#i've also been following more people on youtube but i'm not really posting there right now

[writingwithfolklore]

I Cut Out Social Media for 30 Days and It Changed My Life

Okay hefty title, but I mean every word of it.

Over January I followed a book called Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. I'm sure you've already been lectured to death about how bad technology and social media is for you, so I won't repeat the statistics here. What I will say is that Newport suggests that there are also positives to technology and that abandoning it altogether is not realistic. Instead, he proposes that we define our values, and then use technology to attain them--rather than allowing technology to define what values we should hold.

To do this, Newport suggests a complete "detox" of non-essential technologies for 30 days. That means abstaining from social media, netflix and other streaming services, videogames, etc. But of course still being able to phone loved ones, email for work, and use google maps if you're going somewhere new, etc. In doing this detox, he proposes that we will be able to better understand what values we hold as people, not just as consumers of technology.

He was right.

At first I found it really hard. Right away I noticed that any activity other than doomscrolling and watching endless hours of Youtube took a lot more brain power. I started doing puzzles, reading, writing (a lot!), cooking and baking, and taking many walks with my dog. By the end of the day I'd be fuzzy and exhausted, and all I wanted to do was curl up on the couch and watch my favourite shows. I didn't, but I wanted to.

But then I started to notice my "brain stamina" (I'm sure there's a better term for it but oh well) started to improve. Instead of writing for two hours before getting fuzzy, I could write for four. And then six. And then eight. Slowly, I found myself being able to do more in a day, to focus for longer on one task, and I didn't feel as drained by the end of it. I had a clearer mind, I could remember things a lot better, I was no longer struggling to find really easy words--they just came to me.

This all also resulted in me spending so much more time with my friends and family. I realized that I really valued this time--and that it wasn't something I could replace by hitting 'like' on an instagram post from them. I rediscovered community, passion, and in many ways, humanity.

It was like I was looking at the world in a new way. I started to notice more, be curious about more. I kind of remember being this way as a kid, and I couldn't believe how I had ever let that go. Now, the idea of sitting on my couch and watching hours and hours of Youtube in every moment of my free time feels inconceivable.

However, my 30 days are up, and so Newport suggests setting some rules to reintroduce what technology I believe supports my values. I've decided not to return to Instagram, but that I do value keeping up to date with the gaming community and pop culture, which I do on Youtube. Now, Youtube is something that I watch for a couple hours on weekends, instead of eating up every bit of free time I have. I also value interacting with other writers and the writing community, so I've created a couple hours in my schedule to check Tumblr and my Discord and keep up to date with you guys here.

But now most of my free time is spent reading or writing, or being with my family and friends, and I value that most of all. To demonstrate how much has changed, in the months before my detox, I wrote maybe 2500 words. Since my detox, I've written 40 000. Last year, I read about four books. In just one month during my detox, I read 10.

If this sounds like something you'd be interested in trying for yourself, feel free to reach out to me! I'd love to talk more about my experience and things that worked or didn't work for me. I'd also really recommend the book, it was incredibly helpful in determining what rules were healthy to set and how to get out of technology and then back in with success.

Back to usual content soon :-)

[emilyhopebunny]

In anticipation of the tiktok ban, many of the people I follow over there have let their audiences know where they can be found elsewhere on the internet, so I've ended up following more people on bluesky, and becoming more active there. Follow me if you want! I think bluesky will be my place for more casual daily observations, and I'll keep posting the longer more rambling stuff here on this blog.

[thewadapan]

So why did Transformers One bomb?

Look, I'm just going to say it right off the bat: no, Transformers One is not the best Transformers movie of all time. I am (gritting my teeth) very happy for every single Transformers fan except me, who all seem to have liked it, and most of whom seem to have loved it. I agree that, as a production, it meets some baseline level of technical competence. It's a perfectly fine movie.

It's also the worst-performing Transformers movie Paramount has ever made.

Hopefully, now that its theatrical run has unceremoniously ended, people aren't going to try to rip me to shreds for theoretically threatening this multi-million-dollar film's box office revenue some miniscule amount by sharing a few teensy weensy complaints with my fifty followers.

Because I do just have a few little nitpicks, which I've tried my best to communicate, over the next 17,000 words of this post.

If you're not a Transformers fan, sorry, this essay is mostly written with the assumption that you've seen Transformers One. However, it might still be of some interest as a window into the current state of the franchise. I've written a basic plot summary of the movie to bring you up to speed, in that case. Because Transformers One purports to be the perfect introduction to the story, no homework needed, I've also done you the courtesy of elucidating background context as needed—think of this less as a review, and more as a history lesson, or maybe a "lore explained" YouTube video. After all, that's pretty much all that Transformers One is.

(And if farcically long posts aren't really your thing, you might prefer to listen to the special episode of Our Worlds are in Danger where my pals and I chatted about the film. Many of the hottest takes and silliest bits in this essay are shamelessly stolen from Jo and Umar.)

We've been waiting for Transformers One for a very long time. It's the first animated Transformers film to get a theatrical release since The Transformers: The Movie came out in 1986. It first entered development around a decade ago. Many fandom members I know online got to see it as far back as June. Its US premiere was in September; those of us in the UK had to wait a full extra month before seeing it, for no clear reason. This is a film which purports to show, in broad strokes, for the first time on the big screen, the origin of the Transformers: where they come from, who they are, and why they're fighting.

By the end of its runtime, Transformers One does not actually answer these questions. Don't get me wrong, it takes great pains trying to answer a lot of different, related questions—just ones which nobody was really asking in the first place: What does the word "Autobots" mean, if not "automobile robots"? What does the word "Decepticons" mean, if they're not actually deceitful? Why is he called "Optimus Prime"? Why is he called "Megatron"? If they were friends, why did they fall out? Why does Starscream sound Like That? Where does Energon come from? If "Prime" is a title, what were the other Primes like? How do Transformers transform?

Writer Eric Pearson, coming onto the project as an outsider to Transformers, describes having to go to Hasbro to ask these kinds of questions:

they had a script that outlined the story that they wanted to tell. I knew Optimus Prime and Megatron and I knew Bumblebee as well, or B. I had to ask about some of the other deeper ones, the mythology, “what exactly is the Matrix of Leadership?” Stuff like that.

See, Hasbro does in fact have the answers written down somewhere. The story as I understand it goes something like this. During the wild west of the '80s and '90s, Transformers "canon" was largely a by-the-seat-of-your-pants consensus-based affair between the freelance writers and copywriters the toy company would bring on to advertise their toys. That changed around the turn of the millennium, when late later-CEO Brian Goldner saw how Hasbro's licensed IP lines (such as Star Wars) were more financially successful and realised they could make more money by aggressively promoting their own in-house IP, which they didn't have to pay licensing fees for. (For the curious, a similar thought process at rival toy company Lego was what led to their creation of BIONICLE.)

The guy basically singlehandedly managing the Transformers brand at the time, Aaron Archer, eventually set to reconciling all the self-contradictory lore surrounding Transformers, an endeavour which dovetailed into the creation of the HasLab internal think-tank (best known for Battleship, the 2012 store-brand Michael Bay knockoff which was a failure critically and commercially but not in my heart) and ultimately the creation of the so-called "Binder of Revelation", an internal story bible which cost over $250,000 to produce and has strongly influenced nigh on every piece of Transformers media released since, but which we hadn't actually seen until it got leaked a week ago. As it turns out, the document itself (compiled mostly by marketers and toy designers) is patently useless to any writer: it's a typo-ridden internally-inconsistent wishy-washy mess that mostly describes the characters in terms of a made-up form of Transformers astrology that has otherwise never seen the light of day.

So although the Binder is the baseline story bible for most modern Transformers media, its influence isn't direct per se; it's more accurate to describe it as being an elaborate game of telephone between high-profile cartoons, comics, and other internal documents, with the Binder itself apparently just sitting in a drawer somewhere at Hasbro; Eric Pearson says that he never received a "binder", with the "script" he mentions either being the earlier draft from Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (the guys who originally pitched the story), or some other unseen internal document. Director Josh Cooley, however, definitely seems to have been physically handed the Binder or its mass-market adaptation:

I knew that there was a lot of origin to be told, and when I first started, [Hasbro] gave me the Transformers Bible. I could not believe how big it was. I was like, "This is way more than I ever anticipated."

When trailers first dropped for Transformers One, a lot of my friends who are savvy were immediately like: "Oh, this is a weirdly faithful adaptation of the Binder of Revelation, huh."

I. The One True Origin of the Transformers

Half of the people reading this are Transformers fans, and half of you literally could not give less of a shit about Transformers, so if you're in the 'former group (so to speak), you'll just have to bear with me while I bring the rest of us up to speed.

Before the Transformers' civil war begins, Cybertron is being oppressed by the Quintessons. The Quintessons are a race of five-faced aliens (as in, not Transformers), who execute everyone they come across, first introduced in The Transformers: The Movie, presiding over a kangaroo court on a castaway world. In the followup cartoon five-parter "Five Faces of Darkness", writer Flint Dille established that, gasp, they were actually the original creators of the Transformers! But basically nobody else at the time was particularly compelled by this idea, it seems, with most fans preferring the more mythological origin story conceived by Bri'ish writer Simon Furman for the Marvel comics. I think people kind of just didn't like to think of the Transformers as being robots—mass-produced, a fabrication, programmed—as opposed to an alien race of thinking, feeling beings like us. But because the cartoon was important to many kids, a lot of early-2000s media tried to reconcile the cartoon and comic origin stories by stating that the Quintessons didn't actually create the Transformers; rather, they simply colonised the planet early in its history and pretended to be the Transformers' creators, until the truth came out and they got kicked offworld. This is how the Binder of Revelation ultimately paid lip service to the Quintessons. In Transformers One, the Quintessons are just sort of here, they're these evil aliens secretly skimming Energon from its miners, they don't speak English (or whichever language the film was dubbed into in your market region), they're just these nasty societal parasites.

Energon is Transformers fuel. In the original cartoon, it was these glowing pink cubes the Decepticons were always trying to produce using harebrained Saturday-morning-cartoon energy-stealing devices. There was a Cold War going on, America had just been through an "energy crisis", maybe you're old enough to remember any of that. Transformers are these big, complicated machines, so I guess the idea is they need this hyper-compressed superfuel to run off, and their homeworld has run out. By the time of the Binder of Revelation, the concept had been telephoned to the point where Energon is like the lifeblood of Primus or some shit.

Primus is the Transformers God—but not the kind of God you have "faith" in, rather this actual guy whose existence is objectively known in various ways. He transforms into a planet, that's kind of cool, right? Where does Primus come from? Look, it doesn't matter, he's like, the God of Creation, he was there at the start of time. He created all of the Transformers. All the other species in the galaxy, though, they evolved naturally thanks to "science". Actually wait, didn't that Quintus Prime guy go around the universe seeding all the planets with different kinds of Cybertronian life? That's why they're called Quintessons. See, now you know. Who's Quintus Prime?

Okay, so the Thirteen Original Transformers, or the Primes, are the thirteen original Transformers created by Primus. Most of them correspond to different kinds of Transformer: Nexus Prime is the god of Transformers who can combine, Onyx Prime is the god of Transformers who turn into animals, Micronus Prime is the god of Transformers who are small, and Solus Prime is the god of Transformers who are women. You might remember the Primes from Revenge of the Fallen, although there were only seven of them there for whatever reason.

Honestly, The Fallen was the only one who mattered for a long time. The whole reason there's thirteen of them is because thirteen is kind of an unlucky number, right? Twelve would've been fine. But throw in a thirteenth guy, and he betrays everyone, he's this fucked up evil guy. In the Binder of Revelation, though, the Thirteenth Prime is his own special guy shrouded in mystery, because they kind of liked the idea that Optimus Prime would secretly turn out to have been the Thirteenth Prime all along, and he just forgot or something, because that means he has the divine right of Primes. In IDW's 2010s comic-book reboot, the Thirteenth Prime was called "The Arisen"—in reference to that one line in The Transformers: The Movie, "Arise, Rodimus Prime!" (this margin is too narrow to explain who Rodimus Prime is). Towards the end of his run, writer John Barber did some actually interesting stuff with the concept, playing with the ambiguity over whether-or-not Optimus Prime was actually the chosen one.

All of Optimus Prime's immediate predecessors as Autobot leaders, Sentinel Prime, Zeta Prime, the lineage seen in "Five Faces of Darkness"... they're all false Primes. They're Primes in name only. In fact, IDW had a whole procession of these cartoonishly evil dictators thanks to a few continuity errors leading to the addition of a couple of extra narratively-redundant fuckers. Transformers One tries to simplify it slightly by just saying that Zeta Prime was one of the Primes for real—occupying that thirteenth "free space"—and it was just Sentinel Prime who was only a normal Transformer pretending to be a Prime, then Optimus Prime who's a real boy.

But if he's not a Prime from the start, Optimus Prime needs another name in the meantime. In the '80s cartoon episode "War Dawn", before he was called Optimus Prime, he was called "Orion Pax". Have you noticed that Optimus Prime is kind of an odd-one-out amongst all the straightup-English-word names like "Bumblebee" and "Ratchet" and "Jazz"? That's because his name was one of a tiny handful from very early in the franchise's development, before writer Bob Budiansky came onboard and came up with identities for the vast majority of the toys. Practically everyone Bob Budiansky named is called like, "Bolts" or some shit, long before the characters even know of Earth, which has always just been a contrivance of the setting you're not supposed to think about.

Presumably to create a parallel with Orion Pax's transformation into Optimus Prime, someone at Hasbro in the 2010s came up with a new name for the bot who would become Megatron: "D-16". In real-world terms, this was nothing more than a dorky reference to the Megatron toy's original Japanese release being number 16 in the line ("D" stands for "Destron", which is what they call Decepticons in Japan). But in-universe, the name "D-16" was drawn from the sector of the mine where he worked. I don't get the impression it was originally intended to be part of a broader pattern.

Which is why I'm baffled as to what the hell the reasoning was behind Bumblebee's pre-Earth name, "B-127". There's this bizarre situation in the Bumblebee film, where the name "B-127" first cropped up, where literally every other bot gets a normal cool name with personality like "Cliffjumper" or "Dropkick" except for Bumblebee, who is stuck with this clunky sci-fi name until he makes friends with a human teenager on Earth and she gives him the name Bumblebee. I guess I don't find it confusing that the writers would (correctly) realise it's a bit weird for Bumblebee to be called Bumblebee on an alien planet where bumblebees don't exist. What I find confusing is that they didn't extend that logic to any other character.

So despite everything else in the franchise's direction pointing away from "robot" and towards "alien", Transformers One ends up with this ridiculous situation where two of the most important guys are, for practically the whole movie, simply referred to as "Dee" and "Bee", I guess because the writers correctly realised the numbers sound fucking stupid.

And if you squint, "Elita-1" sorta fits this naming scheme. But the great irony of it is that the very same cartoon episode which coined "Orion Pax" simultaneously established that Elita-1 also used to go by a different name: "Ariel"! Like the Little Mermaid. Y'know, because an "aerial" is a type of electrical component- oh, forget it.

By the time the script made it into Eric Pearson's hands, it's obvious that he simply was not thinking about it that deeply. He describes the genesis of a scene where Bumblebee introduces his imaginary friends, "A-atron, EP 5-0-8, and Steve." A-atron was impov'd by Keegan-Michael Key as a reference to one of his own skits on Key & Peele. Steve ("He's foreign.") was literally just because Pearson thought it would be funny. It's true that Steve is an inherently funny name, and I guess if you're struggling to come up with jokes of your own, it can be handy to fall back on something which is inherently funny.

And again, our silly answers to these silly questions beget yet more questions. If he started out as "D-16", then where did the name "Megatron" come from? And if all the Primes have epic made-up fantasy names, then surely that one guy can't just be called "The Fallen", right? That's not a name, that's an epithet. Unfortunately, someone at Hasbro had the bright idea to answer both these questions at once: The Fallen's real name was "Megatronus". Later, for consistency, they threw on the title, and we get "Megatronus Prime", which sounds like what a thirteen-year-old on deviantART in 2014 would call their Steven Universe fusion of Megatron and Optimus Prime. So you see, Megatron actually named himself after Megatronus Prime, famously the most evil of the Primes. In Transformers One, this is changed slightly so Megatronus is merely the strongest of the Primes, as part of its overall effort to make Megatron not look completely insane.

Which, it must be said, is a tall order. Better stories have tried and failed. Back in 2007, Scottish writer Eric Holmes came up with Megatron Origin, a perfectly-fine comic miniseries which drew heavily from the miners' strikes that took place in the UK from 1984-1985, coinciding with the inception of the Transformers franchise. In that comic, Megatron is a lowly miner who, through a series of chance events, winds up at the head of a dangerous political revolutionary movement.

For some reason—I guess because nobody had ever tried to make Megatron anything other than a bloodthirsty cackling madman before—this take on Megatron as a guy who rose up against a corrupt system became the defining interpretation of the character, copy/pasted pretty much wholesale into the Binder of Revelation. Orion Pax also opposes the system, and bonds with Megatron over it, but they disagree on how to fix it: Pax believes in peaceful reform, Megatron just loves to kill. In Transformers One, the problem everyone has with Megatron is basically "whoa, this guy's a little TOO angry!" and there's a point towards the end of the film where Megatron suddenly starts jonesing to kill literally anyone who stands in his way, because he's irrationally angry.

The core problem here—and it's kind of the Magneto problem, the Killmonger problem, whatever better-known example you care to insert here—is that these guys all fundamentally exist just to be a big villain who loves to kill people and who ultimately gets defeated, but the kids who grew up on this stuff in the '80s are now adults who are no longer satisfied with cardboard cutout villains. People like a complex villain, they like a villain who has a point. They like to root for both sides. And in fact, it's easier to sell more toys to people who are rooting for both sides, if your villain is just another kind of hero. But you don't really need to take the same effort with the good guys: they're good by design, righteous by nature. They don't need to stand for something, they just need to stand against the guy whose whole thing is that he loves to kill people.

But again, we're starting from a place where the evil faction—who half the planet will ultimately align themselves with—are literally called "Decepticons". It's a name you'd only ever call yourself ironically, maybe reclaiming it from your enemies. In this film, there's some tortured logic that implies they're called Decepticons because they were deceived by Sentinel Prime. Like if you met a gang of guys who call themselves "The Robbers", but it turns out to be because they got robbed one time, and they actually have zero intention of stealing from anyone.

The Autobots are easier, of course. "Auto" is a prefix that just means, like, the self, or whatever. And the most agreeably American ideal of all is selfishness the power of the individual, the freedom to seize one's own destiny. Prime's original '80s motto, "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings," is bastardised in Transformers One into the slightly less rolls-out-off-the-tongue "Freedom and autonomy are the rights of all sentient beings," because (I can only assume) they forgot to work the word "autonomy" earlier into the script. If they ever greenlit Transformers Three, I suppose the motto would have ended up as something like "Freedom, autonomy, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope are the rights of all sentient beings." Even though bodily autonomy is one of the most salient motifs present in the film—all but referred to by name—I suppose the filmmakers were worried that you might think, when Prime says "freedom", that he actually means something completely different. So now you see! "Autobots" is actually the descriptive name of a political movement which believes in obviously good things. Like "Moms for Liberty".

Okay, so the cannier among you have probably spotted the mean rhetorical trick I'm pulling with this encyclopedia-entry-ass introduction. By sarcastically relitigating all the storytelling choices I dislike from the last 20 years of Transformers lore, I can build up a negative association with Transformers One without even reviewing the movie itself! On a subtextual level, I'm deliberately misattributing these bad ideas to the filmmakers, conveniently ignoring the mountains of evidence to suggest that they were just trying to make the best of whatever Hasbro handed them from on high. If anything—you might think—the filmmakers deserve even more credit, for spinning this shite into something even remotely good on the big screen.

Like, you'd be wrong, but I can see why you might think that.

