#it absolutely can be used to flesh out the world and characters etc etc

[elibean]

also we are at the halfway point and like, nothing substantial has happened

[fixyourwritinghabits]

No Such Thing As Filler

Okay, so yes, this is another post based on something I saw that irritated me, but it seems like this idea keeps coming up, so I need y'all to internalize this. There is no such thing as filler in good writing. None. Do not approach your work thinking you have to fill space in a story, I will beat you with this wiffle bat. Don't ask me where I got the wiffle bat. Don't even worry about it.

The idea of filler comes from a very particular place - when an anime or TV show has to fit in a certain number of episodes, but doesn't have enough content (hasn't caught up with the manga, the source material isn't long enough, etc) to cover those episodes. An episode has to be written, but the characters can't really progress, and so are given something else to do. Many a trope has come from these episodes, and they're sometimes necessary. Filler in this context is something that makes sense.

The dark side of filler is the idea that you need some space between Big Event 1 and Big Event 2 in your story, therefore you need throw anything in there to take up space and make your word count. This is a mistake I've made and I've seen plenty of other writers do it too, but it's a huge waste of your time. You do need something between those big action scenes, but you should always be writing to accomplish something.

Instead of thinking of that writing as filler, try to approach it with three things in mind:

Move Forward With Character Development and Backstory - Your characters barely survived a huge gunfight, and they won't encounter the big bad again for another few chapters. How do your characters decompress from that gunfight, and what does that say about them? Did a cocky character go in guns blazing, only to be deeply shaken by how a real fight works? Did that fight spark a moment of deep trauma for the main character that they have to reflect on afterwards?

Filling this space with meaningless scenes is a huge waste of opportunity. Think about how to dive deeper into your characters.

Move Forward With Plot and Subplot Development - The bad guy beat the heroes to the stolen gem, but they left behind a clue to why they want it. However that clue could reveal some painful truths about the protagonist's beloved great aunt... Carmen Sandiego???

A major goal following a big action scene is having the characters figure out what to do with what they've learned and what to do next. It's where romance subplots or secret relative subplots make progress, when truths are revealed and next steps are taken. You can absolutely do this in any setting - a flirty conversation while at the battling cages, a tense moment of feelings while hunting down a wayward chicken - but your main goal is making progress for both the characters and plot.

Move Forward With Worldbuilding - Worldbuilding has it challenges, believe me. You don't want to write a chapter on how an airship works only to have to cut it later. But you should still try to flesh out your world, and you should do so with the perspective of how to use that worldbuilding to your benefit. Maybe a critical scene hinges on the main characters knowing how that airship works, or that lake your main character often stares at is the setting of the big Act 3 Boat Battle. The weather can play into both perspective and emotions. Knowing what the main character's house and car looks like can reflect a lot on their personal character or backstory.

When you're struggling with a scene or a chapter, rather than writing filler, take a few steps back and think. What can you establish with your worldbuilding? What can you reveal about your characters through their dialogue and actions? What subplot could you explore or add in these between moments?

Filler from a fandom perspective - Now let me make this clear - if you're writing a fanfic just to have a cute moment between the characters you like, or you really want to force everyone to do that weird Twilight baseball scene, that's fine. You don't need a grand goal to achieve for every story, there's no need to justify your fanwork in any way other than you wanted to do it.

But I'd also argue fanwork doesn't fall under the filler label either - something you create, be it a character snapshot or a 'what if the gang meets Slenderman' parody, isn't taking up meaningless space. It's something fun you did that you and others enjoy, and there's nothing wasteful or pointless about that.

[theoddityherself]

TLOU HBO S2E4 REVIEW:

This has been my least favorite episode of the four and a lot of you might not like what I have to say but I do not care. I did not enjoy this episode as much as I hoped I would and I even considered giving up on the show after watching it because the direction of the writing legit pissed me off.

Dina and Ellie:

So many of you were confidently pulling out the term slowburn as an excuse for the writing when it came to Dina in episode 3. The writing completely went against that in episode 4. Not only was it not slowburn but everything that happened in that theater felt rushed and out of character. The fact that they turned a scene that was supposed to show relationship conflicts between Ellie and Dina, because not everything is perfect in their relationship, and is also supposed to show how Ellie is spiraling as she's trying to seek revenge for Joel's murder, the scene in the show did the complete opposite of that. They took the seriousness out of the scene by having Dina point a gun at Ellie just to turn around and reveal her pregnancy and then have sex in the theater.

Also I know a lot of people aren't going to want to hear this but show Dina and Ellie have no more development than game Dina and Ellie. A lot of you like to say that the show developed their relationship so much more than the game did. It didn't. Dina and Ellie kiss at the winter dance, they go on a patrol together, Joel dies and all we know is that Dina visits Ellie while she's in the hospital, they go to Seattle together and rate their kiss in a tent, Ellie sings to Dina, Ellie gets bit and Dina finds out she's a immune, Dina tells Ellie that she's pregnant for Jesse, they have sex. Where exactly is the development for their relationship?

You can definitely tell that a man is writing their romance...

Urgency:

And that brings me to the lack of urgency in this show. Ellie seems like she's in absolutely no rush to avenge Joel. She's doesn't even look like she's emotionally going through anything. Nothing about how they're writing Ellie in this show really reflects how much Joel's passing affects her aside from the bits and pieces they gave us in episode 3. Ellie looks like she doesn't have a care in the world. I feel like the show is doing a piss poor job of truly portraying somebody who's to get revenge, is suffering from the trauma of watching the most important person in their life be murdered and is truly losing it as she looks for Abby throughout Seattle.

Dina:

Can people stop saying that Dina is more fleshed out in this show than she is in the game? Dina is out of character in the show and what fleshing out she's had has been related to all the relationships she has with other people; Joel, Jesse and Ellie. Not one thing about Dina herself has really been dabbled into. They haven't talked about her religion, more about her mom, her sister or her life before she met Ellie. Even in episode 4 her character was still mainly focused on the relationship between her and Ellie. As of right now Dina's character still revolves around Ellie. She has not been expanded on whatsoever.

Also before anyone brings up the fact that this is an adaptation. I know, but HBO is quite literally known for not respecting the source material even when they have access to their creators, this is currently happening with House of the Dragon. It's very obvious to me that they could have easily adapted the second game into a show without making major changes to the characters, personality traits, core elements, etc., but they just didn't care enough to try and adapt this game with same love and care that they gave the first game and first season.

I'm also starting to feel like a lot of you have forgotten that the last of us is not a romance and that anger, grief and trauma that Ellie went through is very important. It's definitely not something that she should be written out or overshadowed.

[feukt-42]

Elden ring + Shadow of the Erdtree lore thoughts

Alright, so, first off, obviously, spoilers ahead.

I've been thoroughly enjoying and getting my ass kicked by SotE and what ive seen of the lore so i wanted to ramble about it.

I specifically wanted to talk about how Elden Ring explores power and godhood.

In the base game, godhood isnt seen as inherently bad. Marika's golden order is fucked up six ways to sunday, but the blame mainly rests on Marika's shoulders it seems. She's a genocidal homewrecking war-mongerer who threw two of her children in the sewers bc of racism, she's not a good god, but it doesnt portray the problem as her being a god, just her being a mess. The game provides several "solutions" to unfuck everything :

Ranni's ending has you completely throw the system in the trash. She says, fuck it, godhood's the problem, im out of here. She is kinda right, but the lands remain fractured and the power vacuum left behind is going to be immense. We're on the right track but could be better.

The frenzied flame ending is just pure concentrated nihilism so i think we can move past it for this one.

The bunch of other endings are fairly similar : you beat Marika/Radagon's ass and you impose yourself as Elden Lord to keep her in check and fix the issues you see as most important. This doesnt fix anything long-term, the god in power is still the exact same fucking mess but with a chaperone now i guess.

None of these endings are very satisfying, they all leave you with a sense of "it could be worse i guess" (except the frenzied flame one but you get the point). This is where Miquella comes in :

Everything we hear about Miquella sounds great. He's kind, compassionate, against racism, doesnt like violence, etc etc. Cherry on top, he's even one of the characters with a direct shot at godhood, brilliant ! Why cant we just put him in charge, he'll do much better than the absolute wreck we have right now.

And thats where the base game leaves us, Marika is a fucked up mess of a person, and the obvious solution is to put the much better Miquella in her place.

Shadow of the erdtree, on the other hands, aims to set the record straight. The problem wasnt just Marika, the problem is inherent to godhood in and of itself.

In SotE, we see the land of shadow, the realm where Marika came from and ascended to godhood, and the realm where Miquella intends to do the same. And the more we hear about who Marika was before in snippets of lore, and the more we watch Miquella tread the road to godhood, we realise something :

There is no such thing as a good god

It doesnt matter how kind and compassionate you were, what your morals were, who you loved, who you loathed, none of it matters because you cannot grasp the power to become a god without sacrificing who you were before.

In the dlc we see Miquella shed more and more of himself, his flesh, his arms, his eye, his heart, his doubts, his fears and even his love. Miquella has shorn so much of who he was that he formed an entire new person (St Trina) from it. Some of him remains, he still wishes for a kinder world, but he cant sacrifice anymore of himself for it. Now he has to start sacrificing others.

Miquella was always blessed with the ability to charm others, and he sees it as the least painful path to make others do as he wishes. And so he charms his sister, he charms Mohg, he charms Radahn, his followers, Leda, Moore, Thiollier, Freyja, the hornsent, Ansbach, and everyone he can convince to give themselves up for his dream of a kinder world, regardless of the pain they might cause or feel by being enthralled by him.

