#is it a break it ralph moment where the characters just DIE

[the-acid-pear]

obvious answer is, it's just a game, game has gameplay and limitations, it is what it is, but like... it is kinda interesting how despite how dangerous and insane or whatever Jevil is, after you open the door you can just go do fuck all and he will stay there bouncing in his little out of bounds area waiting for you to come inside. It contrasts specially hard with Spamton who as soon as you do what he wants is like I'm going to fucking kill you now 👍 and yes, i know, he came after this is a video game jevil is harder so forcing you into his fight would be evil etc, but it's still very interesting for him as a character!

Like, sure, according to him he's free and everyone else is locked away, but what's even the point in locking him then if he's oh so obedient? Just a precaution?

[bloopme911]

Random WandaVision Thoughts

Thoughts about WandaVision I cannot get out of my head, so here you go.

SPOILERS AHEAD. BLOOP. YOU’VE BEEN WARNED. 

1. Wanda and Vision are connected by the stone. 

I went back and watched AOU and pretty much from the moment Vision is on screen, the connection between him and Wanda is obvious. Her reaction to him in particular struck me. She exhaled like she was drawn to him--to the stone. She also said she saw inside his mind before he was brought to life. 

I believe they’re meant to be together, not only b/c of their chemistry together and compassion for one another, but also b/c of that mind stone. It gave him life and awakened her latent powers. It drew them to one another the moment they met. Vision himself even said in Civil War that he didn’t fully understand the stone, or how it works exactly; it’s a mystery to him. That stone is POWERFUL. It “speaks” to Vision, it “has a mind of it’s own”, it’s not a passive player, IMO. 

...more after the kr...

2. Wanda can channel the powers of ALL of the stones in her chaos magic.

This I can’t claim credit for, but I believe it. I saw a theory on ScreenCrush (great YT channel for dummies like me to break things down) that Wanda can not only bend reality to her will, she can channel pretty much all the powers of the five stones. She demonstrates this in many ways -- bringing the butterflies and stork to life, rewinding the turkey until it turned into eggs, planting visions into Avengers heads, controlling the minds of the Sokovian citizens so they would evacuate the city in AOU, etc, etc, etc. 

ScreenCrush theorizes that the stones are all connected, having sprung from the same fabric of the universe, their powers work alone but also together. Inside Wanda. If she concentrates, if she wills it, she can be just as powerful as Thanos was with that Infinity Gauntlet. So yeah, I believe she can trap a whole town under a spell and give Dr. Strange a run for his money across the multiverse, point blank periodt. 

And if she can do that, could she not remake Vision? Pull his atoms back together, reform him, especially if she (somehow) got ahold of the copy Shuri made of his neural network? Why wouldn’t she bring Pietro back to life? I’m not sure...perhaps it could be that it’s simply too painful. Or perhaps she just doesn’t want to put her brother under a spell in a dream world. Vision is Vision, he can handle this, and she may not feel as bad resetting him when he gets too suspicious she might if she had to do that to her brother. I don’t know...time will tell, hopefully.

3. Wanda was an Avenger, training under Black Widow. She got rid of her accent intentionally. 

I see people referencing her “suddenly disappearing” accent a lot. I think she (the character) did this on purpose. In the opening of Civil War, when her accent was first starting to fade, she was being taught to spy by Black Widow and Sam and the gang. It stands to reason that accents and speaking with what TV folks used to call a “non regional diction” or any accent she pleases would be part of that training. 

Since this WandaVision is based on a sitcom reality, if you know how painstakingly they recreated these sitcom eras, plot tropes and all, then you’ll find that not only is Vision’s behavior based on the popular ‘TV Dads’ of each era (Dick Van Dyke, Mike Brady, Ricky Ricardo, etc) but Wanda was also mimicking the way TV wives speak and act during each era. Perfect 50s diction for Ep 1, slightly more relaxed like a Mary Tyler Moore in Ep 2, a bit more broad and (with a lot more physical comedy in her face, she’s so adorable) for the 70s.....the MCU didn’t forget about Wanda’s accent and Elizabeth Olsen isn’t being lazy.

Wanda deliberately got rid of her accent while she was a spy, and she slipped into it when she was thinking of her brother, her home, her childhood lullaby. 

4. “Geraldine” a.k.a. Monica was casing Wanda’s house. 

I noticed that from the moment Monica set foot inside, she covered a lot of ground. She found little ways to check that house out because she’s a trained agent and I think even though she was NAILING the part of the stereotypical 70′s black “foxy” nosy neighbor, she was 100% on a mission that whole time. She went in to get Wanda out, but the pregnancy obviously derailed that. I think she was waiting for an opportunity to gage when she could jog Wanda’s memory and probably also waiting to make sure Wanda would be at home alone before she stopped by. 

She has “no home” in the town, Agnes said, but she is a SWORD trained agent, so she knew how to survive until she could make her move. Unfortunately, Wanda was not having it. She does not want to be saved. “Geraldine”/Monica also said during her crazy work story that she keeps her cool under pressure, which she did during that BONKERS delivery. She even gave Wanda the coaching she needed to get through it despite the house going all Poltergeist around her. 

I only wish that when Wanda was questioning her, she would have been like “I’m Monica Rambeau, I’m here to rescue you.”

5. The townspeople have known all along about both Wanda and Vision’s powers, but they’re only terrified of Wanda. 

Vision used his powers in front of people from day one. Helping Mr. Hart at dinner (notice how IMMEDIATELY after Vision saved him, they left in a hurry? They were terrified. They went there to act out a dinner, not for Mrs. Hart to watch her husband almost die without being able to break character to save him, and Mrs. Hart knew it was Wanda who could make it stop). Speed computing at the office. Obviously the magic show kinda sort doesn’t count but does b/c come on mirrors don’t work like that. Getting the doctor, etc. No, I think the townspeople know Wanda and Vision are Avengers, but there is nothing they can do about it because they are under a spell and they must carry out the FOR THE CHILDREN evil plot. I’ll bet word spread about Wanda choking Mr. Hard, so they def don’t want to piss off Wanda, nor bring the wrath of the nefarious entity controlling them all (most signs point to Mephisto). 

6. Agnes’ witch costume reminds me that there are some tropes in media where evil witches are the wives of the devil (or sell their souls/enter a pact). 

Obviously the Mephisto Comic story line sets this up, but I just love the way they executed it in the show, using the spouse that never appears on screen as a big fat clue.

Agnes may not be evil but she def wants Wanda to have children for her devil husband and she def does not want “Geraldine” disrupting that. Everyone else just seems straight up afraid of Wanda but Agnes knows who is really pulling the strings here. Agnes is terrified of the Big Bad, whereas the townsfolk fear Wanda b/c they know what she’s capable of. They may even believe Wanda is the one controlling them all--and she is--but Agnes knows who’s manipulating Wanda--Ralph, or Mephisto to us.

7. I get the strange impression that the sitcom credits start because Wanda is waking up for the day, and end because for her the day is over... 

...and she’s done concentrating so hard on the sitcom spell. It’s sleep time for REAL-real. If she’s using magic to keep this stage play going constantly, then it stands to reason she will tire even though she’s pretending to live in sitcom world where time works totally differently. I believe the commercials are her dreams, sending her subconscious messages about her past traumas. I also believe dreams could be the way Mephisto called out to her--subconsciously drawing her to Westview.

Fun fact: TV way back in the day used to turn off at a certain time at night. 11pm or midnight, I can’t remember, but the networks STOPPED BROADCASTING at a certain time and there was no such things as 24-hour TV until like the late 80s. 

There are waaaaaaaay more thoughts banging around in my head but this post is pretty long so until the next time I’m wide awake at 4am with the 70′s WandaVision theme song stuck in my head...

[raindrop-on-a-spiderweb]

What were your overall thoughts on the sopranos? Favorite characters/moments or even ships lmao. I’m on season 5 ep 2 now

I watched the whole series; I'm actually rewatching it right now with my father because we found some dvds at a book sale.

Love it love it love it. Sopranos is one of my fave series ever. It doesn't rely on flashy graphics to be fascinating and intriguing, it relies on interpersonal relationships and incredible dialogue. It's just a treat to watch in general and the actors give their all in every damn scene. It's funny they didn't really pursue a lot of other roles outside of Sopranos. Paulie's actor was in the mafia and actually murdered people. Everything about the Sopranos was just so authentic to the mafia and human behavior/interaction in general

I liked Phil (that scene in Ragnatela where Leonardo's name was misspelled Leotardo came directly from that lol, there are a couple references to Sopranos in Ragnatela) and Chrissy and poor Finn lol. And Gloria too.

You know what, all the characters were great. I also just got past the Ralph death scene and I have to say he was a shitbag but damn did his actor do a good job.

And in terms of my favorite scenes, his death was one of my favorite moments in the series. The brutal murder scene was so visceral, fumbling and realistic.

Weirdly enough Meadow yelling at her father she wanted to travel really got me for some reason, it's so relatable to want to break free and forge your own life, but scary too. Adriana's death got me too, I loved her arc and her end was so gut wrenchingly sad when she realized when she was going to die. But my absolute favorite was when the FBI pins Junior on their whiteboard and moves him up to Boss status, while the undercover waiter snaps pictures of them during the congratulatory dinner. Phenomenal.

I always kinda shipped Tony/Melfi and Carmela/Furio but there's like no fanfic about them at all!! I think the reason was that they never did "it", their relationship was burning hot but unresolved.

Honestly the final arc with Agent Harris and Tony is amazing. Let me know when you get to that. Just loved the historical thread of truth in it. And the ending... let me know what you think of it.

DON'T STOP--

[villainess-apologist]

here are my thoughts on my second watch of wandavision episode six!

a halloween special in february! I’m wondering about the timeline of wanda’s reality because I think the very first episode took place in august, according to a calender where vision works. maybe wanda jumped to a holiday to take vision’s mind off the cracks beginning to show? 

I LOVE THE MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE THEME SONG?? especially agnes’ part oh my god I love her <3 but the lyrics are very creepy, honestly, and they really fit the situation everyone finds themselves in

the set is basically taken from malcolm in the middle as well, and the kids talk to the camera just like malcolm did ahH I love this 

I don’t. trust this pietro. he and wanda have different memories and. he just feels off to me? 

wanda’s original costume! she looks so beautiful! vision’s costume! ,, he does look like a traffic light-

oh the tension between wanda and vision makes a reappearance! I wonder if in between episodes, they came to an uneasy agreement? or if pietro’s reappearance was enough of a distraction? 

the fandom is divided on many things, I know that, but we can all come together over our collective hatred of hayward <3

but seriously, hayward is definitely antagonizing wanda and painting her out to be the bad guy. he was experimenting on vision, and possibly on wanda, and now maybe he wants to erase all evidence of that? 

I just think the Chaos Trio is amazing in everything they do

pietro knows way too much about what’s going on, and he’s not afraid to break character or casually reference things he shouldn’t know about,, I’m suspicious

herb is relatively self-aware and breaks character for a second to ask wanda if she needs anything changed. he asks the question really delicately like he doesn’t want to make her upset or scare her, but he doesn’t really look that nervous or frightened 

people are glitching the farther away they are from the center of town, and the poor woman repeating the motion of hanging up the ghost is crying silently. the townspeople are aware of what’s going on, but most of them can’t break character

THIS FREAKING COMMERICAL? it’s highkey TERRIFYING? can someone please help me understand what part of wanda’s life it is referencing? actually. I’m not sure I want to know it freaks me out so much-

hehe “the incredibles” and “the parent trap” are playing in the movie theatre, but the former came out in the 2000s so wanda’s reality is definitely not as detailed as before. but both movies reflect the situation in her reality, so that’s so cool!

the edge of town near the border gives me horror movie vibes 

ahh,, the agnes scene,,, I have so much to say about this

there is no laugh track anymore, which makes sense because those started to die out in the 90s, but the moments where the laugh track cut out in earlier episodes really made the situation very unsettling. don’t worry though! the agnes scene managed to be just as unsettling and freaked me out even without the added unease of the missing laugh track-

can someone please give kathryn hahn some kind of award for that scene?? the way she plays an emotionless, blank character, and then a tragically hopeful character turned into a frantic and hopeless one, and then snaps back into her cheerful neighbor character in the sAME SCENE?? PLEASE I GOT CHILLS

I do wish she had tossed in a random diss toward ralph when she was driving away, but alas,

it’s never a good idea for a trio to split up 

pietro scares me

poor wanda definitely needs therapy 

I feel so bad for vision; he just wants to escape and get help for the townspeople but his wife is using her fictional reality as a form of therapy :/

pietro crossed the line (it was only a matter of time) 

wanda’s display of power at the end of the episode is insane- how does she have this amount of power? how many people were taken into her reality? how far could the boundary of her reality spread? could she maybe turn the entire world into her ideal fantasy? 

final thoughts: 

:) what

I’m going to have to make a separate post on my thoughts on agnes’ scene I think (within the next day or two) 

[flyingpochama948]

Things that really grind my gears about the WiR sequel. Warning this is going to be negative so don't read if you like the movie

No Bad-Anon meeting shown. Granted you see some of the members in the background but that's it. Cause showing that Ralph had other friends besides Vanellope would surely ruin the plot

Which brings me to my next point. Ralph was made to look like he had no friends other than Vanellope. Yes they are my brotp and they had cute moments. But Ralph does have other friends. Again, I think this was done to make it look like he had an unhealthy attachment to Vanellope.

We were promised Mario but there was no Mario. They even removed Bowser. Though maybe Nintendo took one look at the plot and went “lol nope”.

The Sugar Rush game console is suddenly a 1P model instead of a 2P model. Again, for plot convenience.  Cause the unplugged thing wouldn’t have worked if another seat was functioning.

WTF was Ralph doing in Sugar Rush during game hours?? Like the whole basis of the first film was that his game was doomed of he wasn't in it. Get back to your game Ralph or so help me.

Litwak unplugs Sugar Rush MERE MOMENTS after the steering wheel breaks off. In the first movie he let Fix-It Felix Jr. stay plugged in with just an Out of Order sign on the screen. Why do that now? Has there been a power shortage in recent years so maybe games that go OoO get unplugged right away now?

27 years???  27 years. Okay let's go with that.

Who is this lady and what have you done with the real Calhoun? I understand she probably became a lot friendlier being with Felix but I always imagined she'd retain some of her toughness. She would have kept those kids in line the moment they acted up.

Felix and Calhoun were horribly ignored.  A complaint that is the most prominent in the fandom.  I kinda wanted them to be on the adventure with Ralph and Vanellope. But being that they wanted to go with the adoption thing I would have thought they would have spent more than 3 minutes on it.  There were a lot of deleted scenes showing them bonding with the racers and that would have been great to see.

Shank... I don't need to say more.  No maybe I do.  I’m sad we got this watered down design when we could have had one of those gorgeous big girls from the concept art.  But also, to me, she is a very uninteresting character.  Just the standard badass female with very few personality traits that you see a lot of movies dishing out lately in the name of woke feminism.  Again, I stress, this is an opinion, not a fact.  But it’s not just this but how she acts later on in the film which I point out a bit later.

Ralph is made to look like an idiot doing these memes to get money for a steering wheel. They were meant to be funny but I cringed way too much. I get Ralph was also humiliated a lot in the first film but at least it followed along with the plot. And were funny without trying to force it on us. Unlike these memes.

