#i’ve seen so many takes like ‘this character is toxic’ ‘no they’re misunderstood’ ‘no you just don’t have reading comprehension’

[haleigh-sloth]

I wish people are more honest with there takes this is a shounen story mha has a lot of fans from all over the world with various age group but let not kid ourselves and think it a Japanese shounen story who caters mainly to Japanese audience is it bad writing or it is what one not used too this tale has always bother me cause I see this discussion in school I remember showing someone a folktale from Nigeria and he told me it don’t hold up to Greek stories and who made that rule

LOL at the guy comparing a Nigerian folktale to Greek stories???? 🤦🏻‍♀️

Anyway….I mean yeah. Cultural differences aside because I’m not Japanese and can’t comment on what Japanese fans want or expect or whatever, with literally any story there is an obvious role assigned to each character within a story.

Somewhere along the way, my guess is after MVA, I think some people expected the story to suddenly be about the LOV and be narrated by them and for them. I’m of the opinion that the LOV do in fact carry the story because their writing is ten times better than any of the hero characters. I genuinely think Hori just likes writing and drawing them more, but with that being said—I had to remind myself at one point “This story is not about them.”

Like yes, to and extent, it is about them. But they’re not the protagonists. No matter how much we joke that they are, by definition, they are not. By this point, they will be the reward FOR the protagonists. I understand people not wanting or liking that, given that the story handles heavy topics like abuse and discrimination, and some people personally want to see different outcomes for their own enjoyment for those topics. I get it. But at some point you gotta remind yourself that literally from chapter 1, this story was about the younger generation being better heroes than the older gen. It’s honestly a very basic coming of age story.

On top of that, just like you said: This. Is. A. Shounen. Manga.

So on the cultural note you mentioned, there IS a basic recipe being followed and to an extent, it’s expected to be followed by fans. BNHA is unique in many ways, but also in many ways, it is nothing new at all.

I’m honestly baffled by the people who were convinced Hori would turn it into a seinen halfway through to focus on the LOV. Could Hori write that? Oh fuck yeah I bet he could. He handles dark imagery and tones really well. But man, read his past published stuff and tell me it’s not literally just pre-BNHA material. Oumagadoki Zoo was literally about “Show your love to others and accept it when it’s shown to you.” Literally in the dialogue, paraphrased but, it’s in there lol. Pretty cheesy and shounen-esque.

And, Bnha isn’t as psychologically focused as people think either. Like god, I’ve read Monster by Naoki Urasawa and THAT is a seinen with a heavy focus on psychology. So comparing BNHA to that, BNHA is not seinen material.

Could it be? Sure sure, with the focus having been on someone like Shigaraki or Touya from the start. There are characters in BNHA who would absolutely fit that genre due to the potential of the layers in their psyche, and I’d say Touya, Shigaraki, and Hawks are really good contenders for something like that. But alas. In this story, the LOV are traumatized and sad, and tragically misunderstood. And they need to be saved. That’s what we have, what’s what Hori wrote.

And then lastly, I get that the corrupt hero society issue hasn’t had as much focus overall and I get the disappoint. But I’m a little tired of people being mad at only Deku’s character not focusing on it. Like dude, Shouto is kind of a direct victim of that toxicity their system holds and I have not seen Shouto’s thoughts or arc so much as even point in that direction. It’s not in his dialogue. I think this current confrontation with Touya can change that and might, but so far? Nada, even though Shouto is like….the perfect character to bring that into question. And I don’t think the hero society stuff was ever gonna be the main drive. It’s world building put in place so that saving the villains is not only possible, but makes sense. But, imo, that’s all it serves for. If the hero society system was gonna be more of a prominent focus for the end game then the HPSC would have been WAYYYYY more relevant throughout and not only a little side piece for Hawks’s character—whose relevance lately has all but disappeared for quite a long time. All that to say, it’s a valid annoyance than it isn’t brought up more and made more of a focus for the protagonists. But it’s not a complete failure on the author either that he didn’t, as it isn’t the MAIN drive for the ending to the story.

Saving the villains is the main drive. The villains getting to be heroes is the main drive. It’s the story of how “we ALL became heroes”! Come on!

[hexalt]

CW for discussion of suicide

- She's the crazy ex-girlfriend - What? No, I'm not. - She's the crazy ex-girlfriend - That's a sexist term! - She's the crazy ex-girlfriend - Can you guys stop singing for just a second? - She's so broken insiiiiiide! - The situation's a lot more nuanced than that!

There’s the essay! You get it now. JK.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the culmination of Rachel Bloom’s YouTube channel (and the song “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury” in particular where she combined her lifelong obsession with musical theatre and sketch comedy and Aline Brosh McKenna stumbling onto Bloom’s channel one night while having an idea for a television show that subverted the tropes in scripts she’d been writing like The Devil Wears Prada and 27 Dresses.

The show begins with a flashback to teenage Rebecca Bunch (played by Bloom) at summer camp performing in South Pacific. She leaves summer camp gushing about the performance, holding hands with the guy she spent all summer with, Josh Chan. He says it was fun for the time, but it’s time to get back to real life. We flash forward to the present in New York, Rebecca’s world muted in greys and blues with clothing as conservative as her hair.

She’s become a top tier lawyer, a career that she doesn’t enjoy but was pushed into by her overprotective, controlling mother. She’s just found out she’s being promoted to junior partner, and that’s just objectively, on paper fantastic, right?! ...So why isn’t she happy? She goes out onto the streets in the midst of a panic attack, spilling her pills all over the ground, and suddenly sees an ad for butter asking, “When was the last time you were truly happy?” A literal arrow and beam of sunlight then point to none other than Josh Chan. She strikes up a conversation with him where he tells her he’s been trying to make it in New York but doesn’t like it, so he’s moving back to his hometown, West Covina, California, where everyone is just...happy.

The word echoes in her mind, and she absorbs it like a pill. She decides to break free of the hold others have had over her life and turns down the promotion of her mother’s dreams. I didn’t realize the show was a musical when I started it, and it’s at this point that Rebecca is breaking out into its first song, “West Covina”. It’s a parody of the extravagant, classic Broadway numbers filled with a children’s marching band whose funding gets cut, locals joining Rebecca in synchronized song and dance, and finishing with her being lifted into the sky while sitting on a giant pretzel. This was the moment I realized there was something special here.

With this introduction, the stage has been set for the premise of the show. Each season was planned with an overall theme. Season one is all about denial, season two is about being obsessed with love and losing yourself in it, season three is about the spiral and hitting rock bottom, and season four is about renewal and starting from scratch. You can see this from how the theme songs change every year, each being the musical thesis for that season.

We start the show with a bunch of cliché characters: the crazy ex-girlfriend; her quirky sidekick; the hot love interest; his bitchy girlfriend; and his sarcastic best friend who’s clearly a much better match for the heroine. The magic of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is that no one in West Covina is the sum of their tropes. As Rachel says herself, “People aren’t badly written, people are made of specificities.”

The show is revolutionary for the authenticity with which it explores various topics but for the sake of this piece, we’ll discuss mental health, gender, Jewish identity, and sexuality. All topics that Bloom has dug into in her previous works but none better than here.

Simply from the title, many may be put off, but this is a story that has always been about deconstructing stereotypes. Rather than being called The Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, where the story would be from an outsider’s perspective, this story is from that woman’s point of view because the point isn’t to demonize Rebecca, it’s to understand her. Even if you hate her for all the awful things she’s doing.

The musical numbers are shown to be in Rebecca’s imagination, and she tells us they’re how she processes the world, but as she starts healing in the final season, she isn’t the lead singer so often anymore and other characters get to have their own problems and starring roles. When she does have a song, it’s because she’s backsliding into her former patterns.

While a lot of media will have characters that seem to have some sort of vague disorder, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend goes a step further and actually diagnoses Rebecca with Borderline Personality Disorder, while giving her an earnest, soaring anthem. She’s excited and relieved to finally have words for what’s plagued her whole life.

When diagnosing Rebecca, the show’s team consulted with doctors and psychiatrists to give her a proper diagnosis that ended up resonating with many who share it. BPD is a demonized and misunderstood disorder, and I’ve heard that for many, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the first honest and kind depiction they’ve seen of it in media. Where the taboo of mental illness often leads people to not get any help, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend says there is freedom and healing in identifying and sharing these parts of yourself with others.

Media often uses suicide for comedy or romanticizes it, but Crazy Ex-Girlfriend explored what’s going through someone’s mind to reach that bottomless pit. Its climactic episode is written by Jack Dolgen (Bloom’s long-time musical collaborator, co-songwriter and writer for the show) who’s dealt with suicidal ideation. Many misunderstood suicide as the person simply wanting to die for no reason, but Rebecca tells her best friend, “I didn’t even want to die. I just wanted the pain to stop. It’s like I was out of stories to tell myself that things would be okay.”

Bloom has never shied away from heavy topics. The show discusses in song the horrors of what women do to their bodies and self-esteem to conform to beauty standards, the contradiction of girl power songs that tell you to “Put Yourself First” but make sure you look good for men while doing it, and the importance of women bonding over how terrible straight men are are near and dear to her heart. This is a show that centers marginalized women, pokes fun at the misogyny they go through, and ultimately tells us the love story we thought was going to happen wasn’t between a woman and some guy but between her and her best friend.

I probably haven’t watched enough Jewish TV or film, but to me, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the most unapologetic and relatable Jewish portrayal I’ve seen overall. From Rebecca’s relationship with her toxic, controlling mother (if anyone ever wants to know what my mother’s like, I send them “Where’s the Bathroom”) to Patti Lupone’s Rabbi Shari answering a Rebecca that doesn’t believe in God, “Always questioning! That is the true spirit of the Jewish people,” the Jewish voices behind the show are clear.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend continues to challenge our perceptions when a middle-aged man with an ex-wife and daughter realizes he’s bisexual and comes out in a Huey Lewis saxophone reverie. The hyper-feminine mean girl breaks up with her boyfriend and realizes the reason she was so obsessed with getting him to commit to her is the same reason she’s so scared to have female friends. She was suffering under the weight of compulsory heterosexuality, but thanks to Rebecca, she eventually finds love and friendship with women.

This thread is woven throughout the show. Many of the characters tell Rebecca when she’s at her lowest of how their lives would’ve never changed for the better if it wasn’t for her. She was a tornado that blew through West Covina, but instead of leaving destruction in her wake, she blew apart their façades, forcing true introspection into what made them happy too.

Rebecca’s story is that of a woman who felt hopeless, who felt no love or happiness in her life, when that’s all she’s ever wanted. She tried desperately to fill that void through validation from her parents and random men, things romantic comedies had taught her matter most but came up empty. She tried on a multitude of identities through the musical numbers in her mind, seeing herself as the hero and villain of the story, and eventually realized she’s neither because life doesn’t make narrative sense.

It takes her a long time but eventually she sees that all the things she thought would solve her problems can’t actually bring her happiness. What does is the real family she finds in West Covina, the town she moved to on a whim, and finally having agency over herself to use her own voice and tell her story through music.

The first words spoken by Rebecca are, “When I sang my solo, I felt, like, a really palpable connection with the audience.” Her last words are, “This is a song I wrote.” This connection with the audience that brought her such joy is something she finally gets when she gets to perform her story not to us, the TV audience, but to her loved ones in West Covina. Rebecca (and Rachel) always felt like an outcast, West Covina (and creating the show) showed her how cathartic it is to find others who understand you.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the prologue to Rebecca’s life and the radical story of someone getting better. She didn’t need to change her entire being to find acceptance and happiness, she needed to embrace herself and accept love and help from others who truly cared for her. Community is what she always needed and community is what ultimately saved her.

*

P.S. If you have Spotify... I also process life through music, so I made some playlists related to the show because what better way to express my deep affection for it than through song?

CXG parodies, references, and is inspired by a lot of music from all kinds of genres, musicals, and musicians. Same goes for the videos themselves. I gathered all of them into one giant playlist along with the show’s songs.

A Rebecca Bunch mix that goes through her character arc from season 1 to 4.

I’m shamelessly a fan of Greg x Rebecca, so this is a mega mix of themselves and their relationship throughout the show.

*

I’m in a TV group where we wrote essays on our favorite shows of the 2010s, so here is mine on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, I realized I forgot to ever post it. Also wrote one for Schitt’s Creek.

[letterboxd]

Bridging the Gap.

Filmmaker So Yun Um highlights ten underrated Asian American and Pacific Islander films set against the backdrop of America.

Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month has many film lovers seeking to celebrate Asian American cinema. Beyond Minari, Always Be My Maybe and Crazy Rich Asians, there are dozens of films that depict the Asian American experience. In choosing to focus on ten of the lesser-seen, I contemplated the notion of what defines AAPI cinema.

For me, it goes deeper than films that have been directed by, or star, Asian American and Pacific artists. Having watched a wide selection of Asian American films, I can firmly say our cinema, no matter the genre, puts Asian Americans at the forefront on both sides of the camera. I believe the essence of Asian American cinema was born out of resourcefulness, mining themes and ideas that distinctly bridge the gap between Asian and American culture. These films tell stories that explore the vast differences between the two, and the ways in which they coexist, whether comfortably or uncomfortably.

In selecting these ten underrated AAPI films, I searched deep to find stories with uncompromising vision and character; stories about Asians that could only be told within, and against the backdrop of, America. These ten films highlight intimate, distinct and unfiltered experiences mostly unseen at our local multiplexes: family and cultural obligations, generational and cultural gaps, and raw, mostly obscured views of American life.

Chan is Missing (1982) Directed by Wayne Wang, written by Isaac Cronin and Wayne Wang

There would be no Asian American independent cinema without Wayne Wang’s Chan is Missing. Shot on black-and-white film, this striking noir follows Jo, a San Franciscan cab driver, and his nephew, Steve, as they track down the titular Chan after he disappears with their money. Wang’s unpredictable directing career spans neighborhood intrigues, rom-coms and family movies; alongside which, he has kept a strong focus on Asian American stories (he helmed the adaptation of Amy Tan’s generational bestseller, The Joy Luck Club).

In Chan is Missing, for the first time on screen, we get to finally see an “ABC” (American-Born Chinese) story from the source, with an all-access pass to the often misunderstood terrain and people of Chinatown. It’s the tightness of the plot and the authenticity of its characters that make this movie such a classic. Even after 40 years, Chan Is Missing doesn’t feel dated—its laugh-out-loud dialogue (they actually utter the word “FOB”!) and moody tone capture why Chinatown continues to be an enigma. Spoilers: Chinatown runs by its own rules.

Available on DVD via Indiepix Films.

Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) Directed by Justin Lin, written by Ernesto Foronda, Justin Lin and Fabian Marquez

Justin Lin’s directorial debut film is a visionary portrait of Asian Americans that’s still relevant two decades on. Since its release in the early aughts, there has yet to be a film that explores the nuances and complexities of the average Southern-California Asian American teen like this film does. Better Luck Tomorrow focuses on a group of Asian American overachievers who become bored with their lives and enter a world of petty crime. It’s loosely based on four Sunny Hills High School students and the real-life murder of Stuart Tay, a teenager from the OC.