II. The Spider-Verse of Transformers

Okay, I can see that I've spat in your soup. I'm sorry. There are lots of good bits in Transformers One. I can even think of one or two of them off the top of my head, without really racking my brains.

Maybe halfway through the film, there is one specific moment where the story suddenly promises to get good. You can pinpoint it down to the word, down to the frame even. Our heroes have just discovered that their planet's leader, Sentinel Prime, is a complete fraud who's been secretly exploiting them ever since they were born—and worse, castrated them by removing their transformation cogs. They are all very cross about this. Orion Pax expresses that he wants to come up with a plan to expose Sentinel Prime. Megatron is too angry to listen. Orion Pax asks, "Don't you want to stop him?" And Megatron replies, "No, I want to KILL him!" And there's like, a little tint of red creeping into the glow of his eyes.

Whoa. Chills. Up to this point in the film, Megatron has been kind of surly at times, but he's otherwise a generic kids' movie protagonist. He's often chipper. He makes quips. He has this banter with Orion Pax where he's always complaining. It's literally that one "Optimist Prime"/"Negatron" comic, committed to film. Like I'm not even being facetious, one of the film's few obligatory "emotional moments" has Elita-1 sit Orion Pax down and say, "You know what I love about you? You always see the bright side. Like you're some kind of OPTIMIST or something." And then later completely unrelatedly God gives him the mandate of heaven and says "ARISE, OPTIMUS PRIME!" Y'see, as originally conceived, "Optimus" is the word "Optimum" if it was a name, which is why people sometimes localise his name as "Best #1". But it's genuinely kind of cute to reverse-engineer the etymology as coming from "optimist", I guess. Like, it's stupid, but it's cute.

Argh, I got distracted with naming minutia again! Entirely my bad. That's the last time, I promise. Where was I? Right, we'd just found out that Megatron is kind of scary. Brian Tyree Henry's line delivery as he growls "KILL" is his crowning achievement in this film.

Where Optimus Prime's character arc in this movie sees him change from a funny, rebellious spirit to a complete personality vacuum, Megatron's character arc is kind of the opposite. When we're first introduced to him, it's weirdly hard to get a handle on who he is. He's a fanboy for Megatronus, the strongest and most morally-unremarkable of the Primes. He looks up to Sentinel Prime. He likes sports. He doesn't like breaking the rules. In fact, we get the sense that, were it not for his friendship with Orion Pax, he would be literally indistinguishable from the legion of silent crowd-filling background characters he works with. But the moment he starts to become Megatron, it's like everything starts to click. Gears catch, where once they ground and idled. There is something in this guy that was made to fight, made to kill, made to rule. It's sick.

And the underlying tension in his friendship with Optimus suddenly snaps into focus. Megatron is mad at Sentinel Prime, but Sentinel Prime isn't there, he's somewhere else, far below... and he can't help but turn that anger on the next closest thing to an authority figure he has in his life, which is his peer-pressuring bestie, Orion Pax. There is a part of Megatron that wishes he'd never learned the truth, and he blames Orion Pax for his cursed knowledge, for constantly leading them into predicaments on his stupid flights of fancy. Now that he knows, he can't go back to how he was. He can't stop thinking about it.

I'll be honest, it rules. Obviously it rules. It's complicated and toxic and darker than this movie was marketed to be. In interview, Josh Cooley describes the draft of the script he was presented with when he joined the project as having been far more jokey, light-hearted, glib—and it seems we can credit him for saying "Look, this ain't right, the minute the credits roll these guys are going to be at civil war for millions of years."

So, they started talking about it in — what did you say, 2015? I came on board in 2020, and when I came on board there was the first draft of the script. So I don't think they'd been working on it that entire time, but they'd been thinking about it, for sure. And the script that I read was a little more comical? But it was clear that that wasn't the right tone for this film specifically, because we know there's gonna be a war, civil war on Cybertron, you can't have everybody making jokes and then all of a sudden there's a war. So, um, the stakes were really important for this film. And because our characters at the beginning are a little naive, and just on the younger side, not as experienced, it allowed more freedom for them to be a little looser and have fun really getting to know these characters. But once they realize something's going on and things are getting real, it needs to get real.

Cooley also describes his "in" on the film as being the brotherly relationship between Optimus Prime and Megatron (they're not literally brothers in this film, though they have been in the past), which perhaps explains why Megatron and Optimus Prime get to be characters, instead of just like, guys who are there.

That was always the goal from the beginning and what got me on board. It was this relationship between these two characters that was very human and brotherly. I thought about my relationship with my brother and how I could bring that in. It’s not like we’re enemies, but we grew up together and then went down our different paths, but we’re still brotherly. I became a writer-director and live in a fantasy land, and he became a homicide detective who deals with reality, so we’re two very different mindsets. I have always been fascinated by the idea of two people who come from the same place but end up in different ones. From the very beginning, I was like, ‘That’s something I can relate to.’

Anyway, things I liked, what else. There's that joke at the very start, after the excruciating lore powerpoint, where Orion Pax does a fake-out like he's going to transform, the music briefly swells, and then it just cuts to him legging it down the corridor. In a similar vein, I liked the idea behind the Iacon 5000, where Orion Pax has them run in the race. I felt like the execution of the race left a bit to be desired—the only other participant who matters is Darkwing—but it's still honestly the best big action setpiece in the film. There's also that bit at the end where Megatron and Optimus Prime are both changing into their final forms simultaneously, and it's basically a Homestuck Flash (what would that be, "[S] OPTIMUS PRIME. ARISE."?), so obviously I liked that. Oh, and I really liked the environment design where the planet's landscape is constantly transforming, that's brand-new, someone had an Idea there, and it creates visual interest during the initial Energon-mining scene... even if I wished it had actually paid off in a more meaningful way than "the planet's crust opens as Prime falls to get the Matrix"—like, someone really should've gotten eaten by the planet, that's a cracking Disney death scene and they left it on the table! I also liked getting to see my blorbo, Vector Prime, on the big screen.

I think, as a Transformers fan who's had to sit through a lot of really quite sexist, racist, and plain bad films, you're well within your rights to come out of this one ready to give it a fucking Oscar. You should be ecstatic! It has none of those pesky humans clogging up the frame. It has plenty of robot action. It has jokes which- well I struggle to call many of them "funny", but they're at least trying to be funny in a different way to Michael Bay's films. The film is obviously a massive love letter to... honestly every part of Transformers except the live-action movies. It is an incredibly faithful and earnest adaptation of all the lore and iconography that has randomly accumulated the way it has over the last forty years of bullshit.

My main point of contention, then, is with the overriding sentiment I'm seeing from pretty much everyone else in the fandom: that this is not just the best Transformers movie, but that it's a great animated movie period, that it does for Transformers what Into the Spider-Verse did for Spider-Man, what The Last Wish did for Puss in Boots, and what Mutant Mayhem did for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That, in effect, this film will make you "get it". That it's better-looking, better-written, and more meaningful than a silly toy commercial has any right to be.

I think you can definitely see some loose influence from Spider-Verse in the overall look of the film—particularly in its color grading, and in the design of its main setting, the underground city of Iacon, where the upside-down skyscrapers hanging from the ceiling evoke the iconic "falling upwards" shot from Spider-Verse. Like The Last Wish, it's an animated franchise film that spent much longer than you'd think in development, only for the release of Into the Spider-Verse to have an immediate impact on its visual style... without actually affecting the basic story to the same extent. Both Transformers One and The Last Wish, in many ways, feel like stories concocted using an older formula; in particular, Transformers One bears startling similarities to a similar toy-franchise-prequel, BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, which was released twenty years ago! By contrast, Mutant Mayhem—which had a much shorter development period—is a direct reaction to Spider-Verse in both aesthetic and narrative, and it has a much more distinctive creative direction as a result.

If you look at how all these titles have performed in cinemas, I think you can make a pretty strong case that audiences are perfectly willing to go out and see this kind of flick. A glance at Wikipedia tells me that Mutant Mayhem, The Bad Guys, and The Last Wish grossed double, triple, and quadruple their budgets respectively. In terms of the pre-existing cultural cachet they were banking on, we're talking about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a children's book series I'd never heard of, and fucking Puss in Boots. You cannot tell me that Transformers, as a brand, is on the same level as any of these properties. Meanwhile, Transformers One hardly broke even, while The Wild Robot—another DreamWorks film based on a children's book I've never heard of, which it ended up competing with in theatres—grosses three times its budget. My friends who've seen The Wild Robot say it made them cry.

Face it: Transformers One has not lit the world on fire. I've seen a lot of people cope with this by suggesting that it's to do with the film's staggered release, or even by claiming that the film's marketing was somehow misleading. I'll be honest, upon seeing it, it did not strike me as being at all dissimilar to the trailers. You can maybe say that the trailers undersold the depth of Orion Pax's and Megatron's relationship—which is its best aspect—but honestly, I think if they'd taken a lot of those scenes out of context and put them in early teasers, audiences would've laughed it out of theatres. Like, c'mon, it's toy robots, stop pretending it's Shakespeare. And otherwise, what you see is what you get; it's exactly what it says on the tin.

I wonder how many Transformers fans, on some level, have noticed that even when we're supposedly "eating good", and watching "peak cinema", our films just aren't as good as everyone else's. They're something you'll enjoy if you're already highly predisposed to enjoy them. But otherwise, they're not turning heads. They're not as funny, or as heartfelt, or as complex, or as exciting, or as charming, or as memorable, or as beautiful as these other films. Unlike with Spider-Verse, there's no word-of-mouth amongst normal people to say that this is a film worth seeing.

What I perceive in studios hoping to recreate the flash-in-the-pan success of Spider-Verse is a misunderstanding of what made people go crazy for that movie in the first place. Yes, it changed our conception of what an 3D-animated film could look like. Yes, the multiverse is very cool and all that. Yes, it had a huge IP attached to it. But on a more fundamental level, that movie has a fantastic story underpinning it. The script is razor-sharp. The story is beautifully complex. The vision of New York City it presents is a living, breathing place, populated by real people. It has the kind of craft to it that can only come from truly obsessive creators cultivating an absolutely miserable professional environment for a legion of passionate animators.

In interview, Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura actually spoke surprisingly candidly about his view on crunch:

I probably shouldn't answer this question, because I'm not exactly PC on my answer. I think the nature of filmmaking is, we're really lucky to work in a business that's about passion. Passion doesn't fit really well into a timeline, so inevitably you come to a crunch time. It's just true in the live action, it's true in every movie, and authors always tell me that about when they're writing their books — it's the same thing happens to them! There's something about the creative process that's not — it's unruly. So, I think if you're enjoying it, you need to recognize that. Like, you know, I don't wanna abuse anybody, and y'know — if you get into that period where people have to really work too hard, you gotta help them in that situation, then. 'Cause it's gonna come. It does on every movie. I've never seen it not come, no matter how well you plan, et cetera. 'Cause it's not a science what we're doing at all, and there's all these discoveries that happen near the end, which makes you go "oh, let's do some more, come on!". We discovered that on this movie, where we're calling ILM going "we've got a few ideas, you know, do you have enough man-hours?". [...] Like, you gotta be conscious of it — in live-action, for instance, there are some studios that are so cheap that when you're on — sort of medium location-distance and you're shooting 'til midnight, they don't pay for a hotel room. It's like, well, no-no-no, you pay for a hotel room. You protect the people.

According to everyone who worked on Transformers One, everyone who worked on Transformers One was very passionate about it. But there are parts of this film where I think you can say, pretty objectively, that it's falling short of its intended effect. So I guess maybe they weren't that passionate. I'm not saying that to be mean! It's just... isn't that better than the alternative—that this was the best they could do?

III. I did not care for The Godfather

At one point in the film, the gang's magic map leads them to a scary cave, which looks like this:

Bumblebee fills the dead air by saying, "A cave, with teeth. Nothing scary about that!" The joke here is that this is a cave that looks like a mouth. But as depicted, it's a cave that looks like a mouth that doesn't look like a cave! I get that this is an alien planet, but stalactites don't grow that way on Earth, so when you see the cave onscreen, your gut reaction isn't "oh my, what a frightening cave!". No, this is a cave that makes you say, "that's not a cave, that's some kind of alien monster".

(It's not like "cave turns out to be a monster" would in any way be a fresh twist. In BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, there's a bit where a character swims into a scary cave, and it turns out to be the mouth of a massive sea serpent. In The Empire Strikes Back, the Millennium Falcon briefly hides in an asteroid tunnel which turns out to be a giant space worm. So I'm definitely not saying Transformers One would've been a better film if it had used this stock trope.)

Then once the heroes go inside, we're whisked off to an entirely different set of concept artwork, for this lush organic underground paradise. There's no danger there. The cave itself is reduced to a strange little footnote. Maybe it's only in the story because a concept artist drew it before they'd worked out the finer points of the narrative, and Keegan-Michael Key just ended up ad-libbing the "teeth!" line when he was told to vamp for a few seconds. Or maybe the teeth gag was fully written into the script from the start, and the environment artists just interpreted it way too literally.

Like, I'm sorry, I don't mean to start off on the wrong foot here by harping on about the cave thing—it's not a perfect example anyway—but to me it's a microcosm for my frustration towards what I perceive to be a lack of creative vision in this film. So much of the film feels like it's not there to be entertaining, or meaningful, or narratively load-bearing... it's just obligatory, something they threw in for the sake of having anything at all. It's colors and sounds. When you see the spiky shape onscreen, you think, "ooh, this film was pretty bouba earlier, but now it's more kiki!" They get the comedian to improvise a few one-liners while the characters walk from place to place. And it's like, yes, this is a film for children. Of course the heroes have an adventure map with a big red X on it. In many respects this is a glorified episode of Pocoyo, or the modern equivalent, which I guess is "Baby Shark | Animal Songs For Children".

Nowhere is this sense of "we are obliged to put this in the movie" felt more strongly than in its supporting cast. When you look closely, you notice that Bumblebee and Elita-1—placed prominently in the film's marketing and being technically present for much of its runtime—don't actually do anything of narrative significance. They don't make choices that impact the story; they're just there, and it would not take much rewriting to excise them entirely, so it's just Orion Pax and Megatron on their little adventure. In fact, I'll just come out and say it: I think Transformers One would have been a better movie if Bumblebee and Elita-1 were not in it.

It helps that, from a Doylist perspective, the motivations for their inclusion are perfectly transparent. Firstly, think of the merchandise! Secondly, in Bumblebee's case, it's fucking Bumblebee, he's the whole reason half the kids will be watching, you can't not have him in there. Whenever Bumblebee's not onscreen, all the other characters should be asking, "where's Bumblebee?" Also, I think the creative team felt that they could use Bumblebee tactically to balance some of the darkness in the story.

In the G1 cartoon, Bumblebee just has the default Autobot personality—good-natured, a little sarcastic—with the dial turned a little more towards friendliness. There's this iconic anecdote from the production that cartoon, where writer David Wise found himself in exactly the same situation Transformers writers are finding themselves in forty years later: he was told to write a story about something called "Vector Sigma", and he had no fucking clue what Vector Sigma was supposed to be. So he asked story editor Bryce Malek, who also had no fucking idea. Malek in turn asked Hasbro, and was told that Vector Sigma was "the computer that gave all the Transformers personalities". Upon hearing this, Malek said, "Well, it didn't do a very good job, did it!" Vector Sigma, in case you missed it, does actually appear in Transformers One, as the polygonal shape that transitions into the Matrix of Leadership in the opening powerpoint; I guess they're one and the same now. Some things never change: in Michael Bay's Transformers movies, there is again just a single default personality that every single Autobot shares, a braggadacious action-hero facade over genuine bloodthirst. Who can forget that iconic moment in Revenge of the Fallen where Bumblebee rips out Ravage's spine in grisly slow-mo?

Aside from the fact that he's small and yellow, Bumblebee in Transformers One bears very little resemblance to any incarnation of the character kids might be accustomed to. Instead, he occupies a stock comic-relief archetype, he's a zany guy who goes "Well, that just happened!" If anything, his one joke in the third act—wanton murder—reads like it could maybe be a reference to his many Mortal Kombat fatalities in Bay's films. Beginning in 2007's Transformers Animated, Bumblebee has sometimes possessed deployable "stingers" that flip out from his hands, as a fun action feature for toys. Clearly someone on Transformers One saw this and thought it was the funniest fucking thing that Bumblebee has "knife hands", because the character spends the third act of the movie just shouting "knife hands!" and cutting people in half like a medieval terror.

(In the UK, Bumblebee's lines were re-recorded at the last minute so he says "sword hands" instead. This is because in the UK, we generally aren't able to kill each other using guns, so it's knives that are the big armed-violence boogeyman. Everyone's always talking about how all the kids have knives. And look, I'm not someone to indulge in moral panic, but genuinely, when I look at Bumblebee chasing around people with knives, saying, "I'm gonna cut these guys, watch!", I'm like... what the fuck were they thinking when they wrote that?)

Frankly, whatever is going on with Bumblebee is just an entirely different movie to everything else that's happening. When Bee shanks his twelfth nameless lackey in a row, the movie's like, awww, you're sweet! But when Megatron tries to kill the one (1) evil dictator who's just fucking branded him, who's still lying to his face while his people continue to die to the guy's fuckin' honor guard, Optimus Prime is like, HELLO, HUMAN RESOURCES?

Bumblebee is solely here to be funny, but there's a point in the film where it needs to become a war story, and the best they can think to do with Bumblebee is to have him kill people but in like, a funny way.

As for Elita-1... look, to put it very bluntly, she is in this movie to be a woman. Transformers has had a long, long forty-year history of boys'-club exclusionism, if not outright misogyny, and each new series usually has a token female character, as a kind of fig-leaf for the fact that really, the only fucking thing Hasbro cares about is that the boys are buying the toys. Beginning in the 1986 movie, it was Arcee who got to be "the pink one" for many years of fiction—but not toys, y'see, when parents want to buy something for their beloved young lad, they don't buy "the pink one", no sir. In the 2010s, wow-cool-OC Windblade took over for a stint as leading lady, decked out in a commercially-non-threatening red color scheme. Recently, though, it's been Elita-1—Optimus Prime's girlfriend from the original '80s cartoon—who's been the go-to female character, and she's increasingly allowed to be pink.

There is a lot of love for these characters amongst creatives and fans alike, and especially in the last decade, female Transformers have been both more numerous and better-written than ever. Unfortunately Transformers One, which depicts Elita-1 as an arms-crossing career-obsessed buzzkill, whose arc sees her learn her place in deference to a less-competent man... well let's just say it struck me as a significant step back in this regard.

There's this great interview with Scarlett Johansson, voice of Elita-1, where she's trying to describe what makes her character interesting, and it's like she's drawing blood from a stone. She's like, "yeah, so Elita-1, I would say, she's on her own journey, because at the start of the film it's sort of like she's working at a big company, you know, and she wants to get a promotion, but then later on she learns that she can't, y'know, get a promotion". Look, it's not that Scarlett Johansson does a bad job—in fact, considering the material she's working with, she practically carries Elita-1 entirely on the back of her performance—it's just that I can't shake the impression that the filmmakers would rather pay Scarlett Johansson god knows how many thousands of dollars than try to think of a second actress that they know of.

As I've already complained, Transformers One has a pretty thin cast, but it effectively only has two other female characters who do anything. Airachnid is a secondary antagonist, Sentinel Prime's spymaster/enforcer, and it's clear that some concept artist really fucking popped off when designing her. She has eyes in the back of her head, and it's ten times creepier than that makes it sound. Her spiderlegs also create some visual interest during fight scenes. As a character, Airachnid has zero internality and is not interesting, but she is cool, so you'll get no complaints from me there.

The film's other other female character is Chromia, who wins the Iacon 5000 race at the last moment. She really comes out of nowhere to clinch it. It's funny, because the leaderboards show this one guy, Mirage, hovering near the top of the rankings for almost the whole sequence. And Chromia's character model really looks suspiciously like Mirage's. In fact, there's a different character who stands around in the background a couple of times who looks much more like Chromia. Funnily enough, that background character is even called Chromia in concept art! So if you connect the dots, it really seems that the "Chromia" who is the best racer on Cybertron was originally meant to be Mirage, a guy, until they switched the character's gender at the very last minute, and didn't bother changing the leaderboards to match.

