#i mean maybe something terrible will happen to him in the next movie but. yk what im saying

[collieii]

someone probably said this already but in spiderverse i think it's interesting how when pavitr was first introduced everyone thought something bad was gonna happen to him bc of how confident and optimistic he was. and then in the actual movie we see that something bad was supposed to happen to him (police chief dying!) but it doesn't! miles stops it! and miguel berates miles for this, says it's going to cause the universe to collapse or whatever.

there's this idea that tragedy is inherent to spidermans growth, and while it's true that some spiderpeople learn important lessons through loss, no one stops to ask, is it really necessary? yeah, maybe the chief was supposed to die. but why does spiderman have to be formed through tragedy? why do we (as heroes) have to let people die? pavitr didn't lose anyone, and he's still a good spiderman! maybe, if he doesn't suffer, he'll end up better off for it!

so while miguel is arguing for all this big picture stuff about saving the multiverse he's lost sight of what it really means to be a spiderman, he's not looking out for the real individual people. yeah it's just one person who would die, but that one person means something to someone. shrugging and saying "stuff just sucks sometimes, we can't do anything about it" is the opposite of what superheroes do. pretty obviously, miles arc is also a reflection of the struggles people face in real life, working within unequal systems, where it's easy to shrug and say "that's just the way it is" and not ask "but why does it need be this way? can't we do something about it?"

miguel is arguing that you can't have your cake and eat it too. presumably, miles and co. are going to find a way to get around that and change things for the better (and maybe that's why miles has that line about two cakes in the advisors office!)

[paintingraves]

Crimes of Grindelwald info dump

CAREFUL : SPOILERS ! There’s no structure to this I’m sorry 

the humor is still very present. from newt’s awkward flirting skills to Jacob’s tell-tale high-pitched screams, it’s all here and guaranteed to bring a smile to your face.

seeing Hogwarts again was a great plus as well. Dumbledore as a teacher is a great thing.

Speaking of which Jude Law makes a perfect young Dumbledore. His performance is great, and I wish he’d had more screentime. I’m looking forward to seeing his role grow in further movies.

Credence is GROWING and that’s GREAT even if he MAKES MISTAKES

the baby nifflers - and as a matter of fact, all creatures - are delightful. the CGI is very well-done, and the creativity behind each of them is palatable. I love those guys so much.

Newt and Tina are actually adorable as fuck

Dan Fogler is great. Scratch that, he steals the show. He’s brilliant.

The cinematography, costumes, etc - all that is great as well. it’s believable.

in terms of acting… none of the actors get much screentime. Queenie & Jacob do get some emotional scenes. Credence is very busy making angry murder faces at the camera. I liked Tina as well, but again - not enough screentime.

there’s a lot of new characters being introduced, some who get no more than perhaps ten minutes of screentime as a whole (looking at you Nagini.) We get this whole building plot about Credence being Leta’s long-lost brother, thought dead, only to have it crumble in the last minutes - the same as it was with Credence’s sister Modesty in the first movie who we thought was the Obscurus. Now that worked actually well in FB1 but here it feels… kind of anticlimactic? Leaving you to wonder the whys and the hows because nothing led up to it.

I’d like to know how Credence came to know Nagini and how he found himself working in a circus, as well as how he survived. How?!

Nagini and Credence seem to be close friends, nothing more. Which is good - he could use some good friends, especially given the direction he’s taking. Just wish Nagini had more screentime to really show up the mechanics of their relationship and how close they are, because it really isn’t clear. We’re just supposed to take at face value that they know each other and that’s it.

How did Credence even find his adoption papers? Isn’t he being wanted by every government in the world? How does his status work?

They’re literally sending assassins after him because he’s supposedly Grindelwald’s greatest weapon, which like… chill a bit guys maybe. Rethink this through???

Oh, Grindelwald. Grindelwald is grooming Credence like hell, calling him “my boy” again and again and hugging him and touching him and making promises and Credence is falling for it hook, line and sinker. Someone help him holy shit.

