#i think its mostly a narrative thing to the audience

[charmac]

why do you think dennis doesn't pursue any women in season 16? it's a huge contrast to how he is in previous seasons so it must be a deliberate writing choice & i've been dying to hear detailed theories about this

Every season for the past, well I don't even know how long, has always had some kind of 'Dennis pursuing women' narrative written in, for sure, but I think it's maybe less of a Dennis x Women plot, and more of a hard-scene reminder that this guy is a freak, he plays games, he is a sexual predator (and he's fucked up).

Take the last couple seasons: 13, Escapes; 14, Gets Romantic; 15, LW7; 16...Frank vs. Russia. These plots for Dennis are continuing to establish and reaffirm that this guy is in the 'dating' game for the hunt, to evolve and beat any challenge that presents itself. Sex is a game he needs to win at, and he continues to find new ways to approach that. We aren't seeing this side of Dennis' life so we know he's into women or that he has sex, we're seeing it because we're continuing to learn and understand that he's always playing a game, working a narrative. He's not out there dating or having sex for a connection, he never has. He's getting something else out of it.

I'm not sure I really have a theory, or even need to dig more than surface level here. I think Frank Vs. Russia is that same plot that you might say was 'missing' this season. It's the same thing, just men.

In Escapes we only learn Dennis has a sex escape room because Dee gets caught up in it, but he's been doing this. We were none-the-wiser, because Dennis' sex life only rears its head to the Gang when the narrative calls for it. I see Frank vs. Russia as very similar (and same writer, look at that). We learn about The S.I.N.N.E.D. System because Dennis revealed it to Dee and Mac to get them off his back, but he's been doing this. It's the same narrative we've seen for years, really truly: Dennis pursues women people in creepy (or freaky) ways because sex is a game he needs to play in order to win.

Why don't we see him pursue any women in Season 16? Well, we don't often get more than one Dennis sex plot, but I genuinely think having this as the stand-alone sex (in the butt) plot of the Season just better highlights the fact that Dennis "anyone can get a guy to bang them once" Reynolds plays for both teams, in equally messed up ways.

So, it's not a seasonally "Dennis pursues women" plot, but a seasonally "Dennis has a fucked up relationship with sex" narrative :)

[mysticalalleycat]

I think something really interesting about TMA vs TMP so far is the different use of suspense, which I actually think "the cake scenes" (as I've started to call them in my head) are really good shorthand for.

In TMA, we spend four seasons very slowly getting the hang of things alongside the protagonists. We take all of that time to slowly understand how the world works, how fucked up it is, and how fucked up it can get. The narrative waits until we have a deep understanding of that (although maybe not entirely complete yet), until the characters and world have hit a new, very deep low. Then it throws us back to the start. It gives us cake scene number one (Jon's birthday) and says "Hey remember how when this started they were all (mostly) happy and just regular people working a kinda weird job and they were all friends and had joy?" And it hurts! Because we know how bad it is now, so the sharp contrast to how it was before it all started hits hard!

TMA's suspense is built on the audience not understanding what's happening alongside the characters, so the depth of tragedy happening to them can only be understood in retrospect.

TMP doesnt rely on TMA entirely, but it's written with the understanding that the majority of its listeners will have listened to TMA. It knows that a lot of the audience may not know exactly what's going on here, but they know the general shape of the world and they know exactly how bad it can get (thanks MAG200).

Because it's writing for (mostly) that audience, TMP doesn't have to write about its tragedy only in retrospect. The suspense comes both from not knowing what's happening (like TMA) and from knowing exactly what's happening while the characters don't (whooo dramatic irony). The audience knows what the fears are and how they can effect the world--Sam and Alice don't.

So TMP's cake scene (Teddy's going away party) happens at the start. "Look at all these people being (mostly) happy and just regular people working a kinda weird job and all being friends and having joy! Doesn't it hurt knowing exactly how bad things could get for them?"

And it does. We are two episodes in and nothing has happened to Alice and Sam, but it's already very clear that we are audience to a tragedy. Even if they don't end up totally fucked, it's clear that their arcs will be tragic.

[cherrytea556]

Lore Rekindled; The Lore Olympus that should have been

To be honest, I checked out the rekindled version before the original one and now having reading the original as well, it's extremely odd. Y'know goodbye volcanic high where the original was a mess but a group of 4chaners made a parody game which turned out to be of better quality than the original? This is like that but replace 4chan with tumblr users, mainly @genericpuff whose series is pinned in their tumblr blog where you can check all of the episodes, especially updated ones. In this post, I will be praising this series of how it fixes the problems of the original

The Pacing

One thing I notice about lore olympus and lore rekindled is the pacing. Not just the flow of the story but where it chooses to focus on. Now in lore olympus, the pacing is kinda a mess and its mainly to do with what it focuses on. An example is the magazine plotpoint; in the original, its basically kinda there in between doses to focus on other stuff like persephone and hades together, persephone's sa (i'll get to that later), eros story, zeus and hera etc...The flow generally isnt that bad per say (except for persephone's sa cuz that was way too quick) but for a story meant to be a romance between hades and persephone, you'd think it idk, it would focus on persephone and hades specifically, not eros which is another example of; its flashbacks. Eros specifically has such a dragged out flashback in episode 12 which we didnt need or at least with that much exposition when it should've naturally expand in the story and that's what rekindled does. The magazine plotline has turned into the first conflict of persephone and hades as we see how it affects their lives and relationships. This works for its pacing better because it doesn't give you too much stuff to jumble with, making the narrative more concise and easier to understand where the story is going. And with the flashbacks, rekindled cuts out the fat in the flashbacks from the original to a perfect balance where it gives exposition of the characters while also leaving mystery for the audience to be intrigued, my favourite one would have to be this (though it more of a nightmare than a flashback specifically speaking);

It's of persephone in a greenhouse her mother placed her in with this red eye thing following her from outside the greenhouse. I have no idea of this lurker if its her metaphorical rage or a danger in her life but either way, i am intrigued by its presentation.

The Characters

When reading lore rekindled and lore olympus, the characters are definetly an odd experience. For lore olympus, the characters arent exactly uh....great per say. I think the main reason for this is how their ultilised, with characters like eros, hera, hectate etc being there to mostly be a matchmaker for hades and persephone even if it was initially seen as wrong like with hera and hectate, be antagonistic as a way to have conflict between hades and persephone like minthe, demeter and recently leuce even if ones had reasons too like minthe with hades emotionally cheating on her and demeter because lets be honest, she had a point. Then there's hades and persephone, whoo boy where to start with them.

Hades starts off as a creep eyeing at persephone during a party, specifically at her body and still lusts persephone even being aware that shes 19 and he's 2000 years old. Also is a shitty boss, father AND contributes to slavery with it while being adressed in some way, doesnt change him which isnt good for a character that's meant to be the main protagonists love interest.

Persephone though, I can get the self insert vibes. From favouritism towards the story, being who most of the men in the story are attracted too, portrayed as a 'cinnamon roll' (they actually said that early on in the story, im not kidding) who cant do no wrong. She acts like a teenager rather than a young adult which makes the scenes where shes sexualised just more uncomfortable (and they already unnecessarily were) along with adding that uncomfortability to the romance

But with rekindled, they expanded on the characters much more than they originally were. Persephone for instance has turned from a 'sexy baby' legal teenager to an actual young relatable adult with agency and allows her to screw up (e.g, getting drunk on her own rather than eros drunking her). Her adult attitude makes the romance between her and hades not only more palpable, but also strays away from the infantilisation/uncomfortable sexualisation of her character which is nice to see. Hades also is written well in the series from how it acknowledges his faults while still making him likable. And thats the same for every character really, their personalities are much more fleshed out and nuanced which makes their characters feel real to life, gaining effectiveness for more emotional scenes with them. An interesting thing too is that they even expanded the magazine guy's character from making fake news for profit into feeling guilt over what they done, standing up for persephone which is a pretty nice change.