I love them but the Disney princess scene dragged on for way too long. The whole part with Disney properties did. Can't have Nintendo characters but we can have Storm Troopers and Baby Groot!

Vanellope running to Shank to talk about her problems and not Ralph. Then deciding to race in Slaughter Race not for any other purpose then to have fun despite the fact she could die. The fact that the adult Shank let her do it. Which I still believe she did because she was bored like Vanellope.  I’ve mentioned before that Vanellope is very impressionable and Shank is the role model whether she likes it or not.  And she acts like a very poor one.  She should have told Vanellope to go talk to Ralph immediately and maybe return home to weigh her options.  Though really, this is still the WiR universe where you should definitely not leave your game.  She as a video game character should get this.

And here we go. The coup de gracé of Ralph's portrayal and why it infuriates me.  Despite the fact that in the last film that him accidentally bringing a virus into a game nearly destroyed it, he just thought "well maybe it won't be as bad this time" and PURPOSEFULLY brought one into another game. And he does it WHILE VANELLOPE IS IN THERE???

Just the whole Ralph insecurity virus thing never sat well with me.  Especially when all those Ralph bodies form a giant Ralph. Just...eww. Though yes, he handled it terribly, he still had valid issues with abandonment.  And I feel they played it off as if he was some manchild who couldn’t except change. Which made people have those awful takes of Ralph being an incel and was mad that he couldn’t control women.

My brotp is now officially "co-dependent" for the sake of the plot and Disney princess dreams. Yay...

It's okay for Vanellope to just straight up abandon her game despite that being a total no-no in the first film. Granted she's not as essential of a character as Ralph is and was already absent from gameplay for 15 years but she's still the leader of Sugar Rush. They really need her there.

Ralph and Vanellope are forced apart and now she has a new best friend, the totally flawless badass Shank.

Not once is Vanellope called out for anything she did and that angers me more. Vanellope I love you and will defend you till the end of time and yes I understand you endured incomprehensible trauma from those in your game but seriously.  As a video game character, you just can’t just leave your game.  Like maybe if they went that route that Vanellope was still traumatized by how the other racers used to treat her I would understand a lot more. But they just play it off as boredom. Boredom that can easily be solved WITHOUT abandoning the game and your best friend. Ralph could have made new tracks for her to have when the game isn't being played.

The Sugar Rush racers being nice to each other now was shown in such a disingenuous way that it's unbelievable. That interaction between Taffyta and Rancis almost seemed like sarcasm. I get it's for comedic effect but I don't like it.

Just the whole concept of the movie focusing more on the internet and capitalism more than it did gaming. Online gaming was said to be explored in this film but they only went to one game. The rest was eBay and Disney and memes and a phony Snapchat/Youtube/Twitter hybrid. 

I wanted to maybe watch the film again to get a bit of refresher but I cannot bring myself to do so. I just can't. It infuriates me too much. IDK I guess the moral of the film brings up bad memories for me. As I feel for Ralph when you have a friend you were so attach to decides to hang out with someone new. Either another platonic friend or someone they're romantically involved with. It's happened way too many times in my life. And might partially be the reason I fear having friendships now.

[singingvio]

LEGEND OF MANGA LISTS: Top 5 SADDEST Moments in the Zelda Manga Series!

((NOTE: Twilight Princess mangas and the Skyward Sword excerpt in the Hyrule Historia are excluded from the mangas considered in this list.))

1. Volvagia’s Demise (Ocarina of Time part 1)

In chapter 3 of Ocarina of Time, part 1, the story depicted is titled “An Old and Beloved Friend.” This chapter mostly depicts Link and Volvagia’s fight, along with their backstory depicted solely in the manga and not in the game, as it isn’t canon. The chapter starts with Link’s bow out, a single arrow ready to be embedded in Volvagia’s skull, only for Link to falter. The dragon burns Link and nearly kills him, only for Link to be healed by Sheik.

Link insists to the Goron Link that he can’t fight Volvagia. Sheik makes a fairly robotic comment while playing his harp that the only way to subdue Volvagia is to kill him, and Link loses it, yelling at Sheik, “That’s easy for YOU to say! There must be some way to make him remember me!” Sheik shows him exactly what disasters are happening due to Volvagia’s tantrum, Kakariko and Goron villages close to destruction, and Link sadly recounts the story of how he and Volvagia met before his inevitable battle.

Link saw him as a baby, locked in a cage with a price of seventy rupees in Castle Town. Link bought the dragon and set him free, only for Volvagia to bite his hand and burn his hair with his flames. Link tries to ignore the dragon later, when it follows him, but then Volvagia ends up burning a Stalfos that had been sneaking up to kill Link. Link then befriended the dragon, and Volvagia said his name aloud, and the memory fades as Link is brought out of his story by someone warning him that the volcano is about to erupt.

Link, in a futile, heartbreaking effort to make Volvagia remember him, yells out, “It’s me! Link! Remember me!” Seeing as this does nothing, Link drives his sword into Volvagia’s flesh, beheading him. At his final moments, Volvagia remembers Link and starts to cry, calling his name out one last time to an expressionless Link as he dies.

2. Ghandi’s Defeat and Link’s Following Despair (A Link to the Past)

In Act 3 of A Link to the Past, Sacrifice, Link and Ghandi (a character created to be Link’s friend and travelling companion exclusively in the manga) travel through the Dark World, saving its inhabitants from fates worse than death to pay for their sins. When Link talks to a gossiping monster of a swamp, it is revealed that Zelda is at Turtle Rock, and Link heads there immediately. Ghandi, however, stays behind.

Ghandi claims that a bandit can’t risk her life just to save someone else, and Link argues that he only got this far because of her helping him. They inevitably split up, and Ghandi worries silently about Link and confesses to herself that she’s had a crush on him and can’t bear to see him reunited with Princess Zelda, as he clearly loves her instead.

Meanwhile, Link makes his way to Agahnim at Turtle Rock, to free Princess Zelda. Agahnim calls on a giant, firebreathing hydra to stop Link from saving Zelda, and Link, thinking nothing of it, defeats the monster with ease. Link comments on the monster’s strength, saying, “It’s kinda weak, for such a big…” and then he realizes. The monster vanishes into smoke, revealing the broken body of Ghandi, who isn’t dead, but very close. Link is heartbroken, and immediately hatred fills his heart as he turns on Agahnim for making him fight Ghandi.

Agahnim points out what Link is becoming, a hateful wolf, and Link watches his own body transform in horror as he cries out in agony. Zelda  manages to break free of her crystal cage, and heals Link from his beastly form. Together, they manage to heal Ghandi before she dies as well, and the two are properly reunited.

3. Pirate Captain and His Lady (Oracle of Ages)

In chapter 7 of Oracle of Ages, The Pirate Captain, Ralph and Link are stranded in an unknown body of water on a raft, trying to get back to the mainland to rescue Nayru. They’re rescued by the Pirate Captain, a man worn away to only soul and bone, as is his crew. Ralph and Link ask him how long he’s been sailing, and he replies that he doesn’t know and is very tired.

The Captain and Link discuss Link’s sword and its fine craftmanship, and then the Captain notices Ralph holding the Harp of Ages, and asks for a song. Ralph obliges, playing a traditional waltz, and the captain is happily lost in the memory of when he was in Labrynna, dancing with a fine lady under the stars. He says, “I remember this song from when I danced with her! We were in love, and the world was ours. Until it ended, and I set to sea to forget. But I could never forget… not her.”

He then makes a bold declaration, one soon revealed to be one of many when Link reads his logbook, that he will make it back to Labrynna to reunite with the lady he still loves to this day. As the ship is caught up in a horrific storm, Link gets his hold on the Captain’s logbook, reading in horror the logs there. “Day 23: set sail for Labrynna. Encountered a storm. Day 145: Storm. Day 317: Storm… They’ve been stuck in this storm forever!”

Link and Ralph attempt to escape the ship in their fear that they won’t be able to, and the Captain attempts to stop them. Link manages to tell the Captain that if he lets them go, he can fix things for him and his Lady, and the Captain, on the brink of tragedy as he lets Link and Ralph go, his final words are a request to Link. “If y’see this lady on your journeys, lad, tell her… the Knight who set sail… will love her for all eternity.” He shows Link a picture of Queen Ambi, and with that, he disappears without a trace, and is never shown again.

4. Shadow Link’s Final Stand (Four Swords part 2)

In chapter 12 of Four Swords part 2, The Four Sword Forever, we see the Four Links’ final stand against Vaati in order to save Zelda. Previously in the manga, Shadow was resurrected using the power of the Dark Mirror after a crushing betrayal from Vio, the smart, collected side of Link he’d thought to be his friend before his temporary defeat. The Dark Mirror is the source of all dark magic, including his life force. Shadow was resurrected right in front of Zelda, who was staring sadly at him, and he yells at her angrily to not take pity on him, as he hates it.

Zelda is then enshrouded in a dark cloud, and Shadow panics, asking Vaati what’s happening to her. When he realizes Vaati is going to kill Zelda, he completely breaks down, taking a quick detour to help the Links by disguising himself as Vio before going back up and grabbing a chair Zelda had been sitting in prior to her slow poisoning in the cloud, throwing it at the Dark Mirror with a scream and breaking the center of it.

Finally, in the final chapter of Four Swords part 2, the Links are almost where Shadow, Zelda and Vaati are. Shadow is incredibly weak, putting almost all his weight on the side of the Mirror. Vaati panics, yelling at Shadow that if he destroys the mirror, Shadow will die too. Shadow grins at Vaati, before saying, “That’s all right. I came out of the Dark Mirror. And with it’s power I woke you. How fitting that I use it to destroy us BOTH!” And with that, he shoves the mirror to the ground, successfully killing Vaati.

The other Links find his body lying next to the mirror, thanking him, and Shadow starts to close his eyes when Vio yells at him to “hang in there!” Shadow then calmly recounts what his life is like as Link’s shadow. “A shadow… usually only ever follows its body. It never gets to lead the way. Today I faced the enemy… on my own. It felt pretty good, but that still doesn’t make me… part of the body.”

Green (the leader and most ‘Link-like’ of the four) tells him the opposite, telling him that he’s their friend, and Shadow, with newfound energy, gets up and reaches towards the other Links, only for him to fade into the light and disappear, dying permanently and for the last time as the other Links stare at where he once was.

5. Skull Kid’s Backstory (Majora’s Mask)

In chapter 9, Fierce Deity Link, the Moon is stopped by the four Giants in Termina. Link sees Tael and Tatl reunited, and notes how sweet it is before thanking the Giants and joking with Tatl about how long it took for them to arrive. Skull Kid, meanwhile, shakes in the background, knocked to the ground and not getting up. In a moment of clarity, the mask not having control on him in his moment of emotion, Skull Kid despairingly recounts his tale.

Skull Kid sadly says that he didn’t mean for this to happen, only wondering why the Giants left him. A flashback is then shown from Skull Kid’s point of view, the Giants getting ready to leave as Skull Kid desperately tries to hold them back. “Why?! No! No, you mustn’t! Hey… Wait! I said wait! Don’t go! Hold on! I said wait! Don’t go! Can’t you hear me?!”

He cries out, many times, sometimes even trying to forcibly hold the Giants back and failing drastically. He ends up falling off a cliff, still trying to catch up with the Giants as he’s battered and bruised, still crying, “Don’t go!” He’s then seen travelling across the desert, tripping and folling multiple times, when he accidentally steps in a bird nest. The birds immediately attack him, yelling at him to watch where he’s going and that it’s fun to hurt him by pecking him.

Skull Kid shakily reaches a hand up to keep going, but gives up as rain pours down on him, tears pouring down his face as he stares at the ground in defeat. The flashback fades out, as Skull Kid says a truly heartbreaking line before being taken over by Majora’s Mask once more, initiating the final battle. “I guess… we never really were friends… after all. They didn’t even say goodbye. Nobody likes me. But with this… Everyone will do what I want! This MASK is my only friend!”

RUNNER UPS

Mask Creations (Majora’s Mask) - The deaths of Darmani, the Goron, and Mikau, the Zora, when Link dons both masks to fulfill their final wishes. Darmani, to see his son again and make the child happy, and Mikau, to spend at least one more concert with Lulu and the other members of his band.

Great Mayfly Fairy’s Transformation (Minish Cap) - The transformation at the hands of Vaati of a lovely singing fairy, with a beautiful voice. Link wistfully mentions that she looks a little like Zelda and Vaati, in a fit of mild hysteria at this point, transforms her into a horrible moth creature. Her transformation is shown to be painful and heartwrenching, as is her defeat.

Deku Tree’s Death (Ocarina of Time part 1) - The famous death of the Deku Tree, in manga format. Link is told of his quest by the Deku Tree, and that the Deku Tree is going to die in the next few minutes. Link cries and even punches the tree in a fit of anger and sadness, crying that the Deku Tree can’t leave him until the Deku Tree inevitably dies and Link must leave on his quest.

Green’s Defeat Against Vio (Four Swords part 2) - When the four Links are finally reunited, Green, Red, and Blue face Vio and Shadow in a battle to the death with Green fighting Vio. Their battle comes to a close as Green falls to the ground, seemingly stabbed through the gut as Vio walks off victorious. Red and Blue yell at Vio and cry over Green, until it’s revealed after Vio and Shadow leave that it was all a ruse and Green was only knocked out.

Zelda and Link’s Meeting (A Link to the Past) - Link finds Zelda in a dungeon, and Zelda tearfully recalls how she had almost given up hope of rescue, stating that she thought she had been all alone until Link had finally found her. Link then embraces her, stating that he heard her voice and she was never alone.

[cheryls-blossomed]

I am still troubled. It's truly excessive to have Iris in the mirror for that long. Since the end of 6x10!! Frost takes CS's place, Allegra has to deal with Nash being creepy, Kamilla's relationship is still new, but she's stuck in the mirror too, Sue is Sue. Things aren't adding up to what he says in interviews. It's seems like Eric doesn't like writing for woman. He's as wishy washy with these characters as Grant is to Candice. As GB is to The Flash show too. All his shows with his name on it get sexy scenes except that one. I think that anon is being too nice. Not everything is or was covid related.

I don’t think Eric doesn’t like writing for women (I think he was being truthful, for example, when he said that Iris is his favorite character to write for), but I think that he doesn’t know necessarily how to write well for women. But this could also be the result of The Flash’s issues with sexism since season 1. The Flash has always had this ever-present, underlying misogyny since season 1, constantly kind of playing to the “boys’ club” narrative, and seen most prominently perhaps in the all-male Team Flash in 3x19 (like can anyone deny that that episode had some seriously misogynistic undertones, with Iris being fridged, and Caitlin going full on evil, and the team thus being all-male). I actually think things got a lot better in this regard in season 4, with Iris gaining a lot of agency, the plot affording her her own POV, and also more women becoming more prominent in the plot (Cecile, also setting up for Nora in season 5). Still, season 4, while improving immensely on affording Iris agency and including more women in the story more prominently, still perpetuated a lot of misogyny due to the introduction of Ralph and his characterization. 

