#in that he adds and changes a lot of rules for the sake of 'realism'

[terresdebrume]

We had our Halloween special yesterday and it got me thinking about the difficulty of balancing encounters again There were 6 of us, at level twelve, we did over 300 points of damage to the main boss and barely got it down to half its maximum

Part of it is that my DM treat all necrotic damage as a life drain, so you heal for as much damage as you inflict when you use it + he often gives his creatures insane amounts of immunities and resistances (I wish I could see his notes tbh xD)

Anyway, this thing would have been crazy hard to beat if it had been our only enemy, but as it was this was a guaranteed tpk: we didn't even finish the fight in the end, we stopped when it was only two of us left up, with everyone else at minus thirty and some hit points and my moon druid clinging to the dragon's back with the must hurtful thing I could give it being 3d8, and only once

Anyway, the point is: it was an unwinnable fight, which we've had before in the main campaign too, and I think from a player POV it drains the fun for me

Like, why would I want to slog through two hours of combat for a fight I have zero chance to win you know? There's a difference between a difficult fight and an impossible fight imo and I don't mind the former* but I don't see the point of the latter

* Although I don't subscribe to the idea that all fights have to be difficult. Easy or medium fights are fun too.

[shihalyfie]

The 02 epilogue and “realism”

While the following thoughts have been something I’ve been thinking about for a very long time, the official Kizuna Twitter posted some interesting tweets this morning about the 02 epilogue that made me feel very much like I wanted to talk about this in detail today, so I’ve written this up. Considering how historically controversial the 02 epilogue is (or having an opinion on the 02 epilogue at all, really), I’m probably standing on thin ice by even talking about it, but I’ll do my best.

I think there’s no way getting around the fact that the 02 epilogue was really sudden for pretty much everyone -- it pretty much jumps at you without warning at the end of episode 50, a sudden 25-year timeskip when we had just gotten out of Oikawa’s death (and a very chaotic finale in general). But there is another quirk about the epilogue, which is that a lot of what seems “illogical” out of it...is most certainly illogical to someone approaching it as a kid thinking in terms of media tropes, but gains a very different nuance when you become an adult and have a certain degree of life experience under your belt.

(Note: This post does not discuss Kizuna, despite being inspired by something from it, so no fear of spoilers.)

Before we begin for real, I just want to get it out of the way that I’m not trying to “defend” the epilogue in the sense of implying that people are unreasonable for being blindsided. Like I said, it was sudden, and it was a giant timeskip where a ton of incredibly massive changes happened, leaving the audience likely to be disoriented wondering what on earth happened in the middle there to lead up to that. On top of that, although the rest of this meta is basically dedicated to “analyzing the meaning behind the epilogue writing choices from the production perspective”, I will be very honest in that, yes, I do think that, regardless of good intent, it may not have been the best decision to go ahead and make these decisions in this degree of lack of thought as to how the audience (especially one that was expected to be largely comprised of children) would take it -- creativity is a two-way street, after all, and communicating with your audience and understanding how your work will come off is very important.

Still, nevertheless, I’m writing this meta because I think, well...now that we’re all adults, and now that we’ve gotten a plethora of development information over the past twenty years, especially in the light of Kizuna, it’s worth doing an analysis about why these kinds of writing choices were made, because even to this day you get a lot of people who feel completely blindsided about it.

Everyone’s careers

Actually, the reason I decided to make this post was that I was inspired a bit by this morning’s post from the Kizuna Twitter discussing why, despite being a lead-up to the 02 epilogue, some of the cast in Kizuna seems to be in careers or aspirations that are slightly off from the careers we saw them in during the actual epilogue. (Most notably, Sora still working in ikebana instead of fashion design, Mimi being into online shopping instead of her future cooking show, etc.) The official statement was that Seki Hiromi (producer for the original Adventure and 02) personally stepped in and warned them that, in real life, a lot of people will end up changing their career aspirations at this age, and that it wouldn’t hit close to home if everyone had it exactly figured out by this point.

Kizuna is a movie about the Sad Millennial Adult Experience, so of course it is very important that it be relatable to adults in the modern era. But, in all honesty, this principle applies to 02′s epilogue itself as well. Back when the epilogue first aired -- and for the last twenty years, really -- you got a lot of comments like “why didn’t Taichi become a professional soccer player? why didn’t Yamato go into music?” and such. The thing is, though...well, this is a personal anecdote, but I first got into Digimon when I was a preteen, and, having already had an experience where my childhood interests had changed completely, I actually severely disliked seeing people say that because it felt too straightforward. Even that early, that kind of thing felt unrelatable.

Kizuna as a movie, right now, would be impossible to make in the form it is now if it hadn’t been for the 02 epilogue setting that kind of precedent -- because of the idea of your childhood hobbies not feeling as appealing as they used to be and being very lost about what to do now, feeling that everyone lied to you about that whole “having things figured out by adulthood” thing, and maybe you’ll never really figure it out. But even taking out the fact that the 02 epilogue most likely wasn’t written with the idea they’d need to make an adult-relatable movie 20 real-life years later, I think it’s easy to glean that this philosophy was behind the 02 epilogue as well. Especially since, well...Adventure and 02 themselves were both famous for this kind of writing, for depicting the lives of children in surprisingly realistic and close-to-home ways that avoided generic anime tropes.

Actually, Kakudou said it straight-out:

There were a lot of anime normally made with the idea that a given rule must occur, but I decided to do them while having doubts about whether or not it was a good idea to take on such given rules without any detail. Even if we went on with these given rules, I tried to take appropriate steps in showing why such things had occurred through step-by-step arrangements and reasoning. That is why I tried to add a little bit of realness each time to the characters, despite the restrictions that they are from anime.

So yes, that actually was the point -- no using anime tropes unless they felt they could feasibly happen with these characters. Daisuke is commented on as having “the most anime-like” and idealistic personality, but as I commented in my earlier 02 meta, he still doesn’t quite hit all of the check marks on the shounen hero archetype. So after going for a whole series on the line of going into a grounded take on human mentalities and thought processes...it probably would be inappropriate to suddenly shift into an extremely idealized fictional trope-ish depiction of everyone just going into a more exaggerated version of their childhood hobbies.

Again, that doesn’t mean that some of these don’t come off as really sudden -- the most infamous being Yamato becoming an astronaut. This was eventually revealed in 2003 and several times later to be a holdover from the original beta concept for a third Adventure series, so in that light it makes a little more sense -- Yamato probably would be the most passionate about keeping up the fight as a Chosen -- but nevertheless, it’s ambiguous whether that actually still holds (especially since the actual, uh, “third series” was...a bit different), and since we live in a world where that hypothetical Digimon in Space series never happened, it still blindsides the viewer.

On the other hand, though, both the tri. stage play and the official Kizuna profiles only took less than a paragraph to explain the disparity of why Yamato isn’t doing music anymore: he wanted to keep it in the range of hobbies. Which, incidentally, is an extremely common thing for many who experiment with creative work in their youth -- many realize that if they make it into their job, they’ll actually start hating it. Conversely, while I haven’t talked to a lot of astronauts myself, I really do sometimes wonder how many of them actually knew they were going to get into it from childhood.

So that’s the thing. We have no idea what happened, we’re left with very little recourse as to bridging the gap (at least, until Kizuna came 20 years later and helped us out a bit), and that’s why it feels implausible to many -- especially for a kid in the audience who may not have had that experience of having their hobbies change or feel less appealing. In the end, like I said, I’m not sure that going about it this way was the best decision when the very target audience was likely to be confused about this, and since, after all, fiction does have to have some acceptable breaks from reality for the sake of being a followable story. But at the very least, it is very much in line with Adventure and 02′s philosophy towards writing and its characters -- that things would be the case based on what would be these characters’ likely trajectory as actual people, and not as what you might expect “because it’s fiction” or “because they’re this kind of character”.

That everyone has a Digimon partner

I have a very distinct memory of, as a preteen, going around the Internet and seeing a fansite where someone made their “better version” of the epilogue, where their favorite ships got married instead and everyone got the careers they thought they should have, but one major thing that stuck out was that it had the now-adult kids still keep the existence of Digimon a secret, and that it’s kind of a “secret club” that they still have. In general, one of the biggest arguments against the “everyone has a Digimon partner” thing is that this, allegedly, diminishes how “special” the Chosen are when they’re not the super-amazing sole people in the world to have a partner.

When you’re a kid, being the “Chosen One” sounds romantic. You’re a special selected hero with fated abilities to save the world. In the context of Adventure and 02, however, this would actually be very contradictory to the constant reminders given by both series that magical powers selecting you out of nowhere means absolutely nothing if you’re not the one with personal will and volition to do the right thing with what you’re given. In fact, I’d say it’s actually the opposite of what all of those people have said -- if you did something amazing because of fate or because some higher power said you should, it says a lot less about you than if you were given abilities and choices and actively made an attempt to do something good and change the world, by your own volition.

But the other very important thing about the epilogue is that people keep seeing this development of Digimon proliferating all over the world like it was completely out-of-nowhere, to the point I’ve even seen conspiracy theories that the epilogue was a last-minute decision. This is especially funny because the epilogue was one of the first things decided in the entire series -- “the entire series” in this case being not 02, but Adventure -- before they’d even finalized the characterizations for everyone! The 02 epilogue was, infamously, intended to be Adventure’s ending, before 02 was greenlighted and they postponed the plan there resulting in 02 ultimately taking the fall for it.

Because it was a new television series, without an original novel or manga to use as its reference, we had to cut back on the aspect of explaining the character to each voice actor, something that we would usually do under normal circumstances. We only described their basic personality during auditions because it was likely that those personalities would change drastically in the future depending on the plot’s developments. We did not omit the explanations because there were too many characters. I swear.