With its depiction of overachieving A+ students who are also foul-mouthed, drug-taking kids, this film was the launching pad for many iconic Asian American actors today—Sung Kang from the Fast and Furious franchise, John Cho (Star Trek) and my personal favorite, Jason Tobin, star of the Warrior TV series. (It’s entertaining to see the seeds of the Fast and Furious series planted in this film in the character of Han, played by Sung Kang, before the explosion of the franchise: one of the characters mutters, “Rumors about us came and went fast and furious”—and the rest is history.)

Better Luck Tomorrow still stands as the most iconic film to capture the suburban Asian American teen existence in all its good, bad and ugly light. “I was part of a movement,” Tobin recalled in this GQ oral history of the film, “and it was a culmination of all the battles I had fought before that to get Asian faces on the big screen.”

Available to stream and rent on multiple platforms.

The Grace Lee Project (2005) Directed by Grace Lee

If you’re an Asian American who grew up in California or New York, chances are, you know at least two Grace Lees in your life. But growing up in Missouri, Korean American filmmaker Grace Lee was the only one she knew with her name. She soon discovers that with the name comes a certain stereotype, that of the “good” Asian—quiet, well-behaved and a hard worker. Lee goes on a quest to interview a wide range of women who have the same name and soon discover if this wildly common stereotype is true.

Lee’s witty, autobiographical documentary is effortlessly funny and insightful. The Grace Lee Project dives deep into identity politics to reveal that sometimes, a name is simply a name. This was the start of Grace Lee’s journey as a filmmaker and she continues to be an important voice in not just the documentary space but in narrative stories as well.

Streaming on Kanopy.

Saving Face (2004) Written and directed by Alice Wu

Alice Wu’s Saving Face is a timeless queer love story. Produced by none other than Will Smith (yes, that Will Smith), Saving Face follows a Chinese American lesbian woman and her traditional mother (played by Michelle Krusiec and Joan Chen, respectively) as both battle with their reluctance to go against cultural expectations and reveal their secret loves. It’s part family drama, part rom-com, exploring expectations specific to Asian women across generations.

While most Asian American films focus on familial obligations through the point of view of the children of immigrants, Wu’s film considers the conflicts of both daughter and mother. For Asian Americans, it’s a tale as old as time but with a twist that shows that no matter how old you get, you still have to, unfortunately, fight to be who you are. I also highly recommend Wu’s spiritual sequel, The Half of It, on Netflix.

Streaming on Amazon Prime and Tubi, and for rent on various VOD platforms.

In Between Days (‘방황의 날들’, 2007) Directed by So Yong Kim, written by Bradley Rust Gray and So Yong Kim

So Yong Kim’s debut feature, In Between Days, follows Jiseon Kim, a Korean teen immigrant, who falls in love with her best friend while navigating the challenges of living in a new country. Director Kim is a masterful storyteller and captures life as it should be seen: unfiltered and trivial at times, but using the mundane to find cinematic magic.

I like to categorize So Yong Kim’s work as a showcase of extreme intimacy. Her story features painfully delicate characters and moments so real, you’ll wonder how any of these scenes could be fiction. There’s a sense of vulnerability and loneliness that fills the air as Jiseon struggles to assimilate to a new country, replete with toxic relationships, self-sabotage and unrelenting jealousy. So Yong Kim’s work is so painfully real, it hurts to watch.

Available on Kanopy and Amazon.

Ping Pong Playa (2007) Directed by Jessica Yu, written by Jimmy Tsai and Jessica Yu

There are two things that embody countless Asian American men’s experience: their love for basketball, and their love of rap music. Ping Pong Playa covers both, and is exactly the kind of Asian American comedy I’ve been waiting for! Christopher “C-Dub” Wang (played by co-writer Jimmy Tsai) is a wannabe baller and a supreme slacker who has to step up to the plate when his family’s business and ping-pong-champion reputation is on the line. In addition to being centered around an Asian family, the core of the film rivals any other low-brow, underdog sport film.

Laugh-out-loud hilarious, this is Academy-Award-winning filmmaker Jessica Yu’s first narrative feature, following a groundbreaking career full of daring documentaries (her Oscar was for this portrait of writer Mark O’Brien, who spent much of his life in an iron lung). Seeing C-Dub as an NBA-loving slacker turned ping-pong playa felt validating; it showed that even if you’re a lazy and immature Asian, you can always find something to succeed at.

Streaming on Tubi, and for rent on Amazon and iTunes.

In Football We Trust (2015) Directed by Tony Vainuku and Erika Cohn

While Salt Lake City, Utah, is seen as predominantly a white Mormon town, it in fact has the largest population of Pacific Islanders in the US mainland, due to the strength of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ proselytizing in the Pacific. The documentary In Football We Trust follows four Polynesian high-school students, as they chase their lifelong dream of attaining professional recruitment. Told in moments of adolescence, the film follows the greatest challenges for these four young men, as they chase their dreams while trying to grow up.

In no time, they’re faced with the harsh reality that just maybe, football isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. As much as their hefty attributes and builds serve as their greatest advantages, these boys’ cultural and familial obligations become both their greatest motivations and, possibly, their downfall. Filmed over the span of four years, first time filmmakers Tony Vainuku and Erika Cohn chronicle the NFL hopefuls as they navigate the pressure to balance dreams and family to win a golden ticket out of gang violence and poverty.

Streaming on Kanopy, and for rent on various VOD platforms.

Spa Night (2016) Written and directed by Andrew Ahn

In his directorial debut, Andrew Ahn perfectly captures a specific corner of Los Angeles’ Koreatown. Spa Night’s focus is David, a closeted Korean American teenager who takes a job at a Korean spa to help his struggling family, and then discovers an underground world of gay sex. You may recognize Joe Seo as the goofy bully in the Netflix hit show Cobra Kai, but it’s Spa Night where you can see him truly shine—he won Sundance’s US Dramatic Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Performance.

Seo delivers a powerfully restrained performance, exploring the burden of hiding your true self from your family. Spa Night is more than a coming out story, it’s also about the broken American dream that so many immigrants experience. Ahn’s direction is finely tuned, honing in on the specificity of Koreatown. It is an acutely queer story of second-gen Asian Americans, where coming out is never really about just you, but also your family.

Streaming on Kanopy, and for rent on various VOD platforms.

Punching at the Sun (2006) Directed by Tanuj Chopra, written by Tanuj Chopra and Hart Eddy

Mameet is young, angry and has always lived in the shadow of his basketball-legend brother, Sanjay. When Sanjay is suddenly killed during a robbery at the family store, Mameet spirals and takes his anger out on anyone and everyone. Coping with loss at a young age is hard enough, but Punching at the Sun mixes in the specific anxieties of being a South-Asian man amidst the backdrop of post-9/11 America. In doing so, the film addresses the difficulty of juggling teenage angst and immigrant identity—Mameet is not afforded the option to express his anger and grief.

Cathartic and emotionally validating, this is a simple yet nuanced slice-of-life story that conveys the heaviness of growing up with the weight of the world on our shoulders. In Mameet’s case, thank goodness, he ultimately shares some of that burden with his comical friends and knit-tight family.

Available to rent on Vimeo.

Meet the Patels (2014) Directed by Ravi Patel and Geeta Patel, written by Ravi Patel, Matthew Hamachek, Billy McMillin, and Geeta Patel

In the romantic documentary Meet the Patels, Ravi Patel is a dutiful first-gen son whose parents are continually nagging him to marry a nice Indian girl. With Ravi's sister Geeta Patel co-directing and co-writing, and his parents in the frame, his film (and true-life story) are indeed a family affair. What starts as his journey to find a wife to make his family happy becomes an enlightening intro to Indian culture and modern love—think dating apps, weddings and a Patel Matrimonial Convention (gotta see it to believe).

Humorous as it is outrageously charming, Meet the Patels ultimately shows the struggles and cultural expectations most immigrant offspring face, on top of the million other obstacles of trying to find your one and only true love in this mad, mad world.

Streaming on various platforms.

Related content

Ten Underrated Asian American & Pacific Islander Films, a Letterboxd list

Best Asian American Films: So Yun Um’s list

Debbie Chang’s comprehensive Asian American film canon list (also features Asian-Canadian, Asian-British and other diaspora)

Bellamy’s list of feature-length films directed by Asian Americans

Follow So on Letterboxd

[ardenttheories]

Though I believe the relationship between most of the hs fandom and the hs2 writing team is pretty toxic I think your 'us and them' attitude is going to perpetuate this. Your posts frame them as villain of sorts and the actions of some justify your distane of them all. I do not know the lives of these people nor all the beliefs they hold within themselves or if they all agree with each other. You need to lurn to be concise in your arguments and where to draw the line between fiction and reality.

The “us and them” mentality was founded by their attempts to isolate a significant percent of the fandom away from the recent content. This is not me perpetuating an ideology; it is me pointing out the flaws in what is happening, currently, and giving voice to the people who have been isolated by the writers and feel as if they are the only ones who feel the way they do. 

I have stated several times how things could improve, and frankly, I think I have been rather fair in many of my assessments - especially at the beginning, when most of the content was being released. But the fact of the matter is, it probably won’t change unless the writers can change the views of people like Kate or talk over her views in Homestuck^2 itself. Because the fandom isn’t the issue, actually; it’s solely in the hands of the writing team.

They are the people with the power, here. They decide what goes into the text, how things are presented, what views come through. They are capable of implementing every transphobic, homophobic, abuse apologist, anti-survivor sentiment we’ve seen in the comic so far - and they’re just as capable to... not do those things. They know their content is triggering. They know how much of the fandom can and cannot handle these things, and how much trigger warnings are important to individual people. And they have actively done everything they can to harm the fandom - have admitted to doing so, actually - that they possibly can. 

You do not take chapter-by-chapter trigger warnings away if you do not want to hurt the people reading your content. You do not respond to criticism by calling your fanbase transmisoynists because you don’t want to admit that your favourite is an abuser. You do not try to make everything you do better by claiming that canon is dead when you are writing the official story. 

What you seem to have completely misunderstood is that we are powerless in this relationship. Yes, we can complain; yes, we can plead; yes, we can try to appeal to them; but they are the ones writing the content. We are only the consumers. They can literally do anything they want to these characters, and they will, and have, merely to spite us. They can make the comic as dangerous as possible to mentally ill people as punishment for daring to say that they weren’t handling triggers well. 

I likewise do not know the lives of the people on the HS^2 team. I do, however, know most of their beliefs - because they do a damn good job of being transparent about it on Twitter. Their beliefs are toxic at best, and outright violent at worst. The problem is, of course, that it doesn’t matter if they don’t agree with each other on these views; they’re still coming through loud and clear. 

If the “good” writers are unable to stop the “bad” writers from pumping HS^2 full of untagged triggers, badly-handled sensitive content, incest, abuse apologism, transphobia, and victim denial, then that honestly says a lot about either: 

- How loud the “bad” voices are that the “good” ones are being spoken over

or 

- How quiet the supposed “good” voices are, and how much they might actually agree with the “bad” voices

I would also like you to, quite kindly, go through and read literally any of my posts. I have gone over several times the distinction between fiction and reality -and how, also, the opinions of a person in fiction tend to shine through in their reality as well. Kate’s abuse apologism isn’t just towards Vriska. She genuinely believes that. The same way as her transphobia isn’t just a fictional thing; she talks over transmen and masc-aligned enbies all the fucking time, and tells them that they don’t have a voice. Her racism is evident in the trivialisation of the BLM movement - and her outright hatred of Gamzee, who is very clearly meant to be an anti-black stereotype, as well as a representation of psychosis. 

The fact of the matter is, they need to be held accountable. We cannot just say, “oh, actually, us vs them doesn’t work”, because us with them didn’t work, either. They have started this mentality, made it clear that they are not with us, and in fact that they actively want to hurt us. All we want is for them to listen to genuine criticism and accept it, to take into account what people are saying - what transmen, mentally ill people, poc, and abuse survivors are trying to tell them - and handle the topics they’re bringing up with slightly more care.

I’ve said several times in my posts that this would literally fix everything. If all we got was an apology, an “we, as a team, are sorry for the hurt we have caused; we have reinstated a better trigger list on each chapter, we are listening to views more closely and have retconned some events that were transphobic/racist/homophobic, or we will take more care with them in the future, and for those instances that did happen, here is an explanation that isn’t just denial or us saying that we’re the writers and you have to accept what we do”, then... we’d have nothing to be upset about. The fandom would be content, would support HS^2, would be more than happy to praise the writers and break the “us v them” mentality. 

But they haven’t, and they seem to outright refuse to do so. And why the fuck should we be the ones to give? If we don’t hold them accountable, they will never change. They will continue to implement harmful and toxic views into Homestuck^2 without criticism or care. We, as a fandom, should not be the ones to end the “us v them” mentality when we are the ones being actively hurt, when they are the ones with the power, when they began the mentality to begin with. 

Of course, if you don’t find that this ask sits well with you, I’d like to suggest some advice to you the same that the writers like to tell us about Homestuck^2 and its content:

If you don’t like it, you’re free to leave. You are in no way obliged to interact at all. In fact, this could be the perfect place for you to write your own posts! Because, naturally, mine have no actual sentiment behind them and should not be viewed in any capacity by people who don’t agree with me, specifically. 

(I want to point out, of course, that the above paragraph is satire. You can do as you damn well please, and this blog IS meant to be interacted with. But maybe now you can see the irony - and fury - behind HS^2 for fans. Imagine if every time I got an ask even vaguely going against my own views, I just turned around and said, “sorry sweetie, not my problem, go do your own shit”. After a while you’d get fed up, and I’d get a callout for actively ignoring valid criticism. I don’t see why, in this capacity, the HS^2 writers shouldn’t be faced with the same.)