And oh boy do they feel pain. Mohg is used and discarded like a ragdoll, and his followers and dynasty slowly crumble to nothing as the last pureblood knight watches helplessly, himself entranced by the one responsible after he failed to kill him. Radahn's soul is shoved in a corpse so that he can play consort to a god that is his antithesis, depriving him of his glory and honour as lord of the battlefield. Malenia is left alone to rot after Miquella has no use or help for her, and she endlessly waits for her brother to return. Every one of Miquella's followers has to grapple with those feelings of betrayal, manipulation, and lost memories returning all at once. It is by no means painless.

And so we end up with a god that is not much better than Marika was. On his path to godhood, Miquella has caused as much pain to those along the way as his mother once did, in this very same land that still feels the scars of Marika's ascension.

The only way to gain power is to take it from everyone else, and that cannot be achieved without pain.

[multishipper001]

I don't see much discourse about Study Group, although it's an absolute masterpiece, so let's put some content out here!

1.) The characters

Oh my babies. Hats off to the author, because he really can make a diverse set of people! Each character has a fleshed out backstory, defined goals and ideals (that are shown to clash with others, be it enemies or allies).

They're all very-human like in some way, with just enough cliché to make it enjoyable but not predictable.

(spoiler for chapter 252-253: I didn't know what choices Gamin and especially Geonyeob would make until the very last moment. Geonyeob had two choices ahead of him, and it heavily determined his future and showed a glimpse of what kind of person he is, how far he's willing to go for revenge... It surprised me, but boy was it an interesting chapter!)

You can't help but root for each and every one of them, prepare to get emotionally attached to them all!!

2.) The plot

This part deserves its own category.

The synopsis tells the base of the story. A high school boy that forms a study group, with the goal to enter university.

Easy, right? Simple goal, one that can be achieved if you study hard, right?

THINK AGAIN

First of all, and this is not a spoiler, our mc SUCKS ASS at studying. Like I'm not the best at studying either but he's on a whole new level. He puts time into it, is dedicated, tries his hardest... And still can't.

(I read theories that he may have a disability that affects his studying, like dyslexia or something, and it's very much possible!)

He's in an environment where people don't expect him to study since he's bad anyway, and actively try and sabotage his every attempt to get better grades & enter uni.

(Sounds cliche and weird but it makes sense if you learn about the plot later)

Every new character comes into the plot because of the study group he forms —directly or not directly, but they get in contact with the study group in a way later on.

And you know what's good about it?

The main character DOESN'T CHANGE.

He's not going "I'm powerful and cool now, so I'll choose the easy way out/focus on fighting instead/aim lower/etc," NO.

He's had a goal since day 1, and he's clinging to it like a fucking LIFE LINE.

There are arcs ofc, but the main goal is set, and the characters are slowly marching forward, doing their best to reach it.

3.) Realism

One more great thing? NO CLICHÉS

I'm taking about the story here.

There's NO "the power of friendship saves the day", no "the evil villain gets defeated simply because he's the evil villain", no "mc gets what he wants easily because he's the main character".

(and no "every girl falls for mc and he builds a harem around himself bc he's the mc". There's barely any romance in it, and it's not forced or unrealistic)

There are forces in front of the main character which affect his story, yet he cannot fight them because he's still a child, or a student, or a part of a system that is made to oppress him. Corruption, manipulation, crimes... It's realistic in the best way, with no easy way out.

There are highs and lows for our characters, and for a few moments, after a cool fight where they won, you might fall into the mistake of thinking about this story like any other : "oh, they're going to win after all! They're the main characters, they'll make it! "

... Just for the issues of the plot to slap the naive thought out of your head not even a chapter later.

Corruption is rooted deep, and this story portrays it beautifully : how getting rid of one, two or several causes won't make it all disappear.

To what extent people can be controlled by money and power.

How the powerful uses the weak, how the wealthy use those below them for their own benefit.

How adults would rather destroy children's futures and lives just to squeeze a few penny out of them and get rich from their misery.

The main character is idealistic in a corrupted world, refusing to give up on what he thinks is right —where most people around him choose the easy way out and give up their beliefs, their present and future for quick cash, for promises of wealth and power.

He is their mirror, their proof that you can stay true to yourself and fight through your misery, even if it's hard, even if it seems absolutely hopeless.

There are many arcs, and each show different approaches to this, but this is the core essence of the story. That you can choose the easy road, but you don't have to. You can fight for your goals even if everyone says you'll fail.

And so many people can't see past the fight scenes and the "action manhwa" tag, thinking that if the story doesn't show them some peak badass mc-gets-what-he-wants-through-fighting moment, the whole thing is trash.

Yes, this is an action manhwa, with fights. But it isn't about fighting.

And lastly, honorable mentions to this gem:

4.) Portrayal of stereotypes

Best parts coming up!!

As usual, every story has stereotypes portrayed in them.

How men are stronger than women, how gangsters act or rich kids behave. How bullies and nerds interact.

They don't gloss over these stereotypes.

Women are physically smaller and weaker. Rich kids are assholes, bullies are cruel and victims are weak.

They don't make them magically gain courage, change their behaviour overnight OR make these things seem cool.

They make changes.

Step by step, they are influenced by each other (not just the mc, but other characters as well: they exist even when the mc isn't present). They're weak, and powerless, but they learn to be brave. They find a way to fight : maybe they don't become martial artists overnight, but each one of them develops their own method to survive in their fucked up life.

If they need to study better, they ask their friends and teacher for help. If they need to fight, they do so for the sake of protecting themselves and what is important to them : family, friends, a cause.

None of them are made as a gear to move the plot forward, they're their own characters. And they have clichés. They have stereotypical behaviours, and maybe even look stereotypical. But even so, they're not making it their only personality trait : they're complex, and flawed, and make mistakes.

And it's beautiful.

Oh god I love this story dearly.

[writingquestionsanswered]

Do you have any advice for writing with adhd? I can craft these elaborate storyline in my head, but the minute I try to write any of them down I get bored. (Or is that just regular writer block?) It's really discouraging, because I feel like my mind is moving faster then my head, and any time I try to bring any of my ideas to life it just disipates.

Writing with ADHD: 5 Game Changers for Me

Here are some things that have been game changers for me as a writer with ADHD: [Edit: everyone's ADHD is different. This is just what works for me. It may not work for you...]

Planning: It's different for everyone with ADHD, but for me it's essential to spend time planning my story before I start writing. I like to flesh out as much as possible concerning plot, timeline, setting, world, characters and arcs, subplots, and themes.

Summary, Outline, and Scene List: Three items that are critical for me to have in hand before I sit down to write are a beginning to end summary of the story detailing all plot events as far as I know, an outline loosely based on the story structure template/s that feel right for the story (for example, I may use elements of Save the Cat! and some elements of of the Six-Stage Plot Structure), which helps me navigate my plot and hit the relevant plot points. And finally, I need a detailed scene list/timeline combo which lists chapter, scene, date/time, POV character, location, and a one to two sentence summary of what happens in the scene, including the character's goal in the scene, the scene's conflict, and the scene's resolution or how it carries into a later scene.

Gamifying: When I'm struggling with a particular time period or project, it can help me to gamify things. You can do this using a game board strategy, the Yahtzee Method, making a list of bench marks that serve as "levels," race against yourself by trying to bet the previous day's goal, etc. The key to gamifying is to set reasonable benchmarks and give yourself periodic rewards. Rewards can be anything from buying yourself a boba, watching a favorite TV show episode, an hour of playing your favorite game, or going to a movie. Some people like to go to the dollar store and buy a lot of small fun things and use those as rewards. Whatever works for you! Sometimes, turning it into a game with tangible progress and rewards can keep you motivated.

Setting Up a Routine: Although I have my general daily routine, I am without a doubt more productive when I can stick to a more specific routine that includes writing time. For me that works out to writing early in the day before other distractions start ramping up. When I put on my music, sit down with some coffee and a snack, and pull up my manuscript, my brain knows it's time to get to work. That doesn't always mean the work happens, but it's much more likely I'll get something done.

Minimizing Distractions: Anything that can be a distraction when I write is problematic. For that reason, I only listen to music without words and advertising. I turn off my phone or leave it in the other room. If possible, I try to use placeholders for things I need to look up. If I absolutely have to look something up and I get distracted by headlines, interesting articles or videos, or other things, I bookmark them in a special folder and immediately close the window. That way, I know I can go back to them later (I almost never do...) And, for me, as much as I love Scrivener and the ability to organize by chapter, have quick access to character profiles and photos, toggle between scene cards and my story... it's just too distracting for me. I'll sit down to write a chapter, then decide I need to re-do my scene cards, or cast characters, or do mood boards for every location in my story.

For that reason, writing in Word works best [for me] It's simple and there's nothing to distract me. Any story references I might need while writing, such as character profiles and photos, mood boards and aesthetics, setting inspiration photos, etc. are all organized in a special folder, categorized into sub-folders, so I can go straight to the required reference.

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I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

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[thewadapan]

thoughts on Transformers Animated

I would've been the perfect age to get absolutely oneshotted by Animated when it started airing on Cartoon Network, but my parents didn't pay for satellite TV, so after Transformers: Cybertron finished airing on CITV I was pretty much shit out of luck for Transformers cartoons for a while. I remember watching clips from the show on Monkey Bar TV, a section on Hasbro's website. The art style didn't really appeal to me. I do wonder about that alternate reality where I did get to see Animated as a nine year old. Would that have fucked me up?