As for Eric, he either gives gimmicky, cringe-worthy plots to women with powers like swapping Caitlin out for Frost almost completely and making her behave like a bratty teen or Cecile’s convoluted stories concerning her powers, filled with unfunny humor, OR he will saddle women to some man for their man pain (see Allegra and her terrible plot for Nash, or even Kamilla, who’s most prominent plot was being supportive girlfriend™ to Cisco in 6x05). Allegra and Kamilla only exist outside of these dynamics with... men, because they are also members of Team Citizen. Allegra would otherwise likely be given gimmicky plots with her powers. Iris is certainly the female character who BY FAR has better plots (honestly, imo, her plots are the best on the show), because she heads the Citizen and gets to obviously feature more prominently in story-lines, she has great POV moments, she gets lots of emotional scenes, and the show delves into her dreams, aspirations, and emotions frequently. But Eric has constantly boxed her into the Strong Black Woman trope; he’s allowed for the projection violent imagery upon her; he sidelined her feelings and emotions, while forcing her to be strong in the lead-up to Crisis. The one scene where she breaks down over her husband’s impending demise was deleted, and her father in that scene doesn’t comfort her, while she’s literally weeping, basically telling her she has to be strong (meanwhile, he got to breakdown and be comforted by Barry... but ANYWAYS). And she’s been trapped in a mirror, while a mirror version of her appropriated her likeness and took over her life, and she’s still trapped even after that mirror version was destroyed, and she’s been trapped for like the entire Mirrorverse plot. And Iris is being further traumatized. There’s also a lot racism at play, of course, with white women being coddled, while Iris is forced to be incredibly self-sacrificing, while her livelihood is devalued. Also consider Sue being given far more prominence in the Mirrorverse story-line upon her introduction than Allegra and certainly Kamilla were ever afforded. 

Barry and Iris being constantly shortchanged romantically is absolutely the byproduct of misogynoir, and it’s not just that they’ve been visibly shortchanged on intimate moments, but that they’ve also been traumatized the way a white m/f couple on Berlanti shows never would be, when the show had their daughter die in their arms. I don’t really know why people are even talking so much about the COVID-19 restrictions in place wrt Flash, because these restrictions are not going to change anything. The show hasn’t been giving us cute domestic moments or even relatively frequent kisses since season 4. 

[hyperfixation-stations]

So I feel like we are severely lacking in conversation about Wanda and you know she is one of my emotional support characters and I get to psychoanalyze her so I’m taking it upon myself to start discourse/conversations. Also there will be spoilers for the MCU and WandaVision 

Wanda is a character that is highly complex and I would say falls into the morally grey area, with her being more good then bad. Wanda has also experienced more trauma in her young life then most people will in their life. She is orphaned along with her twin brother at the age of 10, she joins a sus group in her teens because she feels wronged (its the kind of shit teenagers do, particularly those who are homeless and watched their family get blown up), taken prisoner and tortured(?), had to kill the love of her life, died, had to watch the love of her life die again, and watch the government dismantle his body. Most of this happening within about five or so years of each other. That’s a lot of emotional turmoil for someone to go through in a very short amount of time and Wanda doesn’t grieve in a healthy way, and she was already considered to be morally grey when we first meet her, now the interesting thing that happens is each time she is confronted with having to to do the right or the wrong thing, she typically chooses the right thing, even if it means hurting herself. She and Pietro leave Hydra once they find out their true motives, she kills vision because in the long run it will help save everyone, in WandaVision she chooses to close the hex after she finds out that she was actually hurting everyone. Not to mention she does this all in moments of crisis or very soon after, while I don’t necessarily agree with but I don’t think people realize how easy it would have been for her in those situations to just choose the wrong or “bad” thing because she was so often in situations where choosing the right thing ended up hurting her in the long run and it takes a lot to willingly put yourself through that. 

Not to mention it’s not unlikely that Wanda harbors some degree of survivor’s guilt, she has quite literally watched everyone she loves die and yet she’s the one who keeps on surviving and having to continue living this painful life. Not only is survivor’s guilt particularly isolating, but Wanda honestly doesn’t have any kind of support system, she is in a country that she did not grow up in, all of her immediate family’s dead, her boyfriend’s dead, her closest friends on the avengers died (or moved to a farm) so she has no one to lean on and honestly it isn’t surprising that she lashes out. Wanda was probably due for like a proper break down several films ago, but props to her for keeping it together this long. Grief makes people do some harmful things, and while it isn’t right as I said above, it’s also understandable. It’s also why I don’t think Monica’s like in the finale is that out of character, not only is she still reeling with the loss of her mother, she has to live with the fact that she was snapped and missed it, so she never got to say a proper goodbye. I think we as people are foolish to think that if we didn’t have the power to bring someone that we love back from the dead that we wouldn’t consider that.  

I also don’t think that Wanda genuinely meant for anything to happen. When we see her go to the plot of land and we see her truly break down for the first time, it just kind of happens and for the first two episodes she appears to be just as confused as Vision. While she clearly recognizes she is doing it at some point, I do think that this started off innocently and potentially non intentional. Not to mention even in her fake world as someone says (I forget who, I think it’s Darcy), talks about how Wanda gave everyone better jobs and Pietro/Ralph says that she keeps the children asleep, not to mention she is shocked to find out any of them are in pain and is overwhelmed with concern when she finds out that fact. And while enslaving a whole town is wrong, once she found out that they were hurting she set them free. Even in her bad moments she still wants to be a good person and I think that is so important to her character. She is someone who is jaded at the world and she has every right to be and even in these moments of darkness or “evil” she chooses the path in the end that is considered “good” which speaks so much to who she is. 

Anyway that’s me meta for the night, this will continue to be my only personality until Falcon and Winter Soldier come out next week so yeah. Also side not Quicksilver/Evan/Fietro stans, love the work that you’re doing, but can y’all keep your discussions out of the wandavision tag, I don’t mean this in a rude way but I think a lot of people want to have conversations about the show and they tend to get over shadowed by those talks, and while I love that people are trying to advocate on behalf of the character/actor, you’re not discussing anything that actually pertains to the show or Wanda so tag appropriately. Also additional note, for all this talk about Wanda not facing consequences for her actions, a.) it’s a superhero show that will never happen, b.) and more importantly how many MCU characters have we seen do bad shit and not be held accountable I mean Hawkeye/Clint became an Assasian, Tony did a lot of sketchy shit and profited off of war (and the bombing of Wanda’s country), Thor has got some people enslaved or he did at some point, like none of them were ever held accountable so why all the out cry about Wanda all of a sudden hmmm. Thank your for listening to my rant, I appreciate it. 

[theradioghost]

hey, can i pester you for some podcast recs? something with a good dose of humour and not too many episodes to catch up on. a sprinkle of queer romance would be a nice bonus. my fave so far is tsco starship iris, and i also loved greater boston, wooden overcoats, the bright sessions and caravan. and thanks always for all your great recs! you’ve brought many hours of joy into my life :)

We Fix Space Junk -- Two intergalactic repairpeople -- a knowledgeable cyborg veteran and a former socialite on the run -- travel the universe meeting people and fixing things at the behest of the terrifying intergalactic corporation they’re trying to work off their debts to. Hilarious British sci-fi sitcom featuring Evil Space Capitalism, many many wonderful AI characters, and an absolutely delightful teenage space wasp-human-cow hybrid princess who is probably off accomplishing her grandiose special destiny somewhere offscreen while the main characters deal with things like their bosses possibly trying to kill them (again).

Death by Dying -- People have a tendency to die in odd ways in the small town of Crestfall, Idaho. Luckily the town also has an Obituary Writer, an eccentric and nameless but impeccably stylish fellow whose closest friend is the Angel of Death, and who has a knack for solving murders even though that’s definitely not his job description. Throw in walrus haikus, extremely rude ravens, Something Mysterious And Malevolent Lurking In The Dark Woods Outside Of Town, disappearing childhood homes, silent nuns, ghost bicycles, and three man-eating cats, and you get something like a delightful cross between Wooden Overcoats and Lemony Snicket. (Also, OW is peak Canonically Bisexual Dumbass.)

Less is Morgue -- Riley is a paranoid, reclusive teenager with a fondness for conspiracy theories who lives in their parents’ basement. They’re also a predatory ghoul who feeds on human flesh. Evelyn is a cheerful, outgoing young woman with questionable tastes in media. She’s also a ghost, ever since she was killed by a falling stage light at a Nickelback concert 16 years ago. And since Riley dug up and ate Evelyn’s corpse, they’re roommates! Will they ever manage to record a coherent episode of their podcast without something going ridiculously wrong and/or Riley eating one of the guests? Probably not!

Victoriocity -- The steampunk buddy-cop comedy-mystery thriller you never knew you needed but definitely do! Featuring Inspector Fleet, a grouchy, extremely driven policeman looking for the murderer of the Empire’s greatest inventor, and Clara Entwhistle, an even more driven and unfailingly upbeat rookie journalist who has just arrived in the island-spanning, bizarre cityscape of alt-history Even Greater London. Come for some of my favorite sarcastic British narration since Adams and Pratchett, stay for characters-are-begrudgingly-forced-to-work-together-until-they-come-to-genuinely-and-deeply-care-about-one-another-as-friends trope. (Also for Tom “Eric Chapman” Crowley as the aforementioned grumpy detective.)

Quid Pro Euro -- From one of the other leads of Wooden Overcoats, this doesn’t have a typical plot as such but has made me laugh so hard I pulled a muscle despite the fact that I know nothing about the EU. Which is what this near-surreal, Look Around You-style comedy is about: Felix Trench’s vision of a simultaneously hilarious and terrifying alternate European Union, seen from the perspective of a serious of educational tapes from the ‘90s predicting what the EU would look like in the 21st century. It’s hard to describe this show in any way that does it justice, but it’s incredibly funny.

Time:Bombs -- A miniseries by the exalted creators of Wolf 359, which (because they are madmen) was written, recorded, and produced in the space of one week. Also, a comedy about an NYC bomb retrieval squad on New Year’s Eve, most of whom are just trying to get through the night while their leader attempts to break a record for most bombs cleared before the calendar ticks over. Chaos and hilarity ensure.

Superstition -- Wisecracking, bi, Jewish, definitely-a-private-eye-just-don’t-check-her-qualifications Jacqueline St. James receives a message from her father, which is weird, because her parents disappeared years ago. Following the trail leads Jack to Superstition, Arizona, a town in the middle of the desert where everyone’s got secrets, assorted ghosts/monsters/cryptids harrass the locals, and the missing persons rate is the highest in the nation. As a protagonist Jack is Looking For Trouble And If She Cannot Find It She Will Create It, so while Superstition isn’t a comedy per se, it’s got a fair share of laughs and is also just so, so excellent in general.

Standard Docking Procedure -- A self-declared hopepunk scifi workplace comedy about the somewhat dysfunctional staff of Pseudopolis Station, effectively a high-tech interstellar truck stop. It’s funny and heartwarming, nothing truly bad happens, and Julia Schifini is there.

Solutions to Problems -- A morally-questionable human named Janet who has defintely never done any illegal time travel and an easygoing, physically indescribably alien who likes to go by Loaf host an intergalactic advice podcast. Are you tired of your species’ insistence on solving everything via ritual combat? Not sure how to talk to your partner about whether body-swapping has a place in your sex life? Dealing with being a superpowered teenager summoned into being by the collective will of an apocalyptic groupthink cult? Janet and Loaf have you covered! Provided that Janet’s on-and-off girlfriend, the AI who supplies the air they breathe, doesn’t kill them all first. Oddly heartfelt comedy in the form of a relationship advice radio show from the Space Future.

Middle:Below -- This show’s tagline is “Remember: bad things WILL happen,” and that is basically a lie. This is actually a short, incredibly heartwarming and frequently funny show about Taylor Quinn, the only human with the ability to pass between the land of the living (aka the Middle) and the land of ghosts (the Below). Meaning, of course, that the dead call on him to fix all their problems, with the help of a girl named Heather, a ghost named Gil, and a cat named Sans. (Also, some of the most comparatively wild live shows I’ve ever heard.)

Inn Between -- Ever wonder what fantasy characters get up to between adventures, during all that time they seem to spend at inns? This show skips all the adventuring, question, and action, instead focusing on the quiet moments between where what is Definitely Not A D&D Party meet and progress from bickering strangers brought together by circumstance to close-knit found family -- all at the inn, of course. (Lots of queer folks in here also, although there’s no romance at least in the first  couple seasons.)

The Godshead Incidental -- A relatively new but very exciting and so far really enjoyable show!! Following a young woman who writes an advice column through her life in a familiar, and yet strange city where anyone might be a minor god -- your editor, your landlord, that weird guy on the street who was shouting about how he’s the God of Memory and you got into a fight with him and now you keep forgetting everything? Also, your apartment is full of pigeons now because you found out the aforementioned landlord is secretly the god of doorknobs and he’s panicking. Good luck! (Starring Ishani Kanetkar, aka Arkady from Starship Iris!)

Gal Pals Present: Overkill -- Madison, a middle schooler at a Girl Scout camp, agrees to play a game with a somewhat tastelessly bright-pink Ouija board. However, Madison doesn’t know that she’s a natural medium, and now sarcastic mid-2000s 19-year-old Aya Velasquez has joined the many ghosts who are for some reason haunting scenic Harding Park. Aya, however, will not rest until she can solve her own murder (and possibly get to know that other ghost girl a bit better, who says romance has to stop when you’re dead?). Absolutely hilarious writing of a narrator who is almost definitely wearing spectral Uggs during the entire show.

Dark Ages -- The Rivercliffe Museum of Mostly Natural History is one of the finest museums anywhere! Or it would be, if anyone ever actually visited it. Or maybe if the staff weren’t a disastrous and dysfunctional collection of criminals, weirdos, wannabe immortals, idiot bisexuals who can’t just admit they like each other, and one extremely uptight elf with no people skills. Also, it would probably help if the legendary and fearsome Dark Lord, finally returned from his millennia of dormancy to complete his prophesied conquest of the world, wasn’t hanging around watching the chaos unfold because they’ve got his crown on display. (Fantasy workplace comedy with a theme song that did not need to go that hard?)

Brimstone Valley Mall -- It’s mid-December 1999, and at one mall in South Central Pennsylvania, a group of demons are going about their evil work -- namely, working at various dinky kiosks and restaurants, hoping of achieving every demon’s dream of getting to work at Hot Topic, trying not to do too much evil because Earth is way more fun than Hell and no one wants to get promoted back home, and preparing for their band's triumphant opening performance at the upcoming Y2K party. Just one problem: their lead singer is missing. Another absolute masterwork from The Whisperforge.

Arden -- 10 years ago, Hollywood starlet Julie Capsom vanished into the woods of northern California, leaving behind a car containing a human torso that may or may not have belonged to one Ralph Montgomery. Now, private eye Brenda Bentley and reporter Bea Casely, both of whom were among the first at the scene and both of whom have their own very strong opinions on the case, are setting out to solve the mystery on their true crime podcast, Arden. Providing, of course, they can stop arguing with each other long enough to solve it. (Or, a not-really-parody-but-definitely-comedy “true crime” podcast where the crime is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet -- and even knowing that, it’s still a genuine mystery with twists and a surprise ending! -- and the hosts are wlw Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing. In other words, it’s perfect. Season 2 is upcoming soon and is adapting Hamlet!!)