No Sa Plotline

Not like you cant have sa in your story ever but if you never planned it from the beginning and only did when people tell you that the scene you drew from your comic was sa then....maybe just not do it. Lore olympus does exactly that where while an attempt was made, it goes on to retcon it into making apollo (the guy who sa'd persephone) into a lesser evil like that would made a difference instead of just cutting it out from the very beginning. Lore rekindled thankfully just made apollo into his pilot version, a shitty bf but more likeable and expanded upon (which should have been his portrayal from day 1). His shittiness doesnt come up in the story, more like self absorbness/egotisticalness although with its recent chapter of the magazine guy offering persephone lunch, it might reveal some cracks or at least further down the story it will be revealed to us which futhers how effective rekindled character writing is in how its expansion of characters would give us the feels. That or portray him as not a good match for persephone, either way much better than the original.

Artstyle

Lore olympus has a pretty good artstyle (at least in s1/the early episodes, s3 is just kinda goofy) but lore rekindled has got a good artstyle which is on top, more consistent too. Here's some examples;

Comedy

It's objectively funnier than lore olympus, no question asked

All in all, if you want to read lore olympus, i recommend you to read the lore rekindled one instead as it's better in every way. Give it a read.

[howtofightwrite]

Now you got me thinking...I've been thinking about writing a fic where the (in-universe) desensitization of violence for the main characters is a running theme. My main issue, however, is managing the violence within said narrative because, as you've said before, violence has diminishing returns. While I don't want it to be a gorefest from start to finish, I do want part of the horror to be having to engage in it, no matter what steps are taken to avoid it. If I'm not careful, I could end up with a weaker story for all the violence in it. What could I do to maintain this theme without it losing its impact due to these diminishing returns?

So, there's two different things going on here, and ironically, it's the same term, and mostly the same process.

When I'm talking about your audience becoming desensitized to violence, it's more that they become acclimated to the degree of violence you're comfortable with exposing them to. Again, “diminishing returns,” because as you expose them to more violence, they become more acclimated to that violence, and the shock value will subside. Similarly, the ability to build tension on the threat of violence occurring falls off when you're willing to engage in violence, but that doesn't mean you can't build tension, just that you need to be a little more careful about establishing those stakes.

Also, when most people write violence, they tend to establish implicit boundaries. It may be that only certain characters engage in violence. It may that certain areas are exempted from violence. At very mechanical abstraction, with some writers, you can tell when they've introduced a location that is exempt from violence. Even if you're getting into diminishing returns, violating these kinds of boundaries can keep the violence fresher than you'd expect. The formula of slasher films put a lot of effort into maintaining shock value by creating misleading boundaries that you'll pick up on and then violating them in new and novel ways.

Outside of some genuinely stomach churning violence, you're not likely to permanently move the needle for your readers. You're not actually desensitizing them to violence; just your willingness to depict violence.

I feel like I need to make a clarification: Too much violence doesn't mean the story will be bad. Normally, I offer advice with the assumption that you'll want to manage and maintain as much shock value as you can from your violence. However, that's not the only valid approach. That said, too much violence can cause your readers to disconnect from the work, so that is a legitimate consideration. Also, this doesn't mean the story loses impact. Unless the violence is the story, which is a somewhat weird edge case, violence won't necessarily reduce the impact of the story as a whole.

The example of slasher films, earlier, really does illustrate what I mean when I'm saying that lots of violence (even gratuitous violence) isn't going to necessarily mean that a story will be bad. (Though, this could spiral into a much deeper argument about the artistic merits of that genre.) To some extent, your choice of genre already starts to prepare the audience for a more violent experience. You're preemptively trading shock value for a higher baseline.

The second thing is your character being desensitized to violence. While there is something to be said for getting your audience into your character's head space to the point that they accept it as their own, doing that with desensitization to violence is extraordinarily difficult. (And, really, it's a tricky route to go in general. In most cases, the audience will simply assign whatever dissatisfaction they have onto you or the work, rather than realizing you were being clever.)

So, how do you show someone is desensitized to violence, without trying to simultaneously traumatize your audience? You show the consequences of that desensitization. This can show up in a character's sense of humor, their overall outlook. They may be more clinical about violence, more casual about its consequences (at least, superficially.) They might have an incredibly dark sense of humor, which might not come up most of the time.

In a larger context, a character who has been desensitized to violence may come across as basically normal, outside of a narrow band where certain concepts don't bother them. This is especially true with a specific brand of military humor, where violence has been rendered mundane for the individual, and the people they interact with on a regular basis.

Now, audience desensitization to violence can create a very weird situation. Where an absence of violence is more unsettling. Not because they're worried about what could happen, but because they're waiting for it all hell to break loose. It's one thing to simply call it, “tension,” but it is a very distinct kind of anxiety you can invoke, if you're careful. In the opening of a story, when the genre is clearly established, I've seen this compared to the ratchets on a roller coaster's first ascent. Everyone knows what they're here for, everyone's here for the ride, click, click... and then the lights go out, and the screaming starts.

I'm trying to make it sound easy, but violence is one of the more challenging things to write. That doesn't mean it's impossible, and you don't need to sit down and carefully sketch out every detail before you get going. The biggest thing to be careful of are that you don't want to overuse it, but you have a lot of flexibility to tell the story you want with the amount of violence you need to communicate that story.

Though, it might take a few tries until you get a tone you're happy with.

-Starke

This blog is supported through Patreon. Patrons get access to new posts three days early, and direct access to us through Discord. If you’re already a Patron, thank you. If you’d like to support us, please consider becoming a Patron.

[hamletthedane]

Hamlet’s Age

Not to bring up an age-old debate that doesn’t even matter, but I have been thinking recently how interesting Hamlet’s age is both in-text and as meta-text.

To summarize a whole lot of discussion, we basically only have the following clues as to Hamlet’s age:

Hamlet and Horatio are both college students at Wittenberg. In Early Modern/Late Renaissance Europe, noble boys typically began their university education at 14 and usually completed at their Bachelor’s degree by 18 or 19. However, they may have been studying for their Master’s degrees, which was typically awarded by age 25 at the latest. For reference, contemporary Kit Marlowe was a pretty late bloomer who received a bachelor’s degree at 20 and a master’s degree at 23.

Hamlet is AGGRESSIVELY described as a “youth” by many different characters - I believe more than any other male shakespeare character (other than 16yo Romeo). While usage could vary, Shakespeare tended to use “youth” to mean a man in his late teens/very early 20s (actually, he mostly uses it to describe beardless ‘men’ who are actually crossdressing women - likely literally played by young men in their late teens)

King Hamlet is old enough to be grey-haired, but Queen Gertrude is young enough to have additional children (or so Hamlet strongly implies)

Hamlet talks about plucking out the hairs of his beard, so he is old enough to at least theoretically have a beard

In the folio version, the gravedigger says he became a gravedigger the day of Hamlet’s birth, and that he’s be “sixteene here, man and boy, thirty years.” However, it’s unclear if “sixteene” means “sixteen” or “sexton” (ie has he worked here for 16 years but is 30 years old, or has he been sexton there for thirty years?)

Hamlet knew Yorick as a young child, and the gravedigger says Yorick was buried 23 years ago. However, the first quarto version version of Hamlet says “dozen years” instead of “three and twenty.” This suggests the line changed over time. (Or that the bad quarto sucks - I really need to make that post about it, huh…)

Yorick is a skull, and according to the gravedigger’s expertise, he has thus been dead for at least 7-8 years - implying Hamlet is at least ~15yo if he remembers Yorick from his childhood

One important thing sometimes overlooked - Claudius takes the throne at King Hamlet’s death, not Prince Hamlet. That is mostly a commentary on English and French monarchist politics at the time, but it is strange within the internal text. A thirty year old Hamlet presumably would have become the new monarch, not the married-in uncle (unless Gertrude is the vehicle through which the crown passes a la Mary I/Phillip II - certainly food for thought)

Honestly, Hamlet is SO aggressively described as being very young that I’m fairly confident the in-text intention is to have him be around 18-23yo. Placing his age at 30yo simply does not make much sense in the context of his descriptors, his narrative role, and his status as a university student.

