#i unironically love current canon's dedication to saying

[jaclynhyde]

heyyy, unexpected jack in generations shattered! i don't know who he's fighting (edit: morgan lefey, thanks un-awesomeme) but he's about to get swallowed by nothingness so it doesn't matter. plus bonus hot future booster!

also i was like "wow reading events kinda cool now that i know more random characters :D!" and then they possibly killed off knockout again and comics are bad, actually

[kuuderekun]

Shy and Superhero Anime

One topic I talked about on this blog a few years ago is how as someone who was an American Comic Book Nerd for ages before Anime took over my brain, the Anime that to me have a similar appeal to my favorite DC Universe stories are the not the ones explicitly drawing on American Superhero aesthetics like My Hero Academia and One Punch Man but rather shows like Code Geass, the Raildex franchise, Detective Conan/Case Closed, and I’d now add Durarara! which I watched this year, twice now.

However starting with the Fall of last year a new Superhero Anime has entered the fray, Shy who’s second season is currently airing.

While HeroAca and OPM put the aesthetic trapping of American Comic Book Superheroes onto a show that is essentially a conventional Battle Shonen, with Shy it is the Magical Girl Warrior subgenre putting on Western Superhero clothing.  That actually works far better because the Magical Genre has its origins in part in western Superhero influences. 

Naoko Takeuchi has admitted to being partly inspired by Wonder Woman in creating Sailor Moon, something the recently re-adapted final arc makes more obvious with the Bracelets plot point.  But there’s also the additional indirect influence from how the Transforming Tokusatsu Superhero genre was inspired by Shazam and the 60s Batman show and so forth.

So Shy kind of winds up feeling the Genre returning to its roots in some ways.

90s Magical Girl Warriors like the Sailor Scouts and Wedding Peach wear costumes that fit in with how we typically think of American Superhero Costumes from the Golden, Silver and Bronze ages in that it would not feel inaccurate to describe them as some form of “tights”.

Today however your default parody of a standard Magical Girl is more likely to be wearing a frilly or fluffy dress of some kind and that is a largely the influence of Pretty Cure which in Japan has long surpassed Sailor Moon as the most popular Magical Girl franchise, (but it's Anthology nature means no single team has had as many canonical adventures as the Senshi).

And so Shy wearing a Western Superhero style costume coincidentally looks more like a 90s Magical Girl then any new Magical Girl franchise we’ve seen in 20 years.

But Shy is not completely removed from the history of the Magical Girl, it definitely shows some influence from the Post Madoka era of the genre, with what the villains are doing reminding me of Daybreak Illusion more than anything else.

The main difference between Shy and other Magical Girl shows, in fact the main reason it’s probably not officially going to be considered one is that there are Male Superheroes.  Of course the Nanoha franchise also had males who had essentially the same abilities.  The British Superhero keeps reminding me of the antagonist of Superman Vs The Elite for some reason.

All of this kind of makes Shy the antithesis of how I’ve been thinking about the 2008 OVA School Days: Magical heart Kokoro-Chan.

As one of the very few American Otaku who loves School Days both unironically and not because I view it as some kind of “deconstruction” I was very curious to see what it’s take on the turn the little sister character into a Magical Girl spin off trend would be.  And what I got kind of confused me.

First it starts off by also having a sort of Sentai parody, which would be cool enough.  But then we get to this classroom scene where everyone starts talking about Superheroes.  And Makoto and Sekai started saying things that sound like J. Jonah Jamenson, in my head I was like “I dedicated one of the most overly long posts on my blog to defending you two and this is how you repay me?”.  Then Setsuna starts talking and I think “finally my Waifu will bring some sense to this” and then she starts spouting a “Superheros cause Villains” monologue.

Basically this Magical Girl Parody decided to have the metatextual commentary of a Western Superhero Comic.  In Magical Girls shows and Super Sentai the villains come first and the heroes are a reaction to them, the exact opposite of what Setsuna just said.

[padawanlost]

Assuming my impression is accurate, you seem to be someone who grew up on the OT but prefers the PT and loves it unironically (as in, not just because of the memes). A refreshing change from the usual. And I also don't like Disney basically ignoring the PT in their new canon, focusing instead on the ST and catering to everyone who treats the OT as gospel. I'm sorry, I'm a little bitter.

No, I didn’t really grew up with the OT. When I was born ROTJ had already premiered so I grew up in a time when the OT was all the SW we had but I was too young to be part of the madness. It was only when the PT hype begun that I started to pay serious attention to SW and only after TPM I became truly fascinated by Star Wars (as a fan and not just a consumer). that’s why I don’t consider myself someone who was an OT fan first. The prequels will always be my first and main sw love.