[obeysword]

personality traits / quirks

i’ve been thinking of this a lot bc unlike some of the other IT members, yu doesn’t really have nervous tells. which i guess makes sense when you’re a silent protag in a jrpg, but everyone should naturally have one or two. so i think when yu gets anxious & worked up, he clenches his fists. he will clench his teeth. grip at his clothes or his arms to steady himself & ground himself with reality. pain is a good way to offer focus or to feel the weight of something around you, like you’re clinging to a lifeline before tipping over the edge. they’re silent acts & not things that draw much focus or attention like scratching the back of your neck, looking away when flustered. when yu gets flustered, he’ll shake his head or even smile a little - depending on the type of attitude presented toward him. when he’s worked up, he can still keep his face mostly neutral & impassive, basically giving the impression that he’s fine & his words can remain steady. his eyes are often very clear or glazed when masking. sometimes he has slips, but prompted he’ll change the meaning of what he was implying & make you think, yeah you just misunderstood.

it is so hard to see through this guy. even when nanako was confirmed dead in the hospital, the only time he allowed himself to break & show how utterly upset he was about everything was when yosuke came back after the others walked away. he totally must have cried in nanako’s room with dojima, but when he exits out into the hallway it’s only the IT group that has tears in their eyes or running down their cheeks. narukami breaks down & cries on yosuke. asking him ‘did i make the right choice...letting namatame go like that?’ he’s a silent crier, clearly still trying to hold everything together when everything inside of him is beyond broken. the fact he only trusts yosuke to see him this way, clings onto him, really speaks volumes & parallels back to when yosuke cries on him in their confidant. & in good consciousness, i can’t see yosuke leaving narukami alone at the hospital while dojima was probably heavily sedated after trying to attempt murder on namatame also. narukami is not fine. dojima is not fine. the group comes back the next morning to check on him & go over the case again, they’ve all had a change of clothes except for narukami, which implies he didn’t go home or change.

he feels beyond empty inside. like all the light has been removed from his world, but then his light shows up again & assures him that it’s not over yet. yosuke is always shown to pull narukami out of the darkness, even when he’s dropping & falling in on himself after nanako’s death.

i still think he goes through spades where he can’t sleep well at night. he has to start stealing dojima’s booze just to sleep & still wakes up sweating from nightmares of adachi, namatame, or ame-no-sagiri. i don’t think narukami likes drinking & i really don’t think he acts like how he did in the animation where he takes on being an intense player sort of dude. but the fall out is bad for him. i think he has times where he doesn’t have an appetite & has to be encouraged to eat during this time too.

on another note with personality traits:

i think a lot of the beauty is destiny ending credits too. how oddly feminine narukami’s pose is during them? i’ve only really seen female characters / women taking this pose with their arms folded over their chests. men rarely ever are shown taking this pose.

& when the arcana shatters, the pose is still feminine & vulnerable in ways that you don’t see his character often being.

idk this is just a mental point i think about whenever i see the credits or listen to the song. his character is portrayed differently than many main protags in other animes, esp for the time-frame when the p4 series came out. i love this little touch because i think it shows how he’s someone who doesn’t have toxic masculinity in his nature. he’s rose above traditional norms set for japanese men & japan in general is very traditional culturally. you can see how naoto struggles to be accepted in a male driven society, & this is played again in p5 with sae telling makoto how challenging her job is due to the fact she’s a woman. kanji struggles to acknowledge his feminine side because people frown on how “girly” he acts. he’s not accepted by men or women & he feels there’s something wrong with him. narukami never felt there was something wrong with his friends. kanji’s knitting is cute! he should be proud to be so talented.

i can honestly say, narukami would make an ideal traditional housewife but he would be really bored with it too lol. but he is so comfortable with his manhood & sexuality unlike the characters who struggle to accept it. chie wishes she was as feminine as yukiko & gets embarrassed about her tomboy nature. kanji makes peace with his feminine side & realizes how wrong he was about what his dad meant. naoto is a harder one to place, because i think she still has struggles with defining which gender she identifies as & is more or less gender fluid / nonbinary - at least that’s how i see her, agree to disagree. & yosuke is shown to have a lot of toxic masculinity & struggles with accepting his sexuality to where he comes off as aggressively heterosexual to make up for the fact he’s interested in men.

narukami is so interesting because he’s always liked himself. he’s a person who genuinely likes himself for who he is & that is so refreshing to find. he has his flaws, but he accepts them & grows from them.

[thehollowprince]

I'm actually very ship and let ship so long as you're doing so like, with your eyes open about what you're doing. So when TFA came out and r*ylo became a thing I thought "I personally hate this but at least we can have some good conversations about why we see a white man being violent to a woman onscreen and instinctively parse that as romantic." What a clown I was, huh? Years later all the "Ben is a cinnamon roll uwu" discourse has turned me entirely off Star Wars. Let alone the damn kiss.

Oh, you're preaching to the choir.

I've long grown accustomed to people shipping the weirdest or even outright abusive ships, but I stayed in my lane. I realized fairly early on that no matter what you say to these people, pointing out how toxic or abusive a relationship is, that they'll bury their heads in the sand and outright ignore you, oftentimes shouting about how I (and others) are "ruining their fandom experience".

That's why how I found myself in the "Anti" community (if such a thing exists). I started tagging my posts condemning these horrible ships appropriately, and they (the shippers) still came for me, often trying to use their own history of past abusive relationships as justification for supporting the ship. To which I usually responded with "to each their own" while scratching my head as to why, if they suffered that kind of abuse, would they support a ship that repeats that behavior.

I stay in my lane, but these people don't take any criticism of their ships well. It always baffles me as to why they go looking for posts that criticize something they love, but that's an overarching fandom problem that I don't have any kind of an answer to.

Circling back to R*ylo, I've said it on my blog many times before, but I originally liked Kylo. I thought he could have been one of the best villains in the Star Wars franchise. When I left the theater after The Force Awakens, I was hopeful. I left that theater knowing that Finn was the male protagonist/lead of the new trilogy and under the impression that Finnrey was going to be the big romance. But then Johnson and Kennedy did The Last Jedi and everything went downhill after that. They just reinforced the stereotype that all bad (white) guys (they're always white) actually suffered some horribly tragic backstory and therefor they're just "lashing out" and are totally justified in their irrational anger.

Someone said it better than I could, but (and I'm paraphrasing here) the reason so many of these villains or antagonists are romanticized or immediately forgiven (both by the narrative and the fandom) is that we're used to the POC being the bad guys, so when a white guy is the villain, the white guy writing him feels a kinship and says, "well they're not bad, they're just misunderstood".

For the record, I'm a diehard Finnpoe supporter. I thought John and Oscar had amazing chemistry together and within the confines of the story, it would have taken minimal effort to make that relationship happen. That being said, this is Disney, and I never actually expected that to happen. I, like many others who watched the movies, were certain they Finn and Rey would end up together, but sadly that didn't happen.

Speaking of Finn, the fandom's complete erasure of him as a character and lead is what made me be so anti R*ylo, because more often than not, when trying to woobify Ren, they systematically dismantled Finn's character and gave his backstory and redemption and nice qualities to Kylo, thereafter calling him Ben Solo. This all-encompassing notion that a black man couldn't be seen as a viable love interest for the white female lead is obnoxious and leads into a further discussion of why fandom, despite constantly calling for more Characters of Color, often overlook them, especially when they're in main and/or leading roles.

(I mean, we know that they only want the diversity if it's in a subservient role to the white people, but they don't know that we know, so we're not going to talk about it. Well feign ignorance a little longer.)

But this problem of cannibalizing a hero of color to enhance a white character isn't new. Anyone who's been to my blog in the last few weeks knows that I've been dealing with a particular Anon who absolutely loathes Scott McCall, a Mexican-American character and the titular character of the show Teen Wolf. That fandom (probably the most toxic I've ever encountered) had continuously gone out of it's way to demonize the protagonist to prop up his best friend/sidekick, often by stripping Scott of his good qualities and draping them around Stiles in an attempt to make the character more palatable.

I used to be very much a "ship and let ship" person, but I draw the line at the erasure/demonization of the characters of color in an attempt to make those crack ships happen.

(PS: sorry I took so long to get to this. Tumblr is... well, Tumblr, and I haven't been getting the notifications that I've gotten mail.)

[the-darkness-does-not-bargain]

Yeah... it really is not ideal that they did that.  I’m sure they didn’t mean to insinuate that victims of abuse should get back with their abusers at the first sign of improvement, because they’ve been really good about saying the opposite up until this point, but that IS the message they’re sending.  The fact that very few fans seem to be acknowledging it is worse.  I honestly thought we were better than that.  This show has sent so many positive messages that are great for kids to hear, but this just isn’t one of them.

Tangent here, but I am deadly serious when I say that people are making the wrong parallels when they compare She-Ra to Revolutionary Girl Utena.   She-Ra doesn’t deserve to make Utena references when it ends with the Anthy character (Adora) getting back with the Akio analogue (Catra).  

In fact, the only thing people are sort of getting right with these comparisons is that Adora and Anthy, despite their surface-level distinctions, are very similar characters.  Let’s take a look:

1. Incredibly powerful: Adora is a capable badass who also claims the mantle of She-Ra, and Anthy is basically a god (or the closest thing to)

2. Conned into believing they are worthless/powerless or their power isn’t really theirs to claim: Adora thinks all her value comes from being a hero and specifically being the weapon that is She-Ra, and she eventually has to learn that she is not a weapon or a tool and that her worth comes from within.  She has to learn to find her power to win.  Anthy is beaten down and essentially coerced into using her powers as “The Witch” to help Akio and participate in her own imprisonment.  Utena doesn’t so much help her to recognize her power, but she makes Anthy remember that she has value and power separate from Akio and her role as Witch.

3. Had a loved one they tried to protect but couldn’t due to circumstances out of their control: Baby Adora could never have prevented Shadow Weaver from abusing Catra.  1) a literal child (who is also being abused) cannot be expected to stop an adult authority figure from doing anything, let alone abuse another child, and 2) literal children are NOT responsible for the actions of another child and certainly not the actions of an adult authority figure.  But she gets blamed for not protecting Catra anyway. (Remember all the bullshit hot takes from around season 1 doing this very thing).  Anthy tried to save Dios by hiding him (which failed), and she sacrificed herself to the Mob to save him (he died anyway).  There was nothing she could have realistically done, even with all her power, to save him from the World.  Akio blames her for it anyway and the Swords of Human Hatred back up his accusations.

3. Face a toxic combination of love and hatred from the person they were unable to protect: It’s pretty obvious that Catra’s roiling emotions about Adora are both positive and negative.  The pain she felt when Adora defected is genuine.  She really felt like she lost the one person that mattered to her (even though that isn’t true and it was her choice to stay with the Horde while Adora begged her to leave, making it Catra who actually left Adora when you stop to think about it).  That love turned to resentment and hatred, driving Catra to torture Adora at every opportunity and blame Adora for her various wrongdoings.  It’s not easy to discern entirely what Akio is angry about, but it can be reasonably assumed that he is angry with Anthy for “making him Not The Prince anymore” i.e. “Making Him This Way”.  Anthy “stole him away from the princesses of the world”, which is the same kind of blame as “You broke the world, and it is all your fault!”

4. Have their struggles dismissed and/or misunderstood by people they call friends: If anyone matches up with Utena Tenjou in SPOP, it’s Glimmer.  Glimmer is a girl who wants to be a prince Hero and a leader, but she doesn’t understand what those roles actually entail (see: all of season 4).  She reacts when she sees the physical abuse Adora suffers from Shadow Weaver in the Black Garnet Chamber, just like Utena jumps to defend Anthy whenever she sees someone hit her.  But Glimmer completely fails to either recognize or acknowledge the subtler aspects of Adora’s abuse, and she later dismisses her suspicion of Shadow Weaver as baseless paranoia, which she then proceeds to laugh about.  Utena was naive and failed to notice the obvious signs of Anthy’s abuse by Akio right in front of her, but at least she didn’t do that.

5. Have to find and come into their power on their own: Sure, Adora manages to become She-Ra again to save Catra, but it’s still her decision and willpower that get her there.  Utena helps Anthy to see that she can leave her situation and that she deserves a better life, but it’s Anthy who chooses to leave Akio behind and walk out of Ohtori alone.

Now let’s talk about Catra and Akio.

Catra and Akio aren’t 1 to 1 parallels.  Catra does not appear to be a rapist and a child molester, for one thing.  She doesn’t own a red convertible metaphor for the sins, horrors, and privileges of adulthood.  She’s not a failed heroic archetype who languishes in a timeless, flowery coffin, convincing people to have sex with their siblings.  Her name isn’t a fancy word for Satan.

But other than that, they’re pretty similar.

1. They share a connection with someone who is much more powerful than they are: Adora and Catra are pretty close in skill when they are in the Horde together, but Adora edges her out just slightly.  And when Adora becomes She-Ra, her inherent power blows Catra out of the water.  There could never be a fair fight between them because Adora is a woman-shaped WMD and Catra uses dirty tactics to win confrontations.  Dios/Akio is at first portrayed as having all the power in Ohtori, but an attentive viewer will realize that’s nonsense and it’s really Anthy who has the power, a fact that becomes crystal clear when she ditches him easily at the end of the story.

2. They simultaneously love and hate that person: I don’t think I really have to explain this one.  If you’ve watched both series, you will know exactly what I mean.

3. The relationship they have with this person is both familial and romantic: Look, I’m not going to be That Girl and try to claim that Adora and Catra’s relationship is purely a sisterly one.  That is so clearly untrue even without season 5 that it’s laughable.  But there are definitely familial elements to it.  They were raised by the same woman and they treat each other like siblings do at several points in season 1.  But it’s also clear that they have been harboring burgeoning romantic feelings for each other.  Anthy and Dios are literally blood siblings who acted like siblings when they were kids, and then that relationship was twisted by Akio into this awful thing where they are “”””””lovers”””””””” (blegh) and siblings at the same time.

Catradora is not like that, before you attempt to tell me off.  Like I said, Catra isn’t a rapist, and they aren’t blood-related so it’s not actual incest.  But the underlying dynamic is the same.

4. They can’t stand the idea of that person living without them, and seek to imprison and torment them as a result: There are two main things that Catra wants for most of the show, 1) Adora with her or 2) Adora dead.  She oscillates between these two desires but never progresses beyond them until her heel-turn in season 5.  I’ve written about this before, but she’s the definition of the cliche “If I can’t have her, then no one can”.  Akio is the same.  On some level, he knows that Anthy is capable of leaving him at any time and he can’t stop her, so he tries to prevent that by abusing and manipulating her into thinking, 1) she can’t escape him and 2) it’s her fault that he’s like this so she should stay out of guilt.  Both Catra and Akio also attempt to isolate Adora and Anthy by hurting their support structures (The Princesses and Utena).

5. They seek power and validation with no regard for the consequences: Catra was beaten and diminished for her entire childhood, and Shadow Weaver purposefully praised Adora over her to divide them.  Until Adora left and she was subsequently recognized by Hordak, she had never received validation of her worth.  So, she craves it and seeks it out by doing worse and worse things to please Hordak and Shadow Weaver.  She thinks if she gains enough clout and a high enough rank in the Horde, then no one will be able to hurt her and everyone will recognize her value.  She also associates proving herself with beating Adora.  This drive for power ruins all of her relationships and leaves her at rock bottom rather than the top of the world.  Akio longs for the power he thought he had as Dios (which was really Anthy’s power all along as we see when Utena opens the Rose Gate).  He runs the duels and manipulates the duelists so they will achieve what he can’t and open the way for him to reclaim his divinity, leaving destruction in his wake.