This isn't a proper essay, I'm not here to tell you Transformers Animated Sucks And Here's Why, it's just some off-the-cuff thoughts I had, having now sat down to watch the cartoon in full for the second time in my life. I am going to have to break out the roman numerals, but only because I cannot shut up. So that's the epistemological status on this one.

I. Be a Hero

The thing with Transformers Animated is that it's a great Animated cartoon and kind of a terrible Transformers cartoon. My friend Jo recently put out an essay taxonimising the two different approaches to writing Transformers stories into Budianskian ("human-meets-robot") and Furmanist ("robots-fighting"), pointing to Animated as an example where the first season is grounded in human affairs and culture clash, only for the show to become progressively more preoccupied with conflicts between Autobots and Decepticons until, by the third season, Earth is basically just a backdrop used to create the illusion of stakes, a damsel-in-distress just offscreen. Well, having now revisited it, I honestly think it was Furmanist from the start?

I think the best way to approach Animated through a critical lens is to think of what it means to be an American boy/tween. What do you find cool? What do you want to be when you grow up? My equivalent to Animated was probably Ben 10, which I thought was the coolest shit; it was probably the best of the overtly-boy-aimed cartoons available to us Freeview plebs at the time. Ben 10 is a very empowering fantasy because Ben 10 can have pretty much any abiliity he wants at a particular moment. As a kid growing up you kind of do wish you could turn your flesh to solid crystal, or buzz around as a mutant bug, or just bowl over your enemies like a human bowling ball. These are normal emotions.

That's how Transformers Animated is written. A big part of Sari's character, as the obligatory audience-surrogate-human-child, is that she has an insane amount of freedom for a kid. She has a palatial penthouse, she's homeschooled, except she mostly ignores her Tutor-Bot, so in practise she can do whatever she wants. She gets given a magic key that lets her make any machine do whatever she wants it to, hilarity ensues, etc, etc. Some of my favourite parts of the show are when it teases out some of the pathos of Sari's character; her disconnection from other kids her age, the way the Autobots sometimes treat her more as a pet than a peer, her distant father with his Tom Kenny racist accent, the overly-mechanised and consumerist world she's adapted to thrive in.

The idea of Transformers Animated as a Budianskian story rings false to me because future-Detroit is about as alien from society as Cybertron itself; which is to say, not super alien, but still pretty unmistakably unreal. It's not trying to feel real. In fact, it's clear that the setting was chosen precisely for the sake of injecting Transformers sensibilities into the "human world" of the story, so that the show can be, on balance, more Transformers. This deliberate homogenisation strikes me as intrinsically Furmanist, which shies away from two-worlds-collide storytelling. Animated definitely has its moments of culture-clash, but they're not The Point, they're set-dressing.

Fundamentally, we're invited into the world of Transformers Animated through the eyes of the (all-male) Autobot cast. Between them they account for most of the episodic "learns an important lesson" character arcs, and as the show goes on, more and more of the screentime is devoted to their affairs. It's similar to how BIONICLE has two audience surrogates: the Matoran, who are weak and stupid like human children, and the Toa, who are cool and aspirational like teenagers or adults; the foundational text Mask of Light is preoccupied with the onscreen transmutation of the former into the latter, as if to say, this isn't just who you want to be, it's who you can be. The Autobots in Transformers Animated reflect the five key aspirational archetypes for young lads, as identified through extensive focus-group testing, these being: combination cop/firefighter, ninja, street racer, Engineer from Team Fortress 2, and angry old man.

Everything in the pitch slate for Transformers Animated is geared towards this being a superhero show that Hasbro doesn't need to pay license fees to Marvel for. It was literally called Transformers Hero at the start of its development. So like, taken as a superhero story in a toyetic kid sense (that is to say, there are no "secret identities", Superman is Superman full-time because kids find Superman sitting in an office boring), it's fine for what it is! This isn't like my Transformers One review where I'm going to try to convince you that the creative team weren't fucking trying, no, they were definitely trying for the most part, and they did a good job. It's purely a matter of taste.

Anyway! So!

Probably what had me be like, "man, fuck this"—and I've never heard anyone else mention this—was actually the Constructicons.

I know, right? Weird! If you're a veteran of the Transformers Animated discourse mines, you probably think of stuff like all the sexism, or the Tom Kenny Funny Accents, or maybe even something more abstract like the undercooked politics of the war. I dunno, maybe I'll talk about some of that stuff while I'm here. For me, though, there was more or less this hat trick of episodes at the start of Season 3, nearly three in a row, where for entirely different reasons I was like "man, fuck off".

II. Beneath the enemy scrotum

When the Constructicons are first introduced in Season 2, there's a genuinely tragic bent to their story. They're born into this alien world as fully-formed New Yoik Construction workers, they form this friendship with Bulkhead, the other Autobots are disproportionally suspicious of them, they get seduced by Megatron, they wind up getting their memories wiped. It's giving "Transmutate". And the arc that this introduction sets up for the Constructicons is like, hey, maybe when it counts, they'll remember who their friend really is, and they'll come back around to the side of angels. The thing with the Constructicons, right, is that they're stupid, and they're lazy, and they're selfish, and they think they're owed something when they're not. They operate on pure id, catcalling at cars, tossing back barrel after barrel of engine oil, and never really doing any actual work. And there's definitely an inherent humour to this image of an alcoholic digger sexually harassing random sportscars. So long as the show seems ultimately sympathetic towards the Constructicons, as if they might have a heart of gold under it all that separates them from the Decepticons, maybe it feels okay to laugh at them, because they're good people who just haven't worked it out yet. It's just a farce, a comedy of errors.

But every time the Constructicons come back, the show just... does an encore. They do more and more overtly evil things, and the show leans more and more on how crude these guys are. In "Sari, No-One's Home", they're cast in the roles of the robbers from Home Alone; if Transformers Animated can be said to have sinned, then it's an old sin, one drawn from a rich tradition of scorn for the working class, the ne'er-do-well, the wrong'un, the layabout. The Constructicons clearly have some valuable skill, when they can be motivated to work; the problem is that they're stupid and directionless. They're often banging on about their workers' rights, and making excuses not to work. While I don't think it's intentional on the part of the writers, the contrivance whereby they are "animated" (lmao) by shards of the AllSpark from regular human machinery does sort of separate them from the rest of the Transformers on an ontological, biological level. Wreck-Gar is similar, portrayed as basically just crazy, not quite a "full person".

Through a lens of writing as observation, the Constructicons are great; they're a distillation, a caricature, a cartoon of lots of specific things you've ever heard a workman say. But through a lens of writing as empathy, they're just kind of cringe, sorry. The show does not afford them the same internality as the Autobots, or even most of the other villains. It's hard to read them as anything other than a mean-spirited stereotype of labourers. On a narrative level, the purpose they serve is related to the Bush-era political morality play of the show; in fact, within the show itself, they provide perhaps the clearest view of who exactly Megatron is, what he believes, how he operates.

Again, I would've been eight when this show was airing. I had some consciousness of who the Prime Minister was, and I was cognizant of the election of President Obama, but it's fair to say that I had literally no perception of Bush-era American politics. Sue me. Most of what I know about it now, as an adult, comes from the spectre of the War on Terror on American culture. What I find striking about Megatron is just how abstract of a threat he is for almost the entire show. He almost never actually gets into fights with anyone. He's always lurking in some hole somewhere, making schemes to compel patsies to carry out acts of terrorism on his behalf. There are some occasions where he talks about Decepticons as a revolutionary movement, but only ever with a sneering self-consciousness that makes it clear that this is all talk, an obligatory performance he puts on in case anyone is dumb enough to believe him. Dude is in it for the power. He wants to be the boot. His complete immorality is what makes him dangerous more than anything—he doesn't care how many innocents get killed in the course of him getting what he wants—because even though he is a powerhouse, he's still just one guy, and he achieves most of his goals by being a liar, a schemer, a coward. And yeah, in the show, we see him take advantage of the Constructicons' stupidity/naivete (take your pick), playing on their sense of entitlement and resentment towards authority, directing their frustrations towards an invented scapegoat, the Autobots, who they've never met and don't know anything about. To me, that's political.

"Three's A Crowd" was what did it for me. Megatron's not even in that one; instead, there's this new guy, Dirt Boss, who forces the Constructicons and Bulkhead to fall in line. For their part, the Constructicons are basically onboard with the whole thing, and the language used in dialogue frames the situation as a workers' revolution (as the Constructicons see it) ruining everything. Scrapper gets something of a redemption later in the season, in "Human Error", but this is kind of unrelated to anything else involving the Constructicons; Mixmaster was always the brains of the operation, and he just exits the narrative after his attempted strike Goes Wrong. To me, the way it reads is something along the lines of like... look, the workers are stupid, and they're looking out for themselves, and wannabe-tyrants are always going to prey on that, so we shouldn't really blame the workers exactly... but also the workers should just stop fucking complaining, they should stop being lazy and contribute to society like the rest of us, and let the actually smart people tell them what's right and what's wrong. Maybe it's not exactly that. But it reads as something basically like that, to me, and sorry, but it just does nothing for me except make me feel bummed.

I realise this is probably more ink than has ever been spilled on the Animated Constructicons. Look, I don't want to get some sort of reputation as the Animated Constructicons crank. It's not that I feel particularly strongly about this, and more that it's difficult to articulate. We'll be going back to more familiar discourse territory for the rest of this blogpost.