But in exchange, we began post-recording by saying just this: “This story is one that’s being reminisced on by one of the children in the group who becomes a novelist 28 years later. The narrator here is that child as an adult.” Those who watched the last episode of the continuation series “Digimon Adventure 02” would know that this was Takeru, but back then, that information was kept secret. At the time of the show, it was planned that the last episode of “Digimon Adventure” would end with ‘where are the characters now’ 28 years later. However, in mid-run, production for its sequel “02” was decided and its story contents were established to be juxtaposed to the previous show, so we carried over the 28 years later scene to the sequel series instead.

(From the afterword from Adventure novel #3, from director Kakudou Hiroyuki.)

25 years after 02. 28 years after Adventure. We calculated that very precisely. In 1999, there was Taichi’s group of eight, and there were also eight other people who didn’t appear in Adventure. Before that there were only eight total, and before that only four, and before that only two, and at the beginning, only one. If they were to double every year, then it would be 28 years until everyone in the world would be able to live alongside a Digimon. Threaded through both Adventure and 02 is a story about humanity’s evolution. For everyone to have their own Digimon partner is the final step of evolution. Because there’s not much left for our actual bodies to change in terms of evolution, it is a story about how the hidden parts of our souls use the powers of digital technology to manifest in the real world, resulting in humanity’s evolution.

Statement from Kakudou Hiroyuki, from the Digimon Series Memorial Book.)

About Digimon 10: The initial trigger for humanity receiving partner Digimon was the Hikarigaoka incident in 1996, but at the time the Internet network was not ready and it was too early for anything to happen. The following years resulted in two and then four people getting involved, and after that it doubled every year (twice, because digital and binary). About Digimon 11: Twenty years later, in the world depicted in the final episode of 02, all human beings have received a partner Digimon. This is the ultimate result of Digimon Adventure’s story of evolution.

Statement from Kakudou Hiroyuki, originating from Twitter and later moved to his blog.)

While the 02 epilogue taking place in the year it did sounds like it’s because they just wanted to add an arbitrary neat number of “25 years later” to 02′s finale, in actuality, the original goal was not for that 25 years but to specifically hit the year of 2028 (not 2027, actually), where, calculating the number of humans that could be partnered to a Digimon based on the global population, everyone would have a partner by exactly 2028. The “doubling every year” principle was only brought up in actual anime-centric canon in a drama CD, and even then it was in a context of speculation instead of being stated as hard fact, but it should be noted that even Kizuna is compliant with this principle, since To Sora states directly that the number of Chosen Children as of 2010 is over 30,000, which is the approximate correct amount you should be expecting by 2010 under this principle. (So yes, really, despite ostensibly not being compliant with his original concept, presumably thanks to the nail added by partnership dissolution and how that ties into his theory of Digimon being part of the soul, Kizuna actually goes out of its way to otherwise be compliant with even the more obscure parts of his lore.)

But the really interesting thing that this epilogue concept brings out is that “the adventure of the Tokyo Chosen Children” actually had nothing to do with the proliferation of Chosen Children around the world whatsoever. From the very beginning, even since the original conception of Adventure, the proliferation of Digimon was something that was going to happen whether anyone liked it or not.

In fact, let’s look at what Koushirou actually says in the aforementioned drama CD:

Yes. I’ve figured it out… The meaning behind the term “Chosen Child.” The number of “Chosen Children” has been growing at a steady rate. Having a partner Digimon isn’t really that special. Being a “Chosen Child” means… to cease the hostilities that break out and inconvenience the Digital World. In order to do so, that child gains a partner Digimon faster than another. In other words, we are children chosen to fight. That’s what it means, isn’t it? ... Oh, is that so? That’s surprising. I didn’t expect that not even you would know what countries the Chosen Children come from when they go to the Digital World… It’s Qinglongmon that’s helping you, is it, Gennai-san? Do the other Holy Beasts who have revived not know either? The Digital World is still so full of mysteries. I’ll do my best to look for them over here.

I think a lot of people tend to have misconceptions about the nature of a Chosen Child, and those who picked them, because the way everyone became “chosen ones” is actually very different from how most media usually would play the trope. In particular:

Homeostasis, the Agents, and the Holy Beasts are explicitly not gods nor omniscient. Homeostasis admits their own lack of abilities in Adventure episode 45, and there’s a recurring undercurrent of the “I don’t know” coming from them and the Agents not actually being because they’re deliberately cryptic, but because they really don’t know. In fact, the Digital World itself is depicted as being about as confused about this whole human contact thing as the human world is.

Note that Koushirou makes a distinction between “being a Chosen Child” and “having a Digimon partner”. If you’re deemed someone who might be able to do something important in this very early time when the Digital World is still trying to figure all of this stuff out, in a world where humans overall still don’t understand Digimon very well, you get first dibs because you’re someone who can be a valuable pioneer. In other words, just because everyone else will eventually get a partner doesn’t mean your contributions aren’t still historical, valuable, and important.

The Digital World was mentioned in Adventure episode 19 as being approximately as big in scale as the real-world Earth itself. That means the Digital World is huge. Of course, its time and space doesn’t exactly match up with the real world’s, as demonstrated multiple times in 02 when the kids abuse it to circumvent travel distance, but nevertheless, there is presumably a lot of the Digital World that neither the Adventure nor the 02 kids have seen in their lives. When they meet Qinglongmon in 02 episode 37, he introduces himself as being in charge of the Eastern side -- and we never meet the others. In effect, there’s probably a huge area of the Digital World that needs protecting that even twelve kids from Tokyo can’t cover by themselves. And that answers the question of what the international Chosen Children are there for -- what do you think they’re doing with those Digivices, twiddling their thumbs? The Tokyo Chosen’s adventures were the ones we were blessed with being able to bear witness to, but that absolutely does not exclude the idea that there were other kids going through their own tales of growth and adventure -- especially since, as I said, Homeostasis and the others protecting the Digital World are not omniscient, and there are a lot of known factors beyond their control.

On that note, you might notice that, by the doubling-every-year principle and by running a math calculation, in 1999, there were eight other Chosen Children besides Taichi’s group. This also tracks with the fact that Adventure episode 53 revealed that there were other Chosen Children prior to Taichi et al. who performed an incomplete seal on Apocalymon, ones that even Gennai wasn’t aware of (remember how I said that the Agents aren’t actually omniscient?). While the fact that such an ostensibly huge fact was dropped so casually is jarring for the viewer, in retrospect, the fact that this was dropped so casually was indicative of the idea of how...not very much of a big deal this was supposed to be. Taichi and his friends may have been instrumental in the selection process for Chosen Children back in 1995, but they weren’t the only ones who witnessed the Hikarigaoka incident nor to have contact with Digimon, and they weren’t even the first to save the Digital World, nor will they be the last. But the journey of personal growth they took was still important to themselves -- just because they weren’t the only ones who took it didn’t change the fact that such an important thing happened, nor that we got the benefit of being able to meet and resonate with these kids.

In fact, the Hikarigaoka incident wasn’t even the first point of contact with the Digital World. 02 episode 33 hinted very heavily that what humans have perceived as youkai and other spirits were actually Digital World contact, just not something actually noticeable until digital technology started connecting the worlds. Episode 47 revealed that Oikawa Yukio and Hida Hiroki had made contact sometime in the 80s via video games -- even though they weren’t Chosen Children themselves at the time. In short, the concept of the Digital World and its contact with the human one is something that spans throughout history, of which the Tokyo Chosen Children are only part of in very recent years.

And finally, one of the most important parts: the idea that the Digimon would stay a secret to the world for very long is inherently infeasible. The 1999 “Digimon in the sky” incident was international. It made international news. Everyone in Tokyo has clear memories of the “Odaiba fog” incident, and, as revealed in 02 episode 14, even a boy from America, Michael, has clear memory of seeing a Gorimon. Reporters like Ishida Hiroaki didn’t hesitate to get in on the scene and try to cover what was going on, and 02 episode 38 revealed that Takaishi Natsuko was doing intensive enough press coverage on the Digimon incidents that Oikawa actually sought her out for information on it. They’re probably not the only reporters around the world doing the same. One episode later, Gennai revealed that the government/military and scientific worlds had actually caught onto the existence of Digimon and did make active attempts to research it -- but, fearing that the world wasn’t quite ready to do that without exploiting Digimon for evil purposes, Gennai and the other Agents wiped out any data records so that they couldn’t do organized research or swap notes. But just wiping out data doesn’t wipe out the public memory, and, especially when the number of Chosen Children is proliferating, and with all of the Digimon-related disasters that happened around the world in 02 episodes 40-42, at some point the world is going to start becoming very aware of what’s going on with this whole thing.

And finally, about that thing where a lot of people claim that a world where everyone has a Digimon partner must be some kind of dystopia: I think this camp severely underestimates how adaptable the world is.

This is something that might not be as resonant to those who were very young at the time they aired, but Adventure and 02 were written in what was a very shocking and scary world for adults that were living at the time. The rate at which the world changed and adapted to digital technology in the late 80s and all of the 90s was ridiculous, and in some ways even terrifying. Many tech people have pointed out how much it feels like the entire structure of the world has changed in light of technological developments, AI, and the Internet in only the last few decades compared to centuries before. International policy has changed, daily life has changed, business structures have changed, in time much less than 25 years. Hell, I’m writing this post smack in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic; I think anyone reading this right now at this time can attest to how terrifyingly quickly the world changed itself in only a few months in response to such a thing.

Compared to that, a whole 25 years of slow burn where the Digimon partner rate at least had the decency to double every year and give people a chance to acclimate and make public policy seems practically luxurious. On top of that, while there will certainly be more people like the Kaiser out there abusing their power, Digimon evolution at least happens to be tied to human emotions (unlike many other weapons out there), and there is some stifling factor in less-than-pleasant people being a bit less likely to have the same access to overwhelming power as those who are more selfless and virtuous. That kind of limiter is something I wish modern technology could have sometimes.

So what is the Tokyo Chosen Children’s place in this narrative? At the forefront of such incredibly massive incoming changes were children who were living in a completely different world than that familiar to even people who were born five to ten years earlier -- much like the real children born in the world of technology in the late 90s. The Tokyo Chosen Children were some of the earliest pioneers in this regard, being the ones who had to figure out logistics and Digimon and the Digital World and what it meant to be a partner in a world that hadn’t figured any of this out yet, and arguably wasn’t ready yet.