The primary difference between them with this point is that evidence suggests that Akio self-sabotages all his attempts to regain power.  And while Catra also sabotages herself at multiple points, it’s because she’s reckless and foolish, not because she’s deliberately making things harder for herself.  Akio perpetuates a vicious cycle of trying and failing to return to godhood, and Catra perpetuates a cycle of seeking validation from the wrong place/people, inevitably failing to meet impossible standards, and falling right back to where she started.

6. They blame their special person for their own bad decisions: To be clear, Akio is MUCH worse about this than Catra, but they both do it.  Again, this is a point I’m not sure I need to discuss much.  If you’ve seen Utena’s last story arc and you’ve watched the portal universe episode, then you know exactly what I’m referring to.

I’m not sure how I can make this any more obvious.  In the world of She-Ra, Adora is Anthy and Catra is Akio.  If you’ve read this and you somehow disagree, stop living in denial.  We are better than that.

Again, I’m very happy that Catra was redeemed.  I think it should have started in season 4 but that’s beside the point.  I’m so, so happy that she recognized her mistakes and joined the Rebellion.  But they are really acting like it’s a good and reasonable thing for Adora to let Catra back into her life just because Catra is genuinely trying to improve herself for once.  It’s not, or at least not the way they portrayed it.  I could believe it if the two of them parted ways and then reunited years down the road, because then it would be easier to believe that Catra’s change for the better was permanent.  But that’s not what we got.  What we got was just a new problem that’s going to damage this wonderful show in the long run.

[call-2-arms]

THE POSITIVE & NEGATIVE; Mun & Muse - Meme.

fill out & repost ♥ This meme definitely favors canons more, but I hope OC’s still can make it somehow work with their own lore, and lil’ fandom of friends & mutuals. Multi-Muses pick the muse you are the most invested in atm. 

tagged by: stolen from my other blog :)  tagging: @snowbrn​ @threads-of-destiny​ (Fenris) @thedasonfire​ (Solas) @serbrienneoftarth​ @scndor​

My muse is:   canon / oc / au / canon-divergent / fandomless / complicated 

Is your character popular in the fandom? YES / NO. Hard to answer, and I wouldn’t say he’s UNPOPULAR, he’s just... not as popular as say... Dany or Jon are? Or even Cersei, tbh. If there were a more middle ground option, I’d definitely he’s more middle. Sometimes I feel like he’s a forgotten character despite the massive role he’s played in the series. 

Is your character considered hot™ in the fandom?  YES / NO / IDK. Not only is Jaime known to be attractive and look the part of a king in the entire series, but Nikolaj is honestly just a super attractive male with a smile that could kill. I haven’t heard many people say that he’s an unattractive person, so this is definitely a yes. He might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but he’s enough of a looker that his reputation proceeds him. 

Is your character considered strong in the fandom?  YES / NO / IDK. Okay so... this is complicated. Because many would see Jaime as weak because of his flaws, which is fair... And then they would also say he’s weak because he doesn’t have his sword hand any longer. But overall, Jaime is a strong character throughout the series, especially as a swordsman. He is one of the best swordsmen in Westeros, and I think there are MANY people who forget that little fact about him because in the series he was softening by the end of it. I think that’s where the fandom can really misinterpret Jaime. He definitely has his flaws, but he’s still an exceptionally strong individual. 

Are they underrated?  YES / NO / IDK. I think so. I think it’s mainly because I feel like he’s misunderstood by a lot of the fandom. I’m not excusing any of his shitty behaviour, but when you’ve got heroes like Jon Snow and Dany, and even Sansa, and strong villains like Cersei, Joff and Ramsay, I think they are all the face of the series. Those characters are the main characters that people think of when they see Game of Thrones. So Jaime is seen more of a support character, even with his ties. Most people think Lannister, they think Cersei and Tyrion (because they have so much more screen/book time than Jaime does). That’s the thing about GoT though, I feel like there’s no real “main” character. I feel like no matter who it is, there’s always a little love for them in the fandom, and I love that about the fandom. But overall, yes, I would say he’s definitely the third Lannister when thinking of the siblings.

Were they relevant for the main story?  YES / NO. He’s kind of the entire reason why there’s a war in the first place tbh... He pushed a kid out a window and all hell broke loose :’D 

Were they relevant for the main character? YES / NO / THEY’RE THE PROTAG. He’s a member of one of the great Houses of Westeros. He plays a big part. 

Are they widely known in their world? YES / NO. Oh yes, greatly known, and for many reasons. Mostly he’s known for being a king slayer, though. 

How’s their reputation?  GOOD / BAD / NEUTRAL. It depends on who you ask, but throughout most of Westeros and during the series, he does not have a good reputation. Well known for his fighting skills and handsome features are about the only good reasons, everything else comes down to his relationship with his sister (sexual included) and the fact that he is a man without honour. Only by the end of the series does his reputation change, and even then, it is small. Jaime will never recover from what he has done.

How strictly do you follow canon?  — I’m fairly strict with what I go with. I stick to a strong, canon foundation because it’s a part of Jaime that is essentially who he IS as a character. It’s why I enjoy writing him, and I’m not going to take that away from him. The only divergencies are the fact that I prefer he not die in season 8 and I also write my Jaime as demisexual/romantic. 

SELL YOUR MUSE! Aka try to list everything, which makes your muse interesting in your opinion to make them spicy for your mutuals.  —  Jaime is complicated. There is no saying he is a simple character, he has layer upon layer, and discovering that is a joy. Or at least it is for me, lol. I, personally, think Jaime is such a UNIQUE character because he actually isn’t a liar compared to his siblings. Between the bickering, Jaime is actually exceptionally forward, but because people don’t expect any Lannister to be honest, it’s a joy seeing how he can use that to his advantage. He often says cryptic, sarcastic comments that people think are him being sly and dishonest, but he’s actually being completely blunt that it’s hard to tell if Jaime is actually telling the truth or playing a game. I think that’s just a really fun trait to explore when getting to write and interact with him. Also, who doesn’t like interacting with a sarcastic arsehole? X’D Deep down, Jaime has a lot of complicated issues, however, especially when it comes to family and how he is supposed to be seen. He says he doesn’t care, but he cares deeply, he brushes everything off like it’s nothing, but he’s crippled on the inside. Jaime is just one of those really strong on the outside but weak on the inside characters, and I love getting to explore that. 

Now the OPPOSITE, list everything why your muse could not be so interesting (even if you may not agree, what does the fandom perhaps think?).  — I think the fact that Jaime has been in an incest relationship for his entire life, that would definitely push people away from really caring or interacting with him. And if that’s a trigger for someone, then I totally understand why they’d want to stay away. That’s fair. Jaime can also come off as selfish and cruel, with a bad temper. People might not have the PATIENCE for him, when that’s really what he needs. He needs someone to help guide him to be a better person, to remove himself from the toxicity of ... well, his entire life, lol. He can also, like mentioned in the last questions, be cryptic as fuck. He is handicapped, he can be emotionally unstable, has PTSD and honestly just has a LOT going on, and trying to push past that to make him grow as a person and a character could be too much for folks to deal with (I think that’s a plus, but I can understand why he might not be popular lol).

What inspired you to rp your muse?  —  Jaime has been one of my favourite characters ever since I got interested in the series. I was nervous as hell to join the GoTRP community because I’d never read the books before (and still haven’t finished them lol), but I adored his character from the start, especially when a redemption arc began to happen. Look, I’m a sucker for redemption arcs and character growth, learning about his past and his secret about why he killed the Mad King. Those things are things that draw me to characters, villain characters who try to be better, who learn, who become softer. I LOVE that growth, and that’s definitely what kept me interested in Jaime. His in depth character only made my drive for wanting to delve into his head stronger. I love complicated characters, I love grey characters, I love characters that have layers I can pick through and analyse. I have also always been highly interested in sexual mental health and health in general (and have been interested in psychology for ever since I was little lol), so he was right up my ally. 

What keeps your inspiration going?  —  Definitely rewatching the series (which I desperately need to do lol), and reading the novels (which I’m VERY slow with but absolutely love them!). What really keeps me interested is definitely my RP partners though, and keeping active within the writing community. I love getting to interact with everyone. 

Some more personal questions for the mun.

Give your mutuals some insight about the way you are in some matters, which could lead them to get more comfortable with you or perhaps not.

Do you think you give your character justice?  YES / NO / I SINCERELY HOPE I DO? I have severe duplicate insecurities like most people do, but I’m pretty happy with the grasp I have on Jaime’s character overall. It’s hard to write post season 8 Jaime without a book to go to and compare against the series, so I try and keep them pretty level with each other and find a happy place in the middle. I also know I most likely write Jaime a little more emotionally traumatised, but I try to keep what happened to him real, and that has repercussions. 

Do you frequently write headcanons?  YES / NO / SORT OF? I need to move them over to this blog, but NOT ENOUGH. I really need to rewatch and continue the book series to get my head around more headcanons. Also I just haven’t had ANY time this year for much at all when it comes to headcanons, because I am so exhausted after work  

Do you sometimes write drabbles?  YES / NO. For Jaime, unfortunately, no. I keep most of my drabbles to my Dragon Age protags. I would love to though... if I had time, lol. 

Do you think a lot about your Muse during the day? YES / NO. Absolutely. Hyperfocus like a champ over here, lol. 

Are you confident in your portrayal? YES / NO / SORT OF? I think there’s always room for improvement, but I’m pretty happy with my portrayal so far. I try my hardest to keep him pretty canon, and the feedback I’ve had from my partners has always been so kind and reassuring <3

Are you confident in your writing?  YES / NO / SOMETIMES. I’ve been writing Dragon Age for so long... I feel like I don’t know a lot of the lore when it comes to GoT. I sometimes have to Wiki things I forget, names I don’t remember, and alliances and plots because I’m BAD with politics okay? I’m terrible with it all. Writing helps me learn those things, but if I’m not interested, I find it tedious to go and research (ASD/ADHD).

Are you a sensitive person?  YES / NO / SORTA. It depends. Some things I really don’t care about, others I do. It entirely depends on my mood and the day, and how the stars align lol. Or... how tired I am, haha. It really just depends. I will be more sensitive if I’m hurt from someone that means something to me, or someone I look up to. Other days I just can’t be fucked because I’m too old and tired to deal with it. 

Do you accept criticism well about your portrayal?  —  I’m going to have to say “no” on this. It’s purely because i’m not ASKING for criticism. If I was, then that’s fair because I’m actively SEEKING to be better. Right now, Jaime is a hobby and not a muse that I am constantly working on. He’s a tertiary muse that I’m here to just have a good time with and research when I feel the need to. Outside of that, if you don’t like my portrayal then you don’t have to interact with me and that’s fine. If you think my Jaime is too emotional, I’m working off mostly season 8 things which we have no book to look back on, so it’s mostly me basing everything off his past reactions and character development. If you have issues on the way I see his and Cersei’s relationship and it being toxic despite his love for her, that’s a whole diff convo lol. At the end of the day... I’m writing him the way he comes to me, and if you don’t enjoy it then that’s all good, just don’t get in my face about it. 

Do you like questions, which help you explore your character?  —  Absolutely, they help with getting to know little things about him that I may never have thought about before. I love those kinds of character development questions. 

If someone disagrees to a headcanon of yours, do you want to know why?  —  I guess it depends on what type of headcanon it is. I generally try and base my headcanons off solid evidence within his character background and events within the series. If someone doesn’t agree with me, it’s literally not the end of the world and it’s not worth arguing over--we all have out different portrayals and I’m not the original writer lol. If you’re going to get cranky at me because my Jaime enjoys the company of men as well once he’s able to explore himself sexually, then I really couldn’t give a fuck. As a gay man, it helps me enjoy the character a little bit more and identify with him, and I write Jaime as demi anyway. Plus, I also don’t write it in a sense that it’s not something he doesn’t struggle with considering Westeros is not open to such things. 

If someone disagrees with your portrayal, how would you take it?  —  same as the above.

If someone really hates your character, how do you take it?  —  I don’t actively go looking through Jaime hate tags, so I’ve never run into this? If someone follows me and hates Jaime, then I just think it’s stupid that they followed me in the first place? Obviously now that he’s on a multi, that’s a little bit more complicated, but everyone is free to not interact with him and still interact with my other characters here lol. If I follow someone and then see them actively posting hate about him, I would simply unfollow. That’s it. I’m not here to fight and argue, I’m here to have a good time, and I’m not going to force anyone to enjoy a character they don’t. 

Are you okay with people pointing out your grammatical errors?  —  Mistakes happen, I don’t always look over my reply before posting, and more often then not, I’m tired as hell when I’m writing anyway so there might be errors from time to time. I can guarantee there’s probably some in this meme lol. If a little red squiggle doesn’t come up beneath the word, then I’ve probably not fixed it. In saying that, if you’re coming to me every time I make a typo... I will begin to get annoyed. It’s a small thing, get over it and move on. If you can’t, then maybe I’m not the right person to be writing with if it’s causing you that much stress. If I’ve completely butchered a sentence (which has happened!), then just give me a polite nudge and go “hey did you mean to write this instead?” and I’ll probably feel embarrassed and laugh about it and be like yeah sorry, I meant that :’D 

Do you think you are easy going as a mun?   —  When there’s not a pandemic going on in the world, I’m certainly very easy going, lol. It takes a fair bit to piss me off, and it’s got to be pretty repetitive for me to start going... mmm, there’s a pattern here and I don’t like it. But generally speaking, if you’re nice to me, I’m nice back. I don’t go looking for fights and arguments, and my nature has certainly meant people have abused me in the past. I’m often too empathetic and because I avoid trying to make a fuss and cause confrontation, I often let people do whatever. I’ve... somewhat learned from past experiences to NOT do this to myself, which I guess has made me a little bit less easy going. That and just generally getting older and not having the time to care about petty things might make me come off as a hard arse at times. But look... I’m not going to be a dickhead to anyone who doesn’t deserve it, okay? I get we’re all anxious, I get we’re all curious, I get that we all have opinions. Don’t be a dick and you don’t have anything to worry about. I can sometimes be blunt, but most people learn that that’s just me. Maybe it’s an Aussie thing, maybe it’s a me thing. Probably a combination of the two... my mother always did say I was very blunt. >.> Sometimes that’s a good thing when people want or need advice, but if it’s not what you want to hear, then don’t come asking, because I can be very honest. 

[dalek-in-heels]

Hi hello, I have Feelings about some (not all!) of the ways I’ve seen bisexuality and polyamory discussed in Magicians fandom recently, mainly in the context of how queerness is represented in the show / speculating about what’s next. Queerness and polyam are two things that are near and dear to my own lived experiences, so I want to put my voice out there. This turned into a 2k word jumble, but as always I am open to discussion around any of it! My opinions/experiences, not law, I like hearing other viewpoints, etc etc. <3

tl;dr 1) I think it makes narrative sense why Quentin hasn’t explicitly confessed his love for Eliot to his friends yet.