III. Green with envy

Moving along, we come to "Where Is Thy Sting?", which is the climax of the Wasp subplot introduced in the Season 2 episode "Autoboot Camp". I think this subplot is typically very well-regarded in the fandom zeitgeist; people like the reinterpretation of loyalist Shockwave as a deep-cover Decepticon double agent in the Autobot Elite Guard ranks (his sick design certainly helps), and people enjoy the reinterpretation of Beast Wars Waspinator as a foil to Bumblebee, and people especially like the twist where you're led to believe Wasp is the double agent, right up until the episode's closing stinger.

Did anyone actually believe that, though? I'm genuinely asking. I can't remember if I got fooled the first time I watched "Autoboot Camp", or if I had already been spoiled on the twist through fandom osmosis, or if I just worked out that Wasp was innocent while watching the episode. On rewatch, it felt to me like the episode was really struggling to sell the ruse; Longarm is overtly suspicious from pretty much the moment he first speaks. This paragraph has gone on too long already, this is a cartoon for nine-year-olds, this probably literally was Baby's First Plot Twist for some number of children.

Anyway, the idea of a Decepticon double agent has a lot of narrative potential, so it's a shame that its largest footprint on the narrative of Transformers Animated is the stock-plot-iest mistaken-identity-slash-doppelganger plot to ever stock. If you ask me to point at one part of Animated and accuse it of Not Even Trying, "Where Is Thy Sting?" is that part. The auteur theorist in me notes that the writer of this one was Todd Casey, whose other credits are the aforementioned "Sari, No One's Home", which is another mid stock plot, and "Nature Calls", which is so forgettable that thirty seconds ago I reacquainted myself with TFWiki's synopsis of it and now all I can tell you is… it's about space barnacles?

And you can totally see how it happened, because on the surface, on the logline level, it seems very fun and clever. Wasp is depicted in the show as a green repaint of Bumblebee… so what if he used paint to literally swap identities with Bumblebee? This is the kind of thing that would make a brilliant Ask Vector Prime entry, but it makes for a rubbish 22-minute cartoon. The problem is it just doesn't work. If you stop and think about how to contrive the situation for more than a second, it becomes immediately obvious that it doesn't work at all.

Wasp swaps helmets with Bumblebee and keeps his faceplate up to hide his face. Their voices swap, but their speech patterns don't; one of the episode's big running jokes is that Wasp-as-Bumblebee keeps making obvious slips like referring to himself in the third-person. He hopes to get rid of Bumblebee-as-Wasp as soon as possible to minimize the risk he's exposed, but he also wants revenge, for Bumblebee to suffer as he did. As for Wasp's plan as Bumblebee… well he mostly just wants to enjoy freedom, kick back and play video games, he hasn't really thought past that.

What makes an identity-theft plotline good (I mean, when they are good), is not what it says about the character being impersonated, but rather how it tests the limits of their relationships with the other characters. What makes "Where Is Thy Sting?" bad is that it doesn't tell us anything about anyone—expect perhaps, "all the Autobots are really fucking stupid?" Is that anything?

Like, sure, if we're imagining a character thinking realistically, it's a bit of a leap for them to start entertaining the possibility of bodyswapping. But one of the first things Bumblebee-as-Wasp says to his friends is "I'm not Wasp, I'm Bumblebee! Wasp swapped our paint jobs and is trying to steal my identity!" And the other Autobots are like, "Pssh, that's crazy," despite the fact that Wasp-as-Bumblebee is in fact behaving extraordinarily odd. It's proper "hollering at the telly like Dad three cans deep watching the Green Rectangle" territory. I think this episode needed like three more drafts.

From an Animated liker's perspective, hey, maybe this is one dud amongst what's otherwise a consistently great series.

For me, this episode is sort of a flashpoint for a wider problem with contrivance in the series. That problem has a name.

IV. Sentinel Prime

As the series goes along, it builds up this kind of hilarious impression of Sentinel Prime as being singlehandedly responsible for everything that goes wrong in the show: from his mishandling of the boot camp that let Shockwave slip into the Autobot ranks, to his Archa Seven field-trip that led to the creation of Blackarachnia, to his decisions as acting Magnus nearly allowing Megatron to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Anything Optimus Prime's crew manage to achieve, they do so in spite of Sentinel Prime's actions. In "Where Is Thy Sting?", Sentinel is the last holdout, who'd sooner believe that literally every other Autobot is "in on it" than admit he was wrong about Bumblebee-as-Wasp. The show relies extremely heavily on Sentinel Prime's too-dumb-to-live personality for humour, but also relies on it to contrive conflict.

So yeah, I just don't "get" Sentinel Prime. I am actually doubtful that most Animated fans "get" Sentinel Prime, from the opposite direction, because I know y'all are for the most part, like me, too young to actually remember the Bush administration. Did you know that the title of Season 2 Episode 3, "Mission Accomplished", in which the Elite Guard prematurely declare the Decepticon threat on Earth to be nonexistent, is a direct reference to a famous speech by George W. Bush given at the start of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a bloody war that was still ongoing by the time of the cancellation of Transformers Animated in 2009? I didn't know about that speech until just now. Man, I would love to read a long-form, well-researched essay analysing Transformers Animated through the lens of the Bush presidency.

I can't help but observe history repeating itself with the release of Transformers One, where Sentinel Prime is used as an analogue for another idiotic Republican president.

If you squint, maybe there's something to it, in the Animated worldview, where this absolute brain idiot somehow blunders his way into ruling the whole planet by the show's finale, through no particular competency beyond craven opportunism and a delusionally-inflated sense of his own worthiness. Maybe Animated is a show that saw guys like this in positions of power and just wanted to laugh at them, bitterly, because if your president is bombing the shit out of people on the other side of the world, then if nothing else you can depict him as The Tick.

I dunno, it just doesn't do anything for me, never did. It's not particularly cathartic or entertaining for me when Sentinel Prime gets his head cut off—I would just rather be looking at any other character. My gut just tells me that I'm not looking at a character, I'm looking at some kind of narrative voodoo doll, who's getting humiliated to prove some point about something that exists in some other reality altogether. Put plainly, maybe it's precisely the fact that depicting Trump as the blue-and-orange man… didn't stop his election, and certainly didn't stop his re-election. If there can be said to be a culture war, then shit like this was on the losing side, y'know? It's as if we're conceding that all good people can do is console themselves, and pride themselves on their righteousness, while all bad people can do is whatever the fuck they want.

IV. Animated is cancelled

To be fair, Sentinel does get some actual depth at times, shades of nuance that gesture towarads the illusion that he could be a guy who really exists in a three-dimensional world. One of the best examples of this is in "Predacons Rising". Sidenote, weird that they reused that title for the Prime movie, isn't it?

These exchanges between Sentinel Prime and Blackarachnia are some of the best in the whole series:

"I just never knew, never imagined that something this… unspeakable could have happened to you. How can you even live like that?! It's horrible! It's disgusting!" "Okay, okay, I get it! It's bad, but it's not that bad, all right?!" "No. It's worse. You should have gone offline." […] "So that's it?! You just slag your old friend Elita-1?" "Don't say that name! You don't deserve to say that name! You're not Elita-1, you mutant freak. Elita-1 went offline a long time ago."

Sentinel Prime's xenophobia towards organics is played for laughs in most of the show, and he doesn't get many opportunities to actually act on it. This episode is different! In this scene, a healthy reaction from Sentinel would be relief that his old friend Elita-1 is alive after all. But he's so revolted by her mutant appearance—and, unspoken, by his own hand in disfiguring her—that he actually can't suffer her to live! As I've said, Sentinel Prime is often depicted as a delusional liar, an Autobot equivalent to Starscream, and this episode is special because we see him rewrite the narrative in his own mind in real time. At first he feels that Elita-1 should have died. Then he convinces himself that Elita-1 is already dead, so he doesn't have to feel bad about killing Blackarachnia.

I think this dialogue is very raw, and it's extremely distinctive—Blackarachnia's "Hang on, it's not THAT bad!" is hilarious—and it was only after watching the episode that I remembered it had been written by Larry DiTillio and Bob Forward, which certainly explains why. Beast Wars always walked a knife-edge between great comedy and messy feelings.

Ultimately, though, "Predacons Rising" has kind of a nasty aftertaste. It establishes this deliciously fucked-up dynamic… and then kind of doesn't interrogate it at all?

Some of the earliest criticisms I ever saw directed at Transformers Animated concerned its handling of female characters. In terms of recurring ones that matter, it basically boils down to Blackarachnia and Sari, with Arcee and Slipstream to a lesser extent, and the shared thread I would draw between them is that they all have something fucked-up going on with their bodies. Specifically, they exist in this state because of various men in the show. Blackarachnia's hideous mutation was caused by Sentinel and Optimus, frequently framed as "look what you did!" Sari's technoorganic body and abnormal development are effectively thanks to her father, and her relationship with him in Season 3 is coloured heavily by this. Arcee's memory wipe and millennia-long coma were done at Ratchet's hands. Slipstream is implied to be Starscream's "feminine side", defined explicitly in relation to him. There is a sense that female characters are just treated differently by the narrative, and I personally think it's reasonable to term this a misogynist streak, though it's complicated by the fact that both Sari and Blackarachnia have some of the richest characterisations in the show (contrast Elita-1 and Airachnid in Transformers One, who have literally nothing going on).

A curious thing about Blackarachnia is that the show typically presents her deal as being "I'm hideous!", but many of the male characters in the show are depicted as infatuated with her. Cinemasins ding? Derrick J. Wyatt's design for her may not be as horny as the Beast Wars original, but it's still horny. The "mutation" aspect of her design is a little hard to parse out, because despite her supposedly radically altered biology… well, she looks like a cartoon character, same as any other Transformer in the show. Because Blackarachnia is the only female Transformer for most of the series, it's unclear whether the male bots react to her this way because they've never seen a woman before, or if it's a specific factor of her horrible spider swag. I mean I guess it's the latter? And I dunno, it just bums me out. Everyone is into her, but only in a way where it's taboo, she's Othered. Blackarachnia thinks she won't be accepted back into Cybertronian society because she looks like a monster.