Alba Salix/The Axe and Crown -- Another high fantasy workplace sitcom, this one a medical comedy about the titular not-very-personable witch who runs the kingdom’s House of Healing and the various shenanigans she gets into, between her somewhat scatterbrained sister and brother-in-law the king and queen and her assistants, an overly-whimsical fairy and a wannabe monk forced to do community service. The same feed contains The Axe and Crown, a spinoff set in the same world that manages to simultaneously be a sitcom about the staff of a local pub trying to stave off foreclosure and come up with schemes to beat their business rivals, and a heartfelt story about gentrification and recovery starring a gay veteran with PTSD? Which is possibly one of my favorite podcasts? (Also contains one of the most unbelievable crossover cameos possible: Leon Stamatis.)

The Adventures of Sir Rodney the Root -- Also a high fantasy comedy! When a witch transforms heroic Sir Rodney into a small piece of wood, his closest companion Sir Gilbert must set out to cure him by collecting several highly powerful and dangerous relics, accompanied by a snarky dwarfen thief, an imperious princess, a slightly creepy human child raised by fairies, a picky elf sorcerer, a dead unicorn possessed by the ghost of a stoner, and a bard who breaks the fourth wall too much for his own good. So far as I can tell, nobody is straight.

The Amelia Project -- A dark comedy about a secret organization that helps people fake their deaths. Which is honestly a pretty full summary, barring the two important points that 1. this show contains possibly the most continuity-warping crossover event of all time (it’s the center point of this absolutely chaotic diagram), and 2. in one episode Felix Trench plays a character named Bartholomew Fuckface Chucklepants Knucklecracker.

[make-it-mavis]

Homesick (Entry #26)

(cw: drugs/addiction, themes of depression, very brief reference to sex) ----------

01/13/88   12:40 AM

Hey.

The trip got more solid after that. Sort of. Also sort of the opposite. 

After that last flash, I found myself still sitting at the table, still across from Fix-it, still not quite eating the destroyed pie in front of me. My hand was completely intact.

My finger slipped in a slow, idle circle of cold red syrup. I had my knees pulled up to my chest and my heels on my seat. I’d draped the blanket over my head like a hood and cocooned the rest of it around myself, only exposing my arm to touch the plate. I was too hot, less from the blanket and more from what felt like a fever.

Fix-it’s voice was just finishing a sentence. “--can hear me, just nod your head. If you can hear me.”

I gave one small nod, more entranced with the feeling on the tip of my finger than anything else.

He asked tentatively, “What’s your name?”

My voice was muffled against my knees. “Mavis.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Fix-it Felix Jr.”

He sighed in relief. “Mavy… I need you to listen to me. This might be hard to understand right now, but… a lot of things you’ve seen or experienced tonight… that you’re experiencing right now… are not real. You’re safe, okay? You’re very safe. But you’re not in your right mind. You’re on buffs,” he swallowed. “You’re on… on Game-- Game Changers.”

I blinked without looking up. “No, I’m not.” 

“Mav--” he paused to contain himself. “Mavy, honey, listen. Let me tell you what really happened tonight, okay?”

Pain in my head flared, scratching blue lines in my vision. I tried to listen, but buff-fueled stimuli did its best to drown him out. 

As the stripes on the wallpaper lifted and arched like a hissing cat, he said, “You broke through ---------- second floor. You ---------- bed frame and ---------- like you were being attacked. You even ----------- when I ---------- understand what I was saying…” his voice and eyes lowered. “You… didn’t even know who I was…”

The windows shattered into jagged teeth in yawning mouths that stretched so wide, the curtain rods crumbled off. Tiny, pink, hairless bats flowed from the holes in the walls and flew in circles above our heads. Niceland itself seemed to break from the earth and float on rolling waves like a pirate ship, and he continued, “You went on about ‘a dog in the hive’ and ---------- saw Gene and chased ---------- had him backed into a corner ---------- in time to stop you from -----------”

“Wait,” I said, watching the table leg divide itself into pieces, “Gene? No, it was a dog!”

“It was definitely Gene, Mavy. You scared the daylights out of him.”

“I almost bludgeoned Gene to death with a bat?”

I could hear resigned disapproval in his voice. “Leg of a bedframe, actually, but, yes.”

Pretty sure I laughed an unwholesome, violent, and spiteful laugh, but it played from my throat like a rolling xylophone. Fix-it was less amused.

“Mavis.”

Suddenly, I felt a bit pissed. “Why did you stop me? He would have respawned! That little sausage roll had it coming!”

“This isn’t funny, Mavis! This couldn’t be farther from funny!”

I forgot what we were talking about. “What happens next?”

He explained insistently, “I had to stop you, of course. I knew you wouldn’t like it when I touched you, but ---------- scratching holes in your arms ---------- blood all down your arm, but you wouldn’t let me ---------- out the window to the dump.”

While he spoke, I pushed my finger into a cold, mushy cherry and took way too long to pop it in my mouth. It tasted… in a word, obscene. My feet were yanked to the floor, my knees pried apart, and when I peeked down into the dark of the blanket, binary-blue glowing eyes leered up at me from between my legs. They winked.

It suddenly became way harder to listen, even as I stared intently at the speaker.

“Ralph actually brought you back up here when he found ---------- heal ---------- shouting about being a bird ---------- slow ---------- started to even out ---------- were very chatty, but still couldn’t understand me ---------- on my couch for two hours ---------- talking to me, but ----------- get through to you ---------- with that pie for an hour and a half…”

The wallpaper peeled down like banana skins, and suddenly, we were surrounded by an aquarium. Rather, we seemed to be in a glass box in the ocean, with a panorama view of the life around us. Rainbows of shimmering fish rippled over a coral reef blooming with funny, fingery flowers. Silhouettes of dolphins twirled in the distance. Pink jellyfish floated around like half-filled party balloons. I felt my little hood fall back as I took it all in, spellbound. Part of me wanted to break out and swim away. Would being a fish be so bad?

“Your eyes are still so blue…” he told me then.

I turned my head, and screamed as I felt a wall of icicles shoot through my body.

A dog was in the water. The one that got away. Looking like a deathly thin shark, it floated limply and stared at me with those dead, black eyes.

“THERE!”

I grabbed the nearest object and hurled it with all my strength. When the plate smashed against the wall, the illusion broke. All of them did. The apartment was just an apartment. I sat back in my chair and tried to steady my breathing, tried to level out my heart’s tantrum. Once I settled, I settled hard. I fell into an eerie sense of calm. A peaceful numbness.

When I saw the pie splattered over the wall and the plate shards on the floor, I said, “Aw. The pie.”

Then I heard a sniff.

I looked at Fix-it. He was crying. He covered his mouth and leaned on his elbows, quietly watching me through watery blinks. I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t.

“I can…” I said slowly, “cut another slice… or get another plate, you know… There’s no need to, uh…”

He didn’t answer.

Finally, I asked, “Why are you crying?”

For a moment, he only shook his head. Then he said, through his hand, “I just… I look at your face, and I just--” he shook, “-- I’m so afraid that this’ll be the last time I see it.”

I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t even sure what he was talking about. My knowledge of my high state was unsteady.

“Why? Are you sick?”

“Make-it Mavis,” he said forcefully, “you’re going to corrupt yourself.”

I took a moment to contemplate that, long enough for him to ask if I still understood him.

“I hear you,” I nodded.

“I-- I thought,” he shook so hard, he could barely speak. “I watched you lying there on-- on my couch, and-- and your eyes were so bright, they cast beams on the ceiling, and-- and you were twitching and kicking and your--” he choked on his words, “-- I thought I could see a blue tint over your sprite-- it might have been my imagination but-- but I didn’t know what to do, because I was so-- so scared that you were-- were gonna corrupt right then and there, right in my living room, right-- right before my eyes!”

I felt around inside my cheek with my tongue. “If that’s the case, why would you worry about never seeing my face again? You’d see my face every day,” I shrugged. “Y’know, just in pieces.”

“Mav--” he broke right into sobbing. I was hopelessly confused.

I asked, “What’s the matter?”

After a period of collecting himself, he said, “Mavy, this isn’t a joke. If you take enough GC, and you get addicted, it’s-- it’s all over. The--” he seemed to go green, “-- the other sprites that have been found corrupted, they-- they all--... None of them had a code deficiency, Mavis. Do you know how long it took for a GC addiction to kill them?”

“Two weeks.”

He fell silent. As if he were afraid to ask, he breathed, “How many have you taken?”

I answered, even though I felt like I didn’t know, “Just two.”

“...Over how long?”

“I… don’t know. A couple days?”

Tears poured from his eyes. “Mavy… Mavy, do you want to corrupt?”

“What? No. I don’t even want to die, much less… y’know, that.”

“Then why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you--...” he made vague, upset gestures. “You’re hurting so bad, Mavy. Why do you medicate with-- with this? None of this fixes anything. There are sprites who are able and willing to help you. Just let them. You don’t have to do this alone -- please, please realize that. None of us can undo… the past, but we can make the present and future better. Things can and will get better, Mavy, you just need to--”

“It can only get so much better, though, can’t it?”

He froze. I just blinked and sat in my chair comfortably, as if we were having a quaint conversation over tea. I didn’t even know where my words were coming from -- I just opened my mouth and let them flutter out like moths.

I continued, “It can only get so good. I think I almost found what ‘good’ really felt like to me, but… it’s over now. I don’t know if I have it in me to look for ‘good’ again, not when losing it hurts this much. I don’t know how to carry on, knowing what I do. I don’t want to die -- I just want to forget. I don’t want to corrupt, and I’m not trying to. I haven’t lost my will to live or anything, it’s just that… I’ve been looking for ways to be happy here my whole life, and… that search has never been more daunting than it is now. I’m tired. I want to rest my head for a while. I just want little vacations from life. That’s what GC is to me.”

We were both quiet for a moment. I spoke before I realized I’d opened my mouth.

“I’m too big for the life I was made for, Fix-it. I can only cut off so many pieces of myself to fit into it.”

He seemed stunned. With good reason, too. I’d never opened up to him quite like that before. He was lucky I was so high.

He muttered, “You… You mean being an Easter Egg?”

“Yeah. Everything that goes with it,” I thought for a second. “I probably have the smallest code out of any playable character in the arcade, and I’m still too big for this place. I don’t belong here. I’ve known that my whole life.”

I thought for a second. “I’m not sure I belong anywhere.”

���Mavis,” Fix-it said, suddenly firm, even with red eyes. “That is, if you’ll forgive my potty-mouth, a whole lotta hooey.”

“Hooey?”

“I know it’s hard for you to feel at home… anywhere, Mavy. I know the Devs served you the short end of the stick. And if I meet ‘em after I delete one day, you can bet I’ll give ‘em a good talkin’ to for treating my cousin like that -- but good golly, Mavis. You know this, you must know this,” he leaned on the table. “You are more than just an Easter Egg.”

I just looked at him, waiting. I expected him to tell me a bunch of stuff I already knew and that never helped me before. I was… mostly right.

“Mavis, I have not seen a single sprite less defined by their coded role than you. Most of the time, you don’t even show up for work! And, you know what? That’s okay! Because… I know these words hurt you real bad before, but…” he swallowed, determined. “This game… doesn’t need an Easter Egg.”

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I could hear a distant echo of Gene’s voice saying that, even after all these years. I didn’t have the emotional presence to be upset by Fix-it bringing it up. I just waited for him to finish his point.

“But this arcade,” he slapped the table, “needs a Make-it Mavis.”

I’ll admit it. That was a nice thing to hear.

I can’t tell if I was in a good or bad state to be receptive to it.

“Well…” I said, eyes wandering. “I’d like to believe you. Maybe it did. But it sure doesn’t want me right now.”

He considered that. “Times are really tough right now, but… they won’t always be. Someday soon, it’ll be okay. Once it’s all died down. And until then, you still have sprites who care about you.”

“Like who?”

“Me. Tapper. I-- I think Ralph… maybe? Uh…” he trailed off. I could see panic in his eyes.

I looked at him quietly. I could hear the effort in his voice, the genuine desire to help. More than that, I heard the fear. He was desperate to help me, but lost as to how, and afraid that he wouldn’t figure it out in time. I know I’m not easy to help. I know that. It’s kind of hard to put into words the reasons why. I just need to be able to know that I’m in charge of my own life, whether that lands me in good or bad places. I have a lot of reasons to fly solo. But as Fix-it threw himself so wholeheartedly into some kind of verbal rescue effort, I recognized that there was no way he could understand any of them. If the worst happened to me, I bet he would blame himself. 

I knew all too well what that feels like.

I may not exactly be Fix-it’s biggest fan, but I don’t strive to be cruel. If I really was boarding a one-way train to corruption, attempting to dig up the seeds of guilt before they could take root would be the least I could do.

I wouldn’t have been good at that while sober. I don’t think being high made it any easier.

I asked, “Do you really love me?”

Fix-it froze as if I’d punched him in the chest. I just watched him.

“Of course,” he said quietly. “Of course I love you. Don’t you know that?”

“Sometimes. I think. There’s just something I need to tell you. I’ve been waiting for you to figure it out on your own, but, y’know...”

I looked at him. He was waiting on bated breath, already overflowing with tears. I’m sure he was expecting something better than what I said.

“You’re wasting your time.”

I genuinely took no joy in the stricken look that broke over his face. “What..? No, I’m not.”

“You’re wasting your time and your pain. You can’t keep wasting your love on me.”

“It’s not…” he shook. “I’m not wasting my love. How can you say that?”

“I…” I suddenly felt my shoulders getting heavy. “I… can’t... accept it.”

“Why, Mavy..?”

“I can’t,” I said a bit more forcefully. “No matter how much love you offer, I’m not built to receive it. You’re going through all the trouble of worrying about me all the time, and for what? Doesn’t it hurt you when you get nothing back? Loving me isn’t kind, it’s stupid.”

“Mav--”

“I have nothing to offer you. I can’t give you anything for your trouble. There’s no way for us to have…” I gestured, “a real, functioning relationship. I know it’s very hard to understand why, but trust me. The best thing you could possibly do for yourself is to stop caring so much about me. It’s just going to keep hurting you. Especially right now. If I really do get addicted to GC, and I corrupt myself, you’re going to feel like the entire Devs-forsaken world is ending. You’re going to think it was your fault for not doing more. You’re going to hate yourself every day for not protecting me, but you couldn’t have protected me. If I’m going to be corrupted, it’s going to have everything to do with me, and nothing to do with you. But if you love me so much, you won’t be able to understand that. You have so many reasons to hate me already. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll use them.”

He took a second to breathe, clearly dwarfed by the massive plate of emotions I was serving him. I could see in his eyes things that I didn’t quite understand, but they felt so invasive. I’d laid myself just open enough for him to peer inside, and even in my numb state, I felt horrendously naked. After a period of silence, my eyes fell, and my voice lowered.

“You can’t help me,” I said, and fell into barely a whisper. “I… don’t know how to let you.”

We were both quiet for a minute. I was hesitant to look up, but when I did, I was thrown for a loop.

He was smiling. Through tears, but still. There was a quivering, wavering smile on his face.

“Why…” I said cautiously, “...are you smiling?”

A short, single-note laugh burst wetly from his mouth, and he shook his head. “Mavy, don’t you see what you’re doing?”

“...No?”