Yet they did, and they saved both worlds with no precedent nor support on what to do. This, I think, is a massively more meaningful accomplishment than the idea that they were exclusively selected by some higher power.

On romance and marriage

I feel like this topic is one I’m setting myself up to end up with my head on a pike by daring to breach it -- there is pretty much no way I can cover this without setting myself up for some risk of this -- but I do want to talk about it. I really don’t want to make this post into a pro- or anti-shipping discourse post, so you’ll have to forgive me as I try to be about as diplomatic about this as I possibly can. For all it’s worth, I’m a firm believer in shipping and shipping headcanons being an integral part of the fan’s experience (heck, anyone who knows me knows that I often talk about my own ships more than I really should), and so, as I said before, I’m writing this largely from the perspective of elucidating “the most likely reason it was written this way”, and not “should it have been written this way” nor “how I think people should feel in spite of this”.

In any case, I’m going to start off this section by a statement from a friend that left a particular impression on me. I’d introduced them to Digimon recently, with both of us as adults, and one thing they commented was that the idea of shipping any of the characters felt a little too odd, because they were all elementary school kids. They, of course, understood quite naturally that I had been shipping some of these kids since I was their age (and that my current round of shipping usually was more about whether they’d get together later than whether they would during the time of the series), so it wasn’t an accusation of me being creepy or anything -- it’s just that, as an adult coming into this for the first time without a lot of preconceived attachments, it felt too weird for them to ship children at that young of an age, and it was something that made me think a lot about it.

As I said, shipping is often an integral part of the fan’s experience, even for those who don’t do “fandom” -- romance is such a huge priority that it permeates all of our media, and how it’s handled is often one of the first things deeply scrutinized. Part of the reason the 02 epilogue is so controversial is that it went pretty much against the face of the most popular ships in the fanbase, and the two that did go forward (Yamato/Sora and Ken/Miyako) weren’t ones that people would conventionally expect given what you’d generally look for when it comes to fictional relationship development.

But that’s kind of the issue here: remember when I pointed out earlier that Adventure and 02 were trying to stay away from anime tropes unless they found it to be particularly relevant to the characters’ arcs? In actuality, the way that people generally expect romance and romance tropes to happen in a series -- especially a not-particularly-romance-centric series like this one -- isn’t how romance generally works, and especially not for kids at the age we saw them in Adventure and 02. It doesn’t seem like coincidence that the first hard show of romance we get (Sora asking Yamato out during Christmas) is when the relevant characters were 14, which is around the earliest age you can imagine two kids actually taking a relationship seriously and having some depth of what they’re getting into. As if to drive this in further, Daisuke’s crush on Hikari is portrayed as a sign of him acting shallow and not having a good sense of priorities at the moment; the whole 02 main cast, as of 02, is probably still too young to entertain anything serious for at least a few more years.

If you look at actual couples, as romantic as “childhood friends to lovers” is as a trope, it’s actually not very common in real life, especially for “childhood” being defined as 8-12. There might be a slightly higher chance when it comes to the Tokyo Chosen Children, considering they’d gone through some shared experiences others might not understand, but even that gets slightly mitigated by the fact that more and more people around the world are becoming Chosen themselves. So while it can happen, and while it’s probably somewhat more likely for this group in particular, it’s not as likely as the average shipper would probably want it to be. Even those who support the canon ships don’t really favor the idea of them being in a continuous relationship all the way up to adulthood -- my personal experience as someone closely following Ken/Miyako fanfiction and comics in both the West and in Japan indicates a common thread of it being treated as a mutual pining ship until several years later, and the Yamato/Sora fans I’ve personally talked to have a very high rate of feeling that the two of them have experienced at least one breakup before getting back together. Or, in short, even people who like those ships have a hard time imagining a unbroken, continuous relationship all the way from elementary/middle school to adulthood, because of how much that generally doesn’t happen.

I promise I am not writing this as a treatise against the ship itself, I swear I’m just using this because it’s the best example I can pull out at the moment, but I’ll put it this way: I think the clearest example of this is Takeru and Hikari, the only pairing that has the unfortunate distinction of being explicitly confirmed as not being married (by Seki Hiromi in V-Jump), whereas everyone outside the scope of Yamato/Sora and Ken/Miyako is still technically in “believe whatever you want” territory. Takeru/Hikari is, depending on which scale of ranking you use, a ship that consistently ranks as one of the three most popular Digimon ships globally, and them not getting together is cited as one of the most common things disliked about the epilogue. But despite its overwhelming popularity to the point you’d think it’d be easy to cater to such a humongous fanbase by pairing them together -- and so few people would dispute it, really! -- not only were they not made an item, but they were explicitly confirmed as not being one.

Why?

Takeru and Hikari probably feel “baited” to anyone who’s looking at this from a romantic trope perspective. They’re constantly in each other’s company to the point where it almost feels like they like hanging out with each other more than they do others. Takeru is shown as having a particular investment in Hikari’s welfare in 02 episodes like 7, 13, and 31. They’re constantly associated with each other in promotional materials, too. But when you look at them in terms of their actual relationship as children...well, I’ll put it this way with another personal anecdote: I actually had multiple platonic friends like that back when I was their age in elementary and later middle school, and, uh...well, people did actually ask if we were in love with each other, and it genuinely, no-strings-attached, annoyed the hell out of me, because we weren’t, and I hated being pigeonholed into that.

In real life, platonic relationships happen a lot with kids in that age group, and it’s not actually all that surprising that 02 would have wanted to portray a healthy one without any strings attached -- the same way the series also portrayed other unconventional situations with kids, such as Iori being a nine-year-old who hangs out with kids much older than him (there are most certainly kids who can attest to being in that position!). I mentioned in my earlier 02 characterization meta that both Takeru and Hikari are actually rather inscrutable (especially in the first half of the series), and in fact, episode 13, usually quoted as a Takeru/Hikari episode, is actually centered around Takeru having difficulty reaching out to Hikari because, despite the fact he was closest to her at that point in time, she still was too closed-in to open up about anything. They almost never talk about what they actually think about each other, other than obviously having an investment in each other’s welfare and enjoying each other’s company, but, again -- this isn’t unusual for platonic friends at this age. And the fact that this is the one ship where there was actual official word putting a foot down and saying, no, this did not end up in marriage...everyone interprets this like it’s some kind of callous move made to make people miserable for no good reason, but I would say that, given the writing philosophy applied to the kids in nearly every other respect, the intent was likely to make a statement that this kind of relationship can exist without it ending up in inevitable marriage somewhere down the line.

We’re inclined to see “two people being emotionally close means a higher chance of being a couple” because this is how romance has been portrayed in media for as long as any of us have been consuming media, but in actuality, relationships are very multifaceted and complicated, and there are many ways to be “emotionally close” to someone in ways that don’t overlap with being “romantically attracted” to someone. This is especially once you start becoming an adult and end up needing to navigate the web of who’s a friend and whom you might have a crush on, and in actuality the person you start flirting with because you think they’re attractive might have been someone you just met last week, or at least someone you don’t know very emotionally intimately (which is why crushes can be intimidating, even in adulthood). This is also what I think fuels the disparity between why Taichi/Sora gained such a huge following and what actually happened with them, because many, many fans will testify that they felt baited by the ship, but if you look in the actual series in terms of what counts as “romantic attraction” and not just emotional closeness, there’s...not a lot; they happened to know each other before the events of the series (but so did Koushirou!), Taichi had a bit of a mental breakdown about saving her (because he’s not someone who abandons important friends), and in Our War Game! they had a bit of a spat with traces of tsundere (which, ultimately, are circumstantial and don’t necessarily indicate they actually have serious mutual feelings for each other). Official word implies that Yamato and Sora were planned since rather early in the series, and it doesn’t seem like coincidence that “pairing up the main hero and heroine” (Taichi and Sora) was given as an example of an avoided trope in an official booklet, so it lends further support to the idea that “not following typical romance tropes and expectations” was a significant priority.

Again, this isn’t me saying anything about those who ship it or those who have been able to figure out ways in which the relationship could work in some very wonderful headcanons I’ve had the benefit of reading over the past decades, nor those who are having a marvelous time with fanfic and headcanon and comics and being a bit more willing to indulge outside the scope of the series’s canon. (Nor the multitude of very good headcanons and meta I’ve seen about the possibility of Takeru/Hikari at least trying out dating somewhere along the line, even if it doesn’t end up anywhere permanent.) Nor does that mean I think that this was the best way for the writers to go about it -- as I’ve said in this meta already, there is an inherent fallacy of not paying enough attention to how writing will be taken and interpreted by people with certain reasonable expectations cultivated from years of media consumption, and especially by kids who aren’t going to pick up that nuance or don’t have the appropriate relationship life experience. Regardless of intent, there’s still a lot that can be criticized about its handling; in many ways, it could be considered a bit cruel that the series had things known to be considered romantic subtext in most other series that may not have been actually intended this way. But, nevertheless, I do feel very strongly that there’s a high likelihood that this is what they were at least going for, even if it didn’t come off that way to most of the audience.

Extrapolating this concept further, it’s also interesting to see how Adventure and 02 treat romance as a relatively insubstantial thing in the grand scope of things. I said earlier that it’s quite understandable that romance and shipping have become the main obsession for media -- and it’s probably been that way for as long as human civilization has even existed -- but when you really think about it, Adventure/02 treat romance as “a thing that is a big part of your life, but not the sole controlling factor”. Again, note how Daisuke’s precocious crush on Hikari manifests when he’s at his most shallow, and even after Yamato and Sora start dating in episode 38, we really don’t hear a lot about it -- granted, neither were in the lead protagonist cast by that point in the series, but whenever they do appear thereafter, it’s almost always about their work helping out as Chosen than it is about their relationship, which is presumably a private thing going on in the background. It’s a part of their lives, but it’s not the only thing going on with them. Of course, shounen anime with casts of these ages don’t tend to breach the topic of romance much at all, but it’s interesting how it touches on the topic and then leaves it in the background -- again, something probably frustrating and a bit too cavalier for those inclined to see shipping and romance as life or death, but from a real-life perspective, makes sense in the realm of friends’ relationships largely not being your business, even if it is significant.