And she's right! In "Predacons Rising", Sentinel Prime's view of Blackarachnia is tacitly acknowledged as being basically correct on a narrative level; in fact, at the end of the episode, Optimus Prime surprisingly describes Sentinel Prime as a "good bot"... when the most unusual thing that Sentinel Prime has done this episode is just be very xenophobic. As the show presents it, Blackarachnia is a monster who no longer values the lives of others, and her trauma response has turned her into an evil influence on the universe. At the end of the episode, the problem is "solved" only because Blackarachnia is accidentally shunted into another fucking universe; to Sentinel and Optimus, it literally seems like she's died, and they seem relieved about it, glad they can finally have closure on the whole affair, which was entirely their fault. This was the "original sin" which got Optimus Prime kicked off onto the space bridge repair crew, the entire driving impetus for his arc to prove himself as a hero; but this arc isn't resolved by him "saving" Blackarachnia in any way, rather by him washing his hands of her, this little blemish on his record expelled from the universe. I'm pretty sure Blackarachnia isn't mentioned again.

(You actually see something very similar with Omega Supreme. Animated is pretty clear about the Autobots being fucked up in their own ways, and a big example is Omega Supreme being programmed to heroically self-sacrifice himself if needed. In the Season 2 finale, Ratchet only brings Omega Supreme back online as a last-ditch effort to stop Megatron, and is conflicted over the fact that he's reviving Omega only to have him sacrifice himself again. The resolution to this conflict... is for Omega to sacrifice himself to stop Megatron, because there's no other option, and then Omega pretty much exits the narrative in any way that matters.)

If you're an Animated liker, the obvious argument to make is that the writers did in fact have plans for Blackarachnia… they just didn't get the chance to put them into place. We know that early pitches for Season 4 were very beast-focused, that the show staff were kind of bored of Megatron and wanted to do more with Blackarachnia. It's true! But I dunno, actually watching the show, I just don't see it. I look at the Constructicons, where it seemed like the can was being kicked down the road until they just got bored of it. We have a lot of behind-the-scenes insight into Animated, and it just does not strike me as a meticulously planned show. When Blackarachnia was introduced, I can't imagine there was a strong idea of how her arc might resolve itself, because the tension of leaving it unresolved is in fact the whole point. To me, Animated is a show constructed entirely out of these tableaus, these dynamics, which build towards a season finale but never a series finale. While people generally agree that it was a shame Animated was cancelled, if you probe deeper, you'll find a bit more of a split on whether or not is was cancelled prematurely; more accurately, it simply wasn't renewed. I think part of what confuses people about Animated is that it was never being written towards a definitive conclusion—but rather, with the intent that it it could go on indefinitely.

There's a lot to mourn about the show; it was really the last time—in fact, if you discount the Beast era for the Beast-ness of it all, the only time—that a Transformers cartoon was permitted to radically reinterpret pretty much whatever aspect of the franchise it wanted, to make up new characters, to rewrite the mythos. The "mythos", such as it were, did not exist yet; the Binder of Revelation had yet to be codified. In anything made after Animated, "Prowl" could never, ever, have been a motorcycle ninja. The ossifying brand-alignment that began with Prime and continues with the so-called "evergreen" production bible has stifled innovation in the brand; unless there is a radical change in brand management internal to Hasbro itself, there will never be another take on Transformers as radical as this.

But I guess the necessary flipside of this is that I don't think Animated is really the purest expression of Transformers that many people treat it as. Its writing and visuals achieve a basic level of consistent quality that is otherwise absent from most stories in the brand, sure, but this doesn't make it the "best" Transformers cartoon ever. Perhaps there's no such thing. "Transformers", whatever that is, it's something else. It exists in your mind as much as it exists in mine. True "Transformers" has never been tried.

Just kidding there is a best Transformers cartoon and it's Beast Machines, obviously.

[ranchstoryblog]

ICYMI: Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma Livestream News

Earlier today there was a nice, hour-long livestream covering new information and details about the upcoming Guardians of Azuma, set to release on May 30th. The stream archive is linked above, and is absolutely recommended viewing, but if you just want a quick summary of the basics, that's what this post is here for!

15:05 - Countdown Ends, most recent trailer begins playing. The trailer features the different season-based villages, Village Builder Mode, Adventure, Romance, and story-focused segments.

18:50 - Our host, Ovilee May introduces herself and welcomes viewers to the livestream. She also introduces us to Suzie Yeung, the voice actress for Kaguya, the game's heroine, and Brandon McInnis, voice of the game's hero, Subaru. They emphasize how much work they've put into the game, with a lot of voice acting and story emphasis for the game. Brandon and Suzie describe the protagonists as "good listeners," but adds that Kaguya is refined and elegant while Subaru is a bit more brash.

22:48 - An overview of the Rune Factory series, with slides pictured above. Brandon relates a story about how his voice acting career began during his play-through of Rune Factory 3. Suzie hasn't played Rune Factory yet, but is a fan of farming sims. The basics of the series are laid out, farming, fighting, romance, RPG elements, etc.

30:13 - A look at Guardians of Azuma specifically. Describing it as a re-imagining of the series, building on the core tenants of the series but adding village building and earth dancing. There is emphasis on the turtle in the artwork, which is appreciated as turtles are extremely cool. Please look directly at the turtle in the above image.

32:32 - The next segment focuses on the Earth Dancers, our protagonists. Brandon and Suzie emphasize again that their characters are a bit brash and more elegant respectively while also adding that Subaru is a bit more emotional and Kaguya is more reserved.

34:25 - We move on to the next segment, which covers the Village Builder and farming aspects of the game. Players will be able to place residences for villagers, build farming/ranching facilities like barns, and storefronts. Ovilee emphasizes that you can design the town for your own quality of life, such as setting up the blacksmith next to your home instead of having to run into town every time you need them.

35:20 - There's emphasis on the Eastern style to the game's world design, though there will be some Western aspects as well, such as foods. No specific mention of actual Western foods included in the game.

36:33 - Bows and Talismans are new weapon types, and the ability to recruit monsters and party members to adventure with you as a returning feature is emphasized. When asked about favorite characters, there's some evasion on being able to mention specific characters, but shout-outs to Woolby, the game's mascot.

38:19 - We pivot to the romance side of Guardians of Azuma. If there was any doubt, same-sex relationships are emphasized as a returning feature. While, there was some evasiveness on favorites at first, Brandon does say that the writing is wonderful and that different scenes would make him laugh or cry from the ways different relationships play out before highlighting Cuilang's story in particular.

41:15 - Ovilee, begins asking Suzie and Brandon about their characters. Kaguya and Subaru being childhood friends who were betrothed in an arranged marriage before the events of the game, where things "get complicated." Ovilee then asks about their opinions on the depths of the relationships of the characters. The phrases "comprehensive," "fleshed out," and that each side character has a strong story without short-cutting anyone. Playing their characters did have plenty of strong emotions, with Suzie mentioning one of the characters made her extremely angry, "I was ready to take a swing at somebody." Kaguya and Subaru have a lot of history with each other as well.

45:33 - Garrison Denim, localization team member, joins the group to hand out three Sacred Treasures from the game, a Sacred Drum, Sacred Sword, and Sacred Parasol. After praising our voice actors, it's time to jump into some gameplay. Garrison narrates as we're given a look at Spring Village, the first in the game. Village customization is emphasized, and it's shown that villagers are also helping with the farm work, not just the player. They can plant, water, harvest, and each villager will have distinct qualities and specialties. You can also still use monsters to handle your fields.

Next, the Sacred Treasures are introduced. Each has special abilities: The Sacred Parasol can water every tilled tile simultaneously, the Sacred Drum can speed up growth, the Sacred Sword generating seeds from crops ready to be harvested. While the drum is being used, there is a pop-up referencing a "Drum Dance Skill Tree."

An alternative, birds-eye view for village customization is shown. Maintaining villages will be extra important, as you're "not farming just for yourself" as the leader of these communities, and "making sure all the villagers are fed." There's also a lot of decorations to help creative village designers. Each village will have a fully customizable space, or multiple spaces, to use.

55:55 - We now switch to demonstrating combat. Your party can have a maximum of six, filling in with romance candidates, monsters, or villagers while you adventure. It's demonstrated that bosses have specific weaknesses and that filling a stun gauge can allow you to get an upperhand, and different characters will have different specialties. You can also ride some monsters, relationships with party members will improve, Sacred Treasures are demonstrated to offer combat abilities like debuffing enemies, and perfect dodges will grant bullet-time like effects.

1:07:22 - It's time to get to relationships! There's a new menu while interacting with characters that will give you options based on your bond level with them, with new options unlocking as your bond level increases, as well as a time-based cost. Each character has a variety of different things to do with them, as well as likes and dislikes, and some interactions lead to distinct scenes.

1:12:25 - Sakuna collaboration DLC! She exists as a villager, can join your party, and such. She's itty bitty. We also get to have a little look at the Collectors Bundle. Closing out, Suzie and Brandon also mention that this is probably the longest running project they've worked on, with lots of hard work and voiced dialog that they're looking forward to players experiencing. Finally, the newest trailer plays again.

