out. That’s the man she loves! And you’re telling me, movie, that she STILL chooses the weird disaffected, depressed, traumatized future Steve she doesn’t know over the Steve she loves and knows already — and who just saw Peggy, like, 20 minutes ago, as far as he knows?? (All of this is functioning on the MCU’s presumption that Steve capital-L Loves her back, BTW.) Did Ice Steve and Endgame Steve fight over Peggy? Did he pull the ol “Hey your BFF is actually alive” card to win the fight and then compliment his own star-spangled ass? I mean, this whole thing is so patently absurd that it’s almost not worth thinking about, but Jesus. It makes NO SENSE why Endgame Steve would get Peggy while Ice Steve would either a) stay in ice or b) not get Peggy, if he was in love with her. Poppycock!! This MOVIE.

Welp, I can’t do really anything in one or two sentences, apparently, so...

I will open with the caveat that I am not a Loki person. I have nothing against Loki, I just never particularly attached to him. This is probably because I didn’t really enjoy the Thor movies (except Ragnarok, which I know is divisive and may mean I have bad taste?) and so never got deep into Loki’s story. And I am one of the five people on the planet who didn’t like the first Avengers movie, in part because I thought Steve’s character was so off the mark that it made me wonder if Joss Whedon even saw TFA, and I just found the jokes and the pacing to be so mehhh. And also Joss Whedon has none of my respect, first for Avengers 1’s bad characterization and flat jokes, and second for Age of Ultron’s rampant misogyny poorly disguised under gurl power. Prima nocta? Really? And most egregious — Natasha’s random dating of Bruce (i.e., any penis without a family, a girlfriend, or a gay love interest) just to give birth to some shitty infertility narrative, as if the Black Widow doesn’t have a tragic enough backstory that she needs some bullshit sterilization procedure to make her a sympathetic figure — I’m sorry, make her “a monster,” which infertility apparently makes you.

ANYWAY, about Loki. If I were a Loki fan, I would be pissed about the way his story ended. I was pretty irritated anyway, because his death in IW only seemed to serve as a device to trigger Thor’s emotional journey in that film. And even then, it was minimized by Rocket being like, “So, dead brother, huh? Yeah, that can be annoying.” And yeah, that’s totally a Rocket thing to say, but Thor responds with “Well, he's been dead before. But this time... I think it really might be true…” and then he launches into his grief about his other family and his people. There’s hardly a sense that he’s grieving for Loki personally, and we never see any closure or interaction between them in Endgame, which also minimizes the character’s importance in the MCU as the big sendoff movie. Sure, he gets ahold of the Tesseract and gets to escape, great, but what does that even mean? It wasn’t a moment of major emotional valence.

The audience didn’t really get a chance to properly say goodbye to him. You got a horrific image of his death, truly awful, worse than almost any significant minor character. I cannot imagine what that must have felt like. I can relate to the Loki bad arc thing through the crappy way that Steve and Bucky’s relationship was barely tended to in the last two movies, but they both made it alive, so it’s not even the same. I feel dissatisfied and frustrated on your behalf that his death was a mere device and that his behavior on the Asgardian ship was stupid at best and possibly OOC at worst, I’m not sure what you thought of it. Maybe that was part of some redemptive arc, but he seemed like he should be more clever than that. My condolences for your character getting short shifted along with everyone else except Tony Stark.

Another interesting question.

Bucky probably hasn’t talked to Steve much about George, because it’s just too raw of a subject for him. He still blames himself for George’s death, too, so to think of George is to almost inevitably feel pain. I think Steve has surmised that his death is a core wound for Bucky, which he’s no doubt projecting his own experience of losing his mother upon, but I imagine he holds George in positive regard because the little Bucky has said about him has been positive. I really think the more telling thing is Bucky’s behavior, which is emulating George’s career as a soldier (which, as an infantryman, is more closely aligned with George’s than Winnie’s), and Steve would probably see that as a reflection of the positive role George has had. But like most things, Steve undoubtedly wants to know more, especially as he learns more about Bucky. He would want to know why Bucky has such a bad relationship with his own sexual orientation. Why he started drinking so young. I imagine he’d start to wonder why the math doesn’t add up. Steve knows Winnie well and believes that she’s a very good mother, so how would Bucky grow up to be this way if he had two wonderful, stable parents? Was it just George’s death that threw him off? Maybe, or was there something else? I imagine he’ll get more suspicious as he learns more.

That’s all for now! Stay tuned in the next week or so for Chapter 34. Thank you so much for the wonderful Asks and keep them coming! 

[tagfer]

you should analyze it! i'm curious

urff okay so. I’ll do it. Here’s some overanalysis on how Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon’s story caused almost all of its major characters to become nothing but jokes compared to their original Sun and Moon characterizations.

With full disclaimers, I actually enjoyed playing Ultra Sun. As far as enjoyment goes, it was probably more fun than Sun and Moon. Story? So much worse.