There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that Mirage was the dark horse of Rise of the Beasts, and for some reason they felt like his depiction in Transformers One would've gotten in the way of their plans for the character somehow. It's plausible, I guess. The second, infinitely funnier option, is that at some point someone working on the movie realised that they only put two women in the film, scrambled to look through the feature to find a suitable character to gender-swap, only to discover to their horror that they'd forgotten to put in any characters whatsoever. Fuck it, the racer guy! He can be a girl. Diversity win, the fastest class traitor on Cybertron... is a woman!

In case you were wondering about the Transformers One toyline leaderboards, by my count, Orion Pax has ten new transforming toys currently announced or in stores, Bumblebee and Megatron have six each, Sentinel Prime has four, Alpha Trion has two, Elita-1 has two, Airachnid has one, Starscream has one, Wheeljack has one, and the Quintesson High Commander has one. In fact, one of Elita-1's toys—the collector-oriented high-quality Studio Series release—isn't scheduled for release until some undetermined point later next year, and she was entirely absent from leaked lists of upcoming releases, which to me smacks of "we realised last-minute that it would look really really bad if we didn't bother to release a good toy of the one woman in the film". Oh, and obviously, Chromia has no toys—but there is an "Iacon Race" three-pack consisting of Megatron, Orion Pax... and Mirage. Go figure.

The thing is, all of the stuff I'm grousing about here is pretty much standard fare for kids' films targeted more at boys. Hell, even The Lego Movie—which is basically the gold standard of toy commercials—gave supporting protagonist Wyldstyle a pretty similar arc to the one Elita-1 gets here, which was probably the weakest element of that film. Evidently conscious of this, Lord & Miller redeemed themselves by devoting the entirety of The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part to deconstructing common narratives surrounding gender roles. I guess I just wish the young girls who presumably comprise some portion of Transformers One theatergoers could actually get anything out of Elita-1 as a character. Ah, what do I know, maybe it's still considered countercultural simply to depict a woman punching people.

Still, to give credit where it's due: Transformers One doesn't remotely touch the gender-essentialism prevalent in the Binder of Revelation, treating female Transformers no differently to their male counterparts in lore terms. Solus Prime is, it seems, just a Prime who happened to be a woman, rather than the mythological Eve after whom all women are patterned. There's a scene where our heroes are gifted the Transformation Cogs of the fallen Primes, and the Primes named thankfully bear no particular relation to the characters; in other words, Elita-1 isn't given Solus Prime's cog. As Alpha Trion puts it: "What defines a Transformer is not the cog in his chest, but the spark that resides in their core." Dude really remembered nonbinary people exist halfway through that sentence huh.

(Actually, the bigger mistake would've been with Megatron: if he was given Megatronus Prime's cog from the start, then this would've created the unfortunate implication that his descent into evil was only the result of Megatronus Prime's fucked up and evil cog, rather than a choice Megatron made of his own free will. The film instead has it the other way around: Megatron's radicalisation into a "might makes right" philosophy is what causes him to covet Megatronus Prime's transformation cog, to steal that power from Sentinel Prime, who stole the cogs of both Megatronus and Megatron in the first place. That's cool! This does create a bit of unfortunate narrative dissonance with Alpha Trion's words, alas, as it does seem like Megatronus Prime's cog really is more powerful than the others, because it gives both Sentinel Prime and Megatron a powerup.)

There's just something that I find so dreadfully mercenary about this movie's cast—honestly, everyone except Orion Pax, Megatron, and maybe Sentinel Prime. Take Darkwing, for example. Bro was clearly designed from the ground up to fill this stock character role of "bully who pushes our guys around and later gets his comeuppance". For a more interesting take on that exact same archetype, look no further than Todd Sureblade from Nimona, a bigoted knight who gets a whole damn character arc in the background, which directly complements that film's main themes.

Again, I'm not playing some kind of guessing game here, the authorial evidence is right there: Darkwing didn't even have a name until Hasbro designer Mark Maher was shown a picture of the character and asked, "If this was a Decepticon flyer, who would it be?" This is actually par for the course with ILM; most of their concept art is labelled with very basic descriptions, with the exact trademarks being picked in conjunction with Hasbro at a later point. Darkwing just stands out in Transformers One because he's the only recurring speaking character who's an OC in all but name (unless you count Bumblebee), he's the one guy who's been invented from scratch with total creative freedom, and he's boring as sin. It's like the filmmakers just couldn't conceive of a children's movie without that stock character—and they clearly had no idea what to do with him once they'd invented him, because he disappears entirely from the film at the start of the third act, when Orion Pax throws him into an arcade cabinet, which they have in the mines on Cybertron for some reason.

In a film with as painfully few named speaking characters as Transformers One, there's really no excuse for having this kind of one-dimensionality in their portrayals. Genuinely, I ask—who are Orion Pax and Megatron fighting to liberate? Jazz, one of the biggest personalities from the original G1 cartoon, who gets all of two boilerplate lines here? Cooley seems to think so:

As you’re designing them the background characters are almost like Lego pieces where you put different heads on different bodies just to fill in a crowd. But some of them would be brought forward and be painted specific colors so that it represents a character that I didn’t know was such a big deal. But there was stuff—like Jazz, for example, has a pretty big role. It was important to have a relationship with a character that we know gets to be saved.

To me, the idea that casual cinemagoers would be invested in any of the Transformers as characters is laughable. Michael Bay's characters are famous for being hateful non-entities. In terms of the films, Jazz is best remembered for dying at the end of the first one, seventeen years ago; he looks completely different here. The one breakout character in recent years—Mirage, as played by Pete Davidson in Rise of the Beasts—was, as I've already mentioned, written out so that the movie could reach its girl quota... not that he would've had any lines anyway.

And I just don't buy the idea that the complete dearth of compelling characterisation in this film is just an unfortunate side-effect of its clipped one-hour-thirty runtime—that, given even half an hour longer, the film would suddenly be crowded with rich portrayals of all your Transformers faves. Bumblebee and Elita-1, ostensibly two of the most important characters in the film, are not in this movie because the movie is interested in telling their stories. They are in this movie for the sake of being in this movie. It insists upon itself.

IV. No politics means no politics

In fact, putting aside merchandising considerations, Elita-1 and Bumblebee serve one very specific purpose in narrative terms. The trait Optimus Prime and Megatron have always had in common is that they are both leaders—and what is a leader, without anyone to lead? Without Bumblebee and Elita-1, you'd have this farcical situation where the only person Optimus Prime ever gets to boss around is Megatron, until the very end of the movie when God makes him king of all Cybertron. The High Guard, Starscream's gang of exiles, serve a similar narrative purpose for Megatron; they're a ready-made army who've just been sitting around waiting for him to show up and take charge.

Towards the end, the movie does actually take care to show both Orion Pax and Megatron rallying groups of Cybertronians: in Pax's case, he reveals the truth to his legion of interchangable miner friends, while Megatron riles up the High Guard mob. Again, there's a bit of that narrative sleight-of-hand, a bit of a thematic cop-out, where the question of "how do Optimus Prime and Megatron come to be leaders of their factions?" is answered only in the most literal possible interpretation. Yes, we technically see the exact chain of events that lead to this point—but both characters are portrayed as born leaders. We don't see them grow into the role, except physically. The moment Megatron decides he wants to rule, he's able to take charge. Likewise, Optimus Prime just gets divinely appointed by God. At a key point, Megatron loudly declares "I will never trust a so-called leader ever again", and the movie plays a fucking scare chord like this is supposed to be ominous. Like, oh no! Optimus Prime is a leader! And they're friends! Whatever will Megatron do when he finds out his friend, Optimus Prime, is a leader?

I don't think the movie has given any real thought to what a leader actually is. It seems to take a stance that power cannot be taken, i.e. through violent action, as Sentinel Prime and Megatron do. That one scene with Elita-1 suggests the most important trait for a leader to have, above and beyond any particular competency, is simply hope and optimism. What I just can't wrap my head around is the fact that the counterpoint the movie presents to Megatron, in the form of Orion Pax becoming Optimus Prime, does not support a belief in collective action or basic democracy—rather, it's a boring sword-in-the-stone divine-right-of-kings fantasy.

Except I do have a theory for why the film is like this. Let's look again at that interview with Eric Pearson, who came onboard in the "late middle" of production:

One of the first things that I did was a big pass on Sentinel Prime. I just felt like he was too obviously telegraphing his wickedness in previous versions, and I felt like, “No, he’s a carnival barker.” He’s got to be a big salesman. He’s a bullshitter, honestly is what he is.

(Honestly, if this is Sentinel after a "big pass" to make his villainy more of a twist, I shudder to think what the earlier drafts were like.)

Now, let's see how WIRED introduces their interview with Josh Cooley, titled "Transformers One Isn't as Silly as It Looks":

He liked the script, which traces how Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry) went from friends to enemies. But as the world went into lockdown as Covid-19 spread, Cooley found his story changing, if only slightly. Trump was still in office when Cooley started working on the film, and he was having meetings with the producers and they’d “start these meetings off on Zoom just going, like, ‘Holy crap what is going on in this world?’” he says. Ultimately, the infighting they were seeing between Democrats and Republicans in the same family became an undercurrent in the film’s friends-to-enemies storyline, “because that’s what Transformers is.”

So it's like, oh, this is a 2016 election thing. This is just that one election that broke everyone's brains. Of course this movie about a made-up political struggle on an alien planet being developed from 2015-2020 wouldn't be like, hey, you know what might fix our society's problems, is if we had an election. Of course the main villain is a "big salesman" "bullshitter" who says things like "The truth is what I make it!". Wow, guys, your film is so-o-o politically-conscious, and very pretty.

The fantasy is more or less that Donald Trump's army of reactionaries is marching on Washington to seize power through violent means, and on the way he drops Joe Biden into the Grand Canyon, but just before Joe hits the ground a giant fucking bald eagle swoops in to catch him and squawks, "God finds you worthy! Arise, President Biden!"

In our escapist little morality play, our best friend slash allegorical dad gets made king of the planet, and we all get jobs in the government. As in, one of the funniest lines in the movie is straightup Bumblebee exulting, "This is the greatest day of my life. I get to work for the government!" When Prime met Bumblebee—an hour ago—the dude was talking to imaginary friends, and honestly the only fucking skill he's demonstrated since then is cold-blooded murder. We have this dissonance in the storytelling, where it's mostly a story about four friends going on an adventure (are they even friends? Most of them hate each other!), but it's also a founding-fathers political origin story, which means there comes a point where our hero just suddenly starts bossing his friends around in a deep voice, and they're like, "Yes, sir!" It creates this unhinged situation where the "good" faction on Cybertron is ruled by the biblical chosen one and his nepotism buddies.

Per that quote from WIRED (or are they just putting words in Cooley's mouth? I can't help but notice they don't give an exact quote!), the film is ultimately sympathetic to the bad guys (the Republicans, I guess). It deliberately suggests that there is really nothing that should divide the Autobots and the Decepticons: their political goals, it claims, are identical, and they only disagree on the means by which to achieve them. The Decepticons, who are angry and hateful, have simply been misled by a power-hungry liar with charisma—first Sentinel, then Megatron—and so the tragedy is that they are artificially pushed into conflict with their fellow men, when really they should be uniting to stand against their common enemy, the foreigner illuminati trying to steal Cybertron's wealth.

Now, I know I've just handed you a get-out-of-jail-free card. My political allegory here is chock full of holes. What, are Sentinel Prime and Megatron both Donald Trump? Get a grip. Obviously any real-world commentary in Transformers One was only intended in the loosest sense imaginable: things like, "people should be free to change into whatever they want!" I'm being unfair, I'm reading too much into it, this is a cartoon movie for children, and if I want politics, I should start reading some fucking books. Also, come to mention it, my whole argument about that cave earlier really didn't hold water, and- I know, alright? I know.

V. Place / Place, Cybertron

I'm not mad at this toy commercial because its politics don't quite align with mine. I'm not mad at it for having a boring-ass supporting cast. I'm not mad at it for reheating a bunch of half-baked lore I didn't care for from the early 2010s. I've actually spent a lot of time mad about Transformers media that I've thought was bad. There's Transformers: Armada, where the English translators are fully asleep at the wheel and render even the most basic cartoon plots incomprehensible though constant mistranslations. There's Transformers: Micromasters, where two white guys wrote a downtrodden race of tiny Cybertronians who greet each other like "Wattup, my micro!". There's the recent series of Transformers: EarthSpark, where there's an episode that I can only describe as "the Wonka Experience but it's an episode of a children's cartoon", with a plotline that mostly revolves around our child heroes straightup robbing a Onceler-looking businessman of his most valuable possession. There's Transformers: Age of Extinction, with that one scene, and also the rest of that movie. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most Transformers fiction is some combination of bad, offensive, and offensively bad.

So even though I've just spent thousands of words whinging and moaning about how I didn't like Transformers One, the truth is that I had a perfectly nice time at the cinema. I got to go see it with five of my pals who love Transformers just as much as I do, and we had a blast. It is easily in the top 50% of all Transformers fiction.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I guess I've always given a lot of thought to what Transformers looks like from the outside. Maybe it's that I'm compelled to spend so much time and money on it, that it somehow compels me to vomit up these kinds of essays, and all I want is to be able to make it make sense to anyone in my life. It would be so, so nice if I could just sit down in the cinema with a friend or family member for a couple of hours, and at the end of it, they'd be able to walk out and say, "Okay, I guess I see what you get out of it." Rise of the Beasts was kind of that movie for me, but Rise of the Beasts is also the seventh instalment in a blockbuster franchise. It kind of takes for granted everything about Transformers.

It doesn't answer, "what the fuck is a Transformer anyway?"

For many years now, fans have noticed a marked aversion to using the word "transform" as a verb, or even as a noun. Optimus Prime no longer says, "Autobots, transform and roll out!", he just says, "Roll out!". Transformers no longer transform, they "convert". In fact, Transformers are no longer Transformers at all: they are "Transformers bots", the italics here serving to distinguish a registered trademark. This is because the worms in suits at Hasbro are worried that, if they continue to use the word "transform" by its dictionary definition—that is, to change—then rival toy companies will be able to make the case that anything that transforms can legally be described as a Transformer. It will become a generic trademark, like Velcro, or Band-Aid, or Dumpster.

Yet in Transformers One, "Transformers" is not just the noun by which the characters are referred to—rather, it's used in a descriptive sense to specifically mean "Cybertronians who can transform"! Characters are constantly talking about whether they can or can't transform. Prime gets to say his catchphrase in full. It's a miracle. Not only that, characters even get to say the word "kill" instead of "defeat" or "destroy".

Transformers One has a level of unrestricted creative freedom not seen since the 1986 animated film. This is a film unconstrained by location shooting, or licensing deals, or uncooperative actors; through the magic of CGI, for every single frame of its one-hour-thirty runtime, the filmmakers can put literally whatever they want on the screen. They were given the assignment, "Make an animated prequel set on Cybertron telling the origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron", handed an estimated $147 million and a blank page, and told to go nuts. Like those born with transformation cogs, Transformers One had the power to become anything it wanted to be.

The 1986 animated film took that carte blanche to do whatever the fuck it wanted, and basically singlehandedly defined the direction of the franchise ever since. On a lore level, in terms of tone, I would say that Transformers owes practically everything to The Transformers: The Movie. Cartoons, comics, films, and video games have adapted every single one of its scenes countless times over. I'm not necessarily saying that it's a good film, or even that it's a particularly original film—much of it is ripped off from Star Wars—just that it took the franchise somewhere it hadn't gone before. It was looking to the future. As in, literally, it was set in 2005, at the time two decades into the future.

What gets me down about Transformers One is that—like most major franchise media released since The Force Awakens—all it can do is think about the past. Swathes of it are devoted to painstakingly recreating or setting up the various bits of iconography which have arbitrarily come to define the franchise. Even when it appears to be taking things in a new direction, it's not long before it course-corrects back into familiar territory: Steve Buscemi invents a surprisingly fresh take on Starscream's voice, and then Megatron half-strangles him to death, saddling him with a post-produced rasp to emulate Chris Latta's iconic performance from forty years ago.

The very title of the film, Transformers One, is an allusion to the line, "Till all are one," which originates in The Transformers: The Movie. In an early script for that '80s feature, it was actually "Till all life sparks are one", referring to a literal metaphysical process in that draft whereby one Transformer's life force could be passed on to another, presumably with the belief that they would all eventually be merged into a single afterlife. In the finalized story, it's just this kind of mystical phrase vaguely evoking concepts of togetherness and unity.

Transformers One brushes up against the phrase a couple of times. Alpha Trion almost says it at one point, when passing on his dead siblings' transformation cogs: "They were one. You are one. All are one!" Whatever that means. Later, Orion Pax starts a chant amongst the miners: "Together as one!" And finally, at the very end of the movie, during his obligatory film-ending monologue, Optimus Prime again goes: "And now, we stand here together... as one." (Half of Cybertron has just been banished to the surface forever.) "[...] Here, all are truly... Autobots." (Again, half of Cybertron- Optimus, what the fuck are you talking about?) Regardless, this is inexplicably the one instance where the movie doesn't twist itself up into knots trying to nail the exact phrasing.

Actually, there is one other sideways reference like this I can think of. Early in the film, Orion Pax is chatting up Elita, and he remarks, "Feel like I have enough power in my to drill down and touch Primus himself." To which Elita replies, "You don't have the touch or the power." This is kind of a nonsensical retort unless you know that in the 1986 movie, one of the most iconic songs on the soundtrack was "The Touch" by Stan Bush, which had the chorus line: "You got the touch! You got the power!" It's a banger. Anyway, remember when I said Darkwing gets chucked through an arcade cabinet? Well, here's Cooley revealing why that arcade cabinet is in the film:

I actually wrote [that exchange between Orion Pax and Elita] because I love that song. [...] And we had this one version where D-16 and Orion were playing a video game, like a stand-up old arcade game—it was inspired to look like that, but a Cybertonian version of that. They’re playing that together like friends and the song, like the 8-bit song that’s playing is ["The Touch"]. But that scene got nixed. And so I wanted to work it in there somewhere. And I just felt like a natural place for it. But that was one where I’m like, "I just love that song and those lyrics and that’s Transformers to me so I want to get that in there."

(I've had to amend that quote to fill in the blanks where the article has redacted "spoilers" for the movie. Spoiler culture is an absolute pox, I swear. Can't have the audiences knowing about one (1) mid joke in advance—the movie barely has enough jokes to fill a "Transformers One Funny Moments" compilation as it is!)

This actually isn't the first time Hasbro has "nixed" a reference to "The Touch" in major Transformers media. In the Transformers: Cyberverse episode "The Alliance", a character references "The Touch" right before a training montage which is clearly supposed to have the track playing, except instead it's been replaced by a generic rock instrumental, presumably because they couldn't afford the license. And in Daniel Warren Johnson's Eisner-award-winning bestselling comic run, there's one panel where he clearly wanted to include the song's lyrics as a sound effect, but wasn't allowed, so the final sound effect famously reads "YOU KNOW THE SONG". But that's a random episode of a bargain-bin cartoon, and an indie-darling comic series—not a $147 million blockbuster. You really have to wonder if it came down to money, or if it was something else. God knows Transformers One would not actually be improved for having a chiptune remix of "The Touch" in it, anyway.

The most egregious misplaced bit of fanwank in the film isn't even in dialogue. In the 1986 film, there's this one iconic moment when Optimus Prime arrives at the besieged Autobot City, drives through a crowd of Decepticons in truck mode, then fires some afterburners, launching his cab up into the air, where he transforms mid-leap, drawing his blaster to shoot a couple of Decepticons before hitting the ground. It's a fantastic bit of original animation. It's the Akira slide of Transformers. And, surprise surprise, it crops up in Transformers One. In the climactic final fight, Orion Pax shows up to save Megatron, and he does the thing.