(Ken and Miyako are a trickier matter because their pairing was allegedly based on their voice actors’ friendship, but considering that it has been cited multiple times across multiple Digimon series production notes that character outlines were often subject to change even mid-series based on impressions of the voice actors’ performance -- it happened in Tamers too, and it’s not even unusual for original anime in general -- it’s still ambiguous as to when in production this decision was made, and, considering the flip between Miyako having jealous pettiness over him in episode 3 to fantasizing over him and considering him exactly her type in 8, I would not be surprised if the decision were made somewhere in between there, especially since the fact the epilogue would eventually happen was already established in production over a year prior. Unlike with Yamato and Sora, we don’t get to see the two of them at a reasonable age to start doing anything serious within the scope of 02, which led to the unfortunate result of the reveal of them getting married in the epilogue being a very startling and sudden jump for many.)

In any case, I’m going to close this with yet another disclaimer -- I know I’m repeating myself too many times at this point, but I really, really want to make it clear that I am not, in any way, trying to imply that I don’t understand why people would be blindsided by the epilogue in any of the above ways (careers, the status of Digimon partnerships, shipping) because, as I said, I do think there is some merit to the philosophy that maybe they should have paid a bit more attention to how people -- especially kids -- would actually see the events rather than the writing philosophy behind why it should be written this way. (And, to be honest, I think I might have this complaint behind not just the epilogue, but both Adventure and 02 as a whole, for a multitude of different reasons.) Moreover, there are a million other cans of worms that could be feasibly discussed regarding the epilogue that I’ve only barely scratched the surface of here, because there are so many different topics to unpack when it comes to it, and I could go on forever (and further increase my risk of ending up with my head on a pike...). And of course there’s the wider issue of how to handle timeskip epilogues in general (they don’t really tend to be very popular, do they), so, really, there’s only so much I can cover in one post before dragging this on for too long. But in the end, even after writing all this, I understand that there are a lot of people who still won’t like it or don’t want to accept it, and that’s fine; it’s not my place to try and convince people to.

But, nevertheless, the reason why I made this post -- and what I hope the take-home can be -- is that, no, I don’t think this was made as a random off-their-rocker decision with the intent to make everyone miserable, nor some kind of fever dream that the writing staff must have pulled out while drunk, nor whatever accusations I’ve seen levied about it as a weird spontaneous idea (and the fact it really did come out very suddenly at people), but that -- regardless of how it landed -- there was some idea behind why it played out, and why, even 20 real-life years later, principles like “not everyone’s going to stick with the same career even in adulthood” continue to hold.

[mightbewriting]

Your writing is superb! Wait and Hope is now an all-time favorite fic of mine! I especially admire your ability to write dialogue. Do you have any tips on how to write distinct character voices?

Oh wow, thank you so much! I’m so happy you enjoyed W&H! Dialogue is actually one of my favorite things about writing so the fact that you liked it makes my heart pitter-patter! 

I apologize for sitting on this ask for a couple of days, but I wanted to actually think about some tips for character voice as it relates to dialogue! I do enjoy occasionally nerding out about writing… so without further ado, I’m about to nerd out A LOT (seriously, A LOT). I got a little carried away, but this was so much fun to think about! So, here are some of my thoughts on writing dialogue and using it to support distinct character voices.

The biggest tip I have on how to improve writing the way people talk is to listen to how people talk. Seems obvious, I know. But I mean how real people talk, not scripted movie and TV…which I think is often what comes to mind. I learned more about how people talk in the couple of months I did freelance transcription work than I did in the entirety of the first twenty-something years of my life. You don’t have to actually do transcription work to practice this, just find unscripted video or audio of people talking (interviews, vlogs, streamers, podcasts, whatever!) and type out it out.

The first thing I noticed when I actually had to transcribe real life conversations is that people often make NO SENSE when they talk. They have false starts, verbal pauses, non verbal pauses, they repeat words, they stop mid sentence to start another thought, they fumble with word choice, and so on. This is why professional transcription services offer VERBATIM transcription and NON VERBATIM transcription (I have a point to this, I swear!). Verbatim transcription is how it sounds, you have to type exactly what you hear:

Speaker A: “As I was— I was saying, ah, um, I think we should do— Mary, did you have thoughts on that? No, um, okay [cough], does anyone have any other thou— opinions before we move on?”

Like, what does that even mean? 

Non verbatim transcription teaches you to edit out the stuff that makes real life speech mostly unintelligible (I’m eternally amazed that we’re able to make sense of stuff like that on the fly! Brains are amazing!) and it turns the sentence above into something more like:

Speaker A: “Mary, did you have thoughts on that? No, okay. Does anyone have any other opinions before we move on?”

This is a pretty heavy handed edit, but I’d argue that the first 13 words of the verbatim sentence is nothing but a false start. I also removed the verbal pauses, the coughing notation, and the switch between words mid-speech. What I’m left with is something that looks and sounds more like what you might see in scripted dialogue. 

All of this is to say; when writing, for coherency’s sake, it’s helpful to write in a non verbatim style so you can be understood. BUT, I love throwing in the occasional false start or thought change mid-sentence, or even a rare verbal pause because I enjoy the bit of realism it adds. I know not everyone will agree with that, but that’s just how I enjoy dialogue.  

Character voice comes into play with dialogue in a lot of ways. If I could boil it down to two things; it’s about WHAT they say and HOW they say it. The WHAT involves things vocabulary: words one character might use that another wouldn’t, or a word they might know that another doesn’t. The HOW involves things like your dialogue tags and the associated actions and narrative surrounding the actual speech.

Rapid fire tips for the WHATs: people speak almost exclusively in contractions, they typically only saying things like “can not” and “do not” etc., for emphasis. Read dialogue out loud; if it sounds weird to hear then it’s probably not right. Character motivation is key; what someone says should make sense for their personality, traits, and history. People don’t always answer questions directly, or say what they mean. Less is usually more, unless someone is especially verbose or engaged in a debate, people don’t tend to wax poetic in long monologues all that often. 

My tips for the HOWs are less rapid fire because I want to talk about dialogue tags and that’s, idk…divisive? Here’s the thing; ‘said’ and ‘asked’ (or their other tense counterparts) are pretty much invisible and are used mostly to indicate who is speaking so a reader doesn’t get lost. Less is more with dialogue tags, too.

Alternative dialogue tags aren’t inherently evil (things like: whispered, shouted, grunted, grumbled, mumbled, growled, exclaimed, ordered, etc. have a place when used judiciously) but they are almost always a stand in for what could be a more interesting use of character voice. It usually ends up being a situation where a writer is telling the reader how to interpret dialogue instead of letting the dialogue speak for itself. So I try to use alternative tags very sparingly; you can actually see my evolution in this throughout W&H and then in S&S and my newer stuff, because I went from being subconsciously aware of it to more consciously practicing.  

Consider this real life example of something I wrote from Ron’s POV:

Malfoy forced them out of his office.

“Now you two figure out the details amongst yourselves; I have work to do,” Malfoy ordered.

I used ‘ordered’ knowing I was using an alternative tag and thinking to myself ‘it’s not so bad here, Ron would think Malfoy is ordering him around.’ Which isn’t necessarily wrong…but it’s not all that interesting. My rewrite, after being rightfully called on my bullshit for being lazy about it, looked like this:

Malfoy forced them out of his office.

“Now you two figure out the details amongst yourselves; I have work to do.” Malfoy waved his hands to dismiss them like they were elves he’d had more than enough of.

This version has a stronger character voice; we get Ron’s interpretation that Malfoy is treating him like an elf and we can imagine a physical movement from Malfoy showing how he’s speaking. I think that’s both more interesting to read and has a stronger sense of voice. When and where possible, I would say that substituting some kind of physical action or observation associated with dialogue usually results in a stronger sense of voice, either from the narrator or the speaker, or both! 

This response has gotten…lengthy. I’m sorry for that (but also, not sorry because writing is so interesting xD). In conclusion, writing is subjective and everyone has their own style. I don’t mean for this to be prescriptive advice, these are simply things that are on my mind when I’m writing dialogue and that I think lead to a stronger result. If nothing else: experiment. Write something exclusively in a verbatim style, write something exclusively with alternative tags, write something with no dialogue tags at all, write an enormous monologue and then figure out how to break it up. Try all sorts of different things to see what doesn’t sound right and what does. Learn the rules and then make your own.

Mostly, have fun. <3

[desert-dyke]

the things I’ve read in 2020 and some thoughts...

hey blacklist this now because it’s gonna get long from here. I spent NYE home alone and reading and it has really set the tone for this year. Fortunately, I’ve been reading way more for the first time in...I literally don’t even know? Maybe forever? Which is really dope! Books are fucking fantastic and I hope this trend continues for the rest of the year. So I’m gonna use this post (and continue to add to it as I finish books) to talk about the things I’ve read. It could be annoying. I could give up on it really soon. People might not read this at all. It’s okay! It’s my blog I’ll use it how I want and I want to talk about books I otherwise don’t really have a place to talk about them. 

The Shape of Water - Guillermo Del Toro & Daniel Kraus

If you know me irl you’ll know that I love this movie. Like, it’s probably my favorite movie as an adult. I love watching a movie and then going back and reading the book to compare and vice versa, but knowing that the book came out after the movie did discourage me at first, making me think it was nothing more than a cash grab. Though I was talking to (my boss) who also loves this movie and is a huge bibliophile and she highly recommended the book, so I figured I’d give it a stab.