“You’re giving back. You’re trying to protect me,” he nodded. “You do care about me.”

Yeah. Gross. But at the time, I was just stunned. I couldn’t fathom how I could have broken such hard truths over his head and still have him smiling. “You… wait, what?!”

“If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t even try. This is just one of the things that makes you so wonderful, Mavy -- you’re so full of surprises. You think you don’t know how to be loved, but you do. It just… might not be in the way everyone else does. You give back in ways you don’t see,” he said. “Like right now.”

I stared, agape.

“And, you know…” his smile weakened a bit, “I’m sorry that accepting help is so hard for you. And… yes, it is frustrating a lot of the time. It does hurt. But, no matter what you think you can or can’t accept…” he shrugged a bit, “I still love you. I don’t need your help with that. And you can’t protect me from it, either.”

“You…” I muttered, “ought to have higher standards for yourself. Don’t you want more?”

“Mavy…” he looked at me earnestly, tears flowing, “please listen to me. I don’t care about you just to get something in return. I care about you because I love you. I don’t care if you change or not. I just care that you’re safe.”

I said nothing. I don’t know what my face read.

He continued, “So please, please, Mavy. If I can’t protect you, please protect yourself for me. No more Game Changers, please. Please don’t take my cousin away.”

I blinked slowly and swallowed. “I’ll… try. I just don’t understand how you could care so much when I so clearly... don’t... want you to. Suppose I survive. Just how long do you think you could keep this up?”

Without a single thought, he answered, “Forever.”

The word was barely out of his mouth before I felt it quite physically slap me hard across the face. I reeled and pressed my palm into my cheek, sucking my teeth. I asked, “What in the eight bits was that..?” as pain in my head began to climb.

Fix-it straightened up. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I guess, but…” I pulled my hand from my cheek and saw a bright red streak over the palm of my glove. “What…”

Looking at it shot blinding pain through my head and tore holes in the oddly calm veil I’d been hiding behind. Clutching my head with my other hand, I asked, “Fix-it, am I bleeding?”

“No, Mavy. Not for a while, now.”

“Then what’s…” I stared at the stain, and my heart began to pound. I showed him my hand. “What is this?”

“That’s… your hand.”

“No,” I insisted. “The stain. On my glove.”

He put his hands up in a deescalating way. “Mavy…”

“I’ve seen it before. Why do I keep seeing it?!”

“Mavy, listen. You’re not wearing your gloves.”

It was still there when I turned my palm towards me. “Yes I am! It’s right here! What is it!?”

The sight of my hand became so sharp, so crisp and defined, the scarlet streak so vivid that it bore into my eyes, while the world around me began to wobble and distort at the edges. A hundred jackhammers in my head threatened to split my skull open. Wires of binary scratched, hissed, and sparked across my vision. I felt myself hit the floor.

Squinting through the stinging blue, I didn’t recognize the apartment anymore. I felt like I was looking at it through waves of warped glass. Patches of greyscale cut through the shifting colors. The lines on the wallpaper swelled and shrunk like a ribcage, and with each breath, the lights flared and dimmed. I heard a voice, far away and muffled as if underwater, and a mess of blurry pixels bent over me.

I was suddenly hit with an overwhelming panic. I was dropped into another mental timeline entirely. I was suddenly lost, unprepared -- I felt like I should have known what to do, but I didn’t. I had to act quickly, but I didn’t know on what. I had no idea where any of this was coming from.

I screamed almost involuntarily, and heard glass shatter.

I dodged the blurry figure with a roll, hit my already throbbing head on what I quickly recognized as a table leg. Almost on instinct, I dove for cover under said table, and folded myself up tight. I hid my face in my knees and pulled angrily at my hair, as if I could rip a hole in my scalp to vent out the pain. The crashing and smashing grew louder and more frequent. 

When I dared to peek up from my knees, I saw the walls beginning to push inward with a groan, but not in a comforting way, this time. The drywall began to split and crumble with the pressure, and the room’s light started to struggle and flicker frantically, each frame of darkness seeming to plunge me into a completely different room. The shattering glass rang out like deafening warfare. I couldn’t take it. It was ravaging my brain in ways I didn’t understand. I had so many phantom emotions running my thoughts in circles, it just left me reeling.

“Stop,” I said into my knees, “Stop, stop, stop --” and I screamed, “STOP, STOP IT, YOU’RE GONNA PASS OUT!”

A hand made of dense, metallic code touched my arm.

I shrieked and scrambled backwards. Fix-it knelt in front of me, perfectly tangible, his hand still lifted. When I saw his worried face, I noticed that the rest of the room had snapped back into place, too. My heart wanted to break out of my chest, my head was still killing, and my throat was parched, but everything seemed intact and steady again. My arm still tingled in a sharp and gross way where he touched me. Apparently, the shock of his code was enough to snap me out of it. I wanted to be pissed at him for touching me, but I was too stunned. I took in the sight of him completely, crouching there in full work clothes sans hat, looking ready to collapse from exhaustion, yet still going through all the effort of trying to help me.

I was floored by the fact that he succeeded. 

As I clutched my chest, trying to catch my breath, he sat down very gently. “Easy, easy,” he whispered, “it’s okay.”

I swallowed.

He asked carefully, “What’s your name?”

I breathed, “Mavy.”

His eyes widened a bit, and he held his breath for a second. He asked, “Do you know who I am?”

I stared at him. The bare bones of it, at that point, seemed obvious.

“My cousin.”

I swear I heard his heart thump. 

He slowly brought up his knee to rest his cheek on it, and he took deep breaths. That episode clearly stressed him out, too -- hardly a fair comparison, but still. A weak smile appeared on his face. “Your eyes are starting to dim.”

For a moment, I tried to remember how much time had passed. Then, a pressing thought occurred to me.

“Wait. What time is it?”

“Uh,” his eyes shifted. “Around 3:30?”

“AM?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, crit--” I hit my head on the underside of the table. “Ow-- Okay, I gotta go,” I said as I climbed out and stood. “I’m so cussin’ late. Even for me.”

Fix-it got to his feet, too, and looked more than a little confused. “You had to be somewhere?”

I pulled my gloves on. “Yeah, I was supposed to meet Turbo in Paperboy like, five hours ago,” I grabbed my conveniently materialized leather jacket from the chair and shrugged into it. “He’s probably gone home by now to anger-sleep. You’d never believe that’s possible ‘til you’ve seen it.”

Fix-it just turned white. 

I strode to the door in a place it hadn’t been before. “Toodles,” I said, before grabbing air and walking into the wall.

There was no door. There were no windows. 

I was very late, and there was no way out.

Flash.

My game’s screen loomed in front of me.

I sat cross-legged, wrapped in the blanket, on the grass in front of Niceland, staring up at our inverted title screen with dry eyes. My body felt hot and riddled with aches that would only get worse as my high continued to fade, and my brain felt fizzled to a crisp. I was so tired, I couldn’t even recognize that I wanted to sleep.

Someone next to me didn’t have the same problem. I heard the honks of Fix-it’s cartoonish snoring. He was just barely upright, his face smushed against his bent knee, a bit of drool staining his pants. I wondered how long he’d been there. I wondered how we came to be there at all, but not enough to wake him. Maybe if I had been sober, I would have painted an airhorn. But, being hazy and braindead and with a faulty brush, I just idly flicked colors onto different parts of his sprite. Red hat, orange shirt, yellow shoes. Red hair, orange skin, yellow pants. Red, orange, yellow.

Past my sleeping canvas, I saw movement. Wreck-it was climbing onto his kingdom of bricks, presumably coming home after a particularly long night at Tapper’s. He came to the little peak behind which sat his stump, and paused. His head turned, and he saw me.

I looked at him blankly.

He held my gaze for a minute. It was hard to tell just what expression he was making, but even from my distance, I could see him sigh. He shook his head slowly and stepped out of view.

I couldn’t manage any thoughts on that.

Red, orange, yellow. Red, orange, yellow.

[frowzyspeaks]

Dear Police Officers

Dear Police Officers,

When Ralph Ellison wrote Invisible Man, he was speaking for a community of people whose voice had been excluded from history for far too long. His novel depicts the black experience as a nightmare, which is essentially still our cruel reality today. Progress is the ultimate goal of the United States of America, and it has been since the day the land was stolen from the Native Americans (but that’s not my point today). To progress, one must change, and to change, one must understand the wrong doings they have done so that they can further themselves into a better them. Invisible Man is a depiction of Ellison’s time, the civil rights era. Not much progress has been made since then, and it has been almost 70 years. Where is the change?

Tod Clifton. He was dead before he even realized it. His name literally means death, which was a clever use of word manipulation on Ellison’s part. Clifton was murdered after he struck an officer, which is an undebatable sign of a resisting of arrest. But is resisting the loss of freedom over a doll probable cause to be shot down in the middle of a Harlem street? Although he is a fictional character, his presence in the novel represents a much bigger picture than merely just a character in a book that Ellison made up. To blacks, this is a reality.

Tod Clifton was breaking the law. He was selling Sambo dolls on the street without a permit, resisted arrest, and got shot. He was not even given medical attention after he was shot—he was left laying for all to see. He deserved to be charged criminally in court. However, he never made it to a trial or even to the back of a police cruiser. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, it is your duty as an officer to “[maintain] public order and safety, [enforce] the law, and [prevent, detect], and [investigate] criminal activities.” When do you officers decide that it is also your responsibility to convict a man and give him the death penalty—to assign yourself as the judge and the jury? To become an officer, one must attend a police academy, where the correct way to deal with assault and other unarmed situations is taught and engraved. Yet and still, many officers choose the quick route when it comes to black men, and shoot when the situation gets even just a little bit out of hand. Are there no more batons? Tasers? Stun guns? Bean bag rounds? What about the black man has inflicted fear upon officers? Blackness is not incriminating nor intimidating, yet it has been depicted that way for quite a while.

Eric Garner. He was a black man in Staten Island arrested for illegally selling cigarettes, soon put in a chokehold as he begged for breath almost a dozen times, and let out his final words: “I can’t breathe.” This happened in 2014. Why have we not progressed since Ellison’s era? Do we not strive for progress anymore? Are officers becoming more and more incompetent for their jobs, or are black men becoming more threatening? Garner’s murderer was convicted of homicide eventually, but that was only a small step forward in the corruption that is the law enforcement system. Most officers are not convicted, simply because you all are often given the benefit of the doubt before the case is even explained to its fullest extent. This is done by posing black men as an immediate threat, a sort of threat that cannot be dealt with by the court system. You all are painted as the victims because you put your life on the line every day to ensure the safety of the community, but no one seems to think about us. You chose to be an officer and risk losing your life every time you put on that badge and uniform. Our blackness is not something that we chose. We cannot go home at the end of the day and take it off—it’s something we are born with and are forced to live with. Our blackness puts us at risk every moment of our lives, and we cannot even be given the benefit of the doubt when we are dead. This causes our community to live in constant fear that we can die at the hands of anyone and our murders will get away with it, especially if our murderers are the ones who are supposed to ensure our safety—you.

But what is police brutality? Some officers seem to believe that since they are the image of the law to ordinary civilians, that they are above the law. This leads to them acting out of impulse rather than logic, and results in an excessive use of force and sometimes death when dealing with people who are not even posing an immediate threat. Police brutality has been a major theme of the black experience in the 20th century and seems to have carried itself into the 21st century with an alarming amount of cases. When the ones who are supposed to be protecting us are the same people who harm us, who do we turn to? Distrust in the police departments sprung about organizations during the Civil Rights Movement like the Black Panthers, an organization designed to police the police. In modern times, we have formed the movement #Blacklivesmatter. Since then, black bodies have been put on display as examples of how not to deal with the police, yet we seem to do all the other things that white men do when handling police officers. To debate this, police officers usually point out that whites are murdered by officers far more often than blacks and other minority groups, but we only compose a small percent of the population compared to our white counterparts. If blacks and other minority groups were to be murdered at the same rates as that of whites, we would eventually be wiped out.

Learn how to deal with us when we are angry. We are not angry simply because you are a police officer; we are angry because we fear every encounter with you. Rather it is for a broken tail light or a routine traffic stop, we become alarmed every time we are near you. We should not have to tell our loved ones to keep their hands on the steering wheel when being pulled over or to warn you about where we keep our registration and insurance papers so that we will not be shot. Talking back is not us “asking for it,” it is simply us exercising our rights and letting you as an officer know that we have had enough of the injustices and that we are tired of living in fear that our black skin will get us killed. We should be able to have faith that our law enforcement system will protect us, not harm us.

But don’t get me wrong, for every corrupt officer, there are plenty of officers who carry out their duties exactly as they are supposed to. However, we cannot praise cops for not killing; we have to penalize cops who are not correctly carrying out their duties to promote a healthier relationship between the black community and the police force. As blacks, we often believe that you all treat us all the same due to the color of our skin, so in turn, we tend to assume that all cops are going to treat us as if we are criminals. As a community, yes we do have room to improve, but as an officer, it is your responsibility to ease us away from this stereotype. Prove us wrong.

Sincerely,

A Sister

[classysansypansy]

Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph 1 (My Theory)

Okay, so before I begin my theory about Wreck-It Ralph 1, let me say something about Wreck-It Ralph 2. Disney had so much potential derived from the content of the first movie, and they threw it in the garbage with the second movie. That’s all I wanted to say about Ralph Breaks the Internet.

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT AHEAD!!!

Anyhow...okay, so you remember Turbo from Wreck-It Ralph 1, correct? Good, ‘cause if you don’t then watch the movie because it’s freaking amazing.

Well, I have a theory about him. First off, let me explain who he is. I’ll take mercy on those too lazy to watch the movie to find out. lol

Turbo was a character in the fictional retro video game ‘TurboTime’, his in-game catchphrase being ‘Turbo-tastic!’. His racing game was the top dog for awhile, but quickly got pushed aside for a new racing game called ‘Roadblasters’ in Litwak’s Arcade. This being a Disney film, the character of Turbo got jealous of the new game, so he left his own and went to Roadblasters, causing the game to glitch, go out of order, and get unplugged.

So that’s the end of Turbo, right? Nah...thank Disney for that. Instead, he recoded another racing game called ‘Sugar Rush’ so that its Princess (later revealed as Vannelope von Schweetz) would disappear (at least he tried that part), and would no longer remember she was the ruler of its candy kingdom...along with all of the other subjects. Then, to top that, he recoded his own avatar, dubbing himself ‘King Candy’, his catchphrase being ‘Have some candy!’. For years, he was the king of Sugar Rush and nobody suspected a thing...Vanellope was dismissed as a glitch in the game and forgotten, stuck inside the game console for life...maybe.

Now, on to the juicy stuff.

So, yanno how I mentioned unplugging? No, it’s not an innuendo. Well, thing is, if a character is still in the game when it’s unplugged, they will die. This is how Wreck-It Ralph truly starts, with Vanellope stuck in her game because of being a ‘glitch’.

Aside from that, there are other metta details mentioned throughout the movie, one of them being an arcade rule; If you die in your own game, you will respawn. If you die in a game that isn’t yours...you simply die. No coming back, ever. 

This is how Disney might’ve thought they could trick us into thinking Turbo died during the climax of the movie. Sure, we found out he wasn’t supposed to be in Sugar Rush, that he had just recoded it so as to seem like he was an official part of it. Logic states he wasn’t in his own game when he died.