But the problem is... he's not in truck mode! The film just cuts to him standing there in the middle of some anonymous mooks, then he does a standing jump into the air, the movie momentarily goes into extreme slow-mo like he's doing a fucking quick-time event, then he shoots a couple of guys and drops to the ground. There's no momentum. It exists purely to create that simulacrum, to take the single most iconic frame from that bit of 1986 animation, and stretch that one frame into infinity. The context is discarded, irrelevant. All that matters is that brief moment of recognition: "I know what that iiis!" God knows Transformers One has precious little in the way of impactful fight animation of its own; the choreography is stiff and uninspired, while the shots themselves are nauseatingly cluttered. Often, the best it can do is pilfer from older, better stories.

"Did you clap at any of the new moments and memorable characters?" "Were there any?"

Look, I get it. Transformers One is a prequel. By definition, it can't change the future. It has to play with the characters that are already in the toybox. But I do think it had this really special opportunity: to show theatregoers where the Transformers come from. To show us Cybertron not as a distant star or a barren scrapyard, but as a living, thriving alien world, unlike Earth, something special and worth protecting in its own right. Something new and memorable. In Rise of the Beasts—probably the best Transformers movie by default—when Optimus Prime is at his lowest, he wants nothing more to return home... but home is something we've only ever seen as a cold dystopia, ruled by Decepticons. The version of Transformers One I had hoped to see was one that would have imbued Optimus' homesickness with greater meaning. I wanted to feel his loss, and to hope that one day the war will end, and Cybertron can be restored.

I think Transformers One sincerely tries to achieve this effect. The concept artists have clearly put a great deal of time and thought into Cybertron as an environment. When the artbook comes out, I'm keen to see how much stuff didn't make it into the finished film. You have to assume most of it got cut, because there's next to nothing left!

At the end of the film, battle lines are drawn, the civil war is about to start... but strangely, the movie's setting does not convey the sense that anything beautiful is being lost. Nobody is unwillingly turned to violence, innocence-lost; they're all too eager to get to killing, friggin' Bumblebee is gleeful about it. There's no beautiful, iconic landmark, which gets tragically destroyed, like in some kind of Transformers 9/11—"What have we done! Where will this war take us!". There's no part of Cybertron's natural ecological environment to be ruined by the war, because the surface world is already turbofucked by the Quintessons to begin with. No, rather, we have the total opposite: Optimus Prime finding the Matrix (which was just, like, hanging out in the core of Cybertron or whatever) actually restores Energon to the planet, removing the unnatural scarcity which was the entire impetus behind the film's dystopia. He made Cybertron great again. So again, Transformers One fails to answer one of the most fundamental questions one might expect of a Transformers prequel: "When did things on Cybertron get so bad?" The movie ends with the planet in better shape to how it started!

The big original idea that Transformers One has is that Cybertron, the planet itself, should be in a constant state of transformation. I've already talked about the beautiful shapeshifting landscapes, but it's also the moving buildings, the complicated mechanisms, the roads and rails that magically lay themselves between the vehicles and their destinations. I've already mentioned how odd I find it that none of these environmental transformations have any significance to the story; the closest it comes to some sort of payoff is when Orion Pax falls into the hole that makes you king.

What I find most perplexing are the deer. When the gang makes it to the surface, the idea is to show the natural beauty of the surface, which the cogless have been denied their whole lives. The mountains glisten as they move. Nebulae glow in the night sky. The surface is blanketed in organic (?) plantlife, like a watering can forgotten in a garden. And, most strikingly, there are deer: mechanical animals, just like those found on Earth, being hunted for sport by the evil Quintessons. When the cruisers near, their glowing horns turn red with alarm, and they prance around in fear.

I'm reminded of a brief gag from the third season of Transformers: Cyberverse—one of very few shows to have devoted any serious effort to Cybertronian worldbuilding—in the episode "Thunderhowl". Bumblebee and Chromia stumble across a "singlehorn" (read: unicorn), and when it senses danger, it neighs, transforms into a rocket, and blasts out of frame. And apart from being really cute and funny, it's like, oh, of course that's what animals are like on Cybertron! Everything on this planet transforms. Why not the animals?

For whatever reason, the deer in Transformers One are like the one thing that don't transform. Why the hell not? If Cyberverse could find the budget for its split-second sight gag, surely this blockbuster could, I don't know, have them turn into dirt bikes with antler-handlebars. That would've been something, right? If not, then at least could we maybe see some other animals on Cybertron, to really get across that alien biodiversity? Of course not. See, the deer exist to communicate one very specific story beat: a single moment of trepidation, where the heroes know there's danger nearby, but they don't know what. And all you need for that is a single kind of prey animal, with some kind of warning light to let you know, hey, there's danger! Once this purpose is fulfilled, the deer have no further significance to the story.

We need only look to BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui to see this exact same beat play out with a modicum of competence and creative flair. Also in the second act—in fact, at practically the exact same timestamp—our heroes, the Toa, have a run-in with the bad guys, and they're nearly captured... but then there's this sudden rumble of danger approaching, we don't know what. It turns out to be a herd of giant Kikanalo! They send the bad guys packing, except they nearly trample our heroes too! But then, Toa Nokama's mask begins to glow, and she discovers that her mask grants her the ability to talk to animals. They learn some vital information from the Kikanalo, and are able to ride the creatures for the next stage of their adventure. Finally, when they can go no further, the Kikanalo cave in the passage behind the heroes to ensure they won't be pursued. Holy shit, that's like, five different story beats with just that one type of creature!

It's not just that Transformers One struggles with that kind of basic narrative flow, where a single element serves multiple purposes. It's that often, it wastes precious time creating redundant setups to achieve the same effect twice.

For example, Megatronus Prime's face happens to look exactly like (what we know will be) the Decepticon insignia. At the beginning of the movie, Orion Pax mollifies Megatron by giving him a rare decal of Megatronus Prime's face. Traditionally, Megatron wears his insignia in the middle of his chest—but in this film, nearly every character has a big hole in the middle of their chest, where their missing transformation cog should go. So Megatron sticks the decal on his shoulder instead.

Later, he gets a cog, and the hole in his chest is filled. When Sentinel Prime captures Megatron, he notices the Megatronus sticker, and rips it off. Then, he re-applies it on Megatron's chest—purely so it's in the "right" place for the iconography. And then, he uses his gun to crudely brand Megatron with a tracing of Megatronus' face, inadvertently creating the Decepticon symbol. Finally, in a post-credits scene, Megatron has fashioned a proper Decepticon brand with which to brand himself and his followers. So in effect, there are four separate moments where Megatron gets the symbol! Orion sticking it on his shoulder, Sentinel moving it to his chest, Sentinel mutilating him, and finally Megatron branding himself. You can make an argument that the symbol starts out meaning one thing, but ends up meaning another thing, which has a kind of tragic significance—but I think you would struggle to distinguish subtle shades of meaning from all four of these brandings. Considering the movie only has an hour and a half to work with, I find this lack of narrative economy to be honestly embarrassing.

(My friend Jo also points out what a misstep it is to just have Megatronus Prime's face perfectly resemble the Decepticon symbol from the start. Had it been a looser, more stylised—that is to say, original—design, the moment where Sentinel Prime roughly carves it into Megatron's chest could be a shocking reveal, as the basic outlines are abstracted and simplified. Gasp, that's the origin of the Decepticon symbol! Instead, from the very moment that sticker first shows up, it's like... oh, well, there it is I guess.)

In a similar vein, both Optimus Prime and Megatron undergo two different transformations at different points in the movie: first, when Alpha Trion gives them transformation cogs, and second, when respectively they obtain the Matrix of Leadership/Megatronus' cog. The gun that sprouts from Megatron's arm in his intermediary form bears a much closer to resemblance to his iconic "fusion cannon" than the triple-barrelled cannon he ends up with in his final form. Again, in such a short film, can we really say whatever subtlety this brings to Megatron's arc is worth all this fanfare? Now, Redditors ask: "What is the EXACT moment D-16 became Megatron?"

In fact, probably the only point of criticism I've seen levied at Transformer One from within the Transformers fandom at large is that Megatron's arc is maybe a little "rushed". He starts out being best bros forever with Orion Pax, and by the end of the film, he's ready to drop the guy into a bottomless pit. The film takes a lot of time to justify his anger at Sentinel Prime, but the deterioration of his friendship with Orion goes much more unspoken, and is framed more as a point of irrationality: psychologically, Megatron comes to conflate his bossy friend with his oppressive ruler. I liked this, personally. I liked that it's as if a switch gets flipped in Megatron's head. But you do just kind of have to buy into it. The film itself does not put in the work to really sell you on the friendship souring, because again, it's too busy fucking around with two (2) magical girl transformation sequences for each of them.

Everything in the film is like this. They go into the cave and meet Alpha Trion, then leave the cave so they can watch a FMV cutscene with Sentinel Prime and the Quintessons, who've coincidentally arrived at that exact moment, basically just to rehash what they've just been told... and then they go back into the cave so Alpha Trion can resume his infodump, and then they end up clashing with Sentinel Prime's forces once that's done. At the beginning of the movie, they're at the very bottom in the mines, then they get banished to an even lower level, then they banish themselves all the way up to the surface, then they return to Iacon, and then Megatron gets banished to the surface again so he can be mesmerized by the beauty of the world and/or get gunched by Quintessons depending on what the film wanted me to take away from this. Compare to Minecraft but I survive in PARKOUR CIVILIZATION [FULL MOVIE], where the theme of class struggle is pretty efficiently depicted in the vertically-stratified setting.

I just find it so wasteful. Outside of the one scene where they're introduced, the Quintessons—ostensibly the true architects of Cybertron's oppressive status quo—may as well not exist. If not for Orion Pax addressing his closing remarks to the Quintessons, almost as an afterthought, I'd assume the film wants us to forget about them entirely, as it knows full well that its paltry runtime does not give it time for a second action-climax against the aliens. Even as sequel bait, it feels halfhearted at best; Josh Cooley is clearly already bored of Transformers, and seems unlikely to come back for another round unless the money is really really good (which *glances at the box office* it's not). So what the fuck are the Quintessons here for? Was the idea that Sentinel might just have pulled off his coup singlehandedly really so hard to stomach? Could the conspiracy not have been simplified to just involve Sentinel and his Transformer cronies? Hang on, are all the Transformers seen at the start of the film in on it, or just some of them? How's it decided who keeps their cogs and who doesn't?

VI. Into nothing

Why does this movie, where the main selling point is ostensibly that we're getting to see Transformers civilization for the first time, mostly focus on all these guys who can't fucking transform? Surely the entire thing that makes the setting fun is the Zootopia angle of, look, they're all different animals! Or the Elemental angle of, look, they're all different elements! Or the Emoji Movie angle of, look, they're all different emoji! Or the Cars angle of, look, they're all different cars! This is a Transformers film which features several significant sequences involving these cool trains, and there is absolutely zero indication that these trains are themselves Transformers. This is a Transformers film which extensively focuses on miners, and none of them transform into mining vehicles; they're holding, friggin', space jackhammers. Even the premise of "isn't it sad that these ones can't transform" is kind of undercut by the fact that all the miners get to wear fucking jetpacks, which is a frankly much cooler and more effective method of locomotion than driving.

I'm just sick of Transformers stories having zero interest in the basic premise of Transformers, which is to say, they transform into something. I also think this is the biggest dissonance between casual audiences, who think "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, that guy who turns into a truck", and Transformers fans, who think, "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, the messiah or something". Normal people love to know what the Transformers turn into. They ask, "Wait, is there a Transformer that turns into [insert silly vehicle here]?" Of course people are interested in that angle! Vehicles are such a huge part of our daily lives—honestly, for those of us living in cities, more so than animals, the classical elements, or emoji—but the closest Transformers One comes to engaging with this lens is that aforementioned Iacon 5000 race sequence. By and large, it presents a world which is made for standing up and walking around. And personally I do think that's an insane approach to take?

Is the excuse that cars can't emote? Nonsense. If you've ever seen a traffic jam, you'll know that cars can sure as hell emote. Pixar, where Josh Cooley cut his teeth, famously spent a lot of time working out how to put a facial expression on a car. No, the problem dates back to the very start of the franchise.

In the 1980s, two main people were responsible for writing the comic stories: American writer Bob Budiansky, and British writer Simon Furman. Budiansky approached the premise of the franchise from an external, human perspective, writing about culture clash, and taking delight in the Transformers' mechanical alien nature as "robots in disguise". Meanwhile, Furman wrote the Transformers as giant people: he focused on their own internal conflicts and motivations, and the grand history of their war. Pretty much every Transformers story ever told can be boiled down to one of these schools of thought: Budianskian, or Furmanist.

Budiansky quit the comic after fifty issues, allowing Furman to take the reigns as sole writer, and Furman basically got the final word on what the Transformers are. They did not evolve from naturally-occurring gears, levers and pulleys. They were not designed by a supercomputer, or built by an alien race. They are the chosen sons of God. The Thirteen are, of course, an invention of Furman's. And Transformers One is perhaps the most Furmanist story ever told. It's the culmination of years and years of lore building up, ossifying into something you can no longer describe as the history of a universe—no, this is a mythology. It's the most perfect form of brand alignment imaginable: this is not an origin story, this is the origin story. It's been the origin story for a better part of the decade—and now that everyone's seen it in theatres, it will be the origin story forever.

It's not just the fiction, either, by the way. These days, if you go into the store to buy a Transformers toy, chances are it'll turn into some misshapen made-up futuristic concept car with unpainted windows and wheels that don't even roll—and that's terrible.

There's truly a lot to hate about Michael Bay's Transformers films, but with each new entry that's released following his departure from the franchise, I feel like I only find myself appreciating them more. In the 2007 Transformers movie, we see the Transformers crash-landing on Earth in their "protoforms", and their movements are animated like they're shy, like they're naked until they scan an Earth vehicle and adopt a disguise. The visual impact of Megatron, meanwhile, is that he doesn't adopt a disguise in that movie: he's a horrible metal skeleton that turns into a jet made of knives. It's weird and alien and it rules.

In the 1980s Transformers cartoon, and in the last-minute Cybertron-set prologue added to Bumblebee, and now in Transformers One, the Transformers look basically the same on Cybertron as they eventually do upon their arrival to Earth. Optimus Prime turns, unmistakably, into a truck. He has windows on his chest, and smokestacks on his arms. He doesn't have these features because he disguises himself as an Earth truck. He has those details because that's just what Optimus Prime looks like. They're his "essential brand elements", or "trademark details", which "identify the must-have elements in character design to be carried across all creative expressions". Prime may take any form he wishes, so long as it looks exactly like himself. A mask of my own face—I'd wear that.

What I find fucked up about the reception towards Transformers One is that a lot of people seemed very invested in its success—and not its popular success, certainly not its artistic success, but rather its commercial success. They wanted this to be the first film to make one bumblebillion dollars. They wanted Hasbro to line its fucking pockets and make movies like this forever. So if you express any kind of negativity towards this film online, which might theoretically affect some other person's decision of whether or not to go and see it, which might theoretically affect the profit it makes at the cinema, which might theoretically affect the future of the franchise in some unknown way, then you're some sort of fandom traitor who oughta be executed.

If you're so worried about the future of the franchise, the fandom really isn't where you should be looking. Like, c'mon, the Transformers fandom has been good as gold, we buy so many toys. Meanwhile, Hasbro just got finished laying off around 100 employees with no warning to make their books look a bit better. Transformers designer John Warden—who'd worked at Hasbro for 25 years, is widely credited with inventing the modern paradigm of Transformers toylines, and ultimately became the creative director of both Transformers and G.I. Joe—was on assignment to a convention in the UK with the rest of the Transformers team when he heard the news. Suffice to say, he did not end up making a public appearance at the convention. With his work's health insurance snatched away without notice, he's had to resort to crowdfunding to pay his family's medical bills. As a well-known figure in the toy industry, he will presumably find a new job and land on his feet, but the same cannot be said for all 99 of the remaining employees we're told have been unceremoniously dumped.

The Binder of Revelation, which has been something of a holy grail of behind-the-scenes material for over a decade, has finally been leaked—presumably by one of these guys, presumably out of spite.

Now, I'm not going to pretend to have been paying particularly close attention to Hasbro's financials, but from where I'm sitting, it sure seems that ever since the sudden death of then-CEO Brian Goldner in 2021—credited for saving the company in 2000, and overseeing the explosive growth of its intellectual property ever since then—his replacement, Chris P. Cocks (or "Crispy Cocks", as we're all now calling him), has been dead set on gutting the company for all it's worth. The Power Rangers franchise, which the company acquired for $522 million in 2018, is dead in the water, with huge quantities of physical assets being flogged at auction for quick cash. In 2019, they acquired the entertainment company eOne for $4.0 billion, and now they're selling off the whole shebang (except the cash-printing Peppa Pig franchise) for just $500 million. I guess maybe they just fucked it big style?

Because now, Crispy Cocks has proudly announced that Hasbro is going to stop financing movies altogether.

I'm sure that in the wake of this announcement, many of those aforementioned fandom pundits will be drawing a correlation between this announcement, and the box-office figures for Transformers One, and the fact that you personally failed to convince your Mom to go see it with you or whatever. "Ah, you see! They didn't make enough of their money back, and now they're consolidating. Simple economic cause and effect. Market forces." And look, I'm not going to sit here and claim these things are wholly unrelated. Of course they're very related. But I am going to make the case that, in truth, nobody at Hasbro really cared how Transformers One did. Unless it turned out to be some pie-in-the-sky runaway hit, I don't think the future of the Transformers film franchise would've been particularly different if only the film had done better.

With Paramount, Hasbro has been making these movies and having them underperform ever since 2017's The Last Knight—which apparently lost Paramount $100 million—and that's because at the end of the day, what they're most interested in isn't making movies. It's making toy commercials. And on that level, the Transformers films have clearly been a success so far.

Now, Crispy Cocks' skinsuit fashions itself as a gamer, so he can personify Hasbro's hardcore pivot towards digital and tabletop gaming. While we await the release of the assuredly-dogshit, assuredly-hell-to-have-worked-on, assuredly-never-coming-out Transformers: Reactivate, the brand has been whored out to a procession of mobile games you've never heard of, glorified gambling machines designed to hack the monkey part of your brain with bright colors and Things You Recognize. The exact content of these games is irrelevant; all that matters is the announcement, on every single pop culture news outlet simultaneously (naturally—they're all owned by the same company, talk about Monopoly), of New Collaboration Between Transformers And Goon Warriors Free To Download Now. Your daily, weekly, bi-annual reminder to think about that thing you can buy.

That's all any of this stuff is.

All these words spilled about what a good movie Transformers One is, and how bad it is, and why the marketing failed it, and what the next one might be like, and- none of it mattered! It does not matter. From the beginning, this movie was always going to be too preoccupied with its own mercenary interests to be something anyone would ever be able to seriously talk about as a work of art, even corporate art. The actual content of the movie is irrelevant; I've spent very little of this review talking about it, because there's nothing there to talk about. It is the mere fact of the movie's existence that serves its purpose. Like the Optimus Prime Fortnite skin, it's enough for it to occupy our attention.

Maybe that's why they staggered the film's release date: because some marketing exec watched the rough cut and realised, if everyone saw it at once, we'd be done talking about it within a fortnight. And in ten years' time, after it has been paraded around whichever streaming services survive 'til then, and nearly every last cent of revenue has been squeezed out of it, the kids will be able to watch it on YouTube with ad breaks, and decide what they want for Christmas.

To the Transformers fans reading this, I am begging you, unless you happen to own shares in Hasbro for some fucking reason, to disabuse yourself of the feeling that you owe any kind of loyalty to a toy franchise. It shouldn't matter to you one jot how Transformers One did in theatres. The people who actually make the product you care about, the friendly faces paraded before you on livestreams and press tours, don't see this money anyway—they too are merely assets, who can be fired and replaced with cheaper, inferior equivalents.