[yuurei20]

Hey there! Absolutely love all the work you do here, it's really helped me as a newer fan of Twst get a better grasp on the characters and lore, so thanks a lot!!!

I'm not sure if it's ever specified anywhere, but do we know what exactly the name "Twisted Wonderland" encompasses in-universe? Like, is it the name of the whole planet, or a continent, or some other established grouping?

I know we do have a map that shows a lot of the characters homelands, but as far as I recall, it doesn't include the Scalding Sands. Which beyond it being the homeland of Kalim and Jamil, there was also a whole in-game event there that fleshed out the environment and culture, yet do we even know where it would hypothetically be on a map?

I also remember Sam talking about the cultures of the East during the New Years event, so there is presumably more beyond the map we know, but I just don't know if it has ever been clarified? Madol/Thaumarks are also the only currency we've ever seen, which could make it similar to Euro in how a whole continent uses it, or maybe there's something else to it.

Apologies for the long ask, I just found the implications to be fascinating depending on what little info we may have on the matter!

Hello hello! Thank you for this question! ^^ And you are much too kind!! ♡

From comments like “Twisted Wonderland’s got a number of educational institutions for cultivating magicians” and “Twisted Wonderland would be forever enveloped in winter’s cold, harsh embrace,” I do believe that “Twisted Wonderland” is meant to be the name of the entire place to which the prefect has been relocated! 

There are other times, however, where this can sound odd: the entire world (is it a world?) has the same traditional event (Beanfest)? The entire world has the same kind of fire and police organizations? Halloween is one of the biggest events in the entire world? Icicle mushrooms are one of the three greatest delicacies in the entire world? 

It is not impossible, but it is curious! Is it maybe not literally the entire planet, but possibly just a hemisphere?

(But is it a planet at all? Could it possibly be a dimension? 👀 We know that the dorms exist in dimensions of their own--are those pocket dimensions inside the dimension that is Twisted Wonderland?)

Except, as you say, Kalim and Jamil’s home country is not even on the main “world” map and yet it is still considered a part of Twisted Wonderland (as far as I can tell), so we know that “Twisted Wonderland” consists of more than what is being shown to us!

We have never been shown any borders of “this is where Twisted Wonderland ends and where another place begins,” or even heard that any place besides Twisted Wonderland exists here, so with the information we have at the moment I would say that everywhere we have heard of thus far is within the boundaries of Twisted Wonderland—whatever it is that may be 👀 (Limbo?)

Also as you say Sam does manage having eastern branches of his Mystery Shop, but Sam is very mysterious 👀

We technically do not even know if he is a mage (he does not seem to have a visible magestone, unlike the rest of the staff, and being magicless would tie in well to the character upon which he was based), or anything about these Eastern shops! It does not seem like it would be out of character for Sam to have access to inter-dimensional travel and, as aforementioned, his hometown cannot be found on the map 👀

Is Sam like the prefect, moving in between Twst and the world from which the prefect came (and maybe even Japan itself, hence his "Eastern branches")? I am pretty sure that there is nothing in-game to insinuate that this is the case, but it is fun to think ^^

Also as you say, Madol/Thaumarks seem to be a universal currency! I like your comparison to Euro very much!

While things like having the same traditions/currency/events/etc. throughout an entire planet might be a little unrealistic (in this game about dragon princes and mermaids who do parkour ww), it is possible that things were simplified just for the sake of keeping it all manageable within the visual novel medium ^^

My apologies for not having any answers! I do not believe that there is any information missing from what you already know, and while it is all very vague and curious, I agree it is also fun to think about! ^^

[scrapplescribbles]

Ehhh yhea sure what are you working on? I don't think I know people here enough sadly.

Have a wonderful night do infodump me with ocs and stuff!

AHHH SOMEONE ASKED ME TO YAP

well lemme tell you something youre in for it buddy (gender neutral)

this took a while to actually post but i hope it was worth it

next in the cycle is ✨ Gildamore ✨ and im going to use this as the intro post which i already had in another draft but now i can post it cause someone else wants me to instead of just tossing my shit into the void and hoping it hits something

idk what you were expecting but i do hope this interests you

intro to gildamore (i need to get more stuff out there and this one is really fun and is next in my usual annual cycle of hyperfixations)

hello all ye fans of fantasy idiot mutually pining bffs to lovers

oh boy have i got the fuckin whatever this is for you

it's probably gonna be a webnovel or something cause its chill like that (i'll also make memes and comics and snippets of things that don't make it into the book too cause i have so so many snippets)

small note im planning on making more of these intro things and linking them to my pinned post because contrary to popular belief and the state of my bedroom i fucking live for tying everything up and organizing it

so yeah

here are the two main characters from my self indulgent fluffy romance story about ADHD teenagers getting shipped off to magic school and somehow saving the world (sounds very tropey i know)

i have been waiting for motivation to draw for so long that at this point i will just post this and add pictures later (i will rb this post when i do so keep an eye out)

Aeryth (she/her or she/they i havent decided yet and honestly neither has she)

fuck it we ball

if you ever DARE hurt a duck you'll not live to see another, bastard

Aeryth used to be my self-insert way back when Gildamore was just a slice of life magic school comic for myself so I could have fun with ocs without making it a whole big fleshed out project (back when I thought I was a girl lol.) I've changed her a lot since then, and, whoopsie, Gildamore has become a big project (fleshed out in some aspects but not others.) Aeryth is still very similar to me in a lot of ways but not similar enough to be a self-insert anymore. She is pretty much ADHD incarnate. She comes up with crazy batshit plans, but everyone ends up listening to her because somehow she's good enough at what she does that she can pull them off. Her lack of self preservation instincts go so far that they end up saving her in a lot of situations.

Lavell (or just Lav which is what most people call him) (he/him)

NERRRRRD

was the kid that took apart and reassembled pens in elementary school instead of paying attention and got the best grades in the class anyway

You know that one specific brand of nerdy male character with dark hair and daddy/parent issues? (Hiccup Haddock, Leo Valdez, Hiro Hamada, Varian, etc.) I made him like that on purpose because I absolutely love characters like that. Lav was created in the midst of a Tangled the Series hyperfixation, as you might be able to tell if you watched the show (once I get the pictures in here). So yeah. that archetype. He's the strategy to Aeryth's impulsivity. Not that he isn't impulsive, but he's more "i set it on fire" than "im gonna throw myself into dangerous situations." Fire is quite useful. Certain doom? Less useful.

and others

Via (she/her)- ginger, would constantly speak in italian brainrot if italy existed in the gildamore universe (shes a tralaleo tralalala girlie)

Marob (he/him)- tall and very british (again britain does not exist but you get the idea)

Rin (she/her)- literally the only sane one, also a healer which is very helpful, going for a witchy apothecary vibe with her

Alvara (she/her)- angry and scottish. her roasts put dragons to shame and also she speaks a blend of common and scots (i say scots and use scots even though scotland, like italy and britain, does not exist in the gildamore universe) (shoutout @novaluna7189 :D (alvie is as much nova's baby as mine, perhaps even more so))

and now the plot

It always starts when you turn fifteen.

It doesn't happen to everyone. You're lucky. You're chosen.

All you have to do now is convince your family you're not completely fucking insane.

This was not a problem for Aeryth, apparently. She had elf blood running through her veins, apparently. Nan had already sent all four of her children, including Aeryth's mother, to magic school.

Apparently.

So that's cool, but what the fuck

[insert internal crisis followed by cool themed divider here]

That's it. That's what Lav had been missing the whole time. It made perfect sense.

If only it didn't make him sound like someone who needed to be institutionalized.

His father had never understood. Lav had tried, and it wasn't that he didn't have any valid arguments. His dad was just closed-minded and thought sheep were more important than making cool shit.

He was gonna need help with this one.

[insert second cool themed divider here. i should make dividers but i dont feel like it rn]

then it all works out and they get to gildamore (aeryth with her nan's help and lav with his sister oira's help)

long story short they meet at school, become besties for life, fall hard for each other, and spend the next several years of the plot (think the timeframe of how to train your dragon) hanging out, as besties do, and hopelessly pining for each other, completely unaware that their feelings are mutual and they're literal soulmates. no third act breakup. this is a healthy relationship built on trust and friendship and true love and i will not have you angsty fucks spoil it (i am technically also an angsty fuck and i have an ample dose of emotional devastation in the works for this one but shhh thats for later so totally dont worry about it shhhhhhhh nothing bad will ever happen to either one of them or their friends everrrrrrrrrr)

also plot things happen. i think theres like another continent across the ocean and bad guys and world events and a pantheon of gods who live to meddle behind the scenes (me core) or something. thats the bit im still trying to figure out (maybe i'll be able to this summer since i'm graduating high school very very soon and won't have any summer schoolwork. i do have a summer job but i'll make it work.) this is where the emotional devastation comes in. also they both have personal issues that they have to work out so that happens (aeryth has some identity and parental problems and lav has the typical self esteem issues n shit that come with his archetype)

Conclusion

i love them <3333

and i am writing i promise

i think i am on the fifth iteration of the first couple chapters and it is not going super well but like i said im figuring out plot things and then i will have a clearer idea of what im doing with that

also as i mentioned previously would like to make some comics bc that was gildamore's original purpose

so stay tuned i just might get motivation

any day now

[sscrambledmeggss]

For the brutally honest opinion on ships, klaine, Finchel and brittana

OKAYOKAY SO, i’ll end with klaine because i don’t like them, so i’ll add a cut off so people don’t have to see that if they don’t want to :) (this post will also be tagged correctly !)