But logic is wrong, in this case. 

First- If you think back, the code of Sugar Rush that Turbo created included him, his face and name being in the actual database as a large, glowing...thingy. Just like any other official code. Think about it. A game developer for...let’s say Xbox...can add updates to the game...updates that are new and that are now coded into the actual system each time a player runs the game. Turbo basically just added his own DLC, in hindsight. Thus...he WAS part of Sugar Rush as King Candy, even after he glitched out at the end and was turned into a freakish Turbo/King Candy/Cybug hybrid. Wait, you don’t believe me? Well...

That brings me to my second point- Vanellope was supposed to cross the finish line to reset the game, right? Most people overlook this while talking about King Candy, thinking Turbo’s demise was his final bow. But since he WAS part of the game, and he died before she could even get close to the finish line...he died while he was still part of the game, before he reset. Yeah, he was a glitchy hybrid, but the King Candy part (and thus Turbo, too) would’ve still lived on. He would’ve respawned as King Candy, somewhere. He didn’t actually die, only the Cybug part of him died. And when she reset Sugar Rush, his King Candy guise would’ve/might’ve vanished...but Turbo, himself would still be out there. STILL don’t believe me?

Alriiiighty, well you’ve forced me to come to my third and final point- I have evidence he’s still alive, and it’s in the movie’s end credits. The credits are around 25% pixelated animation, with the animation being set AFTER the events of the actual movie. It follows the lives of our favorite Wreck-It Ralph characters: Ralph and Vanellope have a great old time, game-hopping everywhere, and Calhoun and Felix Jr. are now married and love to adventure in Calhoun’s game...among other events. During transitions and name titles, we briefly see inside Sugar Rush’s game code, with a code plate-thingy as a name holder box thing. Now...this is set AFTER the movie’s events, correct? Then why would King Candy be touching that plate to transition to the next credit? Okay, so if you look really hard or pause it at the PRECISE frame, there’s a moment...a millisecond where you can see a cartoonish hand with a ruffly, purple sleeve reach out and touch the code in order to flow to the next credit in the animation sequence. Not a pink sleeve, like Vanellope’s royal princess dress...but a purple sleeve, like King Candy’s dress-coat. This is set after the movie, so this has to mean something...and it means my theory is right, and Disney is hinting that he’s still out there, based on the logic I mentioned.

My theory in full: TURBO STILL LIVES!

Prove me wrong.

<3

[amphtaminedreams]

S/S 2020 Fashion Month: A Basic, Uneducated Fashion Heaux’s A-Z of Everything Noteworthy (Part 2/3)

Hi to anyone reading,

Back at it again with the giving my unsolicited opinion on 2020′s spring/summer offering, I’m gonna hop straight into part 2 of my fashion month review!

Sorry to start with an underwhelming few but my compulsive tendencies are making it really hard to break out of this alphabetical structure (cry laughs whilst thinking about how long it took me to face up at my retail job last night because it would give me vaguely homicidal urges and make my fingers tingle every time a customer moved something slightly out of line), so I’m gonna whizz through a handful of collections. First up, Halpern:

Not much to say but I’m envious of the heavy liner (my hooded eyes could never) and I like the colour scheme. As for the 80s style metallic pink dress?

Helmut Lang:

And Hermes:

Of these 3 collections, Hermes is definitely the most interesting. I like the colour scheme and the utilitarian shapes and the tan coloured jackets are an absolute shoot. This is how you make safari look fresh, D&G take note.

Isabel Marant was okay. It’s cute, sure, reminds me of something Mary-Kate and Ashley would’ve come out with/worn in the 2000s, and there’s definitely some things I would wear, but I wouldn’t say it looks all that luxury. Pricey, sure, but like, Free People pricey, not designer pricey. As a collection, it’s not all that conceptual, unless the concept is L.A girl does a Starbucks run after her bikram yoga class. What I will say though is that some of the S/S 2020 commercial trends are becoming clear: white cheesecloth pieces, peasant blouses, cowboy boots, scrappy sandals, neutral tones, and bandana print. 

Now onto the darling of high fashion Twitter: Jacquemus.

As far as presentation goes, this has to be one of my favourite set-ups of the season; a hot pink runway running through a lavender meadow is as canny and serene as those who sing the praises of Simon Porte Jacquemus would have you expect, and the clothes were easy, breezy and beautiful, even if there is an element of getting dressed in the dark going on with the styling which put me off including a few otherwise gorgeous pieces. It might not be 100% my style but you can tell this is a brand of the future which is only going to go from strength to strength.

And everything was beautifully and purposefully crafted on the runway with J.W Anderson this year. The pieces are graceful and timeless whilst still easy to envision as something a modern woman would throw on to (very fashionably) run some errands in the city. This was also one of the handful of shows (IIRC! This might be a case of extreme deja-vu!) where we saw the sandal straps tied over the trousers, I’m guessing to accentuate the ankles, and...I’m surprisingly here for it? Though in a sense it kinda resembles when I accidentally get my work trousers tucked into my slipper socks, it’s an interesting touch and adds a bit of a shape to otherwise billowing bottom halves.

Following Jacquemus’ lead (or vice versa, I’m way too deep into this fashion month haze to work out who went first at this point), Lacoste also put on a co-ed show. Otherwise crisp and preppy as per, the neckerchiefs (even if seeing them all next to one another does give off a bit of a Disneyland Main Street barbershop quartet vibe) and vinyl/wet-look/PVC/I’m still not sure what differentiates the 3 coats were an out of the box touch for them and I really liked it. It’s athleisure, but more like something Hayley Bieber would’ve worn as part of her Princess Diana inspired shoot than anything I’d wear to the gym.

LMAO, as if I go the gym. But you get my point. Next, Loewe:

Delicate, feminine and all around delightful, the S/S 2020 Loewe collection is up there with Chloe and Brock when it comes to most spring appropriate. More chiffon, lace and doily-like detailing, please, the old woman in me lives for this kinda thing made fashionable. Like with J.W Anderson, you can tell the design team wanted to do something different without just throwing shit onto their pieces for the sake of being wacky, and so we end up with these dramatic, slightly geometric waistlines and almost angelic Victorian nightgown inspired dresses that kinda make me wished that 1). ghosts existed and that 2). I lived back in that era so I could die some tragic death wearing any one of the dresses on the left in the top 3 rows and then haunt the shit out of everyone. That would really be an iconic fashion moment. Also wonderful, imo, was Louis Vuitton:

The mix between 60s and Edwardian I never knew I needed, as opposed to Gucci’s forward thinking take on the former decade, Louis Vuitton takes it back even further and throws in late 19th/early 20th century structures and references. I adore the what seems to be a mix between brocade and paisley print and the exaggerated collars are a very cute touch. The jacket on the top left is a highlight, a more neutral version of the similar catsuit seen at the Longchamp show (I couldn’t personally pick enough highlights from that to include it), and I now more than ever really want to try and pull off a sweater vest. The shoes might not be the most exciting thing ever but they’re also a personal favourite, from the knee high boots to the loafers with the LV moniker.

Maison Margiela was very cool and again, I’m in love with the shoes and just the accessories in general, ESPECIALLY those hats. I don’t know if I’m way off base here but this show is almost a modernised, fashionable version of a 1940s period drama about WW2 pilots and evacuees. Yes, maybe I am just getting that solely from the trench coats and the naval influences and the exaggerated collars but I think with that list I made quite a case for that perspective, right? Right.

And completing this holy trinity (appropriating the term I usually reserve for Emma Watson, Emma Stone and Emma Roberts is not without careful consideration) is Marc Jacobs. One of my ultimate favourites of this season, this collection is absolutely EVERYTHING: kitschy, dream-like, whimsical, over-the-top, and totally appropriate for your slightly eccentric aunt who always drinks too much wine and talks a lot of shit every time she comes over for dinner. I really feel like I walked into wonderland looking at this collection, and in the best way possible, it gives me a female Russell Brand in the 2000s’ wardrobe on crack. On the one hand we have these insanely beautiful and ethereal chiffon floral dresses but then we also have fricken top hats. Basically, it’s everything I love about fashion and I don’t know if anything can top it. Periodt (and I type that with a totally straight face). 

Next, onto another personal fave, Marchesa:

Which is as always, beautiful. I was going to write that if Disney princesses came to life and lived in the modern world (so, in other words, Elle Fanning), they would be wearing Marchesa and then I remembered that the film Enchanted exists and had a lightbulb moment and thought OH MY GOD IF THEY REMADE THAT IN 2019, THE DRESS ON THE RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE ROW WOULD BE A PERFECT LEVELLING UP OF THE CURTAIN DRESS.

Anyways, favourites of the favourites are the bottom row; I would die for that feather trim. 

BUT where Marchesa is everything opulent, overly ornate and err-ing on “fussy”, Margaret Howell’s S/S 2020 collection is completely stripped back and just as effective, if not as to my taste. Very cool, very current, and altogether effortless (in a good way!), with this show Margaret Howell made mid-20th century utilitarianism relevant. I never thought I’d be praising the combination of bermuda shorts, crew socks and a beanie and yet here I am. Character development.

Next is Marine Serre:

Which I really like! The bottom row isn’t really to my personal taste but I can acknowledge that if I saw somebody wearing any one of those outfits I’d think they looked sick, and as for the first two rows, those mesh tops and the slightly chintzy florals are right up my alley.

Marques Almeida put out a really strong collection, imo. The blending of luxurious silhouettes and fabrics with street wear inspired prints and styling is a really interesting and unique contrast and if Billie Eilish ever decided to stop wearing those tweenie clothes and wanted to actually seduce somebody’s dad (I LOVE BILLIE EILISH AND I KNOW WHY SHE DRESSES THE WAY SHE DOES, IT’S A JOKE, PLS DON’T HATE ME), I’d love to see her wearing something like this. It’s a blend of punk, urban, and 2019 e-girl and has the kind of edge that Topshop has lost over the past couple of years that used to make it so aspirational to my 13 year old self. Of all the shows, it also probably has the most personally wearable accessories, and a shit tonne of cool make up looks I’d love to try if it weren’t for my lack of visible eyelid, lol.

Make up looks were a highlight of the Max Mara show too, for me anyway.

I otherwise wasn’t hugely keen on the collection, it being a little too matronly/Miss.Trunchbull-esque for my liking (wild card fashion inspiration of 2019, apparently?). The light paisley print dresses are very dreamy, though, and I can never resist a good suit. 

As for Michael Kors, dare I say it, but the basic bitch in me loved it. I know as a designer he’s not held in very high regard by the fashion community and I'm not saying it’s at all original but it did what it set out to do well; I mean, it’s quite fitting that he cameo-d in an episode of Gossip Girl because every outfit would be perfect for the Constance attending incarnation of Blair Waldorf, which is probably why I like the collection. Like yeah, it’s a bit of a Polo Ralph Lauren/Lacoste rip off but it’s daintier and more feminine and so I’m not gonna lie, I’m on board with it. 

Next, Miu Miu.

One of the collections I was most excited for, I was a little disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, I really like the collection, but I have never once disliked anything Miu Miu and I usually love it. There are things I love about this line too: the cream, floral lace-up boots, the off-the-shoulder cardigans, the houndstooth oversized coats and of course the fur-lined gilets. My mum used to buy me similar ones when I was a little girl and so they give me childhood nostalgia in the best way possible. I mean, the collection is as girly and eccentric as ever. I think it’s just a little too on the primary school librarian side for me, this time round. Sorry Miu Miu xoxo

Now I’m just gonna speed through a couple, starting with MM6 Maison Margiela, the younger sister to the more expensive regular Maison Margiela line:

And Monique Lhuillier:

So that I can get to one of my other ultimate favourite collections for S/S 2020: Moschino.

Oh my god, where to even start. Firstly, I might be reaching, but if this show is even remotely to thank for art nouveau mesh tops showing up in the Urban Outfitters new in section, then a very sarcastic thank you to Jeremy Scott. You just made ethical shopping a lot harder. HOW am I supposed to not buy an Alphonse Mucha top? HOW!? I mean, I’m sure I’ll manage (I’m on month 3 without a shopping spree I can’t actually afford now and yes, I am very much patting myself on the back), but HOW!?

But on a serious level, if renaissance was the print of 2019, which I’m still very much into BTW, bring on modern art as its 2020 replacement. The Pablo Picasso inspired show not only livened up a generally pretty predictable fashion month but it’s also got me searching up other times art has met fashion on the runway and thrown me down a particularly aesthetically pleasing wormhole I’m not sure I ever want to escape from (https://frontrowmagazine.ca/art-inspired-looks-were-all-over-the-runways-of-fashion-week-a74e8bc7ff0d and https://www.vogue.com/article/spring-2017-ready-to-wear-fine-arts-trends are good starting points!).

Mugler was also up there with the best of them, imo:

See, if the Moschino collection was all about dabbling in art class, Mugler’s S/S 2020 collection is its more mathematically inclined sister, all about sharp lines and deconstructed silhouettes and symmetry all whilst looking hot as fuck. So very Mugler, basically. 

Now, this reference might be slightly off because I haven’t actually SEEN Ex-Machina yet but I imagine if Kim Kardashian were to channel that movie for a costume party she’d end up wearing something from this collection. That sounds like a roast because Kim has worn some questionable outfits but I blame Kanye for most of that and I’m referring to her on a good fashion day, alright!?

As for Off-White, it’s obviously a lot more commercial than most of the lines I’ve reviewed so far. Like, I can see a lot of these outfits on a mannequin in Urban Outfitters (no, I am not being paid to namedrop them, about 3 people in total read this Tumblr so any kind of sponsorship money would be severely wasted on me). That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and I love all of these looks; it just seems unfair to compare them to the the Mugler or Moschino collections, for example. 

The stand outs for me are all on the bottom row: I would buy the utility vest, leather blazer and the all mesh turtleneck under washed-out tie-dye on the spot if I saw them in a high street store. Unfortunately, I feel like that’s kinda where they belong. You just expect collections to be a bit more conceptual, and this one is a little watered down, as much as it’s my style.

Oscar de la Renta was beautiful, of course. Not like I’m shook by how beautiful it is but kinda just what you’d expect from a brand with a name as poetic and fun to say as Oscar de la Renta. The silhouettes are dreamy and the details are as fit for a fairy princess (lmao) as ever. Plus can I just say how happy I am to see butterflies on dresses for adult women again!? And dresses worn by Blanca Padilla nonetheless!? Very here for it.

Next up is another on one of my fashion month highlights: Paco Rabanne.

LOOK AT THIS SHIT!

I mean, don’t get me wrong, something about this collection (I’m pretty sure it’s the knee high coloured socks) is giving me primary school teacher vibes, but I'm not mad about it. It’d be the kind of teacher who’s actually really good at their job and has loads of cool hobbies and a really hot boyfriend or girlfriend or wife or husband who you secretly want to be then you grow up/and or have a huge crush on. 

Like with Marc Jacobs, there’s obvious flower child elements here, and whilst on the whole the former took my breath away slightly more, this is a lot more wearable. My favourites are the paisley print dress and cape on the left in the very bottom row and all the chainmail pieces (which remind me of the dress Naomi Smalls wore in that whole club ninety-sixxxxx skit on drag race), plus that floral cut out dress with the trailing flute sleeves, which is absolute PERFECTION. 