However, it doesn’t really matter what the “right” answer is, because the confusion itself is what makes the gravedigger scene so interesting and metatextual. We can basically assume one of the following, given the folio text:

Hamlet really is meant to be 30yo, and that was supposed to surprise or imply something to the contemporary audience that is now lost to us

Older actors were playing Hamlet by the time the folio was written down, and the gravedigger’s description was an in-text justification of the seeming disconnect between age of actor and description of “youth”

Older actors were playing Hamlet by the time the folio was set down, and the gravedigger’s description was an in-text JOKE making fun of the fact that a 30-something year old is playing a high-school aged boy. This makes sense, as the gravedigger is a clown and Hamlet is a play that constantly pokes fun at its own tropes and breaks the fourth wall for its audience

The gravedigger cannot count or remember how old he is, and that’s the joke (this is the most common modern interpretation whenever the line isn’t otherwise played straight). If the clown was, for example, particularly old, those lines would be very funny

Any way you look at it, I believe something is echoing there. It seems like this is one of the many moments in Hamlet where you catch a glimpse of some contemporary in-joke about theater and theater culture* that we can only try to parse out from limited context 430 years later. And honestly, that’s so interesting and cool.

*(My other favorite example of this is when Hamlet asks Polonius about what it was like to play Julius Caesar in an exchange that pokes fun of Polonius’ actor a little. This is clearly an inside-joke directed at Globe regulars - the actor who played Polonius must have also played Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play, and been very well reviewed. Hamlet’s joke about Brutus also implies the actor who played Brutus is one of the main cast in Hamlet - possibly even the prince himself, depending on how the line is read).

[twig-tea]

Why We Are Gives Me Anxiety

I have been fighting myself on this We Are post for weeks because I wanted to make sure I knew what I wanted to say and was able to say it. I feel the need to say off the top that I don’t begrudge anyone who enjoyed this show and I’m genuinely glad it brought comfort to people. The show in and of itself, as 16 hour-long episodes of fluff (shout-out to @stuffnonsenseandotherthings for using this word to pinpoint the genre for this show, because it’s perfect), is not offensive or bad or wrong or any judgmental or moralistic word. And it does some things well; the centrality of the friend group was a lovely aspect to this show, and the chemistry in the friendship group scenes was on point. All of the couples have good romantic chemistry as well, and the show is packed with butterflies-inducing moments. 

That being said, I did not enjoy watching this show. I watch television mostly for the story; This show felt more like watching 16 special episodes for a show I hadn’t seen (I think this can be attributed to the point made by @italianpersonwithashippersheart in her post here that the show assumes the audience comes to the show with a pre-existing buy-in to the ships). The lack of overarching narrative structure of We Are gave my brain nothing to hold onto and I spent so much of every episode futilely trying to figure out how scenes worked with what had come before, what the show was trying to say, what these characters were thinking–all of which I knew was the wrong way to be watching, but it’s the way my brain works, so I spent a lot of the show frustrated. In short, this show wasn’t for me. 

But that’s not why I feel the need to write about it. Shows are fully allowed to not be for me, I usually can differentiate between when a show is doing something I don’t like well, or when it’s failing at its own goals. And I don’t begrudge people with different taste getting catered to sometimes; my refrain is that most problems of representation are not solved by calling for less of something, and rather than wanting something not to be made, I’d rather champion for more and a greater variety of content. And lord knows there’s enough BL to go around these days (shouting out @respectthepetty’s post along these lines, which I loved) . But We Are still worries me, and I’ve been trying to find a way to articulate that my concerns are not actually about the show itself, in isolation, but rather about how it feels like part of a pattern. This is my best attempt at laying that out. It’s going to get a little ramble-y, so apologies in advance.

Shout-out to @bengiyo who first articulated this anxiety in his post from relatively early in the show’s run . Ben gets into some of where I’m coming from with concerns about what this show means for the genre in this post, which as he mentions we've chatted about in DMs. I’m really grateful to him for these conversations because in isolation, I worried that I was being alarmist. It was helpful to have confirmation that he was feeling the same way so that I could get out of my own head.  

Ben mentions in his post that New Siwaj has been in this business a long time, and I, like Ben, have jived with him for years because he manages to imbue queer angst into his shows in a way that resonates with me, even when he’s had missteps. I'm going to lay out some of the major highlights of his work for those who haven't followed New for years.

He was an editor on Love Sick, arguably the start of the Thai BL genre as we know it today, and a show full to the brim of queer angst. He directed Make It Right, one of my favourite Thai BL comedy series. This show was also an ensemble centered around a friendship group (though admittedly it didn’t balance the friendship and romance content as strongly as We Are), and it covers so many topics that felt refreshing at the time and still are rare (morning-after sex visits to the clinic because things went poorly, hooking up on the apps, sex acts beyond just penetration, suicidality, I could go on). He also was involved in the GMMTV Waterboyy series–this was his first work for GMMTV that I am aware of. That show had a lot of issues but did explore internalized homophobia and bullying.

He worked as a cinematographer on En of Love, which is again similar to We Are in that it has several couples connected by a friendship group (and is several novels in one series), but each couple was given its own miniseries instead of bundling them into one show. En of Love also still dealt with some serious queer angst, especially in the Love Mechanics story [Sidenote, Niink, the director for En of Love, stuck with New and moved on to work for Wabi Sabi].

At this point, New created his own company, Studio Wabi Sabi, which he's said in interviews was to gain more creative control over what he was working on. And his stories became arguably even more explicitly queer and inclusive of queer trauma. He screenwrote and produced Love By Chance (which folks may not remember or know, but that core story starts off with Pete being blackmailed for being gay until Ae convinces him to come out to his mother and shut down the leverage for blackmail, and a good chunk of Pete’s character arc is unlearning internalized homophobia and not seeing himself as ‘corrupting’ Ae) and then Until We Meet Again. The queer angst in UWMA probably doesn’t need my help spelling out, but just in case anyone doesn’t know the summary, this show was about a queer couple who committed suicide in the face of homophobia in the 1980s, and were reborn and given another chance to be together in present day. I did want to note that in both of these series (LBC and UWMA) the core romance itself has no major conflicts; both AePete and DeanPharm felt like they were intentionally side-stepping so many of the usual BL drama tropes of jealousy and misunderstandings through trust and communication. Dean and Pharm’s story took that even further by having so many of the usual drama pitfalls for a gay couple just not be a problem; their only drama comes from their past lives, in a beautiful exploration of the breaking of intergenerational trauma. So many external threats to their relationship ended up being non-starters, and this was my version of a comfort series for that reason. 

From there, New started working with GMMTV again, and directed My Gear and Your Gown. This series was, to my knowledge, the first GMMTV BL series to mention HIV and to show characters getting tested at the clinic, and while it wasn’t perfect representation (didn’t get into PrEP, treated HIV as a death sentence), it felt like an important milestone.

[I’m skipping the sequels and specials he did for series I already talked about, because they don’t feel that important to the story I’m telling here and this is already so long, but I wanted to acknowledge that I’m not covering everything in his oeuvre.]