One of the characters that actually does make sense is actually Abernathy. His role is minimal but he does help Grindelwald escape and seems to be given tasks of importance - which seems to be a great deal for a man who, like him, appeared to be no one before. It’s easy to see how he could have been seduced to Grindelwald’s side.

We don’t know much about Rosier yet. She’s just here. Looking pretty and threatening and hinting at her ‘close relationship’ with Grindelwald, whatever that means (I don’t want to think about it.) She seems to be his second-in-command.

I liked the fact that at the end Grindelwald and Queenie are like bros. Bitch bros. That’s wonderful and terrifying.

I didn’t say it enough, but the grooming

There were so many times. So many times where they could have mentioned Percival Graves and what happened to him in passing but not only once. NoT OnLy oNcE

but that’s a whole other headache SO. moving on

Hmmm Leta. What to say about Leta? She’s great. She seems like a good person, and Zoé did a great job portraying her. She’s the one who gets the most emotional scenes, next to Jacob and Queenie. There’s a whole family drama unfolding here (which oooh boi is it complicated) and it’s kind of easy to see how she became the woman she is?

She and Theseus seem to love each other very much. I’m wishing they had had more screentime, the two of them.

Nicolas Flamel is here for comic value.

I loved the relationship between Theseus and Newt. There’s some real brotherly love and character growth in there, and it felt good to see it depicted well.

I’m wondering how powerful that assassin sent by the british minister needed to be to resist the full-blown assault of a grown obscurus. even Grindelwald had trouble doing that. where’s the logic ???

also how did they obliviate the entire city of Paris following that little trick with the dark cloaks inviting people to Grindelwald’s little rendez-vous? Unless it was visible only to wizards, but since they show us an old intrigued man looking out the window I don’t think it was the case. So?

Same thing with the blue fires and red fires in the cemetery - how’re they gonna explain that to the muggle police and fire brigade should they come running?

Bunty is here for comic value.

Newt literally isn’t aware of his own appeal. I’m afraid oblivious!Newt from the fics is sorta canon now.

TINA DOESN’T GET ENOUGH SCREENTIME. She’s one of the characters who, along with Jacob, seems to have her shit together and seems eager to get shit done but we don’t see her progress. The movie prefers to focus on her relationship with Newt - which, don’t get me wrong, they’re adorable as fuck - instead of the much more interesting investigation plot line she has got going on. She’s an Auror; let her be an Auror ! Show us that side of her !

Queenie was certainly… something in this movie. I get the feeling she’s suffering a lot and Grindelwald is the only one, unfortunately, who listens.

Jacob the poor guy goes through a lot in this one too. I don’t know how he’s expected to survive in a world he really shouldn’t be in, and I think he’s starting to realize that. At the end of the movie he looks to be on the verge of a breakdown.

Leta dies sacrificing herself so the others can escape. Which is very noble but… I don’t know how I feel about that one just yet.

Grindelwald and Dumbledore… Hmm. Dumbledore shows us his suffering intimately. It’s a short but intense scene that goes one with him in front of that mirror and it’s a great piece of acting. Seeing Johnny Depp in front of him stiiiiill doesn’t cut it but oH WELL

Seeing Jamie morph into JD was about as bad as seeing Colin Farrell morph into him tbh. It’s unbelievable.

Now Grindelwald… Grindelwald is… He is Grindelwald. He is busy being Grindelwald. He’s not particularly striking but he gets the job done. That’s it.

Sometimes he looks terrifying and sometimes he looks ridiculous. The character design is still a hard pill to swallow.

I got the feeling at some points that Grindelwald worked well when he was doing some Johnny Depp. Like when he asks Queenie if Credence trusts him or when he says “I hate Paris” after killing a dozen people at the end of his rally - that was funny. Unexpected. And it worked well.