The 70s influence was clear in Peter Pilotto’s S/S 2020 collection too from the abundance of tie-dye to the knit v-neck dress, zany colour and print being the very on-brand focus. That being said, this is definitely more of a street-style inspired collection than usual and whilst the floral suits and dresses on the 3rd row down are very typical Peter Pilotto, the tie-dye corset and combat trousers on the far right, second row from the bottom, are very Jaded London. As for the reoccurrence of the bucket hat, I’ve remained steadfastly against them for several years now (even when our Lord and Saviour Miss Robyn Rihanna Fenty started wearing them) but the way they’re done in this collection even I could definitely get behind; all in all, the show surpassed my expectations.

The same goes for Ports 1961, which was a lot more eccentric than I gathered is the norm from a few google searches. Honestly, I hadn’t really heard of the brand which, upon reading up on it, I feel very dumb for considering it has been around since (in the shock twist of the century) 1961.

Yes, I know how that sounds! But forgive me, I’m still learning:)

Anyway, the fishnet detailing alone pretty much sold the looks I picked out. Seriously, I got a pair of those bloody tights, like, 2 years ago when they became a thing again and now any outfit where I have my legs out feels incomplete without them. 

Next is Prabal Gurung, which, as far as presentation goes, was fucking STUNNING:

I mean, you could say that I’m easily impressed and that the presence of the bouquets won me over (and you’d definitely have a point there), but it’s also this year’s Givenchy haute couture-esque feathers, the trailing pearl necklaces, the exaggerated shoulders, the dreamy colouring, the everything looking like it could’ve grown off a very fashionably-inclined tree. Like, there’s a lot to love here, from the naturalistic elements, to the context behind the show, an ode to American fashion history and those cast out of it (and the notion of “being American” in general) for so long. 

Going from a high to a (personal) low, however, next we have Prada:

I don’t know, I get that it’s supposed to be simple and stripped back and dignified and whatever and I like the looks I picked but it’s just a bit blah for me. The bonnets that kept cropping up just didn’t do it for me and almost ruined what is an otherwise nice skirt suit (top right). Nonetheless, I like the silhouette of the sheer black dress and the the brocade print suit is really luxurious looking, even if the pattern is a *little* Wetherspoons carpet. 

Anyways, here’s a quick overview of Rag and Bone:

So that I can stop moaning and get onto a collection I REALLY liked: 

I am of course talking about Ralph and Russo. See, this is kinda what I expected from, like, Chanel and yet it’s Ralph and Russo that delivered. Also, it gives me Alessandra Rich vibes which is very much a compliment considering how much I love her designs. I mean, if Valley of the Dolls were to get another film remake in 2019, this is exactly what I’d like to see the female leads wearing, from the pastel suits to the satin kaftan style dresses. The yellow feather trimmed dress is practically a copy of something Marchesa has already done but it’s cute all the same. In my top 10 collections of the season, for sure.

Rick Owens was another strong collection; it goes without saying that it’s not the most wearable but that’s not really what Rick Owens is known for, so I wouldn’t expect anything else. If you want fashion on an alien planet, or something Lady Gaga would’ve worn in 2010, he's your man.

Next, Rodarte:

Obviously the dresses are beautiful and the set is magnificent, BUT...I’m really not a fan of the whole celebrities filling in for high fashion models thing. I like Lili Reinhart and I adore Kirsten Dunst, she’s been in a load of my favourite films, but in a similar vein to Dolce and Gabbana’s influencer show, it’s just distracting from the actual garments, if even worse because I don’t WANT to be distracted here (the same can’t be said for the D&G show, lol).  If anybody has read this far, let me know your thoughts! 

Roland Mouret was nice, and I always like a coed show, especially when a designer isn’t afraid to blur the lines of masculine and feminine. It’s fresh, lightweight and luxurious looking, Cannes film festival street style eat your heart out, and I love the colour palette.

Similarly, colour was my favourite thing about Sally LaPointe’s S/S 2020 collection. 

I would never think that teal and burnt orange would work together, let alone in some kind of faux leather, and yet here we are. Orange is in itself always an interesting colour choice, perfect for the summer with a tan, and I really love monochrome outfits, even though they’re something that ends up being quite pricey to put together; slight differences in tone are okay but if you just randomly throw together a few things and they’re too off, it really doesn’t work and you’d have been better off wearing contrasting colours. For that reason, I’m just gonna admire that all-pink outfit from a distance. 

As for Schiaparelli, it’s one I always look forwards to for the sheer weirdness. RTW isn’t quite as kooky as haute couture but still, the interesting choices are still there; what at first glance appears to be flame print is actually coils of hair, and paired with a water print suit is a sequinned jacket emblazoned with a paradisiacal mirage. Ornament-like facial decorations as seen in the over-exaggerated glasses worn with the pony hair suit are also one of my favourite new things to happen in the high fashion scene in the past couple of months and I can’t wait to see how they get watered down to become more approachable for us...regular, non-structurally blessed folks who can’t pull off anything and everything.

Simone Rocha was STUNNING. Romantic and ethereal, it’s druid goddess crossed with upper class Victorian woman of leisure, equal parts delicate and grungy, like a modern, fashion version of Lady Gaga’s Scathach in the Roanoke season of American Horror Story. You know, in the flashbacks, not in present day when she was all gross and like...scalping people and shit. Each dress is so ornate and has such an interesting structure, and the fabric choices give off an organic kinda vibe that create a handmade feel; the collection is, imo, really worthy of being shown under a haute couture heading. When it comes to my favourite element of the show, I’m torn between the petticoats and the hair accessories. I’m just gonna give a cop-out answer and say both. 

Stella McCartney on the other hand, is very much a clear ready-to-wear collection. 

It’s pretty, for sure. The pastel blazers paired with delicate white mesh tops underneath are a gorgeous combination for spring and I like the reoccurrence of the chain glasses (Gucci, right?). But I mean, when you go from Simone Rocha to this, it’s a bit anticlimactic. Plus, if I’m honest, kaftans are always going to remind me of Honey Mahogany from season 5 of Drag Race. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure she’s a lovely person but her runway looks aren’t really ones I look back fondly on, and you’re lying if you say you enjoyed them for anything other than meme purposes.

Temperley is equally meh, though the return of the Erdem-style boating hats is getting me excited that high street retailers might actually pick up on the trend and bring out some cheap ones for me to embarrass myself by wearing. 

I also love a good 70s suit, the neckerchiefs are cute and there are some really delightful prints here that are a more unique approach to florals for spring.

Coming towards the end now, next is Thom Browne:

I LOVE this. Like, don’t get me wrong Rick Owens was cool but I adore how on the nose the concept is here; time to bring back all the Marie Antoinette puns I didn’t get to use in my Versailles Instagram post. I don’t know if it’s the history buff in me or the Sofia Coppola Stan but I will always be willing to sign any kind of treaty for anything related to the excesses of the 18th century French monarchy, and this is that turned up to 1000 infused with a dash of the Teletubbies, which sounds like a nightmarish concept, I know, but as high fashion it WORKS.

Tory Burch was very commercial, seemingly half inspired by Monterey yoga moms and the other half by Hamptons socialites. 

And then there was Valentino, which was fucking exquisite, imo. LIKE, CALLING DOCLE & GABBANA: THIS IS HOW YOU MAKE TROPICAL PRINT INTERESTING. YOU MAKE THE VELVET MONKEY’S ARM THE FRICKEN WAISTBAND. 

Seriously, though, I am enamoured with this colour palette; all the whites and golds are angelic and fr, I didn’t know until now that you could make neons this elegant. I’m also getting an almost clerical feel from a lot of these looks, with the plaited waistband on the black dress that’s 7th row down in the middle, the stunning red cape and the multitude of exaggerated neck ruffs. I think I’ve mentioned before but I always love religious references in clothing-I don’t think I’ll ever get over the 2018 Met Gala-and so whether I’m reading too much into it or not, this collection really did it for me.

Whilst it’s probably as far removed a collection from Valentino’s S/S 2020 contribution you can get, I also loved Vera Wang this season. It might purely (I PROMISE THIS IS MY LAST GOSSIP GIRL REFERENCE) be because it gives me Jenny Humphrey vibes and *controversial* she did have my favourite style of any of the main characters, but sue me, this is just the right amount of late 90s/early 2000s grunge. Deconstructed trashy goth it girl is an interesting concept to see on the runway and I completely support it. 

Versace on the other hand was very hit or miss. The looks I picked out I really loved but ultimately, for one of the household name brands, a lot of the actual garments were a bit pedestrian. I will say though that for me, it’s a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The slicked back mermaid hair and the pops of colour in the makeup and the interesting necklines meant that when it was good, it was GOOD. However, overall, still a bit too 80s Miami businesswoman, and please GOD, can we leave that hideous J-Lo dress in the past, it should really not be the climax of the show in 20-fucking-19!

As for Victoria Beckham, I liked it, but it’s a bit of a Gucci copy, no? And no way near as interesting?

And on that note, I’m gonna have to cut this off. Super annoying but with only 5 collections left that I want to talk about, Tumblr is being a little bitch and will not let me add anything more to this post. So, see you in 5 for the final post!

Lauren x

[rachelking2819]

Crisis on Infinite Earths  - Review part 3

Well well well…. 6 years after crisis’ first mention we got to see the most anticipated and ambitious crossover on tv (in my opinion). Another month later and the event has been wrapped up with a pretty bow around it. Well… kind of, there is a whole lot of fallout to deal with for each of our beloved heroes. But wow what an adventure it has been. I am writing this with the last two parts and the Flash portion freshly in my mind, so bear with me please. Let’s get into it shall we?

This is most definitely my favorite part of the crossover. I have watched this episode about two or three times before watching the last two parts.  

The absolute highlight for me: West fucking Allen. We got three kisses y’all, three! Can you believe it? Cause I ain’t quite sure it happened. Ughh, the feelsss. Of course, Candice and Grant had to make me cry. Finally, the moment has come that Barry is believed to vanish, and he has a moment alone with Iris. The moment these words leave his mouth, Iris is ready and panicky saying she doesn’t want him to die alone, that she will come with him. And then Barry says those beautiful famous words: “I will be running home to you.” At this moment I am done for, my eyes welling up, my heart in pieces. The love in those eyes for their greatest love and the underlying pain. How can you not get emotional??

And then that short-lived reunion. Barry again with those damned words, the relief and happiness in their eyes and on their faces in general. Iris leaping into his arms and bringing him in for a kiss as fast as she can. Again, I am attacked with the feels.

Another great part was Black Lightning. I am not a great fan of the show, but Jefferson Pierce was just a great fit in the crossover. It didn’t feel weird or out of place. Especially the dynamic with Barry was amazing and a joy to watch. I was also very pleased with how Jefferson was brought into the mess. The moment he stepped out of the portal, he was ready for battle after losing his earth and his family. He instantly showed everyone he is a forced to be reckoned with. Later his heart to heart with Barry showed the start of a hopefully strong and lasting bond. Therefore, I demand a crossover for the Flash and Black Lightning. I truly believe that that would be amazing.

Further, I developed a new love while watching this crossover. A love for Lucifer, the devil himself. I was not yet familiar with this character before crisis. I had seen the show while scrolling through Netflix, but never felt the need to watch it. Well, that changed after his 40 seconds on my screen during the crossover. I was instantly hooked on his aloof and charming character and vowed to start watching the show. It was a winter break well spent 😉.

In this episode we met Ryan Choi, the paragon of truth. While his meeting was brief, I instantly adored him. The way he geeked out over Ray Palmer and was apprehensive to Ralph and Iris, was so adorable. Also, his first thought being to go home to his family after hearing about the universes’ demise, is the most relatable thing to happen this entire crossover. His talk with Iris however, tugged at my heartstrings. Of course, my heartache involved Iris again… I am looking forward to what the future brings for Ryan in the arrowverse.

Of course, everything has a downside and again the Oliver centric parts (apart from Lucifer’s appearance) were the parts to annoy me most. This was mostly because of Mia; I just haven’t liked her since the very first time she made an appearance. I think she is arrogant, too stubborn for her own good(not the adorable kind) and she seems to always know what’s best. Many might say, she is just like her dad. While that might be true, it isn’t working for her. Oliver got away with al this because he just always has been like that, but Mia just seems a like a little brat with never ending temper tantrums. I could go on, but let’s get back to crisis.

Another thing about Oliver’s arc here is that I just do not understand anything about what has happened on purgatory. I do now, after having seen all of crisis, but at the time my mind was just blanc. I also thought it to be too easy to remind Oliver’s soul of its humanity, I had expected some kind of battle. Not disappointed, just expected something more elaborate.

The last act shows the anti-monitor as Lyla entering the waverider and managing to wipe out earth-1 and the waverider and its occupants, except the paragons. They get send to the Vanishing Point, a place beyond space and time where the anti-monitor can’t reach them. Here the paragon of truth, Brandon Routh’s Superman, gets replaced with Lex Luthor. And honestly, I think Lex Luthor is the funniest person ever for doing this. He is so full of himself that he just rewrote destiny and put his name down. I also find it hilarious how much hatred he holds for Superman. All of part two he spent his time killing Supermen. And now to save his own life, he could have chosen any of the seven paragons, but ultimately chose the paragon that represents Superman.

What did you think of this part of Crisis on Infinite Earths? Did I miss something worth mentioning? Let me know, till next time!

[sueboohscorner]

#TheFlash Season 6 Episode 17 "Liberation" Recap and Review

The episode starts with Barry, Ralph, and Cisco testing out the artificial speed force. For a moment, it looks like it’s going to work, but it doesn’t.

Cecile comes in to see how the test went, but really to get Barry to see Mirror Iris. He won’t but tells Cecile to tell her that he misses her.

Mirror Iris and Camilla are talking to Eva. Her big plan is going through tonight.

They finish before Cecile comes in and talks to Mirror Iris. She asks if Cecile can tell how she feels. Weirdly enough, she can. Before they can have a full-on heart to heart, Camilla interrupts and then Cecile leaves.

Barry has all of his stuff at Joe’s house. When Cecile comes in, he explains that Iris is not Iris. Hallelujah! I knew he’d gotten it when Mirror Iris kicked him out. Cecile does not know what we know, so she thinks he’s crazy. Because he’s Barry though, he is able to convince her.

Ralph and Cisco visit Frost, who has been recovering from multiple baddie battles. They walk in on an icy Caitlin who needs their help.

Iris wants to smash the mirror so that they can study it. Eva can always put it back together. Eva gets fake mad and storms out. When this happens, Iris finds a secret button on the mirror.

Barry and Cecile are at The Citizen office and find Camilla’s photo.

Mirror Iris, Camilla, and Singh put mirrors all over the loft. There is only one more thing Eva needs, and it involves Bloodwork.

Barry, Cecile, and Nash confront Mirror Iris.

Meanwhile, the button that the real Iris found leads to a secret room that shows recordings of how long Eva has been watching her. It also causes her enough pain to cause her to pass out.

Barry has a device that will reveal Mirror Iris for what she is, but somehow, she uses it against him, and they put him in the pipeline. Mirror Iris tries to steer Cecile and Nash wrong on what exactly she’s made it look like is wrong with Barry, but Cecile senses that something is off.