He then directed 7 Project, which had some serious storylines dealing with bullying and struggling with life in the closet, out of Wabi Sabi, and then Star and Sky out of GMMTV. Star in My Mind included one of the main characters in a beard relationship for years, and some controversy over the adaptation choices to make Daonuea (Dunk’s character) less polite than in the books. There was drama around the pronouns and characterization in that show (both Daonuea and Khabkluen use guu/mueng in the series, but in the novel, Daonuea uses rao; he also curses in the series and novel fans complained that he was too ‘masculine’). I thought it was an interesting attempt at a departure from BL character tropes to try to make Daonuea more evenly matched with Khabkluen in terms of his gender presentation in the show. Sky in Your Heart also included some angst about whether people of a particular station could be gay. Both of these shows (SIMM and SIYH) were also very trope-y, but they had clear throughlines. 

My Only 12%, the next show New directed out of Wabi Sabi, contains one of my favourite moments in all of BL, in which Seeiw sees Love of Siam and cries because it makes him realize he’s gay. There’s this heartfelt moment where he asks his sister, if there’s nothing wrong with being gay, why doesn’t the film let the gay characters have a happy ending? Despite the weird PSA ending, this show remains one of my favourites.

This is an aside but I’ve long been fascinated about this moment in New’s history: he played himself in War of Y, as a director of BL who is sick of being forced to make BL shows full of fanservice; he treats the actors with disdain and cuts marketable high heat scenes from the show which makes everyone nervous for the show’s future. Later we see him and the actor characters on set for My Only 12%, much happier. I ask myself about this moment at least once a week: Did he write this self-insert? Did someone else write the character and he just played it, and the similarities to his style were (were not?) a coincidence? I hope someone knows and tells me one day,

From there, New functioned as an Executive Producer of Dear Doctor, I’m Coming for Soul [I think this was the first outsourced project by Wabi Sabi]. This series’ entire plot is a metaphor for living in the closet and waiting for the time when the main couple can be together fully without having to hide. 

He directed A Boss and a Babe for GMMTV (which had its problems for sure, but also had Cher as an out gay man at the workplace dealing with casual homophobia in a way that was extremely satisfying), and then Between Us, which is maybe the least queer feeling show Wabi Sabi produced on its own, but did go into the issues of dating and the closet while trying to become a star (if I’ve forgotten something from this show let me know, I only watched it the once). One of the things that was so strange about this show was it being a sequel to UWMA but not engaging with the same themes. The only mention of real world queerness I can remember was the acknowledgment that they can’t get married in Thailand and Dean and Pharm discussing again going abroad and getting married there. 

Absolute Zero was a complete mess of a show; New directed this one for Wabi Sabi, and it has some similarities to UWMA in the sense of there being an attempt at saving the gays from the bury your gays trope, this time via time loop rather than reincarnation, but it did not take the issues it raised seriously enough (including the age gap created between the two characters by virtue of time travel). 

And that leads us to We Are for GMMTV, which as Pluem (@happypotato48)  wrote in his excellent post about this, includes Toey using nu and other 'feminine' or 'youthful' sounding language, but also apparently dropped the main conflict of the novel between Phum and his father (because his father disapproved of Peem).

Why did I go through all of that? Because I wanted to lay out how I've watched New Siwaj’s career go from finding a way to tell incredibly poignant and healing queer narratives (by creating his own company, and fitting these moments into the GMMTV series he did work on) to stripping out queerness from the shows he’s creating in the last year or so.

And this is a pattern we’re seeing more widely at GMMTV in particular, but also in Thai QL more widely. This is something that was touched on but not really discussed in the most recent episode of The Conversation podcast (the 23.5 and only boo! episode here). In both 23.5 and Only Boo!, the show faked out a homophobic parent and then treated their kids like they were silly to assume the worst, and I hated that.

Both Ongsa and Kang had internalized homophobia in their respective series. Both were terrified of telling their mothers about their homosexual love interest. And in both cases, their mothers told them something along the lines of 'of course I will support you no matter what'. In Ongsa's case, even though she was outed by Sun without her consent, she's the one who ends up apologizing for her hesitancy and feeling foolish for her concern. In Kang's case, the show never challenges his mother's assertion that she'll always support him even though we know she hasn’t (she was the one who wanted to prevent him from studying art before his father died), and it’s the audience that was left feeling foolish for our concern. 

In the GMMTV round table for Pride Month, it was mentioned that the decision for Ongsa's mother to be accepting of her relationship with Sun was made in order to model good parental behaviour for the older generation in the audience. In the novel, Ongsa's mother presents a significant conflict, but this conflict was erased from the show. I don't know if the same decision was made in Only Boo! for the same reason or not, but either way, the show definitely signalled to Kang's mother having an issue with Kang's relationship with Moo, and then said "sike", which I did not enjoy. The Conversation panelists were correct in the conversation linked and transcribed above that this wasn't the most egregious misstep either show made, but it feels like a telling symptom of the larger overall narrative problems that New is also now succumbing to.

It seems as though telling stories stripped of queer conflict is being seen as progressive, and possibly also easier to sell, and this is where my anxiety lies around what this will mean for Thai QL content in future. 

For the record, I am all for creating queer content in which we envision a better world for ourselves. But when that is the goal, understanding where internalized homophobia comes from and thinking through how removing parental objection will affect the character and the story is vital to the story and characterization remaining coherent. Otherwise it just ends up feeling like the show is telling queer kids that they're paranoid, rather than rightly worried (like I wrote about in this thread on My Love Mix-Up Thailand, where the same decision was made again to fake out a homophobic subplot that was removed from the adaptation but was present in the source material).

These choices speak to adaptation choices with an eye for specific moments and story points, rather than to a narrative or character arc, which is where it feels like they fall into the wider pattern of what @bengiyo, @shortpplfedup and @ginnymoonbeam were describing in their discussion: shows caring more about hitting specific meme-able story points listed out on a whiteboard than about making cohesive sense or having something coherent to say. 

[So as not to leave it out: I don’t think there were concerns of homophobia in the Wandee Goodday novel (novel readers feel free to correct me if I’m wrong about this) but the show faked us out about homophobia concerns anyway, which again really bothered me during that watch and which adds to the pattern.] 

Now, of course, as I stated up at the top there is value in the creation of different kinds of media. These shows sell different fantasies than the ones I want to see, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have value.All of BL has some amount of fantasy that it’s buying into, that’s what comes with the territory of ‘fiction’. The BL bubble (in which homophobia doesn’t exist and all men are gay for each other) is a version that is at its most extreme; nothing bad ever happens that isn’t quickly resolved within an episode, so there is never narrative tension, and nobody really needs to be that concerned about how anything will go ever. I do not find these relaxing because I can’t buy into the fantasy they’re selling; for me, the lack of narrative tension is so unbelievable as to ruin my immersion. But I can see why that would be appealing for someone whose brain is not always on alert and running at 11/10! The problem I am anticipating is when the majority of content is made that way, and when it is done in a way that takes up all of the mainstream space. I think it’s notable that the only show that’s really felt not in the queer bubble from GMMTV in 2024 is Cooking Crush, which was done by a subsidiary team within GMMTV (and the same team went on to make Only Boo!). And this is why We Are caught my attention and made me nervous; When a director who is known for his representation of poignant queer angst makes an entire 16-hour series in which there are no significant conflicts at all and the only hint of homophobia is in Toey’s reference to being bullied prior to the timeframe of the series, I get worried about who is going to be making the queer angst shows in future!  

For the record, my personal preference for comfort shows are the shows that do not pretend the world is perfect, but do depict an idealized subset of that world→where there’s a group of people that support one another through the bullshit of others and the less than perfect world that surrounds them. Shows that teach us to be kind to one another, and ourselves. Shows that say the world is going to suck sometimes, but we can be good to one another, and not lose sight of who we are, and make space for others to be themselves. A few of my favourite Thai series that do this would be: 

Bad Buddy

Cooking Crush

City of Stars

Knock Knock Boys

Miracle of Teddy Bear

My Only 12%

Secret Crush on You

To Sir With Love

Until We Meet Again

(and of course these occur in non-Thai shows as well. A few examples of my favourites: What Did You Eat Yesterday, DNA Says Love You, Light on Me, Oppan, Marahuyo Project, TsukuTabe, Tadaima Okaeri, Koisenu Futari, Joshi-teki Seikatsu, Gameboys, Hehe and He, Twilight out of Focus, She Makes My Heart Flutter)

These are shows in which there are explicitly external judgments on the relationships in the show and/or the characters for things intrinsic to who they are, and the characters build a support structure in which folks are encouraged to be themselves within that ‘bubble’ (Bad Buddy walks a fine line because it’s within the BL bubble but the problems that the main couple face are so a direct allegory that everything feels familiar; this is also the case with Tadaima Okaeri, which is both omegaverse and one of the most beautifully kind shows of all time). 