2) I think it’s canon that Quentin and Eliot are each unique representations of people whose bisexuality/queerness/no-label-sexual-fluidity manifests in different ways.

3) I think it’s canon that there is polyamory in A Life in the Day.

—

First, I want to make clear that, after literally decades in fandoms that queerbait (or not even that), I feel passionately about the writers finally giving us more explicit queer love stories. Like, viscerally anxiously needing some emotional resolution for Queliot. I’m not sure I’ve ever been this invested in a ship before tbh.

That said, I won’t be mad about how Quentin & Eliot’s arc has been represented so far, as long as it does continue to develop going forward. Like, if it’s not explicitly addressed at all the rest of this season? That’s an issue. But if it’s only addressed again, like, tonight or even just in the finale, and leaves open the potential for more development in season five while Eliot is actually not possessed? I can see narrative reasons for why that works better.

In large part because of Quentin’s motivations this season. This is key: They are telling a story about a man who has been suppressing his feelings for the man he loves, who he thinks doesn’t love him back, and who is currently possessed by a monster. Quentin’s cautious. He’s depressed. He’s not going around making declarations, precisely because this is a very different love story than the ones we’ve seen between any of the other couples. Not only because they’re two men, but in large part because one of those men is possessed.

Don’t get me wrong (ha)—I am 100% in the camp of people who want Quentin to make some sort of confession despite all of this, and I definitely daydream about there being some sort of extra footage from their 50 years that we’ve never seen. But also? Story-wise? I get why it hasn’t happened yet: The more things that are out there in the open for the Monster to use against Quentin—and against Eliot’s body—the more damage can be done.

I think that’s one of the things that’s so powerful about that scene in 4x06, when the Monster asks, Why do you care about him so much? and Quentin simply says, Because I do. Yes, we know from Eliot’s memory that it’s because Quentin loves him, but like can you imagine Quentin admitting that to the Monster? What shit the Monster would pull with that knowledge?? It’d be horrible. Quentin knows better. He’s keeping details as close to the chest as possible for a damn reason.

—

Which brings me to Quentin’s bisexuality: I don’t think him not talking openly about his feelings for Eliot erases his bisexuality. Yes, arguably he could have a conversation with Julia or Alice or whomever about it, but what purpose would that serve? Him just feeling even worse admitting out loud that he’s trying to save the person he loves who doesn’t even love him back? Much easier to contain if you don’t say it out loud.

One of the things I’ve really loved about Quentin actually is that his bisexuality is a version that’s relatable to me on a personal level. Quentin is a queer man who has mostly dated women (as far as we can tell in canon). I’m a cis woman who has, largely due to circumstance, mostly dated men, despite coming out as bi 17 years ago. There were also long stretches of time where I didn’t date anyone. None of this has made me less queer/bisexual. My sexuality is an undeniable aspect of me, but also, I pass as straight. A lot. Which is frustrating because I never want to pass as straight in straight spaces or queer spaces, but it’s a super common experience for a lot of us. I’ve known so many women who pass, many of us because we date men, and therefore people don’t see our sexuality as valid since it’s ~ not in practice. It is a part of us; it doesn’t matter what we practice or not.

Quentin is bisexual—or whatever label we as fans want to put on it, but he is not straight. He has had queer experiences and expressed queer feelings. That is canon. Honestly, one of the reasons why I’m drawn to him as a queer character is because he hasn’t put a label on it in canon. They are telling the story of a character whose sexuality is not heterosexual, and it is not the most important thing about him. That is valid. That is the underrepresented experience of many of us, and it is satisfying to see someone represented on television who has experiences with people of different and similar genders, and that is not the core of the relationship conflict. He knows who he is. As Jason has put it before, it’s the one thing Quentin isn’t anxious about. I feel that.

But okay, back to trusting if the writers will represent Queliot or not going forward? I think it’s important to remember that this show has always been pretty fluid sexually, so the writers driving down this route with two of their male leads is, while new ground, not an absurd expectation. On a less queer show, I’d be less trusting of how they’ll handle it, but I feel like out of any writers I’ve loved, these might be the ones who get it on some level? Yes, there are still majority heteronormative things going on, but this is not the first queer relationship we’ve seen on the show: We’ve seen Eliot with randos, we’ve seen Eliot with Mike, with Idri—and with Quentin.

Which, while we’re on that—Eliot’s queerness? Should also not be erased. He is not gay. He is somewhere on a fluid queer spectrum. That’s literally canon, so any hand-waving away of that is erasing it. Sexuality is just so much more complex than that, and I think it’s simplistic to say otherwise. There are people who see themselves in Eliot’s version of queerness (mostly men, sometimes women), just the same way so many people see themselves in Quentin’s version of queerness (mostly women, sometimes men). We deserve more explicit text of their past relationship and Quentin’s current feelings, eventually, but tbh I still think how it’s being portrayed is valid and has made sense within the larger narrative so far.

—

Okay, now I really need to talk about how polyamory is portrayed on the show.

I’m not sure how many people active in this fandom are polyamorous or not (please feel free to give me a shout if you are? I’d love to make more polyam friends here), so extremely bare bones crash course here, since it is an often misunderstood, underrepresented, and stigmatized relationship model:

Polyamory is a relationship model that can take many forms (not necessarily marriage, not necessarily hierarchical), and is always rooted in consent, open communication, and building trust between all partners and metamours (your partner’s partners) in a polycule. All polyamorous arrangements and other versions of non-monogamy are consensual—if they’re not, then quite frankly it’s not polyamory; it’s cheating or, at the very least, pretty dang toxic.

For many of us, polyamory tends to be an alternative to the monogamous “relationship escalator”—instead of every relationship we form having the expectation that it’ll lead to marriage (and/or moving in together, having kids, etc), we choose to explore all the different types of relationships that can form organically in our lives: maybe a long-term partner or two, more partners who are casual but no less cared for and respected, etc. Or there’s solo polyamory, where your primary commitment is to yourself, but you have open consensual relationships with multiple other people, short-term or long-term. There are literally endless other possibilities.

As for how this relates to Quentin & Eliot’s time at the Mosaic: I’ve seen the argument that it couldn’t have been a happy polyamorous thing if only Quentin had two partners. I don’t buy that. Sure, it’s common for there to be relationships where two people each have another partner or multiple partners, but that is not the one right way that polyamory is done or that people who practice it can be happy with.

I personally have been practicing polyamory for several years, and there have been long stretches of time where I simply haven’t wanted to be with anyone else besides my primary partner, even when he has had other partners, and vice versa, and I have still lived my damn life with love. Yes there has been jealousy and insecurity to varying degrees, but there is a lot of support to identify their roots and actively work through them, and face fears. “Love isn’t zero sum” is a phrase thrown around a lot in polyamory literature, but it’s true: The partner who’s only with one person isn’t somehow getting less love. They have their partnership, they have a rich, full life outside of any romantic/sexual relationships, and they have the freedom to be open to other relationships should the opportunities come along.

So, anyway, back to the Magicians: Do I care if the writers intended to show a version of polyamory on the screen in 3x05? Not really. Because what happened anyway, is they did.

I don’t think the writers would or even could get away with representing an explicitly polyamorous relationship, mainly because that is still pretty damn stigmatized and rarely out in mainstream culture. But I do think that they did what they could to make Quentin and Eliot be able to build a family together, which I think was a key part of their narrative. How else would they have shown Quentin and Eliot having a kid in that context? In the space of a highlights montage? I’m not saying Arielle was a fully formed character either, or that she wasn’t a pawn of some sort, but I don’t think she was a pawn to somehow prove Quentin and Eliot had any less real of a relationship. I think if she was a pawn, it was so that they could raise a kid together and have a family. (Which isn’t great, but that’s a whole other issue, not a queer erasure issue.)

My personal headcanon for the 3x05 timeline is that Quentin, Eliot, and Arielle had a polycule that was basically Quentin/Arielle and Quentin/Eliot, with Eliot and Arielle as metamours, who also have some level of romance and maybe the occasional sexual relationship. In my headcanon, they were all happy together, raising a kid together, growing up and out of the insecurities and fears that Quentin & Eliot had back in the present-day timeline. Like, I can’t picture a 25 year old having the exact same hang-ups as a 35 to 75 year old, you know? People grow up. They settle into themselves.

I think that kind of happiness is inherent in how Quentin and Eliot talk about it when they come back: it was sort of beautiful, we worked, who gets that kind of proof of concept. So why would Eliot turn down Quentin when they get back, if that life was so good? I think it’s because wow that is a lot to live up to, when he knows they are not the same people now as who they’d turned into in that timeline. They have those memories and some of that wisdom, sure, but also they are the same people they were back in the future. Eliot doesn’t trust Quentin would choose him in this context, so he runs from things he’s afraid of fucking up or not living up to.

Whatever they are or will become now, I really think that the polyamory in that other timeline was real though. Even though nobody was boning or making out, there was a family of people raising a child together. There were people spending their lives together. It’s not as much representation as we (queer people, polyamorous people) deserve, but it’s not erased either. We focus a lot on the fact that Eliot, upon return, brought up You had a wife. But quickly following that was And we had a family. That’s not nothing.

I think I’ll just end on that note. This is already so long. Let’s see what happens tonight!! [screams into the void]

[alwaysahiccupandastrid]

Leta Lestrange is NOT a bad person

First of all, I just want to make it clear that the opinions expressed in this post are entirely my own - I’m not saying that everyone has to think this way, this is just what I took from ‘Crimes of Grindelwald’ when I watched it. If you disagree, then I respect that but I just wanted to offer my (pretty much useless) thoughts.

(Under a “Read More” because it’s longer than expected- if it doesn’t work, I’m sorry!)

So: Leta Lestrange.

I’ve seen a bit of negativity going around about her, saying how she was clearly playing around with both of the Scamander brothers’ feelings, how she was manipulative etc. etc. I personally disagree with all of these assumptions about her.

One thing I’ve seen is people saying how Leta shouldn’t have touched Newt’s arm in the photo at the book signing, how she was closer to Newt than Theseus etc. I honestly don’t think there was ANY ill intent or ulterior motive behind it in the slightest; Newt and Leta were best friends at school, neither of them fitted in and so they were each other’s only friends. They clearly cared for one another, and those feelings don’t go away easily. I saw it as Leta knowing Newt was uncomfortable, as well as wanting to offer support - not just as an old friend but his future sister-in-law. The picture shows just one moment from an entire book-signing, so I don’t think we can make too many assumptions based on it.

Next, Leta ‘getting at’/nagging Newt to come to dinner with her and Theseus - I’m baffled that people think she was trying to pressure Newt. Yes, she says “Theseus was disappointed you couldn’t come to dinner any of the nights we asked you” - but she’s clearly trying to make Newt see that Theseus cares for his brother. Perhaps she’s also hoping that Newt coming to dinner might help alleviate some awkwardness between the three of them. I’ll talk more about this in a moment, but I genuinely think that Leta loved both of them in different ways - Theseus as her fiancée, Newt as her only friend when she was an outcast. “He’s your brother, Newt, he cares about you - and so do I” - I don’t think this is manipulation, she’s speaking the truth because she knows Newt might not realize it. Asking her future brother-in-law to dinner is NOT a crime or nasty in any way; it’s her trying to be friendly, because they’re going to be family. It’s not like she forced him to come or demanded it.

Getting engaged to Theseus after her friendship with Newt -- okay, but at no point does it say that Newt and Leta were ANYTHING more than best friends. I’m pretty sure Zoe Kravitz said that she thinks Newt had romantic feelings for Leta, but that it wasn’t requited from Leta’s side/he didn’t make it clear at the time. By CoG, Newt has moved on completely and is hopelessly pining after Tina - his love for Leta is no longer an issue. Yes, at first I thought it was a little weird that Theseus and Leta were engaged - but they actually seem to genuinely care for each other, and she seems to love him (eg. initiating to kisses in the French Ministry and warning him to “be careful”, saying “I love you” to him and Newt). I can’t believe this fandom is getting pissed because GOD FORBID Leta fall in love with her best friend’s brother! For all we know, they met, liked each other and she didn’t realize until later that he was Newt’s brother - who knows?

The carving of “L+N” at Hogwarts could have been done by either Newt or Leta; we know Newt harboured romantic feelings for her, so he could have done it, only for her to see it years later and reflect on their friendship. Leta could have done it because “we’re best friends and he’s my only friend” - like “best friends forever” kind of thing. I guarantee that there’s a desk somewhere in modern day Hogwarts with “F + G” carved into it because of Fred and George being the best pranksters or whatever. 

Even if Leta did have romantic feelings for Newt, she was a teenager: people fall in and out of love all the time when they’re young. Feelings change. It doesn’t make Leta a bad person.

Queenie says that Leta was “a taker”, and we all immediately assumed that this must mean she was toxic/nasty/manipulative to him - but now that I’m thinking about it, Leta was brought up by an unloving father, her childhood miserable. When she became friends with Newt, she probably did “take” as it were, without realizing; neither of them had any other friends, Leta was brought up in a toxic environment and filled with fear/misery/guilt over what happened to her brother (and her mother, who died in childbirth giving birth to her), and so it wouldn’t surprise me if she didn’t understand or know how to give back in their friendship.

It’s also important to remember that JK Rowling said that Queenie hears everything constantly “but she’s not that good at interpreting” - just bear that in mind. She could have misinterpreted Newt’s thoughts, especially if he realized she was reading his mind and tried to shut her out.

What happened with Corvus was a complete accident - how was she supposed to know what would happen? She acknowledges it was wrong and she should not have swapped the babies; all she wanted was to be free of her brother - her father’s favourite, the baby who never stopped screaming/crying - for a moment. She was probably hoping to swap them back at some point, for all we know. According to the screenplay, the boat sinking happened in 1901, though the adoption certificate in the Archive of Magic book says Credence was adopted in 1905 - so this makes Leta somewhere between 3-years-old and 8-years-old (given that she was in the same year at Hogwarts as Newt). In the credits, the actress is credited as “Leta Lestrange (3-6 years)” - Leta was only very young, a child, and so this would have seriously messed her up for the rest of her life. Imagine living with that knowledge every day, knowing that you inadvertently caused your brother to drown to his death. 

At 3-6 years old, especially with her father being unloving/childhood miserable, it wouldn’t surprise me if she didn’t think about “right” and “wrong” in that moment or even if she in fact didn’t know the difference because her childhood caused her to be emotionally stunted or something.

As I said earlier, the screenplay states that Leta says “I love you” to BOTH Theseus and Newt; I stand by in my opinion that she loved both of them but in different ways. 