For someone who claims they are the non-violent ones he does seems very prone to like, drowning people, killing children and burning people with fire lol - but all that away from the public eye, which is clever. I’d say in Grindelwald’s and his followers’ opinion that rally worked very well. It did what it was meant to - give them an insight into his hopes and beliefs and then scare them into joining his side.

They introduced World War II which, oh boi. Wonder how they’re gonna weave the muggle history and wizarding world plotline together.

Credence joining him also makes sense for his character. He wants to know who he is and Grindelwald offers him that. But Grindelwald plays him so well it’s also very sad to watch it unfold.

Credence is gonna be so powerful growing under his tutelage though.

The actors playing young Newt and Leta were awesome! Very good casting, very believable. Young Newt’s got Eddie Redmayne’s trademark Newt mannerisms down to a point - congrats to them both!

Newt the adult… well he is busy being Newt. He’s quite cute and clumsy, but he still has some growth to do as a protagonist. I like him being the main character though. He’s caring.

Yusuf Kama doesn’t get much screentime either. He’s part of the whole Lestrange family drama plotline. We don’t have time to get attached to the character.

We don’t relate much to any character, actually. Not to Credence, not to Dumbledore, not to any minor new character either. We might relate slightly to Newt’s rivalry with his brother or his difficulties in approaching the woman he likes as well as the difficulties Jacob and Queenie are facing as a couple buuuut that’s pretty much it.

There’s a scene at the beginning when we’re in the carriage and Grindelwald gets illuminated by lightning - he looks properly terrifying. My heart skipped a beat.

Newt and Leta’s relationship is really touching. It’s easy to see how they could have become close friends.

The Ministry trying to recruit Newt into the auror department like you seriously thought that was gonna work ? lmao

Jacob being charmed by Queenie is problematic…. but it’s interesting to see how Queenie evolves, how she could be driven to such desperations. In my opinion Jacob is a bit too quick to forgive something like this lol but yK

Newt just wants to get to Tina and that’s cute

God these two are just terribly awkward

I genuinely thought they were gonna kiss at one point though.

I felt bad for Credence seeing the servant who was a link to his family (or maybe not ahaa SPOILER) die like minutes after he met her. the poor dude.

So Credence is a Dumbledore uh. Wonder how that one skipped past Rita Skeeter’s sharp quill.

Credence blasting that hole in the mountain like YEAH BABY THERE YOU GO !!!!!

The niffler steals the blood pact Grindelwald keeps on him at all times and im like YES BABY THERE YOU GO TOO !!! GOOD BOY !

and idk there’s probably more to say but here you go

Now I’m saying all this but personally I have a really hard time caring about anything I’m saying or any of the characters. But that’s personal. 

[sophygurl]

Here it goes my meta request. I felt really disconnected from AoS this year. I do love the characters and I still enjoyed some moments but I was like generally not interested in it. Weirdly enough the episode that made me go" YAS THIS IS MY SHOW" was the finale that very much everyone hated lmao. So I'd like to know your thoughts on the season and also your thought on the whole "Fitz has always been capable of being a Nazi" which I disagree with but I'd like to see your take on that too :)

(CONT) Or not only Fitz I guess also May and Coulson. The show overlooked the responsibility of those two in all of it because they were basically enablers of an evil empire and like I know we all are capable of doing bad things but they were playing in another level. All you want to write about the subject I'd love to hear :)

Thank you so much for giving me a meta request! And I apologize about how long it’s taken me to get to it. 

I have to say that I also felt disconnected this season. I’m not sure what it was, exactly, but the whole mysteriously being sent into the future and stuck on the space station thing just didn’t work for me, I guess, and being thrown into this whole new world with new characters and situations sort of confused me for a time. Like WTF is going on? And not in the good-fun way of “I can’t wait to figure out what’s going on!” but more in a just lost and disinterested way? 

I feel like they were maybe trying to make some parallels between the Nazi/Hydra conditions of the Framework but with our characters all scrambling together to fight the powers that be instead of being made to work against one another? Maybe? But I feel like that might have worked better if Fitz had been with them in the future since he was the main one they had to fight in the Framework?