As for Disney, I was one of those fans who was always skeptical about the whole thing. I never saw it as a good and every day that goes by I just become more… resigned. As someone who has dedicated years of her life to star wars to have a company suddenly say none of that matters anymore because they want to make new stuff only to discover the new stuff is just the old stuff with a new paint job was a punch in the gut. Not gonna lie, it hurts. But I also feel conflicted because this has been an introduction to sw to so many new fans and I really don’t want to become the same kind of person who told me I was a bad fan for enjoying something they, the older generation, didn’t. 

There’s a huge part of the fandom that has never enjoyed Star Wars without Disney and that’s something I have to factor in when I’m talking about this because I know exactly how it feels to have someone tell you how wrong you are for enjoying a movie, a ship or a character and I *really* don’t want to be that person. so, I’m hurt. I’m deeply hurt by what Disney has done and will continue doing, but I don’t want to be an asshole about it because I also believe in people’s right to love Disney’s content. It’s a really fine line to walk and it’s one that hurts me. that’s why you won’t see me posting about the current state of the fandom here. I don’t want to get involved because getting involved hurts. I mean, it’s not because of the fandom, the media or even Disney. But it’s impossible to think about the present and future of star wars without being heartbroken at how easily its past, a past that I was part of, was dismissed, erased or retconed.

[kelasparmak]

Odo and Garak for the situations ask?

Fake dating/marrieds: there are two options. one is that odo is excruciatingly uncomfortable and people start taking garak aside to give him unwanted relationship advice for his fake marriage, or they slip odo cards with a divorce lawyer’s name on. garak finds this hilarious at first but, because it’s garak and he is a vain vain man, quickly becomes appalled at how everyone assumes odo has fallen out of love with him and he’ll be left heartbroken. maybe he’s moved on to greener pastures, guys, didja think of that?alternatively, and maybe less likely, garak is for once determined to properly be a good friend to odo, who in fairness has always been a good friend to him, and not do anything that might push his boundaries. odo on the other hand is a noir detective in his heart of hearts and immediately gets super into the roleplay/disguise element, and is surprisingly good at playing the part (because playing the part is what odo has been pressured to do for as long as he’s been conscious and self-aware).either way, it’s not what people expect it to be, and it’s sort of hilarious.

Bodyswap: odo uses his security codes to turn up the temperature in his room, breaks it, and causes environmental problems. o’brien gets pissed off with him, then figures out why and is sympathetic, and then goes right back to pissed off because garak has turned into goo to get into places he shouldn’t and hear things he shouldn’t, and o’brien just found him in his goddamn alamo replica.

Telepathy:  ANGST. angst happens. probably they bond over having daddy issues, but resolutely pretend not to be able to hear each other’s thoughts because they are stubborn pieces of shit who Don’t Do Sadness.

OH NO only one bed at the hotel: odo doesn’t use a bed so this is maybe not an issue. if it’s during the humanoid!odo time though, i can see a cuddling-for-warmth scenario arising. only they refuse to call it cuddling and come up with completely absurd periphrastic overcomplicated bullshit to make it sound like Serious Stuff that was unavoidable and doesn’t mean they’re friends or anything.

Accidental time-travel: oh jeez. i mean, probably the awkward bisexual disaster that is teenage garak turns up, right? that is generally the best use of time travel. no matter who he runs into he develops a crush, because it’s practically asit!canon that that is garak’s whole thing at that age. just crushing on everyone in the entire goddamn galaxy.alternatively, an au of ‘things past’, in which odo’s unresolved guilt about the things he did/allowed while an unwitting/uninformed semi-collaborator is actually addressed. if anyone’s in a position to talk to him frankly about Doing What You Gotta and not feeling worse about it than you have to, it’s sisko and garak. sisko, because he’s a good person and a bit of a martyr, might make odo feel worse, though he’s self-aware and empathetic enough not to do it as much as he could. garak, i imagine, could find the words to make odo feel more okay with what he’s done (if only because he knows that garak wouldn’t just say these things to make him feel better, though actually that’s 100% what garak is doing).