[Massive USUM spoilers! Of all sorts!]

Also a secondary note: I may have missed a thing or two, so if I have incorrect info, please let me know.

Looker & Anabel (and in a way, Nanu) get their postgame removed. Altogether. None of it happens. Looker shows up early to foreshadow Episode RR, but that’s it. Then postgame, there’s a like, ten line cutscene where Anabel introduces herself as a member of interpol and says she’s going to the Battle Tree, and Looker remarks that she’s not that strong. Yeah, let’s put the dude without any pokemon on guard duty for his boss who also used to run a huge battle facility in another universe.

Compare and contrast to SuMo, where the three of them got an entire story. A very horrifying story, but well written, where it’s explained the consequences of falling through a wormhole turns you into a magnet for extraterrestrial beings who will likely kill you, but not out of malice, and that despite her higher rank than Nanu or Looker, that she’s only being used as bait for those creatures. And it explains Looker and Nanu’s past, showing that Looker was a member of interpol years before the quirky guy we meet in Platinum. And that they had a friend/colleague actually die in front of them, and how they both hold immense guilt for that. Oh and that Anabel is likely from a different universe.

But these characters didn’t have destroyed characterization as much as they don’t get any whatsoever because Looker and Anabel get a mass of maybe 20 lines total, only one of which has anything to do with Episode RR.

I included these first because I’ve previously written plenty about Anabel and Looker, and I absolutely loved their plot, so seeing it absolutely absent is the biggest disappointment of USUM for me.

Lillie loses so much that it’s sad. Let’s be honest, Sun and Moon’s plot is really the story of Lillie. How she can grow from a timid girl afraid of the world to realizing that she has her own strength and can determine her own future.

When you first meet her, she’s afraid of birds. By time the climax happens, she’s traveled to another universe to deliver a Why You Suck speech to her abusive mother (and gets one of the best intense musical numbers in the game!). Early in the game, she idolizes your strength, but over the course of it learns she has her own strength and that just because she isn’t the strongest out there doesn’t mean she can’t overcome her own trials and obstacles. She even has some of the best symbolism in the Pokemon games, ever; discarding her old clothes that signify her mother’s control over her and using ones she picked, saying that she’s now going to take control of her life. And she does.

By the end, it’s emotionally impacting when she takes charge to leave Alola on her own journey.

In USUM, the story has shifted. She’s no longer the main character, you are. Which is classic for a Pokemon game, but compared to the games released a year ago it makes everything hollow. It goes from a story where you’re helping your friend who has family issues that spiral deeply out of control to you being the Chosen One who has to defeat Evil Teams and Lillie is just kind of a companion much like previous “friends”.

Her character arc and foreshadowing plays out perfectly in SuMo where as in USUM it falls flat. In Sun and Moon, the entire reason you visit the Ultra Deep Sea is to finish Lillie’s character arc. During their first confrontation, Lillie (symbolically wearing her first outfit) was not strong enough / did not believe in herself enough to confront Lusamine for everything, but she decides that that’s what she needs to do, and that’s what forces her development and drives the plot. In USUM, she never gets to confront her mother at all. And the plot is driven forward partly by Lillie/Gladion’s want to save Lusamine, but mostly because the Ultra Recon Squad needs more help defeating Necrozma.

This makes all her personal growth so much more shallow. Her motivation is to help you instead of you helping her.

Her becoming a Pokemon trainer in Episode RR isn’t foreshadowed at all either (as far as I know) and rather just comes a surprise when you’re forced into a double battle.

Gladion and Type: Null lose a bunch too. In Sun and Moon, he’s a soft kid who tries to hide his gentleness under a facade of badass edgelord. His escape from Aether Paradise, while obviously inspired by his mistreatment, included saving a Type: Null, because he knew it was in pain. He slowly grows and learns the power of friendship. He even names his Type: Full friend.

After the game, he takes over Aether Paradise in order to make sure everything goes right. Which could be seen as unsatisfying but it’s clear he has grown to the point to accept responsibility.

It looks like it was going to be this way in USUM, but it turns out he just gets a Silver complex. He just wants to be the strongest there is. He implies he kidnapped Type: Null not because he wanted to save it, but because he wanted to train it as the Beast Killer it was meant to be, to the point he even points out its concept as a Beast Killer and attempts to follow Lusamine into Ultra Megalopolis.

Even his leaving Alola is just merely a lust for power instead of Lillie’s search for independence. Wicke even comments that Gladion wants to beat trainers like you and Hau. And he does come back for championship title defense matches (a month after you complete the story). That’s it. He didn’t go on a journey, he went on a training mission. His personal growth has really been traded for a Silver complex, of hollow growth but unending lust of power.

Lusamine is a disaster and arguably gets a worse redemption than she did in Sun and Moon despite having a full redemption in USUM.