I'm sure many of you will have, from the very start, seen this review for the foolish endeavour it is. I've wasted all this time criticising Transformers One for its lack of artistic vision, when the truth is, Transformers One is playing an entirely different game. Like the Disney Channel running "Fishy Facts!" segments to subliminally get kids interested in fish a full year and a half before the release of Finding Nemo, this is not a product—it's an ad for a product.

...

Okay I'll be honest, I don't entirely love where this review has ended up. It ends on kind of a "bummer note", I guess you could say. Flashing back to sections I. and II., I feel like things started out so fun. We had that whole bit at the start where I was telling you about the Transformers, remember that? We learned so much together. And there were even a few moments where I was able to express some kind of sincere joy and appreciation over this thing that I supposedly adore so much. Sure, I did a lot of complaining, but it was fun complaining, right? It had like, a sarcastic edge to it, sort of.

What happened? Why am I suddenly talking like I want to cut someone's head off? As I grow more bitter, I type this essay with increasing difficulty. The massive gun that's sprouted from my forearm keeps colliding with my monitor.

Hasbro descends from on high to reward @TFHypeGuy, a grown-ass adult who has spent untold unpaid hours fearlessly replying to every single viral tweet to tell people to go see the film, somehow netting himself 80,000 followers in the process, with a crate of toys, which was probably his end goal from the start. He and I duel. We trade blow after blow. Finally, he clobbers me with a Walmart-exclusive light-up Ultimate Energon Optimus Prime figure. "It didn't have to end this way," he says. Then he banishes me to the surface world to think on my sins.

VII. The Wrong Trousers 👖 | Train Chase Scene 🚂 | Wallace & Gromit

When Eric Pearson came onto the project,

It was late middle of the game. They had a script that had the outline of the story, which is still very much the structural bones of the story now. But what I found interesting about animation is there are certain things that were far along in the process. The train escape to the surface was very far along, so that was just kind of locked. Maybe you could change a line here or there. Meanwhile, the opening, the whole first 10 minutes, was all storyboards and sketches, which changed a bunch of times.

And I do think that's a really difficult position for a scriptwriter to be in. Sure, the parts of the screenplay I feel able to attribute to Pearson, I wasn't particularly impressed by. But I think this anecdote goes to show how unnatural the constraints can be on a story like this. When you think of like, a scene that's key to Transformers One, you're probably imagining something like the Megatron/Optimus fight, or the scene in the mine—not the train scene, which is basically a bit of arbitrary connective tissue bridging the two main locations in the film.

Josh Cooley, the film's director, the face of the film on the press circuit from a creative standpoint, came onboard after five years of previous development work was already done. Writers Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, who originally pitched the film and presumably wrote the early drafts of the story, might have already left the project by that point. Aaron Archer and Rik Alvarez, the creative forces behind the Binder of Revelation, left Hasbro years before the film was even pitched. It's no wonder to me that the final result feels incoherent, disjointed, and oddly stilted. It's certainly no wonder that nobody at Hasbro today really seems to care about the film; it's not their baby. If any of the people credited with bringing the project to completion had been given full creative freedom to make whatever Transformers movie they wanted, it would've looked completely different.

Luckily, there are still plenty of areas of the franchise where creators have just been allowed to go ham. Over in Japan, TRIGGER has taken a modest budget for a music-video and produced one of the most visually-striking bits of animation in the franchise, a true love-letter to all the weird parts of its forty-year history. And in America, comic creator Daniel Warren Johnson is halfway through his Eisner-winning new run on the title, which is the kind of thing I would basically recommend to anyone without caveats as being a phenomenal story, period. If that comic can be said to be an advert for anything, it's for Skybound's other, nowhere-near-as-good comic series, or for the unofficial unlicensed copyright-infringing Magic Square Optimus Prime toy Daniel Warren Johnson apparently used as reference the whole time.

I dunno, maybe Hasbro stepping back from financing these films is a good thing, in the long run. Maybe we can do without Transformers movies for a while. And however many years down the line, maybe Paramount or some other studio will put together a new team of talent, and they'll get to do whatever it is they want. And maybe the movie they make will be the one that knocks everyone's socks off.

Truly, I don't know where the road leads from here. It hasn't been built yet. It could turn out to go anywhere.

If you made it this far, I hope some of what I've said has been entertaining or interesting. Thanks for reading!

Time to for me to come clean. There is one other reason why I've waited so long to release this review... and that's because I have a special announcement to make. Last month I set myself a little challenge: to write something that's at least as long as this review, but which isn't another negative-nancy tirade. It's a story.

The working title is "Ice Road Transformers". It's like an episode of that one reality TV show about Canadians driving trucks across frozen lakes—except the truck is Optimus Prime.

Early reviews say it's good! It'll be going through several rounds of revisions, to turn it into a well-oiled machine, hopefully in time for a seasonally-appropriate wide release in February. I'm very excited for you to be able to read it. You can follow me here or on Bluesky to be the first to find out when it's ready!

I'd like to thank my friends Jo and Umar for their work interviewing Cooley and di Bonaventura during the film's press circuit, along with Viv, Callum, and Omar for allowing me to enjoy this film much more than I otherwise might have. I wouldn't have been able to express many of my feelings about this movie nearly so cogently if not for the conversations I had with them. Additional thanks go to Chris McFeely, as his Transformers: The Basics videos (linked throughout this essay) refreshed my memory on a lot of the Aligned stuff, sparing me from having to read The Covenant of Primus again.

[vanteguccir]

── ୨୧ !　𝗚𝗔𝗟𝗔𝗫𝗬 𝗚𝗜𝗥𝗟

　　　　　　　　　　𝒎𝒂𝒕𝒕 𝒔𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒏𝒊𝒐𝒍𝒐 x reader

SUMMARY: Where Matt has a crush on Y/N, an influencer extremely well-known in the USA, but when she goes to the Zach Sang Show, Matt discovers that she also has a crush on him. When the two meet at a party, how will Matt react?

REQUESTED?: Yes, from anon.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: That is my work, I DON'T authorize any plagiarism! | English isn't my first language, so I'm sorry if there's any grammar error.

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"Hi beautiful people! I'm Zach, and that is Dan, and welcome to the studio for the first time after many requests, Y/N!" Zach began with his standard intro, the camera moving away from him and onto Y/N, who was sitting comfortably on the couch facing her microphone.

"Hii, wow... I've lost count of how many nights I've spent hours watching your show, Zach, so being here is an honor! Thank you so much for having me." Y/N spoke with a smile on her face, her eyes shining with excitement.

"It's amazing to have you here too. Believe me, the honor is ours." Zach replied, smiling just as much. "But tell me, how is life? Crazy, I imagine." He asked with a smile, taking in Y/N's features.

"Don't remind me, literally crazy! As I have Instagram, Tiktok, and YouTube to manage and post content every day, at least in one, I haven't had time to stop much, you know?" Y/N spoke while gesturing with her hands. "But it's been incredible. Over the past five years, I've loved every moment of it."

"I can only imagine, especially since you have a knack for fashion too, right? I see you a lot at events." Zach commented, taking a sip of his water.

"Yes, exactly. My content is a little bit of everything: humor, fashion, relationships, makeup, Q&A, day-to-day life, etc. I like this really mixed stuff." The girl let out a laugh when she finished.

"Yes, I think that's what attracts so many audiences to you too, right? You have subjects that cover all audiences." Zach commented, receiving a nod from the influencer. "And tell me a little about how it all started, from the beginning."

"Well, I've always been a person who loved to talk, my friends at school joked that if I sat next to an unknown person for ten minutes, within the first minute I would come up with a random topic and start a conversation." Y/N smiled when she heard Zach comment that that was something super interesting and traits of an extroverted person. "Plus, I've always liked having an audience and social media. I had Musical.ly many years ago, where I posted short makeup and hair videos."

"Wow, Musical.ly, I completely forgot it existed." Dan commented, laughing along with the other two.

"Yes, it looks like it was a crazy dream." Zach nodded, glancing briefly at Dan before returning his gaze to Y/N. "I saw some videos from that time. You once mentioned that you took makeup courses, right?"

"Yes, I took makeup courses at Make-up Forever Academy while I was at school. It's always been my favorite hobby." Y/N said, as she stirred her Starbucks coffee cup, her drink still warm. "And on Musical.ly, I only posted that, but over time, the app lost popularity, and people started looking for me on Instagram. At the time, my Instagram was pretty empty, I didn't post almost anything there, just some also makeup things. But then, I needed to change that since Instagram gave me a lot more tools to create more expansive content. It was the moment that I completely lost my shyness with cameras, you know? That's when I started talking about other things besides makeup and hair, and the audience grew. Famous people started following me as well, I remember I panicked about that." She paused, laughing, accompanied by Zach, who was listening intently.

"And my followers started asking for a YouTube channel, where I could make longer videos and each one about something specific. I thought a lot about it, but I took courage and created my channel, and it totally exploded, almost all of my followers from Instagram started to follow me there, but on YouTube the number of people doubled."

"It caught the attention of the public who only used YouTube, right?" Zach commented, nodding in understanding.

"Exactly! And I was just with this two social medias for a few years, until I discovered Tiktok, that's when I discovered that it was like an improved Musical.ly, and that a lot of people made content just on it. I remember thinking: why not? I was already fully on the Internet, and it wouldn't hurt to have another social network. The audience continued to grow, and there were shares all the time, likes, and comments, and with that, we reached 16 million subscribers on YouTube and 6 million followers on Tiktok and Instagram." Y/N finished, her face showing a smile as she momentarily remembered her long journey there.

"Your history with the Internet is truly incredible, you are one of the biggest influencers in the United States and well known all over the world, having started at 15 years old and fighting to grow and gain your own space." Zach praised, clapping playfully as Y/N waved her hand like it was nothing, her face turning red in embarrassment. "But you mentioned a subject I wanted to bring up: celebrities." He said, laughing when he saw the girl take on a fearful look.

"Jesus, what are you going to say?" Y/N asked with a smile on her face, she had already opened up her life and tastes so much to her audience, that she knew she would definitely have said something about celebrities that she didn't remember at that moment, but that Zach would bring up.

"There was a video on Tiktok where you were answering a question from a fan, who had asked what your favorite YouTube channel and your celebrity crush were." Zach began, approaching the microphone to his face. Y/N widened her eyes, taking a sip of her drink to hide her expression, vaguely remembering the video in question. "And you answered that your favorite channel was the Sturniolo Triplets and that your celebrity crush was Matt Sturniolo, is that correct?"

"Oh my God." Y/N muttered, hiding her red cheeks in her hands. "Yes, it is." She let out a nervous laugh. "The triplets are super funny, I just love their content! I'm not going to lie, I've never missed a video of them. I saw that Chris came here this year, right? I think their journey with YouTube is incredible." She said, Zach nodding as he confirmed that Chris had been on the show recently.

"They really are incredible people. Their content is gold. But, is Matt still your crush?" He asked again, looking at her with a smile on his face.

"You're not going to let this go, are you?" Y/N asked as she smiled sheepishly. "Yes, he's still my crush. I mean, have you seen that man? He's hot, has an incredible sense of humor, and is kind! Just perfect, just no more than Harry Styles." She counted the characteristics mentioned with the fingers of her right hand, laughing when she mentioned the British singer, trying to take all attention away from her admission about her crush.

"Yeah, guys, it seems like if you're not Matt, or Harry, you don't enter Y/N's list." Zach joked, looking at the camera, receiving laughs from the other two there.

　　　　　༻﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡༺

The triplets were lying on the sofa in their home, each in a corner of the space, while using their phones. Sounds of tiktoks and reels echoed through the walls.

Nick was on his tiktok, browsing his For You, watching the millions of edits that his fans made for them, some videos of other subjects appearing from time to time. The boy let out a laugh when he saw an edit of himself with clips taken from the last car video, double-clicking on the screen to give it a like before scrolling his thumb up, Y/N's voice suddenly sounding from his phone.

Nick took his thumb away from the screen momentarily, paying attention to what one of his favorite influencers was saying, smiling as he heard her tell a little about her history with social media.

His smile was replaced by wide eyes seconds later when the girl's comment about his channel with his brothers and about Matt sounded.

"What?" He asked loudly, catching the attention of Matt and Chris, who had confused looks on their faces.

"What what?" Chris asked, locking the screen of his phone and tossing it to the side.

Matt only looked up from his own phone screen momentarily, returning his attention to his Instagram feed.

"You know Y/N?" Nick asked, his eyes darting from Matt to Chris quickly.

"That super famous influencer that Matt has had a crush on for years? Yes." Chris agreed, nodding his head as he adjusted himself in his seat, receiving a slap on the arm from his brother, who lowered his cell the moment the girl's name left Nick's lips.

"She knows who we are, and not only that, she talked about us on Zach's show." The redhead said with wide eyes.

"Zach Sang?" Matt asked, receiving a nod from Nick, who got up and walked closer to his brothers, sitting between the two and raising his phone, increasing the screen brightness and volume before hitting play on the tiktok again.

The video was a compilation of the show's favorite moments with the influencer. The triplets watched in silence until they got to the part where Y/N talked about her channel, also confirming her crush on Matt. Chris quickly turned his face to Matt with his mouth open in shock.

"Matt, THE Y/N has a crush on you." Nick reinforced, pausing the video and turning to his brother, who had wide eyes as he looked at the phone that had Y/N's face on the screen, a disbelief look on his own face.

"That's crazy." He muttered, shaking his head in denial. "It's not possible that my longtime crush has a crush on me, too. That only happens in movies. Right?" Nick rolled his eyes at the comment.

"It might be crazy, but it's not a lie. She wouldn't talk about our channel and reveal her crush on you if it was a lie or a joke." Chris commented as he fixed the hood of his sweatshirt, earning a nod from Nick.

"Next week, there will be that huge and super chic party for the biggest influencers and YouTubers in the United States here in LA, and we received an invitation. I'm absolutely sure she will be there. It would be a great opportunity to make contact with other YouTubers and get to know her, maybe even ask her to participate in a video with us." Nick reminded his brothers of the invitation, locking his phone screen and looking at the two.

"Are you sure about that?" Matt asked, an expression of uncertainty on his face. Out of the three, he was the least fond of parties, although none of them were very fond of it either.

"It would be great for the channel, Matt." Chris reinforced, shrugging. "It wouldn't hurt to try. If we don't like it, we can leave right away. But meeting Y/N seems amazing to me right now, and it would be a great opportunity for you."

"Okay."

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"Are you guys sure about this?" Matt asked after turning off the key in the ignition, keeping his hands on the wheel as he looked ahead, his ears picking up the loud sound coming from the party.

"Matt, it's just going to be a test, okay? It's interesting for us to make more contacts." Nick responded from the backseat, resting his hands on the sides of the front seats as he looked in the rearview mirror, waiting for Matt to look back.

Matt looked up, focusing on Nick through the mirror, who had a neutral expression. The boy shifted his gaze to Chris beside him, who was already looking at him.

Chris offered a reassuring smile, taking his left hand to Matt's right shoulder, squeezing the area.

Matt exhaled deeply as he mentally prepared himself. It had been years since he had attended such a big party.

It didn't take long for the triplets to get out of the vehicle. Matt locked the doors before they started their walk to the mansion where the loud sound of pop music was coming from.

Nick quickly pulled from the pocket of his jeans the invitation he had received in the mail that stated his and his brothers' names on expensive-looking paper and beautiful writing, holding it ready to present to the security guards at the front.

After being granted entry, the three entered the house, stopping for a few seconds at the beginning of the living room while their eyes traveled over the people there, recognizing some of their social media.

The mansion was extremely chic, decorated with golden tones and diamond chandeliers, long marsala red curtains covered the huge windows and columns that resembled those of Greek temples were spread throughout the space, along with two staircases in each hemisphere of the room with wooden handrails and a red carpet that led upstairs.

Youtubers, influencers, and celebrities filled the space, talking or dancing, some drinking, dressed in extravagant and expensive clothes.

Chris surreptitiously pointed to a specific point, making his brothers look there.

"That's Y/N, right?" He asked, earning a nod from Nick.

To Matt, the earth seemed to have stopped spinning, and the world seemed to have become static. The celebrities in the room suddenly stopped, the sound became muffled, and the smell of drinks and perfume disappeared. His breathing seemed to catch, and his throat felt dry.

Y/N looked perfect, having opted for an all-silver outfit: a mid-length skirt with a thigh-high slit from Diesel draped in synthetic silver along with a white crop top also from Diesel adorned her body. A pair of thin silver high heels decorated her feet, complemented by a silver Diesel bag and jewelry in the same color.

She looked like she came out of one of those galaxy movies, but much prettier than its characters.

Matt could have watched her from afar for seconds or minutes, just admiring her beauty and every detail of herself, but it still seemed to be too quick for his liking. Nick woke him from his hypnosis with a weak slap to his chest, getting his attention.

"You definitely don't know how to disguise it." He commented, rolling his eyes.

"Shut up, Nick." Matt responded quickly, frowning and briefly looking at Y/N again, before turning to his brothers. "I'm going to get something to drink, are you coming?" He asked, needing a cold soda at that moment.

Chris nodded, answering for himself and Nick, following his middle brother to the bar that was in the separation between the kitchen and the living room.

The space was extremely chic, a circle-shaped bar with a gold colored counter decorated with details in yellow and navy blue tiles, giving an air of wealth. At the front there were stools with synthetic gold upholstery and at the back, after the space where the bartender circulated, there was a large circular and high table filled with all types of drinks, including the most expensive ones.

Matt leaned his hips against the counter, choosing not to sit down, and glanced briefly at the bartender.

Nick sat on the stool next to him and Chris sat next to Nick, the two starting a conversation about a subject that Matt didn't pay attention to, his attention focused on the people around him, or rather, on one specific person.

His blue eyes went back and forth to Y/N's silhouette, admiring her from afar as he wished to be by her side, accompanying her and being the person she was talking to.

The girl next to Y/N and who had been talking to her since the moment Matt entered the room walked away, saying something while blowing an air kiss to the influencer, who smiled in response and turned around, facing where Matt was, but not looking directly at him, running her eyes around the people while taking sips of her drink, probably alcoholic.

Matt took a deep breath as he gathered his courage, straightening up and starting to take long steps towards the girl, crossing the room and passing among the famous people there.

"Matt, what do you want to- Matt?" Nick began, turning to where Matt was and stopping mid-sentence when he saw that his brother was no longer there.

"He's on his way to get his pot of gold." Chris commented, poking Nick with the index finger of his left hand and pointing at Matt, who was already approaching Y/N.

The brunette stopped next to Y/N, turning so that he was also facing the people around and shoulder to shoulder with her, a few centimeters between them. His hands were in the front pockets of his jeans as he breathed slowly, trying to calm his nerves.

And then her voice sounded like it was the easiest thing she'd done all day. Her voice was silky in person, so inducing that it sent goosebumps across Matt's skin.

"You were working up the courage to say hi..." She lifts the glass, taking another sip, her lips shiny with gloss and bright red lipstick, her tongue escaping her mouth momentarily, licking the residue of the drink there. "Or would you just stare at me all night?" She turned around, facing him.

Matt almost choked on his own saliva as he heard Y/N confirm that not only had she noticed he was there, but she had also noticed that he had been looking at her this entire time. A weight settled in his chest. Perhaps it was shame or lust due to the way she said that without reservation.

"I didn't mean to disturb you. You seemed quite engaged in your conversation." He made up an excuse, knowing full well that he could have gone to the girl from the moment he arrived, but his fear of what would happen held him back.

"Engaged? In a conversation about who here has the most money and fame?" Y/N threw back, furrowing her eyebrows.

Matt looked around them, stopping his eyes briefly on the girl who had previously spoken to Y/N and who was now watching the people with a gaze torn between judgment and desire. A loud laugh escaped his lips as he shook his head in denial, the pettiness of some people impressed him.