So for now, I still have the other smaller Thai studios including Kongthup Productions (who made Knock Knock Boys; we’ll see whether their latest series Monster Next Door deals with any queer angst or not), idolFactory (just finished My Marvellous Dream is You, which had a ton of queer angst, and is currently doing The Loyal Pin, which I have hope for on this front), DeeHup (currently making I Saw You In My Dream, which I’m holding out hope for) and StarHunter Entertainment (who made City of Stars, but whose record is a little spotty on this front; Their latest, Sunset Vibes, has not done a great job of handling the theme of office relationships and blackmail so far, and feels very much in the bubble) to look forward to. 

But as you can see even just by virtue of the caveats I included above, it feels like this shift is happening in the smaller companies too (harder to see a real pattern with fewer data points, which is one of the reasons why I picked on GMMTV–in addition to it being the largest media conglomerate in Thailand and therefore able to take it). Maybe it’s nothing, maybe I’m just an anxious person. Or maybe I’m just wrong about what would be best for the genre and for queer people in Thailand as well as viewers all over the world. But I, for one, would find it a loss if Thai QL decides en masse to pivot away from queer angst, and right now it kind of feels like that’s what it’s doing. In this context, to reiterate my original point, the existence of We Are is not a problem, but is one in a set of exemplars that raised specific alarm bells due to the people involved and their history in QL and queer representation, its deviation from the source material, and the surrounding shows that seem to indicate a pattern rather than a one-off. 

[fazedlight]

What's Wrong with 5B?

(aka: how It’s a Super Life ruined everything)

The premiere of season 5 was simple. Kara fucked up, felt deeply sorry for it, and revealed her secret to Lena (driven solely by her guilt) after far too long of gaslighting her. Unfortunately, it was a bit too late, Lena was already (rightfully) pissed and about to exact a(n outsized) revenge about it. Easy peasy.

We see Kara struggle with it a little. She gives Lena the superwatch, looking super guilty the whole time. She brings Lena international treats, talks to Alex about how she’s nervous about interacting with Lena. But she seems to have underestimated the damage she’s caused - and Lena is going through a major disillusionment. 

Both of which are mostly in character from my perspective. But with the caveat that, I knew the basic summary of the Rift before I watched the show. So those were moments the characters were already building to in my head. (I know some people think that Kara’s reaction in season 3 was out of character, or that Lena’s reaction in 5A was out of character, and those are valid opinions that are worth exploring! If I watched the show unfold live, maybe I’d be in that camp too.)

We then see Lena’s betrayal and Kara scrambling to pull Lena back from the edge into an anti-villain arc. The Crisis happens, Kara visits Lena, and Lena calls Kara out - “What did you think would happen when you came here? That you'd tell me everything in a fit of selflessness, even if it meant that I knew how you betrayed me, and then I'd just keel over and forgive you?” Kara still knows she did something wrong, and vows to never do it again.

Aaaaand then It’s A Super Life (beloved/beloathed) happens.

I really liked the episode the first time I saw it. I was a supercorp shipper who hadn’t read a single fic. And on its face, I mean, they dedicated the entire 100th episode to the relationship between Kara and Lena and trying to repair it. It failed, sure, but they'd make up eventually (again, I was spoiled).

But that episode was really about absolving Kara. It was a bizarre conclusion. Kara no longer had fault, because any reality they tried out would’ve failed. … which makes no damn sense. Even if no reality could work (I’m skeptical), Kara didn’t know that at the time she made her decisions. She still has fault for the harm she knew she was causing (even if it happened to work out better than the alternatives she didn’t know about).

I think this is a narrative shift. This isn’t just about the in-universe “Kara believes she’s absolved”. This is a writer's ploy to change the narrative and make the audience think that Kara didn’t have fault. Writing this as a character flaw might’ve worked, maybe, if they had Kara reexamine her assumptions later. But as a narrative? … the shift fell completely flat.

The rift was canceled at this point. Suddenly it was no longer the story of two people’s flaws interplaying in the worst possible way. Suddenly it was: Kara is right, Lena is wrong, let us never speak of it again.

It makes everything that comes after really grating. The end of 5x19 (where Kara goes “maybe I’m ready to forgive you now” and shakes Lena’s hand) feels completely empty, because there’s no acknowledgement from Kara that she fucked up - a fact she fully understood at the beginning and middle of the season! It bleeds into season 6, where we never see Lena hash things out with the superfriends or with Kara post-return. It makes the finale (Lena’s “You made me a better person”) fall flat. At this point multiple people in the fandom have pointed out that it’s Melissa’s acting that is Kara’s saving grace (though even that has limitations, as many of us felt with Sadie). But Kara as a character really suffers - and with it, her relationship with Lena, and Lena's arc - because the writers did not make a convincing argument for their shift. 

The hero’s always right, I guess? The main character can’t have major flaws? (I hope someday we learned what instructions they were getting in the writing room 😂)

For my own sanity, I have a whole slew of conversations(/arguments) in my head that I place into season 6 to fix some of this (as well as making Mxy a liar who was trying to make his friend feel better, rather than those other timelines being real). But while they’re canon-compliant… they aren’t canon. What we needed was something on screen to make the relationship shine again, to have Kara revisit why her rationale absolving her in the 100th episode didn’t follow at all, and have Lena work through her issues with Kara and the rest of the superfriends. But we didn’t get that.

Which means everything post-100th will always feel wrong to me.

[agentgrange]

I saw this post and couldn't stop thinking about it, so here is the answer I gave after some consideration-- I'll tell you when I find out. Sometimes it really feels like it depends on your Agents, and what they're accustomed to. I have two groups that I play with, one is mostly serious with a handful of gallows humor quips while the other one is absolutely clown-shoes-goof-goof-times. You could lovingly craft a deeply unsettling body-horror scene or run a tried-and-true encounter straight out of an established campaign and your mileage will greatly vary depending on your audience. That's not *necessarily* a bad thing, a handlers job is to guide a narrative in a way that's first and foremost fun for the players. If they want to take it seriously and buy into the horror they will, but if they want a bit of levity then there's nothing wrong with playing to the crowd. But I do really, really empathize with struggling to convey the awesome and terrible might of some cosmic horror with nothing but your words in a group of people that (hopefully) instinctively feel at ease and jovial while fooling around playing games with their buddies. Here's a few practical pieces of advice I can give you.

Try to cultivate an unsettling environment for your players. This one seems obvious but is actually really hard to get down right, especially when people mostly play online these days. But you’d be surprised how much regularly providing good visual aids, a Discord bot playing ambient music, and a good playlist can really set the tone for your session. Don’t just provide visual aids for the money shots of alien greys and deep ones either, running a campaign based on The Conspiracy era gives you ample opportunity to post a ton of weird, liminal 90s photographs to set the vibe for everyone even during otherwise mundane scenes.