The writing style is beautiful and enticing and overall I was impressed with the quality of it. It’s fast paced and switches perspective between characters frequently, though remains easy to follow. The book focuses a little less on Elisa and more on the other characters and stories around her, including, surprisingly, Elaine Strickland, who despite never wondering much about during the movie, I enjoyed being included in the book. There’s a deeper exploration into pretty much everyone’s backstories, and more prominent character development. It’s excellent as a standalone piece, and supplementary to readers who have seen the movie. There’s also some alternative takes on certain scenes, which I don’t necessarily like better or worse than the choices made in the movie, but it makes for an interesting read. 

The book explores themes of alienation and being othered, with a main cast that breaks the stereotype of straight white fully-abled male. Elisa is a mute woman, Zelda, a black woman, and Giles a gay man. With the political climate of the 1950′s, all of them are outsiders and all of them find solidarity in each other, despite their unique struggles, and also with the creature.

The only thing I didn’t quite like was the portrayal of the creature. I think greater efforts were put into making him more godlike and otherworldly, but also, simultaneously, he comes off as much more like a wild animal in the book, and the latter came off as strange to me, and not in the way I like it. Overall, even if the movie didn’t exist and I only read this, I’d still think it was a really good story.

To Be Taught, If Fortunate - Becky Chambers

If I depended on the synopsis on the back of the book to decide whether or not I wanted to read this, I don’t know if I would have bothered. To be honest, I only wanted to read this because Becky Chambers is my current favorite author and all other of her works I’ve read I’ve absolutely adored, so naturally, I wanted to give this one a chance, even if the concept wasn’t as riveting as I would have hoped.

She didn’t disappoint. 

Whereas her other books take place in a vast space civilization where humanity is integrated with aliens and there’s technology beyond our dreams, this book took place in a different creative universe, a little more closer to our timeline. The book is about space exploration for the sake of learning and taking care to be as least intrusive on the explored worlds as possible. It’s a nice break from what I usually see in sci fi, with colonization and owning space and wanting to use knowledge in order to hurt others. It follows a research crew of four, sent to research four planets in a far solar system. There’s a lag in travel time, since FTL travel had not been discovered yet, so a common device is communication with Earth is off by years. Eventually, the crew realizes they have lost contact with Earth and Earth had likely suffered some sort of devastation. It wonders if Earth has forgotten them or if it’s even worth it to return since they might be the last astronauts of their time. 

The worlds they visit and research are unique and vivid and fill me with wonder. They’re realistic to the point where I found myself questioning if the book was prophetic. Chambers makes effort to incorporate science into her novels, but in a way that does not estrange a reader like me who only has a basic knowledge in science. It’s one of the things I find most attractive about her work, because it has this added realism and this feeling of “wow, this really could happen” and yet remains easy to follow. 

I found the crew to be likeable and diverse. Three of them are in a relationship with each other, and while polyamory isn’t usually an interest of mine, it’s in the background as well as it’s never used as a point to cause drama. It’s a healthy functional relationship. Also, one of the crew is a trans man and another is asexual, both details that exist within a single line, but yet important to be included to flesh out the characters. 

What I didn’t like was the almost rush to the end of the book. It’s a short book, roughly 100 pages, but it seems to me as if it reaches it’s climax and then the book just ends and it kind of feels like it’s still in the middle of things. I’ve had time to think about it, though, and I’ve considered that maybe anything else written would have been redundant or just filler and therefore not needed. So in that case, that’s fair. It still felt a little abrupt to me, but that’s what fic is for. 

Overall, if you haven’t read anything by Becky Chambers you need to change that immediately. Please don’t leave me alone and fanning over this incredible author!!

All Systems Red - Martha Wells

This was another short one, and in fact, I read it entirely in one sitting. The concept of the book was really intriguing, and actually I selected it because I liked the opening line so much. I have a lot of feelings about AI and robots, so this was a naturally alluring story to me. Mixed with the fact that the beefed out security robot, who calls themselves “Murderbot”,  was absolutely obsessed with soap opera tv just absolutely gets me!

The story is told through Murderbot’s perspective, who is assigned to guard a research team. They had recently hacked their government module, which now allows them full autonomy and no longer having to obey orders from their assigned humans. It’s interesting to see Murderbot actively choose to help the humans. Also, needing to maintain an illusion that they aren’t unshackled, since what they did was forbidden. 

The research team is full of interesting characters, who I find tragically under explored. The only couple in the story is wlw, which I vastly appreciated, along with they obviously cared and loved each other and their relationship was not used for drama purposes. In favor of the lack of development with the cast of characters, since the narrator is Murderbot and part of Murderbot’s personality is they are actively trying not to care about these humans, it does make sense. Still, I would have loved to see more of the crew and more development between Murderbot and them. 

I like the dark lore that is hinted behind Murderbot’s existence. There’s organic counterparts to their machine made from cloned humans. It’s creepy and morbid, but a lot is with the lore of the universe that the story takes place in. There’s hints towards a heavy capitalist society in space where the humans and Murderbot came from, where the right price will get you anything, regardless of morals. The overall tone of the story is very quirky, but it needs to be to offset just how dark everything that happens actually is. The book explores the concept of corporate greed, from the existence of Murderbot to the deaths that come to humans on the planet the crew is studying.

This book was deeply fascinating, but I didn’t love the way it was written. I love every concept and choice made, but I didn’t love the execution. It left me wanting without satisfaction. It’s not a bad book and I still over all enjoyed it. It is part of a series, which I did not realize at the time of reading it, but the ending leaves room for more to be written, so maybe in the following books there will be the development I desired. However, the ending of the book leaves it apparent that Murderbot will not be interacting with the same characters of the first, but that is just an assumption and I could be wrong. I’m not sure yet if I will read more in the series but I’m not entirely opposed to it.

All the Birds in the Sky - Charlie Jane Anders

This is another one that I definitely would not have read if I had to choose based on the synopsis alone. The synopsis made it sound so run-of-the-mill star-crossed-lovers, which, hey, maybe that actually helps sell the book because its a pretty well loved trope, but for me it was off-putting, as well as isn’t fair to what the book actually turned out to be. But that’s what reviews are for, and I found this book from some sort of list, I think it was best sci-fi books written by women.

The general idea of the book is a witch and a techie fall in love while the world is falling apart due to a conflict between magic and technology. The book is lauded for bending genre and honestly, it fucking has. It’s as equally a sci-fi novel as it is a fantasy novel. There’s advanced technology, such as robots, two second time machines, rocket ships, and ultimately, a portal leading to a different universe in hopes of escaping the destruction of earth. On the magic side, there’s a connection to nature, rules that have to be abided, quirky witches and magicians and mystique. Both Laurence and Patricia are outsiders that have seemingly found these secret niches in the world that becomes their own.

Both plots are interesting in their own, and could possibly exist as two separate books, but what ties the entire story together is the connection Laurence and Patricia have, and their ultimate romance.

The romance is a wonderful slow burn, from childhood friends, to adult friends to lovers. By the time Patricia and Laurence finally get together, you really fucking want them to. They weave in and out of each other’s lives throughout their own personal plots. There’s tensions and there’s release. And most importantly, they have lives outside of each other. Their romance compliments the story, rather than the story being entirely about romance. 

Similar to the former review, there’s a lot of quirkiness in the story, that ultimately offsets how dark the story can be. The story doesn’t shy away from complicated relationships with parents and siblings and friends and other people, people of mixed ages and backgrounds. It explores abuse, bullying, natural disaster and loss. The story would have been miserable and a drag to read without the whimsical qualities of it. Plus it’s a fantasy/sci-fi, so it should have some quirkiness to it! And it made for a very enjoyable read!

My criticism for this one is, yet again, the ending. The conflict resolves and the story comes to an end. In favor of how it was written, the way things resolve, I believe the world is about to go through a grand change. While the story is quirky, I think it would have been too corny to have had a glittery magical wave drag across the land, altering the world as it went. So, it’s fair, I guess, that the author chose to end it where she did. Still, it left me craving more. Maybe because the story was so good and I wasn’t yet ready to let it go.

Also, as a side note, the author is a trans woman. So if you’re looking for books written by trans authors to support, put this at the top of your list.

[therewatcher-blog]

Best Underrated Scene: Gilmore Girls - 1x08 Love & War & Snow

gOh hello there, I kinda left off doing these, but I want to keep going. Even if it’s just for me. It’s a fun exercise. So here we go, Love & War & Snow. I don’t exactly know why, but this is one of my favorite episodes, especially in season one. It’s one that I’ll consistently rewatch out of context. I think the fact that there is really almost no conflict is just so comforting to me. I also love the introduction of Lorelai’s obsession with snow. It’s one of the things that makes this show so cozy. This mystical connection she has with snow, is like a bit of magical realism sprinkled over this somewhat quietly realistic (if not idealized) show. That mixed with the absurdities of the townies of Stars Hollow just makes for the perfect rewatchable episode. 

I honestly think this episode has a lot of quietly great scenes. Luke and Lorelai’s small interaction and Rory’s dinner with the grandparents are contenders. However, I think the scene with Luke and Lorelai doesn’t have enough in it to make it underrated and Rory’s dinner with Richard and Emily is perhaps maybe too obvious in what it accomplishes. I also think their abrupt end to the reminiscing as soon as they see a picture of Lorelai in her coming out party is maybe a bit over-the-top in it’s awkwardness. We know they have a discomfort in talking about Lorelai’s pregnancy, but you’d think they would better control this clear discomfort when in the presence of their granddaughter who resulted from the pregnancy. It’s just a little bit more than heartbreaking and unfair.   

So moving on to my pick:

The First Stars Hollow Town Meeting:

I don’t imagine too many town meetings will make the list, but I think this introduction to the town’s weekly ritual is seamlessly done in the opening sequence of the episode. It’s also sets up the small D?-plot that follows Luke through the episode. I always like when the cold open has a bit of bearing on the episode rather than being completely without context. 

We open with the town meeting already out of order as Miss Patty attempts to reclaim some control and Taylor complains that no one is listening to him. We know immediately what is happening, but as we will come to learn in the future episodes this course of events is incredibly common which makes rewatching it that much more enjoyable. It’s as if we already have a little inside joke with the characters. 