Their first kiss: hmmmmmm. can kinda see it happening near the end of ‘the die is cast’, just after they escape the trap laid by the founder, both of them very confused and not totally okay with what’s going on. but that’s not going to have been a great first kiss, so maybe… okay, a few options:a) they hang out a lot while garak’s in jail, because i don’t remember if it was ever clarified but if garak was in jail on ds9 that is potentially horrific, the holding cells we see on the show are tiny and have no privacy; hopefully a longer-term cell would be nicer but either way leaving that aside it’d mean he was spending a lot of time with odo. if he was in jail on a different station, which would prbably mke more sense, i like to think odo would still visit him pretty often, maybe even more than julian because i think odo ‘gets’ him more but relates to the lying etc less, which makes it easier for him to sympathise than julian, who empathises a lot but pretends he doesn’t and wishes that he didn’t. anyway they get really close over that time and when garak gets out they have excruciatingly awkward small talk and then a ‘uhh, hey, so… how ya feel bout… touching mouths…’ and then they smooch.b) also sad: when garak and kira realise odo’s dying just after they all leave for cardassia prime. everyone’s poly and that’s not an issue. odo is dying and that is an issue.c) they discuss odo’s awful romance/smut novels and the terrible descriptions therein, and it quicly comes up that odo’s never really kissed anyone before, so garak offers to help him get some experience, fully expecting it to be taken as a joke (as intended!), but odo’s like ‘yeah actually i do need some practice? this is one of those solid things?’ and……. the obvious fanfic ensues.d) the episodes ‘my way’ and ‘our man bashir’ mesh perfectly into one episode where they are both nerds in tuxedos who make out in an early/mid-20th century themed holosuite.

Meeting the parents: this has happened on one side already. i like to think that garak would be very very cutting to dr mora, with no reservations about how he has to be nice to odo’s ‘dad’ and not cause problems in their already fraught relationship. also probably sabotage several little things to make sure that his stay on ds9 is awful, though nothing that’d actually damage him. probably. maybe a lot of ‘accidental’ electric shocks from ‘accidental’ wiring faults, though. turnabout’s fair play.

Moving in together: odo puts his bucket in garak’s room. garak tucks several blankets and a space heater under the desk in odo’s office. DOMESTIC AS FUCK.

A crossover of my choice: oh boy. okay, let’s take some creative license here, cause this is sort of more of an au, but… white collar. odo as the dedicated  and sort of boring-seeming cop with a strong sense of justice and commitment to law & order, but who in his heart believes that people really can be redeemed, and also kind of grudgingly admires criminals like master forger & art thief garak, who is so fucking talented and creative and twisty-mindedly a genius, and who seemingly by coincidence takes care not to put anyone’s wellbeing on the line if they’re just trying to make a living and haven’t done anything to deserve it. together, they solve crimes (and drink a lot of wine).

An au of my choice: again, i have such a fondness for the white collar au i was just talking about, though i don’t think i’d really considered it in any depth before just now, other than ���oh hey, this neal guy reminds me of garak, and if he’s garak then i guess this superficially by-the-book but secretly-a-loose-cannon cop is probably odo’. i love this au now.but because that wasn’t exactly a crossover i feel like i’ve gotta be really strict and come up with a canonverse au for this one. so, either:a) dominion!odo au, where odo rejoins the link willingly the first time he meets them back in ‘the search’, and for the rest of the series is a semi-enemy who genuinely believes the founders can impose order on chaotic and harmful forces like cardassian expansionism and prevent atrocities like those that that happened on bajor from happening again. this brings him into conflict with the regular ds9 crew, obviously, though those conflicts never come to violence because both odo and the rest of the ds9 crew realise that the other has good intentions and they don’t want to hurt each other because they’re friends. garak has no such qualms - anything that might jeopardise cardassian interests, no matter how well-intentioned (and no matter how badly-intentioned he thinks the current cardassian government might be), is fuckin’ going down. this could be a very long fic with a lot of drama where everything turns out okay, or it could be a short one where, lbr, garak fucking dies because he tried to kill an entire planet of near-invulnerable shapeshifters, again.or b) deep dish nine, the One True AU in every niner’s heart. my initial thinking is that this hypothetical fic would relate to odo being involved in an ongoing attempt to shut down a drug operation in the neighbourhood, which he did not realise that that odd but strangely easy to talk to tailor who lives in the basement was involved with. either he talks to garak (who has probs already been talking to julian about this whole Drug Problem Sitch) and convinces him to help with the sting, or he doesn’t find out until the middle of a raid or something. again, this one could end well or it could end badly. i like to think it ends well.

If you like, another trope/scenario of your choice: i mentioned it earlier but it’s canon that odo reads a lot of terrible smut (despite being probably ace, which perhaps surprisingly is not an uncommon combination, even though it’s not an intuitive one at all). and it’s semi-canon (thanks, andy) that garak is a hopeless romantic, a bisexual disaster, kind of kinky, and (full canon now) v into reading as a form of escapism. so, their breakfasts together definitely end up being a second replimat-book-club for garak, only in this one they might pretend it’s Highbrow Literature but genuinely all they discuss is like, bad housewife erotica. they know it’s garbage but they also both unironically love it. (quark overhears more than he wants to but like hell is he telling them that since breakfast time is quiet he can overhear certain frequencies if he’s near the exit of his bar - which he is, more often than he needs to be these days. he’s not suicidal enough to try blackmailing either odo or garak without a damn good reason, but having some material on them doesn’t hurt).