Make a point of explaining to your players the difference between what they are experiencing and what their characters are experiencing. Yes, facing off against a 8ft tall fish man with a crossbow is inherently ridiculous as a fictional abstract. Its an entirely different experiencing actually being there, face to face under an incredible amount of stress seeing something that should not exist. In a lot of ways your players aren’t their characters so much as they are mad gods guiding their characters’ fates. THEY can laugh from the safety of this higher dimension we all exist in, that’s part of the fun. Hell their characters might even have a passing thought or two about how absurd the situation might be—but that entire time they’re fighting their lizard-brained instincts just to stop from mentally imploding. Let them laugh, but then tell them how their characters' hands might be shaking, or how any clever quip they wanted to say just comes out as a mumble as their body betrays whatever thoughts their rational mind tries to convey.

Know the rules of comedy. Comedy usually needs a straight-man, so if your players are goofing around don’t be afraid to give them a straight-man NPC to react to their antics in a way that makes it feel like you’re in on the bit but keeps the narrative going. Better yet, try to get ahead of it. Set up designated low-stakes areas in your story that are designed to add a bit of levity. They say comedy comes in threes, so you should structure these segments to let your agents to do some dumb shit about three times before they get all the sillies out and are ready to move on. And the emotional highs during these side quests will just make the crushing lows in the main plot feel that much more horrifying.

Building off that last one I have one more secret, forbidden technique. Buyer beware on this one honestly, but I cannot overstress just how much. Players. Love. Silly. Characters. And as David Lynch has proven, you can have silly characters that are still deeply unsettling. Try adding a few characters in that flip the script on your players and make *them*  want to play the role of the straight-man reacting to what your NPCs are doing every once in a while. If done right, it can kind of trick them into taking things seriously or feel like the eerie out of place comedy is at their character’s expense even if the players are in on it.

I hope some of this was at least partially useful. Good luck out there.

[mounthuatruther]

I read a review that said that Chung Myung is a flat protagonist with no real depth to him and I'm just like????? ???? What?? lol like were we reading the same thing? What really hooked me in this story was Chung Myung's motivations. It was chapter 4 of the webtoon. After seeing Mount Hua in ruins and being super angry he slows down for a minute and wonders if this is all his fault. From there, he begins to take responsibility for the fall of Mount Hua and feels immense guilt that is touched upon more and more as you continue to read. This webtoon is so precious because it makes Mount Hua a sect that you root for and want only the best for in the end. The novel really compels you to feel Chung Myung's rage, guilt, sorrow, regret, loneliness, joy, pride, etc. and it makes me so emotional. I read mostly while I'm at work and I've straight up cried. The beauty of it is that it is not a hard read either! Like I don't have to decode through layers and layers of implications and subtext. Put some respect on my boy's name. Excluding the novel, the webtoon does pretty well with his character and story telling.

I took creative writing and major in film and to me, he is the perfect protagonist. When creating a story with a narrative and a protagonist one of the first questions you want to ask yourself is, "Why should the audience care about them?" The Return of the Mount Hua Sect answered this question from EVERY ANGLE. The first three chapters of the webtoon are pretty much like every other reincarnation manhua: person is killed awfully, wakes up back in time, restarts but knows how to get stronger faster, and then pursues this path. As I previously stated, they start to change it up when we reach chapter 4. We see Chung Myung start to take responsibility AND blame for what happened to his sect. We start to see how he viewed his sect as his HOME. His home is in RUINS. The side and supporting characters help to add to this as well. Chung Myung feels deep sorrow for the elders who have been taking care of the fallen Mount Hua for so long. We see Chung Myung go from the angry old man who is mad that things have changed to the grandpa who wants his home back and to get back at everyone who had a part in its ruin. HE COUNTS HIMSELF AS THE MAIN PERPATRATOR. He truly wants what's best for the kids of Mount Hua and cares deeply and is very passionate all while shouldering these burdens alone. AND THEN HE LEARNS TO OPEN UP AND GROW AND CHANGE

As we keep reading, we see Chung Myung's character development!! I don't want to spoil it because it is mostly stuff from the novel but talks about his past self like he was a different person, he makes multiple notes on how he acts differently or thinks differently, he is trusted by those around him when he wasn't in the past

Overall, Chung Myung's story is very compelling and he is MY HEART

[funhouse-mirror-barbie]

There’s just…there’s such cognitive dissonance in the Helluva Boss and Hazbin Fandoms when it comes to tone and portraying things like abuse vs. slapstick comedy.

Its really fascinating to me, because if you do point out that there is a double standard in the ways that violence and abuse is framed in certain plot points, you’re usually told that you’re “media illiterate” and that you “don’t understand” how slapstick works. (More below)

Which is wild because the issue is not with slapstick. It’s with the rapidly oscillating tone in the narrative. We’ll see Stella attempt to slap Stolas, and it’s treated as a serious abuse, but when Loona violently beats up Blitz during an argument they’re having, the audience is expected to see this as “slapstick”.

It’s like if Tom and Jerry had an episode with their usual shenanigans, and then suddenly in the middle of it Tom had a realistic panic attack and broke down over all the times he’s been hurt b/c of Jerry. And then in the next episode they just went back to the status quo.

We can find an actual example of this exact same tone issue though in the animated sitcom, Family Guy. Specifically, the episode "Screams of Silence: The Story of Brenda Q"

Family Guy is a show that’s had a long history of violence as a source of comedy—but in the above episode, they attempted (very poorly in my opinion) to tackle the subject of domestic abuse and violence, completely straight.

When this episode came out, it was widely panned and disliked by critics and audiences. Brenda’s initial appearance, while still dealing with domestic abuse, was played off mostly as a one time joke, and was a small bit part of the episode itself.

I think this was a really understandable reaction to the “The Story of Brenda Q” because it was such tonal whiplash from Family Guy’s usual storylines.

The Hellaverse, to me, has the exact same problem. The narrative occasionally treats the heavy topics being depicted as serious issues, but will then switch to making jokes about the exact same topics later.

We see this in Hazbin with the way sexual assault is treated—Angel Dust’s sexual assault is treated as a serious matter, but two episodes later, when Sir Pentious is sexually assaulted, it’s treated as a joke.

I’ve seen fans say that the Sir Pent joke “works” because he wasn’t “actually raped” and I just. I don’t know how to explain to others that sexual assault does not have to escalate to rape to still be sexual assault. Someone touching your body for their own sexual gratification, without your explicit consent, is sexual assault.

Sir Pentious being dragged into a designated “sex room” against his will, while he’s actively saying “no” and is clawing at the ground, is sexual assault. It just is.

And hey, if you WANT to frame that as a joke, you technically can. But doing so undeniably undercuts the anti—sexual violence and anti—sexual assault message that you claim is central to your show’s narrative.

Again, as always you can disagree, this is only my opinion. There’s definitely more examples of other shows (and of Family Guy again, with Meg Griffin) doing this tonal whiplash in their stories, but you have to really be delicate with threading that needle in order to make it work, something that the Hellaverse just doesn’t yet have the maturity to do.

[buzzybee26]

I've seen people saying that this season marks a transition from serious with silly elements to silly with serious elements (particularly after the 1st 2 eps) but now that we've had a lot more of the season, I think this is wrong. This season isn't silly with serious elements, it's a serious season wearing the mask of a silly season.

Spoilers under cut

Space Babies looks like it's just "lol babies running space station, lol snot monster, lol farting space ship" at face value, but there's a lot more to unpack from how The Doctor relates the Bogeyman and being the only one of his kind to the underlying themes of abortion legislation and honestly a lot more to unpack than I don't have the brain power to write rn.

Devil's Chord keeps the silly tone, but destroys the world and does some important foreshadowing about Ruby and The One Who Waits. This is the one that leans most into the silliness, but it has the stakes to work with this analysis.

The plot of Boom is "The Doctor steps on a glowy land mine" which is a hilarious sentence and the next time preview for it was absolutely left us with a lot of questions pertaining to how that was going to be a full episode, but it ended up being a thesis on how organised religion, capitalism and war are some of greatest threats to humanity and they all make each other worse. Boom is played straight for pretty much the whole episode, but it looks like a pretty silly premise before you watch it.