I think something that struck me even more on watching it this time through is that I still chuckled at a couple places. Taylor is perhaps a frustrating and divisive character, but I think he’s a character who is hilarious because of the hyper-realism of what he’s playing. He’s obsessed with rules and order to the degree of insanity. He enjoys the small power he holds in the town and he uses it to his advantage wherever possible, but ultimately has something resembling good intentions. So when he claims Andrew is “peddling drug paraphernalia to kids” when all he did was sell a lava lamp, I can’t help but laugh. He does make a good point that there is no use for a lava lamp unless you’re on drugs.

Of course, Lorelai enters the scene late, carrying food and drinks for her and Rory (something that we find out in a future episode is not allowed during these meetings - again an inside joke we now share on rewatching) and Rory quickly catches her up to speed on the small town politics surrounding the removal of a no-parking zone sign. Lorelai astutely observes that Taylor only wants the sign removed outside his store so he can park there all day. 

Mayor Harry (a character who only shows up one or two more times, unfortunately) begins a speech about the townspeople being like his children which, from the cutting to stifled giggles and knowing looks between Lorelai and Rory, we can deduce is a speech the town has heard more than once. This flowery language is only used to launch into a small chiding of his “children,” reminding them that "we have leash laws, people!” We can see the GIlmore girls having a blast listening to the small town’s petty grievances and we are put right there with them. 

The mayor shifts gears to the “legendary Battle of Stars Hollow.” As he begins to give the recap of the battle, we hear the girls commenting on Luke who is “shifting in his seat” and “adjusting his hat” in annoyance before he finally jumps up and interrupts the mayor’s recounting of the battle - “Oh for god’s sake! Do we have to go through this every damn year?” Mayor Harry asks who is speaking and Luke answers, “It’s me, Harry, Luke. You’ve known me since I was five years old.” I think this is the first mention of Luke having lived in Stars Hollow his whole life (I could be wrong), which is a fascinating facet of his character. Luke detests change and is stubborn beyond reason, but in this storyline and many of his storylines that boil down to Luke vs. The Town (and/or Taylor specifically), he is often anti-tradition. Or at least he thinks the traditions of his town are silly. That is certainly the case here as Luke argues that the battle reenactment for a battle that never occurred is really just beyond ridiculous and embarrassing. 

“Have any of you ever considered the fact that you’re glorifying a war we fought so we could keep land that we stole?” Luke argues in vain. Oh, woke hippie Luke. How I love you. I said it in a previous post, but they really leave this quality of Luke’s behind as the show continues. I love whenever it pops up and I will try to always note it here. I like to believe it’s always there in some small way even as he starts to become more of a somewhat stereotypical manly man in later seasons. “If you don’t like it here in America, why don’t you go stand in line for toilet paper in the USSR!” Mayor Harry retorts to no avail. “There is no USSR, Harry,” Luke responds. The girls make a quip about the sense of community being so important as Harry and Luke continue to argue and we fade out to the opening credits. 

This is one of the early scenes that really starts to shape the wonderful townie relationships that add color to the show. Luke is more of a townie than a leading man at this point, so it is important to see his relationship to the town fleshed out in this moment. His deep roots as well as his antagonistic feelings regarding the town’s obsessions with tradition are set up in this scene and explored even more in the episode. It’s a light and fun exchange with a few chuckles, but more than anything these meetings become an important and unique backbone to the Gilmore Girls viewing experience. Some of them are zanier than others, this one is certainly more grounded and realistic than some others. But in this first town meeting the seeds for all the different characters and their strong opinions regarding the town, it’s rules, traditions, and festivals is established efficiently through action and dialogue that doesn’t feel overly expository or stilted while offering more of a glance into the backstory of a character who will become increasingly important as the show goes on. All in 3 minutes. Not bad. 

[picturesinlove]

London Film Festival 2017 or: the real world sucks just watch films for 2 weeks

I feel like I’ve spent my entire student loan seeing things at the London Film Festival, which ran over the last few weeks.

Was worth it.

#1: MANIFESTO, directed by Julian Rosefeldt, 90 mins

- Originally a critically acclaimed multi-screen video installation in which Cate Blanchett plays 13 different characters, ranging from a school teacher to a homeless man, performing artist’s manifestos in 13 different scenarios. Part of the financing deal was Rosefeldt had to cut a 90 minute, linear version of the piece for a cinematic setting. Provides some super interesting results.

- Clearly a translation, but an interesting one. Making the viewer watch it beginning to end highlights the flaws in that translation from installation to cinematic setting (can get too much to digest sometimes), but when it works, it *really* works. 

- More than anything, made me think about the cinema as a space- question the realms of it and what we’re putting on a big screen. 

- CATE FUCKING BLANCHETT!!!! i am convinced no one could have pulled this off like she did. She’s running on adrenaline and pure bravery. She makes interesting choices at every twist and turn. A masterclass.

- You HAVE to be fully, super awake and willing to give this your full attention from the start. It’s slow and beautiful and wonderful... but it is slow. 

- Genre hops from scenario to scenario perfectly... from Clio Banard-esque social realism to Rachel Maclean-like cartoonish sci-fi. 

- Some things Julian Rosefeldt and Cate Blanchett said in the talk afterwards that seemed interesting (lots of paraphrasing): - The white cube is a prison... talking to people who already agree with you... Cinema has a bigger audience with more coincidental audience members-  Cate Blanchett fans from the new Thor film mayyyy see this... - Ask ‘would anyone be interested in seeing this?’, NOT ‘will anyone like it?’ - ‘If I could say what everything means, I should stop doing art.’ - ‘Your brain attends to things differently when watched linearly’ - ‘Art’s role isn’t educative- it’s provocative.’

4/5.

Opens November 24th.

#2: BATTLE OF THE SEXES, directed by Jonathan Dayton & Valarie Faris, 121 mins

- True story of 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.

- Rousing good fun. A real crowd pleaser. I saw the Gala screening at the Odeon in Leicester Square... the perfect way to watch- with lots of people, all feeling the Hollywood-ised, over-dramatised, over-sentimental beats together... and super enjoying it. 

- It’s less subtle than MOTHER! (2017) about what it’s saying, but has a shining, naive optimism to it that you just kind of have to smile at.

- Emma Stone and Steve Carrell as King and Riggs hold all the moving pieces together. They add weight to potentially weightless, throw-away moments.

- All supporting performances great too- Sarah Silverman the MVP. Andrea Riseborough continues to be a chameleon, effortlessly embodying everything about who she’s playing, and it doesn’t even look like she’s trying. And hey! it’s super nice to Martha MacIsaac back on screen with Emma Stone! Their first time together on screen since Superbad (2007).

- The romance between Billie Jean King and Riseborough’s character Marilyn Barnett is easily the most engaging aspect of the film. The only time it leaves Hollywood feel-good territory. Something so magical watching them drive the sun-kissed California roads together listening to ‘Rocket Man’.

3.5/5.

Opens November 24th.

#3: OUR TIME WILL COME, directed by Ann Hui, 130 mins

- 1940s Japanese occupied Hong Kong. Fang Lan, a young primary school teacher, gets involved in the resistance movement and rises to become a legendary figure in the fight for freedom.

- STAKES. Really, really gets how to set up stakes for the characters. It’s a film about all the small things, the little fights in a war that will eventually add up to victory. Not assassinating all the leaders of the opposing army, just stealing a map that’s been put in a bin in an enemy outpost, hoping perhaps it helps. It’s a section of a larger painting. EVERYTHING feels dangerous. Every character is in danger at every moment, and is always punished for making the smallest mistake. Gives the sense that the oppressive State is ALWAYS watching. It demands you never become de-sensitised to the violence which leads to that immediate sense of danger.

- Had a restrained cheapness to it which I actually quite liked. Every now and then you get some goofy looking VFXs and some badly dubbed ADR, but the restraint keeps everything feeling grounded and human.

- Runs at it’s own pace/abides by it’s own structure, which may be too slow/anti-climactic for some, but I liked it for the most part. Playing by it’s own rules and truly being what it wanted to be... which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.

- The moments it steps out of the main story and does a docu-drama thing... just why? Came across so half-baked. Similar to the 3 time scales in Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017), there was never really a moment of release, an ‘oh! that’s a really interesting decision to do that!’ moment. Just left me kind of baffled to why?

- Genuine moments of magic that I wouldn’t dream of spoiling. Seriously some of the most creative, inspired scenes I’ve ever seen.

- Some guy (wearing a BFI lanyard??) sitting a few seats away kept repeating phrases from the film outloud in a strange voice? Why would you do this??

3.5/5.

UK release date unknown, probably some time in 2018.

#4: LAST FLAG FLYING, directed by Richard Linklater, 124 mins

- 2003. A Vietnam veteran recruits his two oldest buddies, who he served with, to accompany him on a journey no one should ever have to take.

- Richard Linklater continues to prove he can effortless hop between genres like no one else, but the film is still packed full with ideas he’s played with before.

- Performances are uniformly and predictably excellent. Bryan Cranston’s Sal is like the crazy friend of your parents who’d show up every few years in a beaten up old car and give you a pack of smokes for your birthday. Laurence Fishburne says ‘praise Jesus’ every 2 minutes and it’s amazing. Steve Carrell has a quiet dignity to him that’s really special. 

- Linklater knows exactly what he’s doing with his camera (water is wet), but it kills me to say it felt visually bland like his films never have. 

- Features the best ‘characters uncontrollably laughing’ scene since The Intouchables (2011).

4/5.

Opens 3rd November.

#5: THOROUGHBREDS, directed by Cory Finley, 90 minutes

- Two rich-kids from small town Connecticut hatch a plan together.

- Ugh, just.... what’s the point? It’s not boring, but every frame just had me thinking ‘why is this happening?’ So disappointingly transparent. I could see the director sitting planning the movements and cuts. Painfully ‘first-feature’ like. Should have been a rich, twisted delight, but was just so vapid and empty. 