Plus, all of the prophecies causing the things that affect the future circularity of it all just got be a bit too much for me. Perhaps if I had binge watched it all once vs. watching week to week it would have flowed better. I wonder if anyone who watched it that way felt differently about it??

Like, I’m reading a recap of the season to remind myself of everything that went down and I’m like - wait who was that character again? And what was the relevancy of this plot point to the overall arc? And whoa - wait - how did that even happen anyway?! It’s confusing. I like a good mystery in my fiction, but not outright confusion. 

I do feel like the way the show has decided it has to become a whole new entity every season or half-season gets to be a bit much. AoS works better, imo, as a character-driven show. We don’t need all of these complex and ever-changing plots to be interested in what our heroes are doing. 

They can have conflict and drama and climaxes and resolutions without these massive shifts where our characters never even get to take a breath before the next big thing happens. Some of the best stuff is what happens during those breaths, those beats, in between the action itself. And we rarely get to see that stuff anymore. We get a rushed confession here and a quickie kiss there and five seconds of emotional discovery and release before running off to do the next insane thing to save the world from something it turns out they caused in the first place and ENOUGH already, yk? 

It just becomes really difficult to relate emotionally to the characters, and to understand the emotional motivations driving their actions, when we only get maybe half a minute per episode per character of actual character development. They want us to understand and connect with our group, but I feel like they are doing more telling than showing these days. 

Quite possibly, a major reason for all of this extra extraness and convoluted plot twisting is due to their need to be linked with the movie franchise. So the writers of the show have these great ideas, but then they’re being controlled somewhat by what the movies are doing, but likely also aren’t getting all of the info on exactly what happens in the movies, so they just kinda slide around trying to fit it all together in ways that feel less than ideal when it all actually plays out on screen. But that’s just a guess. 

I’m trying to recall, now, if I felt differently about the finale than the season as a whole, but I’m not sure. I did like the installation of Mack as the leader. That felt really called for and well deserved. 

As far as the Fitz always having been capable of being a Nazi, or least Nazi-like, there is a shitton of problematicness going on with that whole deal that I don’t feel qualified to touch on. 

But I did actually like the reveal that it was Fitz himself - and not some fictional other!Fitz - that was making the choices he did in the back half of the season. Because while he didn’t literally become the head of a genocidal fascistic regime, he did make some very immoral decisions. And they were decisions we didn’t think our Fitz was capable of. But he experienced that Framework world, and while he was ashamed and horrified by his role in it, it affected him as any experience would. And it led him to making a terrible decision that hurt a lot of people. Yes, he believed it was for the greater good - where greater good means the literal survival of the human race and the planet earth and all life upon it - so there were some heavy stakes attached there. But they were still immoral choices. 

And we saw all of the team making some weird, and sometimes horrific, choices all season. Which, again, I guess, was trying to make some kind of parallel or at least connection to the Framework world. And these are characters who all, in their own way, already carry the burden of the world with them; and who in this past season were literally carrying the burden of the survival of the world with them. And I suppose the crisis of that burden could cause anyone to make some rough choices. 

But I still have a lot of serious problems with the whole Hydra-Framework-Nazi thing. I mean, the agents aren’t Clark Kent - they don’t have to be perfectly decent and good at all times. But they’re still supposed to be our heroes, you know what I mean? 

And heroes make heroic choices. And heroic choices don’t involve taking other people’s freedom or autonomy away from them. Not in any moral universe I want to take part in, anyway. 

So yea, it’s tricky. I feel distanced from the show not just from the standpoint of the plot being overly and unnecessarily convoluted, but also from an emotional view of just not being sure what they’re trying to say about these characters that we’ve grown to love. 

I guess we’ll see what next season brings. If they just continue to beat down and grind down our team until there’s nothing left of them, the show is likely to go from being one of my faves to something I just have on the background. I need a little light, a little grasp of hope and goodness. This past season just wasn’t giving me that.