The 73 Yards next time preview, whilst creepy, made the episode look a lot cheesier than it ended up being and they ran with this until the reveal that the pub goers were just messing with Ruby, after which we don't get any more stuff like uncomfortable close ups or characters expositing about local folk lore. The horror b-movie is a lie.

And now Dot and Bubble. The brightest episode of the season has the darkest ending so far. At first glance it certainly looks a lot sillier than it is with its bug-eyed monsters and "phone bad" aesthetic. This episode is all about deception. Ricky lies about the home world, Lindy lies about Ricky being alive, but there's more. The residents of Fine Time get the lie of Fine Time. The whole thing is about them looking past a vale to see what's really going on around them. The Doctor and Ruby get the lie that they will save these people. They go in, they try to help and the get cooperation for a bit, but the rich kids' pride and prejudice stops them. We as the audience receive the lie that these characters could be saved in the first place. The episode sets itself up to have a hopeful ending where the rich kids start learning to improve themselves as people in a new home that the Doctor brought them to. We get so focused on that narrative structure that we don't step back and look at the bigger picture. These people think they're so amazing because they don't waste resources with their consumerism and they have followers and they're stuck in a n environment that affirms their egos yet they can't even walk without their bubbles and they mostly get annoyed when the disappearances get brought up. Their egos are so overinflated and they're so used to being in an environment where they can only talk to other people who think and act like them, of course they're not going with the Doctor. They'll use him as long as they think they need him but they refuse to accept that they can't do anything by themselves if they're not in absolute immediate danger because they think they're so amazing. This feels like it should have a somber ending where we mourn the losses and look to a brighter future in the moment because of the tone and structure, but take a step back from it and there was no other way it was going to end.

This whole season has been a tonal lie that's been breaking down as we go and I really hope they do something cool with that idea.

[sinvilles]

additional thoughts: why cancelling the show actually did Orel's character so so so dirty

disclaimer again: I'm unconcerned about redemption because I'm not a fuckin lutheran. I'm a writer and I like sociological stories and seeing characters achieve wholeness within narrative. moral orel is a unique case because the story was cut short halfway through, and all character arcs were arrested at their lowest point in the narrative, except for some characters on the side who were just kind of beginning to shine.

The gist of the matter is that Moral Orel was cancelled because the executive producer's favorite character was supposed to grow up and he had a problem with that not being very funny. Orel was supposed to go from a naive and well-meaning albeit trouble-making child to a very mature and thoughtful young teenager. The beginnings of this were in Nature, and the way people respond to that you'd think this was the point of his character arc, that the end of it was just him realizing his dad wasn't shit and that's the conclusion of his story. That was just the start.

Orel was supposed to experience profound loss for the first time. He was supposed to grow more open minded and perceptive and thoughtful, and actively question his small world and what was being fed to him. Orel was going to have a crisis of faith. HE WAS GOING TO HAVE AN EMO PHASE. There was a lot that was going to occur for his character, but it was cut short and so when they put that happy ending in the finale it feels more like aftercare after a deeply bleak and unsettling turn of events. Just because you get aftercare from a story that only resolves issues to a halfway point, doesn't make a proper ending. The narrative, the writers, the audience have emotional investment in these characters.

Sure, we joke that we hate the characters and that they deserve their misery- and where the story ended, they deserved their misery. It didn't have to be that way. These characters are well written enough to hate, to love, to consider and reconsider over and over. Secretly we all wanted them to grow- even Clay, a character so damaged and ruined he seems bereft of any of god's mercy.

But this assumption that Orel had a full character arc- its insulting to him. Especially the jump to "and then miraculously he had a happy family with Christina the end." Characters become whole through their struggles, because through it they reach a sense of understanding. Orel had come to a couple of understandings by season three- God isn't just in church, and his father is a flawed and hurt individual. Then what? does he just repress everything and go about his life? Hating his father and opposing him was the start of a new arc, not the end of his story. Fuck man, it makes him seem immature.

I mean, if its the end of anything it feels like the end of his innocence, not his story. In one of the unmade scripts, Narcissism, there's this confession to Putty:

shit man he's worried about his dad getting sadder? This child is so beautiful and pure, fuck man I wish the fandom remembered him like this and not like the bleak combined ending of Nesting and Honor. 13 is such an unlucky number. they should have stopped at Sacrifice. and also:

YES OREL, REPRESSION IS BAD! You're doing so good baby boy

Beforel Orel was a fun excursion, and it brought a new angle to his (very strongly hinted to be neurodivergent) character. but it mostly told us things we already knew. and the thought that we'll never get any more.... shit hurts. Idk I don't have much to say other than I'm sad. in conclusion

[holmsister]

As for Shuro/Toshiro... lemme see if I can put this coherently. The long and short of it is, this is Ryoko Kui doing the thing she does in which she uses the dungeon as a neutral background in which characters with different ideas can clash and come to terms with each other. We're not supposed to side with Toshiro, but we are not supposed to side with Laios, really, mostly because there is no "right" and "wrong" here.

A character who is heavily coded as autistic and comes from a northern europe coded culture (low-context - information is supposed to be conveyed in the most straightforward and clear way possible, even when said way is considered rude) meets another character who is extremely shy and comes from a japan coded culture (high context - info is supposed to be inferred by a mix of behaviour and conversational allusion, maintaining peaceful interpersonal relationships takes precedent over efficiency).

Neither of them are inherently wrong in the way they approach the other. Yes, Toshiro shouldve said something, but he doesn't know how. He was not taught how to handle someone like Laios. Conversely, Laios was not taught how to read between the lines and understand what a person is trying to convey if they are not speaking directly.

Since Laios is the main protagonist and we see most of the story from his POV, and also since most people on this website are American (low context culture), its easy for people to assume we are supposed to side with him. But I don't think that's the author's intention at all. Remember - Kui is Japanese writing for a primarily Japanese audience. From THEIR POV Toshiro's behaviour is perfectly understandable. It's also worth noting that there is a lot of extra material that gives further context to the Toshiro/Laios relationship.

One of the main points, for example, is how Laios gets Toshiro's name wrong. When they first met, Toshiro is immediately an object of curiosity to Laios BECAUSE he is a foreigner from a faraway land. Laios immediately invites himself to become his friend and starts asking question after question. When he finally remembers he's supposed to ask for Toshiro's name, he misunderstands it as Shuro, and Toshiro is too shy to correct him. "Renaming" the foreign side character for the benefit of the Western main character is an extremely loaded symbolic choice from Robinson Crusoe's Friday onward. I am not aware of the particular history of this trope in Japanese literature, but other elements of Toshiro's story suggest that renaming in his culture is something that is often done to slaves. Ryoko Kui is generally very deliberate about details like these. I highly doubt this is a random choice.

Of course Laios does not do it on purpose and Toshiro understands this and decides to let it slide, but its still something hurtful that Laios does to another person without even realising that hes doing it. This is a type of mistake he does often and he will do again across the story.

Again. Not saying Toshiro is perfectly right either, but there is a reason why they finish the meeting on relatively decent terms - because they BOTH recognise how they went wrong.

Toshiro realises that he needs to be more direct and determined about what he wants, but this is a reality check for Laios as well. He has been able to coast by so far in the dungeon without giving much thought to other people's wants and needs, thanks to the help of friends who care for him and are willing to follow him, but the story is changing pace and scale. Soon he might have to make some difficult decisions that involve the life and death of others. He needs to learn to listen.

This is why the Toshiro confrontation happens in the same span where we see Chimera!Falin going on a rampage, and Kabru trying to establish a friendship with Laios to assess what kind of person he is. Several narrative threads are coming to a head - the conflict with Toshiro is the tangible result of the tensions we saw around Laios' uncaring attitude from the beginning.