"For what it's worth, you're the only famous person here that interests me." Matt commented, his blue eyes focusing on Y/N's face, analyzing her closely. An expression of satisfaction came over his face as he saw a red color take over her cheeks.

"You flatter me, Matt." Y/N looks back at him, their eyes meeting for a few long seconds, before hers travel across Matt's face, mentally taking note of every detail she could notice in the few seconds.

The boy smiled arrogantly when he saw her eyes on him, receiving an eye roll in response.

"Do you like what you see?" He asked, his voice taking a deeper tone and his pupil dilating as his lips stretched into a smirk.

"Don't let it go to your head." Y/N responded as she scoffed playfully, allowing the beginning of a smirk to emerge on the right corner of her lip.

At that moment, Matt felt like he could do something, anything, that would make her smile like that again or smile a bigger smile. He thought of a million possibilities of what he could say to cause that reaction in her, longing to feel the butterflies in his stomach again.

"You look beautiful tonight." Matt praised, his blue eyes traveling over Y/N's body momentarily, returning to her eyes. "Not that you just look beautiful tonight. You always look beautiful. But today you..." The boy tried to justify, getting caught on his words. "Look perfect."

A sigh escaped his lips, an apologetic look taking over his eyes as his right hand scratched the back of his neck lightly, feeling like a complete idiot for getting tangled up in front of the girl he has a crush on.

"I'm sorry, this isn't how I pictured myself meeting you." He groaned, looking at the ground in shame, hoping something would surge and save him.

"So you imagined meeting me?" Y/N smiled, feeling arrogant. She bit her bottom lip, feeling smug as she watched Matt blush and his eyes widen. "I'm kidding. You look beautiful tonight, too." Y/N let out a low laugh, returning the previous compliment, running her tongue between her lips, wetting them as her eyes traveled over Matt, pausing lingeringly on his exposed collarbone with the tank top he was wearing, the necklaces that decorated his neck made her mouth water.

Before Matt could even open his mouth to answer her, the sound of footsteps approached, catching both their attention. Y/N tore her eyes away from Matt's blue ones and looked ahead, seeing the same girl from before approaching again, holding herself back from instantly rolling her eyes.

The boy realized that the conversation would change direction and that, perhaps, he would no longer be included in it. A subtle sigh escaped his lips, and he tucked his hands into the pockets of his jeans again, looking at Y/N briefly, realizing that she was already looking back.

"I'm sorry." She asked, pressing her painted lips into a thin line before a beautiful, wide smile replaced it. "Text me on Instagram. You will be my priority to respond." Y/N spoke before being gently pulled away by her "friend", turning her face back quickly and sending the brunette a wink before looking forward again.

Matt watched her from behind as her high-heeled legs took long, quick steps away from him, a goofy smile taking over his features. He would definitely send that text.

[lady-raziel]

long reaction to the update

ok. so they put out an update video! since i've been commentating for the last three days i might as well subject you all to more of my thoughts today.

main takeaway: this was a good apology video. i mean it. short and to the point, no overproduction, heartfelt and honest (and not a ukelele to be seen. thank god.) they took ownership of the situation, apologized, and restated how much they value their relationship with the fandom.

their solution is to make the watcher tv platform into kind of an iteration of patreon where content is available for early access before it is released onto youtube later. this is clearly a better option than paywalling everything for everyone. i'm not sure what the relative breakdown of costs turns out to be when you compare how much they were making on patreon after the platform took their cut VS how much it costs in overhead to run and maintain their own platform (how much it costs annually to contract via Vimeo, essentially). but i'm sure that's part of the calculation.

all things considered, that does seem like the best option out of all the alternatives. it allows them to not completely abandon any of the pans they have simmering over the fire for the time being. i don't think i ever thought they were going to just say "oops, forget about the streaming thing! let's pretend that never happened!" because at this point they've invested quite a lot of time and money into it, and i don't disagree that keeping it in some iteration may help them make up some of the funds they're lacking.

i would say, it's fine to keep the streamer. this is one of the ok outcomes, all things considered-- but if they're going to do it, they've GOT to do it smart from this point forward. listen to both the fans and the consultants intimately. both are going to have valid points, and both are going to be right. listening to too much of either side will sink this thing because each has motives and expertise that the other doesn't. if the fans say $6 is too much, listen to them-- but have conversations with business consultants about how much you realistically need to charge to make things work.

also, i'd use this whole situation as a learning experience. watcher is a young company, and it's literally inevitable that mistakes will happen. what's different is that the watcher crew haven't really been in a position before where they've been on the receiving end of the internet-angry-justice-hammer to this extent. it's one thing to watch it happen to others, but it's a position of extreme privilege (and a bit of hubris) to think "but that won't happen to me, because i'm built different." naw, man-- two things in life are inevitable: death and fuckups. the callout posts get us all in the end.

what's really important is that they use this as a wakeup call that even the most loyal fandoms will only follow you so far to the cliff's edge, and you don't want to push that. you have to strike a balance between the passion projects that you think are worthy and the stuff that maybe doesn't excite you as much anymore but the people want to see. a little fanservice keeps the lights on, as unfair as that might seem. i'm gonna make 50 markiplier choccy milk memes just so i can make one niche political joke once and a while for 6 likes. it is what it is.

i'd also use this as a chance to take a very careful look at company structure and finances. it's not fun to do and nobody likes it. trust me-- this is hard whether you're a single adult trying to pay the bills or the freaking US government (speaking from experience on both-- i have to read the president's budget for work frequently). but you all have to ask hard questions about the ratio of creative staff you take on VS staff for administrative and other business roles, as well as the costs and benefits of everything you spend money on. how many staff members are essential to location shoots? can this video be shot with 2 cameras instead of 3 and thus you don't need another cameraperson? you might even have to come to the decision that instead of pitching a new show it makes more sense to use those funds to hire your essential non-creative roles or contract firms or freelancers.

paying staff a fair wage with benefits speaks highly of what watcher wants their values to be. it's hard to find such a position in a creative role and still actually get to work on things you care about. but it would be much worse if watcher didn't make realistic decisions about finances and it lead to the death of the company and everyone losing their jobs. the whole watcher company can work, in my opinion, but not without some sacrifices. they're going to have to run it more like a business and less like a youtube-channel-turned-business in the future if they want to survive.

last thing i'll add is that while i do think this was a good apology video, i still think they hurt themselves by not putting out some sort of statement on Friday or Saturday just to say that they were formulating a response. As i've said in other posts, it's ok and in fact beneficial to not make a kneejerk reaction, but it's also very important to communicate that you SEE what's happening. you SEE what people are saying and THAT'S why you need more time to respond. saying nothing and leaving the angry public to wonder if you dropped your phone off the Hoover Dam or just don't care? that's a fumble. it's a common mistake companies make in a crisis, but that doesn't mean it doesn't erode trust fast.

this could have been handled better in many ways. we see that, and i'm glad watcher says they see that too. crucial going forward is taking all this and patching the errors that caused all this to fall apart and learning from the experience.

tbh at this point what i'm most sad about is that the watcher crew have probably been too stressed out and upset to appreciate some of the absolute bangers people have been laying down to clown on them. i think if it wasn't about them they might be touched by the collective attitude and creative spirit. /j

[youkaiyume]

Alright, so I've been a fan of Shane, Ryan and even Steven since their buzzfeed days and I've been watching this whole thing with Watcher moving their content over to their own streaming service debacle.

Like most ppl, I think it's a poor business move to alienate your fans like this, but I've been thinking on it more from maybe a financial perspective. I'm wondering how many people actually signed up for it. I saw a tiktok advertising expert say that the conversion rate for ads--meaning the number of ppl to actually buy something when they see an ad is about 1-5%. Like, right now they have about 2.8 million subscribers. And even though they've lost about 50K since and counting, they probably anticipated some loss. I'm sure they've mathed that if they just get at least like 100K conservatively out of their nearly 3 million fanbase to sign up, they'd be able to make $600K a month from their streaming service at six bucks a pop each month.

Maybe that's worth it? I'm not exactly sure how much they were making before. Ppl say they had 11K subscribers on patreon before but that's just their member total. Actual paid members was about 5K. But despite the controversy, their patreon member count has actually gone up. Today it sits at 12K members total with nearly 6K members paying. So they're making at least $30K-70K+ a month currently on patreon based on their offered tiers. not sure how much they were making on ad revenue alone or sponsors cuz I'm not sure how that stuff works on youtube. But maybe by their own accounting they think the loss of followers was worth it if they can hang on to that small, loyal but paying minority.

Another youtuber has pointed out that if you have a sponsor for a video and it's a one off, it can pay more. Up to $35K. So if that is the peak and they release 1 video a week, so 4 a month would be like 140K a month on sponsor money. And youtube pays about $10 per 1000 views a video, and they average 1 mil each video. So about $40K a month on views. So we can guess that they made about $180K a month currently on youtube (patreon and merch sales not included).

Honestly, if they can reach the goal of 1-5% of their subscribers converting to their streaming platform, yeah they probably would make more money in the long run. IF they can somehow manage to retain as well as grow those number of subscribers on their new platform. And don't forget, they don't plan to delete their current videos on their youtube channel so they'll still be earning revenue from those videos. We'll have to see I guess given how much goodwill they've lost with their audience.

Tbh, I am all for them trying to get paid more for their work but I also think they could have transitioned much differently, like only putting some exclusive content on their own platform while also posting free shows to youtube. Or maybe delaying releases for a week or a month for youtubers. or cutting back your production costs if it's really killing you cuz everyone has pointed out they liked the ghoul boys when it was just a black screen with text scrolling by saying "wheeze." Only time will tell if this move paid off for them.

But I'm not super knowledgeable on how the entire youtube thing works so if someone has some insight, feel free to weigh in.

[twig-tea]

With 23.5 finally coming out, the people are rejoicing at finally getting a high profile gl from GMMTV. But there have already been several gls airing this year, including my fav TsukuTabe, that have been flying under the radar with fandom, and in general there are more gls already out there than folks seem to think. I just know you have a list of all the gls we should be watching, please share with the class!

Thank you for the ask! How did you know I had a draft of GL recs to make at some point? [Trick question, I mentioned it to you.]

It may seem like I'm out here hating on GL because i've made a couple of negative reviews of recently airing series recently (Love Senior and Chaser Game W in case you're curious) but I actually have lots of GL that I love and that I wish were better known! Thanks for sending this ask so I am inspired to actually finish it! I've limited myself to series so that I could keep the list and this post to a reasonable length. Where possible I've listed where you can find each of these and included a link. And I've included an 'elevator pitch' summary but I am NOT in marketing for a reason, so please don't roast me too hard for my terrible comparisons. Alright, enough waffling!

Twig's GL Rec List

She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat S1 & 2 (Japan, 2022 & 2024, both seasons fansubbed by @furritsubs; if you need help accessing this show feel free to DM me!)

Elevator pitch: Our Dining Table with lesbians and an even slower burn. Watch for beautiful food, acespec rep, mental health and therapy rep

What might turn some off: Extremely low heat, and quite slow-moving; warning for a disordered eating and family trauma plot (v gently handled)

Let's start with the one you've already mentioned. This is a heartwarming slice-of-life slow burn in which an autismspec-coded woman who likes to eat is invited by her neighbour, a femme acespec woman who loves to cook, to come and eat her food. It starts from a very practical place (when you love making food you need someone to help eat it), but their relationship grows as they spend more time together. The story follows them as they both move towards self-actualization in several ways: as a lesbian, as asexual, at work, with their families, with their friends, with each other. This show is so careful to say the important words aloud. And there is so much delicious cooking! Each episode highlights a particular recipe, and the food porn is real. Do not watch while hungry, but definitely watch. The found famiy vibes in this one one are also immaculate.

She Makes My Heart Flutter (Korea, 2022, YouTube)

Elevator pitch: Younger lesbian friend group tries to help out (slightly) older lesbian bar owner with mixed success. I can't think of a good BL equivalent, The Moment Since feels the closest with its similar bartender/patron romance

What might turn some off: Comedic tone; short runtime; struggles with being closeted

This is a gem of a miniseries about a bar owner and an interior designer who smoulder at one another while an intrepid group of younger bar regulars (including the bar owner's neice) meddle. This series is really cute, solid, and full of sapphics! Once again found family vibes are immaculate (you may sense a theme in my faves). Run don't walk.

Fragrance of the First Flower (Taiwan, 2021, GagaOOLala)

Elevator pitch: Right-person-wrong-time/second chance romance; tonally is a little like We Best Love 2: Fighting Mr. 2nd but with an ambiguous ending.

What might turn you off: Medium heat, second chance romance means they break up once, internalized homophobia, adultery/cheating, at one point there's a creepy dude, child with autism (depicted well), ambiguous ending

At its core this is a story of a woman who can't stop getting in the way of her own happiness. This series is a little more sad than the rest of this rec list but I couldn't not include it because this relationship is so poignant. Plus there's a s2 that supposedly is to come out in 2024 so maybe we'll get our happy ending after all?

Love Greater Than or Equal to 70 Degrees C (Korea, 2019, YouTube)

Elevator pitch: Ingredients but with lesbians staring at one another over beautiful tea pairings! What more could you ask for?

What might turn you off: Low heat; short runtime; ambiguous ending; like Ingredients this is essentially a long ad for the café it's filmed at.

This is a Korean miniseries about passionate tea sommeliers making really fancy tea while staring at one another a LOT. Perfect sapphic representation, 10/10 no notes. This one packs a lot of the drama tropes into its short runtime, so even though it's short it's full of butterfly-inspiring moments.

Sleep With Me (Philippines, 2022, GagaOOLala/iWantTFC/Netflix w/VPN set to Philippines)

Elevator pitch: The Truth About Cats and Dogs but the self esteem issues are handled without catfishing. BL equivalent: Hmmm. Closest I can think of is Gaya Sa Pelikula.

What might turn you off: There's some ableism (treated as such) in this show; Open ending.

Stellar GL between a late night radio DJ and an insomniac who listens to her show. One of the main couple is a wheelchair user and the show tackles ablelism and navigating disability in relationship as well as feelings of inadequacy in a relationship and how that manifests as interpersonal conflict.

Our Relationship Ended Before it Began (Korea, 2022, YouTube)

Elevator Pitch: Along the lines of I Cannot Reach You; the show gives both perspectives and they are held back by queer angst.

What might turn you off: No kiss (but they make it very clear both want to kiss), internalized homophobia

Really sweet miniseries about having a crush and being afraid of being hurt so you don't actually make a move. I really like the way the girl who has not dated a girl before defaults to gender roles and it throws the more experienced lesbian lol I also really like the way this show makes clear that both of them are waiting for a kiss, and that if you get in your head about things, it can get in the way of your own happiness!

Pearl Next Door (Philippines, 2020, Youtube)

Elevator Pitch: Gameboys but with lesbian vloggers.

What might turn you off: Love triangle, lots of teasing but low heat in the end, a lot of (good) conversations about mental health issues, ambiguous ending

This is the GL spinoff to Gameboys, starring Pearl from Gameboys. Pearl ends up being fought over by the two gorgeous women in the gif, an old love and a new. I love the queer friendships in this story as much as the relationships. I will say it's an open ending (that felt a bit like the showrunners didn't want to decide between ships) and definitely the love triangle features prominently but even in the face of these aspects that would normally turn me off a series I had a good time. The characters and interpersonal conflicts feel very real, and are allowed to be complex even when the show tone is comedic.

Dear Uranus (Taiwan, 2021, YouTube)

Elevator Pitch: Schoolgirl ensemble GL; a little like My School President but without the singing.

What might turn you off: Short runtime; ambiguous ending; a little bit of bullying; very standard romance trope execution

The first Taiwanese GL miniseries, this series was produced by a Taiwanese lesbian couple (Rabbit & Wolf)! Lots of excellent drama tropes, and incredibly gorgeous women (I think the entire watching audience fell in love with Erol.

Lily Fever (Korea, 2015, YouTube)

Elevator pitch: Complete crack; YYY but with more kissing and frankly an even less coherent story.

What might turn you off: The lack of coherent plot; less a romance and more a very thirsty lesbian kissing everyone she can

This miniseries is utter chaos. Nothing really makes sense, it's all just random excuses to cause very suggestive moments (and kissing) to happen. I love so much how this series depicts women being so absolutely thirsty for one another (and yes that date isn't a typo, this series is ~9 years old). Not an "happy ever after" ending but it really isn't that kind of story.

Chasing Sunsets (Philippines, 2020, YouTube)

Elevator pitch: Ocean Likes Me with lesbians. Resort romance with a mental health twist.

What might turn you off: Some of the mental health stuff gets intense, this was filmed in 2020 so the pandemic features heavily; hopeful but slightly ambiguous ending.

A complex story from the Philippines covering mental health and finding yourself. A woman shows up to a resort and befriends one of the women running the resort. They get closer as they spend time together, and the resort owner realizes something is off. There's also a BL side couple in this series.

Show Me Love (Thai, 2023, YouTube)

Elevator pitch: A little like My Day the series with lesbians, in that they work together and fall in love and it's full of tropes

What might turn you off: The advertising for the Miss Grand competition, there is some bullying and cheating (though way less than I was expecting tbh), not a lot actually happens, the editing gets a bit wonky at the end

This is essentially a massive ad for the Miss Grand Thailand competition; this GL was produced by the same company that produces that competition, and the stars are mostly Miss Grand competitors. The main pairing were shipped in the actual competition, and the company decided to make a GL about them. It's very slow paced and low-stakes, and there are better kisses than I expected considering everything I just said about where this show came from. There are a lot of cute moments!

Girlfriend Project (Korea, 2022, YouTube)

Elevator Pitch: Love Class with lesbians

What might turn you off: One of the leads is kind of mean in that pgitail-pulling way? It ends abruptly (but happily)

This is a short miniseries about two girls paired in a class that are assigned to "date". The chemistry is chemistrying. And there is a kiss (a good kiss, and a tiptoes kiss at that!). This show also has one of my favourite tropes, in which someone who seems like a pushover stands up for themselves and their partner finds it very attractive. For the record, in this show they are watching another GL by the same company, Love Tech.

Lulu (Philippines, 2022, Vivamax/grey)

Elevator Pitch: Present Perfect with lesbians (but with a better ending).

What might turn you off: Depictions of panic attacks, brief depiction of drowning, pandemic lockdowns, illness, exes, waffling, happy but open ending (which I actually liked for this story)

Two women trying to move on from the garbage in their lives meet at the beach of a B&B (where one saves the other from drowning) and become one another's company during their escape and then something more. They both have baggage that seems determined to keep them apart even as they continue to be drawn together. In the end, they decide to stick it out and see where they end up, with no guarantee of happily ever after, which I found very sweet. Requires either a VivaMax account or searching the grey for it, but it's worth the effort (check MyDramaList comments for suggestions on where to find it). Plus one of the leads has a cactus as a pet.

Welcome to the Lesbian Bar (Korea, 2023, YouTube)

Elevator Pitch: A little like Fudanshi Bartender but without the fudanshi bartender and all of the bar patrons are lesbians lol

What might turn you off: Short, can get a little bit preachy, abrupt ending

Cute short series with different very stories every episode as different patrons visit the bar. The stories range from women who have been together for awhile, to people meeting from an online app for the first time, to someone visiting a lesbian bar for the first time; and yet the story all weaves together in a way that's satisfying though ends abruptly. Includes some solid marriage equality propaganda.

GAP the Series (Thai, 2022, YouTube)

Elevator Pitch: Kind of the vibes of Together with Me but lesbians and in an office instead of school. Angry boss falls for charming new intern and

What might turn you off: This one is the highest heat of all these recs; homophobia especially amongst family, brief depictions of death by car, brief mentions of suicide, cheating, bullying, abuse of power in the office.

A list would not be complete without this one! Honestly the plot is a bit wobbly but the show is a lot of fun. The girls are very cute, the feelings and tension builds really well between them, the friend group is excellent, and in the special we get a wedding.