Finchel:

i think finn and rachel definitely have issues and they are not a perfect couple, BUT i appreciate them comedically, LOL. like am i rooting for them to end up together? maybe not. but i am always entertained when they are on screen together. i think they are messy in the way only a glee couple can pull off.

so i guess my “brutally honest opinion” is that i don’t necessarily ship them, but i think they are really funny together :)

brittana:

my favorite canon ship <3 i love them so so much. like any glee couple they are not perfect, but i think their dynamic is really sweet. i am a sucker for best friends to lovers and slowburn. i love how they never try to change each other, but always support each other. :) i will say s4 brittany is a bit hard sometimes because of how they infantilize her (santana is one of the few consistent glee characters imo!), but i absolutely adore s6 brittany and brittana so much.

do not click “read more” if you don’t want to see anti klaine takes 🕺

this is going to be really long 😭 anyone who’s like followed me for awhile knows how annoying i was when i was younger </3 tdlr: it’s complicated, it’s meta, it’s writing.

when i was like 15-18 i was definitely LOUDLY anti klaine, but i am 20 now LOL, so i think although i still dislike them, my reasonings now are more meta/writing based then how i used to view it in the past 😭

i’ll start out with the good of klaine, they mean so much to people and helped SO much with queer representation, because of that i don’t think the show could’ve pulled them off ending up with anyone that wasn’t each other. i could never belittle what they did for gay media, and their impact on the world.

that being said, my issues with klaine rely so much in the writing. yeah they had issues in s2 but there was *promise*. i think as soon as blaine transfers to mckinley things start to fall apart imo.

blaine in s2 was a fully developed character, so when he’s brought back in s3 they basically have to “devolve” him. he also lacked a character outside of “kurt’s boyfriend” my issue is that they proceed to never give him a character outside of that. every action blaine does in the show is literally only because he’s dating kurt. like he doesn’t go to nyada because it makes sense for his character, he goes to nyada because kurt is there. his biggest crime to me now is not his actions, but the way he had potential to be a good character and instead the writers…did that with him. blaine never really faces any obstacles within the show he just kinda, gets stuff?? his biggest consequence for any of his actions was kurt breaking up with him, but then they get married in the end 😭

i am obviously bias and kurt was always my favorite </3 but kurt was also a fully fleshed out character. he had inspirations, goals, etc. outside of his relationship with blaine. but as the show goes on they side step him and put him in the back to just be “blaine’s boyfriend, rachel’s best friend” i LOVE kurt, but in s5 they end up “just some guy-ing” him. i still like him in s5 but they stop caring about his outfits, and he’s just there to be support for blaine and rachel :(

now finally, the relationship of it all: i think it started out with a lot of promise, but in s3 onwards they face A LOT of issues, and none of their issues are ever fully addressed. the scandals parking lot scene is really really bad, and handled just as poorly (also blaine never tells kurt he sleeps with him for WSS, something even rachel is called out for 😭). the tony role scene is bad, and is also handled poorly.

kurt and blaine’s actions are also not handled the same by the narrative (the chandler situation AND sebastian situation being the same exact thing, but only kurt is held accountable for that), and it gets tiring. the s4 cheating plot line is ugh. i don’t think it’s out of character for blaine to do, i think part of his character is that he tends to be emotional and impulsive, while kurt tends to be defensive and avoidant. but the narrative basically begs you to forgive blaine because he’s blaine, and the audience loves klaine.

then they get engaged in s5 with a really manipulative proposal scene :/ and i feel like they haven’t unpacked ANYTHING. then they can’t live together, then they move in together again, and break up. then in s6 they get immediately married. i feel like they never worked on their problems because the writers knew klaine drama would pull in intrigue, and because of this they filled the relationship with senseless drama which made some audience members feel disillusioned with the relationship.

it made kurt fans fill bitter because kurt got sidelined and loss so much of what made him “kurt” solely for the klaine relationship.

and i can see how blaine fans would be bitter because he never fully leaves the role of “kurt’s boyfriend”

i think both characters end up being so vastly different that they are no longer that compatible. kurt is independent, a little mean at times, and not overly affectionate.

blaine is quite codependent, sensitive, and needs a lot of validation.

so at the end of the day, i think the writers accidentally made them out grow each other, and i think they need like different things that they are not really getting from each other 😭 i also wish that we saw more of them actually working through their relationship issues instead of the show just sweeping it under the bus.

i will say, this is just how i view it, because i know a lot of people who love them and i am genuinely glad for that. i do get the appeal because they start out SO sweet, but later on they are just not for me. and i think the people who create stuff for klaine are really talented and nice <3

[call-me-copycat]

Heya @epickiya722 ! Sorry for getting to this late!

I've been asked to post the titles of all My WIPs and then anyone can ask me anything they want about any of them - I'll do the titles of my writing WIPs and a brief title of my drawing WIPs since I have so many of those too (⁠^⁠～⁠^⁠;⁠)⁠ゞ

She's better at explaining it (⁠๑⁠•⁠﹏⁠•⁠)

I have sooooooo many unnamed folders all over my writing app, what you see on Tumblr is after I've fixed it up and made it all nice and shiny (○ﾟεﾟ○)

Writing WIPs:

Random MHA info I've been writing down every time I've watched it (plus info from the movies too)

Random vigilante groups I've made (I like to expand the world, think about the past and the present, the minor things. I like to detail it a ton)

Random Laws and Acts I've made for the MHA universe (I have a ton)

My attempt at restructuring how time (dates wise) is set up in MHA

More random world building, but a little more quirk related

An absolute library of random effects/potential quirk ideas that I haven't fleshed out very well

Random texts for advertisements for UA in MHA (wanted to put these in a drawing, but I have had these texts for a long while)

Order random texts for other MHA in world advertisements

I just discovered this right as I'm typing this but I apparently have a folder with a bunch of random characters made (most likely for background characters). Includes full names, random habit, quirk, and their job

Random emperor/samurai AU I wanted to do late middle school/early highschool but forgot about or gave up on. Has a bunch of MHA characters with assigned roles and everything

Because of that I have a huge folder of a bunch of info I had written down after studying the Samurai era lol

Random information on Japanese services I've used for fics in the past (little things, like convenience stores, post offices, garbage collection, transportation, etc. Helps to World build since MHA is placed in Japan)

Random Japanese names I've forged from different kanji if anyone's curious (you've made me really nostalgic Kiya, I haven't looked at most of these for years lol)

What were Aizawa's parents like? Ideas

More Quirk laws

Emergency laws and regulations that were put into place during the early stages of the development of quirks

Early Quirk rights activists and their contributions

Infamous people in history who supported laws and acts against quirks and those who had them, as well as those who believed that people with quirks were sinners and should be purged

UA after school programs

I forgot I made these but apparently I came up with random click bait news articles that could've been made against UA after USJ and the Bakugo kidnapping (can you tell this is old?)

Limitations of disease manipulation

In The Wake of Chaos (longest WIP)

The Murmurs of The Heart (no memory of writing this, I liked reading it though)

Aizawa's Father Day

Embers of Yesterday (1)

Embers of Yesterday (2 - longer, but scrapped due to being inconsistent with canon)

Prompt was with Deku: "I'll protect you. They'll never touch you again" (scrapped because I have no memory of where I was going with this)

Do You Trust Me?

Purity Prevails at Midnight

A Beautiful Dilemma

Hollow Thoughts

A Glimpse of Tomorrow (almost done and my favorite!)

Close Your Eyes (1, 2, and 3 - have been struggling with this one for some reason)

Short story about the horrors of Regeneration (unfinished, obviously)

Escaping The Night #9 (I know lots have been looking forward to that lol)

Drawing WIPs:

Generic anime girl sketch I only started so I could draw with my friends in a drawing session

The super layered Aizawa sketch I wanted to make for his birthday + the coming out of You're Next that I never got to finishing (⁠T_⁠T⁠)

Sketch of UA

Sketch of Shirakumo and Luffy because I think they look similar + they share a birthday :⁠-⁠)

Random villain drawing I haven't finished the background for

Oldddddd samurai sketch (you can tell it's old since it's still in my chicken scratch era lol)

Tried "painting" a train scene digitally, file got too big and I eventually forgot about it :⁠'⁠( What is done looks nice though

Unfinished schoolgirl base sketch I wanted to draw Pop Step as

Rooftop Trio in random hats (got frustrated with shading the shirts and forgot about it ages ago >⁠.⁠<)

I didn't realize I have so many WIPs (⁠*⁠﹏⁠*⁠;⁠) My notes apps (I have 2) are SO CLUTTERED

It's an absolute mess over there (⁠ꏿ⁠﹏⁠ꏿ⁠;⁠) If you're ever curious, ask about a WIP! Ask about several WIPs! I'd love to share!

If I don't get back to you immediately, don't assume I stopped taking asks! I will answer asks even if you ask like a week later lol (just link the post you're asking about if I've reblogged too much to scroll down) I like to get back as soon as I can but I'm either at work, school, or sleeping in between -⁠ᄒ⁠ᴥ⁠ᄒ⁠-

[class1akids]

What do you think of Nana as a character?

She was really intriguing for me when she was introduced in the Kamino fight. I thought that reveal was a great twist and couldn't wait to find more out about her.

But in the end, I have to say, her character just didn't add up very well for me. She's another one of the "buff, pretty women" who people really love for their design (Nagant, Star, Nana, Mirko), but their characterization relies on a lot of tropes and "cool factor" and remains pretty shallow.

The bits and pieces we get from Nana just feel like a lot of wasted potential instead of really digging into an important theme of the story - the pain caused by self-sacrifice for the people left behind.