SuMo Lusamine is by far one of my favorite villains - both in Pokemon and in general. This is cause despite the fact it clearly isn’t, she totally believed what she did was completely justified. She didn’t see herself as a villain at all. And that’s what makes a good villain. She wasn’t just “oh I’m evil, I want to control the world/etc.” Which Pokemon has a lot of.

Her obsession with beauty (and mistreatment of Lillie and Gladion) was the culmination of years of sanity slippage caused by Nihilego and the loss of Mohn. She even more or less forgets the reason she was looking into Nihilego and instead focuses on Nihilego’s beauty. So while it doesn���t justify what she did, we’re at very least given an explanation as to why she is the person she is.

…

In USUM, so much of this changed it’s… unbelievable. Other than the appearance of Nihilego at Aether Paradise, Nihilego plays no role as far as we know. She suffers little sanity slippage other than delusions of grandeur of helping/defeating Necrozma on her own. She also hopes on seeing Mohn.

She’s still obsessed with beauty. She still treats her kids as ornaments. She still uses Guzma. She still experiments on living creatures, freezes living creatures, and creates chimeras. (And Type: Null gets a special note here because her focus was now Necrozma and not Ultra Beasts - but she was still okay with creating a Beast Killer.)

She also gets no real redemption. Despite all that she did, she suffers no consequence. Lillie never gets to really call her out. Nor does Gladion. She seems to repair her relationship with her children near immediately. Nobody comments that she’s got a giant office full of cryogenicly frozen pokemon, and how she openly announces that her goal was to save Alola from Necrozma to keep that collection. She doesn’t get anything. In fact, you, her, Lillie, and Guzma share a laugh at Faba’s expense right in front of one of her pods, with others also plainly visible.

Post Episode RR, talking to her reveals that you made her rethink her views on beauty. Or something. Honestly, it sounds like the kind of lie you’d feed a kid, but it’s more likely bad and forced character development.

In Sun and Moon, she even remarks to Lillie, who had just stood up to her and then saved her despite Lusamine lunging to kill her, “When did you start becoming beautiful?” Which is a perfect line for her character and Lillie, acknowledging Lillie has grown (and completing Lillie’s arc and foreshadowing). Afterwards, Lillie’s speech to you implies she’s got a chance of redemption - while she doesn’t understand what she did wrong, Lillie is attempting to explain to her, and even though you were a constant disruption to her problems she attempted to visit your championship party. With her trip to Bill to hopefully help her problem of (most likely long-term) neurotoxin poisoning and Lillie’s patience, she could eventually come around and realize what she did was wrong and try to make amends for what she’s done.

Instead, in USUM, she seems to be instantly forgiven for everything. Lusamine deserved better than that.

I will always understand why people hate her. I get it. And trust me, I have strong feelings about what she did too. But she’s still my favorite villain and I will be personally suing Game Freak for what they did to her.

Hau gets a BW Cheren complex where one or two lines of dialog from a character make him rethink everything an in the process lose the major part of his personality that made him noteworthy. Cheren lost his goals, and Hau lost his carefreeness. He’s still a sweet kid and everything, and I’m proud that he actually achieved some more goals in USUM than in SuMo, but his (and Hala’s) changes seem so forced, like they were shoehorned in.

At least for Cheren, he got a game two years later showing how he had developed. We’re probably not gonna get that for Hau.

Guzma is one of the only ones that get a bump. But that’s only because his involvement in the story was hardly affected - he was still Lusamine’s faithful servant, even though she had massively changed.

But because change in the story was minimized for him, his inclusion in Episode RR actually helped his character. And afterwards, he says he’s still looking after his crew. So while the growth was minimal, it was there.

Colress is the only other one I can think of who got better, too, but that’s only because he only had like seven lines in Sun and Moon. This time, it’s shown that�� well, he hasn’t changed at all, still being but a selfish, hedonistic scientist who will double cross anyone who asks for his help.

And this is more than proven true when he confronts Ghetsis. Although he didn’t try to hide it in B2W2, he full on says he hates Ghetsis. He was only using him for funding and science.

This is not a real shock.

Like I love Colress’ passion but y’know. Everyone who’s asked for his help got it but also got double-crossed. Oh, and now his technology is reaching scary advanced levels.

[MASSIVE SPOILERS BELOW.]

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Mohn. If you were hoping for a happy ending for the Aether family, I’m here to tell you you’ll be sorely, viscerally unsatisfied. While in SuMo he got nothing, somehow, they made it worse for USUM.

Because they finally meet him.

And they choose to let him live his life not knowing he has a wife, children, and friends who have all been looking for him for like, a decade.

Despite the plots of both SuMo and USUM being set into action by his disappearance, he gets no resolution. 

He fucking comments on how nice Aether Paradise is! And they decide to not be like “oh hey yeah you kinda were a major part of it.”