[prontaentrega]

@fluctuating-fixations It's mostly about some specific word choices that don't really change the plot or the whole direction of the story so it's not like, an entirely different book, but they alter the whole tone of it and makes it worse to me. The first thing i noticed I didn't like about it was when Valentín first mentions Marta and he says "my girl" i immediately went he would not fucking say that!!!!!

In the original Spanish the word he uses for Marta is "compañera" which translates to partner or comrade (F). It's not the most common word to talk about your girlfriend in spanish so it's a deliberate choice on his part. What was the need to change it? to make it sound more natural? to make him sound less political?

In that same page he goes on to talk about his guerrilla comrades and he actually uses the word compañeros for them. The masculine/neutral form of the word he uses for Marta

But the one that really annoyed me is this one

Because in this part the word he uses in Spanish is, again, compañera. And idk about you but i think it has a completely different meaning if you say "if she's my woman, it's because she's in the struggle too" or if you say "if she's my comrade/partner, it's because she's in the struggle too." And besides he would never call anyone "his woman" it's just completely contrary to his whole character... this and a bunch of other small stuff like it mischaracterizes Valentín as more of a macho figure than he really is. And this is an issue i have with literally every adaptation and translation of this book tbh everyone's always so fixed on making this college educated communist latino more violent and sexist and angry. I wonder why

This one's minor but it also bothers me, when talking about the panther woman movie there's a character that in Spanish is "the architect colleague" but in English she's "the assistant" ????? what reason was for that other than misogyny

Maybe this is a non-issue and I'm nitpicking but with the book's narrative being exclusively a dialogue between two people, word choice is fundamental because this is the only way we have of knowing these characters. And especially on a book where gender expression and gender roles are such a main theme this is not like, getting mad because they switched coffe for tea on a sentence. Which I'm also mad about btw. They completely ditch any mention of the characters drinking mate and switch it for tea. Once again I'm asking what was the point? to make it all less exotic? to make it easier to understand to English speakers? having to look up what a mate is or just guess it from context isn't gonna kill anybody, but the translation is so afraid of alienating its gringo audience that it discards cultural context and reduces its only two characters to shallower versions of themselves. And I'd say the cultural context is pretty relevant because this is a book about two political prisoners under a dictatorship that was written and published when Puig's own country was under a neoliberal dictatorship. It's not Vonnegut's cat's cradle with a made up dictator in a made up country, this was actually the situation in Argentina in 1976.

And obviously someone who only speaks english won't notice any of this. What makes me sad about this is that none of the problems i have with it have to do with impossible cultural clashes, it would be extremely simple to fix all of that. It's a tragedy that the only english translation of a latin american book about gender and propaganda was made in 1976. But still I'd rather someone read the book even with the bad translation than not read it at all

[reddbuster]

I have a lot of thoughts about the ways I see the characters and themes of ace attorney discussed within the fanbase so I wanted to try to articulate some things that I notice in the ways the fandom analyzes and tries to apply literary criticism to these games.

Remember that a text can be viewed from multiple literary lenses. The most important to understand as a basis for everything if you're going to analyze a text is formalism, which is based strictly on what is directly shown IN the text. This means the more obvious plot, themes, settings, characters etc. For example, in terms of AA, this means the setting is either Japan or America (I love Japanifornia as much as the next guy and you could argue it's pseudo-canon, but it's not established in either version of the original text itself so it doesn't really work from the view of a formalist). And the theme of Ace Attorney, from the view of a formalist, would be something like "justice is in the pursuit of truth" and maybe a secondary, underlying theme of revenge. So formalism isn't analyzing the text through knowledge of outside factors like cultural elements, audience response, or even the creator(s) of the text itself. Formalism isn't really psychoanalyzing the characters beyond what's necessary to discuss the larger themes of the text. Formalism on its own is pretty much bound to what is directly referenced within the piece of media.

Now, formalism has it's uses, but it also has its limits. It makes an attempt to be objective and unbiased and can give us a good basis from which to make further inquiry, but ultimately, even if it was possible to be completely unbiased (it isn't) art isn't MEANT to be viewed in a vacuum. Often, the creator intends for you to keep these outside facts or cultural biases in mind when viewing media. But even aside from whatever the original intent behind it was, it's also very valid and even important & necessary in many cases to break away from the restraints of the original tone of the narrative and analyze a text from a different point of view.

What I notice a lot in fandom but especially around AA for some reason is that a lot of people will only consider a formalist reading of the text and will be completely unwilling to even consider let alone criticize anything from outside of that context. OR, quite often what people in fandom will do is they'll be willing to apply other literary lenses like psychoanalysis or even queer theory but ONLY to the characters THEY personally deem worthy (hint hint its usually men) and then get upset when people apply this theory to the characters they don't want to think about (usually mostly women)

Anyway the point of this post is there are multiple valid and legitimate readings of a text and female characters are more than just "girlboss" and "the only braincell" ok thank you bye

[ewingstan]

Hm, I think I mostly enjoyed Breakthrough's debate with Gary. As a look at the the different perspectives one could hold on power and capedom, it doesn't work at all; the reader isn't gonna seriously consider Gary's argument's when he's been positioned as a Teacher shill who'll go after a nine-year-old. But then, its not really being framed as an actual clash of ideas so much as a battle for narrative control.

And that's something I enjoy reading more than Ward's physical battles. The attempts at crowdwork, the politics and pageantry of capedom, is something I kind of wish had been a larger focus rather than the extended battle scenes. There's a lot of questions (what attempts at new modes of organization and protection have people advocated for in the wake of gold morning? how has the proliferation of groups that get hired out to "heroes" and "villains" alike affected perception of those categories?) that I wish got explored by the text more. I do wish they got explored in ways outside of an anti-parahuman movement created by a shadowy conspiracy, but hey, better than nothing.

Usually, at least. Exploring those questions gets worse when the character's attempts at narrative control intersect with wildbow trying to advocate for his own murky ideas of justice. Hence why I'm theoretically interested in how Breakthrough sells the public on Rain getting to be considered a hero, but am offput when the answer is "one girl at his trial recognizes that he's repentant and bravely forgives him, to the jeers of a crowd, because the reader is supposed to agree that Rain's willingness to be punished is both laudable and necessary." This section has enough of Victoria going "okay we gotta sell this specific point even if I don't believe it" that I don't really have the same sense that wildbow is actually making any prescriptive claims.

That falters a bit when Ashley disconnects her arms and Gary immediately loses rhetorical footing.

Ashley didn't really respond in a way that I see Gary's audience being swayed by. It challenges the "I'm specifically a monster" point but not his actual "we need to do something about Parahumans being in charge" point. He could and should be switching tacts to talking about Rune being with the heroes, or asking why they sought her as a candidate in the first place, or asking what it means that parahumans can so easily be made into a weapon even against their will. Breakthrough's argument is maybe effective in terms of having the reader reject Gary's claim, but that's because the reader has been following Ashley and knows how significant it is that she's rejecting having been a real member of the nine. As dramatic as the moment is, it doesn't really make sense for Gary to lose his momentum, and it feels like he only does to sell how powerful and important a moment it was for Ashley. Maybe its for the best, he's gotta falter somewhere for the argument to stop circling the drain, but I feel like I would've been more onboard if Breakthrough got the win through something more directly related to the narrative they're spinning.

Still, there were a number of good character beats. Ashley being faced with an accusation that she was getting preferential treatment through housing, and responding to it largely as an accusation that she was being kept as an object by the government, was a pretty great way to get across where Ashley's at. And Rain being the one to jump to "its all of us vs the villains," while Victoria privately disagreed and wanted to focus on "its the heroes vs the villains," did a good job of demonstrated Vicky's casual dismissal of non-parahumans. It was much less jarring way of communicating that to the reader than her earlier "we might have to tell them that we don't care about their concerns" comment to Vista, which felt too self-consciously villainous. Her needing to be pushed into treating non-parahumans as part of the in-group was a much more believable way of communicating the same thing to the reader.