She is kind of a contradictory person: she tries to hide her son to protect him and cut him off from the hero world but at the same time she burdens another child - All Might - with OFA and the fight against AFO, but leaves him with at least some support. Gran Torino supporting Toshinori helps him rise and her forbidding GT to look after Kotaro is a factor in his spiral.

Hero Nana feels like all the tropes of "badass woman hero": she grins at AFO in her death, talking about how All Might will take him down, also telling a young Toshinori to keep smiling because that's what makes him "strong". And ironically, that smile to Tomura becomes the symbol of everything he hates about hero society, pretending not to see the suffering they cause or simply ignore.

Hero Nana seems like someone who successfully compartmentalized Mother Nana and shut her inside a box when she gave up her son for adoption and seems to have severed that part of herself until the end. The feelings of guilt only come after she sees what Tomura has become.

Vestige Nana with her "testing of Izuku" and "can you kill Tomura - oh I was just kidding" is also tropey as hell. I would have preferred some real introspection, or at least some good interaction with Izuku about the moral dilemma of what to do about Tomura, but Horikoshi is not great with that when it comes to female characters.

So in the end, she is just kind of a crying mess of a vestige, flip-flopping on Tomura's fate. I'd like to say that her finally taking responsibility moved me, but it being between two dead people in vestige land, just doesn't carry the same weight to me (like as opposed to Rei running into the fire).

I always say that Horikoshi is mostly a visual storyteller, and he knows exactly the stuff 99% of his audience wants. I'm in the minority and I actively dislike when I feel like he's trying to manipulate me with sentimental visuals instead of solid storytelling (like last week's episode of Anya x Damien in MHA).

But at least the way he used Nana wasn't too bad - even if it had to be really spelled out for her that leaving her son behind like that was kind of bad for him - hugging and stopping Dreamland Kotaro is stepping up both as mother and hero - reuniting her two halves. She couldn't get through the barrier until she reintegrates the mother into the hero and becomes the hero to save her family. And she is the final piece to help Izuku get through. Thank you. I get the theme. It's about as subtle as a sledgehammer.

I guess it's a decent cap for a character who embodies a key theme. But I think she could have been fleshed out (not just drawing her in a lot of detail), but in actual character nuance and storytelling (things like how she met En, why did she take OFA, her state of mind after losing her husband, etc.)

On another note, it would be nice if this was finally the end of the vestige peanut gallery (I absolutely came to hate their parts in the final fight), but considering Yoichi and Vestige Might just seemed to have gone poof, unfortunately, I wouldn't be surprised to see again all of them.

[leohtttbriar]

I think Michael like for all that she is she is definitely an anthropologist like I think she takes a very great cultural lense before a scientific

you know, i think you are absolutely right! thank you so much for bringing this up! i wasn't even thinking about her academic specialties when i wrote this post. her first question being about "praying" could very easily just have been the way she was trained to meet alien peoples where they are first before obnoxiously being like "what is that, tho"

and, to your point about the cultural v scientific lens:

for better or worse, i'd say star trek collapses the boundaries between a lot of academic disciplines. "hard" v "soft" science doesn't seem to be a distinction in the star trek speculative world, where linguistics and anthropology are as much about physics and biology and no one is going to pretend like learning languages is a different kind of Study to learning chemistry. this sometimes does not work, imo, because sometimes the writing will accidentally slip into an unexamined essentialism with the alien cultures, which renders the whole of the allegory sort of silly and potentially all kinds of offensive. but it sometimes does work.

discovery, from what i remember of the first two seasons (i'm only just now starting the third, bc i lost my cbs account between 2 and 3, alas! etc), seems more able than other series to collapse the distance between disciplines and walk the line between what is cultural and what is material culture informed by biology. like saru constantly talks of his alien species and how their history of being hunted on his planet manifests in a perpetual anxiety and tamed-curiosity for him but also lends a level of care and sensitivity that he excels in---all of which fleshes out the character while giving him the awareness and consciousness to know why he may be acting a certain way compared to others and why he shouldn't ever be demeaned for it and where his body and his body's millions-of-years-old natural history can be challenged with that consciousness and how his consciousness can be valued precisely for its origins.

the klingons and vulcans, while not as sophisticated as the character saru, also seem to be largely cultural products that are informed by their specific biology. michael, somewhat caught between the cultural product and her own biological reality, can affect vulcan mannerisms and is very often portayed as thinking like a vulcan, while remaining very recognizable to us. her phrasing and her pattern of speech, while not monotone, are normally utterances that move from established fact to logical conclusion. I have nowhere to go back to...the only thing I can do right now is trust something, she says, upon being thrust nine-hundred years in the future. it's the statement of a stoic philosopher (probably one of the "vulcan" influences). she is concerned with what is material and what is real and what is real to others.

which is why i really like what you pointed out about her anthropology expertise--culture is real and often naturalized to those who live in it. michael is definitely someone, what with her studies and how she was raised, who is intimately aware of how the alien can be made familiar, how bodies can't be denied but you can learn to know them, how consciousness is strange and existence-in-causal-time stranger, and how people (all creatures included) are never all one thing or another.

obviously there's no perfect speculative fiction creating speculative cultures. the hurdles of making a sell-able show and the ingrained biases and limitations of the writers are not insignificant. but the storytelling here is engaging with conceits concerning the preciousness of life and the immutability of that preciousness--even if you don't understand it.

(also i just love michael burnham with all my heart. don't think it was a coincidence she was named after the angel who carries a sword.)

[thewisecheerio]

I have trouble recommending Fromsoft games to people not because they're hard--that can be ABSOLUTELY managed--but because of the environmental storytelling. People who like the environmental-storytelling style LOVE it and find straightforward, "canon"-heavy narratives to be really boring. But people who prefer overt storytelling will find environmental storytelling very frustrating and give up after a few hours of gameplay.

So even though I think the Soulsborne games are masterpieces, I absolutely cannot recommend them to most people.

In overt narratives, you get one, singular consistent (you hope) canon constructed from the abundance of cutscenes and written lore. You can then use that canon to think about its implications for the untold parts of the story--how certain characters would react in certain situations, what the political implications of the lore are for the world, etc.

The fun of the singular canon-style story is in having a world you already understand the rules of, and then using those rules to construct new fanfics and headcanons and such (essentially "applied lore" work). Meanwhile, you also get to appreciate the established lore itself.

In contrast, in environmental storytelling-heavy narratives, there is no singular canon. The compendium of lore facts doesn't exist yet. Your job is to go find the rules of the universe. You are given the bones of a story and must finish putting the meat and flesh on yourself.

This is a fundamental divide from overt narratives. You are tasked with coming up with a consistent interpretation (or perhaps 5 competing interpretations!) of the evidence put before you. When you find new evidence, you have to discard the narrative you were previously supporting in order to support a new, more consistent narrative that better explains the bones of the story. The fun is in discovery lore work, which is a fundamentally different kind of fun from applied lore work.

For people who enjoy discovery and testing multiple interpretations against each other, this is an endless playground of fun. But for people who like to have a singular canon, this is the most frustrating type of narrative to engage with. So recommending stories that let you play with the narrative itself and figure out which interpretation you like best is really hard for me to do, unless someone tells me explicitly that they prefer this method of storytelling.

[spaceorphan18]

Why is Blaine written as this hypermasculine character in fan fiction? People can absolutely write how they like, I just don’t quite understand why this is such a common trope as he isn’t really like this in canon, is he?

I mean, you watched the show Nonny, what do you think? <3 <3 <3

So. I can kind of talk about how this happened back in the day. I'm not sure I have a good explanation for now.

There are a couple of components going on when the show first started. For one -- Blaine's character was ill-defined and in Season 2, he came off as more masculine coded than he would later on in the series. Even into Season 3, they'd lump Blaine into the guys and Kurt in with the girls and even the show set up this dichotomy that they filled different gender roles.

However... the second component, and the one that really, we should be talking about, is the fact that a lot of people tried putting stereotypical, heteronormative layers onto them. And -- eeesh, that has not aged well, has it. I remember there were a lot of discussions as how Kurt was the 'girl' in the relationship, and assigning those gender roles on to topping vs bottoming, and honestly, it's all a little gross, and completely dismissive of the fact that we're talking about two men in a homosexual relationship.

So, Blaine going super masculine was a way to counter Kurt as super feminine. I mean... and that's the way a LOT of romances had been written in the published world -- (I mean, eesh, just reading Julia Quinn, she's adhering to these strict gender roles up the wazoo, and they aren't great even for the straight couples.) But when that's what people know and are used to (and some people just like that dynamic) that's kind of what got layered onto Klaine.

that all said, gender conformity isn't as much of Klaine's story as people tried to make it. Yes, in the beginning - Kurt was much more effeminate, and Blaine filled in that role as hero, savior and protector, and the Klaine romance took on elements of things like fairy tales, etc. But that's shoving them both into archetypes that are, really, archetypes, and doesn't allow them the nuances of being more fleshed out characters.

Well, more fleshing out is what we got, and as time went on, they evened out. Kurt's masculinity became more pronounced, as did Blaine's femineity, and by the time the show was done, they were pretty even when it came down to having more masc vs fem traits.

But I mean, I go back to my first point, this is still a gay couple, and neither one, no matter how feminine they are, is the 'girl' in the relationship.

Idk, I've probably been more eloquent before when discussing this, because this isn't the first time I have. But it boils down to people wanting to place Blaine into a certain archetype that is surface level and ignoring his sexuality. but I assumed people have gotten away from that? Idk what the state of fanfic is these day. :P