- Olivia Cooke is one of my favourite rising actresses. Has one of my favourite performances ever as Rachel in Me and Earl and The Dying Girl (2015), and dammit I cry every time I watch her in it. In this... she does a good job with what she’s given. Anya Taylor-Joy is fun too.

- Badly costumed?? So rarely actively think that.

- Music was fun but as empty and ultimately weightless as the rest of the film. Felt like an afterthought to spice things up.

- Anton Yelchin’s character was the only person in the whole film I cared about. Brings a greyness to such a black and white film. What a fucking loss to the world man.

2/5.

Opens 9th March, 2018. 

#6: CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, directed by Luca Guadagnino, 130 minutes

- Somewhere in Northern Italy, Summer 1983, Elio’s life changes.

- Sun-drenched Europe, the smell of warmth and twirling cigarette smoke, deep blue sky- pure, breakfast with a glass of apricot juice and an espresso, the sound of bike spokes spinning lazily. 

I wish I could live with these people.

‘Later.’

4.5/5.

Opens 27th October.

#7: THE SHAPE OF WATER, directed by Guillermo del Toro, 119 minutes

- 1962, Cold War America. A mute cleaner at a government research facility, Elisa, strikes up an unlikely relationship.

- Del Toro just *knows* what he’s doing. It’s all so effortlessly confident. So rich and fulfilled. Such commitment to everything. 

- The first half is fantastical and brilliant. The second.... loses something. Still has moments of genius, but too much plot. Fizzles out in a disappointing way.

- Reminded me in a lot of ways of Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver (2017). Both are clearly projects the directors have wanted to make for a while, both have amazing first acts then don’t quite know what do with themselves. However, Shape has pure heart that carries it through any rough patches. It feels like it’s actually about something, not just an exercise in style for the director.

3.8/5.

Opens 16th February, 2018.

#8: LUCKY, directed by John Carroll Lynch, 88 minutes

- The swan song of Harry Dean Stanton. A 90-year old atheist’s life as he wanders his desert town, drinking, smoking and speaking to old friends.

- Pure magic all the way through. Plays at exactly the speed and tone it wants to play at.

- One of the most engaging ‘but nothing happens!!’ films I’ve ever seen.

- Everyone hits perfectly. David Lynch appears playing a character that has a pet tortoise called President Roosevelt for fuck sake.

- Bleak, but finds immense joy in that bleakness. Whenever I feel like I’m about to face the void- I will remember the smile of Harry Dean Stanton.

- 3.5/5.

Opens January 2018.

#9: BAD GENIUS, directed by Nattawut Poonpiriya, 130 minutes

- Thai Heist-Thriller about students cheating their exams.

- WHAT A FUCKING RIDE!! More stakes in this than most ‘end of the world’ superhero movies.

- The filmmaking is so good it makes you forget plausibility is sometimes being pushed. Amazing set-pieces. Expertly choreographed.

- Whimsical, but painful and genuinely emotional when it needs to be. 

- Every character is so rich and textured in their own way. So fully realised.

- Why do the last 2 minutes of this film exist??

- 2 years time, there will almost certainly be an American remake of this... and it’ll suck so hard. 

- SEE THIS FILM. SEE THIS FILM. SEE THIS FILM. SEE THIS FILM.

4/5.

Opens some time in 2018.

#10: THE FLORIDA PROJECT, directed by Sean Baker, 115 minutes

- In the shadow of Disney World, 6 year-old Moonee and her friends spend the summer playing around the Motels they live in.

- Pastel bright colours. Every person has survived a storm. Explore the wasteland of failed corporate America. Become a child again.

- Baker continues to masterfully blend fiction with reality, wrapping one in the other.

- Doesn’t ask you to like the characters. Doesn’t need to. One of the very best films of the year.

4.5/5.

Opens 10th November.

#11: INGRID GOES WEST, directed by Matt Spicer, 98 minutes

- Ingrid moves to California to become Instagram famous.

- An enjoyable, fun Saturday night film. 

- Elisabeth Olsen as ‘photographer’ Taylor Sloane is note perfect. Could so easily have slept-walked through it, but didn’t. Her relationship with brother Nicky is so, so good. Idea of this Instagram famous rich girl with her crazy, pill-junkie, roid-monkey brother who she knows is terrible but loves him and is sort of as vapid as he is- just knows how to hide it better. And man, he is SO evil. Haven’t hated a character as much as I hated him in a while.

- Plaza holds it together. Her and the film trust you to realise how mentally ill she is without reminding us too much.

- 1st half is superbly played... loses it somewhere in the middle of the 2nd act but picks up again at the end.

- Music was terrible?! Suggested some weird criss-cross in tone of the film.

- I GET IT! THE INTERNET IS BAD!

3.5/5.

Opens 17th November.

#12: You Were Never Really Here, directed by Lynne Ramsey, 85 minutes

- Gulf War veteran Joe is known for the brutality he inflicts on captors of the children he’s rescuing.

- Deeply troubled. Beautiful. Precise. Scatter-brained. Focused. A violin strung too tightly, then played by a madman. How can something so stripped down and raw feel so symphonic and wholesome? I feel like I’ve been repeatedly smashed in the head with a hammer... but enjoyed it.

- Jaoquin Phoenix. Lynne Ramsey. Johnny Greenwood.

- There are things in this that will play on loop in my head for the rest of my life.

4.5/5.

Opens in early 2018.

#13: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, directed by Martin McDonagh, 115 minutes

- A mother takes desperate steps to pressure local law enforcement to find her daughter’s killer.

- Perfectly woven and layered characters. I fucking hate the phrase ‘the character arc’, but if I were teaching a class in it- I’d show this film. 

- A film about relationships, and every relationship between every character or creature or inanimate object is perfect.

- McDonagh loves theatrical sensibilities. Nobody does grand, rich set-pieces quite like him... makes highly stylised situations feel real in the world he sets up.

- I could have watched hours more of these characters interacting.

4/5.

Opens 12th January 2018.

STRAY THOUGHTS:

- Felt spoilt in the audiences I had the pleasure of watching these films with. Always respectful.

- Every time Clare Stewart (head of festival) came on stage to present a film, I just couldn’t help but smile. Bumped into her after a screening and told her my student loan situation. I don’t think she knew what to say.

- DON’T WATCH THE TRAILERS OF ANY OF THESE FILMS. THEY SPOIL SO MANY OF THEM.

- I am consistently shocked by how enamoured I am with celebrities. Some weird conditioning in my brain. Am glad I didn’t queue up to get a picture with anyone. Saying that, this screenshot from a random interview I saw online where I’m juuuust to the left of Emma Stone will live on my wall forever.

ughhhhhh i’m a loser ughhhhh

[beaft]

How do you come up with your worlds for your stories? Do you start with a character or a world? How do you figure out the amazing little quirks and details that make it so attractive, without being repetitive or similar to another world? Do you go into the core mechanics of magic when it's present in your world? And how do you brainstorm your world/ideas? How do you know what's a good idea or bad and not worth pursuing?

Oh, man, thank you so much for giving me an excuse toramble about this (although my response is gonna be pretty long, so you mightregret asking). I have a lot of thoughts about worldbuilding, and very few ofthem are coherent, but here’s my best attempt!

(warning: lots of Wordsunder the cut)

1) I don’t really knowhow to answer this one, because…I honestly don’t know? Sometimes it just sortof happens – an idea comes into myhead, and I just put it down and run with it. The “Dearly Departed” ‘versehappened when I got lost in the woods, and found myself wondering what I’d doif I came out again to discover that everyone had disappeared. Pretty basic,but from there it evolved into a weird quasi-horror story with its own set ofrules, to the point where the original concept was fairly peripheral. Other times,it’s just a question of looking at something and asking yourself, “How doesthis work? What would happen if I changed this specific aspect, or addedsomething new on?” Sometimes it feels a bit like engineering – taking thingsapart and putting them back together in new ways, and seeing what happens as aresult.

2) I have kind of a weirdway of working when it comes to characters; sometimes a very loud anddistinctive voice will turn up in my head, and when that happens I spend a bitof time living with them and listening to what they’ve got to say. Then I put themin a sort of mental bank where they can be taken out and inserted into a storythat seems to fit them (possibly adapting some elements of their personality inthe process). Other times, the world itself will suggest what kind ofcharacters might fit into it. In Midnight Calling, a central idea is thatdreams have substance, and can be used as a weapon – so from there it justseemed narratively fitting for the main character to be narcoleptic. I do needto plan out my characters beforehand, though, because if I just try and makethem up as I go they all end up sounding like me (which is to say, confusedsnarky everymen who just want to go home and have a cup of tea and a nicesit-down). As much as we all love Bilbo Baggins, no one wants a story entirelypopulated by him.  

3) The fact is, there aren’treally many “original” ideas left. Making something interesting doesn’t generallycome about by thinking of a concept that nobody has ever thought of before, butby combining old ideas in new ways. Occasionally, it’s fun to just mashtogether two completely random plots or genres, and see what happens. Forexample, Six of Crows is essentially justGame of Thrones meets Oceans Eleven, whilst TheDresden Files is what happens when you take a Raymond Chandler story andadd wizards. The weirder and the more seemingly disparate the ideas are, thebetter. (Or so I’ve found, anyway.)

4) While I’m objectivelyterrible at anything vaguely science-related, I do try to go into themechanics, because at the end of the day I like to have explanations for things.It’s…partly why the way Marvel deals with the whole “magic” thing kind ofannoys me? To give one example: we’re shown that Loki can shapeshift, and whenhe does his voice changes to match the voice of the person he’s imitating (whichindicates that it’s a full-body change, not just a superficial illusion). However,when he alters other people – such as transforming Thor into Sif – their voicesstay the same, implying that this is either a different kind of transformationaltogether or that the voice change and the appearance change are two separate spells.It’s little stuff like that which really gets to me, because it takesme out of that world and makes me question what the actual rules are, orwhether there are even rules at all. simply put, it feels lazy. So while it isimportant to walk that line between “over-explaining” and “under-explaining”, youdo need to have some kind of internal consistency in place - unless you’re doing full-on surrealism, in which case you’re probably not going to be doing much worldbuilding anyway. 