---

The rest of these have caveats of one kind or another, but i couldn't leave them off a rec list, so here are the side couples and censored stories that are still worth your time anyway (I might do a separate more detailed post for these, as well as for films, one day if there's interest):

Nevertheless (GL side; Korean, 2021, Netflix) Not sure it's worth watching a whole kdrama for side lesbians? Search soljiwan on youtube. They are great. Even the Netflix account stans them. I watched this (ngl, I watched the SolJiwan cut) as it aired and was constantly braced for it to let us down but it did not! A really good friends-to-lovers story.

Friend Zone 2: Dangerous Area (GL side; Thailand, 2019, YouTube): These sapphics are messy and I love them. Decent conversation about dating someone with mental health issues in this series, and they're one of the only couples in this ensemble to get a happy ending. If you're just watching the lesbian couple (which you can, their story is pretty self-contained) you don't need to have seen s1.

Six Survivors (GL side; Japan, 2022, Viki) This show is a horror comedy and it is SO MUCH FUN. Warning for zombies and blood, but way less than you might think. One of the eponymous 6 survivors is a lesbian who keeps trying to convert them to veganism lol. If you watched Chaser Game W you'll recognize one of the actresses in this, the lead actress is from Kamisama no Ekohiiki, and one of the guys is from the prequel series His as well as I Want to See Only You! And yes there is a kiss. Also a surprising number of Mallrats references. Not for people who can't handle gore or relationships being complicated/not a "true love" story/ambiguous ending.

Kamisama no Ekohiiki (complicated question of is it GL in parts, Japan, 2021, furritsubs once again coming through to save the day) This one is a bit complex because there's bodyswap, but the girl who falls for the bodyswapped boy-in-a-girl's-body is clear that she is only interested in the girl. One of the better bodyswap stories because the bodyswap is not a secret for very long, so instead there's a lot of introspection about what gender means and who/what they are attracted to. Feels wrong to call this GL, necessarily, but it's very queer.

Couple of Mirrors (Censored GL, China, 2021, Viki) Story of a rich girl and her assassin girlfriend. This production did an amazing job getting away with what they could, just don't watch the last five minutes and we've got essentially a happy lesbian family.

Legend of Yunze (Censored GL, China, 2021, @douqi7s) Very cute very low budget xianxia miniseries with two seasons and a special. The special is set in modern times in a future lifetime so if you want a cute censored-but-clearly-a-soulmate-love-story this is the one for you. Don't be thrown off by the weird cuts/abrupt episode endings, that's in line with cdramas in general.

Led Astray by Love (Censored GL, China, 2021, @douqi7s) A very fun and adorable isekai story in which a modern day girl is transported to a wuxia novel setting and has to figure out how to get home, and gets romanced by the princess along the way.

And a few additional links for people who even more content:

My Indian sapphic webseries rec list

My suggestions for content with toms (Thai category that's similar to but not exactly the same as butch lesbians) in response to this post.

This really good GL MyDramaList list (not made by me!) lists what seems to be everything I've mentioned and about 200 more. Even I haven't seen a few of these!

My YouTube playlist of sapphic content: This includes anything I stumble across or find in my searches, a lot of music videos and random shorts as well as some microseries and miniseries that I don't consider GL but are WLW/sapphic in addition to true "GL" content. For serialized content, I add just the first ep. A complete mess, but you can trawl through to find stuff to watch, like Hetero!

SOONOTSUE: The same producers of She Makes My Heart Flutter have other short series on their channel worth checking out; if you liked that one, try Out of Breath!

Shakeshoulder: Thai YouTube producers of very pulpy (read: low budget and dramatic plots) shorts

FuFuKnows: This YouTube channel is owned by a gay Taiwanese couple that produces shorts every week, including some with GL mains and sides. These are very low budget but cover a whole swath of queer themes.

@douqi7s is a godsend providing subtitles for all kinds of content, including sapphic shorts and more series than I've listed here. Check their tumblr for links to all of their content; A Practical Guide to Being a Superstar's Assistant has one of the best setups to giving us great moments in the guise of something else so that they get past censorship I've ever seen; I also recommend The Vampires if you're into genre fiction, as well as Legend of Yunqian if you enjoyed the xianxia parts of Legend of Yunze. @wlwcatalogue did an excellent summary of many of the non-wuxia options here.

Quick pitch for the streaming platform GagaOOLala; it's affordable, has a ton of content, including a whack of GLs (originals, license series, and a ton of shorts), and is run by queer people out of Taiwan who care about good quality queer content being made and having an audience, and using the soft power from those successful series to support social change. And if you can't afford a subscription it's worth checking out what they have for free, they open up temporary free access to some things for various events throughout the year.

In searching for gifs for this post I found fellow tumblr user @drowningparty 's WLW compendium list; they've listed more series and films so check it out if you still need more content!

*wipes sweat off brow* that should be enough to be getting on with, but it's really just the tip of the iceberg! If there's something specific you want to see with sapphics let me know and I can tell you if I know it exists. Anyway, I hope this gives you and everyone else a taste of what all is out there! I of course always want more, I am serious about being a sapphic dragon hoarding every crumb i can get my lizardy hands on, but I do think what we have should also be appreciated more. If I missed one of your faves, please tell me!

[shadamyheadcanons]

Hey, it's been a while! Hope you're doing all right! Anyways, I'm curious: have you ever gotten hate from Sonamy shippers or anyone who ships other pairings involving Shadow or Amy? I've never gotten hate for shipping Sonouge, though I wonder if it's because 1. the Sonic fandom has been more respectful of different pairings lately, or 2. It's only a matter of time.

Hey! I’ve hardly faced any ship hate, at least on tumblr. I had one run-in from 2022, but that’s it. The only thing sonamy fans have sent me is positivity, like yesterday’s ask. Just friendly multishipping. I think that’s because tumblr lets you tailor your own experience so much; you can blacklist tags and content and unfollow/block whoever you want, and in my experience, people you follow will add tags to their posts if you ask. It’s not a site with an algorithm that forces topics you don’t like. Users have control.

Side note: if anyone wants me to tag something differently, feel free to DM me or send an ask, anonymous or not. I don’t mind one bit!

Tumblr’s structure and culture of “block and keep scrolling” is something I really appreciate. AO3 has it down to a science, too. The only people who are here are those who want to be here. Whenever I do see shadamy hate, it’s on sites like youtube or twitter from people who haven’t figured out where the back button on their browser is.

I think sonouge is pretty safe. I’ve never gotten hate for shipping it, either, just a few comments like, “huh, I never thought of that. Makes sense.” It doesn’t pop up often enough in the wild to aggravate anyone who doesn’t like it, not the way shadamy does, heh. I don’t think shadamy fans are pushy, exactly, but we’re...present. Whenever Shadow and Amy have a “moment,” like Shadow only checking on Amy in Dream Team, you’ll see shippy comments about it.

I also wonder if specialty blogs like ours avoid the worst of it because we’re “too far gone” to them. If you’re trying to rid the world of shadamy and sonouge, you wouldn’t start with shadamyheadcanons and sonougeheadcanons, would you? We’re a lost cause.

A large chunk of the fandom is done with petty ship hate, but Sonic’s getting new fans every day with different ships and different ideas. My advice to anyone: find a nice community to stick to and block anyone who gives you trouble.

[solstrix]

Art Journey Log: What is Artmaxxing... and Why Does it Bother Me? (02/12/2024)

There's a specific type of art content creation I've noticed, especially on Youtube, that I've been wanting to talk about for a while. I'll admit though, even now I struggle with exactly what I want to say, and how... But I really want to try, it feels important that I get out what I've been thinking.

So this thing I've noticed is something I've been calling "artmaxxing", which I define as content centered on attempting to and explaining how one can get as "good" at art as fast as possible. Here's what makes this tricky: there is nothing actually WRONG with that type of content. Sometimes, often even, it can in fact be a very helpful form of video, and suggestions from these videos can, in fact, help you improve on an objective level. But...

(I will not be pointing at any examples, as I don't really want to draw negative attention towards these creators. Just know that they are very common on Youtube's art space, and you wouldn't have to look far to find one.)

(These contentmakers also tend to be the type of creator to make "critiquing/roasting your art" videos, which I also have severe issues with, but is not the subject of this current blog post. Perhaps another time...)

But here is where my issues start. The idea that the pursuit of improvement is not only necessary, but MANDATORY, I find, can be extremely harmful to the art mindset. "Soli, that seems, like, really counterintuitive," I hear you say. And you are correct! But here's the thing: unless your artistic goals begin and end with growth for growth's sake, you will end up standing in your way. And I'm gonna dare say that, for most people, the point of making art isn't inherently just to get better at it.

Most artists start making art for a purpose. Whether it's to make comics and tell stories, make characters, to externalise the visions you are plagued with, for fashion design, or just because you liked a piece of media so much that it inspired you to create something new based on it... There are endless reasons, and they are rarely Just For Arts's Sake, or Just For Growth's Sake. So the problem is when an artist holds themselves back, keeps themselves from creating the things they actually want to make, because they see themselves as not good enough yet. They want to wait until they are better, until they've improved,

The problem is that "better" is a constantly moving goalpost, and one which, simultaneously, you may never actually get closer to. Your own improvement is not always obvious, and there is always something more to learn.

Do the thing now. Do the art you actually want to make now. Pursue what inspires you, what makes you want to create. Improvement will follow, because every time you draw, you get better. If you're struggling on a part of a drawing, find reference, look for advice as to how to improve that one part, and remain specific. Remember that you can always come back to the same work, the same themes, iterate and improve on them, your piece doesn't have to be one and done. Do not let yourself get too general, or you will stand in your own way. Ignore the voices telling you you aren't good enough yet, that you NEED to work to improve.

Don't stand in your way, and don't listen to anyone telling you want you Should or Need to be learning and doing to improve.

You are good enough right now to start being the artist you want to be.

[theshiftingwitch]

Hi again, it's the anon from a couple weeks ago. The one with the poor home life who was in a slump, despite having shifted/manifested before?

I wanted to give an update and thank you because the advice you gave me (getting out of my own way, branching out, making things fun and exciting again) has really helped me out. Since your response, I've taken some simple steps to just refresh and refocus my mindset and stop putting so much pressure on myself.

I've been using ChatGPT as a tool to just talk things out and have essentially made it my personal coach that can give advice with shifting and my general life, or be a sounding board when I just need to vent or talk about random stuff. Sort of like a journal that can reply back to you?

Using it, I've built up a new shifting routine for me to use that used meditation to induce a lucid dreaming. Also talking to it about my DRs and the power, the magic of shifting/LOA has rekindled my excitement for it AND reminded me just how powerful I am ✨

Things have really improved! I've been experiencing more mini-shifts and my dream recall is getting really good. I've even been getting into the void state much easier. Additionally I've been manifesting stuff left and right without even trying:

* Out of nowhere, I won a free diamond necklace valued at $1000 (yes really)

* Found $10 on the sidewalk, I never find free money, let alone that much.

* Received great grades for my final semester of college despite panicking all week that I'd fail and my graduation would be delayed. I got an A- for a paper I really wasn't confident in AND a B for an exam that I barely studied for, when I was barely passing the last exams for that class. And I graduated with honors, though that was a long time coming 🥱

* Caught a cold BUT I cured it in like 2 days and skipped the worst symptoms like a sore throat. (When I get sick it usually lasts twice as long and is way worse before it gets better)

* Fixed my laptop that's been having issues for the past month. Thought I'd have to replace it or get some really expensive replacement parts, instead I just had to change some settings and it took 5 minutes.

* My mental health has improved a bunch since I'm no longer letting the 3D get to me as much, I'm focused on a bright future instead of a miserable one

* My parents have been way nicer to me and more helpful lately and we haven't been fighting as much.

Also here's what I'm most proud of...

* One of my favorite YouTubers has been on hiatus for over a year, no videos, no posts, nothing (if you know, you know). So I thought a few days ago "I'm going to manifest him coming back", not seriously because it really seemed like he'd never be coming back...

Then an hour ago, I got a notification from YouTube...from his channel... because he just uploaded a return video. And funnily enough this is the thing that really got me excited (even more than the diamond necklace) because everyone was saying he'd never come back and was done with YouTube. Literally manifested this man out of his hiatus 💀

I just wanted to share my success to help motivate other people and show my appreciation to you! You didn't make all this good stuff happen for me (that was all my doing, of course), but your advice really helped me to get back on track and remember that I'm the creator of my reality 💅🏽.

Seriously, people, don't just listen to advice. Actually apply it and you will see results much faster. Thank you again!

~ J

Welcome back J!

Thank you for the update, I'm so glad things have been working out for you!

You're doing great, I'm so proud of you and I can't wait to hear more from you ❤️

I'm glad I was able to help, but like you said, you're the one who did all of this! Advice can only help as much as you're willing to follow it.

Congratulations on all of your success stories, and here is to so many more 🥂

Happy Shifting ❤️

[astradyke]

I loveeeed your deep dive! Why do you think we are suddenly getting all the marriage references? “I think you’re just looking for the word husband”, “my fiancé nord VPN”, dressing each other in silly wedding attire, and many more!

(opening note that everything below is truly unedited, i know i say that every time but i get very anxious about editing my thoughts so i typically do go back-- this time, i probably will later but i really don't have much time to spare right now so if this has typos that's why! i'm sorry :c hope it's understandable)

okay hi! first of all thank you so much! i'm quite proud of it :)

i'll open this by stating that i am really not the best at articulating points about Dan, Phil, and marriage; there are many impressive theories/metas out there from incredible folks in the community, which i have lovingly absorbed (feel free to promo off this post if this is you!). but i am a very indecisive person who tends to waver on my thoughts in this subject, and i've not found myself as excitable about the latest hints they've left in this video. so, hopefully it's okay if i use your ask as an excuse to kind of... sandbox around my messy thoughts in this ballpark, and hopefully give you an apt response to your question along the way!

i said before that i waver on my thoughts about Dan, Phil, and marriage, but in actuality, i do have loose thoughts which i have stuck to, which is that i think there have been several past proposals. the following theory operates off of the idea that Phil was the one to propose; i don't necessarily think he's more or less inclined towards proposals exactly, but it kind of works better for what i have envisioned possibly happening. when i discuss this i will try to stay neutral on who does what, but that's important context especially around proposal two.

i joined the phandom in the very tail-end of the pre-II era; by the time i was really immersed approximately a year or two into discovering them, they began the promotion of interactive introverts. because of this, i really have spotty knowledge of their 'prime years' around TATINOF, etc. but i think, across their travels (possibly in Japan?) and during that period of massive fame-- where they were experiencing more security financial and in their careers, as well as becoming better situated in each other's lives off camera-- the first proposal occurred. and ultimately, regardless of who proposed to who, i think this proposal was rejected. certainly, they had a better handle of their images, but this was before Dan had disclosed his mental health to the public; this was before a proper rebrand of his content, even. Phil, similarly, had several issues i can imagine he was juggling at the time, and beyond all else-- the two of them were closeted. their flat had been located, their shipping wasn't at its max exactly but the eyes on them had risen exponentially, if they got married in any kind of formal way that would be largely problematic. 2015 was not ready for Dan and Phil, the people who literally brought YouTubers to the big stage, the golden boys in this strange collab limbo, and a well known duo act-- to actually get married.

so they resolve that, because they know each other well enough to communicate about that sort of thing, and the idea gets shelved. they move into their new flat, which they have secured to be a private space. Dan has rebranded and is opening up about his mental health, Phil has done his own stylistic rebrand, and we are approaching the II era. interactive introverts is a success, the gaming channel goes on hiatus, and Dan has decided to begin working on his coming out video. this is when, in what i imagine to be a much more casual conversation, the question gets put forward: maybe, now, marriage is a safer thing.

and it is, in some ways, but there's still more to unravel here. Dan was, for the first time, out to not only the entire world but also his close family. Phil-- who i worry sometimes has his own story understated at this point-- had been out to a few people but had undeniably been nervous to come out to everybody, too. they had a lot to explore, with this newfound freedom.

commitment and change were crowning points of this era, for Dan and Phil respectively (though, obligatory note that humans are multifaceted and they share a close life together, so both of them mutually did experience both phenomena). working in reverse: Phil would begin to experience, gradually, the onset of a chronic illness. he also had this ambiguous future ahead, as he tried to adjust to the lack of Dan in his public work-- only for COVID to arrive. his anxiety problems were increasingly going from something he could willfully avoid to something he needed to address, and that is a massive adjustment on its own. there were a lot of background changes happening with Phil, even as his content appeared to be the same-- a commitment he hadn't given up.

Dan is, in a lot of ways, the opposite of this. both Dan and Phil had committed to living in their two-flat situation together, but they were planning to move in with one-another throughout 2020. this happens amidst COVID, which crushes a lot of post-coming out plans Dan had both personally and professionally. YouTube systemically destroys his creative visions through bureaucracy and arguable exploitation of his image, and when you rewatch his video explaining this, you realize that he briefly mentions the fact that the sheer financial commitment he had to his dream work prompted him to talk to Phil and describe delaying the purchase of their house. Dan's whole life has involved commitment-- being with Phil, in its own right, has been that, as well as the BBC gig, tour work, etc.-- but you can see this conflict become pivotal as so many of these commitments tie themselves to a part of his very self, and then are ripped away from him. Dan was not ready to get married.

... so, cut to now. see, everything above that i described is very lazily speculative, which i sort of hate for a meta because i feel a rush that desires total accuracy, but i simply can't track all the different moments where a marriage was plausible, all the different hints and signs. what i do think is that there was a serious marriage attempt early in their lives, and then a second casual conversation in a very not-casual situation. where does this leave us now?

Dan and Phil are in a very fresh era of their lives, distinctive from anything of the past. they are out, collaborating together, rebranding themselves gradually into something more fitting to their core artistic identities, and fostering a close community with their audience. Dan is making a severe sequence of commitments here, but these are worth the risk-- bringing back the gaming channel was conditional on the fact that Dan was making a choice he could back out of, but he chose to commit to the channel through committing to his own happiness. Phil is going through a lot of his own changes as he comes to terms with his medical state, as well as his appearance changes and the shifts in confidence it brings. Phil embraces the seismic change that is the end of the hiatus, because for the first time in a while, it's not a bittersweet change or a change laced in uncertainty-- it's a good change.

and, really, it's been fifteen years since they first met, five years since they first came out. what better time is there for something like this?

honestly, i don't know if it's happened yet. i personally don't envision Dan and Phil to approach marriages all that typically; they are chained together, as Dan put it once, in really every facet of their life already. i do believe that both of them like the concept of a wedding but also hate every mini-concept that goes into a wedding, so i really can't imagine that happening.

but i think maybe all these wedding references are emerging for a couple of reasons: namely, to prime us for the idea of them possibly being married (or to tease us for our theorizing, who knows with them), and also subconsciously to prepare themselves. because a proposal isn't just going to be a casual conversation anymore-- it might not be fancy, the way they first did their proposal, in a traditional speech & kneel format somewhere in a beautiful city. but it's not like their second one, halfway through the first okay day in a string of stressful ones, sitting in an apartment packing up their things.

maybe this is Phil bringing up marriage terms in videos, smiling when his family refers to Dan as part of the Lester family (even though really, Phil, they've been doing that for years), thinking about the aesthetics of WAD and wondering if a black-and-orange ring is a little too much. maybe this is Dan calling Phil pet names more often, daydreaming about himself in a dress but realizing he wants to see Phil in a veil more, fully accepting that he does not want to take Phil for granted after spending so long hiding his love for him and several years trapped by his fear of himself.

maybe we are hearing so many wedding references because the two of them are warming back up to the idea. or maybe they're teasing us about it because somewhere both of them already know that they could do this.

me personally, i think Phil proposes first in a ring that is very deliberately artsy and aesthetic. i think some mishap happens during it and it's kind of a disaster but Dan laughs so hard he starts crying and he says yes before Phil can say anything because he knows Phil didn't script anything, that if Dan said no Phil would get up and kiss him anyway. i think Dan follows suit later, but he's really meticulous about getting Phil something comfortable to wear that still looks nice and complements his ring. it's less of a secret, now, so he asks the Lesters and grumbles about Phil beating him to it, but his proposal goes a lot more smoothly and still takes Phil off guard, doing that small smile you see whenever he looks at Dan.

and i think Dan really wants a fancy dress i mean come on. Phil gets the veil though. or maybe they just sign the papers or procrastinate them and no wedding ever happens. honestly, maybe i'm totally off here-- maybe they're never going to get married, just buy a house several years down the line in the isle of man and never really bother with the legal stuff.

but they're not taking things for granted, anymore. not them, and not their audience. they know they can make references to marriage and we'll go batshit, but they know we don't care. they know we want them happy. and they know that no matter what they do, nurses and bartenders are still going to think Dan is Phil's son and there's a joke i really want to make here but i'm not going to right now.