Newt was her first and only friend, the only person who didn’t talk about her behind her back or think ill of her based on her family name; he’s the reason she wasn’t expelled from school, because Newt couldn’t bear to see her expelled (I can’t remember where I read that - if someone can confirm this then that would be wonderful!) People get annoyed that she let him take the blame, but imagine being 16 and threatened with expulsion - it wouldn’t surprise me if she was scared of her wand being snapped and of her father’s reaction if she was expelled. We know he never loved her - imagine how he would have reacted to her being expelled from Hogwarts and bringing shame on the Lestrange family. Newt made that choice to take the blame - no one made him do it - and she was probably too frightened to tell the truth at the time.

Theseus was her fiancée; from what I can tell, they seemed to genuinely love each other. Theseus was distraught after she sacrificed herself, crying and trying desperately to reach her through the flames; she a) initiated two kisses with him at the French Ministry and b) sacrificed herself so he (and Newt/the others) could escape. I admit, we should have been given more about their relationship, but I do genuinely think they loved each other.

One final thing: Leta didn’t owe Newt or ANY other man anything. She didn’t owe Newt happiness - he should be in charge of his own happiness, and she’s not there to owe him a relationship or anything just because he was nice to her. It’s eerily similar to those people who think the “friendzone” is a thing, who think a guy being nice to a girl means she owes him a relationship/sex - it’s disgusting.

It seems to me that Leta is very misunderstood, both in films and by the fandom; the criticism on her and female characters in this series is unbelievably harsh. I can’t help but wonder if people are harsh on Leta because she’s a WOC - and I do wish I hadn’t seen people say Zoe Kravitz is “too white” to be counted as black. From what I know about Kravitz (which admittedly isn’t a lot), she has African-American, African-Bahamian and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. Leta had a white father and a black mother. STOP saying Kravitz/Leta are “too white”, they’re both beautiful WOC who deserve respect.

(Disclaimer: If I have used an inappropriate phrase/term in this post, let me know so I can edit it!)

[kendrixtermina]

I haven’t played all four routes yet but from spoilers I do know that Edelgard has some feelings for Byleth regardless of the route. While the shipper in me likes that detail, objectively from what I’ve seen of AM/VW so far I’m not sure why El would feel that way. I don’t want to chalk it up to waifuism right away. Any thoughts on this, since you’ve played all the routes?

Comments on the premise

(Scroll down for an answer to your actual question) 

First of all this “waifuism” thing is exceedingly cynical. 

Male antagonists in huge classical words of art are given a tragic crush or adorable little daughter/sister them all the time so  as to humanize them, give them internal conflict and expose some contradictions about them, and people get how it’s tragic and gives them dimensionality and no one ever says the only reason is so fangirls will think they’re hot. If anyone gets made fun of it’s the fangirls for “not getting the depht” as if that were mutually exclusive. Vulnerability, temptation, struggle for independence... you find that all over the best stories ever told. 

For every damself in distress there’s one dude (her boyfriend) who manages to be a full compelling non-satelite human being despite having romance as a motivator the problem isn’t romance it’s bad writing. There’s certainly a problem if almost every single female character in a setting were entirely by romance but the idea that liking someone is to degrade, flatten and cheapen yourself is just as toxic. It can coexist with other more complex motivations and in fact lampshade them.

You might perhaps call bad writing if it were one of those situations where the villainess has no other motivation than dudes, brings it up constantly or is so defined by it that it keeps her from acting in any self-consistent manner or just isn’t taken seriously as an antagonist.  Not saying she’s a villain at all but you oppose her on the other routes.

I pretty much all the characters like Byleth and express regret when they go up against them... They have a sort of heroic charisma that’s why they’re the main character. (not per se the other way around - you don’t point the camera where nothing interesting/extrordinary is happening. Few stories tell us about a sack of potatoes falling over or people sitting on chairs, and if they did they’d be about pointing out how potatoes or chairs are actually plenty interesting)

They’re described as accepting ppl just as they are with that having been an attitude impressed on them by their father who himself is cool with Byleth’s own oddities, and also described as one hell of a badass field commander.  Also you DO run around all day bringing everyone gifts, their favorite snacks lost possesions and listening to their problems/lifestories. 

It’s not like it’s super over the top in your face it’s like a handful of lines many of which you might not even hear if you’ve recruited certain characters or don#t trigger certain engage quotes, and it ties into her greater characterization as someone with consummate laserfocus dedication who has pretty much given up on anything that doesn’t further her goal even her own feelings.  - having a crush is just one example, she mentions how she’d have preferred a more peaceful life doing idle fun things and did enjoy her time at the monastery where she got to be just another classmate sand fight alongside everybody else as a comrade.

Though she enjoyed her time at the monastery, her resolve doesn’t waver... but now it hurts a bit more to go through with what she had planned all along since it means losing some of the relative normalcy she had not dared to hope for anymore

You actual question (ie what does she like about them)

Crushes, by nature, are just something that randomly shows up and can produce quite a bit of a reaction in a short time. 

Regardless of route you save her from a bandit and there’s all the explore time dialogue and basically lived in close quarters/ saw each other every other day. Even if theyd spend more time with their own class theyd still be around the place doing cool stuff. That would be explanation enough, I mean it doesn’t necessarily mean that something had to come of it, that she wouldn’t get over it or that you’re immediately soulmates or whatever, I mean you can pair her off with plenty of other peeps in her route. 

Which isn’t to say that the whole thing is just any old youthful crush. Crush or no crush she really wants them to be allies. 

First of all Edelgard has been describing as being drawn to/ sorta ‘collecting’ people she views as talented and exceptional so if you are a badass she’s gonna like you (just in general not even romantically), and if you’re a badass who’s also her ‘type’ that might manifest itself as a crush as well. 

She says pretty early on that she thinks they have similar personalities, and she clearly looks for like-mindedness in friends and allies as well, of the ones that she gets semi-friendly with even before the timeskip the only one with a significant different outlook/temperament is Dorothea, and everyone likes Dorothea, since she goes out of her way to befriend anyone who doesn’t resemble an arrogant dunce. 

Also, she probably finds the idea of having an ally who is “like her” very enticing. First because she’s used to being misunderstood and someone who is similar might “get” her and relate to her. (Conversely there’s a lot of dialogue where she’s like “I know you’re lying” or “wow you’re telling the truth”... she doesnt find them that opaque/unreadable compared to the other characters. so this also goes both ways... this occurs regularly enough that its even kinda used to hint at who the flame emperor is (”I can tell you dont actually want to join me”)) 

Byleth is just generally described in a lot of scenes dialogues and supports as someone whos pretty accepting of peolples weirdness and quirks. Leonie thinks they get it from Jeralt. That tends to be a selling point for most of their romantic options especially the house leaders

Likewise, due to various reasons relating to her natural personality, station and backstory she finds it hard to step out of business mode, and ppl tend to sort of flinch away from her because she’s uncommonly powerful and also the princess, and she doesn’t like that/tends to feel somewhat isolated because of it.  Even ppl who know Edelgard well enough to have significant insight into her (like Hubert or Ladislava) still speak of her with a kind of awe.

Due to their upbringing away from mainstream society, sorta unphased slightly flippant personality and their own considerable power/competence Byleth is one of the few who isn’t daunted to approach her like any ol regular person. They’re powerful enough for her to approach them on an even level, or even rely on them/ take pointers from them. 

You also see that to an extent with Lysithea (who is not just a fellow experiment victim but also has a similar ‘serious/focussed’ outlook and love of sugary things) with whom she also gets various “I wish you’d joined me/pity that we must fight” sort of dialogue. She’s Edelgard’s one inter-house support (suggesting a similar “I kinda can’t help wanting to get to know you even though I know we might become enemies” dynamic at play) the “free recruitee” on the CF route (whereas the other cases are in situations where they have incentives to flip - Lorenz is only with the empire out of opportunism so why wouldn’t he join the kingdom if they look to be winning? And Ashe was flat out drafted and is only with the Rowes out of obligation) and if you spare her she’ll say that Claude explicitly told her to waive the white flag if things get tough because he figured that Edelgard would be likely to spare her. 

[timeagainreviews]

Classic Baddies for the Thirteenth Doctor!

As a fan of classic Doctor Who, one of my favourite elements of the new series has been the anticipation as to which classic villains will make an appearance. Not only is it cool to see more of these older monsters, but it’s also exciting to see how they update their look. Some really nail it too. Keeping the classic design of the Daleks while making them look more tank-like and utilitarian in 2005 was a masterstroke. I liked that they embraced the Ice Warriors’ original look as well. While I may not be as hot on the updated Silurians, or Autons, it’s always fun to see classic villains regardless.

When Chris Chibnall mentioned that there would be no classic villains in series 11, my heart sank a little. Are they necessary for Doctor Who to be successful? Not hardly. But it’s fun dammit. Even if they were cameos like the Macra or the Movellans, these were moments I looked forward to. I have a sort of checklist I like to go through with each series of new Who. Are there classic villains? Check. Does the Doctor meet a figure from history? Check. Series 11 has one of those.

It’s been no secret that a major criticism of series 11 has been its lack of compelling villains. I myself have been vocal about this disappointment. So I thought I would make up a list of 10 classic villains I would like to see the Thirteenth Doctor go up against. I’m basing these off a few factors. Personal favourites, Jodie’s vibe, the era, etc. Enjoy! And feel free to add your own!

1. Autons

First Appearance: "Spearhead from Space" (1970)

I know they have already returned. I know I said I didn’t like their update. That’s exactly why they’re on this list now. I didn’t exactly hate the updated Autons when I first watched them. At the time, I didn’t have any classic villains to compare them to, as they were new to me. I thought they were pretty corny and not very scary, even as they did openly murder people in the streets of London. But when seeing "Spearhead from Space," for the first time, I was supremely creeped out. The newer Autons remind me of the movie theatre scene in “Human Traffic.” Just a bunch of dancers doing the robot. Not very scary. And turning the Nestine consciousness into a big vat of CGI goo, as compared to a giant plastic space squid seems like a crime. They’re due an update.

2. Voord

First Appearance: "The Keys of Marinus" (1964)

These guys creep me out. Their costumes are really stupid, and I still find them creepy. They’re like spiky fish men mixed with Egyptian gods. Ignoring the weird "Voord became Cybermen," storyline, and focusing on the fishman aspect would be the way to go. Could you imagine their costume if updated correctly? I picture a mix between Edward Scissorhands and a scuba diver. I’ve wanted to see Jodie encounter these guys ever since "The Ghost Monument," reminded me of "The Keys of Marinus." Something about First Doctor villains with the first female Doctor kinda works for me too. Speaking of First Doctor villains…

3. Zarbi

First Appearance: "The Web Planet" (1965)

Ok, so this one is a bit of a cheat. I know the Zarbi aren’t really a villain by their own doing. In many ways, these oversized ants are just dumb animals. But the biggest way this is a cheat is because I just want them so we can have the Menoptera! I love those stupid moth cuties. I think an updated one of them could look really fun. Think the aliens from the queue scene in the "Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy," movie. Something between realistic, and fantastical. They would also add a much-needed sense of levity to the Chibnall era.

4. The Dominators

First Appearance: "The Dominators" (1968)

The Dominators are a race of men whose name pretty much describes their modus operandi. Having long ago developed beyond the need for women, these guys seem an obvious choice to go up against a female Doctor. Their look is simple enough to update. They need only to look armoured and militaristic. Their robot drones, the Quarks, would be the real challenge to update, but I’m sure they’d nail it. I would be interested in seeing a more bureaucratic ruling class of Dominators as well. Perhaps instead of having a male and female population, they have the soldiers and the suits. Could be a really interesting way to talk about the insular nature of toxic masculinity. This would fit in well with Thirteen’s villains being chauvinistic shitbirds that don’t like women much.

5. Axons

First Appearance: "The Claws of Axos" (1971)

I’ve heard the Axons get a bit of flack in the past, which is bananas to me. There’s so much potential there. They have a rather psychedelic look, and then they get super gross. I’ve always seen them as very retro style monsters. Jodie’s costume has a real 1970’s "Godspell," look about it, so I always picture her going up against monsters that look the part. They wouldn’t be hard to update either. I would make the golden lines on their humanoid forms slightly raised, like a system of fibres across their skin. And of course, their squidgy red form could be a tangled mass of CGI that kinda bubbles up from the gold lines. The transformation scenes could get very visceral. They’ve got a sneaky nature about them. Like anglerfish, their beautiful golden appearance conceals a horrific monster. They’re known for making Faustian deals with people fool enough to believe their lies. How could we resist?

6. The Mara

First Appearance: "Kinda" (1982)

Many people love the Kinda/Snakedance storyline. I wasn’t sure what to make of either serial, as the quality of both waivers. Over time, though, I’ve come to really appreciate them as stories. I have a love for characters that exist as a sort of gestalt. There’s something very unsettling about a hive mind. As The Doctor has three companions this time around. There’s lots of room for one of them to go off and become possessed by an evil snake god for a while. Either Graham or Ryan becoming hosts for the Mara could be an interesting way to explore their relationship. While the DVD release saw an updated version of the Mara’s snake form, I’m sure the modern show can do one better. They’ve already done giant spiders, now let's see them do a giant snake!

7. The Rani

First Appearance: "The Mark of the Rani" (1985)

While I am aware many people dislike the Rani, and the idea of Chris Chibnall choosing a character created by Pip and Jan Baker is unlikely, I still don’t care. Any character can be made good in the hands of a competent writer. All it takes is one good idea. Personally, I’ve never really gotten the guff she’s been given. As a woman capable of cruel scientific experiments, the Rani is a ruthless Time Lady with more guile than the Master. People want to see Thirteen with Missy because they’re both women now, but we’ve had an evil Time Lady for years, and I’d be interested to see what regeneration might bring for her… or him?

8. Rutans

First Appearance: "The Horror of Fang Rock" (1977)

First Mentioned: “The Time Warrior” (1973)

The Rutans are long enemies of the Sontaran race. I would love to see them amp up the danger by getting stuck in the middle of a skirmish between the two races. I would like to see the Sontarans presented as formidable once again. The Doctor Who video game "The Gunpowder Plot," did update their look, to a decent degree. Either way, modern Who could make a Rutan look much more imposing with CGI, or even practical effects. I’d imagine something like a green man o’ war. Jodie’s Doctor’s tendency to mediate during conflict could land her trying to broker peace between the two races. Could she be successful or would she have to count her losses?

9. Drashigs

First Appearance: "Carnival of Monsters" (1973)

Here we have yet another Robert Holmes creation! (The other two being the Autons and the Rutans) While mostly just mindless monsters that can eat through anything, I’ve always loved these horrific beasts. With heads the size of a Volkswagen bug, and an appetite for anything in their way, these guys could really add in a danger element. I doubt they could really carry an episode by themselves, but they’d make a great threat! They may be alien snake monsters, but you may have a creeping familiarity when looking at them. This is because the puppets used were constructed around the skulls of real dogs! While I’m sure these pups died of natural causes, the information has always given them an air of creepiness and realism. As Third Doctor era baddies go, these toothy terrors were some of the more believable creatures yet! They wouldn’t need much of an update, looks wise. Part of me would still want them to be puppets. I’d imagine Thirteen’s compassion for misunderstood creatures would send her on a danger defying attempt to save their lives!