4) My brainstormingusually takes the form of random scribbled notes with a lot of question marksand crossings-out, and probably makes absolutely no sense to anyone who isn’tme. I usually start with a simple concept, and once I have that down there are afew core things that have to be dealt with straight off the bat, such as: whatdifferent cultures exist in this world? How do they interact? Is there anydiscrimination, and if so where does it come from? (For example, having homophobiajust for the sake of “realism” is pretty sloppy, and just makes it seem asthough the author couldn’t be bothered to conceptualise a world in which gaypeople aren’t treated like shit.) What are the different social classes? What’sthe climate and geography? What important historical events happened that impactedthe world? Dragon Age does this really well, imo – while plenty of people havecomplained about the absurd amount of codexes and random lengthy chunks of socio-politicalinformation, there’s no denying that it does a lot to make the setting feel likea real place with a rich history, not something that conveniently sprang intoexistence right before the narrative begins. The way to stop this from becomingtedious and expositional is to allow it to support the story, rather thanbeing the story. Your audience doesn’t need to know everything that youknow. So long as you slip in details here and there, they can generally be countedon to fill in the blanks themselves.

5) The only way I cantell if an idea is good or not is to write it. Generally, if I find it excitingand I want to explore it further, it’s a keeper. If I’m twenty pages in and it’salready feeling like a slog, I don’t bother. While forcing yourself to grindthrough the tough bits is (unfortunately) a key part of the writing process, ifit doesn’t interest you in at least some capacity, then it probably won’tinterest anybody else either.

Thank you again, andapologies for the essay!

[literaryinspiredwebserieslove]

LIW Review: Lovely Little Losers

Much as I love NMTD as my favorite adaptation of my favorite Shakespeare play, LBD for introducing me to the genre and the genre to the world, and so many other literary-inspired webseries for so many reasons, Lovely Little Losers will always be my favorite. 

The premise is simple: Benedick, Balthazar, and Pedro (now going by Peter) from Nothing Much To Do are going to university in Wellington and living in a flat together with the lovely and awkward Freddie Kingston. Freddie and Ben decide to impose some order on the flat with a set of absurd flat rules that everyone has to follow, including a curfew, vegetarianism (and vegan Fridays), Ben getting to film everything, imposed flat bonding in the form of challenges, and the worst rule of all, no romantic relationships, aka no shenanigans. 

The series is loosely based on Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, but in reality there are only about five episodes that have anything to do with the plot of the original play. Apart from those moments, the inspiration mostly just creates the premise and the names of certain characters.

Plot overview:

Freddie, Benedick, Peter, and Balthazar sign a bunch of ridiculous flat rules that at first seem like a good idea and quickly spiral out of control. Then Beatrice and Meg decide to road trip to Wellington, where, due to The Rules, they end of sleeping in a tent in the back garden along with Kit, another friend of the flat. It’s hard to say more about the actual plot without spoilers, since it’s barely revealed what’s been going on until almost the end (starting around “SARDINES” and going until “FEATHERS”), so I’ll move on to my other categories.

Format:

All actual episodes are posted on the Lovely Little Losers YouTube channel, with Ben as the main (unreliable) narrator, Meg as secondary (mostly reliable) narrator, and other characters (such as Beatrice and Peter) occasionally filming/uploading videos as well. Fifteen videos are devoted to “Balth in a Bath,” which was all filmed on the same day in February but is uploaded sporadically throughout the year. There are also between fourteen and seventeen song videos, depending on how you define “song” (more on that later). There are also a few extras on other YouTube channels that, while not technically part of the story, help illuminate things considerably (the channel I’m referring to here is Zoos Job, though there are also two videos on the Nothing Much To Do channel).

How to watch LoLiLo:

This is ordinarily not one of my categories, but in this case it is very necessary. You MUST read the video descriptions, and also check the comments section, to have ANY idea what’s really going on here, and even then most of it’s going to be subtext. You can watch the series either in the order it was intended to be watched in or in chronological order (which ruins a little of the mystery but averts a Zoos Job marathon later on. Links to both playlists are below). Keep in mind that Benedick is the narrator of nearly the whole thing, and that he is editing the content to fit his own agenda – the one @beatriceeagle calls “Project Birdy-Fingers.” This means that two-thirds of the love stories in LoLiLo are almost entirely hidden from the viewers and once again need to be read through subtext. 

Realism:

Off the charts dedicated. This series has a much more experimental style than NMTD – several episodes use more than one camera angle, nearly every episodes has multiple characters in it, and is frequently filmed over multiple days and edited into non-chronological order – but there is still always a reason for the camera to be there and always a reason, in-universe, for it to have been edited and uploaded the way it was. This dedication to realism made things that much more difficult for The Candle Wasters, but it also adds hugely to the value of the series.

Music:

As I mentioned above, many, many episodes of LLL are actually songs. The series has been referred to by many people as a “secret musical” because of this. 11 songs are almost entirely character development. “A Merry Note” was written by Shakespeare and was mostly The Candle Wasters being clever and making us think our ship had sailed. “Heaven in Her Lips” is a cute love song. “Stay” is secretly plot, though the lyrics also assist in understanding “one foot on sea one on shore one in the boiling hot lava,” which is the real first episode of LoLiLo. Then we get to the question of whether certain other videos are songs. “Berry Nice,” while a Balth in a Bath episode, is clearly a song. But what about “Beatrice and Ballads,” which is essentially the reprise of “Beatrice, You’re Vivacious”? What about “A Sonnet,” which, although not a song, is the inverse of “An Ode” and should therefore be included for the sake of symmetry? Of course, the numbers don’t matter, because the songs are amazing. The songs themselves were mainly written by Reuben Hudson, Elsie Bollinger, and Maude Morris, with some help from other writers, and are performed mostly by Reuben Hudson and Mouce Young, with help from most of the rest of the cast.

Representation/diversity:

Very strong. Several characters are not white at all (Kit and Jaquie), and race just generally is a non-issue. LGBT representation is also great, especially for a pre-2016 webseries: Peter is now openly bisexual, Balthazar actually uses the word “gay” to describe himself, Paige and Chelsey are a lesbian couple who have basically the only functional relationship in the whole series, and the sexuality of several other characters (Kit, Freddie, Costa, Vegan Fred), is never defined, though I headcanon them all as bi. Though there are no disabled characters, there are extensive explorations of mental health issues, though as usual for The Candle Wasters, this is largely in subtext. Also, people actually talk about money in this and have realistic issues with money, which is a nice change from every other webseries I’ve seen.

Film quality:

Fantabulous, especially since The Candle Wasters had an actual budget for this series.  As mentioned before, there are even episodes shot with multiple cameras THAT ACTUALLY WORK. Yay for realism and quality combined is all I can say.

My three favorite things about Lovely Little Losers:

1) My two favorite episodes, “RUSSIANFUDGE” and “ACCOSTED”

2) Balth in a Bath, because Balth in a Bath is perfect and innocent and lovely and actually includes a lot of exposition and character/relationship development that doesn’t exist anywhere else.

3) The fact that I keep getting more out of it on every rewatch – and I have now seen this thing in full ten times, though it’s been more like twenty for some episodes (”TEA,” “RUSSIANFUDGE”), and I have no idea how many times I’ve watched/listened to some of the songs.

Difficult things about Lovely Little Losers:

On first viewing it can be almost impossible to understand what’s going on almost all the time, and it can be easy to skip things because the series seems largely plotless. Do not give up hope! There is indeed a plot, but you have to hunt for it. If you finish the series and still feel confused or dissatisfied, I recommend a rewatch and @beatriceeagle and @marydebenham ‘s LLL rewatch metas, which have been invaluable for many the confused/dissatisfied viewer. It can also be frustrating that certain things (like apologies) are never said on camera, but we can blame realism for that. 

All I can say is, despite its surface flaws, LoLiLo is not only my favorite webseries but also only of my favorite pieces of literature of all time. There’s so much here, in character, in content, and in theme, and I could talk about it for ages more than I already have. Although on first viewing I had no idea what to make of it, I now give LLL a solid and glowing 5/5 stars.

Cast:

Benedick Hobbes – Jake McGregor @jakeasaurus--rex

Peter Donaldson – Caleb Wells @letslipthedogsofwar 

Freddie Kingston – Bonnie Simmonds @bonniesimmonds

Balthazar Jones – Reuben Hudson @reubenhudson

Meg Winter – Jessica Stansfield

Beatrice Duke – Harriett Maire @harriettstella

Kitso Harper – Phodiso Dintwe

Paige Moth – Mouce Young

Chelsey Long – Bronwyn Ensor

Rosa Jones – Ella McLeod

Hero Duke – Pearl Kennedy

Jaquie Manders – Kalisha Wasasala

Costa McClure – Robbie Nicol (Aka White Man Behind a Desk, now part of The Candle Wasters)

John Donaldson – Geroge Maunsell

Vegan Fred Boyet – Daniel McBride (aka Sheep, Dog & Wolf)

Dogberry – David Hannah

Claudio – Matthew J. Smith

Leo Duke – Alex McDonald

Ursula – Tina Pan

Zeb – Jim Mitford-Taylor

Kelsi Forrester – Calum Gittins

Julia – Mirabai Pease

Violet – Hannah Mitford-Taylor

Maria – Hannah Geddis

Created by The Candle Wasters @thecandlewasters

More complete social media links for the cast and crew are available from people who aren’t me :) 

Running time:

Approximately ten hours. 

Time frame:

December 24, 2014-December 25, 2015

Watch it in the original order here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ4M4eic7acR3w0c4lLxWE8SnpT2WzoCJ

Or in chronological (Zoos Job) order here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ4M4eic7acRAEqZtFwMqTz_lvB5YxKs4

Or in upload order as a slideshow here:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1tvK1vOQNA9ClJi8K061c_sxiY4pwHfxbUvj8yPd_yuE/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000&slide=id.p