... yeah. i meant to take a shower about an hour ago! i've been sitting down for a long while and don't really remember what i've said ^_^ i hope you like it though!

[queeranarchism]

hi! loved your post about not giving up on learning new things as an adult. do you have any resources you could share about making your own clothes? thanks 💞

Hmmm.. I don't really have specific links and I've only been doing this for like.. a month? I made three pieces of clothing so far that I actually wear in public. But my starting pointers would be:

You need a sowing pattern and you need to follow the instructions. You can not just trace your favorite t-shirt and expect it to look good. (which is what I did when I started). New patterns can be expensive but if you have a printer, you can find free sowing patterns online. If not, thrift stores and online markets will have cheap old patterns and pattern-magazines. One magazine often has over a dozens of patterns.

Youtube is amazing for tutorials.

For me, half the trouble of learning how to sow was learning how to handle a sowing machine, getting the right tension on the threads so it doesn't break or get stuck, etc. I'm still getting the hang of all the things that can go wrong when handling a sowing machine. Again: Youtube is great.

If you don't have a sowing machine: ask older relatives before spending money on a new one. A lot of people have an old machine lying around and those old heavy machines are really good. And bonus: you might get a free class in how to use that damn machine.

In my experience, slightly thicker fabrics and unpredictable patterns help camouflage beginners mistakes. Loose baggy clothing is also easier because the fit doesn't have to be perfect. My first project that I actually wear in public is tartan dungarees (yay, punk). Do consider: cheap modern sowing machines aren't always capable of handling thick fabrics.

You can make your own clothes for many reasons but honestly: don't expect to save a lot of money. Nice fabrics are quite expensive and then there's all the tools. Of course you can recycle your old curtains, get fabrics from thrift stores, etc. But in my experience the cheapest of disposable fashion is so ridiculously cheap that most home made clothing can not compete.

If you wanna save money, reduce your impact on the environment and/or start easy: try fixing and resizing clothes you already own! @wastelesscrafts has a lot of tutorials, like this post full of ideas about how to upsize your clothes: https://www.tumblr.com/wastelesscrafts/700971177595830272/upsizing-clothes-there-are-a-million-upcycling/

That's my starting points for now, maybe more experienced people can leave more advice in the comments?

[lorneytunes]

Beginner Mindset

Recently while doing a tarot reading for myself about my shifting journey, I drew a card that said I needed to "embrace a beginner mindset". I've been thinking a lot about what that means, and as a results I've begun the process of starting my shifting journey from scratch. Coincidentally, I’ve also seen a lot of posts from others about going back to that baby shifter feeling, when it's all about being IN your DR not GETTING TO your DR; thinking about the end result, not the way of getting there.

In that vein, today I saw a YouTube video about training your brain to lucid dream after years of failure, and re-capturing the feeling of excitement around it. I’ve decided I'm going to apply the techniques outlined there to shifting.

These were the main points:

List out all the things you're excited to do in a lucid dream and highlight your top three

Think throughout the day, “This is a dream” and then imagine if this was a dream, what you would do to take control and achieve one of your top three things.

Keep lucid dreaming at the forefront of your mind throughout the day

There were other points too, but these are the ones I think are most applicable to shifting. So from now on I'm going to focus on one DR, and start keeping that at the front of my mind and think about all the things I'm excited to do while shifting there.

I’ve already started by writing the list of 20 things and highlighted my top three (let me know if you want to see a follow-up post with my list). From here, throughout the day, rather than tell myself I’m dreaming, I’m going to go, “Oh, I’ve shifted!” and then imagine that instead of being wherever I am, that I’m currently experiencing something from that list. Preferably the top three, but it was very hard to pick just three things so I don’t see why I can’t expand it to more. The idea was to increase my desire to go to/excitement over that DR anyway, and that has definitely happened.

I’ve been thinking for a while that the reason some people might be having more success than me, is that for a very long time now I’ve found it really hard to daydream. I don’t know why, given I used to do it every night to help me sleep, but for years now it’s like I keep stopping myself, like it's silly or something. Being a writer I often get too caught up in what’s realistic or a good plot/scene rather than just enjoying the process, so I can absolutely see how I could get in my own way like that.

My hope is that giving myself these parameters like, “Imagine you’re actually having lunch in [x] right now!” or “Imagine what it would be like to learn [y]!” will help make daydreaming more achievable. Rather than imagining bigger stories, I’m just living through those tiny everyday moments. And from what I’ve heard from some of the bigger experienced shifters, imagining those everyday moments can really help your subconscious start to see your DR as a real place rather than a fantasy.

At the very least I’m going to try and do it every day for a week. Given I find it really hard to build habits, I’m not expecting to remember to do this very often in the first few days, so I’ll definitely be extending the experiment to up to three weeks if necessary.

Anyway, thanks for reading my first post and another Big Brave Step for me into the shifting community after two years of mostly lurking. Please send love and encouragement so I can do more of these. I'd definitely be down to blog how the experiment goes from day to day, or answer asks about my DRs (I have so many 😅).

[p-redux]

So, more info from Hyrox Glasgow 2024! Again, thanks Team for all the DMs, I really appreciate you! ❤️

Reminder of what I posted yesterday.

And

So, today, I get this video of Sarah Holden competing at Hyrox Glasgow, and you can CLEARLY hear Sam Heughan cheering her on. Sam's voice is at the very end. At the beginning, you hear a man with a thick Glasgow accent pronouncing Sarah's name Serah. That's NOT Sam. There's also a woman's voice. And at the END of the video, you can hear Sam's unmistakable "C'mon, Sarah!" This was shared by one of the Team and I saved it to my YouTube Channel. Enjoy!👇

I also received this DM with additional info. 👇 Posted with permission.

Here's the pic where Sam is tagged. 👇

And Sarah posting she got FOMO aka Fear Of Missing Out and spontaneously competed today in the women's open race. 👇 She definitely matches Sam's energy level! I'm tired just looking at her. 😊

Anyhoooo, I also got some conflicting info regarding whether Sam competed yesterday after all. I was alerted to this Tweet. 👇

And then I received this DM from someone I've never talked to. 👇

It's all very confusing. On the one hand, it is weird that if Sam competed, he never posted anything on his own IG. On the other hand, Hyrox DID post his results as if he DID compete yesterday. 👇

If Sam decided to not compete and wanted to give his slot to someone else, why wouldn't Hyrox be able to substitute the other man's name? Everything is computerized, so I don't see why they couldn't have made the change easily. Also, isn't it fraudulent to post results with Sam Heughan's name if he wasn't the one competing?

On the flip side, if Sam didn't actually compete, then he literally went to Hyrox to watch Sarah! Those saying "No, he went to watch his friend, Valbo. who also competed." Yeah, except Valbo didn't compete until 6:00 PM yesterday, and Sam was there at 12:00 PM, when the women's competitions started. Literally RIGHT THERE where Sarah was competing. 👇

No reason for Sam to be there 6 HOURS before Valbo was competing if he only went to support Valbo. 🤷‍♀️

I ran out of room to post pics since Tumblr limits to 10 pics, but I also got a DM saying Sam got a bunch of new Instagram follows who are Sarah Holden fans. That leads me to think they went to follow him because they saw him with Sarah at Hyrox.

So, that's it for now. I'm in the process of vetting someone from the Glasgowish area who approached me with some Sam and Sarah info. If she and the info check out, then I'll post it.

PS. I'm hearing from people that my usual haters and assorted newish haters are gnashing their teeth about my #samarah posts...same as it ever was. This has happened any time I've ever posted about Sam possibly dating someone. If you look at my track record for the last 10 years, my info has been at least 90% accurate. No one in the Outlander fandom would have known about Cait and Tony, and Sam and Cody, Abbie, Mackenzie, etc if not for my INSIDER source info, and me posting it FIRST. Facts, people. So, the hate makes no never mind to me. I keep doing me. I'm here for those who want the info. If that's not you, go somewhere else. Simple as that.

Oh, one more thing...the LIE that I have a restraining order against me from Sam resurfaced in my Inbox. Let's use our brains once in our lifetime, shall we? If I had a restraining order or a cease and desist, I wouldn't still be here, now would I? Doh. 🤦‍♀️ My blog is just like any celebrity news blog. It's called freedom of speech, peeps. And in the USA people have died to protect this right. That's all, folks.

[jasper-pagan-witch]

Hehe. more!

What's your favorite video game? What about show? And movie? And on each, what makes it your favorite?

What are some blogs you'd suggest to people that are kinda like yours?

When did you get into The Elder Scrolls? What about Magic the Gathering?

How often do you typically practice magic?

Optional additional question because it is a bit loaded and not everyone wants to answer something like this: What's your most hated discourse in the pagan/witchy community? It can be valid or kinda just ridiculous, your choice.

You are feeding me and I love that.

What's your favorite video game? What about show? And movie? And on each, what makes it your favorite?

O...only one? I like a lot of video games...but honestly I can't get over how fucking funny the Monster Hunter series is. Like yeah, random person, go fight some fucking monsters. Take up to two cats with you. Here's a giant sword or a gun. Godspeed.

As for show and movie, uh...I don't...watch a lot of things, admittedly. I prefer to just turn on YouTube videos in the background instead of a show or movie. But if I had to pick, I'd pick Robin Hood: Men in Tights for movie and Legends of Chima for show. If you've seen the fights I've been picking on my main blog, I hope they've been entertaining.

What are some blogs you'd suggest to people that are kinda like yours?

*cackles* Time to summon the friends and the people I follow.

@windvexer - Out here doing the most when it comes to musing on ways to take things from witchcraft 102 to witchcraft 207. A bunch of their posts about divination have taught me more about how to read tarot better.

@stormwaterwitch - Hey kids, do you like seeing someone else's fully-developed elemental system? Do you like deities? Do you like books? My dear friend does it all!

@lazywitchling - DIY galore. As someone who enjoys putting things together, I also enjoy seeing her stuff too!

@sewceress - *grabs you* If you have ever thought too long about astrology, planetary magic, and stuff like that, you will enjoy this blog. That's a threat.

@aesethewitch - If you think it's neat how I can drag people for filth with a single card, you will enjoy Aese doing the same thing on their blog. This is also a threat.

@the-weaving-cryptid - If you enjoy region-specific magic and are interested in Appalachia, give Runa a look!

@strixhaven-study-hall - My dear friend Faust who is on that MTG pop culture shit with me. I need to bother him more, actually. And so should all of you.

@fernthewhimsical - Like with the note on Runa, Fern is big into regional stuff - specifically, Dutch paganism. Fae has all kind of cool posts and shit, I've greatly enjoyed chatting with them.

@creature-wizard - Do you like when I drop twenty-seven source links in one posts? Would you like better critical thinking skills about the bullshit that appears in online religious and occult and witchy spaces? Check out this blog. Particularly their stuff on the New Age to Alt-Right pipeline.

@crimsonsongbird - A fellow follower of Greek deities with some of the most beautiful and heart-wrenching devotionals I've ever read. She's also designed spells based on my OCs in the past!!! They're very neat (both Crimson and the spells).

@will-o-the-witch - Another wonderful reader and a Jewitch. Incredibly easy to chat with through the ask box!

@stagkingswife - Another fun blog to follow if you're interested in folklore or seeing someone who's really comfortable in her path! I enjoy learning about their unrecorded pantheon (which is different from a constructed pantheon, I must stress).

@breelandwalker - The author of what is hands-down my favorite book on witchcraft ever, Grovedaughter Witchery. If you enjoy actual history, debunking misinformation, and beginner-friendly posts (they have a whole advice page for beginners!), then Bree is a good blog to follow.

I think I'm running out of the ability to tag blogs, so I'll pause here. But I follow or am mutuals with all kinds of really cool folks here on Tumblr!

When did you get into The Elder Scrolls? What about Magic the Gathering?

I started playing Oblivion on my biological father's PS3 before Skyrim came out when I was a youngin (I'm gonna say around the age of 9?) and just kind of. Kept with it.

Meanwhile, I finally got into MTG in 2016, when the Shadows Over Innistrad and Eldritch Moon sets came out. My first ever deck was the Blue-Red precon, Dangerous Knowledge. And I hated it. This was before I figured out how to make Blue work for me. The first deck I ever built was a Red-Green Wolf and Werewolf deck, and I still have it to this day - it's my most powerful deck besides maybe my monoBlack Rat deck.

How often do you typically practice magic?

It depends. When I'm in my fallow period, it's literally nothing. Once I'm out, it could be anywhere between "for my entire waking day" to "like, five minutes" to "I have not done anything magical in two weeks". I am inconsistent as fuuuuuck!

Optional additional question because it is a bit loaded and not everyone wants to answer something like this: What's your most hated discourse in the pagan/witchy community? It can be valid or kinda just ridiculous, your choice.

I am biased on account of being a pop culture practitioner, but the "is pop culture magic/paganism valid or not" question that keeps rolling back around every now and again is stupid. We're all magical practitioners and/or religious folks. We are at equal levels of verification, which is "basically none to someone skeptical enough".

There are actual, genuinely good concerns that can be talked about in pop culture magic/paganism, but everyone keeps focusing on "it's faker than our shit lmaooo" instead of discussing things like copyright or capitalism. And even when people bring that up, it's almost always as an addendum to people saying that our shit isn't valid because it comes from a piece of media instead of cultural stories or history. It's like "damn, you're already biased, so I'm not going to listen to your points because you stink", you know?

Anyway, thank you for sending all of these in!

~Jasper

[vitsa-didicoy]

Good evening, I was wondering if you had any good sources for people trying to learn/reconnect to Romani culture? I’ve been trying to learn more lately as my great grandmother left Europe during ww2 and was only allowed to keep her new children (in our current country, the one she fled to) if she didn’t tech them her language, religion or anything really (same with her new husband who was a refugee from another country). Wouldn’t even tell grandma what country she was from to narrow it down, but we recently found out about her eldest kid in Denmark. Would you know of any reputable resources I could access?? There’s a lot of bull shit floating around the internet and I’d hate to be misinformed

I'll start this by apologizing ahead of time for the length, as there is so much information that I feel is important when you are wanting to reconnect with Romani culture. Also, I'm not an expert and a didicoy myself. I do not have Romanipen and do not speak for all Romani. I am just someone who wants to help Roma and didicoy alike with their struggles.

First thing to understand is that Roma are not a monolith (obviously) and that our culture, religious practices, food, clothing, music, art, etc. all varies from vitsa to vitsa and even family to family. There are similarities of course, but never assume that just because one vitsa does one thing that means that its universal. A lot of gadje that try and write Romani characters get this wrong.

Some of our biggest similarities, though, are what keep us together across vitsas, especially our language, our oppression, and our Romanipen. Romanipen is a serious thing, often dictating whether you're "truly" Romani or a gadjo. Whether or not someone has Romanipen is based on whether they speak Romani Chib, were raised in a Romani community, follow Romani laws and traditions, know Romani history and oppression, etc. Because of the importance of Romanipen, some vitsas do not consider didicoy (Roma who were raised in gadjekane society and do not have Romanipen) as Roma and consider them to be gadje. This does not mean didicoy can never be accepted back, but it does mean that there is a lot of work that goes in to reconnecting with the culture.

So, where can you start? In my opinion the easiest way to start learning is through Florian Tacorian. He's Kalderash Romani and he talks about Romani culture, language, traditions, and oppression, including rating characters that represent Romani people in fiction. He's very digestible for gadje and didicoy to learn from. His YouTube channel is found here:

Once you feel comfortable with the info you learn from him, you can delve deeper by reading books about the Romani experience. Many Roma have written their experiences and history into published works (I'll link a list later in the post), but one that I've personally read from is Ian Hancock. He's Romanichal from Britain and he now teaches linguistics and other subjects at the University of Texas in Austin, TX.

Ian Hancock's works:

I suggest: We Are the Romani People and Pariah Syndrome

And here's a compiled list of Romani authors if ever you want to extend your knowledge to other experiences:

Furthermore, I truly believe that advocating for Romani Rights and learning from current events is half of learning about Roma as a whole. Our oppression is on-going with public opinion of Roma being wholly ignorant at best and vehemently hateful at worst. Reconnecting should also be spearheaded by a desire to uplift Romani voices and to advocate for equal rights. To be more educated on current Romani events, the European Roma Rights Centre is the best place for it.

European Roma Rights Centre:

Next, the most desired part of reconnecting I'd say, is learning Romani Chib. The reason you may not see easily accessible lessons for Romani Chib is because it is closed, meaning only Roma are allowed to learn it. This doesn't mean lessons for didicoy don't exist and there are resources available to learn Romani Chib. Personally, I'm learning American Kalderash from Ronald Lee's books. Even though I'm not Kalderash (at least to my current knowledge), it is still a useful dialect to learn, especially if you live in North America and want to converse with other American/Canadian Roma.

Keep this in mind, pretty much each vitsa has its own unique dialect and, based on the region, each dialect may have different loan words from the country that that vitsa resides in. Ronald Lee will not teach you how to speak every dialect, but, if you get the ground work in and talk to more and more people, you may be at least able to understand what someone from a different vitsa is saying using context clues and thus build your own vocabulary.

Link to Learn Romani by Ronald Lee:

Link to it's sister book, Romani Dictionary (English - Kalderash) by Ronald Lee:

Lastly for this section, community is a huge thing for Roma, it's the biggest thing that has kept us alive through being exiled, persecuted, enslaved, and assimilated completely in the over 1,000 years we've been out of India. It's also something that many didicoy have a big problem with, considering the points above on how hard it is for didicoy to be accepted by Roma. It's not impossible, nor is it hopeless however.

Some Roma will take pity on you because you didn't choose to be raised a gadjo, some Roma will see you as an aspect of racism and be defensive, some won't care and treat you on the basis of your character instead, and some will just ignore you. Again, Romani people are not a monolith and 10-12 million minds all with different lives will have incredibly varied opinions.

It is key to keep this mind and most importantly, to be neutral about this internally. You did not choose for your ancestors to undergo persecution, you did not choose to be raised in the dark about your heritage, and you did not choose to be born with mixed blood.

The best you can do when approaching the community is to be respectful, but engaged. As a didicoy you both can't be entitled to practice every aspect of the culture, but you also can't be too afraid to try what you're allowed to. If you are unsure of your place, ask. If you have a question about a practice, ask. If you are interested in aiding and actually being a cog in the community, you can also just ask. "No" is not a bad word and understanding why you're rejected if and when you are is a good mindset to have when you're trying to build trust in the community, too. On the flip side, if you are presented an opportunity to practice within the culture, take it. If there are Romani events in your area with an open invitation, visit and actually experience first-hand. Talk to people, tell them your intention and if you are genuine, you'll get farther than you might think.

As for online communities, I suggest starting with r/Romani on Reddit. There are a lot of posts from didicoy asking about where to start, like you. Read the comments on those posts and you'll see a lot of advice from Roma with all different experiences. And don't gravitate towards the advice that makes you feel good, just the advice that makes logical sense to you.

r/Romani:

Again I'm sorry that this is not only so long, but also that it took so long to get out. When answering these questions, I try to help with any aspect that I can, but I still want people to engage with the community themselves. I wish you the best of luck and I hope that you find the answers you've been looking for.

We are all in this together. Te aves baxtalo 💙❤️💚