10. The Scorchies

First Appearance: "The Scorchies" (2013)

Ok, so this one is another cheat. Technically these aren’t "classic Who" villains. They come from the audios, but I’m counting them because they’re from a Third Doctor era storyline! If you count the mention of the Rutans in "The Time Warrior," this marks the fifth baddie from the Third Doctor era. What is it about that period that is so mineable? Originally a species with bodies, they lost their corporeal form when their planet was invaded and they were transported to safety via television broadcast waves! In their new puppet bodies, they go from planet to planet hypnotising their inhabitants and burning them! Why? Because they’re salty. So why them?  Well, for starters, look at these guys! Jodie’s Doctor has always reminded me as a bit of mad kids’ show presenter, with her bright colours and friendly appearance. Seeing her with puppets almost feels natural. I love the idea so much that I photoshopped it! It would also make Doctor Who history. While the Eighth Doctor mentioned his audio companions in "The Night of the Doctor," no audio characters have ever made an appearance in the show (at least to my knowledge). Appearance wise, they’d be easy to create. If they wanted to go the extra mile, they could partner with the Jim Henson Creature Shop for an added distinction. I feel like no matter what you do, these little critters could draw a crowd. People would watch just to see if Doctor Who has lost its damn mind! If done right, it could be a fun romp! Who says Doctor Who villains always have to be serious?

Well, that’s it for my list! Did you agree? Do you think poor Natalie needs to get her head checked out? Feel free to reblog with your own additions! I’d love to read what you think! Expect the review of this weekend’s Doctor Who either Sunday or Monday. I’ve not yet re-watched Marco Polo, which I might actually do today, but it’s on my list to write it next week! It’s going to be the first reconstruction I’m doing, so it should be interesting! I’m not sure if I will supplement any of it with the Target novelisation, but I am thinking not. We’ll see! It’s still early into the series!

[letterboxd]

Human Resources.

Kitty Green talks to our London correspondent Ella Kemp about “putting the audience in the shoes of the youngest woman in a toxic work environment” in her new film, The Assistant.

The long-undervalued job of a Hollywood assistant has come into stark relief thanks to recent events, and the stories that are being told of assistants’ experiences, working conditions and pay rates are jaw-dropping. (Episode 422 of the Scriptnotes podcast is well worth a listen.)

Filmmaker Kitty Green was well ahead of the conversation; her first narrative feature, The Assistant, quietly premiered at the Telluride Film Festival last August (and the Berlinale in February). Dubbed by many as ‘the first post-#MeToo movie’, it is a remarkable portrait of a young woman navigating just another day in the office. Except this is not just another office, and so many things are wrong about this day.

Starring Julia Garner (Grandma, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Electrick Children) as Jane, the assistant to the predatory head of a New York-based film studio, the story zooms in on the details of her routine—the tedious tasks, the belittlement from her colleagues, the oppression from her mostly faceless boss—with such laser-sharp vision that by the end we feel we know Jane deep in our bones.

Green has previously directed the documentary features Ukraine is Not a Brothel (2013) and Casting JonBenét (2017), the latter a meta-documentary that also hones in on the neglect and exploitation of young women, albeit under a different light (it is now streaming on Netflix). While Green’s documentary experience bears fruit in her attention to detail, the narrative form of The Assistant allows for a focus on mundane tasks and micro-reactions that documentary might not have access to.

Various Letterboxd reviews mention the anxiety-inducing way The Assistant allows us to watch Jane “probe her place in the established, tacit system of complacency… knowing that everyone around her is motivated by self-interest to pretend it doesn’t exist” (Josh Lewis). “Green encourages her viewers to pay close attention to what’s really going on beneath the surface,” (KristineJean) in “a horror movie of soul-sickening ambience” (Scott Tobias).

Though The Assistant’s film festival run was cut short, and the closure of cinemas around the world hurts for a lot of us, there’s something about the claustrophobia of social distancing and the intimacy of the small screen that maybe suits this picture. Nevertheless, seeing the film in a cinema in ‘the before time’ highlighted for Alyssa Heflin the ocean of different opinions that can come from misunderstood subtext: “Watching this in a room where you can hear people snickering at the girl and asking what the point of all this is adds a certain extra… incendiary level to an already deeply angry viewing experience.” Indeed, discomfort and crossed wires seem to define the messages at the core of The Assistant.

Kitty Green talks to Ella Kemp about the influence of Chantal Akerman, the infinite watchability of Julia Garner, and the oddness of growing up with a Nazi-free edit of The Sound of Music.

Jane (Julia Garner) takes another call from the boss in ‘The Assistant’.

The Assistant is your first fiction feature. The subject matter feels so immediate—what made you choose to not make a documentary of this, given your track record in that realm? Kitty Green: I went to fiction film school, and I made fiction short films. I then found work in documentary, so I made two feature-length docs. With this one, I was looking at exploring the micro-aggressions, the tiny moments, gestures, looks, glances, behaviors that often go overlooked when covering the #MeToo movement. We often talk about the bad men and the misconduct, but this is more about a cultural, structural problem. So I was hoping to amplify the more quietly insidious behavior that we need to address if we really want things to improve. A fiction film allowed me to hone in on details—close up—and the way you can take an annoyance through the emotional experience, putting the audience in the shoes of the youngest woman in a toxic work environment.

How did you decide to keep the timeframe to just one day in Jane’s life rather than fleshing it out over a longer period? The lead character is in such a complicated position. It’s such a difficult set of circumstances, the machinery that this predator has created around himself. I wanted to untick that, to discuss how difficult it is to be a young woman in that environment. So the day, the routine, was really important. What she was experiencing, how she was experiencing it; every task she did I gave equal weight to. Whether she was photocopying, binding something suspicious, you experience it as you would if you were in her shoes. That was important to me.

I had my fists clenched the whole time, when she’d be eating cereal, or washing up mugs, waiting for something awful to happen. Totally. It’s exploring misconduct, but it’s also looking at a whole spectrum, from gendered work environments, toxic work environments, through all these environments that support predatory behavior. I was interested in what the entry points are, without conflating those issues and being able to explore all the cultural systemic things we need to unpick to move forward.

The film is so focused on Jane, played by Julia Garner. How did you choose her? The script is pretty bare when it describes who she is, she’s just Jane. I didn’t have anyone in mind, really. I told my casting agent that we’re watching this character do the most mundane tasks, so it was important that she was striking. I said I needed someone infinitely watchable. I had seen Julia in The Americans and I remembered being struck by her, so I immediately wanted to meet her. She really understood the script, it worked out beautifully. We got to create the character together, we had a month of rehearsals where we really went through where she was emotionally at any given point, and Julia is wonderful so it was great.

Matthew Macfadyen and Kitty Green discuss a scene in ‘The Assistant’. / Photo: Ty Johnson

And Matthew Macfadyen—his character feels so crucial and his performance so pivotal, even in just one scene. What were you looking for when casting him? I’ve been a fan of his for forever, but I hadn’t seen Succession. Apparently the character has some similarities? I’ve only watched Succession in the past week… Somebody had to send me a clip to prove he could do an American accent! Matthew really brought something to that character and took it to another level. It’s so insidious what he does. He and Julia worked so beautifully together, it just got better and better every time.

How did you feel watching Succession now and seeing Matthew as Tom Wambsgans? Tom still feels different somehow. But I’ve had a good time watching it, he’s so great. There are parallels for sure!

The language you use in the film is so careful, so much is in the subtext. How do you build tension from these empty spaces? We had a great visual team who were lighting it in an interesting way. There was a lot of oppressive fluorescent lights. The sound was also very important—we had an amazing sound designer, Leslie Schatz, who does a lot of Todd Haynes’ stuff and Gus Van Sant’s. He’d done Elephant, which I thought was phenomenally sound designed. He sent out a team to record every kind of buzz, hum, whir, and we created a lot of tension in that soundscape. It heightens these moments when you can really feel the hum of the fluorescent lights or the alarm of the copier. Things like that are authentic to the world, so it doesn’t feel like you’re manipulating an audience, but they do add a dramatic tension.

During The Assistant’s various film festival screenings so far, audience reactions have been quite varied. Some people find it uncomfortable, some have found it funny. What would you hope an audience member would take from it? Who found it funny…? That’s a strange reaction, and a little terrifying. I think it makes some men uncomfortable and maybe their reaction is to laugh as a way to hide that discomfort. I get a lot of men come up to me afterwards and say, “There are things in that film that maybe I have done.” Those conversations are really important. There’s a scene where the men lean over Jane’s chair and correct her email, little things like that which can be quite patronising even if a lot of men think are helpful. But there’s a point where they cross a line, where maybe it isn’t helpful anymore and it’s a little insulting. I’ve had a few people who are bosses with their own assistants who have watched the film and have said they’re going to treat them a little better, and that maybe they’re wrestling with their own guilt. I think those conversations are great.

Julia Garner prepares for a take on the set of ‘The Assistant’. / Photo: Ty Johnson

What is your favorite one-woman-show performance, where one female actor entirely carries the film? A big influence on The Assistant was Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. It’s just one woman going about her housework. I remember seeing that in film school and being bowled over by it, I’d never seen anything like it.

Do you have a favorite scene that has ever taken place in an office environment? Offices… I mean, I love The Office? I watched it in preparation for this, even though there’s seemingly nothing in common except for the ways of the photocopier…

It’s important to inhale that kind of comedy while working on something more intense, right? For sure, that helps.

What is your favorite on-screen argument? I watched a lot of them to prepare for the HR scene, as it’s a confrontation between two characters. There’s a scene in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, which is a seventeen-minute dialogue. It’s an incredible scene. It’s not an argument but still some sort of confrontation. I was interested in scenes like that which are really long and stand out from the rest of the movie. James Schamus, one of my producers, made a film called Indignation, which has a confrontation between two characters, which also influenced the structure of what I was doing. I also just watched the latest episode of Better Call Saul in which there’s a sixteen-minute confrontation, which I thought was pretty remarkable.

What was the first film that made you want to be a filmmaker? To be honest I’m not sure. I got a video camera when I was eleven, and I started playing with it in our backyard, making little movies. It wasn’t that I saw a film and tried to replicate it necessarily. But I do have a strange story…

I had a copy of The Sound of Music in which my father had edited out the Nazis, because he was worried I’d be scared of them as a kid. So I have this strange 40-minute version of the film that ends at the wedding scene… And I always thought that was The Sound of Music, and then in high school I figured out there’s this whole other storyline I never knew existed. I guess that taught me the power of editing! I had to go back and rewatch what I’d seen, and it definitely made me think of the craft more as a viewer.

‘The Assistant’ is available to watch on VOD platforms (including Hulu) as of late July.

[jandiistheworstandhereswhy]

Jandi Is The Worst And Here’s Why Part 3: Life After Happily Ever After

This is part three in my series “Jandi Is The Worst And Here’s Why”. To read the previous installments, click the links below. 

Part 1, Humble Beginnings

Part 2, He Was A Boy, She Was A Girl, Can I Make It Any More Obvious?

You know its funny, as going into this project I wasn’t expecting to have too many positive things to say about Jandi, yet the first two installments of this series have been relatively focused on the better parts of this ships, hinting at its eventual downfall. Well kids its time to get into what exactly lead Jandi to becoming the dumpster fire it currently is, meaning we’re going to have to look back (*wink wink*) at season two. 

So by the start of season two, Andi and Jonah are finally together which means that we won’t have to focus on all the awkwardness of becoming a couple and delving into the more interesting part of a relationship, the relationship itself. Is what should have happened but instead the show seemed quite adamant about not making these two official for as long as possible. At first this would make sense, as since Jonah had just gotten out of a toxic relationship he probably wouldn’t be interested in starting a new one. Here’s the issue though: the show never makes this explicitly clear, and Jonah’s wording leads Andi to believe they’re boyfriend and girlfriend. Instead of having Jonah say something along the lines of “Hey I’m sorry I let Amber treat you that way, she’s gone now, and I want to try to be friends for real this time” which would align with Andi’s speech in “Were We Ever?”, he just says he wants to hang out with her more, which Andi misinterprets as a start for their relationship. And one thing I want to make clear here, and this is something that will come up a lot as we talk more about Jandi, is that many of the problems here are not character issues but writing issues. What I mean is, the problem isn’t the character’s behavior that lines up with their established traits are creating issues, but rather that circumstances forcing them into tedious and arbitrary situations are being manufactured by the writers in order to maintain a poorly thought out story. It’s not Andi nor Jonah’s fault for this miscommunication, as this was something put in place by the writers to extend the story line further. Why? Well that’s a question I’ve answered on several occasions but for those of you new here....

The reason that stories tend end a story with the start of a relationship instead of having two people get together and showing the ways in which a romantic relationship can affect a person is because the romantic leads simply are not interesting enough as a couple to carry an engaging story. I like using the show Friends as an example since its so well known, because it perfectly displays the difference between a couple with chemistry and without. Monica and Chandler were able to get together and stay together in the show because they were entertaining enough as a couple that having to constantly restart their relationship was not necessary. With Ross and Rachel, however, they had little to nothing in common and wouldn’t really contribute much to the show if put together, so they are constantly put in a state of will-they-won’t-they as the constant instability and drama is the only way the writers know how make the audience care even a little bit about them, which a lot of them still didn’t. That’s why saying Jandi would be good if they stopped having drama is a worthless statement because its never going to stop because Andi and Jonah do not have enough romantic chemistry to carry out a descent story line for the rest of the show and the writers know this. And for the first half of season two, it seemed like they were actually going to say something about it. 

See, during 2a, a lot of people thought that the show was going to subvert the typical middle school romance by having Andi realize that Jonah wasn’t what she really wanted and that instead of chasing after this idea of a perfect boy she should be with someone she actually shares interests with and doesn’t cause her so much emotional stress in the form of Walker. A lot of people though that was the direction they were going in, including myself, because honestly that would’ve been genius. Take a couple the audience just assumes will be together, than show why they shouldn’t actually be together in the first place and we’re only rooting for them because we’ve been conditioned to like the idea of this kind of couple. The biggest reason so many of us believed this was what was going to happen was that Terri Minsky in an interview when asked about her favorite storyline in Andi Mack said how she was most proud of Andi realizing she didn’t need to be in a relationship, and thusly Jonah. So a lot of us pretty much saw 2a as biding time before the inevitable break up (and in my case the inevitable beginning of Jyrus but we’ll get into that later). From the constant miscommunications, to the distrust, to the absolute failure to find any common interests, the writing seemed to be on the walls that Jandi was gonna sink and sink hard. This all came to a head in “We Were Never”, actually referencing the episode that first broke off Jandi, where it was revealed that Jonah never wanted to be Andi’s boyfriend, and that this whole time Andi had completely misunderstood him. This is frustrating for a multitude of reasons, the biggest being it makes out both Andi and Jonah to be completely incompantent at interpreting basic social cues. It was a story beat that just lead to more questions like, why did Jonah mean when he said he didn’t like labels but considered him and Andi together? He tells Cyrus that him and Andi aren’t broken up, but yet doesn’t think that saying he doesn’t want the label of boyfriend could be interpreted that way? How could Jonah not tell when Andi was very clearly upset when he said he didn’t want the bracelet? Was his hesitance towards labels because of Amber? I know most of these are directed towards Jonah, and to be fair Andi did jump to the conclusion they were dating, but not without reason. What would’ve been so difficult of just having them be an official couple? That’s the assumption everyone else watching it had to begin with so why not? Simple, to continue to drag out the storyline. 