[scalproie]

ok i know nobody asked but turns out i will literally go insane if i dont explain so:

Mike Costa is a comic writer who worked for IDW as the main transformers writer from 2009 to 2011. Ive personally never read the issues he wrote, buuuut from what ive gathered theyre. Not Very Good. Apparently he had trouble writing for transformers because to him the concept itself for transformers was too odd and the robots couldnt have personalities like humans or standards action-adventures heros do. One note-worthy thing he apparently said was that they "didnt have women or (romantic) relationships like that [which] they value because they don't have women that they can love." which is pretty :/

ENTERS JAMES ROBERTS with whom I think he wrote the final storyline of this phase before IDW moved on to the next? Anyway the two were co-writers for a short period. Now if you don't know James Roberts, he is the writer of two big stories in IDW transformers: "More Than Meet The Eyes" and its continuation "Lost Light".

And I'm PRETTY SURE Roberts is the one who put the first, actual canon gay couple in all transformers media (without being ambiguous or difference in dubbing), that being the confirmation of a romantic relationship between Chromedome and Rewind. He then went on to have other canon gay couples (and basically confirming the homoromantic aspect of Cybertron society) such as the slow burn between Tailgate and Cyclonus, Drift and Ratchet, Perceptor and Brainstorm, the latter whom had an entire arc dedicated to him going back in time and messing with the whole universe just to save his gay crush: his coworker Quark, there's also the trans lesbians Lug and Anode... and those are just the main confirmed ones. say what you want about JRo and his writing but the man did put LGBT+ representation in a big franchise comic.

Back to Costa. The year is now 2016 and he is now writing for Marvel, and is in charge of the current Venom comic. And the way he writes the pair is... unironically romantic. gone are the "the symbiote is a metaphor for addiction" and "the symbiote is a malevolent entity and nothing else", the symbiote is its own character with its feelings and fears and it and Eddie just got back together and I'm 100% sure it refers to the church where they first bonded after spiderman rejected it as the place where it and Eddie got married. Yeah. Eddie also calls it love. Yeah. (Also im not sure if its in this one but Eddie Brock, known catholic, compared it to an angel). They also had a child and as opposed to the previous ones (Carnage and the lab gang), they wanted to raise this one with love and care as a family. In 2018, the Costa run ends with Eddie in his underwear beating on the first alien host/abuser of the venom symbiote with a trashcan in the middle of the street yelling that he had "no rights to come here and mess with [his] family" and with the symbiote child, named Sleeper best marvel symbiote dont @ me, lobotomising said abuser and using his body to go explore the universe after saying it loves both his human and symbiote parents dearly, leaving the Venom pair with empty nest syndrome. And thats the Venom 2016 Costa run. Its not perfect but id be lying if i said i didnt have a major soft spot for it. Costa went on records to say he wrote it as a love story and that (before the ultimate issue of his run) he wanted leave them in the best place they could be, just after they've had their baby.

THEN THE MOVIE CAME OUT and y'all know the popularity it had on tumblr. The movie had a different, pretty original take on the Eddie/symbiote dynamic (Venom is the symbiote's name in this one and not the Eddie/symbiote fusion name) and people on here definitely saw the appeal, like theres the "What made you change your mind [about invading and eating us with your symbiote buddies]?" "You. You did, Eddie.", the cut line "Technically it was me!" Venom said when Eddie asked if his ex Ann kissed him, which she did, as She-Venom, to pass the symbiote to him, and was as confused as him, the "think of yourself as my ride". Wild movie. Anyway after the movie, people agreed that the best part of it was the relationship bewteen Eddie and Venom and that it has definitely rom-com vibes, the ship named Symbrock got pretty popular, and naturally, it got people interested in the comics, and what did they found but the recently ended Costa run, who wrote the two as an actual canon romantic pairing. So, probably thanks partially to actual comic back-up, the ship blew up, i think it had like 2 pages or less on AO3 before the movie? It was hundred after that. I think it also was at the n°1 spot in the tumblr ship chart for a while, was def in the top 3 for sure. and naturally there was A LOT of nsfw content for it.

Then a few weeks/months pass and tumblr announces the massive porn ban, and, while it is most likely a coincidence and was probably planned long before the venom movie came out, because of the timing, people joked that the reason for the ban was because of the abundance of art depicting the likeliness of famous actor Tom Hardy having intercourse with a big goo monster.

Anyway thats how two comic writers collaborating for a transformers comic ended up "causing" the tumblr porn ban of 2018, because the joke is that the time co-writing with writer James Roberts influenced writer Mike Costa into leaving his initial thoughts that there couldnt be love if it werent 1) human and 2) straight. Thanks for reading.

Im still thinking about that tf post about transformer artist Pat Lee being linked with Rob Liefeld. And because of the hype for venom 2, im reminded of my other favorite transformer comic story/theory with Mike Costa