Caitlin is in an ice coma. Cisco uses a science kit that he brought Caitlin to warm her up, using Ralph as a sort of jumper cable. It works. She explains to them that her wound ruptured and that they have to find her mother in order to help her.

The Mirror Threesome are at A.R.G.U.S. where Iris reveals that Eva messed with the device Barry planned to use to expose her. When they get to Bloodwork, they explain their plan. They’ll release him in exchange for a drop of his blood. Once he understands who they are, he agrees. Mirror Cecile sacrifices herself to release him. He stabs Mirror Singh and starts choking Mirror Iris. He asks her what she wants. She wants to be alive. I think Barry got to her. I think she cares. Anyway, once she says this, he steps back into his cell. He was never just going to walk out and he has a much longer plan. He does give Mirror Iris some of his blood though.

Cecile lets Barry out. She doesn’t know exactly what’s going on, but she knows him, and she knows that Iris is acting strangely.

Barry runs into the loft while Eva is giving Mirror Iris orders. Mirror Iris throws Bloodwork’s blood on the mirror and then they fight. Eva shows Iris the fight in real time, which is an absolute beat down because of all of the mirrors in the loft. Barry goes down but won’t stop asking about Iris. Mirror Iris starts taunting him and Eva starts taunting Iris.

This gives Iris the idea to rile her up in order to distract Mirror Iris and give Barry a fighting chance. What does Barry do when he can’t fight? He talks. He tries to get through to Mirror Iris. She can choose to be her own person and not just what Eva wants her to be. She chooses to be herself. Eva breaks her apart. These writers have an uncanny ability to make annoying characters sympathetic right before they die. When she said she felt alive, I almost felt sorry for her.

Eva then steps through the mirror. She barely spends any effort on Barry, who is wounded on the floor draining his speed. As long as he stays out of her way, she won’t kill him or her insurance policies in Iris, Camilla, and Singh. She leaves and Barry passes out.

When he wakes up, he talks to the mirror. Iris does the same thing. Even though they can’t hear each other, they are finishing each other’s sentences and it’s heartbreaking. Even though there are things about this arc that could have been handled better and even though I’m not sure how this shortened season will affect whether she will get out, this was incredibly moving.

I still have plenty of questions, but this was definitely a step in the right direction. Congratulations by the way to Danielle Panabaker, who gave birth earlier this month! 7.5/10.

[jq37]

well. that was it.

**spoilers for prompocalypse  part 2**

Y'all this is it. The end-end. The last recap, at least for Fantasy High.

I honestly could have gotten this up yesterday but I wanted to give myself a hot sec before it was really over. 

But, no way out but through. Let’s get to it. 

We start back up right where we left off with no break in between. Cast still freaking, Brennan still gaping. 

“What the Fuck.” –Brennan 2019

Anyway, Kristen once again appears in corn heaven and she’s very not chill about it. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. On the plus side, she runs into Doreen in heaven who is young and hot again (which I’m sure Fig would appreciate knowing) and also apologizes for her traumatizing speech to Adaine during her death.

Helio playing beer pong. I wonder if that was always a facet of his personality or if Brennan just decided to yes-and all of Ally’s suggestions of him being a frat bro.

The angels being like, “Please be nice to God. He’s our dad,” was kinda adorable. 

“Why are you dressed like a weird stripper?”/“It’s too hot in here. He’s the sun!”

So while the gang has been living out Breakfast Club + Stranger Things, Aguefort has been Weekend and Bernie’s-ing Heaven apparently. I want to say wild, but tbh that’s pretty on brand for him. The wild part is that he was able to knock out GOD. Like, how even?

Aguefort tells Kristen that Sol is one god of many and she says, “Cool, I always thought that,” as if this is new information but, living in a D&D world, shouldn’t she definitively know that already? Like, the gods in fantasy worlds are pretty blatant about letting their presence be known and there are clerics/paladins who aren’t Heleoic but still have powers. 

OK I have a bone to pick with Ms. Kristen Applebees. You get a chance to talk to the primordial source of all divine power and magic and you (1) ask who you’re allowed to bone and (2) create a TERRIBLE god. Just truly TRASH. She created a reaction gif god. It’s not even a physical representation of the concept. Like, I thought she meant something like Yass from Wreck it Ralph 2 but no. Just a literal Yes! Like, you can trash talk Helio when you come up with something better, girl. Also, wild that you can just…walk into a room and do that. Like you have to knock out Sol first but still. Wild.

“You’ve created a new deity and already you’re fed up with it. I would say that’s par for the course.”

I low key thought Kristen was going to get the option to deify herself. I think because I had just rewatched The Gamers: Dorkness Rising and that figures in to the plot. But, thinking about it, she wouldn’t have gone for that I don’t think.

Aguefort flipping out at Kristen saying that friendship is the greatest magic of all, and rightfully so. That’s BS.

Since when does Kristen have dog tags?

Anyway, as we all suspected, the chronomancy line from episode 1 wasn’t a random line of dialogue, it was a chekhov’s gun. 

I mentioned this in an earlier post. Brennan didn’t seem too concerned that the party was wiping and I think this is why. I think he had two paths for this fight to take. In one, Riz successfully rolled for police and like 6 helpful NPCs plus his mom show up. That’s enough to beat the dragon without dying and Aguefort shows up having Die Hard-ed his way out of heaven. In the other, Kristen dies, goes to heaven, and basically that same series of events happens. Chronomancy saves the day. I think he was shocked because the roll dovetailed so perfectly with the story beat. 

“Is Arthur Aguefort black? Hell yes. My brotha.” Gonna be honest, I basically had that same reaction when they showed his character portrait in ep 1.

Kristen and Arthur jump back into the battle and Arthur gets possessed by Mr. Gibbons. I guess he’s just been hanging around as a ghost this whole time? Because this seems to lend credence to the theory that that’s who possessed Fig in the arcade but didn’t we see him go to the afterlife (which, I have a question about that too later). But I feel like that must have been Brennan’s way of sidelining him for the fight so they didn’t have like a level 20 wizard making it too easy.

“Oh, and Jawbone!” Murph loses it. 

Jawbone stuck in Goldenhoard’s mouth like that meme of the dog smiling, stuck in a fence.

Gorthalax is like, “I don’t feel great sleeping next to this dude.” Fig meanwhile is all, “I wanna sleep between his legs.” She says this at least twice. 

So everyone just have a freaking picnic and takes a nap in the middle of this fight. Can’t say I saw that coming exactly.

Fabian tries to stab Dayne, who is already dead, during the time stop.

“What the fuck do they teach you at this school?”

“Are you talking about the time thing or–”/“Yeah Gorgug! The time thing!.”

“We’re gonna kill this motherfucker, sweetie.”

I love Sklonda so much.

Jawbone is a salad guy.

OK so I know people were shipping Sklonda and Gilear and it was like, “But how would that work with the height difference?” so Brennan, the absolute madman, decides to pair her with the GIANT DEMON???

Adaine about Gilear: Cucked again.

Everyone treating the DRAGON like a JUNGLE GYM.

“It’s basically Jeb Bush’s Campaign.” Ally, with the fury of 1000 suns: EXCUSE ME?

“I bless, [Riz], your mom, and [Fabian.] Are you the only ones with vendettas?”

“I think we’re all pretty blessed.” Gorgug/Zac is so good.

Adaine, who has all the wisdom and intelligence points of the entire party at the moment: You need to stay safe because the reason that we died is that you died. 

The shot that shows everyone on the giant dragon and then the foreground fuzzes out and shows Adaine a safe distance away in the background is hilarious. 

Ice guitar pick. Sweet.

Yeah, Siobhan really shoulda got healing potions out of her jacket, not the freaking wand. Hilarious. The only thing helpful about that was it hinted he was vulnerable to frost damage which they could have guessed. 

I wonder what Brennan had in his notes about the freaking city in Adaine’s jacket. It’s wild they weren’t more curious about that.

I low key loved Emily buffing Murph the whole fight.

“Hell yes Sklonda!”

Ragh: Giving a gay pride speech./Adaine, who doesn’t want to get knocked out again: STAB HIM IN THE DICK DUDE.

And, speaking of, OWWW.

Fig shapeshifting to Dayne. The hell Emily!

And another eye gouging.

Fabian is incapable of doing a single thing without doing some ridiculous parkour stunt first. 

Kristen,not twenty minutes after Riz said it would be crazy to go inside the dragon: Can I climb inside the dragon’s mouth? (Adaine: KRISTEN!)

Gorgug saving Skonda and Riz going, “Thanks for saving my mom!” from across the room.

Brennan is narrating the epic final battle and what cool thing everyone is doing and Kristen is just being digested. 

Riz was my second choice for the coup de grace until it turned out that Kal ate his dad and then he was my first choice. Riz!!!!

What a badass moment for him. The image of him casting a shadow on the wall is super dope.

Everyone flipping off Kal as he dies.

Riz and Sklonda are making dragon casserole bay-bee! 

MURPH FAILS WITH BARDIC INSPIRATION AND BLESS AT A 12 DC.

Aguefort. What a chaos monster.

“I fucked that bird! It is my paramour!”

Hold up, hold up, hold up. Did Kristen’s freaking Yes god kick Sol out of his own freaking heaven? WHAT?

I love that what Adaine got out of this experience was, “Wait, so my powers are bullshit?”

“Everything in this world is bullshit, Ms. Abernant.” Preach.

“So is the sun just a yes now?”/“Maybe.”

Literally 6 cop NPCs. Like they all seem like they’re morons but I’m sure it would have helped!

“Fuck it dude, it’s worth asking.”

“Are you my dad?”/“I was about to ask you the very same thing.”/“What?”

“TAKE HIS EYE. CUT OUT HIS EYE. YOU WANT ME TO BITE IT OUT FOR YOU?”

Brennan really likes the word bud.

Freak the fuck out all the time and just fuck things up. 

They got their ice cream later! And Adaine says thank you to Basrar, even though he’s not even there.

Adaine as the 7 freed maidens (way to go Sandra-Lynn) are re-killing Goldenhoard: Us and them are the only good students.

Gorgug’s nat20! What a WILD time for the dice to give that to him.

“You gotta ask. I ask everyone if they’re my dad.”

Gorgug’s dad (Gorbag) has just as low an intelligence score as his son. It’s hilarious but also sweet.

THE VULTURE

I thought that Digby and WIlma just found Gorgug in the woods? Maybe I’m not remembering right. I would guess that was their version of the stork story but they straight up told him what docking was so…

“Do any other federal agents want to step to Arthur Aguefort on the grounds of his school?”

The Aguefort way!

I wonder what Sam has to say about her former BFF selling her out like that and also getting murdered.

It seems like Gorgug was put on the guest list for hell by accident (his relieved reaction was adorable) but I thought that was orc heaven?

Interesting Gorthalax still has pull in hell when he’s a high school coach now.

BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL

How did he watch the fight? Do they have pay per view in hell?

“I doubt Cathilda will end up here.”

Bill is just such a maniac. I love him so much. I wanna say I can’t believe that killing the devil dril tweet was serious but I can. It’s Bill.

Bill and Fabian having a casual convo in HELL.

Oh my God, Fabian’s mom stabbed Bill’s eye out and he proposed on the spot. No wonder Fabian is so into Aelwen. It’s in his DNA.

What a dope ship.

I can’t believe Emily tricked me into thinking that her end speech wasn’t in service to some nonsense. She held it together for so long but I should have known bc it’s EMILY.

“Young lady, I have no idea who that is and I’m telling you right now yes. I will make whoever that person is vice principal.”

Adaine: Uhhhh….we should find Zayn.

Aww, Zayn’s parents were also terrible elves. 

Unwanted Wingwoman Kristen Applebees

lol at Adaine casting Ray of Sickness on everyone suggesting she date ghost Zayne. Great callbacks to the early eps all around. 

Don’t @ me, but Adaine w/ a ghost boyfriend who also had terrible elf parents might be kinda sick.

“Tomorrow, we’re gonna start training you on how to actually swordfight.” Uhhh, I kinda love Fabian’s mom now?

She literally hasn’t been sober in 15 years. Icon.

“I didn’t know you spoke Tornado.”

Siobhan’s late season tendency to just flip things/people off is hilarious.

Wild that Adaine’s parents just legit DITCHED her that hard and she was like, f ‘em. Clean break.

“She’s helping me spread something.”

Gorgug has so many friends now!!!!!

Lol, Fabian’s whole journey has just been about becoming captain of the Owlbears.

Riz got his PI License. 

Lou and Fabian immediately being so mad at the idea of his mom (Hallariel?) getting with Gilear. Emily/Fig having an equal but opposite reaction. 

“Mama, I will kill this man.”/“I’ll kill you first, it’s not up to you.”

Sandra-Lynn gets with Jawbone. Did Brennan just roll to pair up everyone?

Also, the group is almost all related or quasi-related now. Gorthalax got with Sklonda which makes Fig and Riz sorta siblings. Gilear got with Hallariel making Fig and Fabian sorta siblings. Jawbone sorta adopted Adaine and he got with Sandra-Lynn, again making Adaine kinda siblings with Fig. Plus Fig claimed Gorgug as a sibling a lot of eps ago and if Kristen sticks with Tracker then she’ll marry into this mess. Crazy!

Fabian totally dipping on the sequel hook because he’s gonna be busy trying to break Aelwen out of jail.

I’ve been keeping up with the fanart but there was some in here I hadn’t seen and it was super dope!

I’m so glad we had the after epilogue-epilogue. It was a very nice send-off.

Adaine using her oracle authority to get Zayn back into school! She’s so good. 

Lol and she helped Basrar so he can grant other wishes. I love that this is the NPC that she decided she was going all in for.

Riz and Adaine join AV club! Idk why I love that detail.

Riz cutting off Adaine’s very good question about her jacket w/ his PI talk.

“They’re our rivals.”/“Into it.”

“Is ‘The Ball’ not your real name?” I love Fabian so much.

Zac doing Gorgug’s excited crack-y teenage voice when he’s just concentrating on that and not playing the game is so adorable. He’s just so sweet and enthusiastic and a good kid.

“Guess that tin flower worked, huh?” I cry.

I love that Gorgug’s happy ending is basically just that he has friends now. And that’s literally all he wanted starting out. 

“FIG! GO TO BARD CLASS!”

Aww, Ragh and Gorgug are friends now.

I knew it! I at some point pitched the idea of Ragh ending up with one of the AV guys so he would be w/ someone who had enough intelligence to keep him from dying and I’m 90% sure it’s somewhere on my blog but I can’t be bothered to find it right now. But anyway, he’s in the lgbt club w/ Ragh and Kristen so it’s def a possibility! 

“My bitch sister? Don’t you fucking dare.” (lol, if that happens then the group will be even more related)

Fabian considering recruiting the Cubbys for his rescue attempt of Aelwen.

“Gilear!” I love that Fig loves Gilear now but still calls him by his first name.

And that was Fantasy High! 

I have at least two more posts in the hopper: And epilogue retrospective type deal and also the official JQ37 ranking of all the adults in Fantasy High.

Thanks for sticking with me this far you guys. I can’t draw to save my life and I don’t really do fic so this is the one little way I can contribute to this thing I love so much. 

It’s been real and I’ll see you all soon for an epilogue because, no surprise, I have more things to say.