If Andi and Jonah had been official, there would’ve been far more of a sense of finality with their “break up” in “We Were Never” but instead the show can say “Well they never really were together meaning they didn’t actually break up so we still haven’t seen these two get together”, meaning that the writers have created a scenario in which they can technically repeat the same story beats without it actually being the exact same thing. Now anyone with basic brain functioning knows that’s total bullshit, and pretty much everyone has seen through it. It’s quite frustrating but not as frustrating as what was to come. 

Looking back at Bash Mitzvah is truly disheartening, as it was an episode that set it self up to be the turning point for pretty much every character’s storyline but ended up being for the most part an empty promise. One of the bigger examples of this would be the final ending of Jandi, as with Jonah seemingly having lost Andi for good now that she had hung out with Walker and realized that a relationship shouldn’t have to be as emotionally draining as hers was with Jonah, and it seemed that unlike last time when she cut Jonah off, Andi was still willing to be with Jonah in a platonic way. This isn’t what happened obviously and the fans were furious. Of course they would be, since the show was so blatantly being lazy when it came to the writing around Jandi. Surely there’s no other reason that the fans would have a problem with alright you know where this is going and we’ll be getting into that next time. 

[plunder-heaven-and-devour-god]

This fan base never ceases to amaze me. Apparently, no one moved pass their SuperWhoLock mentality.

I loved the film, but I’m still adjusting, that is all I will say about the Last Jedi. 

Having a good or bad reaction to the content does not bar me from critiquing any production experience of a major film franchise. I can admire a film franchise I dont like for its creativity and cast and crew, and I can critique one I do like for where it goes wrong. 

But I have written this as a reaction the internet’s hatred toward’s Rian Johnson, not the film, not his choices, not Lucasfilm’s or Disney’s choices. That is an entirely different subject. This is about the hatred that sprung from the ground like oil out of nowhere. This dirty oil did not exists before December 15th. 

Where to start?

People are pulling up out of context interviews and tweets to make it seem that Rian Johnson was hated by the cast and no one wanted to work with him. I’ve seen every accusation under the sun. If you ask Tumblr, Reddit, IGN, etc, he’s everything from racist to Cthulhu. 

This type of reaction from the internet is predictive and cyclical. 

There was, and still is, a camp of disatisfied star wars fans born in 2015 dedicated to defaming J.J Abrams and The Force Awakens. This was in the wake of the criticism that The Force Awakens was too similar to A New Hope. Coincidence? If you said no, you’re right. 

But back to Rian. 

I want to state here and now that I don’t have a rosy tinted view of the production, I’m not saying everyone warmed quickly to the plot points of The Last Jedi. I want to state that no one, strangely, had a problem with the director. That’s it.

I hope that I can bring up some points that are on record to remind people, that maybe, if not surely, that this criticism is transparent and stupid. 

There was a slow evolution for the actors, like many of the avid star wars fan, to adjust to the change in gear for the franchise. I find it especially amazing that Mark Hamill went out of his way to publicly state his wariness and the disagreements on the script which the late Carrie Fisher collaborated on with Rian Johnson. Hamill came back and said he was wrong and now he is utterly in tune with Rian’s vision. If there were any hard feelings left they wouldn’t have mentioned it on the press tour. This isn’t remotely reminiscent of Chris Hemsworth staring into camera during the 2015 Ultron Press Tour and saying: I had no clue what was going on. 

If Hamill and Johnson hadn’t reconciled you can bet that their original disagreement wouldn’t have made itself known on the Star Wars 40th Anniversary Celebration Stage. If audiences want to counter and say that it was Disney’s plan all along to bolster the image of the Last Jedi, go ahead, it’s a damn good strategy. People disagree in creative circles, and to have one publicly state their agreement is a good thing. 

Carrie Fisher didn’t seem to be the only collaborator. Rian Johnson and John Boyega inform interviewers on separate occasions about how happy they were to work on progressing Finn’s character together. John Boyega took a huge lead in strengthening the character and making him stronger, he even cites rian’s auteurship as the reason for the maneuver room in the franchise. 

Gwendoline Christie also cites Rian’s collaboratory attitude when forging ahead with Phasma’s story. Oddly enough so does Oscar Isaac.

Daisy Ridley speaks about her wariness for the direction of the franchise as well. But she also speaks on how open the director was to input and how much he tried to make everyone feel comfortable. I say this because I saw someone pull up a tweet of Daisy’s reaction to J.J coming back to work on IX. The article states she apparently was delighted and cried with joy at the TFA director’s return. The blog post framed it as a relief and reprieve from Rian’s supposed reign of terror. This sounds very silly because J.J Abrams wasn’t AWOL during pre-production, production and post: He’s the producer. Not even executive producer. Producer. He is also present for writing/directing the third installment in the trilogy. The most important detail left out was that this was a reaction to Colin Trevormorrow who was slated to direct the third installment. I believe he left on creative differences with the Walt Disney corporation and lucasfilm. His vision for the film was not in tune with the direction of the movie. This was also a secondary source article, there was a clear bias in the words spoken by the article. 

Speaking of bias, the internet loves screenshots, so much so that they become subsitutes to whole videos and dialogues. An out of context picture is misleading, for better of worse.

The cast joke about the poker faces during interviews because their NDA comes with a side order of Mickey Mouse Snipers. But yet, bloggers on the internet take screencaps of the interviews mid questions and post them with captions like: They’re hiding their hatred for the director and/or the movie. In reality, they’re in the middle of listening to a question or trying to not react to a spoiler. If any of you have seen anything of the press tour, most of it is the cast trying to keep a straight face and avoid spoilers. And trust me, I watched the entirety of the press tour, I know which moments were screenshotted. 

If this sounds familiar it’s because the internet is predictable. This is beginning to sound a lot like how people tried to frame Adam Driver like some sort of 9/11 bigoted ex-soldier with no respect for his cast mates after TFA. There was divisive crowd who initiated a backlash against him simply because they didnt like the character. Remember half the reason he isn’t in most of the press junkets and press conferences? Half of it is his self proclaimed discomfort at the whole idea of the spotlight. But it isn’t absurd to think the other half is unfounded backlash he receives for his character.

I saw people also quoted one of Adam’s interviews and his feeling on 9/11 and left it at that. The blogger made it seem like he was what all liberals fear. They forgot to mention his exit from the Marines, the creation of his foundation for returning War Vets and reintegration and encouragement through the arts as a way to explore trauma. When I did my gendered violence class we found a Ted Talk with him talking about the toxic masculinity of the US military complex. It’s a great speech and its deeply profound. If you really care about feminist issues and the nature of the military backbone in the United States there is some great reading I can recommend but this is a good start.

I don’t want anyone to mistake my fondness for any of the characters for any biased defense. They are people too, they aren’t perfect, but they aren’t evil incarnate. I’m not opposed to dumping a content creator like a hot potato for violation of ethical rights and questionable conflicts in production. 

This is all to say that Tumblr finds ways to do what all bad journalists do: commence head hunts through clipped interviews, out of context quotes,images, and pseudo liberal pitchfork waving. 

I’m half expecting half the disgruntled fans to be Alicia Silverstone in the Scooby Doo movies. So much of the hatred on the internet feels like Freddie’s dialgue cut together to say: I THINK COOLSVILLE SUCKS.

All for what? For the same reason they don’t like the new movie. They’ll skim the surface for buzz words, absorb misunderstood information, and ignore internal meaning, and cast aside the answers to their questions which are explicitly stated. 

Until I see any facts that actually exist outside the draconian and dogmatic bubble of Tumblr’s bowels I think its safe to say that Rian and the cast are A-Okay with one another. I’m not avoiding being convinced, I just hope people can see HOW SILLY IT ALL SOUNDS.

It seems like we haven’t really progressed from the SuperWhoLock Days? Huh, Tumblr? It just seems to hide behind seemingly more lofty righteous reasons. 

[tgtahr]

Hey! I just found your comic on Webtoon, and I was wondering where you got the inspiration for it? It seems super intricately planned, I really like it!!

Aw thank you, anon! I’m glad you liking what I’m putting out so far!The answer for this is going to be a bit long.  Bear with me, I really like babbling about my comic.It’s a weird source but the inspiration for my comic are topics that stood out too me in media I’ve consumed over the years.  When coming up with TGtaHR I wanted to sort of analyze or subvert a few tropes I always had a some beef with.  Mainly dealing with the gender/sex roles that are usually queer/LGBT+ characters in romantic fiction, the depiction of mental and physical illness, lastly relationships and abuse.Sorry about my grammar and spelling!Gender/Sex Roles - This one goes back when my character Julian was first created back in 2010, as the main character in a different comic called ‘WYIHN!’, who was meant to be in a romantic role with another character named Matthew. (Once getting the story down on paper the story was changed to something platonic because I’m not very good at working with romance)  This was going to be my depiction of sexuality and companionship from a more dreary standpoint given my recent criticisms with BL/Yaoi and the romance genre as a whole.I used to be a huuuunge, gross, fujoshi funny enough... until I realized how I fetishizing real people in the queer community, and how toxic most romance is.  WYIHN was going to be a romance with a much more melancholy ending with Matthew losing his home because of his sexuality, leading to him and Julian living in a small studio apartment, barely making ends meet as they’re both still kids. (Julian being just becoming old enough to leave the orphanage, and still figuring out how to live on their own)Of course the whole thing sorta flopped, losing direction after realizing their relationship was still toxic, and I didn’t have the experience or knowledge at the time to know how to fix it.  Ultimately Julian, a fight or flight type of character with an interest in science was extremely incompatible with Matthew, an entitled religious fanatic who is fine with using force to push their beliefs on others.Why am I bringing up all this? Well, Julian was meant to be a subversion of the heteronormative ‘uke’ stereotype.  Julian was original created as a cis-gendered, gay male, who was comfortable enjoying feminine things while still being more masculine.  Of course as I developed them as a person, and I myself grew mentally, they evolved from cis and gay to non-binary and pansexual.  Which fits much better with the extremely fluid or vague ideas they’ve had of gender to begin with. (being a child not raised by conventional means, Julian has no solid concept of gender, so it makes sense that their view on sexual attraction and their own gender identity would be just as vague)In turn when creating Apollo, who was literally just made so Julian can have a friend of some kind, he was also made to challenge stereotypical masculinity of a ‘seme’ type.  While he does display toxic masculine views, Apollo is not a masculine person himself, having some feminine mannerisms, finding himself in situations being lead or dominated by others, and later in TGtaHR enjoying a more subservient or domesticated role.  In a way Apollo himself is struggling with finding himself, sticking with a certain set of beliefs because he was raised to think that’s how things should be, and due to the pressure of his peers.In sort, I wanted to take the masculine vs. feminine gender roles, and pick them apart while observing how these characters with their very specific personalities work these social standards.  Especially as people in the queer/LGBT+ community.Mental and Physical Illness - This one has more of a personal spin with it, but I’ll bring that stuff up last.If you’ve watched a movie ever, read a book or comic, or played a video game, chances are you’ve seen some unnamed illness or something along the lines of cancer being used as a way to make the audience feel sympathy for a character.  Most of the time this is used as a lazy means to bring emotion to a character with little to no personality, and the illness is rather... romanticized, normally being magically cured or the person showing little to no physical signs of the illness outside of a bad cough and looking tired.On the subject of mental illness.  Growing up with the horror genre, and the occasional thrillers and dramas, I’ve seen a lot of negativity surrounding this topic.  In a way it’s very similar to how physical illness is used, but rather than being a tool for sympathy it’s normally used to villainize a character, sometimes using a mental illness as a reason why they murdered their family or something along those lines.  This particular trope is used A LOOOOOT in indie horror games, as well as a good number of horror movies and such.  It’s an easy way to make a character do something bad.To me both of these subjects are very misused and very misunderstood, so I wanted to make a story that focused on them.  Mainly centering around how to deal with these issues, how to live with them, and the importance of having help.  Many people live normal lives with chronic mental and physical illness, it’s not something that should be glamorized or demonized.  So I wanted make a story focused on characters fighting through this stuff, depicting these subjects in a very down-to-earth light.  Showing it’s just something that happens, and it doesn’t make you a victim or a monster.On the personal side I myself have always been a cynical person, dealing with a lot of mental turmoil.  Especially in the past 2-3 year.  Not gonna lie, I think about the benefits of death a lot, and see myself and everything I touch as the most worthless garbage to ever be dumped on the planet.  I’ve had this mindset for so long that it feels normal, I don’t know how to feel and act a different way.  Working on TGtaHR has been a way for me to put all this into perspective.  Dumping all my mental problems in a character or characters, reading up on these issues from a scholastic standpoint, then figuring out how they tackle the issues with their given personalities helps me recognize my own mental illness(es).If you’ve ever seen me talk about how I work TGtaHR 100% for myself, aside from the escapism that drawing gives me, this is the main reason.  In a way I’m doing a bit of “self help” with a comic. (But hey! There’s nothing wrong with that, everyone has their own way of working through things)Relationships and Abuse - This is also in relation to the romance genre.  For the longest time I thought that rape/abuse = love thing was normal.  It really messed up my views on my body autonomy and what abuse is, leading me into a relationship where I was guilted and scared into using my body for my partner’s benefit.When this sort of stuff is showed in movies and such it get’s a similar treatment as mental/physical illness.  It’s overly simplified, and used as a way to squeeze out sympathy for the victim while turning the abuser into some cardboard cutout villain.  While abusers are awful people, due to how little is know about emotional, verbal, and mental abuse an abuser could just as easily be someone totally uneducated on the subject.  Surprisingly enough I’ve spoken with a lot of people who think abuse is just all physical stuff, even my mom didn’t know that she was being abused when her ex would manipulate her emotionally with abusive language.  I wanted to play around with these subjects, give them a little more depth, along with playing around with what a relationship is in a general sense, and how do you make one healthy. (hence the title)Lol in a way my comic is an experiment playing with how different people handle difficult situations.  If Apollo were in Julian’s shoes he’d handle everything waaay differently, same with Julian in Apollo’s shoes.TL:DR: I guess my inspiration is my own experiences, and misused/misunderstood subjects that interest me.